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By the end of World War II, however, American corporations were facing severe talent shortages. Their senior executives were growing old, and a dearth of hiring from the Depression through the war had resulted in a shortfall of able, well-trained managers. Finding people who had the potential to rise quickly through the ranks became an overriding preoccupation of American businesses. They began to devise a formal hiring-and-management system based in part on new studies of human behavior, and in part on military techniques developed during both world wars, when huge mobilization efforts and mass casualties created the need to get the right people into the right roles as efficiently as possible. By the 1950s, it was not unusual for companies to spend days with young applicants for professional jobs, conducting a battery of tests, all with an eye toward corner-office potential.

But companies abandoned their hard-edged practices for another important reason: many of their methods of evaluation turned out not to be very scientific.

this regime, so widespread in corporate America at mid-century, had almost disappeared by 1990. “I think an HR person from the late 1970s would be stunned to see how casually companies hire now,”

Many factors explain the change, he said, and then he ticked off a number of them: Increased job-switching has made it less important and less economical for companies to test so thoroughly. A heightened focus on short-term financial results has led to deep cuts in corporate functions that bear fruit only in the long term. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which exposed companies to legal liability for discriminatory hiring practices, has made HR departments wary of any broadly applied and clearly scored test that might later be shown to be systematically biased.

about a quarter of the country’s corporations were using similar tests to evaluate managers and junior executives, usually to assess whether they were ready for bigger roles.

He has encouraged the company’s HR executives to think about applying the games to the recruitment and evaluation of all professional workers.

Knack makes app-based video games, among them Dungeon Scrawl, a quest game requiring the player to navigate a maze and solve puzzles, and Wasabi Waiter, which involves delivering the right sushi to the right customer at an increasingly crowded happy hour. These games aren’t just for play: they’ve been designed by a team of neuroscientists, psychologists, and data scientists to suss out human potential. Play one of them for just 20 minutes, says Guy Halfteck, Knack’s founder, and you’ll generate several megabytes of data, exponentially more than what’s collected by the SAT or a personality test. How long you hesitate before taking every action, the sequence of actions you take, how you solve problems—all of these factors and many more are logged as you play, and then are used to analyze your creativity, your persistence, your capacity to learn quickly from mistakes, your ability to prioritize, and even your social intelligence and personality. The end result, Halfteck says, is a high-resolution portrait of your psyche and intellect, and an assessment of your potential as a leader or an innovator.

When the results came back, Haringa recalled, his heart began to beat a little faster. Without ever seeing the ideas, without meeting or interviewing the people who’d proposed them, without knowing their title or background or academic pedigree, Knack’s algorithm had identified the people whose ideas had panned out. The top 10 percent of the idea generators as predicted by Knack were in fact those who’d gone furthest in the process.

What Knack is doing, Haringa told me, “is almost like a paradigm shift.” It offers a way for his GameChanger unit to avoid wasting time on the 80 people out of 100—nearly all of whom look smart, well-trained, and plausible on paper—whose ideas just aren’t likely to work out.

Aptitude, skills, personal history, psychological stability, discretion, loyalty—companies at the time felt they had a need (and the right) to look into them all. That ambit is expanding once again, and this is undeniably unsettling. Should the ideas of scientists be dismissed because of the way they play a game? Should job candidates be ranked by what their Web habits say about them? Should the “data signature” of natural leaders play a role in promotion? These are all live questions today, and they prompt heavy concerns: that we will cede one of the most subtle and human of skills, the evaluation of the gifts and promise of other people, to machines; that the models will get it wrong; that some people will never get a shot in the new workforce.

scoring distance from work could violate equal-employment-opportunity standards. Marital status? Motherhood? Church membership? “Stuff like that,” Meyerle said, “we just don’t touch”—at least not in the U.S., where the legal environment is strict. Meyerle told me that Evolv has looked into these sorts of factors in its work for clients abroad, and that some of them produce “startling results.”

consider the alternative. A mountain of scholarly literature has shown that the intuitive way we now judge professional potential is rife with snap judgments and hidden biases, rooted in our upbringing or in deep neurological connections that doubtless served us well on the savanna but would seem to have less bearing on the world of work.

We may like to think that society has become more enlightened since those days, and in many ways it has, but our biases are mostly unconscious, and they can run surprisingly deep. Consider race. For a 2004 study called “Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal?,” the economists Sendhil Mullainathan and Marianne Bertrand put white-sounding names (Emily Walsh, Greg Baker) or black-sounding names (Lakisha Washington, Jamal Jones) on similar fictitious résumés, which they then sent out to a variety of companies in Boston and Chicago. To get the same number of callbacks, they learned, they needed to either send out half again as many résumés with black names as those with white names, or add eight extra years of relevant work experience to the résumés with black names.

a sociologist at Northwestern, spent parts of the three years from 2006 to 2008 interviewing professionals from elite investment banks, consultancies, and law firms about how they recruited, interviewed, and evaluated candidates, and concluded that among the most important factors driving their hiring recommendations were—wait for it—shared leisure interests.

Lacking “reliable predictors of future performance,” Rivera writes, “assessors purposefully used their own experiences as models of merit.” Former college athletes “typically prized participation in varsity sports above all other types of involvement.” People who’d majored in engineering gave engineers a leg up, believing they were better prepared.

the prevailing system of hiring and management in this country involves a level of dysfunction that should be inconceivable in an economy as sophisticated as ours. Recent survey data collected by the Corporate Executive Board, for example, indicate that nearly a quarter of all new hires leave their company within a year of their start date, and that hiring managers wish they’d never extended an offer to one out of every five members on their team

In the late 1990s, as these assessments shifted from paper to digital formats and proliferated, data scientists started doing massive tests of what makes for a successful customer-support technician or salesperson. This has unquestionably improved the quality of the workers at many firms.

In 2010, however, Xerox switched to an online evaluation that incorporates personality testing, cognitive-skill assessment, and multiple-choice questions about how the applicant would handle specific scenarios that he or she might encounter on the job. An algorithm behind the evaluation analyzes the responses, along with factual information gleaned from the candidate’s application, and spits out a color-coded rating: red (poor candidate), yellow (middling), or green (hire away). Those candidates who score best, I learned, tend to exhibit a creative but not overly inquisitive personality, and participate in at least one but not more than four social networks, among many other factors. (Previous experience, one of the few criteria that Xerox had explicitly screened for in the past, turns out to have no bearing on either productivity or retention

When Xerox started using the score in its hiring decisions, the quality of its hires immediately improved. The rate of attrition fell by 20 percent in the initial pilot period, and over time, the number of promotions rose. Xerox still interviews all candidates in person before deciding to hire them, Morse told me, but, she added, “We’re getting to the point where some of our hiring managers don’t even want to interview anymore”

Gone are the days, Ostberg told me, when, say, a small survey of college students would be used to predict the statistical validity of an evaluation tool. “We’ve got a data set of 347,000 actual employees who have gone through these different types of assessments or tools,” he told me, “and now we have performance-outcome data, and we can split those and slice and dice by industry and location.”

Evolv’s tests allow companies to capture data about everybody who applies for work, and everybody who gets hired—a complete data set from which sample bias, long a major vexation for industrial-organization psychologists, simply disappears. The sheer number of observations that this approach makes possible allows Evolv to say with precision which attributes matter more to the success of retail-sales workers (decisiveness, spatial orientation, persuasiveness) or customer-service personnel at call centers (rapport-building)

There are some data that Evolv simply won’t use, out of a concern that the information might lead to systematic bias against whole classes of people

the idea that hiring was a science fell out of favor. But now it’s coming back, thanks to new technologies and methods of analysis that are cheaper, faster, and much-wider-ranging than what we had before

what most excites him are the possibilities that arise from monitoring the entire life cycle of a worker at any given company.

Now the two companies are working together to marry pre-hire assessments to an increasing array of post-hire data: about not only performance and duration of service but also who trained the employees; who has managed them; whether they were promoted to a supervisory role, and how quickly; how they performed in that role; and why they eventually left.

