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the faceless communication social media creates, the linked distances between people, both provokes and mitigates the inherent capacity for monstrosity.

The Gyges effect, the well-noted disinhibition created by communications over the distances of the Internet, in which all speech and image are muted and at arm’s reach, produces an inevitable reaction — the desire for impact at any cost, the desire to reach through the screen, to make somebody feel something, anything. A simple comment can so easily be ignored. Rape threat? Not so much. Or, as Mr. Nunn so succinctly put it on Twitter: “If you can’t threaten to rape a celebrity, what is the point in having them?”

The challenge of our moment is that the face has been at the root of justice and ethics for 2,000 years.

The precondition of any trial, of any attempt to reconcile competing claims, is that the victim and the accused look each other in the face.

For the great French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, the encounter with another’s face was the origin of identity — the reality of the other preceding the formation of the self. The face is the substance, not just the reflection, of the infinity of another person. And from the infinity of the face comes the sense of inevitable obligation, the possibility of discourse, the origin of the ethical impulse.

“Through imitation and mimicry, we are able to feel what other people feel. By being able to feel what other people feel, we are also able to respond compassionately to other people’s emotional states.” The face is the key to the sense of intersubjectivity, linking mimicry and empathy through mirror neurons — the brain mechanism that creates imitation even in nonhuman primates.

Inability to see a face is, in the most direct way, inability to recognize shared humanity with another. In a metastudy of antisocial populations, the inability to sense the emotions on other people’s faces was a key correlation. There is “a consistent, robust link between antisocial behavior and impaired recognition of fearful facial affect. Relative to comparison groups, antisocial populations showed significant impairments in recognizing fearful, sad and surprised expressions.”

Without a face, the self can form only with the rejection of all otherness, with a generalized, all-purpose contempt — a contempt that is so vacuous because it is so vague, and so ferocious because it is so vacuous. A world stripped of faces is a world stripped, not merely of ethics, but of the biological and cultural foundations of ethics.

The spirit of facelessness is coming to define the 21st. Facelessness is not a trend; it is a social phase we are entering that we have not yet figured out how to navigate.

the flight back to the face takes on new urgency. Google recently reported that on Android alone, which has more than a billion active users, people take 93 million selfies a day

Emojis are an explicit attempt to replicate the emotional context that facial expression provides. Intriguingly, emojis express emotion, often negative emotions, but you cannot troll with them.

But all these attempts to provide a digital face run counter to the main current of our era’s essential facelessness. The volume of digital threats appears to be too large for police forces to adequately deal with.

The more established wisdom about trolls, at this point, is to disengage. Obviously, in many cases, actual crimes are being committed, crimes that demand confrontation, by victims and by law enforcement officials, but in everyday digital life engaging with the trolls “is like trying to drown a vampire with your own blood,”

There is a third way, distinct from confrontation or avoidance: compassion

we need a new art of conversation for the new conversations we are having — and the first rule of that art must be to remember that we are talking to human beings: “Never say anything online that you wouldn’t say to somebody’s face.” But also: “Don’t listen to what people wouldn’t say to your face.”

The neurological research demonstrates that empathy, far from being an artificial construct of civilization, is integral to our biology.

Her reason for coming was obvious. She was around 40 weeks pregnant

She was an office worker in Ohio when she became pregnant by a man who wasn’t going to marry her. The most remarkable part of her story was this: When she knew she was about to give birth, she drove westward out of Ohio, stopping at Indianapolis only because it was the first big city she encountered

She arranged to place the baby for adoption and gave birth the next day.

The baby was me. If she’d driven farther, I’d be a native of Chicago or St. Louis, but Indianapolis it was

Life is a journey, and I was born on a road trip.

Secrecy was considered best for all concerned. In recent decades, open adoption has been replacing this practice, but rules governing past adoptions change slowly, and I was barred from seeing my birth records.

Everything I just told you about my biological parents was unknown to me growing up; they were such a blank that I could not even imagine what they might be like.

I accepted this until I became an adoptive parent in 2012 and a social worker suggested that my adopted daughter might want to know my story someday

She’s from China, and like many international adoptees, she also had no story of her biological family.

I requested my records from the State of Indiana and was denied.

Next I called the Children’s Bureau, where a kind woman on the phone had my records in her hands, but was not allowed to share them.

