Why wealth equality remains out of reach for black Americans

A Danish word the world needs to combat stress: Pyt Danes are some of the happiest people in the world, and they also happen to have a lot of cool words for ways to be happy. You may have heard about “hygge,” which has been the subject of countless books, articles and commercials. Often mistranslated to mean “cozy,” it really describes the process of creating intimacy. But another word “pyt” – which sort of sounds like “pid” – was recently voted the most popular word by Danes, beating out “dvæle” (to linger) and “krænkelsesparat” (ready to take offense). Pyt doesn’t have an exact English translation.

Study: Religious fundamentalists and dogmatic individuals are more likely to believe fake news New research provides evidence that delusion-prone individuals, dogmatic individuals, and religious fundamentalists are more likely to believe fake news. The study, which appears in the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, suggests that the inability to detect false information is related to a failure to be actively open-minded. The rise of online social media has led to growing concerns about the spread of unsubstantiated rumors, misleading political propaganda, and blatantly false articles designed to create viral web traffic. Even the U.S. Army has become involved in efforts to understand and combat disinformation in cyberspace. “Our interest in fake news is grounded in a general interest in understanding the common experience of believing things that are not true,” explained study author Michael V.

Dem. Presidential Candidate Calls for $100B in Slavery Reparations Marianne Williamson, a best-selling author. spiritual teacher and activist, announced her bid for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination on Monday. On Thursday, she sat down on CNN’s New Day, where she said the United States needs to pay African-Americans reparations for slavery. “We need a moral and spiritual awakening in the country,” the candidate stated. “Nothing short of that is adequate to really fundamentally change the patterns of our political dysfunction.” Her platform includes proposal for public college, universal health care, Medicare for all, a green new deal and $10 billion per year for slavery reparations to be paid over the course of a decade.

Graciela Iturbide, Visionary Ethnographer Consider the chickens, roosting at a vendor’s feet as he reads the daily news; or a semi-circle of women clutching freshly plucked carcasses—wings outspread, headless, then bundled and hung. In the photography of Graciela Iturbide, animals appear in various stages of preparation: walleyed fish dangle in pairs; severed goats’ legs herringbone across a spread of drying mats. Iguanas wreathed around a woman’s stoic face—like tentacles, or the rays of an aureole—are destined for soup. The woman in this final, famous image, Our Lady of the Iguanas (1979), is Zobeida Díaz, a vendor in the Oaxacan town of Juchitán, vaulted from the market’s everyday bustle into the realm of myth. In “Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico”—a magnificent exhibition of approximately 125 gelatin silver prints at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston—five decades of an extraordinary visual intelligence are on display. Iturbide calls her approach to photography “intuitive.”

Hysteresis: The Phenomenon Behind the Anti-vax Movement Despite overwhelming scientific evidence that vaccines are a safe and effective tool for the prevention of childhood diseases, a significant minority of the U.S. population remains skeptical of the practice, as evidenced by the persistence of the anti-vax movement. This has sometimes made it a difficult task to achieve the desired level of coverage required for the protective effects of “herd immunity” to kick in. Now, researchers from Dartmouth College have investigated this phenomenon, uncovering a key factor in why it may be so hard to increase the numbers of people being vaccinated. In a study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Feng Fu, an assistant professor of mathematics, and colleagues showed that a phenomenon known as "hysteresis" may act as a roadblock for efforts to increase vaccination rates.

1/19/19: 2 women from families w/slaves make reparations payments CENTENNIAL, Colo. (AP) — Reparations. It’s the idea that white Americans should pay a moral debt to black Americans to compensate for slavery, Jim Crow and institutionalized racism. Reparations has been a concept debated as far back as emancipation. But for some Denver women, it’s not a debate — it’s an obligation. In late 2018, the Denver-based nonprofit Soul2Soul Sisters received a whopping $200,000 anonymous donation.

