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In turn, these seemingly irrational flaws in judgement can lead to perpetual distortion, inaccurate judgement, and illogical interpretation -- all of which are key ingredients in the widening of cultural rifts, the deepening of global disparity gaps, and the general intensifying of political upheavals.

forming culturally cohesive social circles based upon similar viewpoints, and unconsciously referencing only those perspectives which reaffirm our deeply entrenched beliefs

innate tribal desire to be socially accepted, we tend to favour the thoughts, ideals, and sentiments of those with whom we racially, culturally, and ethnocentrically identify with most.

“I was willing to do everything and anything,” Ms. Seefeld said.

Each had a son who had been accused at college of sexual assault.

The women had been meeting regularly to share notes and commiserate.

We could lament that the price we have paid for our so-called progress in the century and half since Muir has been a loss of perspective blinding us to this essential kinship with the rest of nature.

Still, something deep inside us — something elemental, beyond the ego and its conscious reasonings — vibrates with an irrepressible sense of our belonging to and with nature.

chief among them is the ability to communicate. Politics — both getting elected and making a meaningful contribution to public life — is largely about interaction with other people.

lots of us it's a skill we learn with practice, and it's invaluable to a politician. 

More than a few times, I've prepared for a public appearance only to have my speech become irrelevant when some national issue became the only topic people were interested in discussing. 

At a time when almost everything is politicized, vaccination has planted itself squarely on the national stage.

On one side of the debate are parents who are rebelling against settled science and calling on states to broaden vaccine exemptions. They cite their faith or believe vaccines pose danger to their children, even though no major religion opposes them and claims of vaccines' link to autism has been long debunked.

"I won't be surprised if we see many pro-vaccine bills this year," said Dr. Sean O'Leary, a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Infectious Diseases. "The measles outbreaks were really a wake-up call, showing legislators that maintaining high vaccination rates is not just a theoretical goal."

What's that worn-out phrase? Shouting into the wind? Well, after a decade of rising pollution, failed politics and worsening disasters, it seems the many, many of us who care about the climate crisis increasingly are shouting into the hurricane, if not the apocalypse.

On the cusp of 2020, the state of the planet is far more dire than in 2010. Preserving a safe and healthy ecological system is no longer a realistic possibility. Now, we're looking at less bad options, ceding the fact that the virtual end of coral reefs, the drowning of some island nations, the worsening of already-devastating storms and the displacement of millions -- they seem close to inevitable. The climate crisis is already costly, deadly and deeply unjust, putting the most vulnerable people in the world, often who've done the least to cause this, at terrible risk.

There are two numbers you need to understand to put this moment in perspective.The first is 1.5. The Paris Agreement -- the international treaty on climate change, which admittedly is in trouble, but also is the best thing we've got -- sets the goal of limiting warming to 1.5 or, at most, below 2 degrees Celsius of warming.

Coronavirus poses daunting challenges for economic policymakers. Public health efforts to contain the virus rely on "social distancing" by encouraging people to stay home and requiring businesses to reduce their output. In the past, the primary tools the government used to get our economy going focused on raising spending by encouraging people to do more of their usual activities. But that interferes with the public health effort against coronavirus.

In a typical recession, these effects are desirable. Unfortunately, what worked in previous recessions won't work for coronavirus. If schools and businesses are closed by order of public health authorities, then lower interest rates and tax cuts do not increase spending much. Instead, people are likely to save the money, undermining the stimulus effect. And if people do spend the money instead of saving it, monetary and fiscal stimulus may harm public health by encouraging people to go out and spend.

Studies show that college-educated white Americans value having choice — and yet having too much choice can paralyze and lead to dissatisfaction

Markus and Schwartz start by noting that, to college-educated Americans, it seems obvious that more choice leads to greater freedom and autonomy and, thus, wellbeing. The authors write that this “model of the self as independent and freely choosing” is so pervasive in middle-class U.S. culture that it’s invisible. And yet, from a global perspective, this reverence for choice and autonomy is unusual. Many cultures see people not primarily as inherently independent individuals but as interdependent selves who exist in relationship to others.

in one study, researchers gave South Asian Indians and white Americans the chance to choose and evaluate a pen. In some cases, once a subject made their choice, the experimenter told them that they couldn’t have that pen after all. This “usurped choice” condition made no difference in the Indian participants’ responses, but it led white Americans to give a lower rating to the pen they ended up with.