Typed notes from the Children’s Bureau recorded a visit with my biological mother in the hospital. Asked how she felt, she cried

It’s been nearly two years since I first read those documents, and I’m still not over it. Knowing that story has altered how I think about myself, and the seemingly simple question of where I’m from

It’s brought on a feeling of revelation, and also of anger. I’m not upset with my biological mother; it was moving to learn how she managed her predicament alone.

Her decisions left me with the family that I needed — that I love. Nor am I unhappy with the Children’s Bureau, which did its duty by preserving my records.

I am angry that for 50 years, my state denied me the story of how I came to live on this earth. Strangers hid part of me from myself.

While I now have the privilege of knowing my information, many people’s stories are still hidden.

About 2 percent of U.S. residents — roughly six million people — are adoptees

A majority were adopted domestically, with records frequently sealed, especially for older adoptees

I was never able to tell a doctor my family medical history when asked. It’s one of those little things that never bother you until it does.

The people who blocked me from learning my past must have thought their motives were pure.

Closed adoption began as “confidential” adoption in the early 20th century, enabling parents and children to avoid the stigma of illegitimacy.

Records were sealed to all but people directly involved

But nobody asked if I wanted my identity hidden from me.

Should adoptees and biological families contact each other, after the law forbade it for so long?

Not without mutual consent:

information alone is powerful.

As records are opened, people’s privacy should be respected; that’s why I’m withholding my biological mother’s name and any details that might identify her. But my story is mine, and other adoptees have a right to recover theirs.

That usually is not going on when Christian men like [the shooter] describe their behavior as an addiction. Oftentimes what they really mean is “I’m regularly engaging in this thing that I’d rather not, but I’m doing it consistently, so I feel like I’m out of control.”

That suggests that evangelicals are working with a very expansive definition of addiction that is basically shaped by this idea that if I’m doing something regularly that I’d rather not do, I can call myself an addict. And that’s a core aspect of their identity: I’m a porn addict or I’m a sex addict.

One of these interesting paradoxes among conservative Christian men is that sexual sin is a really bad sin and that you can reduce your entire spiritual life to how you’re doing sexually. It’s something I call sexual exceptionalism

Republican Party is an illiberal anti-democratic nativist global outlier, with positions more extreme than France’s National Rally, and in line with the Germany’s AfD, Hungary’s Fidesz, Turkey’s AKP and Poland’s PiS, according to the widely respected V-Dem (Varieties of Democracy) Institute.

The GOP has been sliding into authoritarianism over two decades, using increasingly demonizing rhetoric against its opponents.

Historically, democracy dies.

Three-quarters of Americans disapprove of the January 6 mob’s actions, and Trump’s seemingly immovable approval floor dropped by about more than six points. In the days after, only 13 percent of Americans considered themselves “Trump Supporters” while another 16 percent considered themselves “Traditional Republicans.” If “Trump Supporters” were their own party, they’d be about as popular as Germany’s far-right AfD, which polled at about 15 percent for 2019, though their support more recently dropped off to 11 percent.

. For decades, majorities of Americans have told pollsters they want more parties to choose from, and registered their dissatisfaction with the two-party system by increasingly identifying as independents.

But as the two parties began sorting more clearly along liberal-conservative lines as “culture war” issues starting in the 1970s, and as American politics nationalized around these cultural issues, and, starting in the 1990s, as the long-time Democratic control of the House ended, every election became a high-stakes all-or-nothing fight for control of federal power.

The only way to elevate the moderate Republicans is for Congress to use its constitutional authority (Article I, Section IV) to change how we vote, and create electoral opportunities for a center-right to rise again.

“When people hear ‘clown,’ the first associations that pop into their head are the killer clowns in the movies — It, the Joker— and then John Wayne Gacy, the real-life mass murderer,” McAndrew says of the 1970s serial killer who became known as the “Killer Clown” for his volunteer clown work. “It’s kind of hard to get past all of that.”

“[Some of the] very first clowns were the court jesters who poked fun at kings and made people in high places uncomfortable. That’s why they exist,” he tells TIME of the history of clowns in medieval Europe. “They’re designed to make people afraid. If you go all the way back to the beginning of clownhood, they’ve always been bad. They’re pranksters, they play tricks.”

