What Should We Say About David Bowie and Lori Maddox? →

Word choice is hard here. Should we say “raped” automatically if a grown man has sex with a teenager? Does it matter at all if the 15-year-old, now much older, describes their encounter as one of the best nights of her life? What is our word for a “yes” given on a plane that’s almost vertically unequal? Does contemporary morality dictate that we trust a young woman when she says she consented freely, or believe that she couldn’t have, no matter what she says?

The best article I've read on resolving the moral tensions between the present and the (rather recent) past on sexual norms, language, and law. Relevant to other debates, too: flying the Confederate flag, keeping monuments to morally-compromised and long-dead national leaders... Knowledge and ethics have increased so much in such a short time; it's easy to see predecessors as monsters. And really, aren't we all. With any luck, in 100 years, we'll be the barbarians.

The remarkably different answers men and women give when asked who’s the smartest in the class →

The surveys asked each student to “nominate” their most knowledgeable classmates at three points during the school year. Who best knew the subject? Who were the high achievers?
To illustrate the resulting peer-perception gap, researchers compared the importance student grades had on winning a nomination to the weight of the gender bias. The typical student received 1.2 nominations, with men averaging 1.3 and women averaging 1.1.
Female students gave other female students a recognition “boost” equivalent to a GPA bump of 0.04 — too tiny to indicate any gender preference, Grunspan said. Male students, however, awarded fellow male students a recognition boost equivalent to a GPA increase of 0.76.
"On this scale," the report asserted, "the male nominators’ gender bias is 19 times the size of the female nominators’."

How the Southern Strategy Made Donald Trump Possible →

But there is another way of looking at Trump: Far from being a “cancer” on Republicanism, or some jihadi-style radicalizer, he’s the natural evolutionary product of Republican platforms and strategies that stretch back to the very origins of modern conservatism in the 1950s and 1960s. 

Is a Surrogate a Mother? →

...When an egg donor is under 35, as C.M.’s was, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine strongly recommends implanting only one embryo to avoid a multiple pregnancy, but some clinics will implant more to increase the chances that at least one will prove viable. In this case, they all survived. For the second time in her life, Cook was pregnant with triplets. And soon, the virtual relationship she had with their father would fall apart.
Cook and C.M. are still strangers to each other, but they are locked in a legal battle over both the future of the children she’s going to bear and the institution of surrogacy itself. Because she’s come under pressure to abort one of the fetuses, Cook’s case has garnered some conservative media attention. This story, however, is about much more than the abortion wars. It illustrates some of the thorniest issues plaguing the fertility industry: the creation of high-risk multiple pregnancies, the lack of screening of intended parents, the financial vulnerability of surrogates, and the almost complete lack of regulation around surrogacy in many states.

If this Iraqi dam collapses, half a million people could die →

If breached, it could unleash a 180-foot-high wave down the Tigris River Basin and drown more than half a million people, with floodwaters reaching as far as the Iraqi capital, about 280 miles to the south.
The collapse of the Mosul Dam would be catastrophic for Iraq.
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The dam’s structural problems became evident as soon as the reservoir behind it was filled in 1985. It is built on layers of clay and gypsum, a soft mineral that dissolves when it comes into contact with water, and the dam immediately began seeping. Since then, about 100,000 tons of grout have been poured into the structure to prevent it from collapsing.
But even this stopgap measure has been disrupted by the Islamic State, which briefly seized the dam in the summer of 2014. The militants still hold the nearby city of Mosul, their de facto capital in Iraq. Political wrangling and a financial crisis in Iraq also are complicating repair work.
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When the Islamic State took control of the dam, a rigid daily routine of pouring grout into the structure to keep it from collapsing was missed for six weeks, and logistical issues have plagued the process ever since.
Meanwhile, a government decision to deprive Islamic State-held Mosul of electricity by blocking the flow of water put additional pressure on the dam as water levels rose.

Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and the Money →

Undoubtedly there are cases where an individual or industry group promises a large campaign contribution in exchange for a politician's support on a particular issue, but this is almost certainly rare. More typically the support of politicians for moneyed interests is part of a much longer process. It's not just that the politician wants to act to curry the favor of the rich and powerful, more typically they identify with the interests of the rich and powerful so that they don't even see themselves as compromising a principle.
Trade policy provides an excellent example. Over the last quarter century, the leadership of both political parties has consistently pushed trade deals that have worked against the interest of a large percentage of U.S. workers. This was not an accidental outcome from these deals, it was by design.
...
While there were big money beneficiaries of these trade deals, most of the politicians who supported them probably did not need to be bought with campaign contributions. Instead, they likely supported these deals because they thought they were the right thing to do. After all, they mostly associate with people who benefit from these trade deals, either through higher corporate profits or from being able to buy cheaper cars and clothes. Politicians are less likely to associate with the auto workers or textile workers who were losing jobs or retail clerks getting lower pay.
In most cases, it probably never even occurred to the politicians voting for the pacts that there was a serious downside. Politicians are people who get elected by making friends and raising money, not by being policy wonks or political philosophers. Being an expert on the issues that Congress or the president addresses is not part of the job description.

VOICE A World War II Marine looks back and wonders: Where’s the America of sharing? →

The basis of success for my Marine Corps was the mantra of “you are now a Marine. You are as good as, but never better than, every other Marine” “Take care of your mates, do your job and never leave a fellow Marine behind.” No matter how important or how mundane your job, from the Commandant to the last private in the last rank, it is incumbent on you to do that job the best you can because this is the only way any of us will survive. Just as in the slums, we did our best and helped each other not just because it was the right thing to do but because it was the only way each one of us had a chance of continuing on.
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In a time of unprecedented wealth, we now have an all-time record-breaking number of people living in poverty. It has been accurately reported that in the last decade while overall wealth has grown by 60 percent, the number of homeless children has also grown by 60 percent, and the number of children on food stamps has increased by 70 percent. In a time of unprecedented wealth we now have full-time workers who need food stamps to survive, and conditions are getting more severe, the trends are getting worse.

The NSA’s SKYNET program may be killing thousands of innocent people →

Last year, The Intercept published documents detailing the NSA's SKYNET programme. According to the documents, SKYNET engages in mass surveillance of Pakistan's mobile phone network, and then uses a machine learning algorithm on the cellular network metadata of 55 million people to try and rate each person's likelihood of being a terrorist.
Patrick Ball—a data scientist and the director of research at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group—who has previously given expert testimony before war crimes tribunals, described the NSA's methods as "ridiculously optimistic" and "completely bullshit." A flaw in how the NSA trains SKYNET's machine learning algorithm to analyse cellular metadata, Ball told Ars, makes the results scientifically unsound.
Somewhere between 2,500 and 4,000 people have been killed by drone strikes in Pakistan since 2004, and most of them were classified by the US government as "extremists," the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported. Based on the classification date of "20070108" on one of theSKYNET slide decks (which themselves appear to date from 2011 and 2012), the machine learning program may have been in development as early as 2007.
In the years that have followed, thousands of innocent people in Pakistan may have been mislabelled as terrorists by that "scientifically unsound" algorithm, possibly resulting in their untimely demise.