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I gave a talk to a class at Northeastern University earlier this month, concerning technology, journalism, and the cultural professions. The students were bright and inquisitive, though they also reflected the current dynamic in higher ed overall - three quarters of the students who showed up were women, and the men who were there almost all sat moodily in the back and didn’t engage at all while their female peers took notes and asked questions. I know there’s a lot of criticism of the “crisis for boys” narrative, but it’s often hard not to believe in it.

we’re actually living in a period of serious technological stagnation - that despite our vague assumption that we’re entitled to constant remarkable scientific progress, humanity has been living with real and valuable but decidedly small-scale technological growth for the past 50 or 60 or 70 years, after a hundred or so years of incredible growth from 1860ish to 1960ish, give or take a decade or two on either side

I will recommend Robert J. Gordon’s The Rise & Fall of American Growth for an exhaustive academic (and primarily economic) argument to this effect. Gordon persuasively demonstrates that from the mid-19th to mid-20th century, humanity leveraged several unique advancements that had remarkably outsized consequences for how we live and changed our basic existence in a way that never happened before and hasn’t since. Principal among these advances were the process of refining fossil fuels and using them to power all manner of devices and vehicles, the ability to harness electricity and use it to safely provide energy to homes (which practically speaking required the first development), and a revolution in medicine that came from the confluence of long-overdue acceptance of germ theory and basic hygienic principles, the discovery and refinement of antibiotics, and the modernization of vaccines.

How a Canadian college — in a remote town most Canadians have never visited, where winters can feel subarctic — became a magnet for young Indians is the story of the many forces buffeting the country.

Public colleges and universities, hit hard by budget cuts, have grown dependent on the higher tuitions international students must pay. For students from abroad, the institutions can be a conduit to permanent Canadian residence, and for Canada, the students help reduce labor shortages and increase the country’s flagging productivity.

The Canadian government said it was on track to host 900,000 foreign students this year, three times as many as a decade ago.

Sometime in recent history, possibly around 2004, Americans forgot to have fun, true fun, as though they’d misplaced it like a sock.

Instead, fun evolved into work, sometimes more than true work, which is where we find ourselves now.

Fun is often emphatic, exhausting, scheduled, pigeonholed, hyped, forced and performative

For the last few years, though, I’ve felt the opposite — that so much of my work was decrying bad choices made by big players

Vladimir Putin’s tightening dictatorship and aggression, culminating in his brutal invasion of Ukraine; Xi Jinping’s reversal of China’s opening; Israel’s election of the most right-wing government in its history; the cascading effects of climate change; the loss of control over America’s southern border; and, maybe most ominously, an authoritarian drift, not only in European countries like Turkey, Poland and Hungary but in America’s own Republican Party as well.

If I think about the three pillars that have stabilized the world since I became a journalist in 1978 — a strong America committed to protecting a liberal global order with the help of healthy multilateral institutions like NATO, a steadily growing China always there to buoy the world economy, and mostly stable borders in Europe and the developing world — all three are being shaken by big choices by big players over the last decade

He and his father, 38-year-old Gerald Parks, were fatally shot while sitting in their vehicle on Carver Street a few yards from their home.“I just heard a whole bunch of gunshots and I came outside and just seen him in the car slumped over, unresponsive,” Frame said.According to the family, the father and son returned from a cookout and had just parked their vehicle when someone opened fire leaving shattered glass on the ground and bullet holes in a nearby rowhome.Jamel’s mother has one word to describe how she’s feeling.“Numb, like literally numb. Like, I don’t have any words. I’m just in shock. I can’t believe this is happening right now. I feel like it’s a dream, a nightmare,” Frame said.

Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney condemned the recent violence, tweeting: “We must all work together to end this heartbreaking, maddening epidemic and make a safer city for everyone.”In the city’s Overbrook section, police say a young man, approximately 18 to 21 years old, was shot multiple times and killed on Sunday afternoon.Police say the shooting happened in a rear alleyway on the 6300 block of West Columbia Avenue around 1:45 p.m. The man was transported to the hospital by police and pronounced dead at 1:58 p.m.

A 31-year-old man was shot once in his left leg during a fight with another man in West Philadelphia, police say. The shooting happened on the 5900 block of Market Street just after 6:30 p.m. on Sunday. Police say they made an arrest and recovered a weapon. The man was placed in stable condition.In Philly’s Torresdale neighborhood, police say a 26-year-old man was shot once in his right leg. The incident happened on the 3900 block of Rowena Drive around 10 p.m. on Saturday. He was placed in stable condition.