However, while many people are apprehensive or fearful of clowns, both Nader and McAndrew agree that someone having an actual phobia of clowns, a.k.a. coulrophobia, is rare.

“Fortunately, we live in a society where clowns aren’t just wandering around, so it’s pretty easy to avoid them or at least not come into contact with them very regularly. Rarely does this fear ever cause a person to experience a disruption in their lifestyle or ability to do things.”

“We like to learn about dangers in a safe way so that we’re prepared in some unknown future time to deal with them if they ever come our way. So by going to see IT and watching this evil clown lure children in and kill them, we learn strategies for avoiding that kind of fate ourselves,” he says. “We’re not consciously sitting there, watching the movie and thinking these things, but that impulse to like to scare ourselves is there.”

Some soldiers married Asian women and brought them home as war brides, while others primarily viewed Asian women as sexual objects. Both approaches perpetuated stereotypes of Asian women as sexually submissive, either as ideal wives or sexually exotic prostitutes.

In online digital pornography, Asian women are disproportionately presented as victims of rape, compared to white women or women of other racial backgrounds.

Harmful stereotypes of Asian women in American popular culture date back to at least the 19th century. Back then, American missionaries and military personnel in Asia viewed the women they met there as exotic and submissive.

The most recent high-profile example of this dynamic is the 2015 rape of a woman by white Stanford student Brock Turner. Not until 2019 did the woman, Chanel Miller, reveal her name and identity as an Asian American woman.

In March 2020, Asian American and Pacific Islander community organizations joined with San Francisco State University’s Asian American Studies Program to document incidents of anti-Asian racism occurring across the country during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The group has found that Asian women report hate incidents 2.3 times as often as Asian men.

Asian women are not the only targets of racial and sexual violence. Any non-white woman has a greater risk of these perils than white women do.

Prices adjust to equate how much people want to buy with how much they want to sell.

And if people want to buy more than they did before, prices rise. If people want to sell more than they did before, prices fall.

Supply and demand. Buyers are competing with each other. Sellers are competing with each other.

The simple answer of supply and demand is a strange answer, for it presumes you can talk about a good of a particular quality

In the real world, every good has a unique mix of attributes. Even when two goods are physically identical, they almost always come bundled with differing levels of service attached to them.

It’s a strange answer because people’s desires and situations and income and alternatives are constantly changing, so the amount that people want to buy and sell of something can never be pinned down instantaneously.

It’s a strange answer because it seems to require lots of information.

The strangeness of supply and demand leads some to conclude that it only applies to special cases of a homogeneous good where there are a near-infinite number of sellers and where there is perfect information about the quality of the good and the alternatives and their prices.

Supply and demand is a way to see the relationship that strips away everything except the fact that what people are willing to pay and what they have to pay depends on the alternatives.

Prices adjust. They’re not fixed. Supply and demand helps us remember this.

Finally, supply and demand helps us see things in a totally different way. How bizarre it is that partisans credit or blame the president for the average level of wages or inequality in the United States.

The president no more controls wages in the United States than he does the average weight of Americans.

One of the simplest insights that comes from supply and demand is the availability of goods in the marketplace.

When people want more of something, the crowd of more enthusiastic buyers rarely exhausts the supply. Prices adjust to equate how much people want to buy with how much people want to sell. So if people suddenly want more of something, it doesn’t just disappear. The price rises inducing an increase in what is available.

Because prices can adjust, the shelves are rarely empty in a market economy

Supply and demand is a poor tool for predicting precisely the exact level of a price.

Supply and demand is a simple and powerful way to describe the ways that transactions across time and space are not independent of one another.

It is a powerful way to organize our thinking about the complexity that emerges out of the propensity to truck, barter and exchange, a complexity that is the result of human action but not of human design.

Revisiting your youth culture when your own youth has mostly fled is an exercise in estrangement and mild humiliation, like running into your therapist at Victoria’s Secret.

“We didn’t know what it was going to be,” the journalist and activist Kevin Powell, one of the original roommates, says in the first episode of “Homecoming.” “We were just ourselves.”

by agreeing to the constant presence of producers and cameras, were the harbingers of today’s culture, in which self-image is shaped in the expectation of a lens and personhood collates with brand identity.

