Group items tagged

Many of the region’s pigs and poultry are raised indoors, where farmers combine methods such as fans, showers, misters and cooling systems. But these cost energy and money, and penning animals indoors can erode their wellbeing, so many farmers also take pains to pasture animals.

Despite her efforts, her chickens have been growing slower in hotter, drier recent years. She thinks this might be due to heat stress. “When an animal becomes hot, just like when you become hot, you don’t want to eat very much,”

The claim plaintiffs bring alleges something horrific: that locaters in Mali sold them as children to an Ivorian farm where overseers forced them to work,” Mr. Katyal said

The plaintiffs sued under the Alien Tort Statute, a cryptic 1789 law that allows federal district courts to hear “any civil action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.”

They sued Nestlé USA and Cargill, saying the firms had aided and profited from the practice of forced child labor.

“Even where the claims touch and concern the territory of the United States,” he wrote, “they must do so with sufficient force to displace the presumption against extraterritorial application.”

The court said foreign corporations may not be sued under the 1789 law, but it left open the question of the status of domestic corporations.

In Tuesday’s case, Nestlé USA v. Doe, No. 19-416, the companies sought to expand both sorts of limitations. They said the 1789 law did not allow suits even when some of the defendants’ conduct was said to have taken place in the United States, and they urged the court to bar suits under the law against all corporations, whether foreign or domestic.

Those questions suggested that the court could rule for the companies without making a broad statement about corporate immunity

Mr. Katyal said there were ways to hold such a corporation accountable. But he said the 1789 law was not one of them

The combination of old factory towns and rural voters who have migrated to the Republican Party, college towns and small cities becoming increasingly Democratic, and Catholic voters inclined to back Democrats as long as they aren’t too strident on abortion rights has made the region that includes the state’s third-, fifth- and sixth-largest counties the ultimate presidential battleground.

It is also an epicenter of the coronavirus surge rampaging through Wisconsin.

“We have to get back to work. But at the same time, we see stories every day about how our hospitals are at capacity, and we don’t know what we’re going to do here anymore if beds continue to fill up.”

found an unusual number of people who have ping-ponged between parties during election years — and sometimes on the same ballot.

“I’m a true independent voter,” Mr. Werley, 34, said. “I really look at the person. I look at whether or not they are genuine.”Mr. Werley said there were few issues that drive his allegiance at the polls. Instead, he focuses on whether a candidate can be trusted.“I liked Rand Paul and Bernie Sanders,” he said of the arch-conservative Republican and democratic socialist. “They have been saying the same thing forever. I like sincere people that are not going to jump on the latest poll.”

Donald Trump Jr. addressed supporters on Tuesday in De Pere, and Pete Buttigieg, the former South Bend, Ind., mayor and Democratic presidential hopeful, last week stumped for Mr. Biden at a brewery across the street from Lambeau Field, home of the locally beloved Packers.

“There’s an expectation that people that run for office take their voters seriously and work hard for their vote,” he said.

said the story of the Fox Valley is that its cities — Appleton, Green Bay and Oshkosh — are becoming more Democratic while the rural areas have become more Republican.

“I’m not always a Democrat, it depends on the person,” she said. “I think a lot of people are voting for Trump because of the abortion thing. I don’t like abortion either, I’m against it too, but I don’t like Trump.”

“We have a manufacturing base, we have a farming base, we just have a real unique mix that can really feel what’s happening,”

He said his old constituents did not engage in the sort of tribal political warfare that takes place in Milwaukee, Madison and the state’s rural regions.

“I still have not made a final decision,” she said. “Both of them have positive and negative things.”

Growing evidence points to a connection between destructive environmental practices and emerging diseases.

