Author: KnowledgeHippo
Damian R. Murray, a psychologist at Tulane University, studies how various social conditions and life events affect people’s political views. For example, he recently found that becoming a parent makes a person more socially conservative. On the eve of the Super Bowl, he sat down for an interview with The New York Times to discuss another recent study, which looked at how sports fans’ political perspectives can be changed by their teams’ wins and losses.This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.What inspired this project?These games are so emotionally powerful and people are so emotionally invested. The question is:…
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is investigating an outbreak on a luxury cruise ship after more than 150 people reported symptoms of gastrointestinal illness, including diarrhea and vomiting.The ship, Queen Victoria, operated by Cunard Line, departed Southampton, England, on Jan. 11 on a 107-night cruise that included recent stops in Florida and San Francisco, according to the company’s website. The ship is scheduled to arrive in Honolulu on Monday.The CDC said that as of Thursday, 129 passengers and 25 crew members had reported being sick on the ship. The agency said 1,824 passengers and 967 crew members were…
A 6-year-old Palestinian girl and the two rescuers who searched for her nearly two weeks ago were found dead Saturday, the Palestinian Red Crescent said, ending a desperate effort to discover their fate.Two rescuers with the Red Crescent were dispatched by ambulance on the evening of January 29 to find Hind Rajab, who was believed to be trapped in a vehicle in Gaza City with six dead family members. The aid group said they were killed by Israeli fire.A statement by the Red Crescent on Saturday accused Israeli forces of shelling the ambulance as it arrived “a few meters away…
Accusations of plagiarism appear to be the newest weapon in the raging battle for leadership and direction at elite universities.For weeks, William Ackman, the billionaire hedge fund manager, campaigned on social media against Claudine Gay, who resigned as Harvard president amid accusations of plagiarism by other scholars and that she did not take a strong enough stand against him. anti-Semitism on campus.But that battle hit home after Business Insider, an online publication, published similar allegations of plagiarism against Mr. Ackman’s wife, Neri Oxman, an architect and designer who holds a Ph.D. in design computing from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Business…
During a recent dinner at a cozy bar in Upper Manhattan, I was confronted with an age-old question about gender norms. Over bowls of ramen and sips of gin cocktails, my date and I struck up a conversation: Who should pay for a date?My date, a 27-year-old woman I matched with on Hinge, said that gender equality doesn’t mean that men and women should pay the same when going out. Women, she said, earn less than men in the workplace, spend more time getting ready for outings and pay more for reproductive care.When the date was up, we split the…
Before dawn, Paolo Benadi climbed the bell tower of his 16th-century monastery, admired the sunrise over the ruins of the Roman forum, and contemplated a world in flux.”It was a wonderful meditation on what goes on inside,” he said, stepping out into the street in his divination robe. “And outside too.”A lot is going on for Father Benadi, who, as the AI ethicist for both the Vatican and the Italian government, spends his days thinking about the Holy Spirit and ghosts in machines.In recent weeks, the ethics professor, ordained priest and self-proclaimed geek met Bill Gates in a meeting with…
Brazil is experiencing a massive outbreak of dengue fever, the sometimes fatal mosquito-borne disease, and public health experts say it is a harbinger of a coming surge in cases in the Americas, including Puerto Rico.Brazil’s health ministry warns it expects more than 4.2 million cases this year, surpassing the 4.1 million reported by the Pan American Health Organization in all 42 countries in the region last year.Brazil has had a bad dengue year – the number of cases of the virus usually rises and falls in a cycle of about four years – but experts say several factors, including El…
Some hot springs look like palaces, others like holes in the ground. Some feel like parties, others like prayers. There are hot baths in cities, on remote islands, in the desert, in dense forests. Thermal water can be green, orange, blue, yellow or turquoise. It can be milky and opaque, silt with sediment, or as clear as a municipal swimming pool. Sometimes it’s just lukewarm; other times it’s so hot it hurts.Several years ago, with the dream of making a book, I set out to learn and document how people around the world use thermal waters. In 23 locations in…
As Panama enters its tumultuous Carnival season, this weekend’s festivities come amid a strange political drama unfolding in the capital.A former president, who is also a leading candidate in this year’s presidential election in May, has holed up in the Nicaraguan embassy in Panama City, accompanied by his furniture, including a sofa and desk, as well as his dog, Bruno.Ricardo Martinelli, a 71-year-old conservative businessman who led Panama from 2009 to 2014, was granted asylum in Nicaragua this week after Panama’s Supreme Court rejected his appeal against a money-laundering conviction that carried a 10-year prison sentence.Mr. Martinelli, who has faced…
Marc Tessier-Lavigne, Stanford’s president, resigned in August after an investigation found serious flaws in the studies he had overseen for decades.Claudine Gay, Harvard’s president, resigned as the new year dawned amid mounting accusations of plagiarism dating back to her graduate student days.Then Neri Oxman, a former star professor at MIT, was accused of plagiarizing from Wikipedia, among other sources, in her thesis. Her husband, hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, was one of Dr. Ackman’s fiercest critics. And he has vowed to search the archives of the MIT faculty and its president, Sally Kornbluth, for plagiarism.Attacks on the integrity of higher…