Moon Frye seems to have known every other child star in Los Angeles and its outlying counties: Sara Gilbert, Emmanuel Lewis, Brian Austin Green, Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Joey Lawrence, Jenny Lewis (hilarious) and at least a dozen more.

These were children valued less for who they were and more for the fandom and ads they could generate, the tickets they could sell

Today, that’s everyone with an Instagram account, potentially.

“Kid 90” also reminds us that until pretty recently, the dumb things teenagers wore and the dumber things they did and said didn’t have an afterlife, because there were few ways to record them and even fewer ways to disseminate those recordings.

I was, unconvincingly, so many people as a teenager — a rebel, a sophisticate, a drama nerd, a go-getter, a witch.

The comedy of adolescence is that it’s practice for adulthood. The tragedy is that adolescents practice on one another

I’m unutterably grateful that my own mortifications — lines like, “I’m not a feminist, I’m really more like a humanist,”

Moon Frye seems to have also struggled with her image and with how the industry treated her when her body began to diverge from Punky’s

In an agonizing section of the documentary, she talks about going through puberty, developing breasts and being seen, at 13 and 14 years old, only for bimbo-esque roles.

Peers called her Punky Boobster.

“It’s hard when you’ve got boobs and you can’t work in this business,”

What if the business is the problem and not children’s bodies?

She wanted serious roles, so at 15, she had breast reduction surgery.

A crucial aspect of adolescence is performance

I could try on a persona for size and then return it, tags on

There was no social media then and no one wanted me on any reality series, so I never had to curate a self before I had one.

What would I have done for likes? What would that have made me?

Like Moon Frye and a lot of girls with big feelings and poetic inclinations, I kept diaries as a teenager. I’ve never gone back and read them. Why? I’m afraid that I might be embarrassed by my younger self or that she might be embarrassed by boring, wine-mom me

But I hope we’d get along. And then we could take a kiss-face selfie together, filter it, Facetune it, post it with some cute caption and watch the little hearts roll in.

er parents divorced when she was a toddler, and she was raised in a crowded Brooklyn apartment by her mother, her mother’s sister and her grandparents, all of whom unstintingly adored her

“Four loving adults had made me the center of their lives

Always the smartest kid in the room (she was a remarkable test-taker), Turkle flourished early as an intellectually confident person, easily winning a scholarship to Radcliffe, support for graduate school at Harvard

Newly graduated from Radcliffe, she was in Paris during the May 1968 uprising and was shocked by the responses of most French thinkers to what was happening in the streets

Each in turn, she observed, filtered the originality of the scene through his own theories.

Few saw these galvanizing events as the demonstration they so clearly were of a hungry demand for new relations between the individual and society.

The anecdotes that illustrate this marriage encapsulate, in an inspired way, the dilemma Turkle has spent her whole life exploring:

My interests were moving from ideas in the abstract to the impact of ideas on personal identity. How did new political ideas change how people saw themselves? And what made some ideas more appealing than others?”

For the people around her, it embodied “the science of getting computers to do things that would be considered intelligent if done by people.” Nothing more exciting. Who could resist such a possibility? Who would resist it? No one, it turned out.

“The worst thing, to Seymour,” she writes, would have been “to give children a computer that presented them only with games or opaque applications. … A learning opportunity would be missed because you would have masked the intellectual power of the machine. Sadly, this is what has happened.”

In a memoir written by a person of accomplishment, the interwoven account of childhood and early influences is valuable only insofar as it sheds light on the evolution of the individual into the author of the memoir we are reading.

with Turkle’s story of her marriage to Seymour Papert her personal adventures struck gold.

“good conversation” was valued “more highly than common courtesy. … To be interesting, Seymour did not have to be kind. He had to be brilliant.” And if you weren’t the sort of brilliant that he was, you were something less than real to him.

electrified

the rupture in understanding between someone devoted to the old-fashioned practice of humanist values and someone who doesn’t know what the word “human” really means.

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.

Little kids were new casualties in our country’s ongoing struggle to define itself. Its endless argument over guns appeared to be a symptom of a national identity crisis between political polar opposites – two parties so ideologically opposed that even the needless deaths of tiny innocents couldn’t bridge the divide between them.

