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Reasons vary, but there are some common arguments made by anti-maskers. Below, Abrams, Trunzo and other experts share seven of the most common reasons people refuse to wear a mask. “So much is uncertain right now. It makes me feel in control to choose to go out without a mask.”

“When faced with uncertain situations over which we have no control, we tend to exercise it wherever we can, so we feel safe,” he said

If the need for control is the driving force for someone not wearing a mask, empathizing with their feelings of uncertainty can sometimes convince them to put one on,

Primary amoebic meningoencephalitis (PAM), a deadly disease caused by the "brain-eating amoeba" Naegleria fowleri, is becoming more common in some areas of the world, and it has no effective treatment.

Primary amoebic meningoencephalitis (PAM), a deadly disease caused by the "brain-eating amoeba" Naegleria fowleri, is becoming more common in some areas of the world, and it has no effective treatment.

Inula viscosa or "false yellowhead," kills the amoebae by causing them to commit cell suicide in lab studies, which could lead to new treatments.

s the coronavirus pandemic continues to cut a wide swath through American communities, many have started to ignore it or, worse, rationalize the country’s mounting losses as a “sad but unavoidable” fact of life.

the pandemic has disproportionately affected populations that are mostly out of sight and mind for the majority of Americans: elderly in care homes, minorities, farm and food workers, and prisoners.

More alarming is the sentiment that these deaths are a price worth paying to get the economy reopened since the elderly in nursing homes already face low life expectancies.

In 2020, the top three educational systems in the world were Finland, Denmark, and South Korea

This is based on developmental levels including early childhood enrollment, test scores in math, reading, and science in primary and secondary levels, completion rates, high school and college graduation, and adult literacy rates.

Finland's education system is a dream: early education is designed around learning through play, school meals are free, and universities are tuition-free for students coming from EU, European Economic Area (EEA) countries, and Switzerland. A majority of teachers also have a master's degree; in fact, basic education teachers are required to have them.

Critical thinking helps us frame everyday problems, teaches us to ask the correct questions, and points us towards intelligent solutions.

Critical thinking is a continuing practice that involves an open mind and methods for synthesizing and evaluating the quality of knowledge and evidence, as well as an understanding of human errors.

Step 1. What We Believe Depends on How We Feel

the reality is very different—the process of communication is actually impressively complex.

The message sent is not necessarily the message received. It is impossible to not communicate. Every message has both content and feeling. Nonverbal cues are more believable than verbal cues.

n contrast to being anyone’s “fault,” this is simply one of the ways the communication process can go off track.

It now seems a near-certainty that he will (and should) name a black woman as his vice presidential running mate.

Floyd's death has sparked (mostly) peaceful protests around the country, not just about police brutality but also about the deep and abiding racial inequalities present in American society.

the former vice president said

As states scramble to delay their spring primaries, election professionals and voting experts are anxiously looking ahead to November and warning that the coronavirus pandemic is already threatening the safety and integrity of the next presidential election.

Congress took a step forward this week by approving $400 million in federal grants that states can use to make coronavirus-related adjustments for the general election. But the two parties couldn't reach a deal on the politically-charged question of how to overhaul the voting laws.

"At all costs, the election must go on," said CNN presidential historian Douglas Brinkley. "This is not the NBA season or the Olympics. Come November, we've got to vote. If we can vote in the middle of the Civil War, and if Franklin D. Roosevelt can run for an unprecedented fourth term in the middle of World War II, then we can figure out how to make 2020 a free and fair election."

How much authority should we give to such work in our policy decisions?  The question is important because media reports often seem to assume that any result presented as “scientific” has a claim to our serious attention.

A rational assessment of a scientific result must first take account of the broader context of the particular science involved.  Where does the result lie on the continuum from preliminary studies, designed to suggest further directions of research, to maximally supported conclusions of the science? 

Second, and even more important, there is our overall assessment of work in a given science in comparison with other sciences.  The core natural sciences (e.g., physics, chemistry, biology) are so well established that we readily accept their best-supported conclusions as definitive. 

recently published scientific article proposes a sweeping new law of nature, approaching the matter with dry, clinical efficiency that still reads like poetry.

“Evolving systems are asymmetrical with respect to time; they display temporal increases in diversity, distribution, and/or patterned behavior,” they continue, mounting their case from the shoulders of Charles Darwin, extending it toward all things living and not. 

To join the known physics laws of thermodynamics, electromagnetism and Newton’s laws of motion and gravity, the nine scientists and philosophers behind the paper propose their “law of increasing functional information.”

Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories.

Social media has weakened all three.

gradually, social-media users became more comfortable sharing intimate details of their lives with strangers and corporations. As I wrote in a 2019 Atlantic article with Tobias Rose-Stockwell, they became more adept at putting on performances and managing their personal brand—activities that might impress others but that do not deepen friendships in the way that a private phone conversation will.

