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Even movies that explore adaptive responses to climate change make glum assumptions. In Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar,” humanity’s future lies on a far distant planet; Earth is unsalvageable. James Cameron’s first “Avatar” movie imagines that resource crises will drive humanity to galaxy-wide pillage.

In Robinson’s telling, climate change will upend our lives, but we all have something to contribute to the response to this radical reordering.

The idea that pop culture can tell these stories creatively and dynamically is not merely speculative.

“The Ministry for the Future” novelist Kim Stanley Robinson has spent decades creatively imagining how humanity might respond to harsh conditions, whether that means Mars and the asteroid belt or a drowned New York City.

If activists, be they filmmakers or politicians, want to persuade the public to adopt new behaviors, or even to do more than simply despair, they need to give the ordinary person a vision for what to do.

e stories creatively and dyn

Facebook shut down the team in late 2019.

“We have a role to play, which is why we’ve built tools and controls to help people manage when and how they use our services,” she said in the statement. “Furthermore, we have a dedicated team working across our platforms to better understand these issues and ensure people are using our apps in ways that are meaningful to them.”

They wrote that they don’t consider the behavior to be a clinical addiction because it doesn’t affect the brain in the same way as gambling or substance abuse. In one document, they noted that “activities like shopping, sex and Facebook use, when repetitive and excessive, may cause problems for some people.”

In March 2020, several months after the well-being team was dissolved, researchers who had been on the team shared a slide deck internally with some of the findings and encouraged other teams to pick up the work.

The researchers estimated these issues affect about 12.5% of the flagship app’s more than 2.9 billion users, or more than 360 million people. About 10% of users in the U.S., one of Facebook’s most lucrative markets, exhibit this behavior

In the Philippines and in India, which is the company’s largest market, the employees put the figure higher, at around 25%.

“Why should we care?” the researchers wrote in the slide deck. “People perceive the impact. In a comparative study with competitors, people perceived lower well-being and higher problematic use on Facebook compared to any other service.

Facebook’s findings are consistent with what many external researchers have observed for years,

said Brian Primack, a professor of public health and medicine and dean of the College of Education and Health Professions at the University of Arkansas

His research group followed about a thousand people over six months in a nationally representative survey and found that the amount of social media that a person used was the No. 1 predictor of the variables they measured for who became depressed.

In late 2017, a Facebook executive and a researcher wrote a public blog post that outlined some of the issues with social-media addiction. According to the post, the company had found that while passive consumption of social media could make you feel worse, the opposite was true of more active social-media use.

Inside Facebook, the researchers registered concern about the direction of Facebook’s focus on certain metrics, including the number of times a person logs into the app, which the company calls a session. “One of the worries with using sessions as a north star is we want to be extra careful not to game them by creating bad experiences for vulnerable populations,” a researcher wrote, referring to elements designed to draw people back to Facebook frequently, such as push notifications.

Facebook then made a switch to more heavily weigh “meaningful social interactions” in its news feed as a way to combat passive consumption. One side effect of that change, as outlined in a previous Journal article in The Facebook Files, was that the company’s algorithms rewarded content that was angry or sensational, because those posts increased engagement from users.

Facebook said any algorithm can promote objectionable or harmful content and that the company is doing its best to mitigate the problem.

“Every second that I wasn’t occupied by something I had to do I was fooling around on my phone scrolling through Facebook,” Ms. Gandy said. “Facebook took over my brain.”

“Actively interacting with people—especially sharing messages, posts and comments with close friends and reminiscing about past interactions—is linked to improvements in well-being,” the company said.

The well-being team, according to people familiar with the matter, was reshuffled at least twice since late 2017 before it was disbanded, and could get only about half of the resources the team requested to do its work.

In 2018, Facebook’s researchers surveyed 20,000 U.S. users and paired their answers with data about their behavior on Facebook. The researchers found about 3% of these users said they experienced “serious problems” in their sleep, work or relationships related to their time on Facebook that they found difficult to change. Some of the researchers’ work was published in a 2019 paper.

According to that study, the researchers also said that a liberal interpretation of the results would be that 14% of respondents spent “a lot more time on Facebook than they want to,” although they didn’t label this group problematic users.

