The logic is supposed to be that only someone of Gorman’s race, and optimally gender, can effectively translate her expression into another language. But is that true? And are we not denying Gorman and black people basic humanity in – if I may jump the gun – pretending that it is?
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Translating Amanda Gorman - It Bears Mentioning - 0 views
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Notice I didn’t mention Shakespeare translated into other languages. According to the Critical Race Theory paradigm that informs this performative take on translating Gorman, Shakespeare being a white man means that white translators of his work are akin to him, while non-white ones, minted in a world where they must always grapple with whiteness “centered,” are perfect bilinguals of a sort.
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The Quest to Tell Science from Pseudoscience | Boston Review - 0 views
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Of the answers that have been proposed, Popper’s own criterion—falsifiability—remains the most commonly invoked, despite serious criticism from both philosophers and scientists. These attacks fatally weakened Popper’s proposal, yet its persistence over a century of debates helps to illustrate the challenge of demarcation—a problem no less central today than it was when Popper broached it
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pper’s answer emerged. Popper was born just after the turn of the twentieth century in Vienna—the birthplace of psychoanalysis—and received his doctorate in psychology in 1928. In the early 1920s Popper volunteered in the clinics of Alfred Adler, who had split with his former mentor, the creator of psychoanalysis: Sigmund Freud. Precocious interest in psychoanalysis, and his subsequent rejection of it, were crucial in Popper’s later formulation of his philosophical views on science.
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At first, Popper was quite taken with logical empiricism, but he would diverge from the mainstream of the movement and develop his own framework for understanding scientific thought in his two influential books The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934, revised and translated to English in 1959) and Conjectures and Refutations (1962). Popper claimed to have formulated his initial ideas about demarcation in 1919, when he was seventeen years old. He had, he writes, “wished to distinguish between science and pseudo-science; knowing very well that science often errs, and that pseudoscience may happen to stumble on the truth.”
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Opinion | The Pandemic and the Future City - The New York Times - 0 views
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The Pandemic and the Future City
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Lessons from Alexander Hamilton and the book trade.
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In 1957 Isaac Asimov published “The Naked Sun,” a science-fiction novel about a society in which people live on isolated estates, their needs provided by robots and they interact only by video
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how will we live once the pandemic subsides?
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First, it seems safe to predict that we won’t fully return to the way we used to live and work.
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A year of isolation has, in effect, provided remote work with a classic case of infant industry protection, a concept usually associated with international trade policy that was first systematically laid out by none other than Alexander Hamilton.
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never coming close to overtaking physical books
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Given a break from competition, for example through temporary tariffs, these industries could acquire enough experience and technological sophistication to become competitive
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the pandemic, by temporarily making our former work habits impossible, has clearly made us much better at exploiting the possibilities of remote work, and some of what we used to do — long commutes so we can sit in cubicles, constant flying to meetings of dubious value — won’t be coming back.
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f history is any guide, however, much of our old way of working and living will, in fact, return.
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what the internet did and didn’t do to the way we read books.
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Hamilton asserted that there were many industries that could flourish in the young United States but couldn’t get off the ground in the face of imports.
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And while big chains have suffered, independent bookstores have actually been flourishing.
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for many readers this convenience is offset by subtler factors. The experience of reading a physical book is different and, for many, more enjoyable than reading e-ink.
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what I find in a bookstore, especially a well-curated independent store, are books I wasn’t looking for but end up treasuring.
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The remote work revolution will probably play out similarly, but on a much vaster scale.
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The advantages of remote work — either from home or, possibly, in small offices located far from dense urban areas — are obvious.
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Both living and work spaces are much cheaper; commutes are short or nonexistent; you no longer need to deal with the expense and discomfort of formal business wear, at least from the waist down.
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The advantages of going back to in-person work will, by contrast, be relatively subtle — the payoffs from face-to-face communication, the serendipity that can come from unscheduled interactions, the amenities of urban life.
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But these subtle advantages are, in fact, what drive the economies of modern cities
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until Covid-19 struck these advantages were feeding a growing economic divergence between large, highly educated metropolitan areas and the rest of the country
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We may commute to the office less than we used to; there may well be a glut of urban office space. But most of us won’t be able to stay very far from the madding crowd.
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Opinion | The Kind Workers at King Soopers Who Helped a Confused College Kid - The New ... - 0 views
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The Kind Workers at King Soopers Who Helped a Confused College Kid
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A University of Colorado Boulder graduate recalls two victims of the shooting who helped a grocery shopping novice.
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To the Editor:In the fall of 2016 I had just moved into my first apartment and was about to start my sophomore year at the University of Colorado Boulder.
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Eager to finally cook food of my own, I decided to pick up groceries at the King Soopers on Table Mesa Drive.
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I spent most of my first solo supermarket store trip asking the store attendants where various items were.
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Right away I was struck by how welcoming and friendly everyone working there was.
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Teri Leiker, killed in Monday’s massacre, was the employee who packed groceries into my large duffle bag. “Find everything all right?” she asked with a grin. “You could pack this thing three times over,” she added, when zipping up my bag.
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My interaction with Teri was representative of the warm vibe and casual relationship I developed with many of the store employees.
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Rikki Olds, also murdered in the shooting, came to the rescue several times when my self-checkout machine froze
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, and assured me it was fine when I realized I forgot things on my shopping list halfway through scanning items.
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Shootings have become an all-too-common occurrence in America.
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serving as a stark reminder that at any moment Boulder could be the next target of domestic terrorism.
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As much as a mass shooting remained a lingering possibility, never did anyone expect something of Monday’s magnitude to occur in a peaceful, quirky, happy-go-lucky college town that’s proudly advertised itself as one of the best places to live in the country.
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I was hit with a sense of guilt knowing I had never fully expressed my gratitude for Teri or Rikki’s hard work and compassion.
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Never did I take a second to stop and think about the role they and their co-workers played in making me comfortable in a new place and transitioning to adulthood.
