Obama's critique of 'woke' culture on social media draws bipartisan support - The Washi... - 0 views
Living Another Day, Thanks to Grandparents Who Couldn't Sleep - The New York Times - 1 views
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A new study, published Tuesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggests that the way sleep patterns change with age may be an evolutionary adaptation that helped our ancestors survive the night by ensuring one person in a community was awake at all times. The researchers called this phenomenon the “poorly sleeping grandparent hypothesis,” suggesting that an older member of a community who woke before dawn might have been crucial to spotting the threat of a hungry predator while younger people were still asleep. It may explain why people slept in mixed-age groups through much of human history.
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The Hadza sleeping environment may have similarities to that of earlier humans, researchers said. They sleep outdoors or in grass huts in groups of 20 to 30 people without artificially regulating temperature or light. These conditions provide a suitable window to study the evolutionary aspects of sleep.
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more than 220 total hours of sleep observation, researchers found only 18 minutes when all adults were sound asleep simultaneously. Typically, older participants in their 50s and 60s went to bed earlier and woke up earlier than those in their 20s and 30s. On average, more than a third of the group was alert, or lightly dozing, at any given time.
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Andrew Sullivan: Is There a Way to Acknowledge Our Progress? - 0 views
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ft of recent books have been full of the need for renewed rage against the oppression of women. The demonization of “white men” has intensified just as many working-class white men face a bleak economic future and as men are disappearing from the workforce. It is as if the less gender discrimination there is, the angrier you should become.
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You see it in the gay-rights movement too. I get fundraising emails all the time reminding me how we live in a uniquely perilous moment for LGBTQ Americans and that this era, in the words of Human Rights Campaign spokesperson Charlotte Clymer, is one “that has seen unprecedented attacks on LGBTQ people.
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Might I suggest some actual precedents: when all gay sex was criminal, when many were left by their government to die of AIDS, when no gay relationships were recognized in the law, when gay service members were hounded out of their mission, when the federal government pursued a purge of anyone suspected of being gay. All but the last one occurred in my adult lifetime. But today we’re under “unprecedented” assault?
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Academics Are Really Worried About Cancel Culture - The Atlantic - 1 views
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Our national reckoning on race has brought to the fore a loose but committed assemblage of people given to the idea that social justice must be pursued via attempts to banish from the public sphere, as much as possible, all opinions that they interpret as insufficiently opposed to power differentials.
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Valid intellectual and artistic endeavor must hold the battle against white supremacy front and center, white people are to identify and expunge their complicity in this white supremacy with the assumption that this task can never be completed, and statements questioning this program constitute a form of “violence” that merits shaming and expulsion.
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Another defense of sorts has been to claim that even this cancel-culture lite is not dangerous, because it has no real effect. When, for instance, 153 intellectuals signed an open letter in Harper’s arguing for the value of free speech (I was one of them), we were told that we were comfortable bigwigs chafing at mere criticism, as if all that has been happening is certain people being taken to task, as opposed to being shamed and stripped of honors.
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Free Speech and Civic Virtue between "Fake News" and "Wokeness" | History News Network - 1 views
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none of these arguments reaches past adversarial notions of democracy. They all characterize free speech as a matter of conflicting rights-claims and competing factions.
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As long as political polarization precludes rational consensus, she argues, we are left to “[make] personal choices and pronouncements regarding what we are willing (or unwilling) to tolerate, in an attempt to slightly nudge the world in our preferred direction.” Notably, she makes no mention of how we might discern the validity of those preferences or how we might arbitrate between them in cases of conflict.
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Free speech advocates are hypocritical or ignore some extenuating context, they claim, while those stifling disagreeable or offensive views are merely rectifying past injustices or paying their opponents back in kind, operating practically in a flawed public sphere.
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How an Organized Republican Effort Punishes Companies for Climate Action - The New York... - 0 views
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In Texas, a new law bars the state’s retirement and investment funds from doing business with companies that the state comptroller says are boycotting fossil fuels.
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Conservative lawmakers in 15 other states are promoting similar legislation.
