Does Democracy Need Truth?: A Conversation with the Historian Sophia Rosenfeld | The New Yorker
Does Democracy Need Truth?: A Conversation with the Historian Sophia Rosenfeld | The Ne... - 0 views
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Ever since Donald Trump announced his Presidential candidacy, in June of 2015, there has been considerable concern about whether his allergy to truth is endangering American democracy
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the relationship between truth and democracy was fraught for centuries before the time of Twitter and Trump.
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Spain coronavirus: How nation became one of world's pandemic hotspots - CNN - 0 views
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Unseasonably warm weather, Champions League football and other major events, homes on the beach and the café culture: just a few of the factors that may have helped carry an insidious virus across southern Europe -- from country to country and city to city, from Italy to Spain and Portugal.
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More than 5,000 people have died since a coronavirus outbreak exploded in Spain, one of the countries worst affected by the pandemic. The country has more than 54,000 active cases of the virus, according to recent figures from the ministry of health.
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Immunologist Francesco Le Foche is of the same view, telling the Corriere dello Sport: "It's probable that there were several major triggers and catalysts for the diffusion of the virus, but the Atalanta-Valencia game could very well have been one of them.
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Coronavirus Tips: How to Protect and Prepare Yourself - The New York Times - 0 views
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The coronavirus continues to spread worldwide, with over 200,000 confirmed cases and at least 8,000 dead. In the United States, there have been at least 8,000 cases and more than 100 deaths, according to a New York Times database.
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Most important: Do not panic. With a clear head and some simple tips, you can help reduce your risk, prepare your family and do your part to protect others.
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That might be hard to follow, especially for those who can’t work from home. Also, if you’re young, your personal risk is most likely low. The majority of those who contract coronavirus do not become seriously ill, and it might just feel as if you have the flu. But keeping a stiff upper lip is not only foolhardy, but will endanger those around you.
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Opinion | World War II and the Ingredients of Slaughter - The New York Times - 0 views
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The (relatively) new technology of the 1930s was the radio. “It is the miracle of radio that it welds 60,000,000 Germans into a single crowd, to be played upon by a single voice,”
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the conviction that an opponent embodies an irredeemable evil, and that his destruction is therefore an act of indubitable good. That spirit of certitude that dominated the politics of the 1930s is not so distant from us today.
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Two aspects of this article relate to our discussions in class. First, the radio made it easier to share knowledge/spread propaganda. If everyone received the same message, people begin to believe it. Second, in WWII as in slavery and other times in history, people justified their inhumane actions and attempted to put themselves on the moral high ground by saying that other groups up people were less than human.
Coronavirus hasn't hit NYC but it's still hurting local economy - 0 views
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What happens to New York when a huge chunk of the global economy is under quarantine? For all the hullabaloo over Team Trump’s travel restrictions on some majority-Muslim countries, the biggest experiment in closing the border is right now, over a public-health scare. Because of coronavirus, America is effectively off limits to Chinese people. The coronavirus thus imperils one of Gotham’s biggest industries: tourism.
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With much of the Chinese manufacturing workforce sidelined, the US auto industry can’t get the imported parts it needs to make its cars here; Chinese factories that make iPhones have been mostly shuttered for weeks.
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New York likes to make fun of its tourists — and Chinese visitors, because of their sheer numbers, tendency to travel in groups and spending power, have become the new version of the “ugly Americans” who started tramping all over Europe after World War II.
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4 Activist Girls Trying To Save The World From Climate Change : NPR - 0 views
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A teenage girl, Greta Thunberg, has become the world-famous face of the climate strike movement. But she's far from alone: Thunberg has helped rally and inspire others — especially girls.
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In Castlemaine, Australia, Milou Albrecht, 15, co-founded School Strike for Climate Australia, which organizes student walkouts. As massive bush fires engulf parts of her home country, Albrecht's group has been pressuring the German corporation Siemens to withdraw from an Australian coal mining project.
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The second, she says, is that "gender equality is itself a climate solution," with women's education and equity leading to smaller family sizes and, research shows, better land management practices.
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What my Florida town can teach us about racist policing (opinion) - CNN - 0 views
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Nine days before George Floyd died an agonizing death under the knee of a white Minneapolis police officer while others watched, law enforcement officials broke up what has been described as a massive block party in my Florida hometown of DeLand and the surrounding unincorporated Volusia County.
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this local example has lessons for all of us looking for ways to facilitate effective community policing of African American communities during the Covid-19 pandemic.
