Hard Times in the Red Dot - The American Interest - 0 views
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Deaths per million in Singapore equal about 4; the comparable U.S. figure, as of June 15, is 356.
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traits with cultural roots planted deep from experience that run through all of East Asia to one degree or another. Unlike most Americans, East Asians retain some imagination for tragedy, and that inculcates a capacity for stoicism that can be summoned when needed.
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Stoicism here wears off faster now, along with any vestigial passion for politics, in rough proportion to the burgeoning in recent decades of affluence and a culture of conspicuous consumption
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Which 'Succession' Character is James Murdoch? - The New York Times - 0 views
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Mr. Murdoch, 47, resigned from the board of News Corp this summer with an elliptical statement, saying he was leaving “due to disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions.”
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in his briskly analytical way, over lunch and a subsequent phone call, he tried to explain why he “pulled the rip cord,” as he put it, after deepening estrangement with his father and brother and growing discomfort over the toxicity of Fox News and other conservative News Corp properties.
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“I reached the conclusion that you can venerate a contest of ideas, if you will, and we all do and that’s important,” he told me. “But it shouldn’t be in a way that hides agendas
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Japan's ruling party wins another election | The Economist - 0 views
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OBARA HIROYUKI, a 33-year-old office worker in Tokyo, considered voting for the first time this year. But he overslept on October 31st—election day—and had other plans in the afternoon. When it comes to politics, “nothing grabs my attention,” he says. “Nobody around me votes—at work, there's a sense that you shouldn't talk about politics.”
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Turnout was just 56%, essentially unchanged from 54% in the last lower-house election in 2017.
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Along with its coalition partner, Komeito, the LDP kept control of the country's lower house despite posting its worst results since it briefly lost power in 2009:
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Remote-first work is taking over the rich world | The Economist - 2 views
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N FEBRUARY 2020 Americans on average spent 5% of their working hours at home. By May, as lockdowns spread, the share had soared to 60%—a trend that was mirrored in other countries.
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Most office workers remain steadfastly “remote-first”, spending most of their paid time out of the office. Even though a large share of people have little choice but to physically go to work, 40% of all American working hours are still now spent at home
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Last year British government ministers exhorted workers to get back to the office; now they are quieter
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Why authors are turning down lucrative deals in favour of Substack | Books | The Guardian - 0 views
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Lulu Cheng Meservey from Substack says the company calls this a “pro deal”, with advances on a sliding scale depending on a writer’s profile. She says: “We do have several authors in our sights who are currently traditionally published, and are proactively approaching writers we think would do well at Substack. Over the next couple of years you will see some very recognisable names.”
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On his blog, Tynion wrote: “DC had presented me with a three-year renewal of my exclusive contract, with the intent of me working on Batman for the bulk of that time … And then I received another contract. The best I’ve ever been given in a decade as a professional comic book writer. A grant from Substack to create a new slate of original comic book properties directly on their platform, that my co-creators and I would own completely, with Substack taking none of the intellectual property rights, or even the publishing rights.”
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The subscription newsletter platform Substack announced on Wednesday it had signed an exclusive deal with Salman Rushdie – but he is just the latest in a growing number of authors making the leap to write serialised fiction delivered straight to the inboxes of subscribers who pay a monthly fee
Opinion | Got Climate Doom? Here's What You Can Do to Actually Make a Difference - The ... - 0 views
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My guests are author David Wallace-Wells, who wrote the book “The Uninhabitable Earth,” and Genevieve Guenther, climate communication activist and founder of the organization, End Climate Silence.
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genevieve guentherAll right, well, let me talk about this point that you shouldn’t have kids or you should have one fewer kid to lower your carbon footprint because it’s misanthropic and it’s just wrong. So there was one study that came up with the top personal carbon footprint actions, and one of them was have one fewer kid. But if you dig down into that study you see that they assume that the consumption of parenthood would remain the same with each subsequent kid. People in the global south generally have large families. And it hasn’t increased their carbon emissions at all. It’s not the kids, it’s the consumption.
