Curated links that highlight what some very smart people are discussing.
-- James Fallows remarks on the pithiest single sentence he's heard so far.
-- Do young playwrights need to read more plays?
-- Alexis Madrigal wonders if Americans are smart... or not.
-- Jeffrey Goldberg continues to report on the UAE and its attitude toward the prospect of Iranian nuclear weapons.
-- Ayaan Hirsi Ali defends her critique of Islam.
Until the midterm elections last year, a split jury could convict a defendant to life without parole in Louisiana.
Hailed as a savant, lampooned as a fraud, Britain’s likely next prime minister must lead his country through its moment of maximum peril—and opportunity.
Late morning on Tuesday, July 23, the denouement in Boris Johnson’s lifelong quest for political power will be revealed, when the committee that has organized the Conservative Party’s leadership election will announce the winner of the race to replace Theresa May. The following day, the winner—Johnson is the heavy favorite—will be driven to Buckingham Palace for an audience with the Queen, and be formally appointed prime minister.
It will be the culmination of seven weeks of national campaigning in which Johnson has slowly and cautiously closed in on the prize. Yet in reality it has been a 40-year pursuit, relentlessly driving forward, each step a mere prelude to the next on his seemingly unstoppable rise.
American corporations are spending trillions of dollars to repurchase their own stock. The practice is enriching CEOs—at the expense of everyone else.
In the early 1980s, a group of menacing outsiders arrived at the gates of American corporations. The “raiders,” as these outsiders were called, were crude in method and purpose. After buying up controlling shares in a corporation, they aimed to extract a quick profit by dethroning its “underperforming” CEO and selling off its assets. Managers—many of whom, to be fair, had grown complacent—rushed to protect their institutions, crafting new defensive measures and lodging appeals in state courts. In the end, the raiders were driven off and their moneyman, Michael Milken, was thrown in prison. Thus ended a colorful chapter in American business history.
Or so it seemed. Today, another effort is under way to raid corporate assets at the expense of employees, investors, and taxpayers. But this time, the attack isn’t coming from the outside. It’s coming from inside the citadel, perpetrated by the very chieftains who are supposed to protect the place. And it’s happening under the most innocuous of names: stock buybacks.
I miss the closeness we had before our baby was born.
Dear Therapist,
My husband and I have been married for three years. It was like a whirlwind of romance when we first met, and we couldn’t keep our hands off each other. We moved in together after just six months and were engaged after one year of being together. We got married two years later and I got pregnant soon after.
Our sex was always good before I got pregnant. When our baby was born, my husband had postnatal depression and I had to keep everything together. I was finding it hard inside, but just had to act strong for the both of us. That really put a strain on our marriage.
Our beautiful baby boy is now 15 months old and we never have sex. Our son has just started to sleep through the night, and I think we have gotten so used to taking care of our son at night and not having sex that now it feels so awkward. This is so upsetting, and I don’t know if we are attracted to each other anymore. We have date nights and nights off, but we still never want to have sex. He said it’s like having sex with his mate.
No one has done more to dispel the myth of social mobility than Raj Chetty. But he has a plan to make equality of opportunity a reality.
Raj Chetty got his biggest break before his life began. His mother, Anbu, grew up in Tamil Nadu, a tropical state at the southern tip of the Indian subcontinent. Anbu showed the greatest academic potential of her five siblings, but her future was constrained by custom. Although Anbu’s father encouraged her scholarly inclinations, there were no colleges in the area, and sending his daughter away for an education would have been unseemly.
But as Anbu approached the end of high school, a minor miracle redirected her life. A local tycoon, himself the father of a bright daughter, decided to open a women’s college, housed in his elegant residence. Anbu was admitted to the inaugural class of 30 young women, learning English in the spacious courtyard under a thatched roof and traveling in the early mornings by bus to a nearby college to run chemistry experiments or dissect frogs’ hearts before the men arrived.
Ten years ago, a neuroscientist said that within a decade he could simulate a human brain. Spoiler: It didn’t happen.
On July 22, 2009, the neuroscientist Henry Markram walked onstage at the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford, England, and told the audience that he was going to simulate the human brain, in all its staggering complexity, in a computer. His goals were lofty: “It’s perhaps to understand perception, to understand reality, and perhaps to even also understand physical reality.” His timeline was ambitious: “We can do it within 10 years, and if we do succeed, we will send to TED, in 10 years, a hologram to talk to you.” If the galaxy-brain meme had existed then, it would have been a great time to invoke it.
It’s been exactly 10 years. He did not succeed.
One could argue that the nature of pioneers is to reach far and talk big, and that it’s churlish to single out any one failed prediction when science is so full of them. (Science writers joke that breakthrough medicines and technologies always seem five to 10 years away, on a rolling window.) But Markram’s claims are worth revisiting for two reasons. First, the stakes were huge: In 2013, the European Commission awarded his initiative—the Human Brain Project (HBP)—a staggering 1 billion euro grant (worth about $1.42 billion at the time). Second, the HBP’s efforts, and the intense backlash to them, exposed important divides in how neuroscientists think about the brain and how it should be studied.