What begins with an online screening test for entry-level workers ends with the transformation of nearly every aspect of hiring, performance assessment, and management.

I turned to Sandy Pentland, the director of the Human Dynamics Laboratory at MIT. In recent years, Pentland has pioneered the use of specialized electronic “badges” that transmit data about employees’ interactions as they go about their days. The badges capture all sorts of information about formal and informal conversations: their length; the tone of voice and gestures of the people involved; how much those people talk, listen, and interrupt; the degree to which they demonstrate empathy and extroversion; and more. Each badge generates about 100 data points a minute.

he tried the badges out on about 2,500 people, in 21 different organizations, and learned a number of interesting lessons. About a third of team performance, he discovered, can usually be predicted merely by the number of face-to-face exchanges among team members. (Too many is as much of a problem as too few.) Using data gathered by the badges, he was able to predict which teams would win a business-plan contest, and which workers would (rightly) say they’d had a “productive” or “creative” day. Not only that, but he claimed that his researchers had discovered the “data signature” of natural leaders, whom he called “charismatic connectors” and all of whom, he reported, circulate actively, give their time democratically to others, engage in brief but energetic conversations, and listen at least as much as they talk.

His group is developing apps to allow team members to view their own metrics more or less in real time, so that they can see, relative to the benchmarks of highly successful employees, whether they’re getting out of their offices enough, or listening enough, or spending enough time with people outside their own team.

Torrents of data are routinely collected by American companies and now sit on corporate servers, or in the cloud, awaiting analysis. Bloomberg reportedly logs every keystroke of every employee, along with their comings and goings in the office. The Las Vegas casino Harrah’s tracks the smiles of the card dealers and waitstaff on the floor (its analytics team has quantified the impact of smiling on customer satisfaction). E‑mail, of course, presents an especially rich vein to be mined for insights about our productivity, our treatment of co-workers, our willingness to collaborate or lend a hand, our patterns of written language, and what those patterns reveal about our intelligence, social skills, and behavior.

people analytics will ultimately have a vastly larger impact on the economy than the algorithms that now trade on Wall Street or figure out which ads to show us. He reminded me that we’ve witnessed this kind of transformation before in the history of management science. Near the turn of the 20th century, both Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford famously paced the factory floor with stopwatches, to improve worker efficiency.

“The quantities of data that those earlier generations were working with,” he said, “were infinitesimal compared to what’s available now. There’s been a real sea change in the past five years, where the quantities have just grown so large—petabytes, exabytes, zetta—that you start to be able to do things you never could before.”

People analytics will unquestionably provide many workers with more options and more power. Gild, for example, helps companies find undervalued software programmers, working indirectly to raise those people’s pay. Other companies are doing similar work. One called Entelo, for instance, specializes in using algorithms to identify potentially unhappy programmers who might be receptive to a phone cal

He sees it not only as a boon to a business’s productivity and overall health but also as an important new tool that individual employees can use for self-improvement: a sort of radically expanded The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, custom-written for each of us, or at least each type of job, in the workforce.

the most exotic development in people analytics today is the creation of algorithms to assess the potential of all workers, across all companies, all the time.

The way Gild arrives at these scores is not simple. The company’s algorithms begin by scouring the Web for any and all open-source code, and for the coders who wrote it. They evaluate the code for its simplicity, elegance, documentation, and several other factors, including the frequency with which it’s been adopted by other programmers. For code that was written for paid projects, they look at completion times and other measures of productivity. Then they look at questions and answers on social forums such as Stack Overflow, a popular destination for programmers seeking advice on challenging projects. They consider how popular a given coder’s advice is, and how widely that advice ranges.

The algorithms go further still. They assess the way coders use language on social networks from LinkedIn to Twitter; the company has determined that certain phrases and words used in association with one another can distinguish expert programmers from less skilled ones. Gild knows these phrases and words are associated with good coding because it can correlate them with its evaluation of open-source code, and with the language and online behavior of programmers in good positions at prestigious companies.

having made those correlations, Gild can then score programmers who haven’t written open-source code at all, by analyzing the host of clues embedded in their online histories. They’re not all obvious, or easy to explain. Vivienne Ming, Gild’s chief scientist, told me that one solid predictor of strong coding is an affinity for a particular Japanese manga site.

Gild’s CEO, Sheeroy Desai, told me he believes his company’s approach can be applied to any occupation characterized by large, active online communities, where people post and cite individual work, ask and answer professional questions, and get feedback on projects. Graphic design is one field that the company is now looking at, and many scientific, technical, and engineering roles might also fit the bill. Regardless of their occupation, most people leave “data exhaust” in their wake, a kind of digital aura that can reveal a lot about a potential hire.

professionally relevant personality traits can be judged effectively merely by scanning Facebook feeds and photos. LinkedIn, of course, captures an enormous amount of professional data and network information, across just about every profession. A controversial start-up called Klout has made its mission the measurement and public scoring of people’s online social influence.

Mullainathan expressed amazement at how little most creative and professional workers (himself included) know about what makes them effective or ineffective in the office. Most of us can’t even say with any certainty how long we’ve spent gathering information for a given project, or our pattern of information-gathering, never mind know which parts of the pattern should be reinforced, and which jettisoned. As Mullainathan put it, we don’t know our own “production function.”

Over time, better job-matching technologies are likely to begin serving people directly, helping them see more clearly which jobs might suit them and which companies could use their skills. In the future, Gild plans to let programmers see their own profiles and take skills challenges to try to improve their scores. It intends to show them its estimates of their market value, too, and to recommend coursework that might allow them to raise their scores even more. Not least, it plans to make accessible the scores of typical hires at specific companies, so that software engineers can better see the profile they’d need to land a particular job

Knack, for its part, is making some of its video games available to anyone with a smartphone, so people can get a better sense of their strengths, and of the fields in which their strengths would be most valued. (Palo Alto High School recently adopted the games to help students assess careers.) Ultimately, the company hopes to act as matchmaker between a large network of people who play its games (or have ever played its games) and a widening roster of corporate clients, each with its own specific profile for any given type of job.

When I began my reporting for this story, I was worried that people analytics, if it worked at all, would only widen the divergent arcs of our professional lives, further gilding the path of the meritocratic elite from cradle to grave, and shutting out some workers more definitively. But I now believe the opposite is likely to happen, and that we’re headed toward a labor market that’s fairer to people at every stage of their careers

For decades, as we’ve assessed people’s potential in the professional workforce, the most important piece of data—the one that launches careers or keeps them grounded—has been educational background: typically, whether and where people went to college, and how they did there. Over the past couple of generations, colleges and universities have become the gatekeepers to a prosperous life. A degree has become a signal of intelligence and conscientiousness, one that grows stronger the more selective the school and the higher a student’s GPA, that is easily understood by employers, and that, until the advent of people analytics, was probably unrivaled in its predictive powers.

the limitations of that signal—the way it degrades with age, its overall imprecision, its many inherent biases, its extraordinary cost—are obvious. “Academic environments are artificial environments,” Laszlo Bock, Google’s senior vice president of people operations, told The New York Times in June. “People who succeed there are sort of finely trained, they’re conditioned to succeed in that environment,” which is often quite different from the workplace.

because one’s college history is such a crucial signal in our labor market, perfectly able people who simply couldn’t sit still in a classroom at the age of 16, or who didn’t have their act together at 18, or who chose not to go to graduate school at 22, routinely get left behind for good. That such early factors so profoundly affect career arcs and hiring decisions made two or three decades later is, on its face, absurd.

I spoke with managers at a lot of companies who are using advanced analytics to reevaluate and reshape their hiring, and nearly all of them told me that their research is leading them toward pools of candidates who didn’t attend college—for tech jobs, for high-end sales positions, for some managerial roles. In some limited cases, this is because their analytics revealed no benefit whatsoever to hiring people with college degrees; in other cases, and more often, it’s because they revealed signals that function far better than college history,

Google, too, is hiring a growing number of nongraduates. Many of the people I talked with reported that when it comes to high-paying and fast-track jobs, they’re reducing their preference for Ivy Leaguers and graduates of other highly selective schools.

