December 29, 2023
Mohenjo
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Justice Samuel Alito challenged voters to decide the future of abortion when he wrote the U.S. Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade last year.
“We do not pretend to know how our political system or society will respond,” he noted as he threw out half a century of precedent.
Now, 17 months later, the court has an answer: Americans want to preserve or restore Roe-like protections. In contest after contest, including a major victory in Ohio this week, voters decisively chose abortion rights over limitations — even in deep-red pockets of the country.
When the right to abortion is on the ballot, it wins. It wins in red states that voted for President Donald Trump. It wins in counties President Joe Biden lost by more than 20 points. It wins when popular Republican officials campaign for it and when they ignore it. And it wins even when the outcome has no immediate effect on abortion access.
Support for abortion cuts across party lines, performing significantly better at the ballot box than Biden and other Democrats. In fact, abortion outruns Biden most in the most Republican areas, according to a POLITICO analysis of election results from the five states that have had direct votes on abortion rights. In those five states — California, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan and Ohio — every county that voted for Biden also voted for abortion rights.
In the counties where Biden received less than 20 percent of the vote in 2020, the abortion-rights side has averaged 31 percent in referendums — an 11-point gap.
The pattern of cross-partisan support for abortion is so strong, the analysis found, that it suggests only a small handful of states, such as Wyoming or Alabama, might be uniformly conservative enough to vote against abortion if given the opportunity.
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Issue 1 supporters cheer as they watch election results come in, Tuesday, Nov. 7, 2023, in Columbus, Ohio. | Sue Ogrocki/AP
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December 29, 2023
Mohenjo
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Long before Pauline Clance developed the idea of the impostor phenomenon—now, to her frustration, more commonly referred to as impostor syndrome—she was known by the nickname Tiny. Born in 1938 and raised in Baptist Valley, in Appalachian Virginia, she was the youngest of six children, the daughter of a sawmill operator who struggled to keep food on the table and gas in the tank of his timber truck. Tiny was ambitious—her photograph appeared in the local newspaper after she climbed onto a table to deliver her rebuttal during a debate tournament—but she was always second-guessing herself. After nearly every test she took (and usually aced), she would tell her mother, “I think I failed it.” She was shocked when she beat the football-team captain for class president. She was the first in her family to go to college—a high-school counselor warned her, “You’ll be doing well if you get C’s”—after which she earned a Ph.D. in psychology, at the University of Kentucky. But, everywhere she went, Clance felt the same nagging sense of self-doubt, the suspicion that she’d somehow tricked everyone else into thinking she belonged.
In the early seventies, as an assistant professor at Oberlin College, Clance kept hearing female students confessing experiences that reminded her of her own: they were sure they’d failed exams, even if they always did well; they were convinced that they’d been admitted because there had been an error on their test scores or that they’d fooled authority figures into thinking they were smarter than they actually were. Clance began comparing notes with one of her colleagues, Suzanne Imes, about their shared feelings of fraudulence. Imes had grown up in Abilene, Texas, with an older sister who early on had been deemed “the smart one”; as a high schooler, Imes had confessed anxieties to her mother that sounded exactly like the ones Clance had to hers. Imes particularly remembered crying after a Latin test, telling her mother, “I know I failed” (among other things, she’d forgotten the word for “farmer”). When it turned out that she’d got an A, her mother said, “I never want to hear about this again.” But her accomplishment didn’t make the feelings go away; it only made her stop talking about them. Until she met Clance.
One evening, they threw a party for some of the Oberlin students, complete with strobe lights and dancing. But the students looked disappointed and said, “We thought we were going to be learning something.” They were hypervigilant, so intent on staving off the possibility of failure that they couldn’t let loose for even a night. So Clance and Imes turned the party into a class, setting up a circle of chairs and encouraging the students to talk. After some of them confessed that they felt like “impostors” among their brilliant classmates, Clance and Imes started referring to the feelings they were observing as “the impostor phenomenon.”
The pair spent five years talking to more than a hundred and fifty “successful” women: students and faculty members at several universities; professionals in fields including law, nursing, and social work. Then they recorded their findings in a paper, “The Impostor Phenomenon in High Achieving Women: Dynamics and Therapeutic Intervention.” They wrote that women in their sample were particularly prone to “an internal experience of intellectual phoniness,” living in perpetual fear that “some significant person will discover that they are indeed intellectual impostors.” But it was precisely this process of discovery that helped Clance and Imes formulate the concept—as they recognized feelings in each other, and in their students, that they’d been experiencing all their lives.