Surrogates have to contort themselves to curry favor with the likes of Boris Johnson and Donald Trump.
Pity Matt Hancock. Until this summer, Britain’s health minister was best known for creating a smartphone app for his constituents—and naming it after himself.
Now he is the most obvious instance of a growing political trend: the self-abasing outrider. No U-turn has been too big to stay in favor with Boris Johnson, the man who will likely be Britain’s next prime minister. This type of abasement is inevitable under a leadership based on charisma rather than strategy: You can see it in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party here in Britain, as well as Donald Trump’s Republicans. Self-abasing outriders are a symptom of a party with an identity crisis. And yet we might still regret their disappearance.
Let’s spend a little time with Matt Hancock, though, because he provides a perfect example of the trend. The moderate Remainer initially ran for the Conservative leadership himself, before pulling out (too few other lawmakers supported him) and quickly swinging behind Johnson, a Brexiteer who is the clear front-runner. Within weeks, Hancock’s reprogramming was complete. Asked why Johnson would not back Britain’s ambassador to Washington in the face of attacks from Donald Trump, Hancock refused to answer the question more than a dozen times. In the hope of getting a promotion, Hancock volunteered to be Johnson’s human shield: the all-but-guaranteed prime minister did not himself give a televised interview until after the ambassador had resigned.
A growing body of research has documented the health risks of getting certain breeds fixed early—so why aren’t shelters changing their policies?
In the 1970s, a time when tens of millions of unwanted dogs were being euthanized in the United States annually, an orthodoxy began to take hold: Spay and neuter early. Spay and neuter everything. It’s what vets were taught. It’s what responsible pet owners were told to do.
A growing body of research, however, suggests that spaying and neutering—especially in some large breeds when very young—are linked to certain disorders later in life. “As time has gone on, vets are starting to question the wisdom,” says Missy Simpson, a veterinary epidemiologist with the Morris Animal Foundation, which recently published a study that found higher rates of obesity and orthopedic injury in golden retrievers that had been fixed. Other studies have linked early spaying and neutering to certain cancers, joint disorders, and urinary incontinence—though the risks tend to vary by sex, breed, and living circumstances. As such, the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) now says in a guide for veterinarians, “There is no single recommendation that would be appropriate for all dogs.”
A new study suggests that learning about one’s own adoption after a certain age could lead to lower life satisfaction in the future.
A predictable sequence of events nearly always ensues after I mention to someone that I’m adopted. First, people blink, then quickly apologize for whatever assumption forced the clarification—that it must be my dad who’s tall, or that it must be my mom who passed down her olive skin to me … that some distinctive feature of mine must run in my family. Then come the questions: “Do you know your birth parents?” “How old were you when you were adopted?” And, almost without fail, “When did you find out you were adopted?” Whatever conversation was going on before the subject of adoption came up, I am always sorry to find, is now lost to history and forgotten.
The enduring popularity of that third question surprises me. The two other questions are aimed at understanding the circumstances under which I joined my family; the third question, an arguably more invasive one, probes into how my family dealt with the aftermath. It is, essentially, asking whether my parents lied to me. (My answer is always that my parents made sure I grew up knowing from the start that I was adopted, and that I have memories both foggy and vivid of my family reading to me throughout my childhood from a storybook they made, which contained Scotch-taped photographs and the story of the day my parents picked me up from an adoption agency in Tennessee. My older brother, according to our book, “gave me a bottle and a kiss” as I rode home for the first time in my car seat.)
ACLU lawyers have stopped border agents from demanding ID after domestic flights.
Commercial airliners are not usually restful environments, but February 2017 was a particularly fraught time for domestic air passengers. Donald Trump had become president a month earlier and had quickly issued his “travel ban” executive order, sparking chaos at the nation’s airports. Although on February 3 a federal district judge enjoined the ban, by February 21 White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer was telling a press briefing that “the President want[s] to take the shackles off individuals in [immigration agencies].” The very next day, Customs and Border Protection agents met Delta Airlines flight 1583 at the gate at John F. Kennedy International Airport. The agents, and the Delta cabin crew, told the passengers that to exit, they would have to show government-issued ID.
If multiracial democracy cannot be defended in America, it will not be defended elsewhere.
The conservative intelligentsia flocked to the Ritz-Carlton in Washington, D.C., this week for the National Conservatism Conference, an opportunity for people who may never have punched a time clock to declare their eternal enmity toward elites and to attempt to offer contemporary conservative nationalism the intellectual framework that has so far proved elusive.
Yoram Hazony, the Israeli scholar who organized the conference, explicitly rejected white nationalism, barring several well-known adherents from attending, my colleague Emma Green reported. But despite Hazony’s efforts, the insistence that “nationalism” is, at its core, about defending borders, eschewing military interventions, and promoting a shared American identity did not prevent attendees from explicitly declaring that American laws should favor white immigrants.
A man is tormented by a low-frequency humming sound emanating from his house, which he believes is caused by a nearby gas pipeline.
Until the midterm elections last year, a split jury could convict a defendant to life without parole in Louisiana.
The science behind that cringeworthy feeling