Of more than 330 diseases which emerged between 1940 and 2004, nearly two-thirds were zoonotic, meaning they were transmitted from animals to humans, as with, for example, HIV/AIDS and probably covid-19.

over 70% originated in wildlife,

Replacing old-growth forests with a single crop, such as oil palm, can also lead to the transmission of disease. If predators’ habitats are destroyed and their populations dwindle, other creatures such as rodents, mosquitoes, bats and some primates can proliferate.

scientists are increasingly turning their attention to how altering land interferes with a pathogen’s journey from animals to humans

felling trees increases contact between humans and disease-carrying animals

correlation between the loss of forests in west and central Africa and outbreaks of Ebola between 2004 and 2014

Cutting down trees may also increase the threat to humans posed by viral infections transmitted through mosquito bites, such as Zika, dengue and chikungunya.

link between changes in global forest cover between 1990 and 2016 and an increase in reported epidemics, even accounting for the fact that deforestation usually means more humans living nearby

Wildlife may also move towards human settlements in search of food. Mango trees planted on pig farms in Malaysia probably attracted fruit bats carrying nipah, a virus that infected local pig farmers in 1999 and still breaks out yearly in Bangladesh.

But the fate of southern Black Americans changed in 1916 when news of better jobs and conditions up North started spreading in rural communities. Black newspapers, like The Chicago Defender, ran stories about opportunities for African Americans in steels mills and factories and encouraged them to leave the South.

"They actually interfered with the U.S. Mail to prevent the Defender from being distributed,” says James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association and author of Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners and the Great Migration.

“They believed, incorrectly, that what was really happening was Black people were being stirred up by labor agents from northern industries coming South to round up Black workers.

Black Americans who fled racial oppression either returned to retrieve the rest of their family or sent train tickets back home. In response, as white southerners observed train platforms packed with African Americans, several cities passed ordinances that made it illegal for trains to accept pre-paid tickets.

“Police literally went up to the platforms and rounded people up,” says Grossman, to dissuade Black people from traveling. And the intimidation tactic worked.

A common belief among white southerners was that Black people were intellectually inferior and would not think to move to the North in search of better opportunities.

African American field workers waiting to be paid near Homestead, Florida, 1939.Photo 12/Universal Images Group via Getty Image

Although there were instances of African Americans being recruited to work as Pullman porters on railways and seasonally on tobacco farms in Connecticut, the true northern labor agents were African Americans themselves, says Grossman.

Still, the Great Migration powered on. With a promise of a better life, more dignity and employment, African Americans began to leave from a train station further away, so they wouldn’t be recognized by locals or police officers.

White southerners, anticipating more labor shortages, utilized the mechanical cotton picker more in the 1940s, often evicting Black sharecroppers from their land, who in turn migrated elsewhere in search of work. These developments cemented the African American pilgrimage from the South until the 1970s.

to carry the “great experiment of liberty” to the edge of the continent: to “overspread and to possess the whole of the [land] which Providence has given us,” O’Sullivan wrote. The survival of American freedom depended on it.

Meanwhile, the question of whether or not slavery would be allowed in the new western states shadowed every conversation about the frontier. In 1820, the Missouri Compromise had attempted to resolve this question: It had admitted Missouri to the union as a slave state and Maine as a free state, preserving the fragile balance in Congress. More important, it had stipulated that in the future, slavery would be prohibited north of the southern boundary of Missouri (the 36º30’ parallel) in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase.

They did not necessarily object to slavery itself, but they resented the way its expansion seemed to interfere with their own economic opportunity.

In 1837, American settlers in Texas joined with their Tejano neighbors (Texans of Spanish origin) and won independence from Mexico. They petitioned to join the United States as a slave state.

This promised to upset the careful balance that the Missouri Compromise had achieved, and the annexation of Texas and other Mexican territories did not become a political priority until the enthusiastically expansionist cotton planter James K. Polk was elected to the presidency in 1844. Thanks to the maneuvering of Polk and his allies, Texas joined the union as a slave state in February 1846; in June, after negotiations with Great Britain, Oregon joined as a free state.

Wilmot’s measure failed to pass, but it made explicit once again the sectional conflict that haunted the process of westward expansion.

In 1848, the Treaty of Guadelupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican War and added more than 1 million square miles, an area larger than the Louisiana Purchase, to the United States. The acquisition of this land re-opened the question that the Missouri Compromise had ostensibly settled: What would be the status of slavery in new American territories? After two years of increasingly volatile debate over the issue, Kentucky Senator Henry Clay proposed another compromise. It had four parts: first, California would enter the Union as a free state; second, the status of slavery in the rest of the Mexican territory would be decided by the people who lived there; third, the slave trade (but not slavery) would be abolished in Washington, D.C.; and fourth, a new Fugitive Slave Act would enable Southerners to reclaim runaway slaves who had escaped to Northern states where slavery was not allowed.

