Group items tagged

“It became very clear to me that I could use Uber and have the kind of life I wanted,” he said. “I feel like I found a way to take the best parts of my New York lifestyle, and incorporate them in L.A.”

Mr. O’Connell is part of a growing contingent of urbanites who have made Ubering (it’s as much a verb as “Googling”) an indispensable part of their day and especially their night life. Untethered from their vehicles, Angelenos are suddenly free to drink, party and walk places.

If you’re going to go to a party, you either don’t drink or you Uber there and Uber back, and problem solved.”

This year alone, officials have detained at least 15 U.S. citizens — nine of them female — who were trying to travel to Syria to join the militants. Almost all of them were Muslims in their teens or early 20s, and almost all were arrested at airports waiting to board flights.

Authorities are closely monitoring Twitter, Facebook and other social media networks, where recruiters from the Islamic State aggressively target youths as young as 14.

“This was not a spur-of-the-moment trip but rather a carefully calculated plan to abandon their family, to abandon their community, and abandon their country and join a foreign terrorist organization,” Hiller told the judge.

Even white Americans of modest means are more likely to have inherited something, in the form of housing wealth or useful professional connections, than the descendants of slaves

When Affirmative Action Was White, Ira Katznelson recounts in fascinating detail the various ways in which the New Deal and Fair Deal social programs of the 1930s and 1940s expanded economic opportunities for whites while doing so unevenly at best for blacks, particularly in the segregated South.

Many rural whites who had known nothing but the direst poverty saw their lives transformed as everything from rural electrification to generous educational benefits for veterans allowed them to build human capital, earn higher incomes, and accumulate savings. This legacy, in ways large and small, continues to enrich the children and grandchildren of the whites of that era. This is the stuff of white privilege. …

WHAT is the point of economics? It often seems that the objective is to make the world richer.

Yet this is the season when, for devout Christians at least, the ineffable supplants the material (and the other way around for most folk). That makes it a good time to ponder whether maximising income should really be the be-all and end-all of economic policy.

people in the ten richest countries in the world have a life expectancy 25 years higher than people in the ten poorest. People with more cash can afford better education, more varied leisure activities and healthier food, all of which improve the quality of life.

You could blackmail Johnson on this stuff, and it might be worth doing,” Haldeman says. It’s not clear exactly what Haldeman has in mind, but Nixon perks up. He suddenly remembers that he signed off on a proposal by White House aide Tom Charles Huston to use wiretaps and break-ins to protect national security. “Bob, you remember Huston’s plan? Implement it,” Nixon says. A staffer objects, and Nixon explodes, “I mean, I want it implemented on a thievery basis. Goddamn it, get in there and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.”

In the lead-up to the election, Johnson had offered peace negotiations in exchange for the halt in bombing. For years, historians have tried to get to the bottom of allegations that Nixon, using a pro-Nationalist Chinese lobbyist named Anna Chennault as a go-between, tried to get the South Vietnamese government to torpedo the proposal. The evidence remains a little sketchy. In a recently released oral history, Huston, who looked into the bombing halt at Haldeman’s request, suggests Nixon was culpable, but there is still no smoking gun. Nonetheless, Hughes shows that we still have much to learn by connecting the dots of Nixon’s angry venting and the shadowy world of national-security spying

fellow Nixonologist Luke Nichter, who is a professor at Texas A&M and runs an excellent website called nixontapes.org in addition to co-authoring The Nixon Tapes, is already following this trail. He recently told me that he is looking for evidence of other Nixon-era break-ins conducted in the name of national security. This sort of deep-cover spying hardly started with the cybersleuthing disclosed by Edward Snowden

The rom-com industrial complex—the cultural institution charged with capturing romance as a kind of ritual—failed to recognize the evolution of romance itself.

the rom-com's normative approach to relationships—the posture that treats romance and romantic partners as puzzles to be solved—is the thing that may be dying. Or, rather, the thing that may be evolving, slowly and steadily, into something else. We have less of a need, now, to look to the movies to give structure to our romantic relationships: The world is doing that for us, already. Under the influence of Match and eHarmony and Tinder and JDate and Our Time and OK Cupid and Farmers Only and all the others—services that promise to mate souls according to algorithms—our sense of romance itself is becoming ever more formulaic. The will-they-or-won't-they—the gooey stuff that forms the rom-com's gooey center—becomes less compelling a tension in a world ever more dominated by signals and swipes. We are ceding some of love's mystery to measurement.