This process is just beginning. Online courses are proliferating, and so are online markets that involve crowd-sourcing. Both arenas offer new opportunities for workers to build skills and showcase competence. Neither produces the kind of instantly recognizable signals of potential that a degree from a selective college, or a first job at a prestigious firm, might. That’s a problem for traditional hiring managers, because sifting through lots of small signals is so difficult and time-consuming.

all of these new developments raise philosophical questions. As professional performance becomes easier to measure and see, will we become slaves to our own status and potential, ever-focused on the metrics that tell us how and whether we are measuring up? Will too much knowledge about our limitations hinder achievement and stifle our dreams? All I can offer in response to these questions, ironically, is my own gut sense, which leads me to feel cautiously optimistic.

Google’s understanding of the promise of analytics is probably better than anybody else’s, and the company has been changing its hiring and management practices as a result of its ongoing analyses. (Brainteasers are no longer used in interviews, because they do not correlate with job success; GPA is not considered for anyone more than two years out of school, for the same reason—the list goes on.) But for all of Google’s technological enthusiasm, these same practices are still deeply human. A real, live person looks at every résumé the company receives. Hiring decisions are made by committee and are based in no small part on opinions formed during structured interviews.

Economics teaches that incentives matter and trade-offs are unavoidable. It shows how naive attempts to fix social problems, from poverty to climate change, can have unintended consequences. Introductory economics, at its best, enables people to see the unstated assumptions and hidden costs behind the rosy promises of politicians and businessmen.

A Chilean professor, Oscar Landerretche, worked with other economists to design a new curriculum. He, Sam Bowles, of the Santa Fe Institute, Wendy Carlin, of University College London (UCL), and Margaret Stevens, of Oxford University, painstakingly knitted contributions from economists around the world into a text that is free, online and offers interactive charts and videos of star economists. That text is the basis of economics modules taught by a small but growing number of instructors.

Students pay $300 or more for textbooks explaining that in competitive markets the price of a good should fall to the cost of producing an additional unit, and unsurprisingly regurgitate the expected answers. A study of 170 economics modules taught at seven universities found that marks in exams favoured the ability to “operate a model” over proofs of independent judgment.

“The Economy”, as the book is economically titled, covers the usual subjects, but in a very different way. It begins with the biggest of big pictures, explaining how capitalism and industrialisation transformed the world, inviting students to contemplate how it arrived at where it is today.

That could mean, eventually, a broader array of perspectives within economics departments, bigger and bolder research questions—and fewer profession-shaking traumas in future.

Messy complications, from environmental damage to inequality, are placed firmly in the foreground.

It explains cost curves, as other introductory texts do, but in the context of the Industrial Revolution, thus exposing students to debates about why industrialisation kicked off when and where it did.

Thomas Malthus’s ideas are used to teach students the uses and limitations of economic models, combining technical instruction with a valuable lesson from the history of economic thought.

“The Economy” does not dumb down economics; it uses maths readily, keeping students engaged through the topicality of the material. Quite early on, students have lessons in the weirdness in economics—from game theory to power dynamics within firms—that makes the subject fascinating and useful but are skimmed over in most introductory courses.

Homa Zarghamee, also at Barnard, appreciates having to spend less time “unteaching”, ie, explaining to students why the perfect-competition result they learned does not actually hold in most cases. A student who does not finish the course will not be left with a misleading idea of economics, she notes.

But the all-important exceptions are taught quite late in the curriculum—or, often, only in more advanced courses taken by those pursuing an economics degree.

Far from an unintended result of ill-conceived policies, she argues, the roughly 4m deaths from hunger in 1932 and 1933 were part of a deliberate campaign by Josef Stalin and the Bolshevik leadership to crush Ukrainian national aspirations, literally starving actual or potential bearers of those aspirations into submission to the Soviet order

The politics in this case was the Sovietisation of Ukraine; the means was starvation. Food supply was not mismanaged by Utopian dreamers. It was weaponised.

. “Red Famine” presents a Bolshevik government so hell-bent on extracting wealth and controlling labour that it was willing to confiscate the last remaining grain from hungry peasants (mostly but not exclusively in Ukraine) and then block them from fleeing famine-afflicted areas to search for food.

. Stalin was not only aware of the ensuing mass death (amounting to roughly 13% of Ukraine’s population). He actively sought to suppress knowledge of it (including banning the publication of census data), so as not to distract from the campaign to collectivise Soviet agriculture and extend the Communist Party’s reach into the countryside—a campaign Ms Applebaum calls a “revolution...more profound and more shocking than the original Bolshevik revolution itself”

The book’s most powerful passages describe the moral degradation that resulted from sustained hunger, as family solidarity and village traditions of hospitality withered in the face of the overwhelming desire to eat. Under a state of siege by Soviet authorities, hunger-crazed peasants took to consuming, grass, animal hides, manure and occasionally each other. People became indifferent to the sight of corpses lying in streets, and eventually to their own demis

While stressing Stalin’s goal of crushing Ukrainian nationalism, moreover, Ms Applebaum passes over a subtler truth. For along with its efforts to root out “bourgeois” nationalisms, the Kremlin relentlessly promoted a Soviet version of Ukrainian identity, as it did with most other ethnic minorities. Eight decades on, that legacy has done even more to shape today’s Ukraine than the Holodomor.

they’re also used as talking points by politicians who are working to make it more difficult for the EPA and other federal agencies to use science in their regulatory decision-making, under the guise of basing policy on “sound science.” Science’s virtues are being wielded against it.

What distinguishes the two calls for transparency is intent: Whereas the “open science” movement aims to make science more reliable, reproducible and robust, proponents of “sound science” have historically worked to amplify uncertainty, create doubt and undermine scientific discoveries that threaten their interests.

“Our criticisms are founded in a confidence in science,” said Steven Goodman, co-director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford and a proponent of open science. “That’s a fundamental difference — we’re critiquing science to make it better. Others are critiquing it to devalue the approach itself.”

alls to base public policy on “sound science” seem unassailable if you don’t know the term’s history. The phrase was adopted by the tobacco industry in the 1990s to counteract mounting evidence linking secondhand smoke to cancer.

The sound science tactic exploits a fundamental feature of the scientific process: Science does not produce absolute certainty. Contrary to how it’s sometimes represented to the public, science is not a magic wand that turns everything it touches to truth. Instead, it’s a process of uncertainty reduction, much like a game of 20 Questions.

Any given study can rarely answer more than one question at a time, and each study usually raises a bunch of new questions in the process of answering old ones. “Science is a process rather than an answer,” said psychologist Alison Ledgerwood of the University of California, Davis. Every answer is provisional and subject to change in the face of new evidence. It’s not entirely correct to say that “this study proves this fact,” Ledgerwood said. “We should be talking instead about how science increases or decreases our confidence in something.”

While insisting that they merely wanted to ensure that public policy was based on sound science, tobacco companies defined the term in a way that ensured that no science could ever be sound enough. The only sound science was certain science, which is an impossible standard to achieve.

“Doubt is our product,” wrote one employee of the Brown & Williamson tobacco company in a 1969 internal memo. The note went on to say that doubt “is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’” and “establishing a controversy.” These strategies for undermining inconvenient science were so effective that they’ve served as a sort of playbook for industry interests ever since

Doubt merchants aren’t pushing for knowledge, they’re practicing what Proctor has dubbed “agnogenesis” — the intentional manufacture of ignorance. This ignorance isn’t simply the absence of knowing something; it’s a lack of comprehension deliberately created by agents who don’t want you to know,

In the hands of doubt-makers, transparency becomes a rhetorical move. “It’s really difficult as a scientist or policy maker to make a stand against transparency and openness, because well, who would be against it?