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December 28, 2023
Mohenjo
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New York Attorney General Letitia James’ lawsuit alleges Trump and top executives at his company, the Trump Organization, conspired to pad his net worth by billions of dollars on financial statements given to banks, insurers, and others to make deals and secure loans.
In a pretrial court filing, James’ office estimated that Trump exaggerated his wealth by as much as $3.6 billion. State lawyers contend Trump used the inflated numbers to get lower insurance premiums and favorable loan terms, saving at least $168 million on interest alone.
They’re seeking the return of more than $300 million of what they say are ill-gotten gains and a ban on Trump and other defendants from doing business in New York. Because it is a civil case, there is no possibility of prison time.
The lawsuit, which cuts to the heart of Trump’s image as a wealthy and successful businessman, went to trial in New York in October. Trump testified on Nov. 6. His three eldest children, Don Jr., Eric, and Ivanka, also testified. Closing arguments are expected in mid-to-late December.
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December 28, 2023
Mohenjo
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The ideal female body of the past decade, born through the godless alliance of Instagram and the Kardashian family, was as juicy and uncanny as a silicone-injected peach. Young women all over the Internet copied the shape—a sculpted waist, an enormous ass, hips that spread generously underneath a high-cut bikini—and also the face atop it, a contoured hybrid of recognizably human mannequin and sexy feline. This prototype was as technologically mediated as the era that produced it; women attained the look by injecting artificial substances, removing natural ones, and altering photographic evidence.
Dana Omari, a registered dietitian and an Instagram influencer in Houston, has accumulated a quarter of a million followers by documenting the blepharoplasties, breast implants, and Brazilian butt lifts of the rich and famous. Recently, she noticed that the human weathervanes of the social-media beauty standard were spinning in a new direction. The Kardashians were shrinking. Having previously appropriated styles created by Black women, they were now leaning into a skinnier, whiter ideal. Kim dropped twenty-one pounds before the Met Gala, where she wore a dress made famous by Marilyn Monroe; Khloé, who has spoken in the past about struggling with her weight, posted fortieth-birthday photos in which she looked as slim and blond as a Barbie. All over Instagram, the wealthy and the professionally attractive were showing newly prominent clavicles and rib cages. Last spring, Omari shared with her followers the open secret behind such striking thinness: the Kardashians and others, she insisted, were likely taking semaglutide, the active ingredient in the medication Ozempic. “This is the ‘diabetic shot’ for weight loss everyone’s been talking about,” she wrote. “Really good sources have told me that Kim and Khloé allegedly started on their Ozempic journey last year.” Omari was about to start taking a version of the medication herself.
Ozempic, which is manufactured by Novo Nordisk, is part of an expanding class of drugs called GLP-1 receptor agonists, which have dramatically altered the treatment of diabetes and obesity. Ozempic is approved by the Food and Drug Administration only for the treatment of Type 2 diabetes—a condition that accounts for ninety per cent of all diabetes cases—and has been available since 2017. Its name is now shorthand for the entire category of weight-loss injections. In 2021, Novo Nordisk received approval for Wegovy, which has the same active ingredient as Ozempic but comes with a higher maximum dose, as an anti-obesity drug. On a year-end earnings call in 2022, Novo Nordisk cited worldwide market growth of fifty per cent, with almost forty thousand new Wegovy prescriptions being written every week.
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December 27, 2023
Mohenjo
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One of my most heartening moviegoing experiences this year fell on July 24, the night I attended a press screening of Disney’s “Haunted Mansion” at the AMC Burbank 16. The movie was lousy, but the preshow in the lobby was thrilling. I first sensed something was up when, after several minutes of driving in circles, I managed to grab the last rooftop spot in a parking structure that rarely reached capacity — on a Monday night, no less. What was going on?
The answer became clear once I made my way into the multiplex and saw more moviegoers than I’d seen in some time. They milled in groups, poured out the doors, and scattered popcorn trails down ugly-carpeted hallways. Some wore pink (a lot of it). They jammed concession lines, bathroom lines, and possibly cellphone lines. (The modern scourge of mid-movie texting keeps growing worse.) Some of them, like me, were journalists who had dutifully showed up to watch Tiffany Haddish trade wisecracks with digital ectoplasm. Everyone else was there for a mighty spectacle of plastic, plutonium, or both: They were there for “Barbenheimer.”
