James' World 2

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When my son was three years old, he told me one day after preschool that he didn’t want to play with me because I was Black. He went on; Black people are mean, he said, and he only wanted to play with his dad because my husband was white, like him.

We were shocked and I was hurt—my child thought I was bad because I was Black. And even though my son is biracial, he characterized himself as white.

What my son said that day unfortunately reinforced what research has long shown: children absorb racial biases from their environment. I study racial socialization—the ways children learn about race and racism—and I know how early these biases form. I also know that talking about race and racism can shape how children perceive others. Yet when white parents tell me their children say things like “Black people are not nice” or “I don’t want to play with Black kids,” they also tell me they ignore what their children said or simply tell their children it was mean. Without a real conversation about why their child might think that way or how to counter those ideas, children don’t unlearn bias; they just learn not to say it out loud.

In 2022, even though research on white parents discussing racism was still emerging, my colleagues and I argued that they needed to have these conversations with their children. At the time, we pointed to the subtle ways children can absorb racial biases—the diversity (or lack thereof) of their parents’ social circles, the characters they see on TV, and the differences they notice in social class.

But, in 2025, subtlety is a thing of the past. In attacking diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, the Trump administration is legitimizing and emboldening racism in ways that children—especially white children—undoubtedly notice. If my son, at three years old, could absorb anti-Black messages when overt racism was more widely condemned, imagine what white children today are internalizing in a climate where political leaders openly promote racism.

White parents who see themselves as egalitarian must recognize that the stakes are now higher than ever. If you want to raise children who reject racism rather than passively absorbing it, right now, today, talk with your child about race and racism.

By preschool, children start associating Black people with negative traits and white people with positive traits. These biases form as children pick up on patterns—who holds power, how groups are portrayed in media and how others interact with them. Even subtle nonverbal cues, like smiling at one group and frowning at another, influence children’s preferences. Not surprisingly, young children favor groups receiving positive signals and mimic those behaviors, reinforcing biases. These small cues accumulate, shaping how children perceive racial groups.

While most parents of color talk to their children early about race to prepare them for potential discrimination, white parents often avoid these discussions. In our research on parents of children in the age ranges of 8–12 and 13–17, less than 40 percent of white parents talked to their children about race, and many who did downplayed racism. This avoidance is concerning, given how racial attitudes develop. Without parental guidance, children interpret racial patterns on their own, often reinforcing societal biases.

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Microsoft has announced that it has created the first ‘topological qubits’ — a way of storing quantum information that the firm hopes will underpin a new generation of quantum computers. Machines based on topology are expected to be easier to build at scale than competing technologies, because they should better protect the information from noise. But some researchers are sceptical of the company’s claims.

The announcement came in a 19 February press release containing few technical details — but Microsoft says it has disclosed some of its data to selected specialists in a meeting at its research centre in Santa Barbara, California. “Would I bet my life that they’re seeing what they think they’re seeing? No, but it looks pretty good,” says Steven Simon, a theoretical physicist at the University of Oxford, UK, who was briefed on the results.

At the same time, the company published intermediate results — but not the proof of the existence of topological qubits — on 19 February in Nature.

Superconducting wire

Topological states are collective states of the electrons in a material that are resistant to noise, much like how two links in a chain can be shifted or rotated around each other while remaining connected.

The Nature paper describes experiments on a superconducting ‘nanowire’ device made of indium arsenide. The ultimate goal is to host two topological states called Majorana quasiparticles, one at each end of the device. Because electrons in a superconductor are paired, an extra, unpaired electron will be introduced, forming an excited state. This electron exists in a ‘delocalized’ state, which is shared between the two Majorana quasiparticles.

The paper reports measurements suggesting that the nanowire does indeed harbour an extra electron. These tests “do not, by themselves” guarantee that the nanowire hosts two Majorana quasiparticles, the authors warn.

According to the press release, the team has carried out follow-up experiments in which they paired two nanowires and put them in a superposition of two states — one with the extra electron in the first nanowire, and the other with the electron in the second nanowire. “We’ve built a qubit and shown that you can not only measure parity in two parallel wires, but a measurement that bridges the two wires,” says Microsoft researcher Chetan Nayak.

“There’s no slam dunk to know immediately from the experiment” that the qubits are made of topological states, says Simon. (A claim of having created Majorana states, made by a Microsoft-funded team based in Delft, the Netherlands, was retracted in 2021.) The ultimate proof will come if the devices perform as expected once they are scaled up, he adds.

