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Opportunity Knocked

Lily Geismer on the Democratic Party’s Failed Vision for the Working Class

A lot of the Biden administration’s pitch was “In ten years, we promise you you’re going to have a job.” Most people can’t afford to have that long-term view.

Long Shadows

Shaul Magid on the Evolution of Zionism and Israel

Hertog: How do we disentangle anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism?

Magid: I certainly don’t think that anti-Semitism is the only reason people are out in the streets protesting the war in Gaza. You just have to look at the pictures of the utter devastation in Gaza to see what they are protesting against. They are protesting against the systematic destruction of an entire society, and with TikTok videos—posted by Gazans and Israeli soldiers—we are all watching it in real time. Media censorship no longer works in our era of social media. I don’t think Israel quite understands that. Anti-Semitism exists in some of these protests, for sure, but it’s not the primary impetus. If that was the case, why weren’t there campus protests against Israel for decades? You have to make a distinction between saying, “Zionists don’t deserve to live,” or, “All Jews are implicated in this Zionist genocide,” which is clearly anti-Semitic, and saying, “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians and murdering children.” We can agree or disagree about what constitutes genocide, but opposition to what’s happening is not anti-Semitic. It has a moral justification. In my view, saying it is all anti-Semitism is just using anti-Semitism as an excuse for destroying a society. Yes, Israel had a right and a duty to respond to a horrendous, murderous act. But destroying a society in response is, in my view, a horrific choice we Jews will live with for many years.

Under Construction

Richard Reeves on Rebuilding Masculinity

McDermon: In my day-to-day life I’ve definitely seen gender stereotyping that has excluded girls from certain realms, but I don’t feel like I’ve seen similar evidence of men and boys being excluded or oppressed. What is it I’m missing?

Reeves: I completely agree that the problems facing men are not largely about exclusion or oppression. That’s why I find the term “men’s rights” so unhelpful. It’s basically an oxymoron. The reason fewer men are attending college today is not the same reason why women were attending college in lower numbers at the beginning of the seventies. Women were not encouraged to go to college. In fact, women were intentionally discouraged, and in many cases legally excluded, from certain spaces. That’s by and large just not true for boys and men. We have two similar-looking gender gaps with very different causes.

Where I think the debate goes wrong sometimes is when people look at these disadvantages for men and boys and try to find a villain or an oppressor. They’ll claim the “feminist woke takeover of institutions” is causing men’s problems. That’s just horseshit, and it distracts us from structural issues.

Bird’s-Eye View

Jennifer Ackerman on How Birds Adapt, Survive, and Think

Leviton: How do we evaluate their intelligence without viewing them as feathered versions of ourselves?

Ackerman: Anthropomorphism is a real sticking point in the field. I think that’s changing because a lot of behaviors in birds are in fact similar to human behaviors. But any scientist will tell you it’s not easy to probe the mind of another animal, especially when they have kinds of intelligence that differ from our own. We know how to measure things that we’re good at, like solving physical problems. Scientists may give a bird food in a container that it has to figure out how to open in order to eat. The scientists observe how long it takes the bird to solve the problem and whether it’s showing “behavioral flexibility.” In other words: Can it shift its strategies? Can it innovate when confronted with new challenges? That’s pretty easy for us to measure, but birds also have social intelligence, musical intelligence, and other kinds of intelligence that are harder to measure. For example, we’re still trying to figure out how birds know where they’re going. Humans don’t have the innate capacity to navigate using the earth’s magnetic fields and other information sources.

Reason To Believe

Randall Sullivan on Faith and Evil

Cohen: Do you think part of that evil spirit is found in every human?

Sullivan: I don’t think we’re born with it, but we have receptors that can connect to it, and we decide how much attention we give it, how much we turn toward its allure.

Hive Mind

Lars Chittka on the Surprising Brainpower of Bees

Chittka: For me, understanding the minds of bees and other animals inspires a new respect for nature. Many conservation efforts—and there are a lot of people trying to rescue what’s left of the natural world—are motivated by the utility of these animals. This is especially the case with bees and insects. Many people are aware that bees are in trouble and that we ought to do something to help them, because they pollinate our crops. Many fruits and vegetables depend on bees’ pollination services: for example, melons, tomatoes, raspberries, blueberries, strawberries, zucchini, pumpkins, cherries, cucumbers, squash, apples, and citrus fruits.

But that approach can’t work overall. If you’re really trying to protect nature, then it’s a complete package with many species, including annoying ones like wasps. So in addition to the utility argument, we must recognize that many of the animals around us are likely sentient—and thus quite possibly capable of experiencing the deterioration of their habitats. This creates a responsibility for us to do something about it.

Where the Wild Things Are

John Davis on the Urgency of Expanding North America’s Wilderness

Tonino: Where would we humans go if we returned half the continent to the wild creatures?

Davis: Well, much of Canada and the American West is already rather uninhabited by humans. In fact, I suspect more than half of the continent could become ecological reserves. I like the idea that, instead of wilderness islands within a matrix of human development, we reverse the pattern, and humans live densely clustered within a wild matrix. It’s not politically or economically feasible right now, but some such arrangement might be possible eventually.

Crossroads

Imani Perry on the South’s Vital Place in America’s Identity

The South is made to carry the nation’s slop jar. That’s deliberate, because then the United States doesn’t have to actually contend with all of its violence. We just put the blame on that region where bad stuff happens and where those backward people are. I don’t think it’s incidental, either, that it is the Blackest region culturally (and demographically) speaking. So it is at once seen as the most racist and the Blackest.

Old Souls

Jim Tucker on Children’s Memories of Past Lives

Askey: This is perhaps an ontological question, but do you think James Huston became James Leininger, or is there some other entity—some consciousness, some soul—that was once James Huston and is now James Leininger?

Tucker: The latter much more than the former, I think. We can only speculate, but to my mind there may well be this larger self that has different lifetimes. It’s a core that continues, though the people it inhabits are different. I use the analogy of actors in movies. When you see Jimmy Stewart in a movie, it’s undeniably Jimmy Stewart, and yet he can play very different characters.

Past Futures

billy woods on the Cycles and Patterns of Human History

It just takes the right person, at the right time, to light the right spark and make what previously would have seemed impossible the law of the land. When I was a child, Somalia had a government. They might not have one again for the rest of my life.