The Conversation

With the opening of the U.S. Supreme Court’s new session on Oct. 3, 2022, Clarence Thomas is arguably the most powerful justice on the nation’s highest court. He’s the longest-serving sitting justice and on track to have the lengthiest court tenure ever.

Conservative Party members who chose Liz Truss as prime minister are wondering whether their choice (and the abrupt change of direction in economic policy it enabled) will cost them the next election. And they are right to be worried.

Shouts of “death to the dictator” and “woman, life, freedom” are reverberating throughout the streets of Iran following the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman, while in custody of the “morality police” in Tehran.

The Supreme Court’s new supermajority overturned abortion rights and expanded gun rights in 2022. Upcoming cases focus on the future of affirmative action, equal treatment of LGBTQ people, and the control of election laws.

Even a modest system of solar plus one battery can power critical loads in a home for days at a time, practically anywhere in the country. But providing backup for cooling and heat can be a challenge, though not an insurmountable one.

Evidence shows that even in coastal cities, ocean desalination may not be the best or even among the best options to address water shortfalls. It’s expensive. It kills aquatic life. It negates better options.

Plug-in vehicles are making great progress, with their share of U.S. car and light truck sales jumping from 2% to 4% in 2020-2021 and projected to exceed 6% by the end of 2022. But sales of gas-guzzling pickups and SUVs are also surging. This other face of the market subverts electric cars’ carbon-cutting progress.

There are tens of billions of super-Earths in habitable zones where liquid water can exist in the Milky Way alone. To date, astronomers have discovered two dozen super-Earth exoplanets that are, if not the best of all possible worlds, theoretically more habitable than Earth.

A professor from the United States who tweeted a critical comment of the queen has been subject to significant public backlash. Police in Britain have questioned protestors expressing anti-monarchy sentiments, and in some cases, arrested them.

Unlike other advertisements for goods and services – for example, what a car manufacturer tells a customer about expected fuel efficiency – there are no federally set standards for measuring broadband service speeds. This means there is no clear way to tell whether customers are getting what they pay for.

Less than 30% of high school students sleep the recommended amount. Among middle schoolers, nearly 60% do not get enough sleep at night. The causes: too- early school start times, lack of morning exposure to daylight and excessive exposure to bright electric light and screens late in the evening.

The United States may regard itself as a “leader of the free world,” but an index of development released in July 2022 places the country much farther down the list, ranking between Cuba and Bulgaria. Both are widely regarded as developing countries..

The overwhelming majority of the 70,000 people who attend the Burning man festival each year in Nevada identify as nonreligious, yet the deeply spiritual experiences they report resemble those of religious groups. Indeed, the similarities with religion are no accident.

Elizabeth II, whose 70-year reign makes her the longest reigning monarch in British history, leaves her successor with a sort of British monarchical republic, in which the proportions of its ingredients of mystique, ceremony, populism and openness have been constantly changed in order to keep it essentially the same.

When news broke in July 2022 that an unvaccinated adult man in New York had contracted polio – the first case in the U.S. since 2013 – and developed paralysis from the disease, it sent a ripple of fear throughout the public health community and raised the question of whether an old foe was making a comeback.

The difficulty of sustained focus on events like the war is due not only to the inherent fragility of moral attention. The 24/7 news cycle is one of many pressures clamoring for our attention. Our smartphones and other technology with incessant communications – from trivial to apocalyptic – engineer environments to keep us perpetually distracted and disoriented.

In the era of today’s heated culture wars, the concepts of academic freedom and freedom of expression have become increasingly conflated. Divisive political debates around critical race theory and talk of establishing “free speech guardians” are just some recent examples. Academic freedom is being subsumed into the oftentimes polarizing rhetoric concerning what is commonly referred to as free speech.

Despite growing water insecurity worldwide, desalination technology remains too expensive for widespread use. Efforts have been made to reduce its cost, with many showing promise. However, technological evolution takes time and it will be decades before costs fall to a level that facilitates the wider expansion of desalination.

