The Conversation

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.