What sickened me most, though, wasn’t our government’s failure to prioritize people over partisanship. It was knowing that there were parents who took their kids to school and returned home eternally empty-handed.

Survivors of school shootings like me are now raising kids of their own, worrying they will suffer similar fates. Although the psychological effects of school shootings on parents may not yet be fully known or understood, research suggests that those with loved ones who have been exposed to “assaultive violence” have a higher risk of mental health disorders.

School shootings don’t just deprive children of their lives and innocence; they deprive parents of a sense of safety and security their parents and grandparents took for granted.

This reality is a painful part of our collective consciousness. We send our kids to school, hoping the horror of gun violence won’t happen there, but knowing no child or school is immune.

Both sides seem content to debate the second amendment and the founders’ intent until they run out of breath. But in the meantime, Congress must come together, in earnest, to find common ground and common-sense solutions to stop this bleeding. The consequences of inaction have become too high – and our kids are counting on them.

The quality of mathematics research in the United States today is the envy of the scientific world. This is a direct result of the openness and inclusivity of the profession.

Can Americans maintain this unmatched excellence in the future? There are worrisome signs that suggest not.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development compares mathematical proficiency among 15-year-olds by country worldwide. According to its 2018 report, America ranked 37th while China, America’s main competitor for world leadership, came in first.

This is despite the fact that the United States is the fifth-highest spender per pupil among the 37 developed OECD nations

This massive failure of our K-12 education system trickles through the STEM pipeline.

At the undergraduate level, too few American students are prepared for higher-level mathematics courses. These students are then unprepared for rigorous graduate-level work

According to our own experiences at the universities where we teach, an overwhelming majority of American students with strong math backgrounds are either foreign-born or first-generation students who have additional support from their education-conscious families. At all levels, STEM disciplines are more and more dependent on a constant flow of foreign talent.

There are many reasons for this failure, but the way that we educate and prepare teachers is particularly influential. The vast majority of K-12 math teachers are graduates of teacher-preparation programs that teach very little substantive mathematics

This has led to a constant stream of ill-advised and dumbed-down reforms. One of the latest fads is anti-racist mathematics. Promoted in several states, the bizarre doctrine threatens to further degrade the teaching of mathematics.

Another major concern is the twisted interpretation of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

Under the banner of DEI, universities are abandoning the use of standardized tests like the SAT and GRE in admissions, and cities are considering scrapping academic tracking and various gifted programs in schools, which they deem “inequitable.”

such programs are particularly effective, when properly implemented, at discovering and encouraging talented children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

The new 2021 Mathematics Framework, currently under consideration by California’s Department of Education, does away “with all tracking, acceleration, gifted programs, or any instruction that involves clustering by individual differences, without expressing any awareness of the impact these drastic alterations would have in preparing STEM-ready candidates.”

These measures will not only hinder the progress of the generations of our future STEM workforce but also contribute to structural inequalities, as they are uniquely detrimental to students whose parents cannot send them to private schools or effective enrichment programs.

These are just a few examples of an unprecedented fervor for revolutionary change in the name of Critical Race Theory (CRT), a doctrine that views the world as a fierce battleground for the narratives of various identity groups.

This will only lead to a further widening of racial disparities in educational outcomes while lowering American children’s rankings in education internationally.

Ill-conceived DEI policies, often informed by CRT, and the declining standards of K-12 math education feed each other in a vicious circle

Regarding minorities, in particular, public K-12 education all too often produces students unprepared to compete, thus leading to large disparities in admissions at universities, graduate programs, and faculty positions. This disparity is then condemned as a manifestation of structural racism, resulting in administrative measures to lower the evaluation criteria. Lowering standards at all levels leads eventually to even worse outcomes and larger disparities, and so on in a downward spiral.

A case in point is the recent report by the American Mathematical Society that accuses the entire mathematics community, with the thinnest of specific evidence, of systemic racial discrimination. A major justification put forward for such a grave accusation is the lack of sufficient representation of Black mathematicians in the professio

the report, while raising awareness of several ugly facts from the long-ago past, makes little effort to address the real reasons for this, mainly the catastrophic failure of the K-12 mathematical educational system.

The National Science Foundation, a federal institution meant to support fundamental research, is now diverting some of its limited funding to various DEI initiatives of questionable benefit.

