we’re at around our 600th mass shooting in the United States for the year.
........ when I’m going to these active shootings and these suspects have better weaponry than I have, it becomes very much a problem. And until we regulate that or we get something in place, that’s going to be more mass killings. ............ Ninety percent of my day is problem solving with BS non-police-related issues. ......... I would say the mental health issue has exploded. ......... that makes me feel good inside, that I had some type of impact with them at a stage where they didn’t know which way they was going. ......... I feel privileged and honored to be the voice of some of these children in severe sexual assault cases. The pride when a jury comes back with a guilty verdict for somebody who just did horrific things that the media will never cover — I think that’s, like, my high. And I think that it was worth every second away from my family and everything like that. ........... In domestic violence situations, you try your best. But am I helping enough to get them out of that situation? ........... One of the primary criticisms of policing these days comes from the view that there’s a serious problem of racism within law enforcement. ......... we definitely have racism within the police department. How could we not? It’s in every culture, every occupation. .......... There’s absolutely racism within the police force and just in general here in this country. .......... I’m out here trying to do the best I can just like anybody else. I’m trying to make a living just like anyone else is. I’m trying to do my best. And I’m a human, and I have feelings and emotions like anyone else. So don’t treat me like I’m a robot. Don’t automatically assume that I’m the bad guy when you’ve never met me before. Give me a chance to show you who I am. .......... instead of trying to call me and my co-workers out, call us in. Call us into your small groups. Call us into your city council meetings. Call us into the meetings that really matter, where the transparency takes place. That’s where I want to be. ........... understand that they could exchange their own lives for yours and that they will. And at the end of the day, we just want to go home to our families, the way everybody else does. ......... We put our pants on like everybody else does every day. And unfortunately, if we make a mistake, it could be a life-or-death situation. ......... Hey, at the end of the day, we’re just like you, just in blue. .We’re Going to Miss Greed and Cynicism nobody really knows how hard it will be to reduce inflation or whether the U.S. economy will experience a recession. ......... As late as 2015, or so I and many others thought, we had a fairly good idea about how American politics worked. It wasn’t pretty, but it seemed comprehensible. .......... by international standards, Democrats are, at most, vaguely center left. ....... the core of the G.O.P.’s financial support (not to mention that of the penumbra of think tanks, foundations and lobbying groups that promoted its ideology) came from billionaires who wanted to preserve and increase their wealth. ......... win over white working-class voters by appealing to them on cultural issues. ......... the culture war was basically phony — a cynical ploy to win elections, ignored once the votes were counted. “The leaders of the backlash may talk Christ,” he wrote, “but they walk corporate. … Abortion is never halted. Affirmative action is never abolished. The culture industry is never forced to clean up its act.” .......... many elected Republicans are now genuine fanatics. ........ Republicans will narrowly control the House. And this means that the inmates will be running half the asylum. ......... not all members of the incoming House Republican caucus are fanatical conspiracy theorists. But those who aren’t are clearly terrified by and submissive to those who are. Kevin McCarthy may scrape together the votes to become speaker, but even if he does, actual power will obviously rest in the hands of people like Marjorie Taylor Greene. .......... How do you deal with people who believe, more or less, that the 2020 election was stolen by a vast conspiracy of pedophiles? .
The Key to Success in College Is So Simple It’s Almost Never Mentioned She was a good student, but what struck me more than her ability was the fact that she cared. Being in class, asking questions, and exploring ideas meant something to her. .......... How should they teach writing in the age of artificial intelligence? How difficult should it be to pass organic chemistry? .......... a simple willingness to learn ........ students who are open to new knowledge will learn. Students who aren’t, won’t. ......... The paradoxical union of intellectual humility and ambition is something that every student can (with help from teachers, counselors and parents) and should cultivate. It’s what makes learning possible. ........... To an overwhelming degree, students today see college as job training, the avenue to a stable career. .......... Knowingness is everywhere in our culture. From the former president claiming “everybody knows” some conspiracist nonsense to podcasters smugly debunking cultural myths to your feeling you have to have read, heard, and streamed everything, the posture of already knowing supersedes the need to approach new situations with curiosity. ............ Knowingness is a danger especially for talented students who have been rewarded for always having the right answer. At the University of Pennsylvania, undergraduates complain that student clubs expect prospective members to have extensive knowledge of the club’s area of interest. As a first-year student, Adrian Rafizadeh, told the campus newspaper, “If I can’t get into the clubs that will help educate me and foster that interest, then how do I even get started?” .......... Universities are factories of human knowledge. They’re also monuments to individual ignorance. We know an incredible amount, but I know only a tiny bit. ......... schools and parents need to convince students (and perhaps themselves) that college has more to offer than job training. You’re a worker for only part of your life; you’re a human being, a creature with a powerful brain, throughout it. ......... school should cultivate students’ curiosity and let them feel the thrill of finding something out. .