In 2019, the researchers had come to a new figure: What they called problematic use affects 12.5% of people on Facebook, they said. This survey used a broader definition for the issue, including users who reported negative results on key aspects of their life as well as feelings of guilt or a loss of control, according to the documents.

The researchers also asked Facebook users what aspects of Facebook triggered them most. The users said the app’s many notifications sucked them in. “Red dots are toxic on the home screen,” a male young adult in the U.S. told the researchers, referring to the symbol that alerts a user to new content.

One entrepreneur came up with his own solution to some of these issues. In 2016, software developer Louis Barclay manually unfollowed all the people, pages and groups he saw on Facebook in an attempt to be more deliberate about how he used technology. The process, which isn’t the same as unfriending, took him days, but he was happy with the result: an empty newsfeed that no longer sucked him in for hours. He could still visit the profile pages of everyone he wanted to connect with on Facebook, but their content would no longer appear in the never-ending scroll of posts.

Thinking other people might benefit from a similar experience on Facebook, he built a tool that would enable anyone to automate the process. He created it as a piece of add-on software called a browser extension that anyone could download. He called it Unfollow Everything and made it available on Chrome’s web store free of charge.

In July, Facebook sent Mr. Barclay a cease-and-desist letter, which the inventor earlier wrote about for Slate, saying his tool was a breach of its terms of service for automating user interactions. It also permanently disabled Mr. Barclay’s personal Facebook and Instagram accounts.

Ms. Lever, the company spokeswoman, said Mr. Barclay’s extension could pose risks if abused, and said Facebook offers its own unfollow tool that allows users to manually unfollow accounts.

Social media also amounts to “a machine for getting you to care about too many things, even if they’re each indisputably worthwhile.” Hence the urge to depict every policy problem as an urgent if not existential crisis

social media has turned all of us into “angrier, less empathetic, more anxious or more numbed out” versions of ourselves.

Finally, our political and policy debates tend towards what Burkeman calls “paralyzing grandiosity” – the false notion that in the face of problems like climate change, economic inequality, and ongoing threats to democracy “only the most revolutionary, world-transforming causes are worth fighting for.” It’s a sentiment that derives from and reinforces catastrophism and absolutism as ways of thinking about politics and policy

That sentiment also often results in impotent impatience, which in turn leads to frustration, anger, and cynicism when things don’t turn out exactly as we’ve hoped. But it also allows us to avoid hard choices required in order to pull together the political coalitions necessary to effect actual change.

Four Thousand Weeks is filled to the brim with practical advice

Embrace “radical incrementalism.”

Burkeman suggests we find some hobby we enjoy for its own sake, not because there’s some benefit we think we can derive from it

Take a break

rest for rest’s sake, “to spend some of our time, that is, on activities in which the only thing we’re trying to get from them is the doing itself.”

we should cultivate the patience to see our goals through step-by-step over the long term. We’ve got to resist the need for speed and desire for rapid resolution of problems, letting them instead take the time they take.

“To make a difference,” Burkeman argues, “you must focus your finite capacity for care.”

“Consolidate your caring” and think small.

it’s perfectly fine to dedicate your time to a limited subset of issues that you care deeply about. We’re only mortal, and as Burkeman points out it’s important to “consciously pick your battles in charity, activism, and politics.”

our lives are just as meaningful and worthwhile if we spend our time “on, say caring for an elderly relative with dementia or volunteering at the local community garden” as they are if we’re up to our eyeballs in the minutiae of politics and policy. What matters is that we make things slightly better with our contributions and actions

once we give up on the illusion of perfection, Burkeman observes, we “get to roll up [our] sleeves and start work on what’s gloriously possible instead.”

“It is hard to look at increasing trends in media consumption of all types, media multitasking and rates of ADHD in young people and not conclude that there is a decrease in their attention span,

Emerging research suggests that watching short, fast-paced videos makes it harder for kids to sustain activities that don’t offer instant—and constant—gratification.

One of the few studies specifically examining TikTok-related effects on the brain focused on Douyin, the TikTok equivalent in China, made by the same Chinese parent company, ByteDance Ltd. It found that the personalized videos the app’s recommendation engine shows users activate the reward centers of the brain, as compared with the general-interest videos shown to new users.

Brain scans of Chinese college students showed that areas involved in addiction were highly activated in those who watched personalized videos.

