SOCIETY

Supreme Court Just Upheld Camping Bans Effectively Making Homelessness A Crime

29Jun

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

SOCIETY, TOP FOUR

Supreme Court Just Upheld Camping Bans Effectively Making Homelessness A Crime

How camping bans − like the one the Supreme Court just upheld − can fit into ‘hostile design’: Strategies to push out homeless people. If you have no shelter and are arrested for sleeping outside, are you being punished for something you did – or for being homeless? On June 28, 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court decided 6-3 that the Oregon city of Grants Pass may prohibit camping, even if there are no free shelter beds in the area. Critics have argued that this policy was a form of “cruel and unusual punishment,” in violation of the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. A lower court agreed, saying it is unconstitutional to arrest people for a normal and necessary human behavior – sleeping – if there is nowhere else to go. But Friday’s decision reversed that ruling. Such laws do not ...

Americans Now Are Divided Over Tragic Events

15Jun

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

SOCIETY, TOP FOUR

Americans Now Are Divided Over Tragic Events

Americans used to unite over tragic events − and now are divided by them. Tragedy seldom unifies Americans today. Every year, horrific crises induce tremendous suffering. Most are privately tragic, affecting only those directly harmed and their immediate relations. A small number, though, become politically notorious and, therefore, publicly tragic. Natural disasters, school shootings, terrorist attacks and economic crises can become public tragedies. Sexual assaults – primarily of women – by abusive executives and other men in positions of power recently emerged as a public tragedy, as has police brutality against African Americans, which has sown political unrest across the United States. Even the COVID-19 pandemic, a seemingly natural disaster, quickly transitioned into a publi...

Trump Never Fully Fit In To New York City High Society

3Jun

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

SOCIETY, TOP FOUR

Trump Never Fully Fit In To New York City High Society

12 New Yorkers convicted Trump − but he never fully fit in to New York City. Donald J. Trump was a president from, but not of, New York. In the final months of his presidency, Trump attacked New York as a lawless “ghost town” and got attacked right back. More than two-thirds of New Yorkers citywide voted against their hometown candidate in the 2020 election. In Manhattan, where Trump lived before becoming president, every single voting district went for Joe Biden. When Trump was elected in 2016, it was his first serious venture into electoral politics. In the half-century before his election, the then 70-year-old Trump had been a real estate developer, serial entrepreneur and reality television star. Back then, Trump’s personal story and style were deeply intertwined with New York....

A Nine Year Old Poses The Question — Why Do People Hate People?

26May

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

SOCIETY, TOP FOUR

A Nine Year Old Poses The Question — Why Do People Hate People?

Why do people hate people? Have you ever said “I hate you” to someone? What about using the “h-word” in casual conversation, like “I hate broccoli”? What are you really feeling when you say that you hate something or someone? Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskidsus@theconversation.com. Why do people hate people? – Daisy, age 9, Lake Oswego, Oregon The Merriam-Webster dictionary describes the word “hate” as an “intense hostility and aversion usually deriving from fear, anger, or sense of injury.” All over the world, researchers like us are studying hate from disciplines like education, history, law, leadership, psy...

15May

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

SOCIETY, TOP FOUR

They Don’t Call Themselves ‘Readers’

Gen Zers and millennials are still big fans of books – even if they don’t call themselves ‘readers’. The Conversation, CC BY Identifying with an activity is different from actually doing it. For example, 49% of Americans play video games, but only 10% identify as gamers. According to a recent survey we conducted, there’s also a small gap between reading activity and identity for younger readers: 61% of Generation Z and millennials have read a print book, e-book or audiobook in the past 12 months, but only 57% identify as readers. And yet there was a puzzling aspect of our results: The 43% of Gen Z and millennials who didn’t identify as readers actually said they read more print books per month than Gen Z and millennials overall. In other words, young people who don’t identif...

