The Education Upstarts

Psychics Who Hear Voices Could Be On to Something

Joseph Frankel

The ways some “healthy voice hearers” cope might be able to help people with psychotic disorders.

Jessica Dorner was lying in bed at her cousin’s house when her grandmother, a “pushy lady” in an apron who had been dead for several years, appeared in front of her. “I know you can see me,” Jessica heard her say, “and you need to do something about it.”

It was a lonely time in Jessica’s life. She was living away from home for the first time, and she thinks her grandmother was drawn by some sense of that. She eventually told her parents what happened, and according to her they were concerned, but not overly panicked. “My parents are probably the least judgmental people I know,” she said.

As Jessica tells it, over the next two years, spirits visited her every now and again. Her brother-in-law’s deceased father began forming before her, ghostlike, just as her grandmother did. And while the experiences were intense and at times made her feel “crazy,” she said, they were infrequent, and insists that they were never a real source of suffering.

Senate Republicans Put Off Health-Care Vote

Russell Berman

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell bowed to mounting opposition and abandoned a vote planned for this week on legislation to overhaul Obamacare.

Updated on June 27 at 4:02 p.m. ET

Senate Republican leaders have abandoned plans to vote on legislation overhauling the Affordable Care Act this week, bowing to opposition within their own party and demands from several senators for more time to consider the bill.

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters after meeting with Republican senators on Tuesday that he would put off a vote until after a weeklong July 4 recess. The move is an abrupt retreat for McConnell, who had been pushing to pass the bill this week just days after releasing it to the public.

“We're going to continue the discussions within our conference on the differences that we have, that we're continuing to try to litigate,” the majority leader said. “Consequently, we will not be on the bill this week, but we’re still toward getting at least 50 people in a comfortable place.”

A Major Church-State Ruling That Shouldn't Have Happened

Garrett Epps

In Trinity v. Comer, there was no remaining dispute between the actual parties—and both the majority opinion and the leading dissent got the issue wrong.

Trinity Lutheran Church v. Comer, the church-state case decided by the Supreme Court Monday, is a truly hard case. I can think of good arguments for either side, and even better arguments why—since there was no remaining dispute between the actual parties—the court should have stayed out altogether.

The court waded in, alas. And the majority opinion, by Chief Justice John Roberts, and the dissent, by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, got the issue wrong.

In Trinity Lutheran, a church challenged the state of Missouri’s refusal to fund safety improvements at its daycare playground. In April 2017, however, the newly elected governor of Missouri ordered the state to grant the funding and not to enforce its no-churches funding rule. The church won what it wanted because the state decided to give it—this being, for any judges unclear on the concept, what is wistfully called “the political process” courts are supposed to support, not supplant.

The Dark Evolution of British Drinking Culture

Chrissie Giles

In 2004, people in the U.K. consumed more alcohol than ever before. How did they get there?

I first met alcohol in the late 1980s. It was the morning after one of my parents’ parties. My sister and I, aged 9 or 10, were up alone. We trawled the lounge for abandoned cans. I remember being methodical: Pick one up, give it a shake to see if there’s anything inside, and if there is, drink! I can still taste the stale, warm metallic tang of Heineken (lager; 5 percent alcohol by volume) on my tongue. Just mind the ones with cigarette butts in them.

Other times we’d sneak a sip of Dad’s Rémy Martin VSOP (cognac; 40 percent) when he wasn’t looking, even though we didn’t like the taste. It came in a heavy glass bottle that he kept in the sideboard. He’d pour himself a glass at night, the ice cubes clinking as he walked to his small office to make phone calls. On special occasions—family birthdays, Christmas lunch—we even got to drink legitimately: usually half a glass of Asti Spumanti (sparkling wine; around 7.5 percent), served in the best glasses.

The Fight for Health Care Has Always Been About Civil Rights

Vann R. Newkirk II

In dismantling Obamacare and slashing Medicaid, Republicans would strike a blow against signature victories for racial equality in America.

It was a cold March night when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. turned his pulpit towards health care. Speaking to a packed, mixed-race crowd of physicians and health-care workers in Chicago, King gave one of his most influential late-career speeches, blasting the American Medical Association and other organizations for a “conspiracy of inaction” in the maintenance of a medical apartheid that persisted even then in 1966.

There, King spoke words that have since become a maxim: “Of all the inequalities that exist, the injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhuman.” In the moment, it reflected the work that King and that organization, the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR), were doing to advance one of the since-forgotten pillars of the civil-rights movement: the idea that health care is a right. To those heroes of the civil-rights movement, it was clear that the demons of inequality that have always haunted America could not be vanquished without the establishment and protection of that right.