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Going forward, we owe it to ourselves to have an enhanced appreciation of life and treat one another more kindly
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In honor of the 10 people caught in the middle of another senseless shooting, let’s all strive to be more appreciative.
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Jack Stern
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Opinion | The Atlanta Shootings and a Religious Toxicity - The New York Times - 0 views
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I’m a Scholar of Religion. Here’s What I See in the Atlanta Shootings.
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Did racism or theology or gender motivate the shootings in Georgia? All of the above.
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I saw in Korean sources first that six of the dead were Asian women, four of Korean descent
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I didn’t yet know their names; I mourned them as Daughter, Big Sister, Mother, Aunt.
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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.
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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.
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In other words, we have to constantly give an accounting of ourselves to justify and explain why we are here.
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I walked through the world in a kind of haze of anger and despair.
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So we learned early on the name of the alleged murderer.
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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?
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Race, gender, religion and culture are all implicated
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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.
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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?
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We learned that he is white. We learned that he is a Southern Baptist, but not his motivation.
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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
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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.
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These colonial projects hypersexualized Asian women, through forced sex and sex work, casting them as docile creatures that brought comfort
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They also shaped Asian men as submissive and feminine, objects to be conquered, dominated and consumed.
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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.
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But churches are imperfect, man-made institutions, burdened by ego and fear
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I grew up never seeing a woman preach from the pulpit.
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Later I discovered stories that centered on people on the margins — Black, queer, women and others.
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These theologies radicalized my faith; I saw myriad possibilities of God in the world.
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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.
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But fear is not so easily uprooted, and shame is not limited to one culture or religion.
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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.
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Though more and more people of faith have questioned the psychological impact of purity culture, shame around sex persists.
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The Asian women murdered in Atlanta were an explicit threat to the purported ideal; their perceived entanglement with sex work justified this violence.
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“I just don’t see you as Asian.” Proximity to whiteness is seen as our saving grace, but we are still dying.
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Xiaojie Tan, Delaina Ashley Yaun Gonzalez, Daoyou Feng, Paul Andre Michels, Soon Chung Park, Hyun-Jung Grant, Yong Ae Yue, Suncha Kim
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Sister, daughter, mother, cousin, aunt, grandmother, child of God.
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Opinion | The Social Justice Purge at Idaho Colleges - The New York Times - 0 views
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The Social Justice Purge at Idaho Colleges
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Republican lawmakers try to cancel diversity programs.
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I wrote that right-wing legislatures trying to ban critical race theory from public schools and institutions were a far more direct threat to free speech than what’s often called cancel culture.
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Some opponents of critical race theory responded that these bans aren’t meant to prohibit teaching about critical race theory; that they are, rather, meant to protect individuals, especially children, from coerced speech and indoctrination.
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“They also take issue with the way this theory is being imposed on schoolchildren, many of whom have been forced to denounce immutable parts of themselves, such as their skin color and sex, in C.R.T. struggle sessions.”
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I don’t like struggle sessions; I think critical race theory as it developed in the academy is intellectually rich, but some of the ways it’s been adapted by workplace diversity trainers and education consultants seem risible.
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Rosen referred to a Nevada lawsuit by a Black woman who accused a charter school of making life miserable for her mixed-race son because he rejected certain ideas about privilege and oppression; if the details in it are true, he was seriously mistreated.
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right-wing caricature of progressive public schools as pampered re-education camps
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This week, they were reinstated, but online only and “asynchronously,” without any live discussions.
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The budget bill also banned state colleges and universities from using any appropriated funds to “support social justice ideology student activities, clubs, events and organizations on campus,”
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The Idaho Statesman quoted one lawmaker saying of schools, “They’re going to get the message.”
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“a series of concerns, culminating in allegations that a student or students have been humiliated and degraded in class on our campus for their beliefs and values.”
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But it’s hard to see how whatever happened implicated 52 different classes, and the political pressure the university is under is undeniable.
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this month called for millions of dollars in cuts to education funding targeting “social justice programming and critical race theory.”
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“Many legislators, frustrated with B.S.U., want to defund the social justice agenda by reducing higher education spending.”
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“We’ve seen a spate of these bills across the country, and some of them are more concerning than others,”
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“It’s comparable, I think, to what happened in Hungary, where the government there cracked down on, or banished essentially, the teaching of gender studies.”
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“Integral to almost all the attacks is the implication that gender studies itself is not an academic discipline, but something larger and more mendacious,”
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Relatively powerless academics were demonized as dangerous subversives.
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The right likes to pretend that social justice-inflected academic disciplines are full of ideological commissars browbeating conservative students.
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in conservative places like Idaho, it’s the professors, many of them untenured, who feel intimidated.
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“With the climate as it is, I wouldn’t doubt that folks are starting to look over their shoulder,”
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When it comes to the campaign against critical race theory, the fear is part of the point.
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Opinion | Trump May Start a Social Network. Here's My Advice. - The New York Times - 0 views
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Trump May Start a Social Network. Here’s My Advice.
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Recast your past failures as successes, engage in meaningless optics, and other tips from the Silicon Valley playbook.
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So Donald Trump wants to start a social network and become a tech mogul?
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I am an expert in all things digital, and I’m willing to help.
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Tech is hard stuff, and new ventures should be attempted with extreme care, especially by those whose history of entrepreneurship is littered with the carcasses of, say, Trump Steaks.
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Or Trump Water. Or Trump University. Or Trump magazine. Or Trump Casinos. Or Trump Mortgages. Or Trump Airlines. Or Trump Vodka. Or the Trump pandemic response. Or, of course, the 2020 Trump presidential campaign.
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So, Mr. Trump, here’s my advice.
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I advise you to embrace your myriad failures as if they’re your best friends.
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Even if “fail” and “don’t work” are the same thing, in tech these are seen as a badge of honor rather than as a sign that you are terrible at executing a business plan and engage in only meaningless optics.
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Engage in meaningless optics.
