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a majority of its Senate voted yes on a bill to legalize abortion up to 14 weeks into a pregnancy

President Alberto Fernández has pledged to sign the bill into law, which will make Argentina the largest nation in Latin America to legalize abortion

This victory comes after decades of feminist advocacy and a women's movement that has demanded its issues be understood as interconnected and overlapping.

They focused on blaming President Donald Trump and the appropriate way to hold him alone accountable.

But many, citing the President's speech during his "Save America Rally" moments before the riot began, claimed there was no evidence of incitement and that the President was just doing his patriotic duty by encouraging his supporters to use their voices.

While Democrats were rightly enraged by the actions of the President at the rally just before the march on the Capitol, each speaker should have spent more of their limited time at the podium to remind their colleagues and the American public of the lie that sparked this fire.

A $2,000 stimulus check will be at the heart of a $2 trillion Covid relief plan that President-elect Joe Biden is set to unveil Thursday evening.

Congress included payments of $1,200 in its initial stimulus when shutdowns because of the coronavirus began last spring.

Current Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell rejected a standalone bill on increasing the value of the checks, but with Democrats about to take control of the chamber -- and of Congress -- following victories in two Georgia Senate runoff elections, Biden will likely have the votes to approve increased relief spending.Read More

Thaler et al. were only scratching the surface of our irrationality. Most behavioral economists study individual thinking. They do much of their research in labs where subjects don’t intimately know the people around them.

It’s when we get to the social world that things really get gnarly. A lot of our thinking is for bonding, not truth-seeking, so most of us are quite willing to think or say anything that will help us be liked by our group

This is where Alan Jacobs’s absolutely splendid forthcoming book “How to Think” comes in

you are not merely your brain — your body and the broader circumstances of your life also make you who you are.

you are not merely your brain — your body and the broader circumstances of your life also make you who you are.

we mythologize brains, creating false boundaries that divorce them from bodies and the outside world, blinding us to the biological nature of the mind.

Stress just means resistance or pressure. We need stress to grow as humans; it can be a positive force if mentally framed correctly — even enhancing performance to blast through a deadline. But prolonged stress erodes your performance and wellbeing.

The workload we endured seemed impossible. But, amazingly, it was. Our “Why” enabled us to tap into our 20X Factor and an uncommon resolve.

Despite the chaos, a SEAL is trained to focus with single-mindedness on the immediate threat and dispatch one target at a time. Excessive thinking would have killed me. My unconscious competence combined with relentless training saved my life.

If cinema had the impact on the world that film critics insisted they did in 2019, Joker would have brought about an incel revolution, and Little Women would have ended misogyny.

This was the year police departments issued warnings about the possibility of mass shootings at opening-night screenings of Joker, after all. It was a hysteria that built online after film critics saw the movie at festivals and started to complain it somehow “glamorized” or sympathized with violent incels.

But if you insist that a movie is important, you don’t really have to deal with whether or not it’s good. You can shame people into seeing it as a political statement, rather than as an entertainment or cultural selection. Same with the “dangerous” or “disturbing” moniker, which got used on everything from Joker to the latest Quentin Tarantino film Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, which was marked down for everything from not giving its female co-star Margot Robbie enough lines to its gratuitous violence against a female would-be murderer to its filming of women’s feet (fetishes are now dangerous, I guess). If a critic doesn’t like a film, labeling it as dangerous – and implying you might get killed if you go see it – is an attempt to keep people away.

t was a victory for a subset of French feminists who had argued that the gendered nature of the language promotes sexist outcomes, and that shifting to a gender-neutral version would improve women’s status in society. Educating the next generation in a gender-inclusive way, they claimed, would yield concrete positive changes, like professional environments that are more welcoming to women.

Feminists who believe that these features of the French language put women at a disadvantage disagree about how best to remedy them.

Many linguists I spoke to stressed that changing a language doesn’t guarantee a change in perception; this leads some of them to say that inclusive writing just isn’t worth the trouble. But at least one major school of linguistic thought concludes that language and perception are intimately related.