The great acceleration The fault lines between industries and business models that we understood intellectually before the COVID-19 crisis have now become giant fissures, separating the old reality from the new one. Just as an earthquake produces a sudden release of pent-up force, the economic shock set off by the pandemic has accelerated and intensified trends that were already underway. The result is a dramatic widening of the gap between those at the top and the bottom of the power curve of economic profit —the winners and losers in the global corporate-performance race. Along with the accelerated pace of change, however, comes a unique opportunity to unlock big strategic moves. Our research found that companies that pursued big strategic moves persistently, through every phase of the economic cycle, increased their odds of outperforming their peers. Mind the gap

Circumcision: Social, Sexual, Psychological Realities We continue examining myths about circumcision, including traditions, social and sexual relations. NOTE: Primary author is Lillian Dell'Aquila Cannon (see her blog), with assistance from Dan Bollinger Part 3 The Root of All Cruelty? The philosopher David Livingstone Smith, commenting on this episode on social media, wondered whether its writer had read his book “Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others” (St. Martin’s). It’s a thoughtful and exhaustive exploration of human cruelty, and the episode perfectly captures its core idea: that acts such as genocide happen when one fails to appreciate the humanity of others. One focus of Smith’s book is the attitudes of slave owners; the seventeenth-century missionary Morgan Godwyn observed that they believed the Negroes, “though in their Figure they carry some resemblances of Manhood, yet are indeed no Men” but, rather, “Creatures destitute of Souls, to be ranked among Brute Beasts, and treated accordingly.”

Slavery compensation Leaders of more than a dozen Caribbean countries are launching a united effort to seek compensation from three European nations for what they say is the lingering legacy of the Atlantic slave trade. The Caribbean Community, a regional organisation, has taken up the cause of compensation for slavery and the genocide of native peoples and is preparing for what would likely be a drawn-out battle with the governments of Britain, France and the Netherlands. It has engaged the British law firm of Leigh Day, which waged a successful fight for compensation for hundreds of Kenyans who were tortured by the British colonial government during the so-called Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s and 1960s. Lawyer Martyn Day said his first step would probably be to seek a negotiated settlement with the governments of France, Britain and Netherlands along the lines of the British agreement in June to issue a statement of regret and award compensation of £19.9m to the surviving Kenyans.

Invest in the green economy and we'll recover from the Covid-19 crisis Although it seems like ancient history, it hasn’t been that long since economies around the world began to close down in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Early in the crisis, most people anticipated a quick V-shaped recovery, on the assumption that the economy merely needed a short timeout. After two months of tender loving care and heaps of money, it would pick up where it left off. It was an appealing idea. But now it is July, and a V-shaped recovery is probably a fantasy.

How Native American tribes are bringing back the bison from brink of extinction On 5,000 hectares of unploughed prairie in north-eastern Montana, hundreds of wild bison roam once again. But this herd is not in a national park or a protected sanctuary – they are on tribal lands. Belonging to the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes of Fort Peck Reservation, the 340 bison is the largest conservation herd in the ongoing bison restoration efforts by North America’s Indigenous people. People in higher social class have an exaggerated belief that they are better than others WASHINGTON -- People who see themselves as being in a higher social class may tend to have an exaggerated belief that they are more adept than their equally capable lower-class counterparts, and that overconfidence can often be misinterpreted by others as greater competence in important situations, such as job interviews, according to research published by the American Psychological Association. "Advantages beget advantages. Those who are born in upper-class echelons are likely to remain in the upper class, and high-earning entrepreneurs disproportionately originate from highly educated, well-to-do families," said Peter Belmi, PhD, of the University of Virginia and lead author of the study. "Our research suggests that social class shapes the attitudes that people hold about their abilities and that, in turn, has important implications for how class hierarchies perpetuate from one generation to the next." The study was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

‘Better Is Good’: Barack Obama's Interview With Ta-Nehisi Coates - The Atlantic Coates: So it didn’t surprise you at all? Obama: No. I think, and look, Ta-Nehisi, I don’t want to discount those criticisms, but offsetting those criticisms is that I have 90 percent or 95 percent support in the African American community and it’s not sort of “Well, he’s black, so it’s okay. We’re not going to say anything even though we’re seething.”