It also found some people have trouble controlling when to stop watching.

attention. “If kids’ brains become accustomed to constant changes, the brain finds it difficult to adapt to a nondigital activity where things don’t move quite as fast,”

A TikTok spokeswoman said the company wants younger teens to develop positive digital habits early on, and that it recently made some changes aimed at curbing extensive app usage. For example, TikTok won’t allow users ages 13 to 15 to receive push notifications after 9 p.m. TikTok also periodically reminds users to take a break to go outside or grab a snack.

Kids have a hard time pulling away from videos on YouTube, too, and Google has made several changes to help limit its use, including turning off autoplay by default on accounts of people under 18.

When kids do things that require prolonged focus, such as reading or solving math problems, they’re using directed attention

This function starts in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for decision making and impulse control.

“Directed attention is the ability to inhibit distractions and sustain attention and to shift attention appropriately. It requires higher-order skills like planning and prioritizing,”

Kids generally have a harder time doing this—and putting down their videogame controllers—because the prefrontal cortex isn’t fully developed until age 25.

“We speculate that individuals with lower self-control ability have more difficulty shifting attention away from favorite video stimulation,

“In the short-form snackable world, you’re getting quick hit after quick hit, and as soon as it’s over, you have to make a choice,” said Mass General’s Dr. Marci, who wrote the new book “Rewired: Protecting Your Brain in the Digital Age.” The more developed the prefrontal cortex, the better the choices.

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that gets released in the brain when it’s expecting a reward. A flood of dopamine reinforces cravings for something enjoyable, whether it’s a tasty meal, a drug or a funny TikTok video.

“TikTok is a dopamine machine,” said John Hutton, a pediatrician and director of the Reading & Literacy Discovery Center at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. “If you want kids to pay attention, they need to practice paying attention.”

Researchers are just beginning to conduct long-term studies on digital media’s effects on kids’ brains. The National Institutes of Health is funding a study of nearly 12,000 adolescents as they grow into adulthood to examine the impact that many childhood experiences—from social media to smoking—have on cognitive development.

she predicts they will find that when brains repeatedly process rapid, rewarding content, their ability to process less-rapid, less-rewarding things “may change or be harmed.”

“It’s like we’ve made kids live in a candy store and then we tell them to ignore all that candy and eat a plate of vegetables,”

“We have an endless flow of immediate pleasures that’s unprecedented in human history.”

Parents and kids can take steps to boost attention, but it takes effort

Swap screen time for real time. Exercise and free play are among the best ways to build attention during childhood,

“Depriving kids of tech doesn’t work, but simultaneously reducing it and building up other things, like playing outside, does,”

Practice restraint.

“When you practice stopping, it strengthens those connections in the brain to allow you to stop again next time.”

Use tech’s own tools. TikTok has a screen-time management setting that allows users to cap their app usage.

Ensure good sleep. Teens are suffering from a sleep deficit.

Only committed conservatives, the theory goes, would bother to tune in to Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson, so what difference could it make what they say?

Broockman and Kalla recruited a sample of regular Fox News viewers and paid a subset of them to watch CNN instead.

Then the treatment group of switchers and the control group of non-switchers took three waves of surveys about the news.

The results: Not only did CNN and Fox cover different things during the September 2020 survey period, but the audience of committed Fox viewers, which started the month with conservative predispositions, changed their minds on many issues.

Switchers were five percentage points more likely to believe that people suffer from long Covid, for example, and six points more likely to believe that many foreign countries did a better job than the U.S. of controlling the virus.

They were seven points more likely to support voting by mail. And they were 10 points less likely to believe that supporters of then-candidate Joe Biden were happy when police officers get shot, 11 points less likely to say it’s more important for the president to focus on containing violent protesters than on the coronavirus, and 13 points less likely to agree that if Biden were elected, “we’ll see many more police get shot by Black Lives Matter activists.”

These are meaningful differences, even if the group that switched to CNN remained very right-wing in their view of the American political landscape.

these are reasonably large changes from a one-month experiment. And they occurred despite the long-term effort of then-President Donald Trump to discredit CNN and other mainstream media outlets.

one of the things that switchers changed their minds about was Fox News itself: They became more skeptical that Fox would cover a story that reflected poorly on Trump, even if it were true.

This mode of political influence, where partisan media can simply ignore stories that are inconvenient, is a potentially powerful challenge to democratic accountability.

