Tag: others
The Angst Behind China’s ‘Lying Flat’ Youth
On Halloween in 2022, outside a party the police had just disbanded in Beijing’s warehouse district, I saw a 20-something woman in a sparkly spandex suit and bunny ears run into the road. “Freedom, not testing!” she shouted. “Reform, not revolution! Votes, not dictators! Citizens, not slaves!”
Those were familiar words at Tsinghua University, where I was studying for a master’s degree. From a bridge near campus, someone had hung a banner emblazoned with the slogans. The banner’s
Universities Have a Computer-Science Problem
Last year, 18 percent of Stanford University seniors graduated with a degree in computer science, more than double the proportion of just a decade earlier. Over the same period at MIT, that rate went up from 23 percent to 42 percent. These increases are common everywhere: The average number of undergraduate CS majors at universities in the U.S. and Canada tripled in the decade after 2005, and it keeps growing. Students’ interest in CS is intellectual—culture moves through computation these
How Humanism Can Save the World
One evening not long ago, I was doomscrolling on social media, wading through the detritus of our present moment: Videos of terrorists in Israel decapitating a man with a garden hoe. A clip of Donald Trump being cruel and narcissistic. Footage of mobs physically assaulting some lone stranger they disagree with, pummeling him as he lies prone on the ground.
These are all products of the rising tide of dehumanization that has swept across the world. The famous dates
Nothing Defines America’s Social Divide Like a College Education
Updated at 5:17 p.m. ET on October 4, 2023
Inequality is one of the great constants. But what sets those at the top of society apart from those at the bottom has varied greatly. In some times and places, it was race; in others, “noble” birth. In some, physical strength; in others, manual dexterity. In America today, most of these factors still matter. The country is racially unequal. Some people inherit great wealth; others become celebrities through sporting prowess.
The Case for Love-Life Balance
If you have a romantic partner, maybe you’ve noticed that you two spend an awful lot of time together—and that you haven’t seen other people quite as much as you’d like. Or if you’re single (and many of your friends aren’t), you might have gotten the eerie feeling that I sometimes do: that you’re in a deserted town, as if you woke one morning to find the houses all empty, the stores boarded up. Where’d everyone go?
Either way,
In Defense of Partisanship – The Atlantic
My most vivid memories of my early years at sleepaway camp, when I was 10 and 11, focus on the bizarre institution of color war. The campers were divided randomly in half for a wide-ranging competition between teams defined around no common identity, status, experience, or prior allegiance—just pure partisan competition. For one entire day, half of my bunkmates and possibly one or both of my brothers would become the sworn opposition. Despite knowing these divisions were both temporary and
Doctors May Soon Be Able to Screen for Preeclampsia and Preterm Birth
This article was originally published by Knowable Magazine.
For expectant parents, pregnancy can be a time filled with joyful anticipation: hearing the beating of a tiny heart, watching the fetus wiggling through the black-and-white blur of an ultrasound, feeling the jostling of a little being in the belly as it swells.
But for many, pregnancy also comes with serious health issues that can endanger both parent and child. In May, for example, the U.S. Olympic sprinter Tori Bowie died
Milk Is an Evolutionary Marvel
If an alien life form landed on Earth tomorrow and called up some of the planet’s foremost experts on lactation, it would have a heck of time figuring out what, exactly, humans and other mammals are feeding their kids.
The trouble is, no one can really describe what milk is—least of all the people who think most often about it. They can describe, mostly, who makes it: mammals (though arguably also some other animals that feed their young secretions
Apple Has Unleashed the Goggle Age
“Vision Pro feels familiar, yet it’s entirely new.” That’s how Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, introduced the company’s new computer goggles at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday. The Vision Pro headset, which resembles a glass scuba mask with a fabric head strap, seamlessly blends the real and digital worlds, Cook said. But the product’s name, which could just as easily describe a brand of contact-lens solution, hints at a challenge. Familiar yet entirely new, natural but augmented: If goggles
The Crafty Logic That Accompanies Dementia
Elizabeth often met her husband, Mitch, after work at the same restaurant in Lower Manhattan. Mitch was usually there by the time she arrived, swirling his drink and joking with a waiter. Elizabeth and Mitch had been friends before becoming romantically involved and bantered back and forth without missing a beat. Anyone looking at their table might well have envied them, never suspecting that Elizabeth dreaded these pleasant get-togethers.
Elizabeth, a tall, elegant woman, told me about those evenings in