Meanwhile, other countries, especially China, are doing precisely the opposite, following the model of our past dedication to objective measures of excellence. How long before we will see a reverse exodus, away from the United States?

The present crisis can still be reversed by focusing on a few concrete actions:

Improve schools in urban areas and inner-city neighborhoods by following the most promising education programs. These programs demonstrate that inner-city children benefit if they are challenged by high standards and a nurturing environment.

Follow the lead of other highly successful rigorous programs such as BASIS schools and Math for America, which focus on rigorous STEM curricula, combined with 21st-century teaching methods, and recruit talented teachers to help them build on their STEM knowledge and teaching methods.

Increase, rather than eliminate, tailored instruction, both for accelerated and remedial math courses.

Reject the soft bigotry of low expectations, that Black children cannot do well in competitive mathematics programs and need dumbed-down ethnocentric versions of mathematics.

Uphold the objective selection process based on merit at all levels of education and research.

Learning how to make friends is a major part of growing up, and friendship requires a certain amount of risk-taking. This is true for making a new friend, but it’s also true for maintaining friendships. When there are problems that need to be faced—big ones or small ones—it takes courage to be honest about your feelings and then hear what the other person has to say

But when friendship is conducted online and through texts, kids are doing this in a context stripped of many of the most personal—and sometimes intimidating—aspects of communication

The other big danger that comes from kids communicating more indirectly is that it has gotten easier to be cruel. “Kids text all sorts of things that you would never in a million years contemplate saying to anyone’s face,”

“Girls are socialized more to compare themselves to other people, girls in particular, to develop their identities, so it makes them more vulnerable to the downside of all this.” She warns that a lack of solid self-esteem is often to blame. “We forget that relational aggression comes from insecurity and feeling awful about yourself, and wanting to put other people down so you feel better.”

. Teenage girls sort through hundreds of photos, agonizing over which ones to post online. Boys compete for attention by trying to out-gross one other, pushing the envelope as much as they can in the already disinhibited atmosphere online.

Another big change that has come with new technology and especially smart phones is that we are never really alone. Kids update their status, share what they’re watching, listening to, and reading, and have apps that let their friends know their specific location on a map at all times.

Offline, the gold standard advice for helping kids build healthy self-esteem is to get them involved in something that they’re interested in

Collective memory is similar, though its loss does not immediately paralyze everyday private activity. But ignorance of history-that is, absent or defective collective memory-does deprive us of the best available guide for public action, especially in encounters with outsider

Often it is enough for experts to know about outsiders, if their advice is listened to. But democratic citizenship and effective participation in the determination of public policy require citizens to share a collective memory, organized into historical knowledge and belief

This value of historical knowledge obviously justifies teaching and learning about what happened in recent times, for the way things are descends from the way they were yesterday and the day before that

in fact, institutions that govern a great deal of our everyday behavior took shape hundreds or even thousands of years ago

Only an acquaintance with the entire human adventure on earth allows us to understand these dimensions of contemporary reality.

it follows that study of history is essential for every young person.

Collective memory is quite the same. Historians are always at work reinterpreting the past, asking new questions, searching new sources and finding new meanings in old documents in order to bring the perspective of new knowledge and experience to bear on the task of understanding the past.

what we know and believe about history is always changing. In other words, our collective, codified memory alters with time just as personal memories do, and for the same reasons.

skeptics are likely to conclude that history has no right to take student time from other subjects. If what is taught today is not really true, how can it claim space in a crowded school curriculum?

what if the world is more complicated and diverse than words can ever tell? What if human minds are incapable of finding' neat pigeon holes into which everything that happens will fit?

What if we have to learn to live with uncertainty and probabilities, and act on the basis of the best guesswork we are capable of?

Then, surely, the changing perspectives of historical understanding are the very best introduction we can have to the practical problems of real life. Then, surely, a serious effort to understand the interplay of change and continuity in human affairs is the only adequate introduction human beings can have to the confusing flow of events that constitutes the actual, adult world.

Memory is not something fixed and forever. As time passes, remembered personal experiences take on new meanings.

Early in this century, teachers and academic administrators pretty well agreed that two sorts of history courses were needed: a survey of the national history of the United States and a survey of European history.

