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net total of 144,00 jobs were lost in December, the clear effect of the continuing economic downturn. But while male employment increased slightly, 156,000 women lost their jobs, mainly in pandemic-hit sectors such as hospitality and education. And since the employment of white women actually increased, on net these losses fell on women of color.

These losses are unlikely to abate. Meanwhile, nearly three-quarters of those working at or below minimum wage in 2019 worked in services, mainly in food preparation and food service, which have been hit particularly hard by the pandemic.

Many of those who lost their jobs last month are trapped in a downward spiral. Research shows that workers of color are far more likely to be paid poverty-level wages than white workers, and they are more likely to have debts than to have savings. They may be at risk of eviction.

Hunter-gatherers were prehistoric nomadic groups that harnessed the use of fire, developed intricate knowledge of plant life and refined technology for hunting and domestic purposes as they spread from Africa to Asia, Europe and beyond.

tools and settlements that teach us about the hunter-gatherer diet and way of life of early humans.

evidence of their activities dating as far back as 2 million years ago

The coronavirus pandemic has put Americans' strained childcare system into a full-blown crisis. We must recognize that we cannot rebuild our economy without first repairing our fractured family care infrastructure.

President-elect Biden's caregiving plan, which calls for universal pre-K, subsidies for low- to moderate-income families, expanded tax credits for families and better pay and benefits to childcare workers, would cost an estimated $775 billion over 10 ten years.

But we need to think of this as a stimulus bill, not as a tax burden.

The death of the iconic Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has shocked the political world, altered the contours of the upcoming election and induced an overwhelming dread among liberals who fear some basic rights could now be in jeopardy.

it remains unclear whether the Senate will hold a vote before Election Day. If it did, it would represent a colossal act of hypocrisy since many of the same senators refused to even give Barack Obama’s last nominee, Merrick Garland, a hearing, arguing that it was inappropriate to fill a seat on the court in an election year.

But Republicans have the power to force a vote, and barring defections, they could exercise it.

Black people aren’t dying in such numbers because all or even most white people around them hate them and want bad things to happen to them. But they probably are dying because we enslaved their ancestors.

I say “we” even though my personal ancestors never, as far as I can determine, enslaved anyone or even set foot in the South

But I am a U.S. citizen, and the United States legalized slavery, even to the extent of helping some whites pursue runaways into free territory. “We,” as a nation, did that. They, as a people, suffered.

The impact of psychological science can also been seen in the approach taken by organizations like Republican Voters Against Trump

At the core of this strategy is creating what the organization’s leaders refer to as a “permission structure,” a mental construct that makes it easier for someone to do something unfamiliar.

“That’s a good strategy,” Duke’s Dan Ariely, a professor of psychology and behavioral economics, told me. “There’s no question that showing [voters] that people from the ‘in’ group, and who are like them (connected to them or related to them) have changed their mind. That is incredibly important.”

n the popular narrative of American history, Black Americans made essentially no measurable progress toward equality with white Americans until the lightning-bolt changes of the civil rights revolution. If that narrative were charted along the course of the 20th century, it would be a flat line for decades, followed by a sharp, dramatic upturn toward equality beginning in the 1960s: the shape of a hockey stick.

In many ways, this hockey stick image of racial inequality is accurate. Until the banning of de jure segregation and discrimination, very little progress was made in many domains: representation in politics and mainstream media, job quality and job security, access to professional schools and careers or toward residential integration.

In terms of material well-being, Black Americans were moving toward parity with white Americans well before the victories of the civil rights era

Texas’ climate risks. Houston will not do well on a warming planet — it is economically dependent on the oil and gas industry and is threatened by hurricanes and a surge in sea levels. But other big cities, including Dallas and Fort Worth, face more moderate risks, especially compared to many cities in California. Yes, Texas is very hot and likely to get hotter; but if a lot of other American cities also begin to get very hot, Texas cities might not feel as overheated by comparison. In addition to the risk of heat stress, Texas also faces the possibility of water shortages, but that will be true across much of the West, including California’s population centers.

What Texans will not have to worry about as much are wildfires, the scourge of so much of California, and the attendant air pollution, though experts predict increases in wildfires in Texas. It’s true that Texas’ less extreme fire risk is related to something precious about California that Texas lacks — abundant trees and mountains in major metro areas, or really any of California’s striking natural beauty. But nobody said living through climate change would be pretty.

You might argue that it’s too speculative to take into account something as broad and complex as climate change when deciding where to live. And more important, there’s no real escape from a long-term planetary disaster — even if you move to some place with lovely weather, your life is bound to be altered in significant ways as habitability shifts elsewhere on the globe.