A decade later, the civil war in Kansas over the expansion of slavery was followed by a national civil war over the same issue. As Thomas Jefferson had predicted, it was the question of slavery in the West–a place that seemed to be the emblem of American freedom–that proved to be “the knell of the union.”

With Mahinda Rajapaksa, the president, then at the peak of his powers, he did what many nationalist strongmen do: erect tributes to himself.

That’s now all gone. Sri Lanka is an international basket case whose foreign reserves — which once stood at over $6 billion under the Rajapaksas — have dwindled to almost nothing.

The collapse is partly a result of the loss of tourism during the pandemic, a problem made worse as war has kept away many of the Russians and Ukrainians who used to visit in large numbers. But the family’s economic mismanagement and denial of festering problems have also contributed mightily.

With food prices rising, electricity often cut and lifesaving medicines scarce, protesters have pushed Mr. Rajapaksa, 76, out of his latest position — prime minister — and are demanding that his brother Gotabaya, 72, give up the presidency.

Just outside the private residence of Mr. Rajapaksa, the Carlton House, they tied ropes to a gold-colored statue of his father, D.A. Rajapaksa. When they couldn’t drag it down, they dug under its feet until it collapsed. And around the corner from the family’s sprawling ancestral estate, they torched the museum memorializing the resting place of the patriarch and his wife.

“Whatever the politics, they shouldn’t have done this to their parents’ resting place.”

Before the economy crashed, she would sell 30 to 40 pots a day. That number has since dropped to about 20, as people have saved for other necessities. Most days in recent weeks, she has come back with half of her stack of 15 unsold.

During her grocery trips, she can buy only half of what she did in the past.

She was clear about who was to blame: the Rajapaksas.

“If you are investing in debt, you should really be looking at return — and quick return. You can’t do all your long-term, hard infrastructure projects on debt,” said Eran Wickramaratne, a former banker turned state minister of finance. “We completely overleveraged ourselves, and the returns are not there.”

With their power consolidated, they announced broad tax cuts — rapidly undoing the work of aligning Sri Lanka’s spending more with its means — and made a disastrous decision to ban chemical fertilizers in hopes of turning the country toward organic farming.

At the airport, which for a time was used to store grain, the only outsiders are the crews of occasional cargo flights, or groups of curious villagers on tours to see the complex. The cricket stadium, where the scoreboard clock is stuck in some afternoon past, was at one point rented out as a wedding venue to produce some revenue. It has a capacity of 35,000, more than the town of Hambantota’s entire population, 25,000.

“But these megaprojects were meaningless,” he said. “This region still has elephants crossing the roads, and people are still cultivating paddy as a livelihood. So these projects were unnecessary.”

“They did a lot — they won the war, they built roads,” Ms. Niroshani said.

But what about economic hardship, Ms. Wijeyawickrama asked.

“In a few days it may be that we have nothing to eat.”

As our sexuality becomes ever more divorced from emotion and intimacy, a process already well underway, sex will increasingly be seen as simply a matter of provoking orgasm in the most efficient, reliable ways possible.

Human sexuality will continue to be subjected to the same commodification and mechanization as other aspects of our lives. Just as the 21st century saw friends replaced by Facebook friends, nature replaced by parks, ocean fisheries replaced by commercially farmed seafood, and sunshine largely supplanted by tanning salons, we’ll see sexual interaction reduced to mechanically provoked orgasm as human beings become ever more dominated by the machines and mechanistic thought processes that developed in our brains and societies like bacteria in a petri dish.

Gender identity will fade away as sexual interaction becomes less “human” and we grow less dependent upon binary interactions with other people. As more and more of our interactions take place with non-human partners, others’ expectations and judgments will become less relevant to the development of sexual identity, leading to greater fluidity and far less urgency and passion concerning sexual expression.

the collapse of western civilization may well be the best thing that could happen for human sexuality. Following the collapse of the consumerist, competitive mind-set that now dominates so much of human thought, we’d possibly be free to rebuild a social world more in keeping with our preagricultural origins, characterized by economies built upon sharing rather than hoarding, a politics of respect rather than of power, and a sexuality of intimacy rather than alienation.

