Opinion | Blue Lives Matter and How the Thin Blue Line Came to Jan. 6 - The New York Times - 0 views
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a now-familiar variant of the American flag: white stars on a black field, with alternating black and white stripes, except for the stripe immediately beneath the union, which is blue.
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as a political totem it is undeniably powerful. A merger of the American flag with a symbol representing the police, the thin blue line flag has become a potent statement in its own right.
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First introduced in the 2010s, it quickly became the dominant popular symbol of the police, flown in pride, solidarity, memoriam, defiance. It was something more than that, too. Beyond a marker of professional affiliation, it was a symbol of personal identity, one that was not restricted to members of law enforcement — one that could even, eventually, be used against them.
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Carole Hooven On Harvard's Existential Crisis - 0 views
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The most salutary aspect of this whole affair is that it has really helped expose the core disagreement in our current culture war. One side believes, as I do, that individual merit exists, and should be the core criterion for admission to a great university, regardless of an individual’s racial or sexual identity, and so on. The other side believes that merit doesn’t exist at all outside the oppressive paradigm of racial and sexual identity, and that membership in a designated “marginalized” group should therefore be the core criterion for advancement in academia.
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so they discriminate against individuals on the grounds of their race before they consider merit.
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For example: If you are black and in the fourth lowest decile of SATs and GPAs among Harvard applicants, you have a higher chance of getting into Harvard (12.8 percent admitted) than an Asian-American in the very top decile (12.7 admitted). It’s rigged, which is why it was shut down by SCOTUS.
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Opinion | This Is the Actual Danger Posed by D.E.I. - The New York Times - 0 views
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D.E.I. Short for “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” the term — like the related progressive concepts of wokeness and critical race theory — used to have an agreed-upon meaning but has now been essentially redefined on the populist right. In that world, D.E.I. has become yet another catchall boogeyman, a stand-in not just for actual policies or practices designed to increase diversity, but also a scapegoat for unrelated crises.
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the immense backlash from parts of the right against almost any diversity initiative is a sign of the extent to which millions of white Americans are content with their vastly disproportionate share of national wealth and power.
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Outside the reactionary right, there is a cohort of Americans, on both right and left, who want to eradicate illegal discrimination and remedy the effects of centuries of American injustice yet also have grave concerns about the way in which some D.E.I. efforts are undermining American constitutional values, especially on college campuses.
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Working from home and the US-Europe divide - 0 views
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there is one explanation that seems almost too simplistic: that “Americans just work harder”,
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The numbers do in fact bear out this assertion—a rare case of national stereotypes being empirically provable
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On average Americans work 1,811 hours per year, according to data from the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries. That is 15% more than in the EU, where the average is 1,571 hours
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Opinion | Ozempic Is Repairing a Hole in Our Diets Created by Processed Foods - The New... - 0 views
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In the United States (where I now split my time), over 70 percent of people are overweight or obese, and according to one poll, 47 percent of respondents said they were willing to pay to take the new weight-loss drugs.
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They cause users to lose an average of 10 to 20 percent of their body weight, and clinical trials suggest that the next generation of drugs (probably available soon) leads to a 24 percent loss, on average
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I was born in 1979, and by the time I was 21, obesity rates in the United States had more than doubled. They have skyrocketed since. The obvious question is, why? And how do these new weight-loss drugs work?
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Ozempic or Bust - The Atlantic - 0 views
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June 2024 Issue
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Explore
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it is impossible to know, in the first few years of any novel intervention, whether its success will last.
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What Was Apple Thinking With Its New iPad Commercial? - The Atlantic - 0 views
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The notion behind the commercial is fairly obvious. Apple wants to show you that the bulk of human ingenuity and history can be compressed into an iPad, and thereby wants you to believe that the device is a desirable entry point to both the consumption of culture and the creation of it.
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Most important, it wants you to know that the iPad is powerful and quite thin.
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But good Lord, Apple, read the room. In its swing for spectacle, the ad lacks so much self-awareness, it’s cringey, even depressing.
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Opinion | Biden's Approval Is Low, Except Compared With Everyone Else's - The New York ... - 0 views
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Q. What do you call someone who speaks only one language?A. An American.
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in general, Americans’ lack of language skills is less important than their insularity, their relative unfamiliarity with what happens and how things work in other nations.
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Other countries, especially wealthy ones that more or less match the United States in technological development and general ability to get things done, are a sort of mirror that helps us see ourselves more clearly. Yet many Americans, even supposedly knowledgeable commentators, often seem unaware of both the ways other nations are similar to us and the ways they are different.
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Opinion | Administrators Will Be the End of Us - The New York Times - 0 views
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I looked into the growing bureaucratization of American life. It’s not only that growing bureaucracies cost a lot of money; they also enervate American society. They redistribute power from workers to rule makers, and in so doing sap initiative, discretion, creativity and drive.
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. Over a third of all health care costs go to administration. As the health care expert David Himmelstein put it in 2020, “The average American is paying more than $2,000 a year for useless bureaucracy.”
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The growth of bureaucracy costs America over $3 trillion in lost economic output every year, Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini estimated in 2016 in The Harvard Business Review
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How a Polyamorous Mom Had 'a Big Sexual Adventure' and Found Herself - The New York Times - 0 views
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“More,” which Doubleday will release on Jan. 16, is landing at a moment when polyamory is drifting from the margins to the mainstream. About a third of Americans surveyed in a YouGov poll in February of 2023 said they preferred some form of non-monogamy in relationships.
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Recent titles include memoirs like the journalist Rachel Krantz’s 2022 book “Open: An Uncensored Memoir of Love, Liberation, and Non-Monogamy,” and self-help and inspirational books like “The Anxious Person’s Guide to Non-Monogamy,” “The Polyamory Paradox” and “A Polyamory Devotional,” which has 365 daily reflections for the polyamorous.