It’s also probably not symmetrical. Even media outlets that skew liberal in their coverage generally don’t shy away from covering the Covid death toll or the rise in inflation.

one lesson they can take from this experiment is that nobody is impossible to reach.

Broockman and Kalla’s research indicates that information flows at the margin really do matter. Any opportunity to present new facts to people, and new arguments, is valuable.

when Mr. Nichol tweaked his requests a little, adding or subtracting a few words here or there, it provided what he wanted. When he asked for “a piano in a living room filled with sand,” the image looked more like a beach in a living room.

DALL-E is what artificial intelligence researchers call a neural network, which is a mathematical system loosely modeled on the network of neurons in the brain.

the same technology that recognizes the commands spoken into smartphones and identifies the presence of pedestrians as self-driving cars navigate city streets.

A neural network learns skills by analyzing large amounts of data. By pinpointing patterns in thousands of avocado photos, for example, it can learn to recognize an avocado.

DALL-E looks for patterns as it analyzes millions of digital images as well as text captions that describe what each image depicts. In this way, it learns to recognize the links between the images and the words.

Another aspect of development that may be happening for her is a stage that the psychologist Erik Erikson called “identity versus role diffusion” (also referred to as “role confusion”), which is shorthand for children figuring out their position in the world. “This is the first time when kids have questions about their own existence, questions about self-identity, the meaning of life and the changing role of authority,” Hunter said.

Mr. Obama starts where most lawmakers are stuck: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which gives platforms immunity from legal liability for most third-party posts. He suggested a “higher standard of care” for ads than for so-called organic content that everyday users post. This would strike a sensible balance between eviscerating Section 230, making sites accountable for everything they host, and doing nothing.

On top of that, “an instant, 24/7 global information stream,” from which audiences can pick and choose material that confirms their biases, has deepened the social divides that bad actors seek to exploit.

Mr. Obama identified another problem with the Section 230 talk: homing in on what material platforms do and don’t take down risks missing how the “very design” of these sites privileges polarizing, inflammatory posts.

With this, Mr. Obama adds something vital to the mainstream debate over social media regulation, shifting attention away from a debate about whack-a-mole content removal and toward the sites’ underlying structures. His specific suggestions, while fuzzy, also have promise — from slowing down viral material to imposing transparency obligations that would subject social media companies’ algorithms to scrutiny from researchers and regulators.

Mr. Obama calls this “democratic oversight.” But the material companies reveal could be highly technical. Ideally, it would get translated into layman’s terms so that everyday people, too, can understand how decisions so significant in their daily lives and the life of the country are made.

I’m kind of tired of pretending that the stench does not exist, as if doing otherwise would be tantamount to expressing prejudice against neurodivergence. This is a bad culture, and it always has been.

If the X rebrand disgusts you—if, like me, you’ve been made a little queasy by having the new logo thrust upon your phone via automatic update—that feeling is about more than Musk alone. He has merely surfaced what has been there all along. The internet is magical and empowering. The internet is childish and disgusting.

Musk’s obsession with X as a brand, and his childish desire to broadcast that obsession from the rooftops in hoggish, bright pulsations, calls attention to this baggage. It reminds us that the world’s richest man is a computer geek, but one with enormous power instead of none

It calls attention to the putrid smell that suffuses the history of the internet

that joy also feels misguided, misplaced, or simply out of time—from an era that definitively ended. The aughties era of universal social-media onboarding that includes Twitter was defined by Millennial optimism and its whoop-whoop soundtrack.

Threads represents a memory of a time that has probably passed but of which we cannot yet let go.

With a few threads posted, and the most eager followees following or followed, the dopamine high cleared, revealing reality: The age of social media is over, and it cannot be recovered.

Zuckerberg has merely copied and pasted a social network, and we are back where we started, only with all the baggage and psychological scarring of previous connectivity experiences.

Big tech companies now dictate where attention, and therefore money, power, and influence, reside. You don’t have to like that fact to admit that it’s the case: Is Threads a thing? Should we be on it? MrBeast has 1 million Thread followers already.

Who, if anyone, is this for? Did anyone ask for this? Why are these hot people with excellent skin, blue check marks, and 750,000 followers so excited?