If there is one thing that economists know, it is that market concentration drives prices up — and quality and innovation down.

hospitals raise prices by about 40 percent after the merger of nearby rivals.

Other studies have found that hospital mergers increase the number of uninsured in the vicinity. Still others even suggest that market concentration may hurt the quality of care.

recent evidence suggests that health care costs are not being driven by intensive use of high-tech procedures as much as by rising prices for even the most humdrum treatments, which are today among the most expensive in the world.

the rising health care spending of Americans under 65 in the last two years has been driven entirely by rising prices; not by more use. The unit price of inpatient care jumped 5.9 percent last year, while the price for outpatient services increased 9.6 percent.

Corporate America could help more. Large companies, like Wal-Mart Stores, Lowe’s and PepsiCo, have cut deals with hospitals like the Mayo Clinic or the Cleveland Clinic to provide specialized care, including cardiac care or spinal surgery, for all their workers across the nation. This will allow them to get around the market power of local hospitals. Others could follow their example.

The Affordable Care Act could help reduce prices too. Forced to compete on price, plans in the new health insurance exchanges will pressure medical providers to limit costs, much as H.M.O.’s did briefly in the 1990s. The “Cadillac tax” on high-end health plans will also encourage some companies to drop high-priced policies.

Merger activity has jumped in anticipation of the law’s coming fully into effect. “Hospitals want to maintain their revenue streams and enhance their bargaining leverage,” said Professor Gaynor. “This is a way to do so.”

Where Stalin excelled, again and again, was in ruthlessness and attention to detail. He paid minute attention to extending Soviet rule in places conquered at the war’s end. He took great interest in details of science and cultural policy, fearing even the faintest breach in communist omniscience.

For all the havoc he wreaked on the countryside, Stalin knew next to nothing about it (he seems to have visited farms only once, in 1928).

Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman failed to grasp their counterpart’s malevolence. Winston Churchill made casual deals that consigned millions of people to slavery and torment. The foreigners thought Stalin was a curmudgeonly ally to be coaxed and cajoled. He treated them as enemies to be outwitted. Far from provoking Stalin into unnecessary hostility, the Western powers were not nearly tough enough.

Jacobin’s success, he said, springs from the highly cohesive politics of the four co-editors he has recruited and their shared commitment to advancing a critique of liber

alism that is free of obscurantist academic theory or “cheap hooks.”

it was a packed Jacobin-organized panel on the Occupy movement, held in a downtown Manhattan bookstore three weeks after the protests began in Zuccotti Park in September 2011, that really put the magazine on the map, drawing attention from Politico and Glenn Beck.

the magazine was also attracting attention from more established figures on the left, who saw it as raising fundamental questions that had been off the table since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Mr. Sunkara, the son of middle-class South Asian immigrants who was voted “most likely to succeed” in high school, traces his politics less to experience than to reading. In seventh grade a stray reference in an introduction to “Animal Farm” sent him to Trotsky’s own writings. By his freshman year of college he was editing a blog for Democratic Socialists of America and writing for Dissent.

Venezuela is in its third year of recession. Its economy is expected to contract 10% this year, according to the International Monetary Fund. The IMF forecasts Venezuela will be in recession until at least 2019.

Venezuela has the world's largest oil reserves, but the problem is that oil is the only game in town. It makes up over 95% of Venezuela's revenue from its exports. If it doesn't sell oil, the country doesn't have money to spend.

Years of excessive government spending on welfare programs, poorly managed facilities and dilapidated farms set the stage for the crisis.

Venezuela's broken engine: oil

Venezuela's currency has plummeted in value.

Oil prices were over $100 a barrel in 2014. Today, they hover around $50 a barrel, after dropping as low as $26 earlier this year.

Soaring food prices & broken hospitals

Venezuelans went weeks, in some cases months, without basics like milk, eggs, flour, soap and toilet paper.

the government continued enforcing strict price controls on goods sold in the supermarkets. It forced food importers to stop bringing in virtually everything because they would have had to sell it for a major loss.

ood imports were down by nearly 50% from the same time a year ago, according to several estimates.

The country's public hospitals have fallen apart, causing people, even infants, to die due to the scarcity of basic medical care.