But at the same time, “you can couch everything in the language of transparency and it becomes a powerful weapon.” For instance, when the EPA was preparing to set new limits on particulate pollution in the 1990s, industry groups pushed back against the research and demanded access to primary data (including records that researchers had promised participants would remain confidential) and a reanalysis of the evidence. Their calls succeeded and a new analysis was performed. The reanalysis essentially confirmed the original conclusions, but the process of conducting it delayed the implementation of regulations and cost researchers time and money.

Delay is a time-tested strategy. “Gridlock is the greatest friend a global warming skeptic has,” said Marc Morano, a prominent critic of global warming research

which has received funding from the oil and gas industry. “We’re the negative force. We’re just trying to stop stuff.”

these ploys are getting a fresh boost from Congress. The Data Quality Act (also known as the Information Quality Act) was reportedly written by an industry lobbyist and quietly passed as part of an appropriations bill in 2000. The rule mandates that federal agencies ensure the “quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity of information” that they disseminate, though it does little to define what these terms mean. The law also provides a mechanism for citizens and groups to challenge information that they deem inaccurate, including science that they disagree with. “It was passed in this very quiet way with no explicit debate about it — that should tell you a lot about the real goals,” Levy said.

in the 20 months following its implementation, the act was repeatedly used by industry groups to push back against proposed regulations and bog down the decision-making process. Instead of deploying transparency as a fundamental principle that applies to all science, these interests have used transparency as a weapon to attack very particular findings that they would like to eradicate.

Now Congress is considering another way to legislate how science is used. The Honest Act, a bill sponsored by Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas,3The bill has been passed by the House but still awaits a vote in the Senate. is another example of what Levy calls a “Trojan horse” law that uses the language of transparency as a cover to achieve other political goals. Smith’s legislation would severely limit the kind of evidence the EPA could use for decision-making. Only studies whose raw data and computer codes were publicly available would be allowed for consideration.

It might seem like an easy task to sort good science from bad, but in reality it’s not so simple. “There’s a misplaced idea that we can definitively distinguish the good from the not-good science, but it’s all a matter of degree,” said Brian Nosek, executive director of the Center for Open Science. “There is no perfect study.” Requiring regulators to wait until they have (nonexistent) perfect evidence is essentially “a way of saying, ‘We don’t want to use evidence for our decision-making,’

ost scientific controversies aren’t about science at all, and once the sides are drawn, more data is unlikely to bring opponents into agreement.

objective knowledge is not enough to resolve environmental controversies. “While these controversies may appear on the surface to rest on disputed questions of fact, beneath often reside differing positions of value; values that can give shape to differing understandings of what ‘the facts’ are.” What’s needed in these cases isn’t more or better science, but mechanisms to bring those hidden values to the forefront of the discussion so that they can be debated transparently. “As long as we continue down this unabashedly naive road about what science is, and what it is capable of doing, we will continue to fail to reach any sort of meaningful consensus on these matters,”

The dispute over tobacco was never about the science of cigarettes’ link to cancer. It was about whether companies have the right to sell dangerous products and, if so, what obligations they have to the consumers who purchased them.

Similarly, the debate over climate change isn’t about whether our planet is heating, but about how much responsibility each country and person bears for stopping it

While researching her book “Merchants of Doubt,” science historian Naomi Oreskes found that some of the same people who were defending the tobacco industry as scientific experts were also receiving industry money to deny the role of human activity in global warming. What these issues had in common, she realized, was that they all involved the need for government action. “None of this is about the science. All of this is a political debate about the role of government,”

These controversies are really about values, not scientific facts, and acknowledging that would allow us to have more truthful and productive debates. What would that look like in practice? Instead of cherry-picking evidence to support a particular view (and insisting that the science points to a desired action), the various sides could lay out the values they are using to assess the evidence.

For instance, in Europe, many decisions are guided by the precautionary principle — a system that values caution in the face of uncertainty and says that when the risks are unclear, it should be up to industries to show that their products and processes are not harmful, rather than requiring the government to prove that they are harmful before they can be regulated. By contrast, U.S. agencies tend to wait for strong evidence of harm before issuing regulations

the difference between them comes down to priorities: Is it better to exercise caution at the risk of burdening companies and perhaps the economy, or is it more important to avoid potential economic downsides even if it means that sometimes a harmful product or industrial process goes unregulated?

But science can’t tell us how risky is too risky to allow products like cigarettes or potentially harmful pesticides to be sold — those are value judgements that only humans can make.

What is it about a new year? How does our psychology influence how we think about that and making fresh starts? We do what social psychologists call temporal accounting -- that is, we have a ledger in our head of how we are spending our time. What we’re trying to do, in some cases, is relegate our previous selves to the past: This year we’re going to do a lot better.

breaks are much more important than we realize.

Many hard-core workplaces think of breaks as a deviation from performance, when in fact the science of breaks tells us they’re a part of performance.

Research shows us that social breaks are better than solo breaks -- taking a break with somebody else is more restorative than doing it on your own. A break that involves movement is better than a stationary one. And then there's the restorative power in nature. Simply going outside outside rather than being inside, simply being able to look out a window during a break is better. And there's the importance of being fully detached,

Every day I write down two breaks that I’m going to take. I make a 'break list,' and I try to treat them with the same reverence with which I’d treat scheduled meetings. We would never skip a meeting.

When you're giving feedback to employees, should you give good news or bad news first?

Here’s where you should go first: If you’re not the default choice

If you are the default choice, you’re better off not going first. What happens is that early in a process, people are more likely to be open-minded, to challenge assumptions. But over time, they wear out, and they’re more likely to go with the default choice.

Also, if you’re operating in an uncertain environment -- and this is actually really important -- where the criteria for selections are not fully fully sharp, you’re better off going at the end. In the beginning, the judges are still trying to figure out what they want.

In fact, what researchers have found is that at the beginning, project teams pretty much do nothing. They bicker, they dicker. Yet astonishingly, many project teams she followed ended up really getting started in earnest at the exact midpoint. If you give a team 34 days, they’ll get started in earnest on day 17. This is actually a big shift in the way organizational scholars thought about how teams work.

There are two key things a leader can do at a midpoint. One is to identify it to make it salient: Say "ok guys, it’s day 17 of this 35 day project. We better get going."

The second comes from research on basketball. It shows that when teams are ahead at the midpoint, they get complacent. When they’re way behind at the midpoint, they get demoralized. But when they’re a little behind, it can be galvanizing. So what leaders can do is suggest hey, we’re a little bit behind.

One of the issues you explore is when it pays to go first — whether you’re up for a competitive pitch or trying to get a job. When is it good to go first

If you ask people what they prefer, four out of five prefer getting the bad news first. The reason has to do with endings. Given the choice, human beings prefer endings that elevate. We prefer endings that go up, that have a rising sequence rather than a declining sequence.

As everyone in business knows, you manage what you measure. So although the replacing-GDP discussion may seem a little airy, its growing credibility in important circles could give it a real impact on economic policy

The story usually begins with Jeremy Bentham, an Englishman who in 1781 outlined a philosophy of utility that assessed the merits of an action according to how much happiness it produced. This was during the Enlightenment, when thinkers sought to replace religion-based rules with rational, scientific guides to decision making and life.

Economists, the most enthusiastic adopters of the concept, came to focus instead on the tangible expression of people’s needs and desires: what they were willing to spend money on.

For its original purpose—measuring short-term economic fluctuations—GDP is not likely to be supplanted anytime soon. It may even be gaining ground: A major discussion is under way concerning whether the U.S. Federal Reserve and other central banks should in times of crisis focus not on inflation but on GDP growth.

Compiling GDP involves making a lot of choices, and even reasonable choices can lead to skewed results. Statisticians understandably favor goods and services that are bought and sold—and thus easily valued by market price—over economic activities whose value must be estimated

Developing nations with lots of foreign direct investment saw GDP grow much faster than GNP would have—but didn’t necessarily reap the benefits, because the investments’ profits went mostly to multinational corporations.