Ah, “Barbenheimer” (a.k.a. “Science Guys and Dolls”), that happy accident of a blockbuster love child conceived by two rival studios, Warner Bros. and Universal, and by two filmmakers, Greta Gerwig and Christopher Nolan, who had succeeded in putting their highly personal stamps on improbable material. For the first time in a while, too, it clearly felt personal for a mass audience. For many of us, words could hardly describe the excitement of seeing people flock giddily to theaters en masse, seeking out pictures without the imprimatur of a Marvel or a DC universe, or even the more benign franchise imprint of an “Avatar” or “Top Gun” sequel. Perhaps originality at the movies wasn’t dead after all.
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(Matt Talbot / For The Times)
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December 27, 2023
Mohenjo
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Beyoncé told us that girls run the world. This summer, she and Taylor Swift seemed to prove it.
Both Beyoncé’s “Renaissance” and Ms. Swift’s “Eras” tours have become cultural phenomena that have swept across social media and are poised to shatter real-world records. “Eras” could top $1 billion in sales, making it the first concert in history to cross that mark. Some estimates suggest that Beyoncé’s world tour could gross even more than that by the time it wraps in October.
It is the latest — and some economists think final — iteration of the “revenge spending” trend that took hold after the pandemic, in which people shifted their spending away from goods and toward experiences. Taylor Swift and Beyoncé fans have been shelling out on everything from secondhand tickets that cost more than a flight to Europe to fancy fingernails to match the singers’ wardrobe.
While event spending overall is still just recovering to pre pandemic levels, the marquee concerts this summer are spurring a lot of consumption.
The survey company QuestionPro estimates that Ms. Swift’s concert could generate some $4.6 billion in economic activity in North America alone, taking into account both stadium capacity and people’s reported spending plans on things like tickets, merchandise and travel. That would be roughly on par with the revenues the Beijing Olympics generated in 2008, after adjusting for inflation. Beyoncé’s shows are expected to spur $4.5 billion in spending, based on a separate QuestionPro survey.
Cosmeticians, Cruises and Cocktails
It isn’t just tickets that have motivated people to open their wallets. They are staying in hotel rooms, buying elaborate outfits, spending on flashy manicures, and attending sideline parties that are generating business and boosting spending in host cities.
Shade Hotel, in Manhattan Beach, Calif., held a Taylor Swift pre-party where guests sported costumes, wore Swift-themed temporary tattoos, and sipped on a signature “Lavender Haze” cocktail, a reference to one of the most popular songs on her latest album. Both the hotel and its neighbors reported surging demand that pushed up room rates and sold out many properties.
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December 26, 2023
Mohenjo
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The concert is in London. You’re watching it live from your home in Atlanta. What makes that possible is a network of subsea cables draped across the cold, dark contours of the ocean floor, transmitting sights and sounds at the speed of light through strands of glass fiber as thin as your hair but thousands of miles long.
These cables, only about as thick as a garden hose, are high-tech marvels. The fastest, the newly completed transatlantic cable called Amitié and funded by Microsoft, Meta, and others, can carry 400 terabits of data per second. That’s 400,000 times faster than your home broadband if you’re lucky enough to have high-end gigabit service.
And yet subsea cables are low-tech, too, coated in tar and unspooled by ships employing basically the same process used in the 1850s to lay the first transatlantic telegraph cable. SubCom, a subsea-cable maker based in New Jersey, evolved from a rope manufacturer with a factory next to a deep-water port for easy loading onto ships.
Though satellite links are becoming more important with orbiting systems like SpaceX’s Starlink, subsea cables are the workhorses of global commerce and communications, carrying more than 99% of traffic between continents. TeleGeography, an analyst firm that tracks the business, knows of 552 existing and planned subsea cables, and more are on the way as the internet spreads to every part of the globe and every corner of our lives.
You probably know that tech giants like Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google run the brains of the internet. They’re called “hyperscalers” for operating hundreds of data centers packed with millions of servers. You might not know that they also increasingly run the internet’s nervous system, too.
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Zooey Liao/CNET
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December 26, 2023
Mohenjo
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In the late 2000s, Carlos Monteiro noticed something strange about the food that Brazilian people were eating. The nutritionist had been poring over three decades’ worth of data from surveys that asked grocery shoppers to note down every item they bought. In more recent surveys, Monteiro noticed, Brazilians were buying way less oil, sugar, and salt than they had in the past. Despite this, people were piling on the pounds. Between 1975 and 2009 the proportion of Brazilian adults who were overweight or obese more than doubled.