An important biological feature of human embryos has been left out of a lot of ethical and even scientific discussion informing reproductive policy – most human embryos die before anyone, including doctors, even know they exist. This embryo loss typically occurs in the first two months after fertilization, before the clump of cells has developed into a fetus with immature forms of the body’s major organs.

And hiring more teachers of color is only part of the solution: a major barrier to intervention is the perception adults hold about Black girls. Instead of receiving developmentally appropriate and socioemotional support, many Black girls are adultified – a concept coined to describe how Black girls are disproportionately perceived as less innocent, needing less nurturing, less protection, less support.

Only 8.4% of the world’s population lived in a fully functioning democracy, this shift is being referred to as a “democratic recession”. The gradual erosion of democratic values and freedoms and the slide towards authoritarianism is opening up more space for China to dominate the global agenda with its values.

Virtue signalers are often inclined to pat themselves on the back for their moral insight and courage. This refuge doesn’t work: talking about virtue is useful, but real virtue requires work. It is far more demanding and is far harder to fake.

Even if all the greenhouse gas emissions driving global warming ceased today, we find that Greenland’s ice loss under current temperatures will raise global sea level by at least 10.8 inches (27.4 centimeters). That’s more than current models forecast, and it’s a highly conservative estimate.

The verdict in the trial of co-defendants Adam Fox and Barry Croft Jr. comes after a previous trial ended in acquittals for two other co-defendants, Daniel Harris and Brandon Caserta, and mistrials for Fox and Croft. Their two other alleged accomplices, Ty Garbin and Kaleb Franks, pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with the prosecutions against the others.

NASA’s Artemis 1 mission is poised to take a key step toward returning humans to the Moon after a half-century hiatus. The mission, scheduled to launch on Monday, Aug. 29, 2022, is a shakedown cruise – sans crew – for NASA’s Space Launch System and Orion Crew Capsule. Here’s the significance of the mission.

The most telling new information is that the FBI agent says that a review of Mar-a-Lago documents the government had already obtained by grand jury subpoena earlier this year were marked in a way that would clearly indicate national security was at risk.

Chautauqua has never been immune from larger national tensions and sometimes failed to live up to the inclusive vision it proclaimed. But its founding values are those that Salman Rushdie’s supporters were seeking to defend when he was attacked there on Aug. 12.

The plan would offer up to US$10,000 in forgiveness for people who earn less than $125,000 – $250,000 for couples – and up to $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients. Three experts explain the decision and its impact.

As the United States gets less religious, is it also getting more selfish? No: progressive spiritual practitioners as a growing but largely unrecognized, underestimated and misunderstood political force. People may change what they do on a Sunday morning, but checking out of church doesn’t necessarily imply checking out of the political process.

The searing temperatures seen around the Mediterranean this year are indicative of rising global temperatures. Marine life is increasingly threatened. Marine heatwaves were found to be responsible for the loss of up to 80% of the population of some Mediterranean species between 2015 and 2019.

Happiness has evolved into an industry. That’s created the social expectation that we should all aspire to happiness. But this can be an obstacle to happiness. This is why if we actually want to live better lives, pessimism is the philosophical system that can help us achieve it.

More than 3% of incoming college students use a different set of pronouns than “he” or “she.” It is indicative of a growing number of young people who identify outside of a gender binary – that is, they do not identify as female or male.

Queer people have always belonged in rural places and have always participated in rural traditions. The unashamed presentation of queer, rural rodeoers refutes the lazy dichotomy of the urban queer progressive versus the rural homophobic conservative.

Just as money laundering enabled mobsters to disguise their ill-gotten gain as the profits of a legitimate business, message laundering presents dishonest and dangerous speech as credible, innocuous or persuasive.

It’s important that people know that sexual and gender minority men are the primary victims of this monkeypox outbreak. This knowledge will help us end the outbreak before it bridges into other communities.