Neal Katyal: Senate's Obstruction of Merrick Garland 'Was Unforgivable'

Rebecca J. Rosen

The former acting solicitor general said that the Republican blockade against the onetime Supreme Court nominee represented a breakdown of checks and balances.

In March of last year, then-President Barack Obama nominated the federal appeals-court judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. Spring passed. Summer passed. Fall passed. Senate Republicans, under the leadership of Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, refused to hold a hearing to consider him, let alone schedule a vote. In November, Donald Trump was elected president and in short order named his own nominee. Within three months of Trump’s inauguration, the Senate confirmed Neil Gorsuch to the Court.

Speaking Tuesday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic, the Supreme Court attorney and former Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal sharply criticized this sequence of events, calling the GOP’s Garland blockade “unforgivable.” Katyal said:

2017 National Geographic Travel Photographer of the Year Contest, Part II

Alan Taylor

The contest is still under way.

The National Geographic Travel Photographer of the Year Contest is open to submissions until the end of this week, June 30. The grand-prize winner will receive a 10-day trip for two to the Galápagos Archipelago with National Geographic Expeditions. National Geographic was again kind enough to allow me to share more of the entries with you here, gathered from three categories: Nature, Cities, and People. The photos and captions were written by the photographers, and lightly edited for style.

How People Like You Fuel Extremism

Conor Friedersdorf

Discussing politics in groups of similarly minded people can be enough to stoke polarization—a frightening prospect in an era of social media.

For Cass Sunstein, a challenge that social media poses to democracy was clarified by a social-science experiment that he conducted in two different communities in Colorado: left-leaning Boulder and right-leaning Colorado Springs. Residents in each place were gathered into small groups to discuss their views on controversial topics, like climate change and same-sex marriage. Afterward, they were asked to report on the opinions of their groups as well as their own views on the subjects.

The results were the same in both communities.

The effect of gathering into groups composed of mostly like-minded people to discuss controversial subjects was to make participants more set and extreme in their views:

The Harry Potter Personality Test

Cari Romm

A new study found that people who identify as Slytherins may be measurably different from the Hufflepuffs of the world.

I’m not particularly proud of this fact, but here it is: Pottermore, the Harry Potter-themed website unveiled by J.K. Rowling in 2012, has peered deep into my soul, evaluated its findings, and pronounced me a Hufflepuff.

Fans of the series will know why this is upsetting. For all the non-Harry Potter buffs reading this, though, here are three quick points of explanation. One: At Hogwarts, the wizards’ academy that serves as the backdrop for most of the series, students are sorted into one of four houses, each with its own distinctive character. Two: On Pottermore, fans can take a personality quiz to do the same. Three: Hufflepuff’s defining trait is “nice.” Its mascot is a badger. Its members, if Hogwarts were an American high-school cafeteria, would be the ones in the corner, frantically combing the trash for their retainers.

What The Big Sick Gets Right About Parenthood

Inkoo Kang

The romantic comedy—about a relationship struggling with culture clash—fleshes out the poignant supporting roles that mothers and fathers can play.

This post contains spoilers for the entirety of The Big Sick.

Kumail Nanjiani’s The Big Sick is one of the year’s most satisfying romantic comedies—but it’s something else, too. Written by Nanjiani and his wife Emily V. Gordon about their rocky real-life courtship, the film is a remarkable achievement for the depth of its unusual B-plot: the fictional Kumail’s relationship with his future in-laws (played by Holly Hunter and Ray Romano). It’s a singularly textured and honest portrayal, especially within Asian American pop culture, of the importance of parents in adulthood—as well as a candid look at the need to negotiate familial relationships when they become too dysfunctional.

A pharmaceutical lab’s worth of chemistry binds Nanjiani (who plays himself) and Zoe Kazan (who plays Emily), giving the first act its easygoing sweetness. But The Big Sick truly distinguishes itself when Kumail meets Emily’s parents, Beth and Terry, about 45 minutes in. After five months of dating, Emily discovers in her boyfriend’s room a yearbook page’s worth of photos: headshots of women that Kumail’s mother had introduced to her younger son in hopes of arranging a marriage. Seeing no future for them as a couple, Emily breaks things off. Shortly after, she lands in the hospital, where she’s placed in a medically induced coma. Reeling from the sudden severity of their daughter’s condition (and fully aware of Kumail’s photo collection), Beth and Terry initially swat their daughter’s ex away like a fly.