Trump’s Legacy: Damaged Brains – The New York Times

The pesticide, which belongs to a class of chemicals developed as a nerve gas made by Nazi Germany, is now found in food, air and drinking water. Human and animal studies show that it damages the brain and reduces I.Q.s while causing tremors among children. It has also been linked to lung cancer and Parkinson’s disease in adults.

The colored parts of the image above, prepared by Columbia University scientists, indicate where a child’s brain is physically altered after exposure to this pesticide.

This chemical, chlorpyrifos, is hard to pronounce, so let’s just call it Dow Chemical Company’s Nerve Gas Pesticide. Even if you haven’t heard of it, it may be inside you: One 2012 study found that it was in the umbilical cord blood of 87 percent of newborn babies tested.

And now the Trump administration is embracing it, overturning a planned ban that had been in the works for many years.

Trump’s Legacy: Damaged Brains – The New York Times

The media’s language about killers in mass shootings analyzed — Quartz

Less than 12 hours after the news of the Las Vegas shooting broke, the sheriff in charge of investigating it described the gunman as a “lone wolf.”

In short order, that terminology was denounced as a proxy for white privilege.

Shaun King writing for The Intercept, said that the language perpetuates a double standard: when the mass murderer is identified as white, he is seen as an individual (and called a lone wolf); when the killer is black or Muslim, the entire race or religion bears the blame. The sentiment echoed across social media as well.

news: someone did a violent thing
me: Lord I hope they weren’t black
news: shooter was a lone wolf
me: oh so they were white
— Brokey S. Pumpkins (@brokeymcpoverty) October 2, 2017

Are there ingrained racial biases that surface when TV news outlets report these tragedies? Is this double standard persistent, or merely anecdotal?
Keen to answer these questions, Quartz reviewed the language used to describe the killers of 27 mass shootings in the US, beginning with the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in 2012.

The media’s language about killers in mass shootings analyzed — Quartz

‘Our minds can be hijacked’: the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia | Technology | The Guardian

Justin Rosenstein had tweaked his laptop’s operating system to block Reddit, banned himself from Snapchat, which he compares to heroin, and imposed limits on his use of Facebook. But even that wasn’t enough. In August, the 34-year-old tech executive took a more radical step to restrict his use of social media and other addictive technologies.

Rosenstein purchased a new iPhone and instructed his assistant to set up a parental-control feature to prevent him from downloading any apps.

He was particularly aware of the allure of Facebook “likes”, which he describes as “bright dings of pseudo-pleasure” that can be as hollow as they are seductive. And Rosenstein should know: he was the Facebook engineer who created the “like” button in the first place.

A decade after he stayed up all night coding a prototype of what was then called an “awesome” button, Rosenstein belongs to a small but growing band of Silicon Valley heretics who complain about the rise of the so-called “attention economy”: an internet shaped around the demands of an advertising economy.

These refuseniks are rarely founders or chief executives, who have little incentive to deviate from the mantra that their companies are making the world a better place. Instead, they tend to have worked a rung or two down the corporate ladder: designers, engineers and product managers who, like Rosenstein, several years ago put in place the building blocks of a digital world from which they are now trying to disentangle themselves. “It is very common,” Rosenstein says, “for humans to develop things with the best of intentions and for them to have unintended, negative consequences.”

‘Our minds can be hijacked’: the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia | Technology | The Guardian

What Rampant Materialism Looks Like, and What It Costs | The New Yorker

The binding of Lauren Greenfield’s new book of photography, “Generation Wealth,” has the color and sheen of a bar of yellow gold. The book has the heft of bullion, too: at seven pounds, it is too heavy to hold in a single hand, and too weighty to read unless rested on a lap or table. The size is demanded by the scope of the work. It consists of five hundred glossy pages of Greenfield’s photographs from the last quarter century, along with accompanying text. The images range from portraits of high-school students and gangbangers in Los Angeles, in the early nineteen-nineties, to photos of plastic-surgery aficionados undergoing their painful rites in the mid-two-thousands to pictures of high rollers at Las Vegas casinos “making it rain,” tossing stacks of dollar bills like confetti to the glee of those around them. But the book’s design also seems intended to be ironic commentary on the culture, or subcultures, it seeks to portray: materialistic, vulgar, excessive, and wasteful. The book would fit perfectly into the pseudo-rococo decorating scheme of the penthouse apartment at Trump Tower.