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uckily, this fits right in your wheelhouse — a talent that you have displayed in spades since the beginnings of your career.
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“genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.” I might rephrase that for your entry into tech by saying, genius is 1 percent instigation and 99 percent perfidy.
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Instigation and perfidy, in fact, make the perfect formula for a modern-day social network, so you are already well on your way, given your skill set.
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Crazy ALL-CAP declarations designed to foment anger? Check.
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Baseless conspiracies? Check
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Incessant lies? Check.
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Self-aggrandizing though badly spelled streams that actually reveal a profound lack of self-esteem? Check.
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Link-baiting hateful memes? Double check.
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Inciting violence over election fraud with both explicit and cryptic messages to your base, in order to get them to think they should attack the Capitol, like, for real? Checkmate
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hate-tweet at you, and, of course, all the fake media
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You didn’t start the fire — well, maybe you did — but you definitely need to keep stoking it.
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A social network requires a lot of it, including servers, apps and content moderation tools. You’ll need a whole army of geeks whom you’ll have to pay real money.
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As for your future competitors … Twitter has seen its shares rise sharply since it tossed you off for life.
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You still might get a reprieve over at Facebook, where an oversight board is contemplating your fate. We’ll see what the chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, decides after the board makes a ruling.
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Keep in mind, Mr. Zuckerberg really is the most powerful man in the world; that was even the case when you were in the Oval Office.
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And while he once bear-hugged your administration, he is now sidling up to President Biden.
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Avoid MeinSpace and InstaGraft, for obvious reasons. The narcissist in you might go for The_Donald, which you might now be able to use, since Reddit banned the 800,000-member forum with that name for violating its rules against harassment, hate speech, content manipulation and more.
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(Sounds like just the kind of folks you like and who like you.)
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Trumpets are brash and loud, and they’re often badly played and tinny. Right on brand, I’d say.
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Opinion | 'This Is Jim Crow in New Clothes' - The New York Times - 0 views
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‘This Is Jim Crow in New Clothes’
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Senator Raphael Warnock’s first speech on the Senate floor brought the past into the present.
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“We are witnessing right now a massive and unabashed assault on voting rights unlike anything we have seen since the Jim Crow era,”
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“This is Jim Crow in new clothes
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I submit that it is the job of each citizen to stand up for the voting rights of every citizen. And it is the job of this body to do all that it can to defend the viability of our democracy.
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The bill that would become the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was first introduced in January 1870 by Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, a Radical Republican and ardent opponent of slavery and race discrimination.
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as well as the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore pre-clearance to the Voting Rights Act, forcing covered jurisdictions to submit new voting plans for federal approval.
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arnock is the first African-American to represent Georgia in the Senate and only the second elected from the South since Reconstruction.
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His presence on the Senate floor is historic just on its own.
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It represents progress — and yet it is also evocative of the past.
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A Black lawmaker from the South, urging his mostly white colleagues to defend the voting rights of millions of Americans is, to my mind, an occasion to revisit one particular episode in the history of American democracy: the fight, in Congress, over the Civil Rights Act of 1875
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The first Black members of the House of Representatives, some of them former slaves, were prominent in this battle
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They saw the bill as vital in the fight against discrimination and race hierarchy.
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Warnock argued, the Senate should pass the For the People Act, which would establish automatic voter registration nationally, provide for at least two weeks of early voting and preserve mail-in balloting,
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“no citizen of the United States shall, by reason of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, be excepted or excluded from full and equal enjoyment” of “common schools and public institutions of learning, the same being supported by moneys derived from general taxation or authorized by law.”
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“viewed school desegregation as a necessary component of achieving a truly colorblind nation.”
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Their opponents saw school desegregation as collapsing a distinction between public rights and social rights that would allow the government to
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“invade all provinces of an individual’s life.”
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And as their fellow Republicans struggled to pass the civil rights bill, these lawmakers used the debate to devise what Francois calls a “counter narrative to white supremacy” that repudiated Black inferiority in favor of a “vision of human equality.”
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“It is not social rights we desire,” Representative John R. Lynch of Mississippi, a former slave, said. “What we ask is protection in the enjoyment of public rights.
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I want to say we do not come here begging for our rights. We come here clothed in the garb of American citizenship. We come demanding our rights in the name of justice.
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The civil rights bill passed Congress in February 1875, nearly a year after Sumner’s death. It did so without the schools clause.
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By the end of the century, Jim Crow was in place throughout most of the former Confederacy.
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It would be over 70 years before the South would send another Black American to Washington.
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His speech is also part and parcel of a Black tradition of calling on the government to fulfill the nation’s professed values
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The question, as always, is whether Congress will actually act to secure democracy for all of its citizens and whether we’ll withstand the inevitable backlash if it does.
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Opinion | What Are Republicans So Afraid Of? - The New York Times - 0 views
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What Are Republicans So Afraid Of?
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Instead of conspiracy-mongering about an election they did well in, they could try to win real majorities.
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There was a time, in recent memory, when the Republican Party both believed it could win a national majority and actively worked to build one.
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Whether shrewd or misguided, cynical or sincere — or outright cruel and divisive — these gambits were each part of an effort to expand the Republican coalition as far as it could go without abandoning Reaganite conservatism itself.
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It was the work of a self-assured political movement, confident that it could secure a position as the nation’s de facto governing party.
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There is no such ambition, or confidence, in today’s Republican Party.
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Republicans have made it their mission to restrict the vote as much as possible.
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Conservative grass-roots and political action groups are joining the crusade, according to reporting by my newsroom colleague Jeremy Peters, galvanized into action by the former president, who blames nonexistent fraud and illegal voting for his defeat.
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“So here’s the good news: There is action taking place to go back and correct what was uncovered in this last election.”