This contradiction troubled Monteiro. If people were buying less fat and sugar, why were they getting bigger? The answer was right there in the data. Brazilians hadn’t really cut down on fat, salt, and sugar—they were just consuming these nutrients in an entirely new form. People were swapping traditional foods—rice, beans, and vegetables—for prepackaged bread, sweets, sausages, and other snacks. The share of biscuits and soft drinks in Brazilians’ shopping baskets had tripled and quintupled, respectively, since the first household survey in 1974. The change was noticeable everywhere. When Monteiro first qualified as a doctor in 1972, he’d worried that Brazilians weren’t getting enough to eat. By the late 2000s, his country was suffering with the exact opposite problem.
At a glance, Monteiro’s findings seem obvious. If people eat too much unhealthy food, they put on more weight. But the nutritionist wasn’t satisfied with that explanation. He thought that something fundamental had shifted in our food system, and scientists needed a new way to talk about it. For more than a century, nutrition science has focused on nutrients: Eat less saturated fat, avoid excess sugar, get enough vitamin C, and so on. But Monteiro wanted a new way of categorizing food that emphasized how products were made, not just what was in them. It wasn’t just ingredients that made a food unhealthy, Monteiro thought. It was the whole system: how the food was processed, how quickly we ate it, and the way it was sold and marketed. “We are proposing a new theory to understand the relationship between diet and health,” Monteiro says.
Monteiro created a new food classification system—called NOVA—that breaks things down into four categories. Least worrisome are minimally processed foods, such as fruits, vegetables, and unprocessed meats. Then come processed culinary ingredients (oils, butter, and sugar), and after that processed foods (tinned vegetables, smoked meats, freshly baked bread, and simple cheeses)—substances to be used carefully as part of a healthy diet. And then there are ultra-processed foods.
There are a bunch of reasons why a product might fall into the ultra-processed category. It might be made using “industrial processes” like extrusion, interesterification, carbonation, hydrogenation, molding, or prefrying. It could contain additives designed to make it hyper-palatable, or preservatives that help it stay stable at room temperature. Or it might contain high levels of fat, sugar, and salt in combinations that aren’t usually found in whole foods. What all the foods share, Monteiro says, is that they are designed to displace freshly prepared dishes and keep you coming back for more, and more, and more. “Every day from breakfast to dinner you are consuming something that was engineered to be overconsumed,” says Monteiro.
The concept of ultra-processed food has caught on in a big way since it was first introduced in 2009: Brazil, France, Israel, Ecuador, and Peru have all made NOVA part of their dietary guidelines. Countless health and diet blogs extol the virtues of avoiding ultra-processed foods—shunning them is one thing that both followers of a carnivorous and a raw vegan diet can actually agree on. The label has been used to criticize plant-based meat companies, who in turn have embraced the label. Impossible calls its plant-based burger “unapologetically processed.” Others have pointed out that there’s no way we can feed billions of people without relying on processed food.
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Photograph: GETTY IMAGES
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December 25, 2023
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December 25, 2023
Mohenjo
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Thinking of spring cleaning? Whether you’re finally cleaning up the junk drawer or upgrading your tech, don’t condemn your old device to your in-home gadget graveyard — or worse, the garbage. We all hang onto outdated tech for our own reasons, but there are also multiple ways to repurpose old devices for your smart home, using them as security cameras and more.
Whatever the tech, when it’s finally time to say goodbye, there’s a right way to dispose of your old gadgets — and there are a lot of wrong ways. We’ll show you which is which.
What to do before you get rid of a device
When you’re finished with a gadget, make sure it’s also finished with you. Make sure to back up anything you want off the device — photos, videos, songs — and then perform a factory reset. Here are a few CNET articles to help clarify the finer points of wiping a device:
Here are the best places here in the US to recycle, repurpose, or give new life to your old technology.
How to recycle smartphones
Smartphone Recycling lets you print a free FedEx shipping label or request a recycling kit. Ship your old smartphone, and you might even get paid, depending on the device’s condition and age. Smartphone Recycling accepts devices in bulk, so you have to ship a minimum of 10. Depending on how long you’ve been hoarding phones, you might meet this quota on your own. If not, check with friends and family and make it a group effort.
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What do you do with your phone when it’s served its purpose? We’ll give you some options. Sarah Tew/CNET
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