China used to bail out Venezuela and loan it billions of dollars. But even China has stopped giving its Latin American ally more cash.

"Tempers are getting hot in Venezuela," says Eric Farnsworth, vice president at Council of the Americas. "All the indicators are that the situation is deteriorating fast and it's not going to get better anytime soon."

Historically, boom times are the exception, not the norm.

Over the past two centuries, per capita incomes in all advanced economies, from Sweden to Japan, have grown at compound rates of around 1.5% to 2% a year

these distinctly non-euphoric averages mean that most of the time, over the long sweep of history, people’s incomes typically take about 40 years to double.

looking from one year to the next, the improvements in living standards that come from higher incomes are glacial. The data may show that life is getting better, but average families feel no reason to break out the champagne.

that is no longer good enough. Americans expect the economy to be buoyant, not boring. Yet this expectation is shaped not by prosaic economic realities but by a most unusual period in history: the quarter-century that began in the ashes of World War II, when the world economy performed better than at any time before or since.

The Golden Age was the first sustained period of economic growth in most countries since the 1920s. But it was built on far more than just pent-up demand and the stimulus of the postwar baby boom. Unprecedented productivity growth around the world made the Golden Age possible. In the 25 years that ended in 1973, the amount produced in an hour of work roughly doubled in the U.S. and Canada, tripled in Europe and quintupled in Japan.

Many factors played a role in this achievement.

The workforce everywhere became vastly more educated.

As millions of laborers shifted from tending sheep and hoeing potatoes to working in factories and construction sites, they could create far more economic value.

New motorways boosted productivity in the transportation sector by letting truck drivers cover longer distances with larger vehicles. Faster ground transportation made it practical, in turn, for farms and factories to expand to sell not just locally but regionally or nationally, abandoning craft methods in favor of machinery that could produce more goods at lower cost.

Six rounds of tariff reductions brought a massive increase in cross-border trade, putting even stronger competitive pressure on manufacturers to become more efficient.

Above all, technological innovation helped to create new products and offered better ways for workers to do their jobs.

The 1973 oil crisis meant more than just gasoline lines and lowered thermostats. It shocked the world economy.

But it wasn’t the price of gasoline that brought the long run of global prosperity to an end. It just diverted attention from a more fundamental problem: Productivity growth had slowed sharply.

The consequences of the productivity bust were severe. Full employment vanished. It would be 24 years before the U.S. unemployment rate would again reach the low levels of late 1973

and the infinitesimal unemployment rates in France, Germany and Japan would never be reached again. Through the rest of the 20th century, the jobless rate in 28 wealthy economies would average nearly 7%.

the world’s overall economic growth rate dropped from 4.9% a year from 1951 through 1973 to an average of just 3.1% for the balance of the century.

With economic planners and central bankers unable to steady their economies, voters turned sharply to the right

Conservative politicians such as Margaret Thatcher in the U.K., Ronald Reagan in the U.S. and Helmut Kohl in West Germany swept into power, promising that freer markets and smaller government would reverse the decline, spur productivity and restore rapid growth.

But these leaders’ policies—deregulation, privatization, lower tax rates, balanced budgets and rigid rules for monetary policy—proved no more successful at boosting productivity than the statist policies that had preceded them

Some insist that the conservative revolution stimulated an economic renaissance, but the facts say otherwise: Great Britain’s productivity grew far more slowly under Thatcher’s rule than during the miserable 1970s, and Reagan’s supply-side tax cuts brought no productivity improvement at all.

It is tempting to think that we know how to do better, that there is some secret sauce that governments can ladle out to make economies grow faster than the norm. But despite glib talk about “pro-growth” economic policies, productivity growth is something over which governments have very little control

The 2012 fire was not the first refinery accident to occur locally or in other parts of the globe where Chevron operates. But its dramatic scale, negative health effects, and adverse economic impact made it a modern milestone in Richmond’s often-fraught relationship with its biggest employer. The fire caused a $1.86 billion drop in the city’s assessed property values, reducing tax revenues from Chevron itself, other businesses, and homeowners

When Standard Oil opened for business in 1905, present-day Richmond consisted of grain fields, cattle farms, and a duck-hunting marsh adjacent to its low range of knolls rising from the bay. As California historian Gray Brechin notes, “Ohlone Indians once found the place so rich in food that they had, over thousands of years, built a gigantic pile of clam and mussel shells at the mouth of a creek there.”