People tend to think of memories as deeply personal, ephemeral possessions — snippets of emotions, words, colors and smells stitched into our unique neural tapestries as life goes on. But a strange series of experiments conducted decades ago offered a different, more tangible perspective. The mind-bending results have gained unexpected support from recent studies.

According to studies done by Sheena Iyengar at Columbia University, Americans make an average of 70 decisions each day. We make mundane decisions about what to have for lunch and which route to take to work, as well as defining decisions such as where to live, whom to marry, and whether to keep this job or accept that other offer. As Albert Camus said "life is the sum of our choices."  

the longer you spend waffling over what to have for breakfast, the harder it will be to make a good decision with a customer or co-worker later that morning.  The more we hem and haw about what to buy at the mall on Saturday afternoon, the more likely we are to choose to throw back a pound of fries and double dose of fudge dessert on Saturday evening.

A simple Know-Think-Do framework can help solve this problem by enabling us to make all of our decisions--big and small; daily and defining--quicker without sacrificing quality.

The online publication Slate has suspended a well-known podcast host after he debated with colleagues over whether people who are not Black should be able to quote a racial slur in some contexts.

he was suspended indefinitely on Monday after defending the use of the slur in certain contexts. He made his argument during a conversation last week with colleagues on the interoffice messaging platform Slack.

Slate staff members were discussing the resignation of Donald G. McNeil Jr., a reporter who said this month that he was resigning from The New York Times after he had used the slur during a discussion of racism while working as a guide on a student trip in 2019.

In his brilliant encyclopedia of “critical studies,” James Lindsay explains the core argument: “Like disability studies, fat studies draws on the work of Michel Foucault and queer theory to argue that negative attitudes to obesity are socially constructed and the result of systemic power that marginalizes and oppresses fat people (and fat perspectives) and of unjust medicalized narratives in order to justify prejudice against obese people.

Fatness — like race or gender — is not grounded in physical or biological reality. It is a function of systemic power. The task of fat studies is to “interrogate” this oppressive power and then dismantle it.

take the polar opposite position: Fatness is an unhealthy lifestyle that can be stopped by people just eating less and better. We haven’t always been this fat, and we should take responsibility for it, and the physical and psychological damage it brings. Some level of stigma is thereby inevitable, and arguably useful. Humans are not healthy when they are badly overweight; and the explosion in obesity in America has become a serious public-health issue.

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.

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.

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.

Plato and Aristotle disagreed about the imagination

Plato gave the impression that imagination is a somewhat airy-fairy luxury good. It deals with illusions and make-believe and distracts us from reality and our capacity to coolly reason about it. Aristotle countered that imagination is one of the foundations of all knowledge.

What is imagination?

The establishment of Fox News in the late 1990s forever changed both media and politics in America, transforming the formerly staid world of television news into the series of political shoutfests we know and love-hate today.

the question persists: Does watching Fox News actually change voters’ minds?

Comparing markets that had received Fox to those where it was not yet available, the study concluded that the presence of Fox News was good for a Republican gain of 0.4 to 0.7 percentage points between the 1996 and 2000 elections. It was a decidedly modest effect — but large enough to sway that super-close election.

As I read about Irpin, about Bucha, about Trostyanets, of the bodies crushed by tanks, of the bicyclists shot on the street, of the desecrated corpses, there it was, “рашизм,” again and again

Grasping its meaning requires crossing differences in alphabet and pronunciation, thinking our way into the experience of a bilingual society at war with a fascist empire.

“Pашизм” sounds like “fascism,” but with an “r” sound instead of an “f” at the beginning; it means, roughly, “Russian fascism.”

According to “fourth turning” proponents, American history goes through recurring cycles. Each one, which lasts about 80 to 100 years, consists of four generation-long seasons, or “turnings.” The winter season is a time of upheaval and reconstruction — a fourth turning.

The theory first appeared in “The Fourth Turning,” a work of pop political science that has had a cult following more or less since it was published in 1997. In the last few years of political turmoil, the book and its ideas have bubbled into the mainstream.

According to “The Fourth Turning,” previous crisis periods include the American Revolution, the Civil War and World War II. America entered its latest fourth turning in the mid-2000s. It will culminate in a crisis sometime in the 2020s — i.e., now.

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

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

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