Natural Gas Prices in Europe Fall to Pre-Invasion Levels Warm weather, alternatives to Russian gas and a buildup of storage all help. But prices remain high for consumers and industry. ........ This is a remarkable turnaround. Just months ago, as Russia curtailed and eventually cut off most exports of the fuel to Europe, there were intense fears that the continent would run out of gas this winter. That pushed prices to an August peak of more than €340 a megawatt-hour, about five times current levels. ........ “We now have a well-supplied E.U. gas market, even without Russian gas” ......... Following the invasion, Europe moved quickly to secure shipments of liquefied natural gas from the United States, Qatar and other exporters. Europe also rapidly built terminals to receive liquefied gas, sweeping away many of the usual bureaucratic obstacles and environmental objections. .
Sabbath and the Art of Rest Judith Shulevitz shares the wisdom of the Sabbath and its offering to a modern world that struggles to unplug. ........ “Most of us seem to labor for the sake of things of space. As a result, we suffer from a deeply rooted dread of time and stand aghast when compelled to look into its face.” ......... “Six days a week we seek to dominate the world. On the seventh day, we try to dominate the self.” ......... It’s amazing how much harder that is to do. ....... “Man is not a beast of burden and the Sabbath is not for the purpose of enhancing the efficiency of his work.” ......... what was being created, what was worth creating. ........ What the Sabbath has tried to create and how that has worked throughout time, throughout cultures, throughout different religions. ........ how fundamentally countercultural the practice now is, how radical something so ancient now feels to me, and, in a way, how urgent it feels. ......... my big resolution for this year is to actually build some kind of consistent Sabbath practice .......... The Jewish Sabbath has a big Friday night meal. Sometimes it’s a big lunch after synagogue. The Christian Sabbath had a big old Sunday lunch. The Black church is famous for its fabulous lunches. It could be a dinner party ......... In a Christian idiom, I’d say you’re supposed to break bread. So you’re supposed to be collective. ........ a set of a kind of work that you don’t do because that kind of work is acting on the world. And the Sabbath is a time when you’re supposed to stop acting on the world. .......... what is there to safeguard the world from man? And that’s the Sabbath. ........ to safeguard you from being an eternal slave ......... the theology of the Sabbath. ......... And on the sixth day, creates man and woman. Which, by the way, God creates equally on the sixth day. ......... God doesn’t just rest. He makes rest ....... God is making something. God is making rest. ....... “Menuha, which we usually render with rest, means here much more than withdrawal from labor and exertion.” He goes on to say it’s something closer to, quote, “tranquillity, serenity, peace and repose.” And I want to get at the distinction between rest, as defined by something you’re not doing — rest is I’m not working — versus rest as a kind of state I’m achieving. ......... a sense I have of myself that I actually don’t know how to rest. ...... “Labor is a craft, but perfect rest is an art.” ......... until I become part of a community that does it, that makes rest something pleasurable, that makes it festive. .......... a four-step program for creating community and social cohesion. ........ the four steps would be right laws to limit work time, make sure the schedules are coordinated, make it a regular habit so that it becomes a regular norm — and the fourth is really the most important — make it festive. Make it fun. Fill it with things. Fill it with meals. Fill it with long walks. Fill it with what they call a Shabbas shlof, which is a Shabbas nap sometimes with mandated sexual activity, if you are married. That’s the Jewish Shabbat. ........ And always, always, always being together. Because you just can’t do this by yourself. ........ Shabbat is a cathedral in time. ....... if there isn’t a general atmosphere of stopping, then there won’t be a feeling of repose or menuha. There will be a loneliness and you’re looking around and everyone else is running around. .......... it’s not just non-work or non-productivity. It’s absolutely collective non-work and non-productivity because I simply cannot stress this enough. If it’s not happening collectively, it’s not going to happen. ......... And he just really hadn’t thought about Shabbat as anything other than a day when you turn everything off and are kind of bored. ......... a time when you were able to stop living to produce, stop living to be somebody successful, stop living to make money for your family and start living for yourself. ......... and you are able to become a better member of your community, and, incidentally, a better person. So he came up with that phrase — the social morality of time — that you can have morality embedded in time. ......... “ethics becomes a luxury as the speed of our daily life increases.” ......... we actually aren’t working that much longer than we used to, but we use social media more. ........ Right now, in our moment in history, stopping our technological addiction is probably the hardest thing that we can do. And it is the biggest obstacle to living your life according to the lessons of Sabbath. ......... The rise of digital Shabbats — people don’t look at their phone on Saturdays. ............ My experience with the secular Sabbath experiments has been they happen around a dinner. They happen around some kind of social event. .......... I started going back to synagogue and the words felt meaningless to me. I struggled with prayer. I still struggle with prayer. When I go to services, really the only thing I really like is the Torah service, because I love reading texts and sitting there and reading the portion of the Torah we’re reading and thinking about it in a new way. .......... How do we sanctify the Sabbath? By wearing a special robe, said the rabbis. By beautifying ourselves in our homes.” .......... You’re supposed to clean your home. This is one way in which the Puritans were very Jewish. They believed in having a full larder, taking a bath and cleaning the home before their Sabbath. And they understood this idea that it’s just not going to have that special quality unless you prepare for it. ............ trying to add a bunch of cooking, cleaning, social organizing, et cetera, to a Friday night ......... You have to work to get to the experience of flow, to get the experience to the experience of God, to get to that what Émile Durkheim, the sociologist — who, by the way, came from a family of rabbis — called effervescence, which is that collective joy. ......... It’s a lot of work to create rest. ........ rest as a discipline. But a lot has to be true to find the space of tranquillity. ....... in Israel where they really do have these Saturday closing laws, and there are fewer cars on the road, and there’s less public transportation. ......... how much more of our space has now been invaded by commerce than was true 100 years ago, than was true 50 years ago. .......... phones and internet and technology has commercialized everything. I mean, it is always there. ......... You just weren’t in a place where there was commerce, so there was no commerce. But now there is no place where there is no commerce. ........ you can only escape in time ......... Sabbath has been an escape in time from commerce and from capitalism. ......... The internet, but especially the phone, is softening the boundaries around time. ......... in order for community and family to be available in the life I have built, a certain amount of digitalness is intrinsic ........ I personally think being bored is a good thing for children to be. ....... when she was filling out her application to Amazon, they told her on this form she had to be willing to work nights, weekends, holidays, and over time on immediate demand with no notice. And she talks about families that never see one another. Husband and wife who work different shifts, who maybe pass each other on a Monday night. So I think it’s a really good portrait of what the decalibrated nature of our just-in-time economy does to people. .
How I Time-Travel to Parent My Adult Son Once a year I record a brutally honest conversation for my little boy. Here’s why that’s psychologically healthy for both of us......... every year around his birthday, I talk to the 22-year-old version of my son for about an hour. And I am honest — brutally honest — which is the only way this works. I tell him my fears, my prejudices and my hopes for him. I just talk like he’s a buddy. I laugh, gush and tell weird stories. .......... A child’s brain reaches maturity in his mid-20s, gaining not just processing power but also empathy for others and a sense of self. .......... “You’ve been asking the ‘Who am I’ question now for a while, but at 20 you’re starting to feel like, ‘I need to have an answer.’” ......... if young people try to skip their impulsive years, they may be forced to experience them later in life. ........ the key to this type of storytelling is to find a balance between chronology — simply listing off events — and reflecting on those events. ........ to start with how much they love their kids and are proud of them. ........ Saying it to a machine can also become practice. “Once you can say it on tape, you can say it in person,” she said. .