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“It kind of feels like an all-hands-on-deck moment for the conservative movement, when the movement writ large realizes the sanctity of our elections is paramount and voter distrust is at an all-time high,”
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H.R. 1’s only objective is to ensure that Democrats can never again lose another election, that they will win and maintain control of the House of Representatives and the Senate and of the state legislatures for the next century,”
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Some of this is undoubtedly cynical, a brazen attempt to capitalize on the conspiratorial rhetoric of the former president. But some of it is sincere, a genuine belief that the Republican Party will cease to exist if it cannot secure “election integrity.”
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If Republicans could break themselves of Trump and look at last November with clear eyes, they would see that their fears of demographic eclipse are overblown and that they can compete — even thrive — in the kinds of high-turnout elections envisioned by voting rights activists.
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Indeed, the great irony of the Republican Party’s drive to restrict the vote in the name of Trump is that it burdens the exact voters he brought to the polls.
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Under Trump, the Republican Party swapped some of the most likely voters — white college-educated moderates — for some of the least likely — blue-collar men.
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In other words, by killing measures that make voting more open to everyone, Republicans might make their fears of terminal decline a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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Opinion | The Decline of Republican Demonization - The New York Times - 0 views
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The Decline of Republican Demonization
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Why has opposition to Biden’s plans been so low energy?
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The American Rescue Plan, President Biden’s $1.9 trillion relief effort, is law.
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But it’s only a short-term measure, mainly designed to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic and its immediate aftermath.
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everyone says that turning those longer-term plans into law will be much harder than passing the ARP.
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But what if everyone is wrong?
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Just about every analyst I follow asserted, almost until the last moment, that $1.9 trillion was an opening bid for the rescue plan and that the eventual bill would be substantially smaller
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Instead, Democrats — who, by standard media convention, are always supposed to be in “disarray” — held together and did virtually everything they had promised. How did that happen?
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Much of the post-stimulus commentary emphasizes the lessons Democrats learned from the Obama years, when softening policies in an attempt to win bipartisan support achieved nothing but a weaker-than-needed economic recovery
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only part of the story
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Republicans have lost their knack for demonizing progressive policies.
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There’s certainly plenty of demonization out there: Vast numbers of Republican voters believe that Biden is president thanks only to invisible vote fraud, and some even buy the story that it was masterminded by a global conspiracy of pedophiles.
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unsuccessful in convincing voters that they’ll be hurt by Biden’s spending and taxing plans.
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Part of the answer, surely, is that this time around Republican politicians and pundits have been remarkably low energy in criticizing Biden’s policies.
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Where are the bloodcurdling warnings about runaway inflation and currency debasement, not to mention death panels?
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the most important reason Trump failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act was that Republicans have largely forgotten how to govern.
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They couldn’t do the hard thinking required to settle on a plausible line of attack
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while Democrats were pushing through tax credits that will cut child poverty nearly in half and subsidies that will make health insurance more affordable, Republicans were focused on cancel culture and Dr. Seuss.
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Bear in mind that both infrastructure spending and raising taxes on the rich are very popular.
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Republicans will have to come up with something beyond boilerplate denunciations of socialists killing jobs. Will they? Probably not.
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Democrats know what they want to achieve and are willing to put in the work to make it happen — while Republicans don’t and aren’t.
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What Comorbidities Qualify for Covid Vaccine? That Depends. - The New York Times - 0 views
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So, What’s Your ‘Fauxmorbidity’?
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People are racing to get vaccinated — even those who don’t yet technically qualify. And that’s good news.
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After Covid-19 vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna were approved for use in late 2020, anecdotes proliferated about rich people finding ways to jump the distribution priority line.
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“I heard a lot from friends in Miami about people flying in, because they were giving it to everybody,”
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, it began to seem like anyone could get a vaccine if they were willing to hunt one down or stretch the truth about their medical history.
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“the equivalent of knocking over an old lady for a taxi and feeling good about yourself,” as she put it in an interview.
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“It’s broadcasting status, that you got the vaccine ahead of others,”
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“We should all consider taking up the Garbo challenge and stay off social media for a spell instead of broadcasting every waking second of the day, including your vax shot.”
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Those people seemed just fine when they were splashing in bikinis in Turks and Caicos at Christmas,
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Occasionally, those posting on Instagram have said that they were trying to say to others that the vaccine is safe and effective
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“On some level, they know it’s tone-deaf for a wide audience but have their group where they feel safe,”
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“What’s funny is that many of them just post their vaccination selfies to green circle Close Friends.”
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“I mean, come on. You’re not Joe Biden. You’re not the queen,”
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Three psychiatrists interviewed for this article said their patients all seemed to understand that attention deficit disorder and mild anxiety do not meet the state definition of an “intellectual” or “developmental” disorder sufficient to place them in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s
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“I have patients who brought stacks of medical info when they went to get vaccinated. No one ever asks to see it.”
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“I’ve never had so many people happy to be told they’re obese,”
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“At this point, the goal is to get as many people vaccinated as possible,”
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He sees no issue with giving a note to a patient who had a melanoma five years back. Cancer is cancer. Elevated blood pressure is fine too, even if it’s sometimes less a reason than an excuse.
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“Young people are the super-spreaders!
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Some young people get around the fauxmorbidity issue by volunteering at a vaccine site.
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. “It was basically treated as a given when I got there,”
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“I get that people are eager to shame those who are gaming the system,” she said, “but let’s shame the people who set up that system.”
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'I Cry on Tuesdays and Fridays' - The New York Times - 0 views
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‘I Cry on Tuesdays and Fridays’
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Moms are still primal screaming their hearts out.
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Michelle Pasos, 46, describes herself as someone who has “always been extremely healthy.”
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That is until the pandemic, when she ended up in the emergency room because she had a bad reaction to a drug prescribed to bring down her elevated blood pressure.
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when the hospital gave her the option of going home and monitoring herself, or staying an extra night, she chose to stay. It was the first time she had felt calm in a year.