It’s true that the challenges of tracking energy use or pollution aren’t huge. But the politics are extremely tricky. In its early days the Clinton administration pushed the Bureau of Economic Analysis—the agency that measures U.S. GDP—to develop a green GDP

Many things of value in life cannot be fully captured by GDP, but they can be measured by metrics of health, education, political freedom, and the like

The idea that economic and other data can be better presented with a dashboard of indicators than as a single number or ranked list is very much in the air among experts and policy makers.

In Sarkozy’s 2009 report on alternatives to GDP, the word “dashboard” appears 78 times. But the notion of dashboards hasn’t captured the public’s imagination. What has is a word that shows up just 29 times in the Sarkozy report (mostly in the bibliography): “happiness.”

In the 1950s and 1960s psychologists and sociologists reopened the question of whether it could be quantified. Opinion polls, then entering their heyday as measurers (and in some cases determiners) of the public mood, were an obvious vehicle for the attempt.

The economist Richard Easterlin imported the happiness discussion to his discipline with a 1974 paper pointing out that the results of national happiness polls did not correlate all that well with per capita income.

The interest in happiness surveys has also led to critical scrutiny of the Easterlin paradox. After reevaluating decades’ worth of polling data, the economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers made headlines in 2008 by refuting the paradox—at least the part that said people in wealthy nations weren’t happier than those in poor nations

They were unable to conclusively debunk the argument that rises in income over time fail to deliver increased happiness, but the evidence they marshaled certainly muddied the waters

Money can’t buy happiness. But it could perhaps buy the ability to measure it.

As a 15-year-old, I was condemned to long-term solitary confinement in the Florida prison system, which ultimately lasted for 18 consecutive years

From age 15 to 33.

For 18 years I didn’t have a window in my room to distract myself from the intensity of my confinement

I wasn’t permitted to talk to my fellow prisoners or even to myself. I didn’t have healthy, nutritious food; I was given just enough to not die

These circumstances made me think about how I ended up in solitary confinement.

United Nations standards on the treatment of prisoners prohibits solitary confinement for more than 15 days, declaring it “cruel, inhuman or degrading.”

For this I was arrested and charged as an adult with armed robbery and attempted murder.

My court-appointed lawyer advised me to plead guilty, telling me that the maximum sentence would be 15 years. So I did. But my sentence wasn’t 15 years — it was life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

But a year and a half later, at age 15, I was put back into solitary confinement after being written up for a few minor infractions.

Florida has different levels of solitary confinement; I spent the majority of that time in one of the most restrictive

I was finally released from prison in 2016 thanks to my lawyer, Bryan Stevenson

Researchers have long concluded that solitary confinement causes post-traumatic stress disorder and impairs prisoners’ ability to adjust to society long after they leave their cell.

In the summer of 1990, shortly after finishing seventh grade, I was directed by a few older kids to commit a robbery. During the botched attempt, I shot a woman. She suffered serious injuries to her jaw and mouth but survived. It was reckless and foolish on my part, the act of a 13-year-old in crisis, and I’m simply grateful no one died.

More aggressive change is needed in state prison systems

In 2016, the Obama administration banned juvenile solitary confinement in federal prisons, and a handful of states have advanced similar reforms for both children and adults.

Yet the practice, even for minors, is still common in the United States, and efforts to end it have been spotty

Because solitary confinement is hidden from public view and the broader prison population, egregious abuses are left unchecked

I watched a corrections officer spray a blind prisoner in the face with chemicals simply because he was standing by the door of his cell as a female nurse walked by. The prisoner later told me that to justify the spraying, the officer claimed the prisoner masturbated in front of the nurse.

I also witnessed the human consequences of the harshness of solitary firsthand: Some people would resort to cutting their stomachs open with a razor and sticking a plastic spork inside their intestines just so they could spend a week in the comfort of a hospital room with a television

On occasion, I purposely overdosed on Tylenol so that I could spend a night in the hospital. For even one night, it was worth the pain.

Another time, I was told I’d be switching dorms, and I politely asked to remain where I was because a guard in the new area had been overly aggressive with me. In response, four or five officers handcuffed me, picked me up by my feet and shoulders, and marched with me to my new dorm — using my head to ram the four steel doors on the way there.

The punishments were wholly disproportionate to the infractions. Before I knew it, months in solitary bled into years, years into almost two decades.

As a child, I survived these conditions by conjuring up stories of what I’d do when I was finally released. My mind was the only place I found freedom from my reality

the only place I could play basketball with my brother or video games with my friends, and eat my mother’s warm cherry pie on the porch.

No child should have to use their imagination this way — to survive.

It is difficult to know the exact number of children in solitary confinement today. The Liman Center at Yale Law School estimated that 61,000 Americans (adults and children) were in solitary confinement in the fall of 2017

No matter the count, I witnessed too many people lose their minds while isolated. They’d involuntarily cross a line and simply never return to sanity. Perhaps they didn’t want to. Staying in their mind was the better, safer, more humane option.

Solitary confinement is cruel and unusual punishment, something prohibited by the Eighth Amendment, yet prisons continue to practice it.

When it comes to children, elimination is the only moral option. And if ending solitary confinement for adults isn’t politically viable, public officials should at least limit the length of confinement to 15 days or fewer, in compliance with the U.N. standards

As I try to reintegrate into society, small things often awaken painful memories from solitary. Sometimes relationships feel constraining. It’s difficult to maintain the attention span required for a rigid 9-to-5 job. At first, crossing the street and seeing cars and bikes racing toward me felt terrifying.

I will face PTSD and challenges big and small for the rest of my life because of what I was subjected to.

And some things I never will — most of all, that this country can treat human beings, especially children, as cruelly as I was treated.

Sadly, solitary confinement for juveniles is still permissible in many states. But we have the power to change that — to ensure that the harrowing injustice I suffered as a young boy never happens to another child in America.

Once veterans got service dogs, they described themselves in surveys as more satisfied with their lives, said they felt a greater sense of well-being and deemed themselves as having better relationships with friends and loved ones.

There can also be a new sense of stigma that goes along with making a disability that might otherwise be hidden readily apparent. Someone who has PTSD might not stick out until they get a service dog that is always present.

"These small year-to-year changes in Saturn's color bands are fascinating," said Amy Simon, planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, in a statement.

From 2018 to 2020, Saturn's equator brightened between 5% and 10%, while winds near the equator actually slowed from 1,000 miles per hour to about 800 miles per hour.

But that blessed feeling evaporated in June of 2019, when I lost my daughter, Frankie, to suicide, three weeks before her high school graduation

Ever since that day, I have thought of little else except how I could help the next struggling teenager, the next Frankie.

Several days after her passing, we opened our home up to our community, including Frankie’s very large group of teenage friends

“What strength Frankie had. It must have taken enormous energy for her to do what she did each day.”

That was Frankie. She had the strength to engage in school and in theater, despite her anxiety and depression. She had an ability to connect — emotionally, profoundly — with others, even when she was struggling herself

“empathy personified, with quite the fabulous earring collection.”

Whether that strength came from her home or somewhere else, or both, Frankie just had a way of drawing out warmth wherever she went.

Just as my parents couldn’t predict in the 1980s what seatbelt safety would look like now, I am not sure what suicide prevention should look like in the future.

Suicidal thinking, whether it is the result of mental illness, stress, trauma or loss, is actually far more common and difficult to see than many of us realize

A June 2020 Centers for Disease Control survey found that one in four 18- to 24-year-olds reported that they had seriously thought about taking their lives in the past 30 days; prepandemic estimates found that just under one in five high schoolers had seriously considered suicide, and just under one in 10 had made at least one suicide attempt during the previous year.

Despite 50 years of research, predicting death by suicide is still nearly impossible

Like others who have lost a child to suicide, I have spent countless hours going over relentless “what ifs.”

Maybe what we need are seatbelts for suicide.

“Click it or Ticket” was born in part out of a concern in the 1980s about teenagers dying in car accidents. Just as with suicides today, adults couldn’t predict who would get into a car accident, and one of the best solutions we had — seatbelts — was used routinely, in some estimates, by only 15 percent of the population. Indeed, as children, my siblings and I used to make a game of rolling around in the back of our car, seatbelts ignored.