the axis romance has revolved around—the guiding sense of mystery, of uncertainty, of otherness—is giving way, under the influence of digital capabilities, to more pragmatic orientations. eHarmony promises to connect people across “29 dimensions® of compatibility,” breaking those out into “Core Traits” and “Vital Attributes.” Match.com now lets MENSA members connect through its platform, and is experimenting with facial recognition programs to help users better find “their type.” The promises of big data—insights! wisdom! relevance!—are insinuating themselves onto relationships. Love, actually, is now more

Aside from the thicket of legal issues raised by the case, does Apple have a moral obligation to help the government learn more about the attack? Or does it have a moral obligation to protect its customers’ privacy? Or how about its shareholders? And which of these should take precedence?

Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, has long spoken about running his company based on certain values. He has used his position to advocate gay rights, for example, and pushed the company to be more “green,” once going so far as to tell a shareholder who questioned the return on investment of taking such stances, “If you want me to do things only for R.O.I. reasons, you should get out of this stock.”

The debate over Apple’s stance is just the latest in a series of questions about corporate patriotism. In recent years, questions have been directed at companies that renounce their United States citizenship to move to a country with a lower tax rate. Others, including Apple, have faced questions about tax strategies to shelter income abroad. And companies’ social responsibility programs, say for clean energy or water efficiency, have been scrutinized

It's impossible for anyone to see what ancient Rome looked like in all of its splendor, since we've failed to invent a time machine. But the above video, which shows a 3D rendering of Rome in 320 AD, is about as close as we can get

Rome Reborn, an academic research project whose central mission is to create a full model of Rome at its greatest heights, working in conjunction with the Khan Academy and Smarthistory. The goal is to take historical depictions of the city and create a true-to-life model of every period of Roman development, ranging from 1000 BC to 552 AD.

they chose to use 320 AD for this visualization because it was "the peak of Rome's urban development." Ten years later, the emperor, Constantine, moved the capital to Constantinople (present-day Istanbul), and the city of Rome began to decline. (The Roman Empire itself went on to survive, in various forms, until roughly 476.)

Shares of Jeff Bezos’s company have doubled in value so far in 2015, pushing Amazon into the world’s 10 largest companies by stock market value, where it jockeys for position with General Electric and is far ahead of Walmart.

The simple story involves Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud-computing business, which rents out vast amounts of server space to other companies.

Deutsche Bank estimates that A.W.S., which is less than a decade old, could soon be worth $160 billion as a stand-alone company. That’s more valuable than Intel.

Growing up in the Bronx, she was unaware of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and was mostly insulated from the surge in suspicion that engulfed Muslims in the United States, the programs of police surveillance and the rise in bias attacks.

her emergence from childhood into young womanhood has coincided with the violent spread of the Islamic State and a surge in Islamophobia,

had to confront some harsh challenges of being a young Muslim in America.

Something unique makes humans the top species of the planet. It’s not our exceptional brain size, but our ability to imagine the future. This skill trains us to think unlike other animals and ultimately triumph over them. And, yet, a limitation of this unique ability might also spell our doom.

At a meeting in Paris, world leaders are scratching their heads about how we can deal with the imminent threat posed by global warming. Our energy-thirsty civilization is guzzling fossil fuels at an unsustainable rate and we are soon to run out our carbon budget. If we don’t act now, disastrous consequences are predicted: rising sea levels, extreme weather events, easy-to-spread infections and so on.

But, as Arnold Schwarzenegger makes it clear, despite our ability to dream up dystopia, “Stuff that happens in the future does not mean anything to people.” It’s a limitation that could seriously hinder a successful outcome in Paris.

Over the holidays, when most Americans were busy buying stuff and trying to stay cool in the December heat, one of the most significant environmental policies of the last several decades was quietly enacted.

The reversal of the oil export ban, along with the expected first shipment of liquefied natural gas to a foreign country ever (expected later this month), is great news for oil and gas producers who've been hit hard by lower and lower prices for their goods in recent years.

"It's a huge deal," Jean Su, a lawyer with the environmental nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, told VICE over the phone. "It's less than a week after the Paris agreement was signed and Obama said the US was committed, then we go and sign a thing that regresses on everything that happened in Paris. It's horrendous."

Say something offensive. Get tons of corrective media coverage. Watch those poll numbers soar.

Donald Trump called for a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims entering the United States. Now that’s grist for the morning shows.

He told co-host Mika Brzezinski not to fear that brand of hate-mongering, but rather to fear the terrorists

Voting rights advocates observe somber King holiday

While most of the country will spend the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday remembering the peaceful nature and civil rights successes lodged by the late leader, voting rights advocates say this is a dark time for them.