COWEN: How has the decline of American religiosity influenced US foreign policy?

MEAD: Well, I think the most important way is that it has diminished our coherence as a society and undermined the psychological strength of individuals in our foreign policy world.

What do I mean by that? If you think about what it’s like to do foreign policy, or even think about foreign policy in today’s world, what are we looking at? Existential threats to human existence. You led us off with nuclear weapons. In the book, I talk about how, as a 10-year-old, my friends and I used to stand around on the playground, debating whether our town, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, would be destroyed in a nuclear attack.

Please note: This is a special Lesson of the Day that brings together many different sources and ideas. Unlike our usual format, this is written to teachers, not students.

Then, in an extensive Going Further section, we have rounded up many contributions from teachers in the United States across subjects and levels who describe ways they are helping their students understand this conflict and its roots and effects.We hope that no matter what you teach, there is something here you can use.

Do Volodymyr’s actions surprise you? Why do you think The Times might have included this specific detail of this family’s story? What do you think it says about the power and importance of education, and the role it plays in young people’s lives, even amidst an ongoing war?

Disinfection is back.

“Bleach is my friend right now,” says Annette Cameron, a pediatrician at Yale School of Medicine, who spent the first half of this week spraying and sloshing the potent chemical all over her home. It’s one of the few tools she has to combat norovirus, the nasty gut pathogen that her 15-year-old son was recently shedding in gobs.

norovirus has seeded outbreaks in several countries, including the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States. Last week, the U.K. Health Security Agency announced that laboratory reports of the virus had risen to levels 66 percent higher than what’s typical this time of year. Especially hard-hit are Brits 65 and older, who are falling ill at rates that “haven’t been seen in over a decade.”

The image I had then of a golden future was a book-lined sitting-room with an old, unused piano and a fire crackling away in the grate. Cats (one had to be ginger) would saunter from room to room and there would occasionally be hints of some Elizabeth David-style French casserole wafting in from a distant kitchen.

books – covering every available surface – were the main thing: proof (at least it seemed then) of a life well spent.

I was at that age of being over-attuned to the books-you-had-to-have-read-in-life, and where to start? Whichever you chose, you always wished you were reading another. It was a bit like being a serial monogamist at an orgy – with devastatingly attractive if sometimes impenetrable sexual partners – and the very thing that should have brought you peace and enjoyment only agitated instead

Here are just a few of the longstanding problems plaguing American education: a generalized decline in literacy; the faltering international performance of American students; an inability to recruit enough qualified college graduates into the teaching profession; a lack of trained and able substitutes to fill teacher shortages; unequal access to educational resources; inadequate funding for schools; stagnant compensation for teachers; heavier workloads; declining prestige; and deteriorating faculty morale.

Nine-year-old students earlier this year revealed “the largest average score decline in reading since 1990, and the first ever score decline in mathematics,”

In the latest comparison of fourth grade reading ability, the United States ranked below 15 countries, including Russia, Ireland, Poland and Bulgaria.

They itched to rectify a military balance that was tipped in favour of the US. The Cuban revolutionaries also approved. Nobody, however, asked Khrushchev what would happen if the Americans discovered the missiles en route to Cuba, before they were ready, or if they reacted violently to them once they were installed. There was no “plan B”.

This failure was compounded by sloppy Soviet planning. The head of the Strategic Missile Force, Marshal Sergei Biryuzov, promised Khrushchev that Americans would not discover Soviet missiles because palm trees would cover them. One expert, who knew Cuba’s vegetation better, wanted to object, only to have his superior press on his foot under the table, to make him shut up. The tradition of telling bosses what they wanted to hear while sweeping awkward realities under the rug is not Soviet-Russian monopoly. Yet tradition truly flourished under the Soviets, and warped their decision-making, even in life-and-death situations.

There is a whole library of excellent books by US historians on the Cuban missile crisis. Innumerable conferences, seminars and “games” have taken place in an attempt to learn the lessons. No wonder that Biden, his people and the US military no longer share the Kennedy-era “gung-ho” approach to nuclear war. On the contrary, they are extremely careful and attentive to the slightest dangers of escalation in Ukraine. And they are determined that a taboo on the use of nuclear weapons should be maintained.

Most of the measurable and qualitative improvements in today’s large language model AIs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini—including their talents for writing and analysis—come down to shoving ever more data into them. 

AI could become a commodity

To train next generation AIs, engineers are turning to “synthetic data,” which is data generated by other AIs. That approach didn’t work to create better self-driving technology for vehicles, and there is plenty of evidence it will be no better for large language models,