Day: July 29, 2020

Wednesday’s congressional antitrust hearing was a historic occasion, offering Congress a chance to grill four of the most powerful men in the world, who control four companies — Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Google — each so massive that they rival nation-states in their power. Observers have grown increasingly concerned about the unprecedented and outsized impact of these companies on the economy, the millions of American citizens who use their products, and the thousands of smaller businesses that try, often unsuccessfully, to compete with them.

But the Republican members of the hearing instead primarily focused on one specific thing: unfounded claims …

Three words explain why many developed countries have contained their coronavirus outbreaks more successfully than the United States: test, trace, and isolate.

The most effective containment strategy involves testing enough people to identify new cases, tracing all of their potential contacts, and isolating the people who may have been exposed before they can spread the virus to anybody else. But today, six months into the pandemic, America is still struggling to stand up these basic features of an effective public health response.

In the states where infections have exploded in the last month, officials say that their outbreaks are …

On May 28, David Shor, a political data analyst, sent a controversial tweet. Soon after George Floyd’s death, alongside peaceful mass protests there was a substantial amount of looting and vandalism in Minneapolis and a few other cities. Shor, citing research by Princeton political scientist Omar Wasow, suggested that these incidents could prompt a political backlash that would help President Donald Trump’s bid for reelection. At the same time, he noted that, historically, nonviolent protests had been effective at driving political change “mainly by encouraging warm elite discourse and media coverage.”

President Donald Trump made a pledge in June 2018 to stop separating families in immigration detention, seemingly bringing an end to a policy that was designed to deter migrants from attempting to cross the southern border, and that ignited protests nationwide.

“We’re going to keep families together but we still have to maintain toughness or our country will be overrun by people, by crime, by all of the things that we don’t stand for and that we don’t want,” Trump said, signing an executive order stating that it is the “policy of this administration to maintain family unity” in immigration …

As the US continues to struggle to contain the coronavirus pandemic and social distancing recommendations remain in place, millions of US children and adolescents aren’t expected to attend school in-person in the fall — meaning they’ll often be stuck inside their homes and using the internet as a primary means of human connection. The situation has resurfaced a longstanding, difficult-to-answer question: Is technology going to ruin my teenager’s brain?

For years, some have blamed the growing rate of teenagers suffering from mental health issues in the US on the drastic increase in compared to previous generations — but there …