A drone lifted off from Michigan this month and flew across the St. Clair River toward Port Lambton, Ontario. Its spooked pilot aborted the landing after being spotted by a neighbor, leaving the police to later fish the drone out of a tree and discover 11 handguns strapped to it with plastic bags, tape and carabiner clips.

The problem is also glaring on the U.S.-Mexico border. Last August, Mexico sued 10 American gunmakers, blaming them for fueling violence in Mexico.

The spillover across Canada’s border with the United States extends beyond the guns themselves to the shared grief and calls for increased firearms regulations in the wake of mass shootings, including two just this month: 10 people were killed in a racist attack in a Buffalo supermarket on May 14; and 19 students and two teachers were killed on Tuesday at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.

As Shanghai eased one of the longest, toughest lockdowns anywhere since the pandemic began, many of its 25 million residents celebrated being free to move around. The reopening on Wednesday came after Shanghai’s two-month siege against Covid had set off public anger over shortages of food and medicine as well as the harsh enforcement of quarantine rules.

For now at least, that anger gave way to relief after the government wound back many restrictions. During the day, people — all wearing masks — basked in the novelty of previously mundane pleasures like meeting friends and relatives, strolling in parks, and driving through streets that had been largely empty since early April. Hairdressers were, as in many cities freed from lockdowns, busy. Subway lines were open but quiet.

With daily infections now falling to low double digits, the government has launched an urgent effort to revive factories, companies and supply lines vital to China’s sagging economy. On Tuesday, Shanghai recorded 15 infections.

The Biden administration will start blocking Russia from paying American bondholders, increasing the likelihood of the first default of Russia’s foreign debt in more than a century.

As a result, Russia will be unable to make billions of dollars of debt and interest payments on bonds held by foreign investors.

Biden administration officials had debated whether to extend what’s known as a general license, which has allowed Russia to pay interest on the debt it sold.

Sandberg, the author of the best-selling 2013 book “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead,” has over 900,000 Instagram followers. Olivan’s Instagram, with 17 followers, is private. Until Wednesday, Olivan hadn’t published a public post to his Facebook profile since 2018.

Olivan’s quiet public persona doesn’t reflect his influence at the company. He’s among a handful of executives reporting to Zuckerberg, climbing near the top of the latter in his almost 15-year stint at the social-media company. He joined the C-suite five months ago, assuming the title of chief growth officer, and is also vice president of cross-Meta products and infrastructure.If Sandberg led the charge in building Facebook’s advertising business, which still represents 97% of Meta’s total revenue, Olivan deserves credit for its global expansion. His first job at the company, from 2007 to 2011, was head of international growth.

In addition to Vy Global, Olivan spent six years on the board of Latin American e-commerce company MercadoLibre, and he invested in geospatial imaging company Satellogic ahead of the SPAC deal it completed in January.But his career has been centered at Facebook. In 2008, Olivan accompanied Zuckerberg for an appearance at the University of Navarra. He later worked on Internet.org, an effort Facebook and other companies launched in 2013 to connect people to internet services in less developed countries.

But those plans, experts say, may be just that – plans and proposals, many of which need unlikely approval by an uncooperative Congress or are subject to the whims of hostile foreign leaders, unpredictable markets or other forces beyond any president's control.

"Did you anticipate that the closure of the Abbott facility, because it was not producing the quality that was necessary, that it would have this profound effect immediately, or did it take a little time?" Biden asked. The question appeared directed at criticisms that the administration did not work better, earlier, to head off shortages when Abbott was forced to recall contaminated formula.The public relations effort, however, may not be enough to boost Biden's low approval ratings in time to help Democrats in a challenging midterm election season this fall. And in many cases, Biden's ability to fix the problems bedeviling the administration is limited.

On COVID-19, Biden has indeed ramped up testing and vaccinations during his term, Perry says. But he can't fight Mother Nature and human nature, she adds, noting that public impatience with masking and the virus's mutations aren't things he can control.On Ukraine, Biden has repeatedly noted his success in strengthening the NATO alliance. But "has he ended the war? No. That's something a president can't do," Perry adds. Aside from the threat of the war itself, the ongoing Russian invasion means higher gas prices as well, since the U.S. and its allies have imposed embargoes on Russian energy.

