The Atlantic America has long had a fickle relationship with homework. A century or so ago, progressive reformers argued that it made kids unduly stressed, which later led in some cases to district-level bans on it for all grades under seventh. This anti-homework sentiment faded, though, amid mid-century fears that the U.S. was falling behind the Soviet Union (which led to more homework), only to resurface in the 1960s and ’70s, when a more open culture came to see homework as stifling play and creativity (which led to less). But this didn’t last either: In the ’80s, government researchers blamed America’s schools for its economic troubles and recommended ramping homework up once more. The 21st century has so far been a homework-heavy era, with American teenagers now averaging about twice as much time spent on homework each day as their predecessors did in the 1990s. Even little kids are asked to bring school home with them. A 2015 study, for instance, found that kindergarteners, who researchers tend to agree shouldn’t have any take-home work, were spending about 25 minutes a night on it. But not without pushback. As many children, not to mention their parents and teachers, are drained by their daily workload, some schools and districts are rethinking how homework should work—and some teachers are doing away with it entirely. They’re reviewing the research on homework (which, it should be noted, is contested) and concluding that it’s time to revisit the subject. Hillsborough, California, an affluent suburb of San Francisco, is one district that has changed its ways. The district, which includes three elementary schools and a middle school, worked with teachers and convened panels of parents in order to come up with a homework policy that would allow students more unscheduled time to spend with their families or to play. In August 2017, it rolled out an updated policy, which emphasized that homework should be “meaningful” and banned due dates that fell on the day after a weekend or a break. “The first year was a bit bumpy,” says Louann Carlomagno, the district’s superintendent. She says the adjustment was at times hard for the teachers, some of whom had been doing their job in a similar fashion for a quarter of a century. Parents’ expectations were also an issue. Carlomagno says they took some time to “realize that it was okay not to have an hour of homework for a second grader—that was new.” Most of the way through year two, though, the policy appears to be working more smoothly. “The students do seem to be less stressed based on conversations I’ve had with parents,” Carlomagno says. It also helps that the students performed just as well on the state standardized test last year as they have in the past. Earlier this year, the district of Somerville, Massachusetts, also rewrote its homework policy, reducing the amount of homework its elementary and middle schoolers may receive. In grades six through eight, for example, homework is capped at an hour a night and can only be assigned two to three nights a week. Jack Schneider, an education professor at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell whose daughter attends school in Somerville, is generally pleased with the new policy. But, he says, it’s part of a bigger, worrisome pattern. “The origin for this was general parental dissatisfaction, which not surprisingly was coming from a particular demographic,” Schneider says. “Middle-class white parents tend to be more vocal about concerns about homework … They feel entitled enough to voice their opinions.” Schneider is all for revisiting taken-for-granted practices like homework, but thinks districts need to take care to be inclusive in that process. “I hear approximately zero middle-class white parents talking about how homework done best in grades K through two actually strengthens the connection between home and school for young people and their families,” he says. Because many of these parents already feel connected to their school community, this benefit of homework can seem redundant. “They don’t need it,” Schneider says, “so they’re not advocating for it.” That doesn’t mean, necessarily, that homework is more vital in low-income districts. In fact, there are different, but just as compelling, reasons it can be burdensome in these communities as well. Allison Wienhold, who teaches high-school Spanish in the small town of Dunkerton, Iowa, has phased out homework assignments over the past three years. Her thinking: Some of her students, she says, have little time for homework because they’re working 30 hours a week or responsible for looking after younger siblings. As educators reduce or eliminate the homework they assign, it’s worth asking what amount and what kind of homework is best for students. It turns out that there’s some disagreement about this among researchers, who tend to fall in one of two camps. In the first camp is Harris Cooper, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. Cooper conducted a review of the existing research on homework in the mid-2000s, and found that, up to a point, the amount of homework students reported doing correlates with their performance on in-class tests. This correlation, the review found, was stronger for older students than for younger ones. This conclusion is generally accepted among educators, in part because it’s compatible with “the 10-minute rule,” a rule of thumb popular among teachers suggesting that the proper amount of homework is approximately 10 minutes per night, per grade level—that is, 10 minutes a night for first graders, 20 minutes a night for second graders, and so on, up to two hours a night for high schoolers. In Cooper’s eyes, homework isn’t overly burdensome for the typical American kid. He points to a 2014 Brookings Institution report that found “little evidence that the homework load has increased for the average student”; onerous amounts of homework, it determined, are indeed out there, but relatively rare. Moreover, the report noted that most parents think their children get the right amount of homework, and that parents who are worried about under-assigning outnumber those who are worried about over-assigning. Cooper says that those latter worries tend to come from a small number of communities with “concerns about being competitive for the most selective colleges and universities.” According to Alfie Kohn, squarely in camp two, most of the conclusions listed in the previous three paragraphs are questionable. Kohn, the author of The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing, considers homework to be a “reliable extinguisher of curiosity,” and has several complaints with the evidence that Cooper and others cite in favor of it. Kohn notes, among other things, that Cooper’s 2006 meta-analysis doesn’t establish causation, and that its central correlation is based on children’s (potentially unreliable) self-reporting of how much time they spend doing homework. (Kohn’s prolific writing on the subject alleges numerous other methodological faults.) In fact, other correlations make a compelling case that homework doesn’t help. Some countries whose students regularly outperform American kids on standardized tests, such as Japan and Denmark, send their kids home with less schoolwork, while students from some countries with higher homework loads than the U.S., such as Thailand and Greece, fare worse on tests. (Of course, international comparisons can be fraught because so many factors, in education systems and in societies at large, might shape students’ success.) Kohn also takes issue with the way achievement is commonly assessed. “If all you want is to cram kids’ heads with facts for tomorrow’s tests that they’re going to forget by next week, yeah, if you give them more time and make them do the cramming at night, that could raise the scores,” he says. “But if you’re interested in kids who know how to think or enjoy learning, then homework isn’t merely ineffective, but counterproductive.” His concern is, in a way, a philosophical one. “The practice of homework assumes that only academic growth matters, to the point that having kids work on that most of the school day isn’t enough,” Kohn says. What about homework’s effect on quality time spent with family? On long-term information retention? On critical-thinking skills? On social development? On success later in life? On happiness? The research is quiet on these questions. Another problem is that research tends to focus on homework’s quantity rather than its quality, because the former is much easier to measure than the latter. While experts generally agree that the substance of an assignment matters greatly (and that a lot of homework is uninspiring busywork), there isn’t a catchall rule for what’s best—the answer is often specific to a certain curriculum or even an individual student. Given that homework’s benefits are so narrowly defined (and even then, contested), it’s a bit surprising that assigning so much of it is often a classroom default, and that more isn’t done to make the homework that is assigned more enriching. A number of things are preserving this state of affairs—things that have little to do with whether homework helps students learn. Jack Schneider, the Massachusetts parent and professor, thinks it’s important to consider the generational inertia of the practice. “The vast majority of parents of public-school students themselves are graduates of the public education system,” he says. “Therefore, their views of what is legitimate have been shaped already by the system that they would ostensibly be critiquing.” In other words, many parents’ own history with homework might lead them to expect the same for their children, and anything less is often taken as an indicator that a school or a teacher isn’t rigorous enough. (This dovetails with—and complicates—the finding that most parents think their children have the right amount of homework.) Barbara Stengel, an education professor at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College, brought up two developments in the educational system that might be keeping homework rote and unexciting. The first is the importance placed in the past few decades on standardized testing, which looms over many public-school classroom decisions and frequently discourages teachers from trying out more creative homework assignments. “They could do it, but they’re afraid to do it, because they’re getting pressure every day about test scores,” Stengel says. Second, she notes that the profession of teaching, with its relatively low wages and lack of autonomy, struggles to attract and support some of the people who might reimagine homework, as well as other aspects of education. “Part of why we get less interesting homework is because some of the people who would really have pushed the limits of that are no longer in teaching,” she says. “In general, we have no imagination when it comes to homework,” Stengel says. She wishes teachers had the time and resources to remake homework into something that actually engages students. “If we had kids reading—anything, the sports page, anything that they’re able to read—that’s the best single thing. If we had kids going to the zoo, if we had kids going to parks after school, if we had them doing all of those things, their test scores would improve. But they’re not. They’re going home and doing homework that is not expanding what they think about.” “Exploratory” is one word Mike Simpson used when describing the types of homework he’d like his students to undertake. Simpson is the head of the Stone Independent School, a tiny private high school in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, that opened in 2017. “We were lucky to start a school a year and a half ago,” Simpson says, “so it’s been easy to say we aren’t going to assign worksheets, we aren’t going assign regurgitative problem sets.” For instance, a half-dozen students recently built a 25-foot trebuchet on campus. Simpson says he thinks it’s a shame that the things students have to do at home are often the least fulfilling parts of schooling: “When our students can’t make the connection between the work they’re doing at 11 o’clock at night on a Tuesday to the way they want their lives to be, I think we begin to lose the plot.” When I talked with other teachers who did homework makeovers in their classrooms, I heard few regrets. Brandy Young, a second-grade teacher in Joshua, Texas, stopped assigning take-home packets of worksheets three years ago, and instead started asking her students to do 20 minutes of pleasure reading a night. She says she’s pleased with the results, but she’s noticed something funny. “Some kids,” she says, “really do like homework.” She’s started putting out a bucket of it for students to draw from voluntarily—whether because they want an additional challenge or something to pass the time at home. Chris Bronke, a high-school English teacher in the Chicago suburb of Downers Grove, told me something similar. This school year, he eliminated homework for his class of freshmen, and now mostly lets students study on their own or in small groups during class time. It’s usually up to them what they work on each day, and Bronke has been impressed by how they’ve managed their time. In fact, some of them willingly spend time on assignments at home, whether because they’re particularly engaged, because they prefer to do some deeper thinking outside school, or because they needed to spend time in class that day preparing for, say, a biology test the following period. “They’re making meaningful decisions about their time that I don’t think education really ever gives students the experience, nor the practice, of doing,” Bronke said. The typical prescription offered by those overwhelmed with homework is to assign less of it—to subtract. But perhaps a more useful approach, for many classrooms, would be to create homework only when teachers and students believe it’s actually needed to further the learning that takes place in class—to start with nothing, and add as necessary.