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Primal Scream phone line
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explored the emotional and economic pressures on a generation of moms,
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hough there is additional federal support to families, more Americans are vaccinated every day and job loss is not quite as dire as it was in the early days of the pandemic, unemployment claims remain higher than they were in previous economic crises
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And moms are still not OK.
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“Despite the increased labor force participation of mothers, mothers are still having a really hard time,”
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Despite their return to the labor force, they are not having much relief at home, and by that I mean, many children are still home-schooling.
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She added that the burden of remote school has fallen disproportionately on the shoulders of mothers
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Almost every mother I have spoken to during the pandemic, no matter what their financial and family circumstances, has expressed guilt about complaining
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Lower-income parents have already been hit harder by unemployment than their higher-income and college-educated counterparts.
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Research has shown that in states where children received only remote instruction during the pandemic, mothers’ labor force participation has been lower than in those where children attended school in person.
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“Now it’s like 76 percent of moms and 94 percent of dads with college degrees,” he said. This suggests that where families could afford for one parent to step back from work to deal with domestic labor, mothers were bearing the brunt.
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While I can list these labor market statistics all day, the emotional impact of Covid-19 is ongoing, devastating and harder to quantify.
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“I cry on Tuesdays and Fridays. Sometimes I have an extra bonus day, like on this Monday,”
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when she called into the Primal Scream line
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Why Tuesdays and Fridays? On Tuesdays, her husband has a lot of meetings, and her day isn’t light either, so even though she is trading off baby care, it’s “really high octane all day.”
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It’s a matter of having kept things nominally together all week, and then you have this big letdown,”
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She said she has felt “terrified” for two years, after being anxious during her pregnancy as well, because she wanted her daughter so badly.
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“I must have buckets of cortisol,”
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“More than parental status or gender, education has been most decisive in who has lost jobs during the pandemic,”
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But mothers shouldn’t have to slap on a Pollyanna smile.
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, there was already a gender gap in caregiving before the pandemic, and moms were more likely than dads to step back from paid work to fill any family needs.
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The past year has only exacerbated the difficulties caregivers face in the United States.
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We can acknowledge that things could be worse, but at the same time honor the fact that our circumstances are still so far from good.
25More
9-Year-Old Migrant Girl Dies Trying to Cross Rio Grande Into U.S. - The New York Times - 0 views
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9-Year-Old Migrant Girl Dies Trying to Cross Rio Grande Into U.S.
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The girl was found unconscious on an island on the Mexican side of the river near the Texas border and could not be revived.
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the first reported death of a child in a new surge of migration along the southwestern border.
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U.S. Border Patrol agents responding to a rescue call found a mother and two children, all three unconscious, on an island in the river that separates the United States from Mexico.
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The agents were able to resuscitate the mother and the younger child, a 3-year-old boy.
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The rescued mother was Guatemalan; her children were both Mexican nationals, the statement said.
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n 2019, a father and his daughter from El Salvador died while attempting to cross the river near the border city of Matamoros, Mexico.
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the second migrant to drown in the area in less than two weeks, according to the Mexican authorities.
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Many have died of heat stroke after getting lost in the remote, rugged arid lands of Arizona.
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Those crossing the Rio Grande typically move under cover of darkness.
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Many pay smuggling networks hundreds or thousands of dollars to float across on inflatable rings, which are often used to hold both an adult and a child.
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A Cuban man died Wednesday night while trying to enter the United States by swimming around the border barrier that stretches into the ocean between Tijuana and San Dieg
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The picture of the father and his 23-month-old daughter lying face down along the banks of the Rio Grande, her tiny head tucked inside his T-shirt, an arm draped over his neck, captured worldwide attention.
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Humanitarian groups leave water jugs in desolate areas on the migrant trail in Arizona where the terrain and heat pose great risks to crossers.
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Since 2004, about 3,400 migrants have perished in southern Arizona.
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Last year, 227 bodies were recovered, the most in a decade.
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Monthly apprehensions had plummeted to 16,182 in April 2020 as the pandemic prompted former President Donald J. Trump to invoke a public-health emergency to seal the southwestern border to all but essential travel.
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A child’s abandoned shoe lies near a river crossing point often used for illegal entries at the U.S.-Mexico border.Credit...
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But apprehensions, the key indicator of the volumes of people trying to enter illegally, have climbed every month since then.
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Mr. Biden has reversed or loosened some Trump-era restrictions, including the “Remain in Mexico” policy, while he and his top advisers have repeatedly urged migrants not to make the trek.
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ut numbers have soared at the border, and Republicans have blamed his new approach for attracting the large numbers of migrants that have overwhelmed border processing facilities.
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the Mexican state of Tamaulipas has been refusing to take them back.
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The crush of arrivals in the Rio Grande Valley, the busiest migrant gateway, is forcing the Border Patrol to release families even faster than usual to avoid the overcrowding in border processing stations that has drawn sharp criticism from immigrant and child-welfare advocates in the past.
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“People back home were saying this is the moment to cross,”
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“I couldn’t even make enough for us to eat, things were getting so bad,”
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$1 Million Raised After Attack on Asian Woman Will Go to Fight Racism, Family Says - Th... - 0 views
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$1 Million Raised After Attack on Asian Woman Will Go to Fight Racism, Family Says
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The woman, Xiao Zhen Xie, 75, was punched by a white man last week.
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Her family raised money through GoFundMe to pay for her medical expenses. Now, they want to use it to fight anti-Asian racism.
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After a Chinese grandmother was attacked by a white man in broad daylight in San Francisco last week, she fought back.
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Ms. Xie holding a wooden board; a representative of the family said she picked it up to defend herself but did not hit her assailant.
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A suspect was arrested, and Ms. Xie was left with several injuries, including two black eyes.
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The assault, which traumatized Ms. Xie and left her with long-term injuries, according to her family, happened during a surge of anti-Asian violence in the Bay Area and across the United States.
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The public response to his fund-raiser far exceeded the family’s goal: By Thursday, about $1 million had been raised.
