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What cicadas taught me about loss, mortality
By Jordan Hernandez May 25, 2021 Billions of Brood X cicadas are above ground for the first time in 17 years. After a year of loss, distance, and personal grief, it feels especially symbolic. The first time I saw a cicada, I wanted to eat it. I was 10, and well into my second summer in North Carolina after moving there from the Midwest. I had spent the day ripping holes in my denim shorts and playing in sprinklers with the neighborhood kids, and was walking home, barefoot and tired. It looked like a piece of candy. Before I could take a bite, it crumbled between my fingertips with a…
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Understanding others’ feelings: what is empathy and why do we need it?
January 8, 2017 2.22pm EST Author Pascal MolenberghsSenior Lecturer in Social Neuroscience, Monash University Disclosure statement Pascal Molenberghs receives funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC Discovery Early Career Research Award: DE130100120) and Heart Foundation (Heart Foundation Future Leader Fellowship: 1000458). Partners This is the introductory essay in our series on understanding others’ feelings. In it we will examine empathy, including what it is, whether our doctors need more of it, and when too much may not be a good thing. Empathy is the ability to share and understand the emotions of others. It is a construct of multiple components, each of which is associated with its own brain network. There…
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How Back-to-School Shopping Is Like Modern Politics
Gary M. Galles August 21, 2019 As 2019’s campaign unpleasantness has accelerated (OMG—there’s still way over a year to go), many Americans have been going through another sometimes-unpleasant experience: back-to-school shopping. Seemingly overlooked, however, is that the frequent parent-child conflict of back-to-school shopping illustrates why politics expands Americans’ disunity. Parents and Children Have Different Values Parents and children value back to school items differently. And the difference is often large. That is because parents’ more practical considerations can be way out of line with children’s “where will this put me on the social pecking order at school?” concerns. And when their valuations differ substantially, requiring them to make decisions jointly…
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How Seinfeld (Hilariously) Exposed the Creepy Authoritarianism of Aggressive Do-Gooders
Jon Miltimore (@miltimore79) October 3, 2021 The writers of Seinfeld saw how the human instinct to do good can breed a fanaticism that is anything but funny. If you asked me what my favorite Seinfeld episode is, I’d have a hard time answering. There are just too many winners. Many would say the best ever is “The Contest,” the Emmy Award-winning episode where Jerry and company compete to see who is “master of their domain.” And who can forget “The Soup Nazi” or “The Merv Griffin Show” or Kenny Rogers chicken (“The Chicken Roaster”)? Personally, I’ve always been a fan of “The Race,” the one where Elaine is dating a…
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Why do holes horrify me?
Trypophobia is the fear of clusters of holes and cracks. Its origin may be evolutionary but as awareness spreads online, is it becoming a social contagion? Julia was around 11 the first time it happened. She let herself into her dad’s apartment in Malmö, Sweden, dropped her schoolbag and flopped on to the sofa. She switched on the TV and turned to her favourite channel in time for the cartoons. The screen filled up with a cartoon man with a huge head. On his chin, in place of skin or a beard were huge cracks. Suddenly, she felt like she was going to throw up in disgust. She screwed up…
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The Federal Government Gave Billions to America’s Schools for COVID-19 Relief. Where Did the Money Go?
The Education Department’s limited tracking of $190 billion in pandemic support funds sent to schools has left officials in the dark about how effective the aid has been in helping students. by Annie Waldman and Bianca FortisOct. 20, 2021, 12:30 p.m. EDT After the pandemic shut down schools across the country, the federal government provided about $190 billion in aid to help them reopen and respond to the effects of the pandemic. In the year and a half since millions of children were sent home, the Education Department has done only limited tracking of how the money has been spent. That has left officials in Washington largely in the dark…
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Impending Zoom: New Exposé Shows Teachers Union Influenced CDC School Reopening Guidelines
Monday, May 3, 2021 by Kerry McDonald Backroom dealings between a powerful government agency and a powerful public sector labor union are concerning, to say the least. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was preparing to release school reopening guidelines in February suggesting that in-person learning would be acceptable even if a community had high coronavirus case rates. After a meeting with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the nation’s second-largest teachers union, the CDC allegedly backpedaled and revised their guidelines about in-person instruction, using wording provided by the AFT. The New York Post broke the story on Saturday using emails received through a Freedom of Information…
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The Lost Year: What the Pandemic Cost Teenagers
by Alec MacGillis, photography by Celeste Sloman ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox. Everything looks the same on either side of the Texas-New Mexico border in the great oil patch of the Permian Basin. There are the pump jacks scattered across the plains, nodding up and down with metronomic regularity. There are the brown highway signs alerting travelers to historical markers tucked away in the nearby scrub. There are the frequent memorials of another sort, to the victims of vehicle accidents. And there are the astonishingly deluxe high school football stadiums. This is,…
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A ‘daunting, dark and difficult’ time: How a Brooklyn school moved forward after losing its leader to COVID
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