Newsbeat

The Cult of Homework

Popular Science On March 18, 2018, Elaine Herzberg, 49, was crossing a road in Tempe, Arizona, when a Volvo SUV traveling at 39 miles per hour hit and killed her. ­Although she was one of thousands of U.S. pedestrians killed by vehicles every year, one distinctive—and highly modern—aspect set her death apart: Nobody was driving that Volvo. A computer was. A fatality caused by a self-driving car might not be more tragic than another, but it does encourage the wariness many of us feel about technology making life-and-death decisions. Twelve months later, a survey by AAA revealed that 71 percent of Americans were too scared to zip around in a totally autonomous ride—an eight percent increase from a ­similar poll taken before Herzberg’s death. Self-driving cars are already cruising our streets, their spinning lasers and other sensors scanning the world around them. Some are from big companies such as Waymo—part of Google’s parent conglomerate Alphabet—or General Motors, while others are the work of outfits you might not have heard of, including Drive.ai or Aptiv. (Uber operated the Volvo involved in Arizona’s fatal crash and took its self-​­driving cars off the roads for about nine months afterward.) But what makes some of us so wary of these robotic chauffeurs, and how can they earn our trust? To understand these questions, it first helps to consider what psychologists call the theory of mind. Put simply, it’s the recognition that other people have brains in their heads that are busy thinking, just like ours (usually) are. The theory comes in handy on the road. Before we venture into a crosswalk, we might first make eye contact with a driver and then think, He sees me, so I’m safe, or He doesn’t, so I’m not. It’s a technique we likely use more than we realize, both behind the wheel and on our feet. “We know how other people are going to act because we know how we would act,” explains Azim Shariff, an associate professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, who has written about this issue in the journal Nature Human Behaviour. But you can’t make eye contact with an algorithm. Autonomous cars generally have backup humans ready to take control if necessary, but when the car is in self-driving mode, the computer’s in charge. “We’re going to have to learn a theory of the machine mind,” Shariff says. What that means in practice is that self-driving cars will need to provide clear signals—and not just turn signals—to let the public know what that machine mind is planning. One solution comes from Drive.ai, a company ­running self-driving vans in Texas. The bright-orange-and-blue vehicles have LED signs on all four sides that respond to the environment with messages. They can tell a pedestrian who wants to cross in front of the car, “Waiting for You.” Or they can warn them: ­“Going Now/Please Wait.” A related strategy is intended for passengers, not pedestrians: Screens in Waymo vehicles show car occupants a simple, animated version of what the autonomous vehicle is seeing. Those displays can also show what the car is doing, like if it’s pausing to allow a human to cross. “Trust is the willingness to make yourself vulnerable to somebody else,” Shariff says. “We engage in it because we can pretty easily predict what the other person will do.” All of which means that if the cars are predictable and do what they say they will do, people will be more likely to trust them. Sound familiar? Communicating with the machine mind is important, but that doesn’t mean we want it to mimic exactly how humans think and act while driving. In fact, the promise of traveling by autonomous car is that silicon brains won’t do dumb things such as text and drive, or drink and drive, or rocket down the highway while upset after a breakup. (Cars don’t date.) “I believe that they have the potential to be safer” than regular cars, says Marjory S. Blumenthal, a senior policy ana­lyst at the RAND Corporation think tank who has researched the vehicles. But she says there’s not enough good data yet to know for sure. One practical way to create a reputation for safety is to start slow. The University of Michigan’s pair of self-driving shuttles go just 12 miles per hour. Huei Peng, a professor of mechanical engineering who oversees the little buses, says the research team behind the project is building trust by not asking too much: The predetermined route is just about a mile long, so they’re not exactly speeding down a highway in the snow. “We’re trying to push the envelope but in a very cautious way,” Peng says. Like other experts, Peng compares self-​­driving cars to elevators: an initially frightening technology that people eventually got used to. Ultimately, not everyone will have to trust driverless cars enough to go for a ride, and especially not at first. Indeed, the public isn’t homogeneous, says Raj Rajkumar, who directs the Metro21: Smart Cities Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He notices three categories of potential users: tech skeptics, who know that their computer crashes and worry about getting into a vehicle controlled by one; early adopters, who are delighted by the promise of new tech; and people who are stressed by driving and would rather not do it if they don’t have to. The early adopters will buy in first, followed by the folks who just dislike driving, and then finally the skeptics, he argues. “So it’s a long process.” Trust grows like a self-driving shuttle drives: slowly.

What will it take for humans to trust self driving cars?

The Verge “Prison labor” is usually associated with physical work, but inmates at two prisons in Finland are doing a new type of labor: classifying data to train artificial intelligence algorithms for a startup. Though the startup in question, Vainu, sees the partnership as a kind of prison reform that teaches valuable skills, other experts say it plays into the exploitative economics of prisoners being required to work for very low wages. Vainu is building a comprehensive database of companies around the world that helps businesses find contractors to work with, says co-founder Tuomas Rasila. For this to work, people need to read through hundreds of thousands of business articles scraped from the internet and label whether, for example, an article is about Apple the tech company or a fruit company that has “apple” in the name. (This labeled data is then used to train an algorithm that manages the database.) That’s no problem for articles in English: Vainu simply set up an Amazon Mechanical Turk account to have people do these small tasks. But Mechanical Turk is “not really that useful when you want to do something [with the] Finnish language,” Rasila says, and the company had only one trainee tagging lots of data in the Finnish language. “We saw that and said, ‘okay, this is not going to be enough,” he adds. The Vainu offices happen to be in the same building as the headquarters of the Criminal Sanctions Agency (CSA), the government agency that oversees Finnish prisons, and so, says Rasila, the founders had an idea: “Hey, we could actually use prison labor.” The partnership started about three months ago and Vainu is now working with two different prisons, one in Helsinki and one in Turku. Vainu shipped 10 computers to these prisons and pays the CSA for each task the prisoners complete. The amount is comparable to how much the startup would have paid for a task done on Mechanical Turk, though the CSA is responsible for figuring out how much of that goes to the prisoners, as well as selecting the inmates who do the data classification. Officials at the agency were excited to partner, according to Rasila, especially because the new jobs don’t require anything other than a laptop. “There’s no risk for violence,” he says, adding that when it comes to other forms of prison labor, like metalsmithing, access to tools that can be turned into makeshift weapons can make a prison workspace “a dangerous place.” Rasila estimates that, currently, a little less than 100 prisoners are working on Vainu’s project for a few hours a day. (A representative from the CSA did not respond to a request for comment.) Right now, Vainu and the CSA have an annual contract based on the number of tasks. The Vainu team hopes to expand elsewhere in Finland, and other countries where it can be hard to find people willing to do this type of work in local languages. To them, it’s a win-win situation. One motivation for the inmates is to make money, of course, but “a selling point of this was that the demand for training AI is actually increasing significantly, globally,” Rasila says. Similarly, the CSA wrote in a release that the program is part of its efforts to develop work activities that match “the requirements of modern working life,” and a PR representative pitched the partnership to The Verge as “an opportunity for inmates to have a job that can empower them.” It’s not surprising, either, that there would be an especially high demand for this type of work in other countries, according to Lilly Irani, a professor of communication at the University of California at San Diego. AI algorithms need to be trained in culturally specific ways, she says, and most Mechanical Turk workers are in the US. Though Rasila says that this is an example of developing skills that can be useful in the future, he also says that the tasks have “zero learning curve” and only require (presumably pre-existing) literacy, which calls into question how useful this skill is. This type of job tends to be “rote, menial, and repetitive,” says Sarah T. Roberts, a professor of information science at the University of California at Los Angeles who studies information workers. It does not require building high level of skill, and if a university researcher tried to partner with prison laborers in the same way, “that would not pass an ethics review board for a study.” While it’s good that the prisoners are being paid a similar wage as on Mechanical Turk, Roberts points out that wages on Mechanical Turk are extremely low anyway. One recent research paper found that workers made a median wage of $2 an hour. For Irani, there’s nothing special about AI in this story. In the US at least, prison labor has long been controversial, with some saying that it economically exploits workers while others argue that it can help rehabilitate them. To her, the public relations push around the collaboration is more surprising than the fact that digital work has become part of prison labor. “The hook is that we have this kind of hype circulating around AI so that we can masquerade really old forms of labor exploitation as ‘reforming prisons,’” Irani says. “They’re connecting social movements, reducing it to hype, and using that to sell AI.”

Inmates in Finland are training AI as part of prison labor

The Guardian Nobody was supposed to see Yovana Mendoza eating the fish. The 28-year-old influencer, also known as Rawvana, has amassed more than 3 million followers across YouTube and Instagram by extolling the life-changing properties of a raw vegan diet. She has built a lucrative brand around veganism. But a couple of weeks ago, Mendoza was recorded eating seafood in a video posted by another vlogger. Realising she was being filmed, she tried to hide the fish, but the jig was up. “It was one of the worst days of my life,” Mendoza told the Daily Beast, recounting the ensuing vicious backlash from “vegan YouTube”. “I felt like someone had died.” Well, mate, someone did die. The fish. That’s why the vegans were angry. Happily, the fish died for a noble cause. As the controversy escalated, Mendoza posted a 33-minute video titled This Is What Is Happening, where she admitted she had stopped being a vegan for health reasons. Her periods had become irregular, and she had been having digestive problems, so she had started eating animal products to see if that helped. In a perfect universe, Mendoza’s digestion would have been of no interest to anybody but herself. But we live in hell; her video has been watched more than 850,000 times, and the postlapsarian drama (dubbed “Fishgate”) has made international news, covered by everyone from the Washington Post to the South China Morning Post. It’s not difficult to unpack this story’s virality: people love laughing at vegans. But there is a more serious side. Most obviously, it highlights the artifice of the internet: everybody filters their life to some extent, selling a more aspirational version of themselves. Fishgate is also a worrying reminder that people are increasingly getting health advice from unqualified online influencers. The registered nutritionist Rhiannon Lambert told the Telegraph that she had seen a rise in clients coming to her clinic with symptoms resulting from poor nutrition and, in severe cases, with eating disorders, having taken the advice of social media stars. Not only was Mendoza promoting a restrictive diet that was making her sick, she was extolling dangerous practices, such as 25-day water fasts, to her millions of followers. And she is far from the only influencer promoting extreme eating. Jordan Peterson, a prominent psychologist, has been outspoken about his all-beef diet, claiming it cured his depression and his gum disease. (Unfortunately, it hasn’t cured his pseudo-intellectual prattling.) The internet seems to have ushered in an unhealthy age of food fundamentalism. There are, for example, “bitcoin carnivores”: a small but intense community of cryptocurrency enthusiasts who believe that you should only eat meat and only use bitcoin. The internet’s ad-centric infrastructure has accelerated this march towards food fundamentalism. Last year, the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci wrote a piece for the New York Times headlined YouTube, the Great Radicalizer, which argued that the video platform was pushing people towards more extreme content because it helped generate clicks. “Videos about vegetarianism led to videos about veganism. Videos about jogging led to videos about running ultramarathons,” she wrote. “It seems as if you are never ‘hardcore’ enough for YouTube’s recommendation algorithm.” “You are what you eat,” has never been so true as it is in the digital era. Whether we are vegan or carnivores, it seems that a lot of us are hungry for community, and will go to extreme lengths to find it. Fishgate may seem funny on the surface, but it’s a tiny part of a much larger problem.