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The mostly African American neighborhood known as Spring Hill is one of five historically underserved communities in the DeLand area where freed slaves settled to live separately after the Civil War. My elementary school — once heralded as a sign of this area's progress toward racial reconciliation when in the 1970s white students from the suburbs were bused there to implement the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education desegregation order — is still a neighborhood school for mostly black and brown students.
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Covid-19 in the US: Hydroxychloroquine treatment for Covid-19 linked to a greater risk ... - 0 views
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Seriously ill Covid-19 patients treated with hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine were more likely to die or develop dangerous heart arrhythmias, according to a large observational study published Friday in the medical journal The Lancet.
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Researchers looked at data from more than 96,000 Covid-19 patients from 671 hospitals. All were hospitalized from late December to mid-April and had died or been discharged by April 21. Just below 15,000 were treated with the antimalarial drugs hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine, or one of those drugs combined with an antibiotic.
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Those treatments were linked with a higher risk of dying in the hospital, the study found.
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No Crowds at the Mona Lisa: Coronavirus Fears Hammer European Tourism - WSJ - 0 views
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The coronavirus outbreak in Europe is scaring away travelers and hammering tourism just as the high season is getting under way. Thousands of people have canceled their trips to the region since the disease began to spread in Italy last month, drying up revenue for hotels, restaurants, nightclubs and conference planners across the continent. Those businesses are the economic lifeblood of many regions in Europe, clustered around its famed cultural attractions. The outbreak is costing the European Union’s tourism industry €1 billion ($1.1 billion) a month, said Thierry Breton, the EU’s internal market commissioner.
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In Paris, some cafes and nightclubs have seen a 40% drop in sales, he said.
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Flight bookings to Europe the last week of February, when the Italian outbreak emerged, fell 79% compared with the same period a year earlier, according to ForwardKeys, which tracks travel data. In Italy, cancellations have exceeded new bookings over that time, the firm said
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Trump pursues his political obsessions as stark 100,000 coronavirus deaths landmark loo... - 0 views
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Sometime in the next few days, the 100,000th American will succumb to Covid-19 in a pandemic that President Donald Trump once predicted would just "miraculously" disappear.
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In his most politically significant maneuver, he heaped intense pressure on North Carolina's Democratic governor to permit a normal, crowded Republican National Convention, despite fears such a mass gathering could seed virus hot spots. Trump warned he could pull the huge money-earner out of Charlotte, which was picked to play host in August.
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And he indulged his preoccupations on his tax returns, Hillary Clinton, Fox News, slanders against MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, the Russia investigation, Joe Biden's mental health, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, mail-in voting in November and highlighted dangerous and unproven Covid-19 therapies promoted on conservative media he has tested himself.
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ACLU files suit on behalf of journalists in Minnesota - CNN - 0 views
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"The past week has been marked by an extraordinary escalation of unlawful force deliberately targeting reporters," the ACLU says in Wednesday's filing.
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"We are facing a full-scale assault on the First Amendment freedom of the press," Brian Hauss, staff attorney with the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, said in a statement. "We will not let these official abuses go unanswered. This is the first of many lawsuits the ACLU intends to file across the country. Law enforcement officers who target journalists will be held accountable."
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Reporters have been arrested by police from Florida to Nevada; pelted by police rubber bullets fired by police from Washington, D.C. to California; and attacked by protesters from Arizona to Pennsylvania. In one of the highest-profile examples, a CNN crew was briefly taken into custody on Friday by Minnesota State Police on live TV.
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Opinion | One Cure for Malnutrition of the Soul - The New York Times - 0 views
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We do not have all the answers. We are on a spiritual journey.
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Britain — and much of Europe, the theological cradle of Christianity — has perhaps never been so removed from belief in God. Elsewhere, the world is becoming more religious, and Christianity is growing, robustly so in China and Africa. With 2.2 billion followers, the faith that began as a small Jewish sect is by far the planet’s most popular and diverse religion.
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While organized religion may be dying in Europe, the pilgrim trails of the Via Francigena, and the better-known Camino de Santiago in Spain, are drawing crowds.
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He Wants to Save Classics From Whiteness. Can the Field Survive? - The New York Times - 0 views
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Padilla laid out an indictment of his field. “If one were intentionally to design a discipline whose institutional organs and gatekeeping protocols were explicitly aimed at disavowing the legitimate status of scholars of color,” he said, “one could not do better than what classics has done.”
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Padilla believes that classics is so entangled with white supremacy as to be inseparable from it. “Far from being extrinsic to the study of Greco-Roman antiquity,” he has written, “the production of whiteness turns on closer examination to reside in the very marrows of classics.”