Who, if

The cascade of new followers, the collective rush of establishing new communication norms on the fly with friends and total strangers—all of that is fleeting. And the true sickos know what happens next: the trolls, the spam, the ads, the Conversations About Politics. Even if those things never materialize, the nagging feeling is still there

It’s not exactly like rebuilding your home on the coastline after it was destroyed by a hurricane, but the vibe is similar: rebirth and hope, but also regret and dread. If only it had all just fallen into the sea.

But Lembke says social media companies have essentially exploited our need for human connection.

“Part of the way our brains get us to do that is by releasing oxytocin, our love hormone, which in turn releases dopamine in the reward pathway, which makes connection feel good, ”

Lembke explains that social media has taken the work out of how we connect with other human beings, placing that effort online and adding three major ingredients: novelty, accessibility and quantity, making scrolling a very potent drug.

More than 95 percent of people ages 13 to 17 in the country say they use a social media platform, and more than a third say they are “almost constantly” using one.

“We are living in the middle of a youth mental health crisis in America. And my growing concern is that social media has become an important contributor to that,

In the absence of laws against overuse of social media platforms, Lembke says, the responsibility rests on parents and users. She recommends identifying the particular type of digital media that is affecting us and eliminating it for four weeks, as a sort of dopamine fast.

“We’re not saying to eliminate all devices and all social media or even all media, but to identify the ones that are problematic and eliminate those for four weeks, which is on average the amount of time it takes to reset reward pathways,”

Though Hoover’s settings bop around America from Boston to New York to Texas to Vermont, the only contextual references pertain to pop culture, social media and the occasional local attraction.

Politics are confined to the daunting gulf between haves and have-nots, and even when Hoover’s striving heroines find themselves among the haves, their hearts remain forever with the have-nots.

In these novels what matters more than anything else is hardship: Hardship is everywhere, women must suffer, women can heal, and those who make it through all this have the capacity to find themselves/love/happiness. The reader can’t help feeling that the heroine/Hoover is speaking to me/for me/like me.

Fiction of this sort reflects a strain in the culture that has shifted from a fascination with the other — the rich, the powerful, the exclusive — to a more inward preoccupation with the self and the desire to see oneself reflected in the stories one consumes

Women’s popular fiction of the ’80s, when the glitter and glamour of “Dallas” and “Dynasty” dominated prime-time TV, offers a sharp contrast. In best sellers of that period, the settings jetted from Monte Carlo to Capri to Rodeo Drive, populated by the rich, famous and destined-to-be. Heroines could have been peeled off the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine

As with TikTok testimonials of adolescent mental health challenges and group-chat confessions, it’s about “relatability” and the willingness to reveal all. Even celebrities must bare all

I never shed a tear while reading Sheldon, but that wasn’t the point. The point was exuberant voyeurism, the literary equivalent of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” The heroines’ lives were nothing like mine nor were they meant to be. That’s what made them so absurdly entertaining.

Colleen Hoover paints on a more intimate canvas. Her stories aren’t about attaining worldly power on a grand scale, but about finding power within

Hoover offers readers an emotional road map to recovery from imposter syndrome, domestic abuse, betrayal, victimization. It’s a very different kind of achievement.

In a country where economic inequalities can seem insurmountable and systems of power ever more remote, this may be the best her hard-knock heroines — and readers — can hope for.

For readers invested in characters who are like themselves — if perhaps more beautiful and with more exciting sex lives — the emotional payoff can still feel hard-earned. And, just possibly, the story could happen to them.

I don’t think these tools will ever render learning foreign languages completely obsolete. Real conversation in the flowing nuances of casual speech cannot be rendered by a program, at least not in a way that would convey full humanity.

even if it may fail at genuine, nuanced conversation — for now, at least — technology is eliminating most of the need to learn foreign languages for more utilitarian purposes.

The old-school language textbook scenarios, of people reserving hotel rooms or ordering meals in the language of the country they are visiting — “Greetings. Please bring me a glass of lemonade and a sandwich!” — will now be obsolete

to actively enjoy piecing together how other languages work is an individual quirk, not a human universal

Obsessive language learners have come to call themselves the polyglot community over the past couple of decades, and I am one of them, to an extent. As such, I know well how hard it can be to recognize that most human beings are numb to this peculiar desire.

Most human beings are interested much less in how they are saying things, and which language they are saying them in, than in what they are saying.