Humility is not the boldest of personality traits, but it’s an important one, studies find. And it’s hard to fake.

In a paper published in the latest issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a team of researchers reviewed studies of a once-widespread personal trait, one “characterized by an ability to accurately acknowledge one’s limitations and abilities, and an interpersonal stance that is other-oriented rather than self-focused.” Humility.

The word “humble” travels so often now as a verb that embodying its gentler spirit, the adjective, can be an invitation to online trolling, professional invisibility or worse. Oscar Wilde wrote that, before he found humility, he spent two years behind bars experiencing “anguish that wept aloud” and “misery that could find no voice” — which sounds more like defeat than victory.

the audit failed: Not only did it count Biden’s victory, but even its attempts to sow doubts about its own findings and the official results are fairly weak and rehearsed. 

But for Trump supporters desperate to keep the fiction going — particularly those who’ve staked their political campaigns on the Big Lie — the show needed to go on. 

Responding to the disappointing report, they ignored the bad news and acted as if it had affirmed their prior assumptions. And, therefore: Audits, forever and always. 

This year, workers at Amazon, Starbucks and other major corporations are winning a wave of union elections, often in the face of long odds and employer resistance. These wins are showing it's possible for determined groups of workers to break through powerful employers' use of union-busting tactics, ranging from alleged retaliatory firings to alleged surveillance and forced attendance at anti-union "captive audience meetings." But workers should not have to confront so many obstacles to exercising a guaranteed legal right to unionize and bargain for improvements in their work lives and livelihoods.

For decades, wage suppression, growing income inequality and persistent racial and gender wage gaps have characterized the US labor market.

But now, as workers are pointing the way to better workplaces and a more equitable economy, employers and policymakers need to pay attention. Policymakers must better protect workers' union rights, and employers must start respecting workers' right to participate in union elections without interference or coercion.

Why did Depp, who had already lost a similar case in Britain, insist on going back to court? A public trial, during which allegations of physical, sexual, emotional and substance abuse against him were sure to be repeated, couldn’t be counted on to restore his reputation. Heard, his ex-wife, was counting on the opposite: that the world would hear, in detail, about the physical torments that led her to describe herself, in the Washington Post op-ed that led to the suit, as “a public figure representing domestic abuse.”

The fact that Heard’s partial victory, which involved not Depp’s words but those spoken in 2020 by Adam Waldman, his lawyer at the time, can be spun in that direction shows how such ambiguity served Depp all along.

Maybe they were both abusive. Who really knows what happened? The convention of courtroom journalism is to make a scruple of indeterminacy. And so we found ourselves in the familiar land of he said/she said.

In fact, history is NOT a "collection of facts about the past." History consists of making arguments about what happened in the past on the basis of what people recorded (in written documents, cultural artifacts, or oral traditions) at the time.

The problem is complicated for major events that produce "winners" and "losers," since we are more likely to have sources written by the "winners," designed to show why they were heroic in their victories.

There is no interpretation. There is no explanation of why the Mexicas lost.

Christopher Lasch, the historian and social critic, posed a banger of a question in his 1991 book, “The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics.”

“How does it happen,” Lasch asked, “that serious people continue to believe in progress, in the face of massive evidence that might have been expected to refute the idea of progress once and for all?”

A review in The New York Times Book Review by William Julius Wilson, a professor at Harvard, was titled: “Where Has Progress Got Us?”

Did you hope to combine chemistry and political philosophy in some way in your medical career?

Chemistry requires synthetic thinking. You have to bring disparate pieces of knowledge together in order to look for a chemical structure. Political philosophy, to some degree, also involves disparate aspects of knowledge: economics, sociology, history, pure philosophy

I found that in medicine, you don’t have an answer when you start out. You’re looking for clues that are often distributed in different places: family history, as there might be a genetic predisposition; social history, because the person smoked or was exposed to a toxin; the physical examination, where you find that an organ might be disordered. Add to that the blood test, the CAT scan, all of it, but most importantly, the person, the psychology of the person you’re dealing with. It’s the same kind of synthetic process as political philosophy, but in a different dimension.