The furore over the fish eating vegan influencer is a warning to us all

The New York Times “I was sure she was dead,” Lottie Mackinnon said quietly. Ms. Mackinnon was sitting huddled in the corner of a cafe with her two children, sipping hot chocolate as she described the day three years ago when she was walking with her Border collie, Bonnie, over the Overtoun Bridge in Dumbarton, Scotland. “Something overcame Bonnie as soon as we approached the bridge,” Ms. Mackinnon said. “At first she froze, but then she became possessed by a strange energy and ran and jumped right off the parapet.” A bewitched dog lured to leap off a bridge by a malevolent force? It sounds like a preposterous scene straight from an old “Twilight Zone” episode. But Ms. Mackinnon’s dog is one of hundreds that Scots insist have suddenly been compelled to throw themselves off the gothic stone structure since the 1950s. Many have ended up dead on the jagged rocks in the deep valley bed below. Residents of Dumbarton, which is northwest of Glasgow, began calling Overtoun, a century-old bridge that stretches across a 50-foot gorge, the “dog suicide bridge.” Ms. Mackinnon, who grew up in the neighboring village of Milton, winced at the memory of scurrying down the gorge through the trees and the bushes in a desperate hunt for Bonnie. But when she approached the dog’s body, Bonnie started to whimper and eventually tried to stand up. “It was a miracle that she survived,” she said. In a land rife with superstitions, myths and monsters the bridge has been at the center of an enduring mystery. Why do so many dogs jump? Local researchers estimate more than 300 have sailed off the bridge; tabloid reports say it’s 600. At least 50 dogs are said to have died. Some say there are rational explanations involving the terrain and the scents of mammals in the gorge that may drive the dogs into a frenzy. Other explanations take on a more paranormal tone. The bridge’s location, hushed, lush and sometimes still, fits the description of what the pagan Celts called a “thin place,” a mesmerizing spot where heaven and earth overlap. “People in Dumbarton are very superstitious,” said Alastair Dutton, a local taxi driver. “We grew up playing in the Overtoun grounds, and we believe in ghosts here because we’ve all seen or felt spirits up here.” The leaps inspired an episode of the American TV series “The Unexplained Files.” An entire book is dedicated to exploring the phenomenon. But despite all this attention, the mystery lives on, unsolved. From a distance, it seems as if the ornate Victorian bridge, built in 1895, is a mere extension of the driveway of an adjoining 19th-century manor built in Dumbarton by a wealthy industrialist, James White. Closer still, one can make out the bridge’s three archways spanning a small river, the Overtoun Burn. Standing in the middle on the bridge’s blackened granite parapets, it is easy to forget the space beneath falls away into the deep gorge. In the manor nearby, the current tenant, Bob Hill, said he and his wife had seen several dogs suddenly dive off the bridge since they moved into the property, now called Overtoun House, more than 17 years ago. But Mr. Hill, a pastor from Texas who runs a local center for women in crisis, had an earthbound explanation: The smell of small animals scurrying around in the gorge below the bridge drives the dogs into a frenzy; then they break free of leashes — if they’re on any — and jump. “The dogs catch the scent of mink, pine martens or some other mammal and then they will jump up on the wall of the bridge,” Mr. Hill said. “And because it’s tapered, they will just topple over.” Still, he allowed, the Overtoun grounds are “more spiritual than other parts.” “Scotland is kind of a place where there is a lot of the supernatural, and it is very common in people’s lives,” he added. Paul Owens, a teacher of religion and philosophy in Glasgow, grew up in a town close to the bridge and recently published a book about the mystery. When it comes to an explanation for the leaping dogs, he is firmly in the supernatural camp. “After 11 years of research, I’m convinced it’s a ghost that is behind all of this,” he declared, while sitting outside a pub on a drizzly day in Glasgow. Mr. Owens’s theory is popular among some local residents, who grew up hearing stories about the “White Lady of Overtoun,” the grieving widow of John White, James’s son. “The lady lived alone in grief for more than 30 years after her husband died in 1908,” said Marion Murray, a Dumbarton resident. “Her ghost has been lurking around here ever since. She’s been sighted in windows and walking around the grounds.” In 2010, the animal behaviorist David Sands investigated the phenomenon and ruled out the possibility that the animals were deliberately killing themselves. His experiments at the bridge found that dogs — especially long-nosed breeds — were drawn to the scent of mammals below. Dr. Sands theorized that the dogs’ limited perspective, their ignorance that the path changes from level ground to a bridge spanning a deep gorge and the smells wafting through the air probably enticed the dogs to jump. But even he acknowledged that the bridge had a “strange feeling.” Some residents found his theory plausible, but many here still take the position that the leaps are inexplicable. They question why the phenomenon does not occur at the same rate at other bridges in Britain where mammals roam below. “Other bridges don’t have troubled spirits lurking about,” Ms. Mackinnon insisted grimly. Despite the macabre reputation, the Overtoun grounds remain a popular dog-walking area and many of the animals are off leash. “Many people don’t believe in the story until they see it for themselves, and even then they don’t think it will happen to them,” said Mr. Hill, the pastor. One day, Emma Dunlop, who said she had heard “the horror stories,” took her Labrador retriever, Ginger, for a walk to Overtoun anyway. She did not let him out of her station wagon until he was on a leash. “He’s never tried to jump,” she said, “but sometimes he freezes or hesitates when he gets on the bridge, so I’m always careful.” Ginger jumped from the car, raced around his owner and headed straight toward Overtoun Bridge, crossing it without any hesitation. But then Ginger froze, looking back intently at something on the bridge, which appeared empty to human eyes. “Aye, there she is — there’s the White Lady,” Ms. Dunlop said with a laugh, suggesting Ginger had seen the bridge’s ghost. Then the pair continued their walk.

Dog Suicide Bridge: Why Do So Many Pets Keep Leaping Into a Scottish Gorge?

The central idea behind the Brexit referendum was for Britain to “take back control”—over its laws, its money, its immigration system. For those who campaigned in favor of the United Kingdom leaving the European Union, Brexit would mark the beginning of a new, more global Britain. By leaving the EU, they argued, they would be returning power from Brussels back to lawmakers in Westminster and, by extension, to the British people themselves. But if the past two years have demonstrated anything, it’s that Britain hasn’t taken back control. It has lost control entirely. More than 1,000 days after the U.K. voted to leave the EU, the country’s future is still shrouded in uncertainty. Its exit date from the bloc is still unknown. Its parliament is hopelessly divided. Who will be leading the country in the weeks and months ahead is no longer clear. No one, least of all British lawmakers, seem to know how Brexit will happen, or even whether it will happen at all. Nearly every political figure or institution of note in London—including Prime Minister Theresa May, who has lost control of Brexit to both her party’s right wing and to Parliament, and the House of Commons itself, which has not been able to agree on any single option for leaving the EU—has, when seeking to exert control, proved to have none. Much like Brexit itself, Britain’s loss of control wasn’t a moment, but a process. It began two years ago, when May embarked on a series of negotiations with the bloc during which her government, without a plan or, soon, a governing majority to support one, appeared at best unprepared and at worst unsure of what it was even asking for. The British wielded little control over the negotiations, from the timetable that dictated how they would take place (the EU ruled out beginning talks until London formally triggered Article 50, the bloc’s time-limited exit procedure) to the sequencing of the talks themselves (which was also set by the bloc). What little control Britain did have, it often squandered. May’s decision to preemptively invoke Article 50 is now widely regarded as a strategic error. Her failure to pursue a Brexit strategy that could pass muster with both her colleagues in Westminster and her allies in Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party, who prop up her Conservative Party’s wafer-thin majority, is another. This loss of control didn’t end when British and EU negotiators reached a provisional agreement on the terms of the U.K.’s withdrawal late last year. Instead of fighting with the EU, May’s government began fighting with itself. The prime minister’s deal—the only one the EU said it would consider—was twice rejected in the House of Commons by historic margins. Facing the prospect of a third defeat on her deal, and with no parliamentary support for the country’s crashing out of the EU, May was forced to go back to Brussels and ask to delay Britain’s March 29 exit date. Here, too, the decision-making power belonged to the EU: A short extension will be granted until May 22 if the House of Commons agrees to support May’s deal by March 29; if it does not, the extension will last until April 12. A longer extension is conditional on Britain taking part in the upcoming European Parliament elections, which May has so far ruled out. Throughout the negotiations, various interests have tried to exercise influence—from the hard-line Brexit proponents within May’s own party and her Northern Irish partners advocating against her deal, to the opposition members of Parliaments calling for a second referendum. Though their efforts have worked to stymie parliamentary support of May’s deal, they have done little to achieve their respective aims. The chaos was compounded this week when the British Parliament, in a bid to end the Brexit stalemate, made the historic decision to strip the government of its powers to set the parliamentary agenda so that it could hold a series of nonbinding votes on Brexit alternatives. The plan ultimately backfired Wednesday night after eight different options—including maintaining a close economic relationship with the EU, a second referendum, and revoking Article 50—failed to achieve the support of a majority. Having lost control of her party and her cabinet, as well as her authority in Parliament, May did have one last card to play: her own leadership. On Wednesday night, the prime minister pledged to her Conservative Party colleagues that she would end her premiership early in exchange for her opponents’ agreeing to support her deal. “I know there is a desire for a new approach—and new leadership—in the second phase of the Brexit negotiations,” May told Conservative lawmakers at a meeting in Parliament, “and I won’t stand in the way of that.” With few lawmakers signaling their willingness to shift in support of the prime minister’s deal, even her own resignation seems to be out of her control. Now it’s up to Parliament to reach a consensus on May’s deal or find an alternative.

In a Bid to Take Back Control, Britain Lost It

When Chris Rackliffe, a motivational speaker in New York, met a potential friend at a bar last weekend, it never occurred to him to exchange phone numbers. Instead, the two swapped Instagram handles, and have been liking each others’ posts. Rackliffe said they'll probably meet up in person again soon. "It's so much more casual to give someone your Instagram handle and keep in touch through stories and DMs,” Rackliffe said. “Swapping numbers feels so serious and stiff nowadays." As Instagram has grown to more than a billion monthly users, it has also morphed into people's default public internet profile and communication method. "I cannot imagine preferring phone number to Instagram handle," said Ziad Ahmed, founder of Juv, a Gen Z consulting agency. While nearly many people message frequently throughout the day with their closest friends, Instagram is particularly great for connecting with people you don't know super-well, or have just met. "Usually someone hands you their phone and you follow yourself on their Instagram," said Rachel Schultz, who works in the advertising industry. "It’s nice because you can then share things with them like events or funny things or whatever they’re into, which makes nourishing new friendships easy." Crucially, Instagram provides much more context—and conversation fodder—than a random string of ten digits. Because iMessage or SMS don’t come with public profiles, when someone texts you from a number outside your contacts, you have little to no information on who that person is or where you met. Sometimes a person will provide this information themself via text, but often you're left guessing. But adding someone on Instagram is like scanning a digital business card into your address book. You get the person's full name, their bio, and a direct line of contact through Instagram DM. Plus you have the added benefit of scrolling back on their profile for additional context on who they are and what they're into. A person's Instagram posts provide a stream of conversation prompts: Maybe you’ll just reply to their Story, asking where they got that pasta they're eating, or notice they're nearby and asking to meet up for a drink. One of the hardest parts of fostering a new connection is figuring out how to reach out and start a conversation out of thin air. Instagram makes it easy. John Colucci, a social strategist in Seattle, said that he's even seen the insta swap become more popular in business settings. In fact, he has all but done away with his physical business cards. Instagram is "a less intense, light touch connection," he said. It’s notably less uptight than LinkedIn, said Allison Winer, a public relations strategist in Baltimore. "LinkedIn is so stale when it comes to being interactive, and then exchanging numbers is a little too formal and close for comfort," she told me. And of course, because Instagram is such a good way to get a sense of someone's personality and interests, it's also a great way to suss out dating opportunities. Winer said that men nearly always ask for her Instagram handle as opposed to her phone number. "To be honest, I always try to look them up that way, too," she said. "It gives you a little insight into their life, and of course, selfies." Many dating apps, such as Tinder and Bumble, even allow users to sync their Instagram profiles so suitors can browse their recent pics. In 2017, New York Magazine coined the term Tindstagramming, for the growing phenomenon of men who slide directly into women's DMs on Instagram looking for a date. Revealing your phone number to too many people can also be a security concern. Once someone adds your number to their contacts it's easy for them to find your profiles on other apps. Given the prevalence of two-factor authentication, keeping your phone number private is an important part of thwarting SIM card hackers. "I avoid giving my [phone number] out unless I know a person very well," said Nima Gardideh, a tech worker and entrepreneur, citing security concerns. When things go south, the fluid nature of Instagram makes it easy to disconnect. Whereas on Facebook or LinkedIn unfriending someone is a default two-way interaction, on Instagram, it's easy to simply click the unfollow button. Instagram swapping doesn't work in all contexts. Many users, particularly older ones, still consider the platform to be more personal and are uncomfortable being followed by, for example, more junior members at work. But there are signs the practice is spreading. After I recently posed the question in a Facebook group for Bay Area parents, many moms revealed that they preferred connecting via Instagram before giving away more detailed contact information. "I asked to exchange phone numbers for texting with another mom and I felt a weird vibe, like I was being intrusive," commented Tina Grove. "I think I should have asked for her Instagram handle instead."