What Rampant Materialism Looks Like, and What It Costs | The New Yorker

What if Trump is actually a master of empathy? | Richard Friedman | Opinion | The Guardian

Many Americans see President Trump’s preoccupation with the protesting NFL athletes – and his near silence on the unfolding humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico – as evidence that Trump has no empathy. Wrong.

Actually, Trump is a master of empathy. Most people confuse empathy with sympathy and don’t understand the nature – or power – of empathy. There is nothing necessarily nice about empathy, which is essentially the ability to imagine and intuit how other people think and feel.

It has nothing to do with genuinely identifying with others or actually feeling their pain; that would be sympathy. Instead, empathy is really about having an accurate theory of mind of other people – and getting under their skin.

Trump has lots of empathy. What he doesn’t have is sympathy – he doesn’t really feel badly for other people. He is not using his considerable empathy skills for Puerto Rico for a simple reason: they are not his base and he has little interest in them.

What if Trump is actually a master of empathy? | Richard Friedman | Opinion | The Guardian: “”

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The Last Testament • Jonas Bendiksen • Magnum Photos

In his latest book, The Last Testament, Magnum photographer Jonas Bendiksen chronicles seven men who all publicly claim to be the biblical Messiah returned. Some have thousands of followers; others only a handful of disciples. All are united in the faith that they themselves are the Chosen One and have come to save the world. In his own words, the Magnum photographer explains what the project means to him.

The Last Testament • Jonas Bendiksen • Magnum Photos

Hooked: how pokies are designed to be addictive | Australia news | The Guardian

Poker machines use a range of design features that leverage psychology to keep people playing. Here, we break them down so you can see exactly how they work, and how they affect people.

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Hooked: how pokies are designed to be addictive | Australia news | The Guardian: “”

(Via.)

A Stanford psychologist on the art of avoiding assholes – Vox

The world is full of assholes. Wherever you live, whatever you do, odds are you’re surrounded by assholes. The question is, what to do about it?

Robert Sutton, a psychology professor at Stanford University, has stepped up to answer this eternal question. He’s the author of a new book, The Asshole Survival Guide, which is basically what it sounds like: a guide for surviving the assholes in your life.

In 2010, Sutton published The No Asshole Rule, which focused on dealing with assholes at an organizational level. In the new book, he offers a blueprint for managing assholes at the interpersonal level. If you’ve got an asshole boss, an asshole friend, or an asshole colleague, this book might be for you.

Asshole survival, Sutton says, is a craft, not a science, meaning one can be good or bad at it. His book is about getting better at it.

I sat down with him recently to talk about his strategies for dealing with assholes, what he means when he says we have to take responsibility for the assholes in our lives, and why he says self-awareness is key to recognizing that the asshole in your life may be you.

“You have to know yourself, be honest about yourself, and rely on people around you to tell you when you’re being an asshole,” he told me. “And when they are kind enough to tell you, listen.”

A Stanford psychologist on the art of avoiding assholes – Vox

40 million slaves in the world, finds new report – CNN

London (CNN)More than 40 million people were estimated to be victims of modern slavery in 2016 — and one in four of those were children.

Those are the findings of a new report produced by the International Labor Organization (ILO), a U.N. agency focusing on labor rights, and the Walk Free Foundation, an international NGO working to end modern slavery.

The report estimates that last year, 25 million people were in forced labor — made to work under threat or coercion — and 15 million people were in forced marriage.

It’s impossible to know exactly how many people are living in modern slavery, and different studies have produced different estimates. One reason is that modern slavery is a hidden crime that’s difficult to identify. Another is that different studies use different definitions of slavery, with some including forced marriage, for example, and others not.

40 million slaves in the world, finds new report – CNN