The Impact Of Community-Based Entrepreneurs Solving The Local News Crisis

10Mar

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

SOCIETY, TOP FOUR

The Impact Of Community-Based Entrepreneurs Solving The Local News Crisis

Community-based entrepreneurs are leading the way in solving the local news crisis. The local news crisis has led to no end of policy proposals, funding initiatives and angry denunciations of the harm done to journalism by the likes of Craigslist, Google and Facebook. Ideas for responding to the crisis include paying recent journalism school graduates with state tax revenues to cover underserved communities, as in California; mandating that state agencies direct half of their spending on advertising to community media, as has been proposed in Illinois; and creating tax credits that would benefit subscribers, advertisers and publishers, the subject of several federal and state initiatives. And those are just a few. Though all of these have some merit, they share a fundamental flaw: They...

28Feb

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

CULTURE, SOCIETY, TOP FOUR

Where Did The Time Go?

Why is free time still so elusive? There have been massive gains in productivity over the past century. So why are people still working so hard for so long? Output per worker increased by almost 300% between 1950 and 2018 in the U.S. The standard American workweek, meanwhile, has remained unchanged, at about 40 hours. This paradox is especially notable in the U.S., where the average work year is 1,767 hours compared with 1,354 in Germany, a difference largely due to Americans’ lack of vacation time. Some might argue that Americans are just more hardworking. But shouldn’t more productive work be rewarded with more time free from work? This is the central theme of my new book, “Free Time: The History of an Elusive Ideal.” Keynes misses the mark Many economists see the status quo mostly as ...

In The South Separate Water Fountains For Black People Still Stand — Monuments To The History Of Segregation

3Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

SOCIETY

In The South Separate Water Fountains For Black People Still Stand — Monuments To The History Of Segregation

Separate water fountains for Black people still stand in the South – thinly veiled monuments to the long, strange, dehumanizing history of segregation. No one knows for certain when public facilities like bathrooms and drinking fountains were separated by race. But starting in the 1890s, shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized “separate but equal” in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Jim Crow laws and customs that emerged required Black and white people to be separated in virtually every part of life. They used separate restrooms, sat in separate sections on trains and buses and drank from separate water fountains. Even in death, Black and white people were buried in separate cemeteries. Though the racist practice of separate accommodations was officially outlawed by the Civi...

The Unintended Impact Of Redundancies For All Employees

18Feb

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

SOCIETY, TOP FOUR, WORK

The Unintended Impact Of Redundancies For All Employees

Redundancies have unintended consequences for all employees, even those who keep their jobs. Tech giants including X (then known as Twitter) and Facebook owner Meta announced thousands of job cuts globally in 2022 and 2023, as did other firms like entertainment company Disney, consultancy firm KPMG and phone company Vodafone. And let’s not forget those making redundancies as a result of company collapses such as UK retailer Wilko. In the UK alone, the number of planned redundancies by companies increased by 54% over the last year, from 153,635 to 237,017. This is likely to continue. Businesses are dealing with sharp rises in borrowing costs and continued wage growth, at the same as consumer spending is falling, affecting industries like advertising and retail. Of course, such news has a ve...

Uncovering The Reasons Why Fathers Thrive In Careers While Mothers Are More Likely To Work Worse Jobs

13Feb

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

SOCIETY, WORK

Uncovering The Reasons Why Fathers Thrive In Careers While Mothers Are More Likely To Work Worse Jobs

Mothers are more likely to work worse jobs – while fathers thrive in careers. Having a child is bad for a woman’s earnings. This is not only in the immediate period after the birth, but across her lifetime – as shown in research by recent economics Nobel prize-winner Claudia Goldin. On the other hand, men who become fathers are perceived as self-reliant and decisive. And they are often rewarded at work with opportunities and pay. Campaigns by groups like Pregnant Then Screwed make explicit that, in the UK, this “motherhood penalty” extends to pregnancy discrimination, the extortionate costs of childcare and ineffective flexible working policies. Yet we still know little about how it extends to job quality. Together with colleagues, I have carried out research to explore this “motherhood pe...