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Across the country, Republican lawmakers and their allies have launched a campaign to try to rein in what they see as activist companies trying to reduce the greenhouse gases that are dangerously heating the planet.
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Notes Towards a Philosophy of Sleep | Issue 91 | Philosophy Now - 0 views
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Meeting Christopher after a long interval reminded me of his excellent book Living Philosophy: Reflections on Life, Meaning and Morality (2001). The volume includes a fascinating essay entitled ‘The Need to Sleep’, where he notes that philosophers have not paid sufficient attention to this extraordinary phenomenon. Well, a decade on, this is the beginning of a response to Christopher’s wake-up call.
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If I told you that I had a neurological disease which meant that for eight or more hours a day I lost control of my faculties, bade farewell to the outside world, and was subject to complex hallucinations and delusions – such as being chased by a grizzly bear at Stockport Railway Station – you would think I was in a pretty bad way.
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Of course, sleep is not a disease at all, but the condition of daily (nightly) life for the vast majority of us. The fact that we accept without surprise the need for a prolonged black-out as part of our daily life highlights our tendency to take for granted anything about our condition that is universal.
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Bile, venom and lies: How I was trolled on the Internet - The Washington Post - 0 views
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Thomas Jefferson often argued that an educated public was crucial for the survival of self-government
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We now live in an age in which that education takes place mostly through relatively new platforms. Social networks — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. — are the main mechanisms by which people receive and share facts, ideas and opinions. But what if they encourage misinformation, rumors and lies?
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In a comprehensive new study of Facebook that analyzed posts made between 2010 and 2014, a group of scholars found that people mainly shared information that confirmed their prejudices, paying little attention to facts and veracity. (Hat tip to Cass Sunstein, the leading expert on this topic.) The result, the report says, is the “proliferation of biased narratives fomented by unsubstantiated rumors, mistrust and paranoia.
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Bile, venom and lies: How I was trolled on the Internet - The Washington Post - 1 views
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In a comprehensive new study of Facebook that analyzed posts made between 2010 and 2014, a group of scholars found that people mainly shared information that confirmed their prejudices, paying little attention to facts and veracity. (Hat tip to Cass Sunstein, the leading expert on this topic.) The result, the report says, is the “proliferation of biased narratives fomented by unsubstantiated rumors, mistrust and paranoia.”
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The authors specifically studied trolling — the creation of highly provocative, often false information, with the hope of spreading it widely. The report says that “many mechanisms cause false information to gain acceptance, which in turn generate false beliefs that, once adopted by an individual, are highly resistant to correction.”
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in recent weeks I was the target of a trolling campaign and saw exactly how it works. It started when an obscure website published a post titled “CNN host Fareed Zakaria calls for jihad rape of white women.
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Opinion | The Morality of Selfism - The New York Times - 0 views
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You probably want to be a good person. But you may also be completely self-absorbed. So you may be thinking, “There is no way I can be good if I’m also a narcissist. Isn’t being good all about caring about other people?”But how wrong you are!
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We live in a culture of selfism
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one of the things we’ve discovered is that you can be a very good person while thinking only about yourself!
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Erick Erickson: How to Find Common Ground - The New York Times - 1 views
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Our family life is now focused on three-month windows of normalcy between my wife’s CT scans.
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Contemplating these things, last November I posted a short essay on my website of things I would want my children to know if their mother and I died before they woke.
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I want them to do what is right, not what is popular, and I want them to measure their self-worth by being ethical individuals, not by the applause they receive on social media.
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Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation? - The Atlantic - 0 views
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She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”
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. I had grown accustomed to line graphs of trends that looked like modest hills and valleys. Then I began studying Athena’s generation.
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Around 2012, I noticed abrupt shifts in teen behaviors and emotional states. The gentle slopes of the line graphs became steep mountains and sheer cliffs, and many of the distinctive characteristics of the Millennial generation began to disappear. In all my analyses of generational data—some reaching back to the 1930s—I had never seen anything like it.