Three decades later, our world is unlike anything I could have imagined as a child. Putting on a seatbelt is the first lesson of driver’s education; cars get inspected annually for working seatbelts; car companies embed those annoying beeping sounds to remind you to buckle your seatbelt

But like many who struggle with suicidal thinking, she kept her own pain camouflaged for a long time, perhaps for too long.

Most of us (estimates range as high as 91 percent) now wear a seatbelt.

But I imagine a world in which every health worker, school professional, employer and religious leader can recognize the signs of suicidal thinking and know how to ask about it, respond to it and offer resources to someone who is struggling

When I told Frankie’s orthodontist about her suicide, his response surprised me: “We really don’t come across that in our practice.” Even though orthodontists don’t ask about it, they see children during their early teenage years, when suicidal thinking often begins to emerge. Can you imagine a world in which signs for the prevention hotline and text line are posted for kids to see as they get their braces adjusted?

What if the annual teenage pediatric checkup involved a discussion of one-at-a-time pill packaging and boxes to lock up lethal medications, the way there is a discussion of baby-proofing homes when children start to crawl? What if pediatricians handed each adolescent a card with the prevention hotline on it (or better yet, if companies preprogrammed that number into cellphones) and the pediatrician talked through what happens when a teenager calls? What if doctors coached parents on how to ask their teenager, “Are you thinking about suicide?”

What if we required and funded every school to put in place one of the existing programs that train teachers and other school professionals to be a resource for struggling students?

I recognize that despite progress identifying effective programs to combat suicidal thinking, their success rate and simplicity does not compare with what we see with seatbelts. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do more.

Part of doing more also includes making the world more just and caring. To give one example, state-level same-sex-marriage policies that were in place before the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationally have been linked to reductions in suicide attempts among adolescents, especially among sexual minorities.

Just as safer highways and car models make seatbelts more effective, asking about and responding to suicidal thinking is only one part of a solution that also includes attention to societal injustices.

I understand, of course, that asking about suicidal thinking is scary. But if it is scary for you to ask about it, it is even scarier for the teenager who is thinking about it.

I will never forget sitting with Frankie in the waiting room in the pediatric psychiatric wing on the night I brought her to the inpatient unit, three months before she took her life

“You know, I am so glad you finally know.” I could hear the relief in her voice. I just nodded, understandingly, but it broke my heart that she held on to such a painful secret for so long.

I find myself inspired by Frankie’s teenage friends, who cared deeply for her and now support one another after her passing.

On good days, she would sit on the worn couch in that office, snuggle in a pile of teenagers and discuss plays, schoolwork and their lives.

And in that corner space, she would text a friend to help her get to class or, after she had opened up about her struggles, encourage others to open up as well.

The fall after Frankie left us, some students decided to remake that hidden corner, dotting the walls with colored Post-it notes. Scrawled on a pink Post-it were the words “you matter”; a yellow one read “it gets better”; an orange one shared a cellphone number to call for help. Tiny Post-it squares had transformed the corner into a space to comfort, heal and support the next struggling teenager.

I don’t know if a seatbelt approach would have saved Frankie. And I understand that all the details of such an approach aren’t fully worked out here. But I don’t want us to lose any more children because we weren’t brave enough to take on something that scares us, something we don’t fully understand, something that is much more prevalent than many of us realize.

If 17- and 18-year-olds who’ve lost a friend have the strength to imagine a world dotted with healing, then the least we can do as adults is design and build the structure to support them

Since NAGPRA passed in 1990, the National Park Service estimates over 50,000 sets of human remains have been repatriated in the United States.

Museums in the U.S. and Europe have collected and studied human remains for well over a century, with the practice gaining considerable momentum after the Civil War.

. The skeletons provided better data about diseases and migration, as well as information about historic diet, with potential impact for living populations.

For them, data gathering was simply not a priority. Instead, they sought to return their ancestors to the earth.

Presenting human remains as purely scientific specimens and historical curiosities hurt living descendants by treating entire populations as scientific resources rather than human beings. And by focusing mainly on nonwhite groups, the practice reinforced in subtle and direct ways the scientific racism permeating the era.

Hidden away from public view, the prehistoric remains were anything but forgotten. Many indigenous people came to view Kennewick Man as a symbol for the failings of the new NAGPRA law.

Last year, genetic testing finally proved something many people had suggested for some time: Kennewick Man is more closely related to Native Americans than any other living human group.

By some estimates, museums today house more than half a million individual Native American remains. Probably hundreds if not thousands of sets of skeletal remains will face these big questions in the coming decades.

Indicative of changing attitudes and ethical approaches to museum exhibition, recent calls to display Kennewick Man’s remains have largely been rebuked, despite potential for engaging large audiences.

Kennewick Man may be among the most high-profile cases of human remains going under the microscope – both in terms of the scientific study he was subject to and the intensity of the debate surrounding him – but he is certainly far from alone.

Applied welfare economics is the fruition of microeconomics.

It is hard to imagine a basic course in microeconomics failing to include numerous cases and examples drawn from all of the fields listed above. This is because microeconomics is so basic. It represents the trunk of the tree from which all the listed subfields have branche

The specialization of production and the institutions of trade, commerce, and markets long antedated the science of economics. Indeed, one can fairly say that from the very outset the science of economics entailed the study of the market forms that arose quite naturally (and without any help from economists) out of human behavior

In microeconomics this is translated into the notion of people maximizing their personal “utility,” or welfare.

At the beginning of the process, those who adopted the new hybrids made handsome profits.

The economics of supply and demand has a sort of moral or normative overtone, at least when it comes to dealing with a wide range of market distortions. In an undistorted market, buyers pay the market price up to the point where they judge further units not to be worth that price, while competitive sellers supply added units as long as they can make money on each increment.

The strength of microeconomics comes from the simplicity of its underlying structure and its close touch with the real world. In a nutshell, microeconomics has to do with supply and demand, and with the way they interact in various markets.

If price controls keep bread (or anything else) artificially cheap, the predictable result is that less will be supplied than is demanded.

Had the government given wheat farmers coupons, each of which permitted the farmer to market one bushel of wheat, wheat marketings could have been cut by the desired amount. Production inefficiencies could be avoided by allowing the farmers to buy and sell coupons among themselves.

monopoly represents the artificial restriction of production by an entity having sufficient “market power” to do so.

Modern monopolies are a bit less transparent, for two reasons. First, even though governments still grant monopolies, they usually grant them to the producers. Second, some monopolies just happen without government creating them, although these are usually short-lived.

A final example of what occurs with official prices that are too high is the phenomenon of “rent seeking,” which occurs when someone enters a business to earn a profit that the government has tried to make unusually high.

If the wage does not adjust downward to equate supply and demand, the rate of urban unemployment will rise until further migration is deterred. Still other examples are in banking and drugs.

Rent seeking also occurs when something of value (like import licenses or radio/TV franchises) is being given away or sold below its true value

The great unifying principles of microeconomics are, ever and always, supply and demand. The normative overtone of microeconomics comes from the fact that competitive supply price represents value as seen by suppliers, and competitive demand price represents value as seen by demanders.

Over multiple years, family income fluctuates, and so the distribution of multiyear income is moderately more equal than the distribution of single-year income.

n one sense, the growth of inequality in the last part of the twentieth century comes as a surprise. In the 1950s, the bottom part of the income distribution contained large concentrations of two kinds of families: farm families whose in-kind income was not counted in Census data, and elderly families, many of whom were ineligible for the new Social Security program

Over subsequent decades, farm families declined as a proportion of the population while increased Social Security benefits and an expanding private pension system lifted elderly incomes. Both trends favored greater income equality but were outweighed by four main factors.

Family structure. Over time, the two-parent, one-earner family was increasingly replaced by low-income single-parent families and higher-income two-parent, two-earner families

Trade and technology increasingly shifted demand away from less-educated and less-skilled workers toward workers with higher education or particular skills. The result was a growing earnings gap between more- and less-educated/skilled workers.