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On Monday Mr. Chen said on the GoFundMe website that the family was planning to donate all the money to fight anti-Asian racism.
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The AAPI community is bleeding from this violence and hatred,”
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“We as a community cannot stay silent nor be silenced anymore. That is why our family plans to donate ALL funds generated in this GoFundMe to help the AAPI community recover, and combat racism.”
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The report was released on the same day that eight people, six of them Asian, were fatally shot at three Atlanta-area massage parlors. Stop AAPI Hate called the shootings “an unspeakable tragedy” for the victims’ families and the Asian-American community, which has “been reeling from high levels of racist attacks.”
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The attack against Ms. Xie was one of several that have been captured, at least in part, on video.
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Her assailant, whom the police identified as Steven Jenkins, 39, first attacked an 83-year-old Vietnamese man, Ngoc Pham, who had been grocery shopping on March 17
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According to the police, the attacker was then chased by a security guard; he punched Ms. Xie while being pursued.
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Video footage from the immediate aftermath of the assault shows Ms. Xie holding an ice pack to her face and telling officers and bystanders about her attacker.
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“One big punch came down on me,” she said in Cantonese, wailing in distress.
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“Investigators are working to determine if racial bias was a motivating factor in the incident,”
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Mr. Jenkins has pleaded not guilty to the charges against him, which included elder abuse and assault,
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“It’s been difficult on the Asian-American community — of course I understand,”
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“These elderly, first-generation immigrants who give up the world to give their kids the American experience — there should be an award for people like this.”
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“As more information is shared,” he said, “I think that people will see that this is more complex.”
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Ms. Xie “has been severely affected mentally, physically, and emotionally,” adding that she said she was “afraid to step out of her home from now on.”
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On Tuesday, Mr. Chen wrote that his grandmother was finally able to open her swollen left eye and that she was in better spirits than before.
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“She insists on making this decision, saying this issue is bigger than her.”
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“Right now, the funds are being safely held by our payment processor and will be transferred at the direction of Ms. Xie and her family,
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“We are in close touch with the family and will ensure the funds are transferred to the appropriate place.”
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Is Ringing in the Ears a Symptom of Coronavirus? - The New York Times - 0 views
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When the Noise Never Stops: Coping With the Challenges of Tinnitus
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Researchers are just beginning to untangle how Covid might be linked to a ringing in the ears. Here’s what we know.
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Experts are beginning to learn how it may be linked to Covid
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the heart palpitations, headaches, stomach troubles, numbness and weakness in her hands and feet — the most frustrating one is the tinnitus, a condition that can cause sufferers to hear phantom ringing, buzzing, whistling, chirping or other sounds.
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“It makes it hard to concentrate, it makes it hard to hold conversations with others, it makes it almost impossible to lie down and go to sleep. It’s maddening, and you can’t fully understand it unless you experience it yourself.
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the most common cause of chronic tinnitus is age
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As the hair cells inside your inner ear become damaged over time, she said, they may no longer send sound waves to your brain, so your brain tries to recreate them on their own, which is what might cause the ringing.
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But experts have long known that some viruses can temporarily cause hearing loss or ringing in the ears, too. When the body fights an infection, the overall inflammation from the virus can damage the nerves or hair cells in the ear, Dr. Cosetti said.
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“I was so depressed and scared I’d never get better,” Ms. Suarez said. “I speak and talk for a living — how was I going to be able to have a conversation with a client or present in court if it constantly sounded like bells were exploding on my left side?”
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Tinnitus has been linked to several mental health conditions, including anxiety and depression, and mostly in women. “It can be particularly challenging for many people initially because it’s something they have absolutely no control over,”
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“For most people with tinnitus, the worst time is the first six to nine months after it begins,” Dr. Tyler said. “After that, most people adjust and learn to live with it, especially if they’re given the right treatments.”
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If you are diagnosed with Covid-19 and you experience tinnitus that lasts for more than two days, tell your doctor right away.
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If your tinnitus persists after you’ve recovered from the virus, make an appointment with an ear, nose and throat doctor, who can check for blockages in your ear
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If no blockage exists, you might be sent to an audiologist to check your hearing.
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“It’s always there and with me all the time — I can never escape it,” she said, adding that she has to take sedatives now to fall asleep. “I have days when I don’t know if I can handle this anymore. But I have to go on being hopeful.”
36More
It's OK to Feel Joy Right Now - The New York Times - 0 views
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It’s OK to Feel Joy Right NowHere’s how to prolong it.
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The birds are chirping, a warm breeze is blowing and some of your friends are getting vaccinated.
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After a year of anxiety and stress, many of us are rediscovering what optimism feels like.
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Spring is the season of optimism. With it comes more natural light and warm weather, both great mood boosters
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Yes, receiving your vaccine shot, daydreaming about intimate dinner parties or those first hugs with grandchildren may give you a jolt of joy, but euphoria, unfortunately, tends to be fleeting.
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When good (or bad) things happen, we feel an initial surge or dip in our overall happiness levels.
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Hedonic adaptation means that, over time, we settle back into wherever we were happiness-wise before that good or bad event happened.
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ven if the good thing — like getting your dream job — is continuing.
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To maintain those positive feelings, you are going to need to work on it a bit
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Thank evolution.
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“Our brains developed biologically for survival, not happiness,”
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ven the mundane things — like watching yet another youth soccer game — can feel special if you take a moment to remember the not-so-distant past when so much of our lives was put on hold.
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While many Americans are beginning to exhale, many others are buried deep in grief.
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If you’re not allowing yourself to feel happy because you worry you’ll be disappointed by future bad news, that’s OK too, Dr. Owens said.
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This is called defensive pessimism, and it can help people feel more in control of a bad situation.
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it’s understandable if you are just not ready to feel optimistic yet
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Savor this (and everything).
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Your first time hugging friends in a year is going to be so sweet, you’ll undoubtedly savor every moment of it. But there is joy in everyday things, too
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To start, it’s OK if you’re not OK.
