Can you remember the other key facts from this week’s global affairs coverage? Test your knowledge below:
1. The International Olympic Committee banned ____________ from the 2018 winter games because of its state-sponsored doping program.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
2. The United Nations estimates that ____________ migrants came to Europe across the Mediterranean Sea in 2017.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
3. The conflict in Yemen has displaced about ____________ million people since 2015.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
— Annabelle Timsit
Answers: russia / 164,654 / 3
Urban Developments
Our partner site CityLab explores the cities of the future and investigates the biggest ideas and issues facing city dwellers around the world. Gracie McKenzie shares today’s top stories:
How does your neighborhood vote? You can get a pretty good idea from what's visible on Google Street View, these researchers found.
LA Weekly, Los Angeles’s award-winning alternative newspaper, was recently purchased by a shadowy entity. Immediately, most of the staff was fired. Then things got weird.
Lofts and studio apartments for low-income artists may suffer a major blow if the Republican effort to overhaul the tax system is signed into law, thanks to an amendment added by a Kansas senator.
For more updates from the urban world, subscribe to one of CityLab’s newsletters.
Reader Response
Bryan Caplan, an economics professor, argues that a college education doesn’t serve the needs of many students—and may even waste their time and money. This reader sums up the debate:
A lot of innovators today use cross-disciplinary methods, so clearly some people are getting something out of a liberal arts education ... At the same time, lots of people are going to college just because that’s what they are supposed to do. Our current situation stipulates that to do well you simply must have a degree. The fact that a lot of people aren’t getting out of the college experience what they should is probably a failure on multiple levels.
You’ll never find me arguing that higher education doesn’t need to change or that we can’t teach in high school a lot of what we teach in college. There should absolutely be more ways to do well in today’s economy, preferably ones that don’t rack up tons of debt. I don’t think crippling the minds of the citizenry by eliminating arts and humanities is the answer though.
More reader discussion here.
Verbs
Democracy drafted, ghost texted, DNA analyzed, fast food transformed.
Time of Your Life
Happy birthday to Brian (a year younger than websites); to LaWanda’s boyfriend of eight years, Shawn (twice the age of Amazon); to Krishna’s daughter Meghana (a year younger than the 24-hour news cycle); from Claire to Chris (13 years older than Grease); to Natasha’s boyfriend (the same age as text messages); and to Jasprit’s daughter Caroline, who at 7 is too young for the Timeline, but just the right age to become an art prodigy.
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