How Instagram Replaced the Contacts List

The New York Times When Facebook and its family of apps experienced a daylong malfunction last week, millions of people got a taste of what life would be like if the social network were out of their lives for good. I can tell you more about that: I permanently deleted my Facebook account five months ago. So what has happened in the aftermath? The social network’s long-stated mission has been to connect people so that we can live in a more open world. But after being off Facebook since October, I found that I did not feel less connected and that my social life didn’t suffer, even though I was no longer seeing status updates and pictures on my News Feed. My friends and I continued making plans over email and messaging apps. So did my family. Same old, same old. There were some differences, though — including some strange experiences with online ads. Facebook has long used information that it collects on its users to target people with the most relevant ads. So after a few months of deleting the social network, I began seeing random ads pop up on sites like Instagram (which Facebook owns). Among them: promotions for women’s shaving products, purses and bathing suits. Instagram might have started thinking I was female, but my wallet thanked me. I realized I was spending considerably less money on my usual guilty pleasure of buying clothing and cooking gadgets online because I was no longer seeing the relevant Facebook ads that egged me on to splurge. Over the past five months, my online shopping purchases dropped about 43 percent. So what about FOMO, otherwise known as a fear of missing out, typically induced by social media? That is often one of the biggest reasons people are afraid to quit Facebook. What if they didn’t see that post about an outing with a distant friend? Or a party invitation shared on the social network? For me, it turned out that without Facebook, there wasn’t much I really missed out on — except targeted ads. Here’s more of what I learned. I don’t miss my ‘friends’ Over the 14 years that I used Facebook, I accrued about 500 friends. Most were former classmates whom I had lost touch with. In my real life, I have about 20 friends I talk to on a regular basis. So when I finally deleted Facebook, the fallout was underwhelming. Those same friends kept in touch over iMessage, Signal or email. We still get dinner or go to the movies together. I can think of one friend who exclusively used Facebook Messenger to communicate — we email now and talk less than we used to, but when we meet in person we are as close as we always were. And I can’t remember the last time I attended an event that I was invited to via Facebook, so I never had a case of FOMO. I can also tell you what I absolutely don’t miss about Facebook: the people who frequently posted online quizzes, political news stories or their thoughts about current events on the site. Occasionally, there were funny or interesting posts, but ultimately most were time wasters. Recently, I also started reading more books. Could it be because I’m no longer expending my energy reading Facebook? Brands have long been able to target us with ads through Facebook’s tools. You might see an ad on Facebook for a watch, for instance, because a watch company used the tools to upload your email address and leverage other data that the social network has on you — like your age or the fact that you follow Timex’s Facebook page. When you browse sites outside Facebook, the company can still track your browsing activity to help brands serve you targeted ads. After visiting a website for a pair of shoes, for example, you might see an ad for those shoes — or similar ones — when you go to another site. The social network uses a variety of approaches to collect information about web users. One involves Facebook pixel, an invisible tracker that brands can embed into their websites. When you load a website for a brand, Facebook pixel sends information about the device and its browsing activities back to the company. The social network can then use that information to help brands target you. When I deleted Facebook, I wanted all of that ad targeting to go away. So not only did I erase my Facebook account, I also installed tracker blockers on my computer browser and mobile devices to prevent advertisers from using web cookies and invisible tracking pixels like Facebook’s. The extra steps worked. The onslaught of targeted online ads stopped. “If you have the tracker blocker and deleted your Facebook account, you’ve exited,” said Gabriel Weinberg, the chief executive of DuckDuckGo, which offers internet privacy tools including a web browser that blocks trackers. Facebook says it does not build profiles on people who are not on the social network, nor does it serve targeted ads to them. “Sites and apps send us information about the people who visit them, regardless of whether that person has a Facebook profile,” the company said in a statement. “If you aren’t a Facebook user, we don’t know who you are and don’t build any kind of profile on you.” Advertisers still have methods other than Facebook to chase me around, but there are economic reasons for them to give up. With Facebook’s tools, it was relatively affordable and effective for them to track and target me. Without those, it gets a lot more costly. “You might be too expensive for them to chase,” said Michael Priem, the chief executive of Modern Impact, an advertising firm in Minneapolis. My spending dropped. A lot. Facebook has often defended targeted ads by saying that internet users are annoyed when they see irrelevant ads. I disagree. Yes, the ads I now see have nothing to do with me — but the benefit was watching my spending drop immensely. About a year ago, I recall shopping on the site for Taylor Stitch, a men’s clothing retailer. I looked at a coat and closed the window after deciding not to buy it. Then over the next weeks, an ad for that coat loaded on Facebook, inside Instagram and on other websites. Guess what happened? I bought it. After deleting Facebook, I have more often canceled online purchases after asking myself: Do I need another plaid shirt, frying pan or cocktail shaker? The answer was always no. And as there is now nothing to change my mind, my credit card remains sheathed. I opened Mint, the budget tracking tool, to get a clear picture of how much I was saving. From October to mid-March, I spent about $341 on clothing and $1,100 on Amazon purchases. That was a significant drop from my internet shopping sprees before I deleted Facebook. From October 2017 to mid-March of 2018, I spent $1,008 on clothing and $1,542 on Amazon. Gulp. For years, I saw ads on my personal Instagram account for men’s boots, briefcases and video games. Now, I’m getting ads for products like women’s razors and brassieres. I have a theory for the change, which Facebook didn’t dispute: Having no Facebook account means Instagram is missing big pieces of accompanying information about who I am and what I like. So it may be lacking signals to serve the correct ads. And because my fiancée and I both run our dog’s Instagram account and interact with it from our personal accounts and our own devices, some wires may have been crossed and Instagram now thinks I’m female. (Instagram does not require people to share their gender when signing up for accounts.) That’s a bit odd, but I’m not annoyed. Instead, I find the irrelevant ads amusing. At least they give me ideas for future gifts.

I Deleted Facebook Last Year. Here is What Changed (and What Did).

It’s been just four days since the president learned that Robert Mueller found no evidence of collusion, but Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s lawyer, is no longer in the mood to celebrate. He’s thrilled about the outcome, of course, as is his client. Trump told the former New York mayor that “he’s happier than he thought he would be.” But Giuliani, sipping a Diet Coke on Wednesday morning at the Trump Hotel, said it’s time to focus on the next mission: Find out who started all this—and why. “We’re now trying to prove who did it,” Giuliani said. “The premise is, somebody had to have started the ‘He colluded with the Russians’” narrative. (Never mind that Trump’s posture toward the Kremlin has long been strange.) Asked whether the president himself wants an investigation to examine this question, Giuliani said, “Goddamn right he [does]. This is not ‘Oh, gee, it’s over, let’s forget about it.’” A reliable barometer of Trump’s moods, Giuliani offered a glimpse into the future. Mueller might be done with his investigation, but Trump and company are loath to let it drop. They want to capitalize on the president escaping criminal charges and make Mueller’s findings a core piece of 2020 campaign messaging. In their view, Attorney General William Barr’s four-page summary of the report is a gift that vindicates Trump, undercuts Democratic investigations, and repudiates critical news coverage. There’s time enough to talk policy on the campaign trail. Team Trump first wants to showcase the special counsel’s conclusions: According to Barr, Mueller reported no evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians, and he couldn’t make a judgment on obstruction of justice. Even though the probe has led to 215 criminal charges and five prison sentences, Trump and his allies have framed Mueller’s findings as total exoneration. Yet many Republican lawmakers and strategists fear that Trump would be fixating on the wrong message at the wrong time. They worry that Trump risks repeating the same strategic blunder he made in the midterm elections, which culminated in Republicans losing control of the House. Rather than spotlight economic gains rung up on his watch, the president might wind up dwelling on collateral issues of scant interest to voters. In the midterms, Trump locked onto migrant caravans making their way north from Mexico, warning of a national-security threat that never materialized, and ultimately made little mention of the bread-and-butter issues that some strategists believe would have bolstered his party’s odds for winning. Tensions over Trump’s campaign message underscore a split within the Republican Party that’s existed since the day he announced his candidacy for president in 2015. Then and now, he’s trampled long-held convictions about how a presidential candidate should behave, relying on his own instincts and feel for the voters’ mood, to the dismay of mainstream GOP figures. Though the establishment and Trump wings of the GOP have joined forces since the 2016 campaign, the next election will test their alliance anew, with the Mueller report emerging as an early flash point. Trump allies see Barr’s letter as a kind of Swiss Army knife—a tool useful in all kinds of situations. Not only is it exculpatory, they say, but it also implicitly rebukes the press for its coverage of the Russia investigation, inoculating Trump from any future scandal that reporters might unearth. According to a source familiar with internal discussions at the Republican National Committee and the pro-Trump super PAC America First, both organizations are “geared up for any nonsense to come.” They’re already prepared to attack reporters. “Any reporter who tries that will be hit with 30-second spots of all their ridiculous claims about collusion,” said the source, who, like others interviewed for this story, requested anonymity to describe private conversations. “Their tweets have all been screencapped. It’s all ready to go.” Earlier this week, Trump’s campaign previewed the in-your-face tactics they have in mind. A campaign official sent a letter to TV producers cautioning them against booking certain guests who had alleged that Trump colluded with Russia, including Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Representative Adam Schiff of California, and Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez. “It’s not hard to figure where we’re going to go with this,” a current campaign official told The Atlantic. “We’re still in victory-lap mode, but it will turn into a message that [Democrats] will say or do anything to stop us from making America great again, including making up lies about the president and ruining a lot of people’s lives.” xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx White House officials suggested that the president has no plans to “move on” from the report because Democrats aren’t moving on. Instead, “they are doubling and tripling down,” says the White House spokesman Hogan Gidley. At some level, letting go would be out of character. From the first, Trump has personalized the presidency. He still obsesses over the crowd size at his inauguration, along with perceived betrayals from Senator John McCain of Arizona, who died last summer. The Mueller investigation shadowed Trump for nearly two years. Now that it’s over, he is indulging in a bit of triumphalism. But the president’s allies on Capitol Hill take a more clinical view. Having lost their House majority in 2018, they’re not persuaded that the Mueller report is the path back to power. “We have to be able to pivot to something,” one House Republican leadership aide told The Atlantic. “You can certainly use the findings to shine a light on any kind of frivolous investigations, but at the same time, we have to start thinking about moving on.” Representative Mark Meadows of North Carolina, a close Trump ally, suggested that focusing on the press in particular would be unproductive. “Calling on the media to apologize is not something that most people would advocate for, as much as hitting the remote and changing to a different channel,” Meadows said. No less than the leadership of a pro-Trump political-action committee is ready for a new script. “What we’re gonna try to do is get things back on the economic front—I don’t think we want to stay in the mud slopping for another year,” says Ed Rollins, the lead strategist of the Great America PAC. “I hope he can stay focused on his agenda, keep things positive.” Fresh developments could keep the Mueller probe alive in any event. Barr’s letter isn’t the last word on the subject. Mueller’s report clocked in at more than 300 pages, The New York Times reported Thursday, raising the possibility that Trump’s handpicked attorney general elided more troubling conduct on the president’s part. Congressional Democrats are demanding to see the full report, raising the prospect of a standoff with the Justice Department. But should more damaging material come out, Trump’s legal team says they have a lengthy rebuttal at the ready. Trump’s lawyers had drafted a counter-report in preparation for Mueller’s findings. Coming in at nearly 90 pages, it was kept locked in a safe in the Trump attorney Jay Sekulow’s office, ready to be released if the Mueller report found that Trump colluded with Russia or obstructed justice. Throughout Mueller’s investigation, Trump’s lawyers were far more concerned about the obstruction part of the inquiry than the collusion question. Giuliani summarized parts of their defense in the counter-report to The Atlantic. If Mueller wrote that Trump obstructed justice after allegedly telling then–FBI Director James Comey to “let go” of his inquiry into former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, Trump’s lawyers would respond by laying out a timeline that suggests Comey inexplicably sat on the information. Comey said the conversation with Trump took place in February, but he didn’t raise alarm until May, Trump’s lawyers note. “If I’m the director of the FBI, and you call me in, and you are obstructing my investigation, I know it right away,” Giuliani said. “How can he decide … three months later, that this is obstruction?” Trump’s lawyers could still put out some of the counter-report if, in the coming weeks, the Justice Department turns over more material from Mueller’s findings that suggests malfeasance on Trump’s part. Indeed, Mueller’s indecision on obstruction leaves many questions unanswered, which Trump’s team finds frustrating. “It’s kind of absurd that he couldn’t decide,” Giuliani said. “‘Difficult issues of law and fact’—that’s what you’re there for, pal! It’s like saying, ‘Well, I’m a brain surgeon, but I’m not gonna operate because this is a difficult brain situation.’” In the coming weeks and months, the president will not only press for answers on how the investigation began, Giuliani said, but he’ll also potentially consider pardoning its casualties: Though “he hasn’t decided” if he wants to take that step, “that doesn’t mean down the road he’s given up the power to do it. “I mean, are there cases that are worthy of it? Probably. People have been pardoned for far worse,” he continued. “Flynn is a very sympathetic case, and in some ways [the former Trump campaign chairman Paul] Manafort is, because he’s already spent a year in jail.” It’s those emotions that will likely motivate Trump moving forward: a conviction that he and his allies were victims of a devastating miscarriage of justice. Appearing on Sean Hannity’s show on Wednesday evening, the president made clear that the nation should remain riveted to all things Russia, saying that “this was an attempted takeover of our government, of our country.” And his biggest fans affirmed that they have no intention of letting him let go. As Hannity put it, “The deep state’s day of reckoning has now come.”