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Marvel as much as you can.
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This feeling can come from a walk around the block, said Allen Klein, author of “The Awe Factor.” One of his favorite strategies for ensuring his daily dose of awe is heading out for an “awe walk.”
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On these strolls, he’ll turn off his mental list of chores and things to remember, and instead focus on finding wonder in small things along the way.
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Be grateful and kind.
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Acts of kindness tend to increase people’s ratings of their happiness,
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The boost you get may not be huge, however
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University of California, Riverside, found reflecting on past kind deeds improved well-being at a rate similar to actually going out and doing new good deeds.
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This isn’t clearance to never be kind again, though. But if you’re stuck at home and cannot get out to help a friend, try thinking back on a time when you did those things.
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Realize happiness alone isn’t enough.
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If you have been struggling with depression throughout the pandemic — as many Americans have — working to boost your own happiness may not be the cure you are hoping for
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“The opposite of depression is not happiness,”
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“The opposite of depression is no longer being depressed.”
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If you have been struggling with symptoms of depression these past 12 months, you may feel your depression subside as the pandemic slowly wanes. It may not.
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Clinical depression should be treated by a mental health professional.
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Break out your calendar.
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Perhaps it’s too early to set a date for that 15-person dinner party, but you certainly can crack open a cookbook to start planning the menu.
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And when party day arrives, don’t forget to savor every last morsel and belly laugh, as you eat, drink and be more than just fleetingly merry.
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Misogyny Fuels Violence Against Women. Should It Be a Hate Crime? - The New York Times - 0 views
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Misogyny Fuels Violence Against Women. Should It Be a Hate Crime?
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Experts say the everyday harassment women have learned to put up with — the catcalling and lewd gestures — connects directly with more serious abuses.
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“Men who kill women do not suddenly kill women, they work up to killing women.”
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Sarah Everard in London. Soon Chung Park, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Yong Ae Yue, Delaina Ashley Yaun, Xiaojie Tan and Daoyou Feng in Atlanta.
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Eight women, two continents apart, killed in the space of two weeks. The suspects in both cases are men.
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London, Ms. Everard disappeared while walking home from a friend’s house, and was found dead a week later. A police officer was charged with kidnapping and murdering her.
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In Atlanta, a gunman stormed three massage parlors and shot and killed eight people — seven of them women, six of them Asian — raising speculation that the attack was racially motivated
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In the days after Ms. Everard’s body was found and protests calling for deeper social change grew across the United Kingdom
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the British government announced an experimental pilot program (though there is no fixed start date yet) that would categorize cases of gender-based violence and harassment motivated by misogyny as hate crimes.
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“Across the country, women everywhere are looking to us not just to express sympathy with their concerns, but to act,”
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“Stop telling them to stay at home and be careful, and start finding those responsible for the violence.”
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In Atlanta, the arrested suspect told the police he had a “sexual addiction,” according to the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office, prompting some activists to call for him to be charged with a hate crime there, too.
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“What can’t be forgotten is the hate crime statute says ‘because of gender’ as well,”
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“The angle of misogyny has to be looked at.”
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Do ‘sweat the small stuff’
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As women around the world watched the two events unfold, they started sharing their own stories on social media of having been in similar situations that had the potential to escalate and turn similarly violent.
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Women spoke of all of the things that they — like Ms. Everard — did “right,” including walking on well-lit streets, and talking on the phone or clutching their keys in their pockets while doing so — and described how they still ended up in dangerous situations.
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Asian women spoke of all of the ways in which sexism and racism coalesce to expose them to a unique form of harassment that can lead to violence and abuse.
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Their stories confirm that violence against women isn’t an aberration, but a “global public health” crisis of “epidemic proportions,”
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In the United States, one online survey in 2018 found that 81 percent of women had experienced some kind of sexual harassment during their lifetimes. In the United Kingdom, 97 percent of women aged 18 to 24 said they had been sexually harassed, according to UN Women UK.
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These numbers are all from before the coronavirus pandemic; with the onset of the health crisis, domestic abuse surged and public spaces became eerily empty, leaving women feeling increasingly worried about their safety.
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Violence against women is consistently underreported because women are scared of retaliation for speaking out or they fear the stigma associated with sexual violence,
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UN Women’s initiative to end gender-based violence.
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“We’re not joining the dots, nobody is making connections,
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“There is a big picture here that we are just repeatedly missing. There are connections between the normalized daily behaviors that we brush off and the more serious abuses.”
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a woman recalls that when she was in school, at age 13 or 14, a few girls complained to a teacher that the boys in their class had been groping them and the teacher said that they were “being oversensitive.
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In another example, a woman recalls waiting at a bus stop when a man walked up to her and grabbed her bottom but everyone around her who had witnessed the incident remained silent.
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a woman recalls how a man sat directly opposite her on the train and touched himself and then got off the train on the next stop, as if nothing had happened.
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There is plenty of evidence to suggest that misogyny and gender-based violence are also correlated with broader threats
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a spike in gender-based violence — particularly domestic violence — correlates with “rising levels of insecurity in society more broadly.”
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A sudden disappearance of girls from schools, for example, could point to a rise of fundamentalist views
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“If only we were to listen to women and pay attention to the misogyny and aggression and violence that they deal with on a daily basis.”
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As pervasive as sexism, misogyny and gender-based violence are, none are inevitable and they can be countered
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“The term ‘violence against women’ is a passive construction — there’s no active agent, it’s a bad thing that happens to women,” he explained, but it’s as if “nobody’s doing it to them.”
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“shifts the accountability off of men and the culture that produces them and puts it onto women.”
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The second step is recognizing that male aggression against women is a manifestation of a broader systemic problem. “There’s this impulse to pathologize the individual perpetrators — that somehow the individual perpetrator is some monster who just kind of crawled out of the swamp,
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“But if you accept the concept that it’s systemic, then there are policy implications and political implications and introspection that can be uncomfortable.
