I was curious why the State Education building is lit up bright blue. The reason is it's World Autism Month, so they are lighting the building blue this month.
Militia leader Ammon Bundy, famous for leading an armed standoff in Oregon, had a tender moment in November of last year. He recorded a Facebook post saying that perhaps President Trump's characterization of the migrant caravan on the U.S.-Mexico border was somewhat broad. Maybe they weren't all criminals, he said. "What about those who have come here for reasons of need?"
Bundy did not say he was breaking with Trump. He just asked his followers to put themselves in the shoes of "the fathers, the mothers, the children" who came to escape violence. It was a call for a truce grounded in empathy, the kind you might hear in a war zone, say, or an Easter Sunday sermon. Still, it was met with a swift and rageful response from his followers, so overwhelming that within days, Bundy decided to quit Facebook. Keeping It Civil: How To Talk Politics Without Letting Things Turn Ugly Civility Wars Keeping It Civil: How To Talk Politics Without Letting Things Turn Ugly
In an earlier era, Bundy's appeal might have resonated. But he failed to tune in to a critical shift in American culture — one that a handful of researchers have been tracking, with some alarm, for the past decade or so. Americans these days seem to be losing their appetite for empathy, especially the walk-a-mile-in-someone's-shoes Easter Sunday morning kind.
When I was growing up in the '70s, empathy was all the rage. The term was coined in 1908; then, social scientists and psychologists started more aggressively pushing the concept into the culture after World War II, basically out of fear. The idea was that we were all going to kill each other with nuclear weapons — or learn to see the world through each other's eyes. In my elementary school in the 1970s, which was not progressive or mushy in any way, we wrote letters to pretend Russian pen pals to teach us to open our hearts to our enemies.
That’s the argument Harvard politics professor Nancy L. Rosenblum makes in her new book, A Lot of People Are Saying. And it’s not merely that conspiracy theories are thriving — they’re also getting more absurd, less substantive, and harder to refute.
In fact, what we’re seeing now, according to Rosenblum and her co-author Russell Muirhead, is more “conspiracism” and less theory. Which is to say, the purpose of conspiracy theories is no longer to explain reality or offer some account of the world; instead, the point is to erode trust in public figures or institutions.
The findings, published in the current issue of the medical journal BMJ, "are quite consistent with other studies," says Simon Bacon, of Concordia University, who studies the impact of lifestyle on chronic diseases. He points to other studies that show depression, anxiety and stress increase the risk of cardiovascular events. He's written an editorial that is published alongside the study.
So, when is stress just a normal part of life — something we all just need to deal with — and when does it become so problematic that it sets the stage for disease? Part of the answer here depends on how we respond to stress, the scientists say, and on our own internal perceptions about how much stress we're feeling.
As somebody who is getting older I think about things like this a lot, and try to work to reduce stress in my own life.
Life expectancy only increased significantly a hundred years ago or so. And contrary to popular belief, this change had little to do with modern medicine.
“The most important thing is not medication; it’s sanitation,” Lieberman said. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, people learned how germs worked and started doing things like building more sewers, boiling water for childbirth and making sure drinking water was clean. Countries also got better at distributing food, which decreased starvation, Vijg said. Subscribe to The Morning Email. Wake up to the day's most important news.
“We can thank public health far more than we can thank medicines,” Lieberman said, noting that by the time antibiotic use became widespread after World War II, mortality rates had already plummeted. In 1870, the average person in Europe or America lived to their mid-30s. Life expectancy rose steadily from there, reaching 58 to 65 years in 1950.
Not that medicine has been useless. After sanitation, antibiotics and vaccines have been the biggest boons to life expectancy, partly because they fight diseases that became common when people started farming.
“They’ve basically got us back to where we used to be,” Lieberman said, adding, “The average person who walks in to see a doctor is seeing them for a disease that we didn’t used to get.”