Screens and Social Media Are Damaging Kids’ Conversation Skills. Here’s Why This Matters, and How to Get Them Back
Quelle surprise! Smartphone fixation is producing conversation-deficient children.
Read more...Category Archives: Social values
Coffee Break: More on Our Lousy Diet and Recovery of the Iconic American Chestnut
Part the First: Ultra-Processed Foods and Addiction. Big Ag and Big Food may finally have a problem with their big moneymaking products. We have discussed UPFs here several times before. They fill the center aisles of grocery stores in much of the Anglophone world. This article in Scientific American adds to wave of information coming […]
Read more...There Are No Free Markets
Neoliberal free market ideology was always a fantasy. But what comes next given the late stage capitalism breakdown?
Read more...Deaths by Liposuction Still Fail to Stop Ads Promising ‘Dream Body’ With Minimal Risk
Liposuction deaths at a private-equity-backed spa chain, after other liposuction deaths, fail to elicit responses like curbs on advertising.
Read more...A Few Notes on Progress in Gene Therapy
Gene therapy has been a goal of medicine since the first “inborn errors of metabolism” were identified by Sir Archibald Garrod in the early twentieth century. This was before anyone had a good idea of what a gene was, but the principles of Mendelian genetics were used by Garrod, with the assistance of William Bateson, […]
Read more...Progressive Educator Myles Horton’s Lessons for Fighting for Social Justice Today
Horton’s work offers a compelling model of how popular education can contribute to progressive change, fostering critical thinking in slow times and accelerating the spread of radical ideas during movement peaks.
Read more...Coffee Break: Boxing Day Miscellany
Part the First: No, This Is Not Another Bell Labs. Bell Labs was justifiably renowned as the place to do high level physics and engineering. It also supported Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson in their research that identified the background cosmic microwave radiation that is the remnant of the Big Bang. But Bell Labs worked […]
Read more...What World Was Jesus Born Into? A Historian Describes the Turbulent Times of the Real Nativity
On the debate over the life of the historical Jesus.
Read more...Americans Aren’t Traumatized Enough by Gun Violence
More on American resignation and hypocrisy about gun crimes.
Read more...Coffee Break: Climate, Eugenics, and a Note on mRNA Vaccines
Part the First: Climate, “What, Me Worry?” Once again Alfred E. Neuman comes to mind as “policy-based science” remains the order of the day in the Current Administration as Trump Administration Plans to Break Up Premier Weather and Climate Research Center. The Trump administration said it will be dismantling the National Center for Atmospheric Research […]
Read more...Ethnic Cleansing, Trump Style: Administration Moves to Send Asylum Seekers to Uganda, Honduras and Ecuador
Yes, the Trump Administration is seeking to shunt asylum seekers to Uganda, Honduras, and Ecuador, presumably <1>pour décourager les autres.
Read more...“Trump Supporters Distrust Science. We Need Ways to Reach Them”
The elites, including those in science, seem to think that their loss of legitimacy can be solved by messaging. Good luck with that.
Read more...What Will Happen If the Right Wins Absolutely?
Right wing factions are determined to implement extreme agendas. Where are they heading?
Read more...What to Eat Now, More Than Ever
Marion Nestle has been the essential guide to our “food system” (one trillion dollars a year) in the United States for a long time. Her work is relevant in other such as the United Kingdom that lack a robust food culture, for the most part because it was killed by the food system, not because […]
Read more...Is AI Creating Monsters?
More troubling new sightings on the AI front.
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