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genevieve guenther
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Xi Jinping's Terrifying New China - The Atlantic - 0 views
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A century ago, when the CCP was formed, this ideology appealed greatly to young radicals who sought to strengthen a China laid prostrate before imperial powers. Chen Duxiu, one of the party’s founders, wrote that China must be purged of its entire traditional civilization if the Chinese people were to rise again. “I would much rather see the past culture of our nation disappear,” he wrote, “than see our race die out.”
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In sum, the individual edicts form part of a larger, more important shift. For much of his rule, Xi has worked to reassert the power of the state and party, which had somewhat receded during the decades of reform.
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A U.S. diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks, which was written before Xi became China’s paramount leader, paraphrases a professor and former friend of Xi’s who described him as “repulsed by the all-encompassing commercialization of Chinese society, with its attendant nouveau riche, official corruption, loss of values, dignity, and self-respect.” The professor speculated that if Xi gained power, “he would likely aggressively attempt to address these evils, perhaps at the expense of the new moneyed class.”
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Facebook's Dangerous Experiment on Teen Girls - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Much more than for boys, adolescence typically heightens girls’ self-consciousness about their changing body and amplifies insecurities about where they fit in their social network. Social media—particularly Instagram, which displaces other forms of interaction among teens, puts the size of their friend group on public display, and subjects their physical appearance to the hard metrics of likes and comment counts—takes the worst parts of middle school and glossy women’s magazines and intensifies them.
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The preponderance of the evidence now available is disturbing enough to warrant action.
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The toxicity comes from the very nature of a platform that girls use to post photographs of themselves and await the public judgments of others.
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Shanghai's Omicron Outbreak Corners Chinese Leader - WSJ - 0 views
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China’s top leaders believe that confining residents to their homes during outbreaks is the most effective way to keep death rates low and avoid overwhelming the country’s healthcare system.
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Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said at a public forum in November that China would have had about 260 million Covid-19 cases and more than three million deaths if it had adopted looser restrictions similar to those in the U.S. and U.K.
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China has reported fewer than 260,000 cases and less than 5,000 deaths, compared with 80 million confirmed cases and nearly a million deaths in the U.S.
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Opinion | What Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos Reveal About Venture Capitalism - The New ... - 0 views
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the history of venture capital is replete with partnerships that bestrode the Valley and then lost their footing. In 2001, the top two investors at the storied firm of Kleiner Perkins were ranked first and third on the Forbes Midas List of the top 100 V.C. investors. Twenty years later, only one Kleiner partner was ranked, and he came 77th.
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Spend time with other sophisticated V.C. shops, and their deliberate methods become clear. Accel, the partnership best known for backing Facebook, developed an approach known as “prepared mind.” You study a coming technology shift — for example, the migration of data from customer devices to the cloud. You figure out the implications: new hardware configurations, new software business models, new security vulnerabilities. Then, when you come across a start-up that is poised to surf the new wave profitably, you are primed to react quickly.
Cracking the Code of One-Hit Wonders - The Atlantic - 0 views
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For decades, psychologists have puzzled over the ingredients of creative popularity by studying music, because the medium offers literally millions of data points.
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Is the thing that separates one-hit wonders from consistent hitmakers luck, or talent, or some complex combination of factors
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Berg compiled a data set of more than 3 million songs released from 1959 to 2010 and pulled out the biggest hits. He used an algorithm developed by the company EchoNest to measure the songs’ sonic features, including key, tempo, and danceability.