Strategy to Use Mueller on the Campaign Trail By Trump

The New York Times The dream of a “Blue Texas” has captured the imagination of Democrats for nearly a decade, and Beto O’Rourke has come closer than anyone to making a statewide victory a reality. His strengths as a candidate in his narrow loss in a 2018 Senate race against Ted Cruz — by 2.6 percentage points — led his supporters to push him to run for president, and he obliged them Thursday morning. But his performance may have demonstrated something else: Texas is on the doorstep of emerging as a battleground state, and any number of Democrats might stand a chance to compete there in 2020 for the presidency or the Senate. His relatively close loss is promising for the party because he did not take full advantage of the longer-term trends that might put it over the top sooner than later. His strength came almost exclusively from white voters, not from the growing Hispanic population in the state. None of this is to take away from his accomplishment. He did better than every Democrat running statewide in Texas in the 2018 midterms. It seems unlikely that many Democrats would have fared as well as he did, and you could argue it bodes well for his chances in a presidential race. But on balance his success was a reflection of deeper trends. Mr. O’Rourke’s close result wasn’t because of an exceptional turnout that will be hard for other Democrats to repeat in 2020. Republican voters, defined as those who have participated in a recent Republican primary, turned out at a higher rate than Democratic ones. Neither the Hispanic nor youth voter share of the electorate was higher than it was in 2016, when President Trump won the state by nine points. On the contrary, Democrats in 2020 can be expected to enjoy a more favorable turnout because presidential races tend to draw in more young and Hispanic voters. Mr. O’Rourke might have won Texas last November if turnout had been at the level of a contested presidential race, based on an Upshot analysis of Times/Siena poll responses, actual results and voter file data from L2, a nonpartisan voter file vendor. The data yields an estimate of how every registered voter in Texas would have voted, based on a long list of geographic and demographic factors that predicted vote choice in the Times/Siena polling. Importantly, turnout in 2018 is among those factors, which allows us to fully untangle how much of Mr. O’Rourke’s strength was because of strong turnout among his supporters. The data indicates that two opposing turnout trends influenced the results. The electorate was older, whiter and more Republican than the state as a whole — or than the 2016 electorate. But an O’Rourke supporter was generally likelier to vote than a demographically and politically similar supporter of Mr. Cruz. This was the pattern nationwide, so it is not obvious that this can be attributed to Mr. O’Rourke specifically; it could have been the favorable Democratic environment more generally. Either way, the extra turnout boost probably cut Mr. Cruz’s margin of victory by two points. Mr. O’Rourke might have won with a turnout of around 10 million voters. (The actual turnout was around 8.4 million.) Without the extra edge of a Democratic wave year, it might have taken 11 million votes, a number that is not out of the question in 2020 if Texas is contested as a battleground state. So how did Mr. O’Rourke fare so well? He did it through old-fashioned persuasion, by winning voters who had voted for Republicans and for minor-party candidates. The results themselves make it clear that he won a lot of voters who supported Republicans in other races. He ran three points ahead of the overall Democratic state vote for the U.S. House in 2018 (adjusted for uncontested races), and ahead of every down-ballot Democrat running statewide. Mr. O’Rourke’s personal appeal was probably a factor, and there’s no guarantee a different Democrat can replicate it. His strong favorability rating (plus-10 in the exit polls, 52 percent to 42 percent) is consistent with that possibility, though he might have also had the benefit of a relatively unpopular incumbent in Mr. Cruz. Only 50 percent of voters had a favorable impression of Mr. Cruz in the exit polls (48 percent had an unfavorable one). But Mr. O’Rourke’s personal appeal is not the whole story. After all, many Democrats running for the U.S. House or other statewide offices posted noteworthy performances. The tide lifting all Democratic boats in Texas was an anti-Trump rebellion. Over all, President Trump’s approval rating was at 49 percent in the exit poll and 50 percent in the large AP/Fox Votecast poll. This is consistent with a variety of other survey data, including a recent Quinnipiac poll that put the president’s approval rating at minus-3 among registered voters in the state, 47-50. Gallup, measuring the much more diverse pool of Texan adults, put the president’s approval rating at just 41 percent in 2018. It is notable that Mr. O’Rourke, with 48.3 percent of the vote, fell a bit short of the disapproval number of the president. That could reflect that he was facing a well-known incumbent, which offers on average a meaningful benefit to the officeholder (despite Mr. Cruz’s relative unpopularity). It could also reflect the state’s G.O.P. tradition; some number of Republicans may disapprove of Trump but not be ready to vote for a Democrat. No matter how you explain it, the president’s disapproval rating in Texas would seem to imply that there’s at least some additional upside for Democrats there, beyond what Mr. O’Rourke pulled off. And the president’s far lower approval rating among all adults (as opposed to among registered voters) hints at another opportunity for Democrats: mobilizing unregistered voters. In both cases, Hispanic voters could represent the upside for Democrats. Mr. O’Rourke’s strong showing had essentially nothing to do with the initial vision of a Blue Texas powered by mobilizing the state’s growing Hispanic population. The Texas electorate was only two points more Hispanic in 2018 than it was in 2012, but President Obama lost the state by 16 points in 2012, compared with Mr. O’Rourke’s 2.6-point loss. At the same time, Mr. O’Rourke fared worse than Mr. Obama or Hillary Clinton in many of the state’s heavily Hispanic areas, particularly in more conservative South Texas. This could reflect Mr. Cruz’s relative strength among Hispanic voters compared with a typical Republican. Instead, Mr. O’Rourke’s improvement came almost exclusively from white voters, and particularly college-educated white voters. Whites probably gave him around 33 percent of their votes, up from a mere 22 percent for Mr. Obama in 2012. There’s clearly additional upside for Democrats if they could pair their recent gains among white voters with improvement among Hispanic voters (through some combination of persuasion, higher turnout among registrants and newly registered voters). Can Democrats really turn out Hispanic voters in huge numbers in Texas? There are real barriers, and you wouldn’t expect Hispanic Democrats to turn out in particularly high numbers given their low turnout elsewhere in the country. It is far-fetched to suggest Hispanic mobilization will fundamentally transform the electorate and turn Texas into a blueish state anytime soon. But a more modest increase in turnout or support among Hispanic voters is fairly likely if Texas sees the campaign dollars and attention that come with a contested state in a presidential year. When Mr. Obama contested Virginia, North Carolina and Colorado in 2008, the turnout there increased by an average of 13 percent to 23 percent over 2004 levels, which included a mix of higher turnout among registrants and thousands of newly registered voters. Given the extraordinary turnout in the 2018 midterm election nationwide, it is plausible that turnout will be up substantially in Texas regardless of whether the state is a battleground. Is Texas a true battleground state? Mr. O’Rourke and House Democrats fared much worse in Texas than in clear battleground states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan. They also fared worse than in the next tier of Sun Belt battlegrounds, like Florida, Georgia, Arizona and North Carolina. And Texas is substantially more expensive to compete in than any of those states, save Florida. But if you squint at the midterm results, it is not obvious that Texas will be so far to the right of those Sun Belt battlegrounds. The president’s approval rating in the two election surveys was basically the same in Texas as in Florida, Georgia and Arizona (there were no surveys in North Carolina, where there was no statewide contest). Democrats in Texas, including Mr. O’Rourke, fared worse in the major statewide contests, but it was also the only state where the Democrats all faced incumbents in such contests. It is also the state where the Democrats have the most obvious upside in terms of the mobilization of additional voters; the pace of demographic shifts; and the trend toward Democrats in the Trump era. Put it together, and Texas is on the cusp of being a true (if Republican-tilting) battleground state. It might not be immediately and vigorously contested, as Arizona or North Carolina will most likely be, given the greater expense of campaigning in Texas and the fact that it starts out to the right of those states. But if Democrats chose to contest it seriously in 2020, there wouldn’t be anything crazy about that.

Why Texas Is Nearing Battleground Status (It is Not Just About Beto)

Slate Unless you spend your day glued to a Bloomberg terminal or mainlining CNBC, you might have missed the news late last week that the yield curve for U.S. Treasury bonds “inverted” for the first time since 2007. This dry-sounding development has led to a great deal of speculation on Wall Street and in the financial press about whether an economic downturn might finally be on the way. As the Wall Street Journal’s James Mackintosh put it, “The market’s most reliable recession indicator is finally flashing red.” Why does this have people so worried? The yield curve has inverted in the lead-up to all nine U.S. recessions since 1955. As the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco notes, there has only been one instance in the last six decades when an inversion wasn’t followed by an official recession within two years or less. That was back in the mid-1960s, when growth slowed, but the economy didn’t technically shrink. Since then, there hasn’t been a single false alarm. How the yield curve works is fairly simple: When the economy is healthy, investors usually demand higher yields from long-term than short-term U.S. government bonds, in part because there’s a greater risk that growth will cause inflation to pick up down the line and eat into their interest payments. When the yield curve inverts, the opposite becomes true: The returns on long-term government bonds dip below those on shorter-term ones . That’s what happened last week, when yields on 10-year Treasury notes crossed under the yields on three-month bills—the two securities that economists and investors often compare to determine whether the curve has flipped. It’s a spooky reversal of the debt market’s natural order.* Does this mean the economy is about to crash? Not necessarily. Most analysts seem to be staying even-keeled about the whole thing, reassuring readers that it’s “premature” to panic and such. But it’s as good a sign as any that investors collectively sense some sort of trouble ahead. Nobody can say for sure why the yield curve has inverted at any given time any more than can explain why the stock market falls. But most explanations suggest that investors are basically pessimistic about growth. They may think an economic contraction will keep inflation low or force the Federal Reserve to cut rates. They might be buying 10-year Treasuries—when demand for a bond rises, it pushes up its price and lowers its yield—because they expect economic turmoil in the near-term and want somewhere relatively safe to park their money. It’s not clear if the yield curve can actually help trigger a recession, though some have speculated it could. It could discourage banks from making loans, for instance, since they borrow short term rates and lend at long-term ones. There could also be an element of self-fulfilling prophecy: Once the yield curve inverts, businesses and investors start to expect a downturn, and retrench accordingly. With that said, it’s a bit early to be forecasting economic doom. One reason for calm comes from Campbell Harvey, the Duke University finance professor who first pinpointed the relationship between the yield curve and growth. (Harvey measured the spread between five-year and three-month bonds.) As he explained to me, the yield curve only becomes a recession indicator once it has been inverted on average for a full three-month period. Downturns also sometimes take a while to follow. The yield curve inverted eight months before the 2001 recession officially began. It inverted 22 months before the Great Recession kicked off in 2007. And of course, Harvey said, even if the yield curve has preceded recessions in the past, this time could be different. “It’s only one indicator. I wouldn’t want to use only one indicator to do a forecast,” he said. There are some concrete reasons why history might not repeat itself this time around. Some believe the yield curve may be a less useful barometer, now that the U.S. seems to have entered an era of persistently low interest rates and inflation. It has a mixed record of predicting growth outside the U.S., and has been particularly inaccurate in Japan, which has long struggled with low rates. The Federal Reserves post-recession bond buying program was also designed, in part, to lower long-term rates compared to short-term ones, and some of its effects may still be lingering. This could also all just be a sign that the Fed is hiking short-term interest rates too fast—though it paused its increases last week—and that it needs to consider a cut. Still, as far as wonky market signals go, the inverted yield curve is a fairly ominous one with a good track record. Would you want to be you bet against it?