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Winter concedes that polyamory could be exhausting — particularly when she had to balance it with marriage, child care and working as an 8th grade English teacher.“I did not sleep very much,”
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Can things get any worse for Olaf Scholz? | The Spectator - 0 views
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A survey earlier this month suggested that only a fifth of voters are currently satisfied with the chancellor’s work – the worst result recorded since this type of polling began a quarter of a century ago
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If they could pick a chancellor from any political party, only 5 per cent said they would choose Scholz.
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This year has also been a difficult one for Germans.
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Opinion | Empathy Is Exhausting. There Is a Better Way. - The New York Times - 0 views
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“What can I even do?”Many people are feeling similarly defeated, and many others are outraged by the political inaction that ensues. A Muslim colleague of mine said she was appalled to see so much indifference to the atrocities and innocent lives lost in Gaza and Israel. How could anyone just go on as if nothing had happened?
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inaction isn’t always caused by apathy. It can also be the product of empathy. More specifically, it can be the result of what psychologists call empathic distress: hurting for others while feeling unable to help.
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I felt it intensely this fall, as violence escalated abroad and anger echoed across the United States. Helpless as a teacher, unsure of how to protect my students from hostility and hate. Useless as a psychologist and writer, finding words too empty to offer any hope. Powerless as a parent, searching for ways to reassure my kids that the world is a safe place and most people are good. Soon I found myself avoiding the news altogether and changing the subject when war came up
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Opinion | Germany Has Finally Woken Up - The New York Times - 0 views
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German democracy is not well. The problem is not just the rise of the AfD, which has become strong enough in some regions to aspire to positions of power or at least to seriously disrupt the process of forming stable governments.
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It’s that in many parts of the country, a general sense of discontent has tipped over into disdain. People now reject not just the current government but the whole political system.
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it is true that Germans have had to deal with a lot: the war in Ukraine, an energy crisis, inflation and, most recently, the painful fallout from war in Gaza. Even though immigration is rising, we still lack skilled labor — teachers, plumbers, I.T. specialists — and public infrastructure is crumbling. Add in an ambitious government green transition agenda hamstrung by brutal infighting and you get a grim picture. Everything, it seems, is changing — and not for the better.
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Who's Afraid of Early Cancer Detection? - WSJ - 0 views
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A diagnosis of pancreatic cancer usually means a quick death—but not for Roger Royse, who was in Stage II of the disease when he got the bad news in July 2022. The five-year relative survival rate for late-stage metastatic pancreatic cancer is 3%—which means that patients are 3% as likely to live five years after their diagnosis as other cancer-free individuals. But if pancreatic cancer is caught before it has spread to other organs, the survival rate is 44%.
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some public-health experts think that’s just as well. They fret that widespread use of multicancer early-detection tests would cause healthcare spending to explode. Those fears have snarled Galleri and similar tests in a web of red tape.
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Early diagnosis is the best defense against most cancers,
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AI in Politics Is So Much Bigger Than Deepfakes - The Atlantic - 0 views
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“Deepfakes have been the next big problem coming in the next six months for about four years now,” Joshua Tucker, a co-director of the NYU Center for Social Media and Politics, told m
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Academic research suggests that disinformation may constitute a relatively small proportion of the average American’s news intake, that it’s concentrated among a small minority of people, and that, given how polarized the country already is, it probably doesn’t change many minds.
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If the first-order worry is that people will get duped, the second-order worry is that the fear of deepfakes will lead people to distrust everything.
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Germany Braces for Decades of Confrontation With Russia - The New York Times - 0 views
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Defense Minister Boris Pistorius has begun warning Germans that they should prepare for decades of confrontation with Russia — and that they must speedily rebuild the country’s military in case Vladimir V. Putin does not plan to stop at the border with Ukraine.
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Russia’s military, he has said in a series of recent interviews with German news media, is fully occupied with Ukraine. But if there is a truce, and Mr. Putin, Russia’s president, has a few years to reset, he thinks the Russian leader will consider testing NATO’s unity.
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some of Mr. Pistorius’s colleagues are warning that if American funding dries up and Russia prevails, its next target will be closer to Berlin.
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'The machine did it coldly': Israel used AI to identify 37,000 Hamas targets | Israel-G... - 0 views
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All six said that Lavender had played a central role in the war, processing masses of data to rapidly identify potential “junior” operatives to target. Four of the sources said that, at one stage early in the war, Lavender listed as many as 37,000 Palestinian men who had been linked by the AI system to Hamas or PIJ.
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The health ministry in the Hamas-run territory says 32,000 Palestinians have been killed in the conflict in the past six months. UN data shows that in the first month of the war alone, 1,340 families suffered multiple losses, with 312 families losing more than 10 members.
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Several of the sources described how, for certain categories of targets, the IDF applied pre-authorised allowances for the estimated number of civilians who could be killed before a strike was authorised.
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Hannah Arendt would not qualify for the Hannah Arendt prize in Germany today | Samantha... - 0 views
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The Foundation, which is affiliated with the German Green party, founded the prize not to honor Arendt but to “honor individuals who identify critical and unseen aspects of current political events and who are not afraid to enter the public realm by representing their opinion in controversial political discussions”, withdrew its support, causing the city of Bremen to withdraw its support, leading to an initial cancellation
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The Foundation said Gessen’s comparison was “unacceptable”, but has since backtracked and has now said that they stand behind the award.
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The comparison is not a one-to-one argument, but rather a barometer for urging individuals – and countries – to think about their support for Israe
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