“the prevailing winds through the Golden Gate drove the smoke, ashes, and dust rich in heavy metals and asbestos, along with the stench of petrochemicals and acids, back upon the town.”

Cheered on by religious conservatives, the new government has defunded public assistance for in vitro fertilization treatments. To draft new sexual-education classes in schools, it tapped a contraceptives opponent who argues that condom use increases the risk of cancer in women. The government is proffering a law that critics say could soon be used to limit opposition protests.

Yet nothing has shocked liberals more than this: After a year in power, Law and Justice is still by far the most popular political party in Poland. It rides atop opinion polls at roughly 36 percent — more than double the popularity of the ousted Civic Platform party.

Trump is promising a tax code rework that could trigger a bonanza of cash rebates for Americans. In Poland, Law and Justice put cash in pockets in other ways, but always while merging social conservatism and nationalism with populist economics. The new government doled out money to families with children. They also slashed Poland’s retirement age — to as young as 60 for women and 65 for men.

Opponents call such actions the “buying” of support, moves that will only drive up Polish debt and masquerade a long-term power grab that could entrench Law and Justice for years.

In the land of Law and Justice, anti-intellectualism is king. Polish scientists are aghast at proposed curriculum changes in a new education bill that would downplay evolution theory and climate change and add hours for “patriotic” history lessons. In a Facebook chat, a top equal rights official mused that Polish hotels should not be forced to provide service to black or gay customers. After the official stepped down for unrelated reasons, his successor rejected an international convention to combat violence against women because it appeared to argue against traditional gender roles.

And the party’s views have never been more effectively disseminated. The national broadcaster in Poland would often tilt toward the party in power. But following its victory, Law and Justice launched an unprecedented purge of journalists at the channel, turning it into what opponents describe as a propaganda machine where conspiracy theories flourish. It recently ran a piece on the health risks of child vaccinations. 

The new government is also skeptical of the Paris climate change agreement to cut carbon emissions and has pulled support for Polish wind and solar farms. At the same time, it is pumping more money into coal.  “Who really knows what is causing global warming?” Pawel said. “And Poland needs the coal industry.”

There is no more talk in Poland, for instance, of offering any legal rights to same-sex couples. Earlier this year, the office of a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender group in Warsaw was badly vandalized. Police never caught the perpetrators. “Homosexuality was quiet before, then they tried to normalize it,” she said. “You don’t see that happening now.” 

Already, the new government has taken steps to limit the power of the constitutional court, chipping away, critics say, at checks and balances. A new draft law would also allow government-appointed governors the right to decide on future permits for demonstrations. 

“I’m here marching because it may be the last time we’re allowed to,” she said. “I don’t think many of us really understand what’s happening in Poland.”

Mizolebska said she is deeply concerned about what sees as an attack on women’s reproductive rights. A near-total abortion ban — women and doctors faced up to five years in jail — was defeated in October after a massive street protest. But she fears it may yet come back.

She is also concerned about a new proposed school curriculum the Polish Academy of Sciences says will marginalize evolution theory by reducing its prominence in some grades. Sciences more generally would receive less time, in favor of more hours for Polish history. 

The fraction of workers required to hold a government-issued license has sextupled since the 1950s, from less than 5 percent to almost 30 percent today. It’s harder to switch into an industry, especially one in a new state, that’s larded with licensing.

States with more workers in routine-intensive tasks, like administrative duties, actually saw smaller declines in labor market fluidity.

Young people are more likely to switch jobs and move around.

If young people are tumbleweeds, adults are like trees: They grow roots, and they tend to stay put. So, as a country ages, it should become less dynamic.

. On Thursday, the Financial Times reported that productivity “is set to fall in the U.S. for the first time in more than three decades.”

Geographic mobility was very high in the U.S. in the 19th century. This was initially due to the settling of the western frontier. But even after the “closing" of the frontier in 1890, mobility remained high for decades, according to the economists Jason Long and Joseph Ferrie.