One of the Most Important Recession Indicators Is Beginning to Flash. Is It Time to Worry Yet?

Vice Somehow, whenever I find myself scrolling aimlessly on my personal Instagram feed, I always end up near the end, fixated on the first photos I posted, in June 2016. I don’t know if it was the music—Rihanna, Chance, Drake, and Kanye all released life-changing albums around then—or the freedom that came with traipsing all over Europe those three months, but that summer is the last one that’s really clear in my memories. I’ve posted scores of better-edited, higher-quality photos in the three years since, but those old photos never fail to stop me in my tracks, dousing me in waves of nostalgia. To my followers, that summer was neatly summed up in six simple rows of three perfectly sectioned squares. Yet when I look closely at these posts, I realize that the moments I remember most poignantly are the nights out and secret beaches I never thought to document for social media—I was too busy soaking it all in. That same summer turned out to be a pivotal moment for social media. With its Russian misinformation and data privacy scandals still under the radar, Facebook dominated as a critical platform for staying informed in the months leading up to the 2016 US presidential election. Twitter’s spastic, minute-by-minute updates aligned perfectly with today’s lightning-fast news cycle as people debated free speech and its meaning in contemporary politics. And Snapchat, the rising star of social media, had reportedly just snubbed a $30 billion offer from Google as it geared up to go public in 2017. In the summer of 2016, we had fewer apparent reasons not to welcome social media into our lives with open arms. But how this embrace would go on to affect our memories, a core cognitive process, would be greater than we could have foreseen. Creating a memory begins with perception: Your brain registers visual, auditory, olfactory, and tactile sensations—like the sweet sharpness of mint ice cream or the balmy scent of magnolia on warm summer nights—and sends them to the hippocampus to determine if they’ll be stored as long-term memories. Factors like familiarity, repetition, and emotional arousal (a state of heightened physiological activity) all help determine which experiences cross the short-term to long-term memory barrier. As the neuroscientist James L. McGaugh noted in his 2013 paper “Making Lasting Memories: Remembering the Significant,” increased emotional arousal during an experience actually stimulates your amygdala (the part of your brain responsible for emotions, survival instincts, and memory) to release stress hormones—chemicals secreted in response to stressful or exciting occasions—making it more likely for those experiences to be encoded as long-term memories. McGaugh’s research, first published in 2013, seems much more relevant now: The inextricable flow of digital technology in our lives has rendered it more difficult than ever to be emotionally connected to our experiences. In hindsight, the summer of 2016 was a crucial point in time when many tech companies were faced with an opportunity to augment social media’s influence in our daily lives. The platforms that lacked that foresight, like Vine and Tumblr, would recede into tech’s oversaturated backdrop, while those that anticipated that moment would come to dominate the landscape. Instagram, the photo-sharing platform acquired by Facebook in 2012, was simple proof of that. While Snapchat had found initial success from its vanishing messages, its “Stories” format—which lets users take candid photos and videos that last 24 hours on their feeds before disappearing—changed the game entirely after its release in 2013. Three years later, Instagram essentially stole the feature for its own platform. Although many—including me—were skeptical at first, Instagram Stories rapidly took over. Indeed, after Stories appeared, the platform saw their monthly active user base jump from 500 million users to 700 million by the following April, effectively doubling its annual user growth rate in just eight months. The Stories format broke with the static, hypercurated images typical of Instagram posts with its elusive, 24-hour narrative sequences full of “real-time” glimpses into the everyday, lending a more casual tone to the app. Brands and consumers alike benefited from the feature and continue to use it today. The downside to that is evident: Now there is a pressure to post more often and during our most exciting experiences—interrupting the moment to add a story for our followers to see. The first time I noticed myself doing that was New Year’s Eve 2016. I was at a warehouse party with some friends in LA when the countdown began; we were relishing each other’s company and happy we made it somewhere before midnight. About to pull out my phone to Snap the countdown, I changed my mind last minute and put it away, not wanting to leave the moment. But when I turned to my boyfriend, he had his own phone out, yelling “Three, two, one!” into the screen. He kissed me as everyone cheered, but I recall feeling strangely disconnected from him. Mostly, I wondered if he’d enjoyed the moment as much as I did. Julia Soares and Benjamin Storm, researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, have studied the influence of digital technology on memory for years. Research they released last March suggests that, when taking photos on camera phones, people disengage from the moment to capture the experience and therefore store the memory less deeply than they would otherwise. Their groundbreaking paper, “Forget in a Flash: A Further Investigation of the Photo-Taking Impairment Effect,” compared participants’ memory in three scenarios: after pure observation, documentation on the Camera app, and documentation in a condition when their photos wouldn’t be saved, like on Snapchat. Previous research had already established that a reliable memory source, such as a camera, would worsen people’s memory—a phenomenon dubbed the “photo-taking impairment effect.” Researchers, however, had largely chalked up the effect to “cognitive offloading” (when people store memories onto an external memory source instead of personally retaining them), but Soares and her team took those findings further by testing whether cognitive offloading was the sole cause of memory impairment in photo taking. Surprisingly, it was not. “Our study showed evidence that the photo-taking impairment effect doesn’t seem to depend on whether or not the photo is saved, on somebody being able to say to the camera, ‘Hold this information for me, I’m going to use this later,’” Soares explained to me over the phone. “Otherwise, the effect would go away when they know the camera is not a reliable partner.” She proposed a new hypothesis of “attentional disengagement,” which suggested that engaging with a camera or camera phone takes people out of the present moment enough to impair memory formation even after they put the camera down. Interestingly enough, when using Snapchat, participants were found to have even greater memory impairment than in photo-taking alone, potentially because of greater distractions like filters, effects, or text additions in the app interface. With this newfound understanding and McGaugh’s previous findings on the connection between emotional arousal and memory in hand, it suddenly becomes clear how adding Stories on a platform like Instagram can profoundly impact a whole generation’s ability to stay present and engaged—and, in turn, affects personal memory formation as well. (When I reached out to Instagram and Snapchat for comment on the study, Snapchat declined, instead offering to discuss its core product values through a spokesperson. They cited how many facets of the app—such as its lack of public likes and comments, for instance—are designed to help users feel more comfortable truly expressing themselves and living in the moment. At the time this issue went to press, Instagram had not replied to our requests for comment.) “You’re stepping back from the present moment, and that’s what’s causing that disengagement. You’ve literally put a screen between yourself and the event that you’re trying to record. And it seems like it would take a little bit of time to recover from that attentional disengagement, to get back in the mode of ‘OK, I’m living in the present experience. I’m being present,’” Soares elaborated. Yet as “being present” becomes increasingly part of our conversation around mindfulness, truly being able to stay disconnected from social media seems to grow more difficult with each passing year. The rapid-fire rhythm of the digital universe doesn’t let up, nor does the pressure to keep up. And while we feel the problem poignantly on a voluntary, consumer level, it’s exacerbated when we feel like we have to post against our will. I find myself constantly refreshing Twitter for the latest news updates or reassuring people I’m alive and well on my Instagram Story if I go too long without posting. Feeling the pressure to constantly produce content to share with others often devalues the time I have to myself—distracting me enough that I can’t fully emotionally appreciate every moment. The social media editor of Paper magazine, Peyton Dix, shares that sentiment. When she gets off work she tries to disconnect, but the nature of social sharing makes it hard. “I have to airplane mode, [with a] book in my hands. Like, don’t look at the fucking phone,” she told me. “But also, to be frank, as a social media editor, that’s impossible. If something happens, you’re at the front lines of this publication. So we’re making sure we’re being immediately responsive to any kind of potential criticism [or negative feedback].” She loves her job, but Dix is no stranger to the negative effects social media can have on one’s psyche and self-esteem. At her first New York Fashion Week, Dix struggled to reconcile her personal obligations—which included taking care of her roommate after an accident—with her professional obligations to live-tweet a show and orchestrate a social media takeover that was constantly interrupting what she needed to do in the present. “I remember sitting in the hospital waiting for my roommate, crying on my computer while on the phone feeling like, I could die right now. This is too much for me to handle,” Dix recounted to me. “Learning from my experience, I was so emotionally involved and feeling drained. That’s not gonna happen again.” Interrupting moments is, ultimately, at the crux of the memory-impairment effect that accompanies social media use. But the intention behind why we disrupt certain moments can actually alter whether or not the memory is stored in our brains. Previous research has shown that volition—the power of using one’s will, such as thoughtfully taking a photo for memory’s sake—can actually show a benefit in memory retention. While the research is still in very preliminary stages, Soares hinted to me that “there are reasons to expect that the more intention that a person puts into taking each photo, the less likely they are to suffer from an impairment effect. So when somebody’s taking pictures because they have to post them on Facebook, there’s research to show that they’re going to remember the event less positively [than] if they’re taking the photos really intentionally.” The professional photographer Aaron Ricketts prides himself on his ability to put intentionality at the forefront of his work. He aims to capture dynamic movement and eye-catching moments—like his famed shot of Offset’s first proposal to Cardi B in October 2017. As someone whose shot could make or break an assignment, Ricketts emphasizes how, when capturing a moment, he’s hyperaware of a situation and its smallest details compared with a regular observer, often entering a heightened emotional state that makes it easier for him to remember those moments. “When I take photos, I’m not taking photos just to take them. There’s usually planning involved, certain things that must be in place before that photo is taken,” Ricketts told me. “I can only speak for my own personal experience, but I feel as though photographers have to be so present. It affects the way we remember situations a lot, with or without photographs.” Being selective and mindful about his photography is a trait that’s proven useful in Ricketts’s own social media use. Even though he documents experiences for a living, Ricketts doesn’t feel the need to constantly keep up on social. Rather, he’s found the balance between showing the world what he’s up to and saving some of those moments to enjoy himself. In our deeply digital age, perhaps Ricketts has already found the secret to success: Photo taking, as important and necessary as it is, should be approached with moderation and intentionality. The next time we grab our phones to Snap a scene for our Story, we should remind ourselves that digital documentation can hurt—not help—how we remember our most magical moments. And, while we can rarely choose to avoid social media altogether, we can be judicious about which moments we choose to step back from—because, sometimes, it can be worth it to just exist, live in the moment, and have the story to tell later.