Many might spend Monday reflecting on King's 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march to push for voting equality for black Americans,

spewing hate has a significant impact upon society. It is the equivalent of modern-day propaganda where the population is barraged with a stream of consistent messaging.  As ordinary people go about their daily lives, they are exposed repeatedly, day in and day out, to the same messages in numerous forms and by numerous people. Pretty soon, these messages begin to sink in and take effect.  The audience begins to adopt a worldview consistent with these messages, regardless of the degree of truth. 

Propaganda is powerful stuff.  Many people are susceptible to it and can be swayed by it, especially the less educated.

In America today, right-wing media is engaged in this very same activity through Fox News and extremist talk radio. 

Last month, scientists warned that we had only about 12 years to cut global emissions in half and that doing so would require a worldwide mobilization on the scale of that for World War II.

perhaps it should not be surprising that, even in many of the world’s most progressive places, even in the moment of acknowledged environmental crisis, a sort of climate NIMBYism prevails. The cost of inaction is sort of unthinkable — annual deadly heat waves and widespread famine, tens of millions of climate refugees, global coastal flooding, and disasters that will cost double the world’s present-day wealth. And so we choose, most of the time, not to think about it

This is denial, too, whatever you check on a survey about whether you “believe” the climate is changing.

it was Pelosi who did what the media has not done — interject, fact-check to his face and refuse to allow him to operate in a parallel reality. It’s not just that Trump has blurred the difference between facts and lies, but that so few have stood up to him in the moment for all the public to see.

She managed to get under Trump’s skin. Eli Stokols of the Los Angeles Times later reported, "It sort of spiraled out of control, and when the President left the Oval Office after Pelosi and Schumer left, a number of people saw him, he stormed out of the Oval, walked into an anteroom just off the Oval Office, and had in his hand a folder of briefing papers, and he just scattered them out of frustration, threw them across the room and expressed frustration to the people who were present.”

Pelosi came out triumphant. As my Post colleague Colby Itkowitz wrote, “Pelosi emerged from the meeting not some wilted flower, but a symbol of a woman who doesn’t have time for male posturing. ... Pelosi kept her composure throughout the charade, continually trying to bring the conversation back to a place where actual dialogue could occur.”

In a full-page advert in the Algemeen Dagblad, Rutte said he saw the Netherlands, “a country that isn’t perfect but where we do make progress”, as a “precious possession” that belonged to everyone but “was brittle … and can easily break”

He compared the country to “a fragile vase” held by its 17 million “ordinary and exceptional” citizens who “do not only want a good life for themselves and those around them, but also want to contribute to the happiness of others”.

Making sure the vase stays in one piece often requires “compromises … in which difficult problems are solved in a sensible way,” he said: “I almost never get my way. I water down my demands because I have a responsibility to keep that vase intact.”

So this was a premeditated, conscious attempt to hurt vulnerable children in order to deter future would-be asylum seekers who might bring their kids with them. It was an instrumental cruelty in which children were not seen as subjective beings to be protected but as objects to be used. It wasn’t a policy designed to be hidden, but to be broadcast.

A Trump administration official said Tuesday he warned for months about the potential for harm to migrant children if they were separated from their parents before the administration launched its “zero tolerance” border policy earlier this year.

Shklar puts it this way: “No child can deserve brutality. Punishment is justifiably inflicted in the service of retribution, education or public security; but if it goes away from, or beyond, these ends, we call it ‘cruel and unusual’ and forbid its use.”

we are becoming interdependent to an unprecedented degree. In this world, growth increasingly depends on the ability of yourself, your community, your town, your factory, your school and your country to be connected to more and more of the flows of knowledge and investment — and not just rely on stocks of stuff.

Over centuries, notes John Hagel, who currently co-heads Deloitte’s Center for the Edge, business has “been organized around stocks of knowledge as the basis for value creation. The key to creating economic value has been to acquire some proprietary knowledge stocks, aggressively protect those knowledge stocks and then efficiently extract the economic value from those knowledge stocks and deliver them to the market. The challenge in a more rapidly changing world is that knowledge stocks depreciate at an accelerating rate. In this kind of world, the key source of economic value shifts from stocks to flows.

“The companies that will create the most economic value in the future,” Hagel says, “will be the ones that find ways to participate more effectively in a broader range of more diverse knowledge flows that can refresh knowledge stocks at an accelerating rate.”