The eminent criminal psychologist and creator of the widely used Psychopathy Checklist paused before answering. "I think, in general, yes, society is becoming more psychopathic," he said. "I mean, there's stuff going on nowadays that we wouldn't have seen 20, even 10 years ago. Kids are becoming anesthetized to normal sexual behavior by early exposure to pornography on the Internet. Rent-a-friend sites are getting more popular on the Web, because folks are either too busy or too techy to make real ones. ... The recent hike in female criminality is particularly revealing. And don't even get me started on Wall Street."

in a survey that has so far tested 14,000 volunteers, Sara Konrath and her team at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research has found that college students' self-reported empathy levels (as measured by the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, a standardized questionnaire containing such items as "I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me" and "I try to look at everybody's side of a disagreement before I make a decision") have been in steady decline over the past three decades—since the inauguration of the scale, in fact, back in 1979. A particularly pronounced slump has been observed over the past 10 years. "College kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago," Konrath reports.

Imagining, it would seem, really does make it so. Whenever we read a story, our level of engagement is such that we "mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative," according to one of the researchers, Nicole Speer. Our brains then interweave these newly encountered situations with knowledge and experience gleaned from our own lives to create an organic mosaic of dynamic mental syntheses.

Many people who get anorexia recover after therapy and counseling. But in about 20 to 30 percent of cases, the disease becomes a chronic condition that gets tougher and tougher to treat.

Neurosurgeons from the University of Toronto tried a technique called deep brain stimulation to see if it might help patients with severe anorexia.

The results didn't meet the statistical tests for significance.

The site does not allow corporations, individuals or organizations to defend themselves transparently or submit information on their own behalf. This is a serious flaw and a real challenge for a site that has become a fundamental source for so many around the world. This policy results in many articles on the site that are inaccurate or even blatantly false.

I decided to provide a resource to the Wikipedia editors and help them get the story straight. I signed up as a Wikipedia editor under the name QorvisEditor. Under this handle, my goal was not to edit client or Qorvis pages, but to become a direct source from which established Wikipedia editors could ask questions about our company and work. Within minutes of signing up, I was blocked by established editors for personally representing the interests of the firm — not for editing anything incorrectly, mind you. This action prevented me from having any direct interaction with any editor in the future, and thus prevented me from providing any first-hand information to any editor. This action also prevents any other Wikipedia editor from having a direct dialogue with the firm.

This inane policy would violate the basic tenets of even the most partisan of small-town newspapers or the most crooked court rooms. This dangerous policy violates the fundamental rules of reporting, of debate and of discussion

an approach developed at Stanford's Graduate School of Education that's rapidly gaining adherents across the country

trial studies of the Stanford program demonstrated that when high school students engage regularly with challenging primary source documents, they not only make significant gains learning and retaining historical material, they also markedly improve their reading comprehension and critical thinking.

Colglazier builds his thought-provoking classes using an online tool called Reading Like a Historian. Designed by the Stanford History Education Group under Professor Sam Wineburg, the website offers 87 flexible lesson plans featuring documents from the Library of Congress

"To have faith in a religion, any religion, is to accept at some primary level that its particular language of words and symbols says something true about reality. This doesn't mean that the words and symbols are reality (that's fundamentalism), nor that you will ever master those words and symbols well enough to regard reality as some fixed thing. What it does mean, though, is that you can 'no more be religious in general than [you] can speak language in general' (George Lindbeck), and that the only way to deepen your knowledge and experience of ultimate divinity is to deepen your knowledge and experience of the all-too-temporal symbols and language of a particular religion. Lindbeck would go so far as to say that your religion of origin has such a bone-deep hold on you that, as with a native language, it's your only hope for true religious fluency. I wouldn't go that far, but I would say that one has to submit to symbols and language that may be inadequate in order to have those inadequacies transcended. This is true of poetry, too: I don't think you can spend your whole life questioning whether language can represent reality. At some point, you have to believe that the inadequacies of words you use will be transcended by the faith with which you use them. You have to believe that poetry has some reach into reality itself, or you have to go silent," - Christian Wiman, "Notes on Poetry and Religion," from Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet.

David Riesman spent the first half of his career writing one of the most important books of the twentieth century. He spent the second half correcting its pervasive misprision. “The Lonely Crowd,” an analysis of the varieties of social character that examined the new American middle class

the “profound misinterpretation” of the book as a simplistic critique of epidemic American postwar conformity via its description of the contours of the “other-directed character,” whose identity and behavior is shaped by its relationships.

he never meant to suggest that Americans now were any more conformist than they ever had been, or that there’s even such a thing as social structure without conformist consensus.

John Kasich may be running a distant third in the primary, but he's the Republican presidential candidate best positioned to beat Hillary Clinton in a general election matchup

The researchers then took the results of those interviews and combined them with voter demographics and economic data to forecast an outcome in each state. These models, as expected, show Clinton pretty easily winning Electoral College majorities over Trump and Cruz, the two Republican frontrunners.

Yet she still loses overwhelmingly — she trails Kasich in a couple of traditional swing states (Colorado and Kasich's home state of Ohio), and even narrowly trails him in bluer states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Maine, and Oregon.

The first story about the typical Trump buyer was simple: These were poorly informed voters, swept up by a modern circus act orchestrated by a mass-media-age P. T. Barnum with arguably worse hair. But Trump’s appeal has proven to be more than a passing fad.

Back in December, a Washington Post analysis found that Trump's support skewed male, white, and poor.

The single best predictor of Trump support in the GOP primary is the absence of a college degree.

Not Everyone Is Beautiful

But in our culture, women are pretty much a one-note instrument.

Because if we acknowledge that physical appearance is your primary scale of value, we have to acknowledge that this is an unfair and unreasonable way to run things.