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“And how that message plays in the community, how you talk about it, how you have police understand it.”
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“Making misogyny a crime is like making racism a crime — it’s unfortunate, it’s ugly and we wish people wouldn’t do it, but you can’t punish somebody for saying something,” he said.
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In other words, they’d have to show that the man assaulted her because she’s a woman, which is a tough standard to meet.
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In the United States, a crime motivated by gender bias is considered a hate crime at the federal level and in 35 states.
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Reporting hate crimes also requires a police force that is trained to appropriately respond to those complaints.
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But that would only broaden the powers of law enforcement, which several women’s rights groups argue wouldn’t do much to prompt deeper cultural change.
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. Many still felt, according to the survey, that incidents like name calling or groping seemed too normal for the police to take seriously.
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“So what’s the point of me going to the police station and sitting there for two hours with a policeman who probably just thinks, ‘Why are you wasting my time?’”
31More
The Costly, Painful, Lonely Burden of Care - The New York Times - 0 views
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The Costly, Painful, Lonely Burden of Care
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Health care in the U.S. relies on an “invisible army” of caregivers — mostly women. For many, stunted careers, lost earnings and exhaustion are part of the fallout.
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“If society wants us to keep caring for others, it’s going to have to show a little more care for us.”
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Her husband, Brad Buchanan, was late for family dinner. She found him in the bathroom, coughing up blood — a lot of it.
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Doctors found that a tumor had ruptured in one of his lungs and he urgently needed chemo. As her husband became critically ill, Ms. Washington, a freelance writer, was thrust into the role of nurse.
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“My hands were shaking,” she said as she remembered apprehensively pushing in the drugs for the first time and feeling the weight of keeping her husband alive.
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Mr. Buchanan had a stem cell transplant that left him with graft-versus-host disease
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Depending on the analysis, between 61 and 75 percent of caregivers are women
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When she explained that she had two children who also had needs, he said, “Well, usually family steps in, and it works out fine.”
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Ms. Washington felt the burden of responsibility, but also the sting
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The U.S. health care system relies on and takes for granted the “invisible army” of people — mostly women — who keep the system functioning by performing home care for the many people who are “too well for the hospital” but “too sick for home,” as well as for those on end-of-life care.
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In 2017, AARP found that about 41 million family caregivers in America perform roughly $470 billion worth of unpaid labor a year.
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they tend to do more personal care tasks like helping patients bathe and use the toilet than their male counterparts, who are more likely to oversee finances and arrangement of care.
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The historical roots are complex, but as Evelyn Glenn puts it in “Forced to Care,”
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emale caregivers put in more hours — 22 to men’s 17
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they are also more likely to stand by their partner through a serious illness
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Many people who take on caregiving roles experience negative health impacts, but women are especially at risk of the fallout from caregiver stress.
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Female caregivers are also 2.5 times more likely to live in poverty as non-caregiver
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A 2011 study found that women who left their jobs to care for a parent lost an average of $324,000 in wages and benefits over their lifetimes.
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Ms. Washington was able to dip into savings and a recent inheritance to help pay for supplemental in-home care, but it was still a struggle, causing stress, resentment and lost income.
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It was hard to have my life put on hold. Everything kind of slipped away.
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I lost a sense of who I was. I was going to pick up a prescription for myself, the only prescription I had when my husband was sick, and the pharmacist asked for my date of birth, and I gave his date of birth
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People talk about how it’s the most important job in the world, taking care of our children or taking care of our vulnerable elders, and yet those are some of the worst paid jobs.
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How much is a quarterback paid versus someone who is doing care for a vulnerable elderly person?
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How did care work become so undervalued?
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A doctor told Ms. Washington that her husband would need 24-hour care and “could not be left alone for even a moment.”
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Western culture has long framed care work done by women as a moral duty or obligation, rather than an economic activity.
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If your earnings are lower than they would normally be because you’re busy caring for a family member, and you can’t save and pay into social security, it can lock whole families into a cycle of lower wealth and economic instability.
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And what should someone not do
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Don’t tell someone to stay positive. For me, there was no staying about it, because I didn’t feel positive to start with. It brought up this feeling
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My time isn’t my own, but surely my emotions can be
18More
JAMA Editor Placed on Leave After Deputy's Comments on Racism - The New York Times - 0 views
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JAMA Editor Placed on Leave After Deputy’s Comments on Racism
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After a staff member dismissed racism as a problem in medicine on a podcast, a petition signed by thousands demanded a review of editorial processes at the journal.
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Following controversial comments on racism in medicine made by a deputy editor at JAMA, the editor in chief of the prominent medical journal was placed on administrative leave on Thursday.
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“Structural racism is an unfortunate term,” said Dr. Livingston, who is white. “Personally, I think taking racism out of the conversation will help
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Many people like myself are offended by the implication that we are somehow racist.”
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The podcast was promoted with a tweet from the journal that said, “No physician is racist, so how can there be structural racism in health care?”
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The response to both was swift and angry, prompting the journal to take down the podcast and delete the tweet.
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Comments made in the podcast were inaccurate, offensive, hurtful, and inconsistent with the standards of JAMA,
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The A.M.A.’s email to employees promised that the investigation would probe “
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Dr. Livingston later resigned.
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“It’s not just that this podcast is problematic — it’s that there is a long and documented history of institutional racism at JAMA,”
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“That podcast should never have happened,”
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The fact that podcast was conceived of, recorded and posted was unconscionable.”
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“I think it caused an incalculable amount of pain and trauma to Black physicians and patients,” she said. “And I think it’s going to take a long time for the journal to heal that pain.
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“staff and leadership are overwhelmingly white and economically privileged,” and he committed to reviewing its editorial process.
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“We are instituting changes that will address and prevent such failures from happening again.”
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how the podcast and associated tweet were developed, reviewed, and ultimately published,” and said that the association had engaged independent investigators to ensure objectivity.
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The email did not offer a date for conclusion of the investigation.
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