In every major city, there are many stores, health-care facilities, and insurance offices. By and large, less educated workers might be less willing to move between states because they assume every area has generally the same type of work.

somebody moving from a small farm to Washington, D.C., would have to visit the capital to understand its culture, job mix, pretty falls, and humid summers. But today’s potential movers are more informed and therefore more strategic:

Between 1880 and 1980, people generally moved from poor states to rich states, seeking the best jobs. “The creation of a single automobile plant—Ford’s River Rouge complex, completed in 1928—boosted Michigan’s population by creating more than 100,000 workers,” as Tim Noah reported. Migration promoted geographical equality.

Smaller counties used to lead the nation in the growth in new businesses even through the early 1990s. But this decade, small counties have lost businesses, while venture capital, the lifeblood of high-growth startups, clustered in a handful of metros.

Land-use policies prevent more middle-class families from living in productive areas, because housing becomes too expensive. Meanwhile, the rich can afford to cluster in a handful of metros where entrepreneurship is a norm, while business dynamism falls in the rest of the country.

After she moved to New York, Jones worked with a group of her fellow high school graduates to start a scholarship fund for young African-American women to go to college. She also was active in her public housing building's tenant patrol until she was 106.

"Ms. Jones was the very last American from the 1800s," said Young, whose group tracks and maintains a database of the world's longest-living people.

Facebook just opened up its Instant Articles feature to all publishers. The feature allows external outlets to publish their content directly onto Facebook’s platform, eliminating that pesky journey to their actual website. They can either place their own ads on the content or join a revenue-sharing program with Facebook. Facebook has touted this plan as one which provides a better user experience and has noted the ability for publishers to create ads on the platform as well.

The benefit to Facebook is obvious: It gets to keep people inside its house. They don’t have to leave for even a second. The publisher essentially has to accept this reality, sigh about the gradual death of websites and hope that everything works out on the financial side.

It’s all part of a much bigger story: that of how the internet, that supposed smasher of gates and leveler of playing fields, has coalesced around a mere handful of mega-giants in the space of just a couple of decades. The gates didn’t really come down. The identities of the gatekeepers just changed. Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon

At Stanford more than elsewhere, the university and business forge a borderless community in which making money is considered virtuous and where participants profess a sometimes inflated belief that their work is changing the world for the better

Faculty members commonly invest in start-ups launched by their students or colleagues. There are probably more faculty millionaires at Stanford than at any other university in the world.

In his twelve years as president, Stanford’s endowment has grown to nearly seventeen billion dollars. In each of the past seven years, Stanford has raised more money than any other American university.

But Stanford’s entrepreneurial culture has also turned it into a place where many faculty and students have a gold-rush mentality and where the distinction between faculty and student may blur as, together, they seek both invention and fortune.

A quarter of all undergraduates and more than fifty per cent of graduate students are engineering majors. At Harvard, the figures are four and ten per cent; at Yale, they’re five and eight per cent.

many students uncritically incorporate the excesses of Silicon Valley, and that there are not nearly enough students devoted to the liberal arts and to the idea of pure learning. “The entire Bay Area is enamored with these notions of innovation, creativity, entrepreneurship, mega-success,” he says. “It’s in the air we breathe out here. It’s an atmosphere that can be toxic to the mission of the university as a place of refuge, contemplation, and investigation for its own sake.”

Stanford is not the only university to adopt this approach to learning—M.I.T., among others, does, too. But Kelley’s effort is widely believed to be the most audacious. His classes stress collaboration across disciplines and revolve around projects to advance social progress. The school concentrates on four areas: the developing world; sustainability; health and wellness; and K-12 education.

Feeling dejected or unhappy in a place like Stanford causes one to feel abnormal and out-of-place, so we may tend to internalize and brood over this lack of happiness instead of productively addressing the situatio

his principal academic legacy may be the growth of what’s called “interdisciplinary education.” This is the philosophy now promoted at the various schools at Stanford—engineering, business, medicine, science, design—which encourages students from diverse majors to come together to solve real or abstract problems. The goal is to have them become what are called “T-shaped” students, who have depth in a particular field of study but also breadth across multiple disciplines. Stanford hopes that the students can also develop the social skills to collaborate with people outside their areas of expertise. “Ten years ago, ‘interdisciplinary’ was a code word for something soft,” Jeff Koseff says. “John changed that.”