To Find Happiness, Try Talking to Strangers A new project by the Well desk is challenging readers to strengthen their relationships and form new ones........ Our interpersonal relationships are critical to our well-being. ......... strong social bonds make people happier and feel more fulfilled than money or I.Q. do. ....... encourages readers to stretch their social muscles and engage with all kinds of people: family members, partners, co-workers and even strangers. By increasing your “social fitness,” you may very well become a happier, healthier person ......... really, in no uncertain terms, it’s the strength of your relationships that can improve your well-being over the course of a lifetime. ......... weak ties — the ties that you make with strangers — and how those are important ties in your life that seem very fleeting, but they’re not. ........ I can think about times that I’ve been on a plane with somebody and I had some really profound conversation and never learned their name. ........ I really made it a practice of chatting up people more directly. ........ people who have a best friend at work are much happier ........ suggested taking someone you don’t know very well, but who you like, on a walk ....... So I took my teenage niece for a long walk. I learned things about her that I never knew. ......... I found my buried treasure in my niece. People are an unlimited resource when it comes to happiness. .
Here’s Yet Another Reason to Worship Canned Beans Canned cannellini beans quickly braised with olive oil, rosemary, tomato and golden fried onions make the best of your pantry. ......... Less than 20 minutes later, the beans had absorbed the olive oil and melted into a stewlike mass. The kitchen smelled divine. .
Day 2: The Secret Power of the 8-Minute Phone Call I just had an eight-minute call with my good friend Tina, whom I’ve known for over three decades. I could never seem to connect with her (she has a very demanding job) until I sent her a text last week proposing an eight-minute phone call. ........ Send that person a quick text asking if they can chat on the phone for eight minutes — ideally today, but if not, schedule it for sometime this week. ............. most busy people “tend to think that in some unspecified future, we’ll have a ‘time surplus,’ where we’ll be able to connect with old friends.” That may never materialize .......... Hearing the sound of a loved one’s voice .. “is emotionally regulating.” ......... In eight minutes, she added, “I can call my friend Mary Beth from high school, and say, ‘I love you so much, here’s what’s happening,’ or ‘Listen, I want to run something by you really quickly.’ It’s a short period of time, but you can get a lot in, and it’s deep enough that all the bonding hormones start to hit.” ......... A hard out, agreed upon in advance, solves a common conversational issue ........ when participants received brief phone calls a few times a week, their levels of depression, loneliness and anxiety were “rapidly reduced” compared with people who didn’t receive a call. .......... As they stumbled through conversations about their respective families, they learned that both of their mothers had died by suicide a few years before. ....... “It’s like the valve at the top of a pressure cooker that you lift off,” he said. “Suddenly, the air can come out.” .
Heartbreaking stuffhttps://t.co/eKLIf3gqKX
— Gregory Zuckerman (@GZuckerman) January 2, 2023
Tech twitter: You need 8 hrs of sleep
— Lucy Guo (Hiring Engineers & Designers) (@lucy_guo) January 2, 2023
Solomun: DJs a 24 hour set nonstop
Miami: pic.twitter.com/ieKzzISKV5
Yes, a Shukla can get published in the NYT!
— Suhag A. Shukla (@SuhagAShukla) January 2, 2023
Well, as long as one is willing to write that Chinese aggression is India’s fault for joining #Quad, only India suffered casualties in border skirmishes & that China determines when India suffers politically. https://t.co/N96FHJTUz9
Why India and China Are Fighting in the Himalayas mutual suspicion is deepening as China contemplates the increasing strategic cooperation between the United States and India as competition and conflict between Washington and Beijing intensifies. ......... Neither the colonial British authorities nor the leaders of independent India were able to agree on the detailed alignment of a border with China. ........ With little human habitation along the China-Indian border, there are few land or revenue records — traditional ways of establishing ownership. ........ Between 1989 and 2005, the Indian and Chinese sides had 15 meetings and no blood was shed for 30 years. ........ the most lethal confrontation on the disputed border occurred in the northern Ladakh region in June 2020 when Chinese soldiers killed at least 20 Indian soldiers with wooden staves and nail-studded clubs, and the Chinese military seized more than 40 square miles of territory controlled by India. .......... Indian military planners worry that sufficiently reinforcing the border with China might come at the cost of their ability to deter Pakistan. ......... Should India continue to build strategic and military relations with the United States and the partnership of America, Australia, Japan and India — known as the Quad — even though Beijing has made it clear it sees the Quad as an anti-China grouping? .......... From New Delhi’s perspective, the Chinese military aggression on the disputed border is the price India is paying for joining hands with the Western alliance. New Delhi takes pains to portray its independence, even turning down an American offer of assistance against China at the time of the 2020 intrusions in Ladakh. ........ The Chinese military’s most recent aggression shows that Beijing continues to fuel the confrontation, and relations between India and China face a negative spiral without a predictable end. .