Suddenly, five low-flying helicopters thrummed overhead, some firing weapons and drawing gunfire in return. Villagers ran for their lives. But there was nowhere to escape: The helicopters were dropping soldiers on the town’s outskirts to block all the exits.

The foreigners, according to diplomats, officials and human rights groups, belonged to the Russian paramilitary group known as Wagner.

However, using satellite imagery, The New York Times identified the sites of at least two mass graves, which matched the witnesses’ descriptions of where captives were executed and buried.

The Baltic Sea port has silos to store plenty of grain, railway lines to transport it there from Ukraine, where it has been trapped by the war, and a deep harbor ready for ships that can take it to Egypt, Yemen and other countries in desperate need of food.

“Starvation is near,

Belarus controls the railway lines offering the most direct, cheapest and fastest route for large volumes of grain out of Ukraine to Klaipeda and other Baltic ports.

startling, although not actually surprising, has been the embrace of economic vandalism and intimidation by much of the U.S. right — especially by people who ranted against demonstrations in favor of racial justice. What we’re getting here is an object lesson in what some people really mean when they talk about “law and order.”

The “Freedom Convoy” has been marketed as a backlash by truckers angry about Covid-19 vaccination mandates

In reality, there don’t seem to have been many truckers among the protesters at the bridge (about 90 percent of Canadian truckers are vaccinated)

The complaint also cites internal records about the platform’s Climate Science Information Center, a much-touted hub designed to connect people with authoritative climate information. Awareness of the webpage was “very low,” even for people who had visited it.

“Climate change knowledge is generally poor,” one of the internal reports from 2021 said. “Given how many people use Facebook for information about climate change … climate science myths are a problem across all surveyed markets.”

The filings argue that it’s particularly urgent that Facebook tackle climate change misinformation, in part because of the popularity of the site. An internal company document cited in the complaint says Facebook is the second-most common source for news related to climate change, behind only television news and ahead of news aggregators, movies, online climate news sources and other social media platforms.

A full Russian invasion would be Europe’s biggest war since the 1940s, and the first toppling since then of a democratically elected European government by a foreign invader.

Russians would not only suffer casualties, especially during a long-running insurgency, but also cause the death of untold Ukrainians—fellow Slavs, with whom many have family ties.

War would affect the prices of other commodities, too. Oil is already spiking. Russia is the world’s largest exporter of wheat, with Ukraine close behind. Russia is a big source of metals: in today’s tight markets even a small shock could send commodity prices upwards.

Central-bank sanctions are a weapon so devastating, in fact, that the only question is whether they might do more damage than Western governments might wish. They could potentially bankrupt the entire Russian banking system and push the ruble into worthlessness.

Very seldom does any actual paper money change hands

There’s only about $12 billion of cash dollars and euros inside Russia, according to Bernstam’s research. Against that, the Russian private sector has foreign-currency claims on Russian banks equal to $65 billion, Bernstam told me. Russia’s state-owned companies have accumulated even larger claims on Russia’s foreign reserves.

We are experiencing the same problems and having the same arguments. It’s all leading to a pervasive feeling, especially among younger people, that our systems in the United States (including our system of government) “are no longer able to meet the challenges our country is facing.”

The internet, as a mediator of human interactions, is not a place, it is a time. It is the past. I mean this in a literal sense. The layers of artifice that mediate our online interactions mean that everything that comes to us online comes to us from the past—sometimes the very recent past, but the past nonetheless.

Sacasas asks us to revise the notion of real-time communications online, and to instead view our actions as “inscriptions,” or written and visual records. Like stars in the galaxy, our inscriptions seem to twinkle in the present, but their light is actually many years old.

London is missing out on a spending boom by wealthy American and Middle Eastern tourists that began last summer and has benefited big cities on the European continent, mainly Paris and Milan. In January, VAT receipts from Middle Eastern visitors to continental Europe, a good proxy for luxury spending, were up 224% compared with the same month of 2019, based on data from tax refund company Global Blue

American spending was even heavier, with receipts up 297% over the period. The strong dollar means the discount available on luxury goods in Europe has been historically wide recently and U.S. tourists outspent all other nationalities in every month of 2022.

Britons are spending heavily on tax-free goods in the European Union.