Among the bolder initiatives to create T-students is the Institute of Design at Stanford, or the d.school, which was founded seven years ago and is housed in the mechanical-engineering department.

Distance learning threatens one day to disrupt higher education by reducing the cost of college and by offering the convenience of a stay-at-home, do-it-on-your-own-time education. “Part of our challenge is that right now we have more questions than we have answers,” Hennessy says, of online education. “We know this is going to be important and, in the long term, transformative to education. We don’t really understand how yet.”

financial aid has produced a campus of diverse students who are unburdened by student debt—and who thus don’t have to spend the first five years of their career earning as much money as they can.

“The kinds of project we put in front of our students don’t have right and wrong answers,” Greenberg says. “They have good, better, and really, really better.”

he was impressed by “the bias toward action” at the d.school. Newspapers have bureaucracy, committees, hierarchies, and few engineers, he said. At the Post, “diversity” was defined by ethnicity and race. At the d.school, diversity is defined by majors—by people who think different.

Byers has kept in touch with Systrom and Krieger and remembers them as “quiet and quite humble,” by which he means that they were outstanding human beings who could get others to follow them. They were, in short, T-students.

The United States has “two types of college education that are in conflict with each other,” he said. One is “the classic liberal-arts model—four years of relative tranquility in which students are free to roam through disciplines, great thoughts, and great works with endless options and not much of a rationale.” The second is more utilitarian: “A college degree is expected to lead to a job, or at least to admission to a graduate or professional school.” The best colleges divide the first two years into introductory courses and the last two into the study of a major, all the while trying to expose students to “a broad range of disciplines and modes of thought.” Students, he declared, are not broadly educated, not sufficiently challenged to “search to know.” Instead, universities ask them to serve “the public, to work directly on solutions in a multidisciplinary way.” The danger, he went on, is “that academic researchers will not only embrace particular solutions but will fight for them in the political arena.” A university should keep to “its most fundamental purpose,” which is “the disinterested pursuit of truth.

Stanford, along with its peers, is now justifying its existence mostly in terms of what it can do for humanity and improve the world,” he answered. “I am concerned that a research-intense university will become too result-oriented,” a development that risks politicizing the university. And it also risks draining more resources from liberal arts

students spent too much time networking and strategizing and becoming “slaves to the dictates of a hoped-for future,” and too little time being spontaneous. “Stanford students are superb consequentialists—that is, we tend to measure the goodness of actions by their eventual results,

We excel at making rational calculations of expected returns to labor and investment, which is probably why so many of us will take the exhortation to occupy Wall Street quite literally after graduation. So before making any decision, we ask one, very simple question: What will I get out of it?”

“At most great universities, humanities feel like stepchildren,”

The long-term value of an education is to be found not merely in the accumulation of knowledge or skills but in the capacity to forge fresh connections between them, to integrate different elements from one’s education and experience and bring them to bear on new challenges and problems. . . . Yet we were struck by how little attention most departments and programs have given to cultivating this essential capacity. We were also surprised, and somewhat chagrined, to discover how infrequently some of our students exercise it. For all their extraordinary energy and range, many of the students we encountered lead curiously compartmentalized lives, with little integration between the different spheres of their experience.

Instead of erecting buildings, Andreessen says, Stanford should invest even more of its resources in distance learning: “We’re on the cusp of an opportunity to deliver a state-of-the-art, Stanford-calibre education to every single kid around the world. And the idea that we were going to build a physical campus to reach a tiny fraction of those kids was, to me, tragically undershooting our potential.”

In late January, a popular d.school class, Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability, taught by James M. Patell, a business-school professor, consisted of thirty-seven graduate and three undergraduate students from thirteen departments, including engineering, political science, business, medicine, biology, and education. It was early in the quarter, and Patell offered the students a choice of initial projects. One was to create a monitoring system to help the police locate lost children. Another was to design a bicycle-storage system.

The “key question,” he says, is: “How can we increase efficiency without decreasing quality?”

online education might also disrupt everything that distinguishes Stanford. Could a student on a video prompter have coffee with a venture capitalist? Could one become a T-student through Web chat? Stanford has been aligned with Silicon Valley and its culture of disruption. Now Hennessy and Stanford have to seriously contemplate whether more efficiency is synonymous with a better education.