Social Media Is Ruining Our Memories

Wired TWO YEARS AGO, a 6-year-old boy playing on his family’s farm in Oregon cut himself. His parents cleaned the wound and stitched it, and everything seemed fine—until, six days later, he began having muscle spasms, arching his back, and clenching his jaw. The boy had tetanus, the first case in a child to occur in Oregon in more than 30 years. Tetanus is rare because a routine childhood vaccine prevents it. The boy’s parents had elected not to vaccinate him. A case report written by a physician who treated him along with staff members at the state health department and published this month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention relates what happened next. The boy was airlifted to a university medical center and given immunotherapy and the first dose of the vaccine regimen he had missed. His spasms were so severe he could not open his mouth or breathe, so he was admitted to an intensive care unit, placed in a medical coma, and put on a ventilator. His body couldn’t regulate itself; his heart rate sped up and his temperature soared and dipped, so he had to be pumped full of IV drugs to keep his vital signs under control. Eventually he recovered, but only after 57 days in the hospital and 17 days in a rehab center learning to speak again once his tracheostomy healed and relearning to walk when his muscle tone came back. His parents took him back to the family farm. Before they left, they refused to allow him to receive any other vaccinations, including the second dose of vaccine that would have cemented his immunity to the infection that almost killed him. There’s a coda to the story of the boy’s unnecessary endangerment and unlikely survival. The CDC reports that his care, just in the hospital—exclusive of the air ambulance or the more than two weeks in rehab—cost more than $800,000. When we talk about vaccines, we tend to talk about the clinical impact of refusing them, the potentially deadly danger that vaccine-preventable diseases pose to the unvaccinated or the immunocompromised when herd immunity breaks down. Every grave illness and death is an individual tragedy, but the cost of vaccine hesitancy also enforces a shared public toll. Consider the ongoing measles outbreak in Washington State, which is centered in Clark County, on the Oregon border. In January, when it had racked up 26 cases, the state governor declared a public health emergency. Since then, the case count has almost tripled, to 74. To figure out who might have been put at risk, the state health department has interviewed 4,652 people and closely monitored 812 of them. It has reassigned staff from across its divisions, borrowed public health workers from other states, sent people who would normally be at desks out into the field, performed hundreds of lab tests that would not normally be necessary. So far, it has spent $1.6 million. “It is extremely frustrating,” says John Wiesman, an epidemiologist and the state secretary of health. “To know the financial cost of this but also to know all the work that is not getting done, or getting backlogged.” In coverage of the dangers of vaccine hesitancy, cost doesn’t get discussed much. But it’s not unusual for a preventable disease outbreak to rack up a bill as high as Washington’s. In 2005, a 17-year-old girl whose family belonged to a church that discouraged vaccination went on a mission trip to Europe. The day after the group arrived home, the church threw a party; 34 attendees caught measles from the teen or from someone she infected. Not including medical care, containing that outbreak cost $167,685. When they analyzed the spending, the CDC and the state health department calculated it had taken 3,650 work hours, 4,800 phone calls, and 5,500 miles of car trips to track the victims down. In 2008, an unvaccinated infected traveler brought measles to a hospital in Tucson; the cost of containing the outbreak, which spread to a second hospital, was almost $800,000. The numbers can grow much bigger still. Researchers at the CDC estimated that handling 107 cases of measles that occurred in 2011 cost state and local health departments between $2.7 million and $5.3 million. In 2014, 42 people came down with the disease after passing through Disneyland at the same time as a never-identified person with measles—and subsequently infected 90 additional people in California, 14 more in other states, and a further 159 people in Canada. The cost of controlling the outbreak, just in California, totaled almost $4 million. And in 2017, a five-month outbreak of measles in Minnesota infected 79 people and cost the state $2.3 million. The funding to support that work isn’t being conjured out of the air. It’s coming from the budgets of public agencies, which have already been facing years of cuts and have no secret stashes of discretionary money to spend. “There are substantial public health responses that go into mitigating an outbreak, and we should pursue those, because they prevent larger outbreaks or broader social disruption,” says Saad Omer, a physician and epidemiologist at Emory University and the senior author of a recent paper on the “true cost” of measles outbreaks. “But it does result in a lot of costs that can be pretty substantial. And we don’t measure the further indirect costs to the community.” In Washington State, those indirect costs include the other work that doesn’t get done while the outbreak proceeds. The state health department was forced to appropriate a portion of its poison control center’s work hours to handle the calls made by people worried they had been exposed to measles. In Clark County, the local health department reassigned to measles the home-visit nurses who take care of risky pregnancies, and also the investigators who track down victims of sexually transmitted diseases and foodborne illnesses. Most of the havoc wreaked by outbreaks of otherwise preventable diseases can only be measured qualitatively: a parent’s terror; a child’s loss of weeks at school; a neighborhood or city’s frayed social bonds. (In Clark County, Wiesman says, “People are staying home, afraid to go out, cancelling birthday parties.”) But we can quantify the medical and public health response. It is the bottom lines on hospital bills, for medical care that would not otherwise have been necessary. (In the tetanus case, the hospital has declined to say whether the parents or their insurance will pay, or whether the hospital will eat the cost as charity care.) It’s lab work that was never budgeted for, hotel charges and gas for investigators sent out on the road, overtime hours for state police rushing emergency doses of immunotherapy across the state. Those costs are being paid by state governments, and by federal agencies such as the CDC that give states grants and loan them personnel. State and federal budgets are public money—which means those necessary bills for unnecessary outbreaks are being paid by all of us. The toll of illness may be confined to individuals, but the cost of responding to outbreaks related to vaccine refusal is a bill that we are all being compelled to pay.

The True Dollar Cost of the Anti Vaccine Movement

CNN The CBD gold rush has begun. CBD, the chemical found in hemp and marijuana plants, is showing up in shampoos, lattes, body oils, gummy bears and dog treats. It's being sold in coffee shops and farmer's markets, mom-and-pops and high-end department stores and most recently, drugstore chain CVS. "Literally overnight, you're seeing CBD all around you and in everything," said Troy Dayton, CEO of The Arcview Group, an Oakland, California-based cannabis investment and research firm. "This is a product that is going from relative obscurity to being on everyone's mind: producers, consumers and especially entrepreneurs." The CBD floodgates opened after President Donald Trump signed the Farm Bill into law in December. Among other things, the bill legalized the production of hemp, which contains high levels of cannabidiol, or CBD. CBD is non-psychoactive, meaning it won't get you high. (THC, or tetrahydrocannabinol, is the chemical in cannabis that does that.) Instead, CBD is marketed for everything from helping to relieve pain and inflammation to reducing stress and anxiety. Yet, the Food & Drug Administration still hasn't decided how to regulate CBD products. In a recent interview with Brookings Institution, outgoing FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb said it could take several years before the agency fully legalizes CBD for use in food products and dietary supplements. So far, little clinical research has been conducted to prove CBD's effectiveness. Last year, the FDA approved the first drug containing CBD for the treatment of certain forms of epilepsy, but no other drugs have been approved since. Dayton cautions that there's also a lack of standardization in terms of recommended doses and quality control. "As exciting as this is, it gives rise to some challenges," he says. "Standardization and testing are important. Otherwise, it's hard to differentiate hype from reality in terms of determining the efficacy of CBD products." A lack of access to banking remains another hurdle. "We've talked to clients who are still struggling to find a bank willing to work with them and we've spoken with banks and credit unions who want to support the hemp industry, but still feel there is considerable risk attached to the CBD industry," says Evan Eneman, CEO of MGOELLO National Cannabis Alliance, a financial and tax advisory service for the cannabis industry. "Both sides want clear, actionable banking guidelines from the federal government." Despite these roadblocks, the Arcview Group projects sales of CBD products will outpace legal marijuana sales in the United States in five years. Here are some of the entrepreneurs hoping to cash in. 'We want customers to trust our products' "For us, 2018 is the year when so many of our big problems started to go away," says Chase Terwilliger, CEO of Denver-based Balanced Health Botanicals. Before the Farm Bill passed, many banks and payment processing companies refused to work with his company. "We had accounts at many large banks and they all shut us down," he says. "Now, banks and credit card processing companies are calling constantly to lend us money." Founded as CBDistillery in 2015, the company initially sold pure, hemp-derived CBD extract in powders that could be added to food and beverages or mixed in with oils and lotions. Sales have soared as the business has expanded its portfolio to include oils, tinctures, capsules and gummies. In 2016, the firm logged $200,000 in sales, he said. Last year, annual revenue was $41 million and Terwilliger projects sales will double to $80 million by the end of this year "We've now grown to 101 employees, our products are sold in all 50 states and I have 20 open positions in Denver to fill," he says. Terwilliger says he's trying to navigate the CBD industry landscape responsibly. He says the company tests each product at three separate labs to make sure they meet standards, such as ensuring THC levels do not exceed 0.3%, (as mandated by federal law) and the products don't contain contaminants like heavy metals. "We're doing this voluntarily because there is a lack of standardization in the CBD industry and we want consumers to trust our products," he says. High-end retail embraces CBD Soon after Katherine, Alison and Juliana Ragusa launched their Lab to Beauty line of CBD-infused face washes, masks and moisturizers, it was being stocked on the shelves at high-end retail chain Barneys New York. The sisters, who started developing the line early last year, already had in-house expertise on creating and marketing beauty products through their family business, The Advantage Co., which manages a portfolio of beauty, fashion and jewelry brands and restaurants. They worked directly with hemp farmers to source the CBD and with Advantage Co.'s lab and scientists to formulate the products. By summer, after they had tested the products with a third party lab, they sent samples to Barneys' beauty team. "It was exciting for us to see how open they were to trying our samples on the spot," says Katherine Ragusa. Jennifer Miles, Barneys' senior vice president, divisional merchandise manager, cosmetics, says the department store chain had been looking for a CBD skincare line. She says Barneys is trying to address customers' misconceptions around CBD "as it is becoming more mainstream and customers are learning about the benefits, and how to add these products to their wellness routine." Barney's. Neiman Marcus. America's stores are taking the leap into cannabis products The line of eight products is now sold in seven Barneys locations, including its stores in New York, Chicago and Beverly Hills and on Barneys.com. "The response has been tremendous. Barneys sold out of some of the products online, but we have now replenished the supplies," says Katherine. A market for mints, pets and beyond College friends, Tim Moxey and Chris Abbott, launched BotanicaSeattle in 2012 with a line of cannabis-infused chocolates. Since then, they've added Mr. Moxey's CBD Mints, and a line of CBD products for pets called Austin & Kat that includes biscuits and oils they claim can provide pain relief and calm anxiety in dogs, cats and other animals. Last year, the company logged about $7 million in sales and Moxey expects sales to hit $20 million at the end of this year. But getting to this point has required winning over consumers and building trust. "We've chatted with customers who purchased other products they found on the internet and felt they were duped because those products didn't contain the stated amount of CBD, or contained trace amounts of THC," says Moxey. "Pushing to build trust and transparency is difficult in this industry where there are so many dishonest companies entering the market every day." He hopes the FDA will move quickly to establish quality control guidelines. Moxey says the company has several new CBD products in the pipeline, including topical solutions and other pet products. "As we educate people about our products and as research continues, our long-term goal is to make products that bring the cannabis plant into people's lives in a meaningful way," he says.