Memory, indeed, makes us human. History, our collective memory, carefully codified and critically revised, makes us social, sharing ideas and ideals with others so as to form all sorts of different human groups

The varieties of history are enormous; facts and probabilities about the past are far too numerous for anyone to comprehend them all. Every sort of human group has its own histor

Where to start? How bring some sort of order to the enormous variety of things known and believed about the past?

Systematic sciences are not enough. They discount time, and therefore oversimplify reality, especially human reality.

This second course was often broadened into a survey of Western civilization in the 1930s and 1940s

But by the 1960s and 1970s these courses were becoming outdated, left behind by the rise of new kinds social and quantitative history, especially the history of women, of Blacks, and of other formerly overlooked groups within the borders of the United States, and of peoples emerging from colonial status in the world beyond our borders.

much harder to combine old with new to make an inclusive, judiciously balanced (and far less novel) introductory course for high school or college students.

But abandoning the effort to present a meaningful portrait of the entire national and civilizational past destroyed the original justification for requiring students to study history

Competing subjects abounded, and no one could or would decide what mattered most and should take precedence. As this happened, studying history became only one among many possible ways of spending time in school.

The costs of this change are now becoming apparent, and many concerned persons agree that returning to a more structured curriculum, in which history ought to play a prominent part, is imperative.

three levels of generality seem likely to have the greatest importance for ordinary people.

First is family, local, neighborhood history

Second is national history, because that is where political power is concentrated in our time.

Last is global history, because intensified communications make encounters with all the other peoples of the earth increasingly important.

Other pasts are certainly worth attention, but are better studied in the context of a prior acquaintance with personal-local, national, and global history. That is because these three levels are the ones that affect most powerfully what all other groups and segments of society actually do.

National history that leaves out Blacks and women and other minorities is no longer acceptable; but American history that leaves out the Founding Fathers and the Constitution is not acceptable either. What is needed is a vision of the whole, warts and all.

the study of history does not lead to exact prediction of future events. Though it fosters practical wisdom, knowledge of the past does not permit anyone to know exactly what is going to happen

Consequently, the lessons of history, though supremely valuable when wisely formulated, become grossly misleading when oversimplifiers try to transfer them mechanically from one age to another, or from one place to another.

Predictable fixity is simply not the human way of behaving. Probabilities and possibilities-together with a few complete surprises-are what we live with and must learn to expect.

Second, as acquaintance with the past expands, delight in knowing more and more can and often does become an end in itself.

On the other hand, studying alien religious beliefs, strange customs, diverse family patterns and vanished social structures shows how differently various human groups have tried to cop

Broadening our humanity and extending our sensibilities by recognizing sameness and difference throughout the recorded past is therefore an important reason for studying history, and especially the history of peoples far away and long ago

For we can only know ourselves by knowing how we resemble and how we differ from others. Acquaintance with the human past is the only way to such self knowledge.

Yet their moods remained elevated, on average, compared with those in younger generations, the survey data showed — despite the fact that both groups reported the same stress levels.

Older people, especially those with some resources, have more ability than younger adults to soften the edges of a day, by paying for delivery, hiring help, staying comfortably homebound and — crucially — doing so without young children underfoot.

when people are young, their goals and motives are focused on gaining skills and taking chances, to prepare for opportunities the future may hold.

They have come to accept themselves for who they are, rather than who they’re supposed to become.

In contrast to a previous study6, they observed a robust lifespan extension in male mice fed a BCAA-restricted diet throughout life, equal to the benefits of dietary protein restriction.

Interestingly, female mice showed no lifespan extension from BCAA or dietary protein restriction, and if BCAA restriction was started during middle age, the benefits on males were greatly reduced. Thus, both studies collectively point to mTOR as a primary mediator of the benefits associated with BCAA restriction (Fig. 1).

A clear picture is emerging of how specific amino acids are sensed by sestrin to regulate mTOR signalling and autophagy and so preserve the function of intestinal stem cells during ageing.

Genetic background is crucial in the response to dietary restriction, with an identical low-calorie regimen increasing lifespan in some mouse strains but shortening it in others

There is also evidence that dietary restriction initiated later in life might have reduced benefits in rodents and, in some cases, result in premature death

Taken together, these observations suggest that although protein- and BCAA-restricted diets are a powerful research tool for exploring the fundamental mechanisms of ageing, it is premature to recommend adoption by the general population.

