Bipartisan Push Builds to Relax Sentencing Laws →

Even in a Congress riven by partisanship, the priorities of libertarian-leaning Republicans and left-leaning Democrats have come together, led by the example of several states that have adopted similar policies to reduce their prison costs.
As senators work to meld several proposals into one bill, one important change would be to expand the so-called safety-valve provisions that give judges discretion to sentence low-level drug offenders to less time in prison than the mandatory minimum term if they meet certain requirements.
Another would allow lower-risk prisoners to participate in recidivism programs to earn up to a 25 percent reduction of their sentence. Lawmakers would also like to create more alternatives to incarceration for low-level drug offenders. Nearly half of all current federal prisoners are serving sentences for drug crimes.

The Trouble with Pinker's Argument about 'The Trouble With Harvard' →

Quoted in full:

What does elite education provide, and why do the rich do whatever it takes to gain entrance into top tier institutions? If we don't understand this, we don't understand what we need to provide for everyone else. Here's the full study.
Here's a key point: it's not content knowledge. It's not even academic skills nor critical thinking. If we focus only on these, the elite institutions offer no advantage. Why then are they elite? Kevin Carey suggests that the elites "select the best and the brightest", but this isn't true either. They select the richest. They then turn these very average intelligences into social and economic successes.
The focus on quality, as I argue, is a distraction. We need to provide people not only with learning, but with the social network, tools and empowerment that a proper education produces. As Cathy Davidson says, "What if the issue isn't what Harvard can and does do brilliantly but what, for the students who do not go to elite schools, they must do for themselves: ensure their own success.

What 2,000 Calories Looks Like →

Here, we show you what roughly 2,000 calories looks like at some large chains. (Depending on age and gender, most adults should eat between 1,600 and 2,400 calories a day.) Researchers have long understood that people are more likely to finish what’s on their plate than to stop eating because they’ve consumed a given amount of food. It’s “the completion compulsion,” a phrase coined in the 1950s by the psychologist Paul S. Siegel. Combine that compulsion with the rising number of restaurant meals Americans eat and the substance of those meals, and you start to understand why we’ve put on so much weight. But there is some good news: As you’ll see below, it’s not so hard to eat bountifully and stay under 2,000 calories. It’s just hard to do so at most restaurants.

Affluent children reach top universities no matter the system →

They calculate that high-achieving children from privileged backgrounds in England have a 53 per cent chance of entering a Russell Group university, compared with a one in four chance for their disadvantaged peers. The chances of not entering higher education at all are one in 20 and one in five, respectively.
The results for the US were similar, with high-achieving children from advantaged backgrounds having a 58 per cent chance of entering a highly selective university, compared with 27 per cent for the less privileged group. The prospects of not entering any university were 8 per cent and 27 per cent, respectively.

Why did Iran sign on to a deal that will weaken its regional hold? →

So why did Iran sign on to a deal that will undermine its regional strategy? The obvious answer is that economic sanctions forced Iran to choose between political stability at home and hegemony over the region. On that score, then, the nuclear deal has in one swoop ended Iran’s nuclear threat and hobbled its regional agenda.
But equally important is that Iran’s main regional worry has become the so-called Islamic State. The extremist Sunni force has emerged as an anti-Shiite and anti-Iranian juggernaut that now controls vast territory in Iraq and Syria and is a growing presence in Afghanistan. The Islamic State has the potential to expand into other Sunni Arab states and thereby present Iran and its Shiite allies with a significant strategic threat.
Iran has been fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and it could be doing the same in Afghanistan before long. This could be a long war, and that reality has forced Iran to rethink its strategic calculus. Confronting the Islamic State requires not a nuclear umbrella but a reduction of tensions with the international community and greater economic resources. The threat of the Islamic State, more so than any promise of hegemony over the region, was likely a decisive factor in Iran’s decision to sign away the nuclear cover for its regional strategy.

The Pentagon now says at least 192 laboratories accidentally received anthrax →

A US Army lab accidentally shipped live anthrax to at least 192 laboratories, according to a Department of Defense statement. That’s more than double the number reported by the Pentagon in June.
On the DOD's Laboratory Review site, the agency on Monday updated the list of all the laboratories that had received anthrax spores. The list now includes labs in all 50 states, as well as Guam, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands and Washington, DC. Seven foreign countries also received the shipments, including Japan, the UK, South Korea, Australia, Canada, Italy, and Germany.
This is at least the third time the Pentagon has updated the number of labs that accidentally received shipments of Bacillus anthracis, the bacterium that makes up anthrax...

From Gamergate to Cecil the lion: internet mob justice is out of control →

Because of the democratizing potential of the Internet (and the increasing ability to find any information one wants online), we'll have to contend more and more with online mass action. Where this fits into the justice system we create as a society is anyone's guess.

When an American dentist named Walter Palmer killed a beloved lion named Cecil, the social media platforms that allowed outraged web users to spread the story also enabled them to do more than just fume. It gave them the power to act on their anger, to reach into Palmer's life and punish him for what he'd done, without having to wait for the wheels of more formal justice to turn.
Web users uncovered Palmer's personal information, including about his family, and published it online. They went after his business, a private dental practice, posting thousands of negative reviews on Yelp and other sites. The practice has since shut down. Users also went after professional websites that host his profile, leading the sites to remove his information. On Twitter and on his practice's public Facebook page, people made threats of physical violence.
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What Palmer did was wrong, and he deserves to be punished to the full extent of the law. But it's easy to forget just how dangerous and unjust "mob justice" is while it's targeting someone you despise. The more this behavior is normalized, the more likely it is to be deployed against targets who might not necessarily deserve to have their lives destroyed — including, perhaps one day, against you.