All Else

“Homicide: Life on the Street” featured cops, but you couldn’t always tell whether they were the good guys or the bad guys; its writers played with traditional episode formats; and its scenes were shot on location with handheld cameras in order to give the show a realistic feel. The show has finally been made available for streaming on Peacock. Its groundbreaking visuals and courageous scripting set the template for the television shows of the 21st century, a golden era of programming sometimes called Platinum TV or Peak TV.

Storm-chasing for science can be exciting and stressful. It has been essential for developing today’s understanding of how tornadoes form and how they behave. Here are some answers about what scientists who do this kind of fieldwork are up to when they race off after storms.

The vast majority of Americans – both then and now – agree that democracy requires freedom of speech. That’s in the abstract. When the questions get more concrete, though, their support wanes. Only about half of the respondents in both the 1939 and 2024 polls agreed that anybody in America should be allowed to speak on any subject at any time. The rest believed some speech – or certain subjects or speakers – should be prohibited.

Theodore Ell’s new book, “Lebanon Days,” spans the tumultuous period from 2018 to 2021, which include the country’s economic collapse, Covid, and the horrific explosion in Beirut’s port in August 2020. Ell’s book exudes reality to anyone who has lived in Lebanon. He describes vividly the Lebanese sense of fun, the nightclubs in East Beirut where patrons could drink and dance till dawn – and had done even in the depths of the civil war.

Nearly half of all dementia cases could be delayed or prevented altogether by addressing 14 possible risk factors, including vision loss and high cholesterol. That is the key finding of a new study published in the journal The Lancet.

If AI alignment is the serious issue that OpenAI believes it to be, it is not just a technical problem to be solved by engineers or tech companies, but also a social one. That will require input from philosophers, but also social scientists, lawyers, policymakers, citizen users and others.

Activists are calling for a U.S. arms embargo on Israel, which the Democratic Party’s new national platform does not include. Dov Waxman, a scholar of Israel studies, explains what is behind the U.S.’s relationship with Israel and the strategic reasons why an arms embargo is, at best, a remote possibility.

Differences over politics and policy have a long history of being divisive, of course. But it’s one thing to disagree over substantive matters such as tax rates or foreign aid and something very different to undermine the legitimacy of your opponents. It’s the difference between framing those who disagree with you as fair and equal competitors or as enemies who must be defeated.

Since 5G’s rollout, which coincided with the Covid-19 pandemic, it was accompanied by all manner of conspiracies and falsehoods, notably that it was causing or spreading the pandemic, and that vaccines contained computer chips that would allow us to be controlled from a distance via 5G technology. Don’t believe the fabrications.