With improved communications and transportation, people increasingly functioned in national, rather than local, markets. In these broader markets, persons with unique talents could command particularly high salaries.

In 2002, immigrants who had entered the country since 1980 constituted nearly 11 percent of the labor force (see immigration). A relatively high proportion of these immigrants had low levels of education and increased the number of workers competing for low-paid work.

A second offset to estimated inequality is economic mobility. Because most family incomes increase as people’s careers develop, long-run incomes are more equal than standard single-year statistics suggest

Is inequality of wages and incomes bad? The question seems ludicrous. Of course inequality is bad, isn’t it? Actually, no. What matters crucially is how the inequality came about.

Inequality of wages and incomes is clearly bad if it results from government privileges. Many people would find such an outcome unjust, but even more important to many economists is that such inequality sets up perverse incentives.

But inequality in wages and incomes in relatively free economies serves two important social functions.

U.S. Border Patrol agents responding to a rescue call found a mother and two children, all three unconscious, on an island in the river that separates the United States from Mexico.

The agents were able to resuscitate the mother and the younger child, a 3-year-old boy.

The rescued mother was Guatemalan; her children were both Mexican nationals, the statement said.

n 2019, a father and his daughter from El Salvador died while attempting to cross the river near the border city of Matamoros, Mexico.

the second migrant to drown in the area in less than two weeks, according to the Mexican authorities.

Many have died of heat stroke after getting lost in the remote, rugged arid lands of Arizona.

Those crossing the Rio Grande typically move under cover of darkness.

Many pay smuggling networks hundreds or thousands of dollars to float across on inflatable rings, which are often used to hold both an adult and a child.

A Cuban man died Wednesday night while trying to enter the United States by swimming around the border barrier that stretches into the ocean between Tijuana and San Dieg

The picture of the father and his 23-month-old daughter lying face down along the banks of the Rio Grande, her tiny head tucked inside his T-shirt, an arm draped over his neck, captured worldwide attention.

Humanitarian groups leave water jugs in desolate areas on the migrant trail in Arizona where the terrain and heat pose great risks to crossers.

Since 2004, about 3,400 migrants have perished in southern Arizona.

Last year, 227 bodies were recovered, the most in a decade.

Monthly apprehensions had plummeted to 16,182 in April 2020 as the pandemic prompted former President Donald J. Trump to invoke a public-health emergency to seal the southwestern border to all but essential travel.

A child’s abandoned shoe lies near a river crossing point often used for illegal entries at the U.S.-Mexico border.Credit...

But apprehensions, the key indicator of the volumes of people trying to enter illegally, have climbed every month since then.

Mr. Biden has reversed or loosened some Trump-era restrictions, including the “Remain in Mexico” policy, while he and his top advisers have repeatedly urged migrants not to make the trek.

ut numbers have soared at the border, and Republicans have blamed his new approach for attracting the large numbers of migrants that have overwhelmed border processing facilities.

the Mexican state of Tamaulipas has been refusing to take them back.

The crush of arrivals in the Rio Grande Valley, the busiest migrant gateway, is forcing the Border Patrol to release families even faster than usual to avoid the overcrowding in border processing stations that has drawn sharp criticism from immigrant and child-welfare advocates in the past.

“People back home were saying this is the moment to cross,”

“I couldn’t even make enough for us to eat, things were getting so bad,”

I didn’t yet know their names; I mourned them as Daughter, Big Sister, Mother, Aunt.

As a child I asked my parents why we did this. They explained that who we are is inseparable from who loves us and whom we love.

Who are you? Where are you from? What do you believe? To move through this world as an Asian who is American is to exist under the gaze of white supremacy.

In other words, we have to constantly give an accounting of ourselves to justify and explain why we are here.

I walked through the world in a kind of haze of anger and despair.

So we learned early on the name of the alleged murderer.

Was it racism? Was it deep-rooted misogyny? Was it a fetishization of Asian women in particular? Was it toxic theology — an extreme fear of God and an equally extreme self-loathing?

Race, gender, religion and culture are all implicated

The Asian who is American is an accessory — the one you want for your group projects, or the one who makes your farms yield more.

And the Asian woman who is American is simultaneously translucent, a mirror and a looking glass; she is a ghost, invisible, unknowable, stripped of her identity, making her both desirable and expendable. How else to explain how easily she is attacked?

We learned that he is white. We learned that he is a Southern Baptist, but not his motivation.

All the moments I’d kept hidden for years suddenly rushed to the surface: the attacks, the looks, the vandalism, the endless stream of questions

The long history of anti-Asian racism is rooted in the history of American expansionism amid wide-ranging legal, cultural and military projects across the Pacific.

These colonial projects hypersexualized Asian women, through forced sex and sex work, casting them as docile creatures that brought comfort

They also shaped Asian men as submissive and feminine, objects to be conquered, dominated and consumed.

Even the humanitarian interventions and the religious outreach that helped to shape much of white imagination about Asian women’s bodies overseas were then continuously reproduced here in America.

But churches are imperfect, man-made institutions, burdened by ego and fear

I grew up never seeing a woman preach from the pulpit.

Later I discovered stories that centered on people on the margins — Black, queer, women and others.

These theologies radicalized my faith; I saw myriad possibilities of God in the world.

When I looked in the mirror, I saw the divine in myself and in the faces of those around me. This changed everything. The God of grace I proclaim from the pulpit lives in us, loves every single one of us, and this was liberation.

But fear is not so easily uprooted, and shame is not limited to one culture or religion.

Absolute moral ideals of virginity or marital sex have long been linked to conservative white Christian attempts at what is sometimes called “sexual containment” or more popularly known as purity culture.

Though more and more people of faith have questioned the psychological impact of purity culture, shame around sex persists.

The Asian women murdered in Atlanta were an explicit threat to the purported ideal; their perceived entanglement with sex work justified this violence.

“I just don’t see you as Asian.” Proximity to whiteness is seen as our saving grace, but we are still dying.

Xiaojie Tan, Delaina Ashley Yaun Gonzalez, Daoyou Feng, Paul Andre Michels, Soon Chung Park, Hyun-Jung Grant, Yong Ae Yue, Suncha Kim

Sister, daughter, mother, cousin, aunt, grandmother, child of God.

Globally, the numbers can be even worse, and the stakes often higher. “Say a person comes into the hospital in Sierra Leone with a fever and flulike symptoms,” DeRisi says. “After a few days, or a week, they die. What caused that illness? Most of the time, we never find out. Because if the cause isn’t something that we can culture and test for” — like hepatitis, or strep throat — “it basically just stays a mystery.”

It would be better, DeRisi says, to watch for rare cases of mystery illnesses in people, which often exist well before a pathogen gains traction and is able to spread.

Based on a retrospective analysis of blood samples, scientists now know that H.I.V. emerged nearly a dozen times over a century, starting in the 1920s, before it went global.

Zika was a relatively harmless illness before a single mutation, in 2013, gave the virus the ability to enter and damage brain cells.

The beauty of this approach” — running blood samples from people hospitalized all over the world through his system, known as IDseq — “is that it works even for things that we’ve never seen before, or things that we might think we’ve seen but which are actually something new.”

In this scenario, an undiscovered or completely new virus won’t trigger a match but will instead be flagged. (Even in those cases, the mystery pathogen will usually belong to a known virus family: coronaviruses, for instance, or filoviruses that cause hemorrhagic fevers like Ebola and Marburg.)

And because different types of bacteria require specific conditions in order to grow, you also need some idea of what you’re looking for in order to find it.

The same is true of genomic sequencing, which relies on “primers” designed to match different combinations of nucleotides (the building blocks of DNA and RNA).

Even looking at a slide under a microscope requires staining, which makes organisms easier to see — but the stains used to identify bacteria and parasites, for instance, aren’t the same.

The practice that DeRisi helped pioneer to skirt this problem is known as metagenomic sequencing

Unlike ordinary genomic sequencing, which tries to spell out the purified DNA of a single, known organism, metagenomic sequencing can be applied to a messy sample of just about anything — blood, mud, seawater, snot — which will often contain dozens or hundreds of different organisms, all unknown, and each with its own DNA. In order to read all the fragmented genetic material, metagenomic sequencing uses sophisticated software to stitch the pieces together by matching overlapping segments.