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Who Decides What's Racist? - Persuasion - 1 views
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The implication of Hannah-Jones’s tweet and candidate Biden’s quip seems to be that you can have African ancestry, dark skin, textured hair, and perhaps even some “culturally black” traits regarding tastes in food, music, and ways of moving through the world. But unless you hold the “correct” political beliefs and values, you are not authentically black.
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In a now-deleted tweet from May 22, 2020, Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times, opined, “There is a difference between being politically black and being racially black.”
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Shelly Eversley’s The Real Negro suggests that in the latter half of the 20th century, the criteria of what constitutes “authentic” black experience moved from perceptible outward signs, like the fact of being restricted to segregated public spaces and speaking in a “black” dialect, to psychological, interior signs. In this new understanding, Eversley writes, “the ‘truth’ about race is felt, not performed, not seen.”
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Revisiting the prophetic work of Neil Postman about the media » MercatorNet - 1 views
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The NYU professor was surely prophetic. “Our own tribe is undergoing a vast and trembling shift from the magic of writing to the magic of electronics,” he cautioned.
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“We face the rapid dissolution of the assumptions of an education organised around the slow-moving printed word, and the equally rapid emergence of a new education based on the speed-of-light electronic message.”
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What Postman perceived in television has been dramatically intensified by smartphones and social media
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Opinion: America was lucky to be saved by its democracy -- even if some don't realize i... - 0 views
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America's extraordinary privileges of law and functionality seemed to sustain, even in a brief moment of collapse
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Americans perhaps also took that for granted
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not fear at the new unknown - dominated. Chaos normally follows disorder, but in the United States the cogs kept whirring.
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Opinion | Liberalism's Latinx Problem - The New York Times - 0 views
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Warren’s adoption of “Latinx” is a different example of this problem: There’s no policy here, but the rhetoric still suggests that Warren is distinctively beholden to a hermetic academic-progressive world, to a point where she doesn’t know how to talk to the less-ideological, less-woke, maybe-even-somewhat-conservative Hispanics whose votes her party needs.
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a related question is whether progressivism can succeed in consolidating the larger share of the Hispanic vote that Democrats expected in 2016 and didn’t get — an 80 percent rather than close to a 70 percent share, which would tip states like Florida and Arizona and even Texas and make Trump’s Rust Belt resilience moot.
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Hispanics (and African-Americans and Asians) now represent the moderate wing of the Democratic Party, the pocketbook-conscious, somewhat culturally conservative flank
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OUPblog » Blog Archive » While You Are/n't Sleeping - 1 views
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In sleep the unconscious selects new experiences to save in memory, particularly new experiences that have an emotional charge.
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If you worked hard to learn something new you will remember it better after a period of sleep than if you stay awake before you need to remember that new learning.
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Nightmares are defined as a vivid dream with strongly negative emotion that wakes the sleeper abruptly, with a clear memory of the dream. The awakening aborts the natural process of down-regulation of negative emotion. Therefore the dream is not completed and the process will repeat until some other experience allows the downloading of the negative emotion to take place. That is why small children have more nightmares than grown-ups. To children many experiences are frightening until we develop more coping skills
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Quinn Norton: The New York Times Fired My Doppelgänger - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Quinn Norton
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The day before Valentine’s Day, social media created a bizarro-world version of me. I have seen strange ideas about me online before, but this doppelgänger was so far from resembling me that I told friends and loved ones I didn’t want to even try to rebut it. It was a leading question turned into a human form. The net created a person with my name and face, but with so little relationship to me, she could have been an invader from an alternate universe.
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It started when The New York Times hired me for its editorial board. In January, the Times sought me out because, editorial leaders told me, the Times as an institution is struggling with understanding how technology is shifting society and politics. We talked for a while. I discussed my work, my beliefs, and my background.
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The Psychology of Taking a Knee - Scientific American Blog Network - 0 views
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Those are some of the scientific questions raised when San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick decided last year to kneel, instead of stand, for “The Star-Spangled Banner” before a preseason game.
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Police violence against unarmed black people.
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At first glance, research into emotion and nonverbal communication suggests that there is nothing threatening about kneeling
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