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Why Did So Many People Stop Going to Church? - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Forty million Americans have stopped attending church in the past 25 years. That’s something like 12 percent of the population, and it represents the largest concentrated change in church attendance in American history
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This change is also bad news for America as a whole: Participation in a religious community generally correlates with better health outcomes and longer life, higher financial generosity, and more stable families
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A new book, written by Jim Davis, a pastor at an evangelical church in Orlando, and Michael Graham, a writer with the Gospel Coalition, draws on surveys of more than 7,000 Americans by the political scientists Ryan Burge and Paul Djupe, attempting to explain why people have left churches—or “dechurched,
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Opinion | The W.G.A. Deal Offers a Blueprint on How to Save Your Job From A.I. - The Ne... - 0 views
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A.I. is coming for workers in every sector, no matter their academic pedigree or sartorial choices. Now the W.G.A. has delivered a gift to future union negotiators. It’s illuminated an approach to negotiating around technology, and demonstrated the ways in which a white-collar rank-and-file can leverage labor solidarity toward the shared benefit of both management and employees.
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Union negotiators can point to this agreement when employers refuse to bargain over technology in good faith. Moreover, the language in this agreement can serve as a model for other workers and employers, union and nonunion, who agree that neither an outright ban nor unchecked use of A.I. would be a sensible way forward. Workers can pressure employers to use technology to augment rather than automate work, asserting that technology does more than just increase the size of labor’s slice. It enlarges the whole pie.
The Age of Social Media Is Ending - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Slowly and without fanfare, around the end of the aughts, social media took its place. The change was almost invisible, but it had enormous consequences. Instead of facilitating the modest use of existing connections—largely for offline life (to organize a birthday party, say)—social software turned those connections into a latent broadcast channel. All at once, billions of people saw themselves as celebrities, pundits, and tastemakers.
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A global broadcast network where anyone can say anything to anyone else as often as possible, and where such people have come to think they deserve such a capacity, or even that withholding it amounts to censorship or suppression—that’s just a terrible idea from the outset. And it’s a terrible idea that is entirely and completely bound up with the concept of social media itself: systems erected and used exclusively to deliver an endless stream of content.
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“social media,” a name so familiar that it has ceased to bear meaning. But two decades ago, that term didn’t exist
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A Culture Primed For Indecency - by Andrew Sullivan - 0 views
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In our collective psyche there is the problem of mentally ill people committing crimes on the streets, and there is also the problem of everyone constantly seeing videos of mentally ill people committing crimes on the streets
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It distorts our judgment; it privileges the vivid and violent over the lucid and peaceful. It normalizes and numbs us to violence and can incentivize it. And this emotive tribal priming makes us more likely to react to the deaths of our political opponents with glee.
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The distortion affects both tribes
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More Brokerages Leave Powerful Realtor Group - The New York Times - 0 views
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The Chicago-based N.A.R. is the largest professional organization in the United States. It has 1.5 million members, more than $1 billion in assets and owns the trademark to the word “Realtor,” making a real estate agent’s ability to call themselves a Realtor and to buy and sell homes contingent upon the payment of membership dues in much of the country.
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A coalition of home sellers sued N.A.R. and several brokerages in 2019, challenging N.A.R.’s policy that requires a listing agent to pay a fee to a buyers’ agent in a home sale transaction — a fee that is nearly always passed on to the home seller.
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An attorney for plaintiffs in the antitrust case told Inman, the real estate news site, which first reported the shift, that the change amounted to “a stunning admission of guilt.
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Where we build homes helps explain America's political divide - The Washington Post - 0 views
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Zoning, NIMBYism and regulations — “all those things matter” when you’re trying to build housing, Herbert said. But land scarcity is the most important.
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So what’s happening now “is a lot more infill of single-family housing in closer-in communities, where you’re not going to have room for large-scale developments and where the land is going to be worth a lot more,” Herbert said. Single-family land scarcity, he said, “has been a big factor keeping the supply down.”
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In a blockbuster 2010 paper, Albert Saiz, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, analyzed satellite data to estimate how much land was actually available for development within a 50-kilometer (31-mile) radius of each major U.S. city. He found that available land, when combined with measures of land-use regulation, could go “very far to explain the evolution of prices” from 1970 to 2000.
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