The assembled genomes are then compared against a vast database of all known genomic sequences — maintained by the government-run National Center for Biotechnology Information — making it possible for researchers to identify everything in the mix

Traditionally, the way that scientists have identified organisms in a sample is to culture them: Isolate a particular bacterium (or virus or parasite or fungus); grow it in a petri dish; and then examine the result under a microscope, or use genomic sequencing, to understand just what it is. But because less than 2 percent of bacteria — and even fewer viruses — can be grown in a lab, the process often reveals only a tiny fraction of what’s actually there. It’s a bit like planting 100 different kinds of seeds that you found in an old jar. One or two of those will germinate and produce a plant, but there’s no way to know what the rest might have grown into.

Such studies have revealed just how vast the microbial world is, and how little we know about it

“The selling point for researchers is: ‘Look, this technology lets you investigate what’s happening in your clinic, whether it’s kids with meningitis or something else,’” DeRisi said. “We’re not telling you what to do with it. But it’s also true that if we have enough people using this, spread out all around the world, then it does become a global network for detecting emerging pandemics

One study found more than 1,000 different kinds of viruses in a tiny amount of human stool; another found a million in a couple of pounds of marine sediment. And most were organisms that nobody had seen before.

After the Biohub opened in 2016, one of DeRisi’s goals was to turn metagenomics from a rarefied technology used by a handful of elite universities into something that researchers around the world could benefit from

metagenomics requires enormous amounts of computing power, putting it out of reach of all but the most well-funded research labs. The tool DeRisi created, IDseq, made it possible for researchers anywhere in the world to process samples through the use of a small, off-the-shelf sequencer, much like the one DeRisi had shown me in his lab, and then upload the results to the cloud for analysis.

he’s the first to make the process so accessible, even in countries where lab supplies and training are scarce. DeRisi and his team tested the chemicals used to prepare DNA for sequencing and determined that using as little as half the recommended amount often worked fine. They also 3-D print some of the labs’ tools and replacement parts, and offer ongoing training and tech support

The metagenomic analysis itself — normally the most expensive part of the process — is provided free.

But DeRisi’s main innovation has been in streamlining and simplifying the extraordinarily complex computational side of metagenomics

IDseq is also fast, capable of doing analyses in hours that would take other systems weeks.

“What IDseq really did was to marry wet-lab work — accumulating samples, processing them, running them through a sequencer — with the bioinformatic analysis,”

“Without that, what happens in a lot of places is that the researcher will be like, ‘OK, I collected the samples!’ But because they can’t analyze them, the samples end up in the freezer. The information just gets stuck there.”

Meningitis itself isn’t a disease, just a description meaning that the tissues around the brain and spinal cord have become inflamed. In the United States, bacterial infections can cause meningitis, as can enteroviruses, mumps and herpes simplex. But a high proportion of cases have, as doctors say, no known etiology: No one knows why the patient’s brain and spinal tissues are swelling.

When Saha and her team ran the mystery meningitis samples through IDseq, though, the result was surprising. Rather than revealing a bacterial cause, as expected, a third of the samples showed signs of the chikungunya virus — specifically, a neuroinvasive strain that was thought to be extremely rare. “At first we thought, It cannot be true!” Saha recalls. “But the moment Joe and I realized it was chikungunya, I went back and looked at the other 200 samples that we had collected around the same time. And we found the virus in some of those samples as well.”

Until recently, chikungunya was a comparatively rare disease, present mostly in parts of Central and East Africa. “Then it just exploded through the Caribbean and Africa and across Southeast Asia into India and Bangladesh,” DeRisi told me. In 2011, there were zero cases of chikungunya reported in Latin America. By 2014, there were a million.

Chikungunya is a mosquito-borne virus, but when DeRisi and Saha looked at the results from IDseq, they also saw something else: a primate tetraparvovirus. Primate tetraparvoviruses are almost unknown in humans, and have been found only in certain regions. Even now, DeRisi is careful to note, it’s not clear what effect the virus has on people. “Maybe it’s dangerous, maybe it isn’t,” DeRisi says. “But I’ll tell you what: It’s now on my radar.

it reveals a landscape of potentially dangerous viruses that we would otherwise never find out about. “What we’ve been missing is that there’s an entire universe of pathogens out there that are causing disease in humans,” Imam notes, “ones that we often don’t even know exist.”

“The plan was, Let’s let researchers around the world propose studies, and we’ll choose 10 of them to start,” DeRisi recalls. “We thought we’d get, like, a couple dozen proposals, and instead we got 350.”

Metagenomic sequencing is especially good at what scientists call “environmental sampling”: identifying, say, every type of bacteria present in the gut microbiome, or in a teaspoon of seawater.

“When you draw blood from someone who has a fever in Ghana, you really don’t know very much about what would normally be in their blood without fever — let alone about other kinds of contaminants in the environment. So how do you interpret the relevance of all the things you’re seeing?”

Such criticisms have led some to say that metagenomics simply isn’t suited to the infrastructure of developing countries. Along with the problem of contamination, many labs struggle to get the chemical reagents needed for sequencing, either because of the cost or because of shipping and customs holdups

we’re less likely to be caught off-guard. “With Ebola, there’s always an issue: Where’s the virus hiding before it breaks out?” DeRisi explains. “But also, once we start sampling people who are hospitalized more widely — meaning not just people in Northern California or Boston, but in Uganda, and Sierra Leone, and Indonesia — the chance of disastrous surprises will go down. We’ll start seeing what’s hidden.”

The ‘urge’ to check one’s social media may be linked to both instant gratification (the need to experience fast, short term pleasure) and dopamine production (the chemical in the brain associated with reward and pleasure).

The popular concept of Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) refers to ‘a pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent’ and is ‘characterised by the desire to stay continually connected with what others are doing’.

Data from qualitative studies has shown that using social media compulsively can damage sleeping patterns, having an adverse effect on young people’s performance in school

The University of Glasgow found that young people found it difficult to relax following night time social media use, reducing their brain’s ability to prepare for sleep. Sleep loss works in a vicious cycle of reinforcement with mental health; that is, that loss of sleep due to night time social media use can lead to poorer mental health, and poor mental health can lead to intense night time use and sleep loss

What is dangerous about this compulsive use is that, if gratification is not experienced, users may internalise beliefs that this is due to being ‘unpopular’, ‘unfunny’ etc. A lack of ‘likes’ on a status update may cause negative self-reflection, prompting continual ‘refreshing’ of the page in the hope of seeing that another person has ‘enjoyed’ the post, thus helping to achieve personal validation.

FOMO has been linked to intensive social media use and is associated with lower mood and life satisfaction.

Social media has been linked to poor self-esteem and self-image through the advent of image manipulation on photo sharing platforms. In particular, the notion of the ‘idealised body image’ has arguably been detrimental to self-esteem and image, especially that of young women. The 24/7 circulation of easily viewable manipulated images promotes and entrenches unrealistic expectations of how young people should look and behave.

The evidence suggests that social media use is strongly associated with anxiety, loneliness and depression

Begin to build boundaries by starting with the easy stuff, whatever that means for you

This one is relatively simple: don’t have television news on in the background (or better, a news podcast). Clean up the passive background noise

Assess the situation

Figure out your main problem area

Choose what, when, where, and how

“What level of news is going to make me feel suitably up-to-date and responsible without driving me insane? Recognize that may be a moving target and that it’s going to be extremely difficult to stick with, but at least have some kind of goal.

A word on the “when” part 

Sometimes this means buying an alarm clock and putting your phone in a different room/closet than the one where you sleep. 

Ask for help

Who profits from my fear, my elation, my outrage? It’s a nice question to keep in the back of one’s head when you’re down the rabbit hole—especially when you’re not really getting much out of it, but just half-remembered ideas about what you’re reading and why.