I don't know how you bring these people together.

"This isn't their Republican Party anymore," the president's son said. "This is Donald Trump's Republican Party."

He thinks the big divide is between authoritarians and those who believe in democracy.

It's a fundamental belief in whether or not you want to continue the American experiment.

You have a segment of American society that does not accept the election outcome and is going to continue to speak up, is going to continue to agitate. And that's going to make this a very unstable period for months and perhaps even years."

That means a long, unstable period not just for the Republican Party, but for the American political system as a whole.

Annie says it wasn't that long ago that she could talk politics with her mom without things getting heated. But when the pandemic started, she says their conversations were peppered with conspiracies.

And what I found were stories, mostly from family members of people who have gotten wrapped up in political conspiracy theories like QAnon. And many are adult children who say they can't really have a civil conversation with their parents anymore and that it wasn't always this way.

It kind of seems normal at first. And then all of a sudden, something will just be out of the blue that just seems so far from anything that could be true.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: She's spending 16 to 18 hours a day consuming this. CORNISH: And the result of all this is a detachment from the facts.

Q's stories range from false notions about COVID to a cabal running the U.S. government to the claim there's a secret world of satanic pedophiles. But what's relevant here is that this culminates in a belief that President Trump is a kind of savior figure, which leads to the next phase for these families - a breakdown.

Because these belief systems are not about the information within them, but about the identity and the emotions that are appealed to through them, the only thing that can actually combat them effectively are loving, trusting, emotional connections.

Do not mock. Do not use snark. All of the, you know, Twitter posts where people make fun of the crazy QAnon supporters, all that does is further reinforce their sense that they are disrespected and maligned.

No. 2 - using scientific evidence, argumentation, etc., that comes through the very institutions that they have been told not to trust, that is going to backfire because now they think that you are the dupe because you trust these institutions, etc.

In 1609, Kepler published a book containing the first two laws. The book also revealed his new model of the solar system, which was against what most scientists back then believed.

He stated that planets moved in elliptical orbits through the solar system, with the Sun located at one focus of the ellipse. Before Kepler, they believed that all orbits in the solar system were perfectly circular.

About ten years later, Kepler added his third law: that square of the orbital period divided by the cube of orbit’s semi-major axis is the same for all planets. Although not immediately accepted, his three laws took science to the next level. Why was he initially not appreciated?

Kepler applied this to the planets and stated that the solar system was built upon geometrical objects called Platonic solids that are a specific type of three-dimensional shape. They have identical sides or surfaces, edges of equal length, and angles of equal extent.

The model Kepler presented was based on a sequence of six spheres and the five Platonic solids, each located between two spheres. Back then, only six planets were discovered as Uranus and Neptune’s discovery took until the 18th and 19th centuries. Thus, each sphere represented one planet.

nitially, it seemed to explain the approximate ratios of the orbits of the six planets. It also gave a reason why there are only six planets—because there are only five Platonic shapes, each of which needs to fit between the orbit of two planets, only once

Kepler published this theory in detail, in his book Mysterium Cosmographicum. Despite all the value he gave to this theory, we now know how wrong it was.

Kepler cherished the theory as his most significant work, long after he had discovered the three laws.

However, the number of planets in the solar system or any other system in the universe is not predictable. Many of the numbers appearing everywhere are out of a mere accident, just like the number of planets.

Kepler thought his greatest achievement was the wrong solar system he drew, but it was the three laws that were so right to survive to date.

Because these belief systems are not about the information within them, but about the identity and the emotions that are appealed to through them, the only thing that can actually combat them effectively are loving, trusting, emotional connections.

If you think about somebody who either is addicted to heroin or you think about someone who has fallen into a religious cult or you think about someone who has fallen into QAnon, they all are creating boundaries that divide them from their families. They're all engaging in dysfunctional behaviors and holding dysfunctional attitudes that make their participation in regular life more difficult.

Do not mock. Do not use snark. All of the, you know, Twitter posts where people make fun of the crazy QAnon supporters, all that does is further reinforce their sense that they are disrespected and maligned.

No. 2 - using scientific evidence, argumentation, etc., that comes through the very institutions that they have been told not to trust, that is going to backfire because now they think that you are the dupe because you trust these institutions, etc.