Early announcement

Some researchers are critical of the company’s choice to publicly announce the creation of a qubit without releasing detailed evidence. “If you have some new results not connected to this paper, why don’t you wait until you have enough material for a separate publication?” says Daniel Loss, a physicist at the University of Basel, Switzerland. “Without seeing the extra data from the qubit operation, there is not much one can comment,” says Georgios Katsaros, a physicist at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria in Klosterneuburg.

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Roy Ayers, a legendary jazz vibraphonist, keyboardist, composer and vocalist known for his spacy, funky 1976 hit “Everybody Loves the Sunshine” that has been sampled by such R&B and rap heavyweights as Mary J. Blige, N.W.A., Dr. Dre, 2Pac, Mos Def and Ice Cube, has died. He was 84.

The Ayers family said in a Facebook post that he died Tuesday in New York City after suffering from a long illness. “He lived a beautiful 84 years and will be sorely missed,” it said.

Ayers had 12 albums land in the Billboard 200 album charts, the highest being “You Send Me” in 1978 at No. 48. His “The Best of Roy Ayers” spend 50 weeks on the Contemporary Jazz Album chart.

His music never went out of style, appearing in the 2019 “Queen & Slim: The Soundtrack.” His song “Running Away” propelled A Tribe Called Quest’s 1989 opus “Description of a Fool,” and the song was sampled by Big Daddy Kane and Common. Ayers was heard on Tyler, the Creator’s album “Cherry Bomb” and Erykah Badu’s “Mama’s Gun.”

“Well, I have more sampled hits than anybody,” he said in a 2004 interview with Wax Poetics magazine. “I might not have more samples than James Brown, but I’ve had more sampled hits. Oh, man, and there’s a few I don’t know about.”

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Roy Ayers

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The James Webb Space Telescope is an incredible piece of engineering and has brought some incredible images of our universe. But the intention of James Webb was to peer into the furthest reaches of the known universe, how is that going? Watch to find out.

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The Edge of the Universe

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Kylie Perkins faces the camera in a pink quarter-zip, hands clasped to reveal a blue manicure. “Are you doing your best, or are you lying because it’s easier?” she asks. “If you tell the truth, you are gonna be forced to make changes.”

The 27-year-old TikTok influencer has amassed most of her 2 million followers in a matter of weeks — half of them in just the past few days — by posting motivational videos from her home in North Carolina aimed at young mothers like her who may feel behind on housework, urging them to essentially get their shit together. In some, she demonstrates her morning routine of drawing the curtains, opening the windows, and making the bed. In others, she wipes down her kitchen, folds laundry, or simply addresses the camera. In many of them, she’s yelling.

“You’re capable of so much more than just scrolling on your phone and not getting anything done,” she says. Her aim, she explains, is to help women experience clearer minds through uncluttered spaces.

Women seem to be responding to the tough love. “Kylie Perkins has yelled at me enough that I finally got up and started to do something about my depression,” a 30-year-old Kansas City woman named Heather Richard said in a voice-over for a recent video. In her post, Richard described the challenge, and ultimate relief, of deep-cleaning her home while newly sober.

“pov you introduce your teenage daughter to Kylie Perkins and this is what her room looks like this morning,” reads the text over a video from another woman, who filmed herself entering a tidy bedroom with a neatly made bed and raised blinds.

The conversation around Perkins has quickly become about more than cleaning. When, in recent days, an influencer made a video alluding to Perkins and suggesting she supported Donald Trump, conservatives quickly rallied around Perkins, following her in droves and flooding her comment sections with support. “Following you because of the way the left is trying to cancel you,” one woman wrote.

Perkins’s rapid ascendence seems to mark, if not the start of a new era, a return to an old one: “bootstraps”-style self-help is back. That means no wallowing allowed. In her videos, there’s a relentless focus on the individual as the agent of change, regardless of context. If you feel shame or guilt about your mess, you probably should, she says — that’s a message from your brain to get going and fix it. (Perkins didn’t respond to requests to speak for this story.)

Part of the reason Perkins isn’t compelled by conditions that may make it hard to be productive, like depression or ADHD, she’s suggested, is that she has overcome some difficult personal circumstances of her own. In her videos, she has mentioned parents who suffered from drug addiction, a period as a teen when she experienced homelessness, and later, as a mother, a challenging time when one of her children was having seizures and Perkins struggled with suicidal ideation.

As such, she seems to have little patience for people who point to some sort of circumstantial disadvantage as an explanation for flagging motivation or functioning. If she has come through all that, she suggests in her videos, you can get off the couch and do the dishes. “I have had to be tough my whole entire life,” Perkins says. “That’s why I come on here and I’m tough with you guys.”

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Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photos: @sociallykylie/TikTok, @heatheratl/TikTok, @thesoberglowwithheather/TikTok

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