Learning to express this what — beyond the very basics — in another language is hard. It can be especially hard for us Anglophones, as speaking English works at least decently in so many places

To polyglots, foreign languages are Mount Everests daring us to climb them — a metaphor used by Hofstadter in his article. But to most people, they are just a barrier to get to the other side of.

After all, despite the sincere and admirable efforts of foreign language teachers nationwide, fewer than one in 100 American students become proficient in a language they learned in school.

Because I love trying to learn languages and am endlessly fascinated by their varieties and complexities, I am working hard to wrap my head around this new reality. With an iPhone handy and an appropriate app downloaded, foreign languages will no longer present most people with the barrier or challenge they once did

Learning to genuinely speak a new language will hardly be unknown. It will continue to beckon, for instance, for those actually relocating to a new country. And it will persist with people who want to engage with literature or media in the original language, as well as those of us who find pleasure in mastering these new codes just because they are “there.”

In other words, it will likely become an artisanal pursuit, of interest to a much smaller but more committed set of enthusiasts. And weird as that is, it is in its way a kind of progress.

Hours after the attack, a post on the fringe online message board 4chan circulated claiming that the gunman was transgender.

where people falsely claimed that the shooting was a result of hormone therapy undertaken by the gunman.

“There is an overwhelming number of individuals who are posting images of this person, who was the shooter, and information about the nature of them being transgender,”

On Tuesday, a transgender artist said on Reddit that people online “just took my photos and used it to spread misinformation.”

False claims that the gunman was born outside the United States began to circulate within hours of the shooting. Spread largely on white nationalist Telegram channels and Gab accounts, the claims alleged that he was an undocumented immigrant in the United States, even after authorities including Roland Gutierrez, a Texas state senator, confirmed that the gunman was born in North Dakota.

“Did he cross the border illegally?” Code of Vets, a veterans organization, posted on Twitter. “Our nation has a serious national security crisis evolving.”

We haven’t seen this combination of economic anxiety and high inflation before. Economists are weighing the risks of a U.S. recession, and companies in many industries are worried that their businesses are slowing.

Fast growing start-ups in particular need the faith of investors, customers and employees to keep the momentum going.

If within a few months, stock prices bounce back, investors start putting money into start-ups again and the market for initial public offerings unfreezes, the industry might be fine. But if investors stay skittish for many months or years, that could lead to a major shake-up.

Related Expert Q&A

This methodology involves one party proving it has information it claims is true and a second party that wants to verify that the first party's information is indeed true. With a zero-knowledge proof system, the proving party does not transmit any secretive information that could substantiate whether what it claims is true.

– SearchSecurity

A zero-knowledge proof requires no real knowledge or secret information to prove the claim.

Zero-knowledge proofs are used in modern cybersecurity in situations where one system claims to possess sensitive data yet does not want to transmit that data to prove it to another system.

“Indigenous knowledge provides a very unique perspective because it provides a more respectful and reciprocal view on nature and animals, and these are passed from generation to generation.”

But Sidorova notes that the integration of ILK is only a first step and should not be used to tokenize Indigenous communities.

Sidorova says policymakers, governments and organizations need to adequately fund Indigenous-led CBEM and research programs to ensure partnerships with Indigenous and local communities last long term.

The programs should also focus on Indigenous languages because Indigenous roles have spiritual elements that show connections to the land that can’t necessarily be fully translated into English, she added.

Over half (51 percent) of respondents reported that they either didn’t believe or weren’t sure that the data recorded in their EMRs was accurate.

The healthcare industry’s growing reliance on clinical data and EHRs requires that patients are educated and empowered about data collection, sharing, and use, the report authors noted. Bridging knowledge gaps between health systems and patients has the potential to significantly improve care, medical research, and health equity.

Even before the massacre, when student protesters in Beijing would use the square as a base to push for governmental reform and greater democracy, Hong Kong residents would hold rallies in solidarity. Many would even travel to the Chinese capital to offer support.

Since that last vigil, there have been many symbolic erasures of the city's ability to publicly remember, protest and mourn the massacre.

Last December Hong Kong University removed its "Pillar of Shame," an iconic sculpture commemorating the Tiananmen victims, which had stood on its campus for more than 20 years. Several other local universities have also taken down memorials.