Suddenly, CBD is everywhere. Here is what is next

Washington Post Before 10 a.m. on another cold Thursday, Monica Diaz stirred in her tent, filled with dread. It had been two weeks since the last cleanup, and city workers would again be here soon, with their dumpster truck and police cars, to clear out the encampment. Every morning was awful, but these were the worst of all, when Monica, who’d otherwise be resting before work, was forced to confront publicly what she did her best to hide: that she’s homeless. That she lives in a tent. That she just turned 40, and that this is somehow her life. “You ready?” Monica asked her husband, after a sleepless night at the base of Union Station, near CNN’s Washington bureau, where the noise never stopped and they’d huddled together with their dog, Sassy, against the cold. “Somewhat,” said Pete Etheridge, 31, sighing. They looked around their tent, which not only held the sum total of their world but also reflected a way of life that has, over the past decade, fundamentally changed the face of American homelessness. As housing costs climb ever higher in booming urban areas, the significant growth in tent encampments nationwide has become one of the most visible signs of the nation’s failure to alleviate widening inequality. In Orange County, Calif., more than 700 people were cleared out of a tent city along the Santa Ana River last year after thousands signed a petition and Anaheim declared a state of emergency. Seattle, meanwhile, has allowed some tent cities to operate as de facto communities — long-term, regulated, even with phone numbers and addresses. And in the District, the number of encampment cleanups has surged, according to city data, rising from 29 in 2015 to 100 in 2018. Monica, a stout, wavy-haired woman now living in her seventh tent after cleanup crews tossed the others, looked down the busy street and tried to gird herself for the indignities to come. She needed to place her clothing and blankets into black trash bags, take down the blue and gray nylon tent and wheel everything out of eyesight in a shopping cart. Then she would watch as workers wiped away any trace of her from First Street NE, wheel it all back, pitch her tent again, take an ibuprofen p.m. and then sleep it all away until it was time to go to the fast-food restaurant for work. “We got to take it all the way down there,” she said, pointing toward the next street. Pete looked over everything that needed packing and was quietly shaking his head when a man in a brown coat approached. He’d come to cover the cleanup for Street Sense, a publication about homelessness, but now told them that the move had been canceled. The city was worried about hypothermia. Monica and Pete wouldn’t have to dismantle their lives — at least not today. “It’s canceled?” Monica said, putting a hand over her mouth and closing her eyes. “Oh my God! We were just about to move all of our stuff!” She hugged the man, and then Pete, the two of them overcome with such sudden relief that they began to cry. Behind them was a sign screwed to a metal post. It showed the date of the next cleanup. Feb. 28, it now said. Ten a.m. Two weeks from today. Life in the tent: Everything looks blue. “Our efficiency on First” they jokingly call it, imagining a different existence. On one side is the “wardrobe closet,” where they store the clothing the church people gave them. In the middle is the “bedroom,” where they’ve laid down blankets and sleeping bags. Off to the other side are the “kitchen” and “bathroom,” where they put the groceries and toiletries that Monica can manage to buy with the biweekly pay from her job. That was where she had to go one afternoon soon after a cleanup. Just past 3 p.m., she unzipped the tent and awkwardly stepped out into the brightness of day. Eyes puffy, hair ruffled, exhausted, she pulled up the hood of her coat. Pete secured the tent with a padlock, leaving Sassy behind in a cocoon of blankets, and the two of them walked toward Union Station, which, for scores of homeless people like them, functions as the epicenter of daily life. It is where they can use a restroom, buy a cheap meal at the Bojangles’ or McDonald’s, get warm. Here, there’s a largely invisible, parallel reality apart from the thousands of people whooshing through the station each day, catching trains, clutching coffee, going about the business of making it in a city powered by ambition. Some of those people are Monica’s customers, and rather than risk seeing them while she was so disheveled, she walked in through a service entrance, hood pulled down low. She passed the spot where the trucks drop off their cargo and where the restaurants throw away their waste, considering again the same question: How did it come to this? She knew that she’d made some mistakes. Some bills went unpaid and debts had accumulated while she tried — unsuccessfully — to get a college degree at Towson University, ruining her credit. Then four years ago, she was charged with distribution of a controlled substance, a case that was dropped. But this? Not that long ago, she’d had a house, a car and a job — one with benefits and potential for promotion to management, at the Price Rite supermarket in District Heights, Md. And then Pete — the quiet, big-hearted man who got her phone number seven years ago, after they bumped into each other several times on the streets of Washington, their hometown. He told her they kept running into each other for a reason, and soon he was coming over to her house and that was that. Home for him was now with her. The first place they shared was a one-bedroom apartment in Temple Hills, Md. Rent had been an easy $900, which they managed with their pay from her job at Price Rite and his job stocking groceries overnight at a Giant. Monica cooked them Dominican and Guatemalan food most nights, recipes she learned from her mother and grandparents, all of whom had long since died. By May 2016, they’d gotten engaged, with Monica posting a picture on Facebook of the silver rings they bought for each other. But while their world was solidifying inside the apartment, it was fraying outside. Lynnhill Condominiums, where they lived, a massive building filled with mostly low-income tenants, was buckling beneath the weight of housing code violations. In October 2016, the power was cut because of unpaid utility bills, and some residents started leaving. But not Monica and Pete. “I’m basically living paycheck to paycheck,” Monica told a television reporter, looking then like a different person — earrings in, hair brushed, glasses on. “I have nowhere to go.” Less than a year later, the Prince George’s County Fire Department condemned the building. “For your safety, you are being ordered to evacuate,” a police offer said into a loudspeaker in the parking lot. But to where? “What did we do to deserve this?” Monica asked in another television interview, frantic. “We paid rent. We worked hard, you understand? So why would you do this to us?” Two years later now, long after they’d wound up on the streets and the condemned building had been sold to a real estate company, Monica and Pete walked up to the Union Station bus terminal. Nearby was a family bathroom. It was where Monica liked to go before work. There, she could lock the door, have a moment of privacy, breathe deeply and make herself clean again. But today the bathroom was under construction and closed. She sighed irritably. She knew how important it was not to look homeless. After Lynnhill was shuttered, and she was living on the streets for the first time, she held onto her Price Rite job for months. But her appearance deteriorated from sleep deprivation and infrequent showering, and she was fired for poor hygiene. Unwilling to let that happen again, she walked downstairs to the women’s restroom below. It was as chaotic as she’d feared — tourists, commuters and homeless women, everyone jostling, waiting for a turn at the mirror. Finally, it was hers. Ten minutes later, she came out. Her hood was off. Her hair was up. White earrings shined from each lobe. Lip gloss sparkled. Days later, it began to snow early one morning, thick globs of it, and nearly everything closed along First Street. Pete was beginning to worry. He hadn’t seen Monica for hours, not since she’d walked to Union Station to use the restroom after waking up. He well understood how homelessness can destroy a person — he’d been on and off the streets since he was 13 — and could see the corrosion in Monica. Lately, she’d been disappearing for hours and talking about having “crazy thoughts.” What if she needed him now, and he wasn’t there? He had to find her. One bench to another, this park to the next, he and Monica had slept wherever seemed safe in those first few months, until a woman from a church gave them a tent. It was everything. Finally there was somewhere to store the things that made them feel less homeless — a chain with a gold cross, a pair of Converse shoes that Pete, who loved fashion, had adored. There was a sense of privacy. But then a city cleanup crew came through while they were out, and they returned to find that their tent and all of their things were gone. All around them were other homeless people who’d undergone or would soon undergo the same sudden deprivation. “Crushed” is how one homeless man, Montrel Williams, said he felt after a recent cleanup stripped him of all he had. “They’re taking what little we got.” Pete didn’t know which discarded tent had stored Monica’s Maryland driver’s license, but the loss had severed her last connection to her old life. Afterward, the only full-time job she could get paid under the table and less than half of minimum wage, with overnight hours. He’d tried to help, getting some work on construction sites, but they never seemed to get closer to their goal. They needed $2,000, he figured, to pay the first month’s rent and security deposit for an apartment to get off the streets. But now the problem was even more urgent: He couldn’t find Monica. Then: There, at the bottom of the steps, near the Metro entrance inside Union Station, he glimpsed Monica on her phone, which she charged at the train station and could use only while connected to WiFi. She was laughing, smiling bigger than he’d seen in a long time. Whom was she talking to? It was her half sister, Selena, 12, living in New York with their father, a man Monica barely knew. Monica was asking to come visit for the weekend, to get out of the cold. “Maybe sometime this weekend, if Daddy’s not too busy, because Daddy’s working two jobs,” she said into the phone. “I’m going to try to make it out there. You, me and Sassy, okay? I love you. I miss you so much. Tell Daddy, okay? Because I love you guys so much.” She hung up, crying now, knowing she wouldn’t make it to New York, that she didn’t have the money for a bus ticket. So she did the only thing she could, walking slowly with Pete through the snow back to the tent, then laid down atop the concrete, curling up next to her waiting dog to try to rest before her next shift. Not too long ago, Monica had worked at the cash register, chatting with customers as she rang up orders of chicken and fries. It was what she loved most about the job, getting to know the usuals, soaking in how they looked at her — as an equal, not as someone to hurry past on the sidewalk. But these days, Monica had come to trust herself less with that responsibility. A construction project was tearing up the street in front of their tent, and she felt herself fracturing. So she asked to be moved to the kitchen, where she worked late on Feb. 27, the night before the cleanup. Head down, she breaded and fried the chicken, talking to no one. She knew her co-workers didn’t understand what had been going on with her lately, why she’d become so withdrawn. She wanted to be honest. But fearful that she’d lose her job if she told the truth — that a homeless person was handling food — she lied. It was her younger sister, Selena, she’d say. She was having problems with school, and Monica had to get up early to take her to class. That story seemed to satisfy them, but more and more she could feel the two worlds she’d always kept meticulously separate — the working one and the homeless one — beginning to converge. She worried one night that she’d yell at a customer over nothing and get fired. And then she’d be left not with two worlds, but one, the wrong one. The next day Monica emerged to see their encampment in upheaval. The man who’d lived beside them for months, who was drunk more often than not, was gone, to who knew where. A woman across the street, who raved at all hours about a Clinton conspiracy and yelled racist things at passerby, had pulled everything out of her tent, which she was taking down. The sidewalks were full: federal workers hustling into the Bureau of Labor Statistics, newscasters heading into the CNN offices, Howard University students who’d come to witness the cleanup. It was 38 degrees outside. As Sassy quivered, Monica piled everything they had into black trash bags, then handed them to Pete. Wordlessly, he placed them into a shopping cart, one after another, until a woman came up to him just after 9:30 and said something softly. He turned back to the tent, where Monica was packing. “It’s off,” he said of the cleanup. Another hypothermia warning. Inside the tent, she erupted. “Why do they keep doing this to us?” she said. “This is so frustrating!” “Come on,” he said, trying to soothe her. “It’s cold.” But she couldn’t stop, not now. Even if she suddenly was the person she’d never wanted to be — homeless, shouting in the streets. Workers in suits streamed past, ignoring the uncomfortable scene. Pete stood there, powerless to hold her together. “I’m so sick and tired of these people treating us like we’re idiots!” she said. “I’m tired of being like this. . . . This day has been on my mind for the longest time. I’ve been looking at that sign, the 28th!” Down she spiraled. “I’m dying out here!” she said to no one. “I’m dying out here! Please, I need help!” “Monica!” Pete finally shouted. “Calm your voice down!” Now she was addressing the people on the streets. “Acknowledge us!” she said. “We’re human beings! Please, just acknowledge us!” But people kept passing and, defeated, Monica and Pete slowly began taking the bags out of the shopping cart to reassemble their home. The wardrobe over here. The bedroom over there. Outside, another business day in professional Washington was underway and, inside, all Monica wanted to do was sleep. Nearby, the sign showing the next cleanup changed. March 14, it now said. Ten a.m. Two weeks from today.

The rise of tent encampments is changing the face of American homelessness

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