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Rather than kowtowing to criticism, Williams said, “maybe we should start defending our discipline.” She protested that it was imperative to stand up for the classics as the political, literary and philosophical foundation of European and American culture: “It’s Western civilization. It matters because it’s the West.” Hadn’t classics given us the concepts of liberty, equality and democracy?
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I Actually Read Woody Allen's Memoir - The Atlantic - 0 views
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I’m a Woody Allen person, not because I disbelieve Dylan—in fact, I believe her. I’m a Woody Allen person because his movies helped shape me, and I can’t unsee them, the way I can’t un-read The Great Gatsby or un-hear “Gimme Shelter.” These are things that informed my sensibilities. All of them are part of me.
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As to our opinion about his past, one thing is for sure: He couldn’t care less about it. “Rather than live on in the hearts and mind of the public,” he says in the final lines of the book, “I prefer to live on in my apartment.”Exit laughing.
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the scene in Hannah and Her Sisters in which the Woody Allen character, distraught by his realization that there is no God and considering suicide, stumbles into a revival house to find the movie playing. He says in voice-over: The movie was a film that I’d seen many times in my life since I was a kid, and I always loved it. And I’m watching these people up on the screen and I started getting hooked on the film. And I started to feel, How can you even think of killing yourself? I mean, isn’t it so stupid? I mean, look at all the people up there on the screen. They’re real funny—and what if the worst is true? What if there’s no God and you only go around once and that’s it? Well, you know, don’t you want to be part of the experience? I did.I do.
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The AI is eating itself - by Casey Newton - Platformer - 0 views
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there also seems to be little doubt that is corroding the web.
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, two new studies offered some cause for alarm. (I discovered both in the latest edition of Import AI, the indispensable weekly newsletter from Anthropic co-founder and former journalist Jack Clark.)
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The first study, which had an admittedly small sample size, found that crowd-sourced workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turks platforms increasingly admit to using LLMs to perform text-based tasks.
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Opinion | Elon Musk's Tesla Management Is a Bad Sign for Twitter - The New York Times - 0 views
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His promises to preserve free speech, ban spam bots and dramatically boost revenue may have earned the blessing of the company’s founder, Jack Dorsey, but with Twitter’s stock falling well below his offer price, Mr. Musk appears to be reneging on a deal that has made even Wall Street grow skeptical.
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The way that he has managed and marketed his businesses from Tesla’s early days reveals a dysfunction behind the automaker’s veneer of technofuturism and past stock market successes.
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The way that he has managed and marketed his businesses from Tesla’s early days reveals a dysfunction behind the automaker’s veneer of technofuturism and past stock market successes.
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Every Annoying Letterboxd Behavior - Freddie deBoer - 0 views
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as a social network it’s a) made up of humans who are b) trying to stand out from the crowd like a goth at the homecoming pep rally.
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Here’s a list of some of the many annoying things people do
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Like-whoring by writing tweets instead of reviews. Like-whoring is the basic problem with every social network depraved enough to have a “like” function, of course. The most obvious like-whoring behavior on Letterboxd is the shoehorned-in one-liner review. On rare occasions, these are funny and apt and really say something; mostly, they’re people desperately trying to appear witty to strangers and succeeding only in appearing desperate
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Overstimulation Nation - Slack Tide by Matt Labash - 0 views
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The local radio jock said to me, “You must think all of this is pretty silly”. He motioned towards the crowd and then to a rollercoaster directly beside us that came screeching at our heads every 95 seconds. But I said, “No. In a century people are going to look back on right now as a sort of magic era, a charmed time of peace and prosperity and freedom from fear, as something that can never happen again, no matter how much they wish it would.”
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telling the truth always liberates us, even if it scares the hell out of us simultaneously
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Bad things have always happened in this world. That’s nothing new. And bad things will continue to have their uninterrupted run, right until the end of time. But the “freedom from fear” Coupland speaks of is largely a function of not wallowing in it all the live-long day, which our trusty bad-news delivery systems are pretty good about making us do. They give us the illusion of constant movement, even if our only destination is backwards, prompting us to forever double down on fear, and agitation, and mutual suspicion, while steeping us in our own soul sickness.
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Opinion | Chatbots Are a Danger to Democracy - The New York Times - 0 views
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longer-term threats to democracy that are waiting around the corner. Perhaps the most serious is political artificial intelligence in the form of automated “chatbots,” which masquerade as humans and try to hijack the political process
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Increasingly, they take the form of machine learning systems that are not painstakingly “taught” vocabulary, grammar and syntax but rather “learn” to respond appropriately using probabilistic inference from large data sets, together with some human guidance.
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In the buildup to the midterms, for instance, an estimated 60 percent of the online chatter relating to “the caravan” of Central American migrants was initiated by chatbots.
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