Breast cancer, fundraising
The game raised more than $300,000, including ticket and
concessions sales, for the Young Survivors Coalition, an organization dedicated
to helping young women with breast cancer. The total broke the game’s previous
fundraising record of $215,000, set in 2016.
The
bipartisan lawmakers’ team was made up of three senators and 11 House members,
according to the official roster. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and Reps.
Martha Roby, R-Ala., Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz,
D-Fla., served as captains. Moore Capito took home the award for most valuable
player on the lawmakers’ team.
The press team had 23 players, including four from PBS
NewsHour, and was captained by Amy
Walter of the Cook Political Report and Mikayla Bouchard
of the New York Times. Tamara Keith of NPR was named MVP of the press team.
Urban
living, families
Should cities try to keep families
around? Some urbanophiles argue that
they’re not worth it. Families cost cities more in services, spend less in the
economy, and produce less tax revenue than affluent young single professionals.
Cities that want to grow fast do it by building studios and one-bedrooms and
drawing on endlessly renewable mobs of Youngs.
But few city leaders take that
attitude. They see families as an important source of economic stability (hot
industries come and go) and social vibrancy. You can read a lament about DC here, one about Denver here, one about Seattle here.
All these articles go on and on
about amenities families enjoy, but the root of the problem is that families
need bigger homes, while developers have every incentive to squeeze in as many
small homes as possible, to maximize their profit per square foot. Unless
cities step in, that’s what developers will keep doing.
Yet somehow, Vancouver has thousands of families with
children living in its downtown. I asked urbanist Brent Toderian, who was
Vancouver’s Chief Planner from 2006 to 2012, how the city did it. He says that
there are three elements of family-friendly city design: bigger housing,
amenities for families, and a safe, welcoming public realm.
Health, Antibiotics
What Roberts has just
done, in an action that he and people who support him have performed hundreds
of times, is to return to a practice that was abandoned more than 40 years ago.
He has sampled the environment, hoping to find in the dirtiest, most
germ-filled places an answer to one of the most pressing problems of our day.
Drug resistance—the
ability of bacteria to defend themselves against the compounds we use to kill
them—has impaired the effectiveness of almost every antibiotic produced since
the first ones were developed, in the 1940s. At least 700,000 people are
estimated to die worldwide every year from infections that no longer respond to
antibiotics. That toll could balloon to more than 10 million a year by 2050 if
we can’t slow the spread of resistance or find new drugs; routine surgeries and
minor injuries will become life-threatening.
Yet making the necessary changes to stave off
this catastrophe seems to be beyond us. We continue to take antibiotics with
abandon (nearly a third of antibiotic prescriptions in the U.S. aren’t actually
needed) and feed huge quantities of them to farm animals. And pharmaceutical
companies—daunted by how quickly resistance can undermine drugs that may take a
decade and a billion dollars to develop—are not rushing to fill the gap.
Elections,
redistricting
Americans are fed up
with gerrymandering. The most recent Harris poll shows that 74 percent of Republicans, 73
percent of Democrats, and 71 percent of independents believe that politicians
shouldn’t have a hand in drawing lines that benefit them.
Despite public
opposition across the political spectrum, politicians have taken a stronger and
stronger hand in line-drawing, resulting in gerrymandered maps that are more
and more extreme. The problems continue to mount: A combination of “Big Data,”
single-party control of state governments, and polarized politics have allowed
paid political operatives to craft increasingly surgical gerrymanders far more
potent than their precursors, locking in lopsided maps that are deeply
unrepresentative of the electorate.
The good news is that
the Supreme Court has the chance to take a major bite out of extreme
gerrymandering this fall when it hears Gill v. Whitford,
an appeal of a landmark decision striking down a Wisconsin state assembly map
as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.
Culture, well-being
Despite – or perhaps because
of – its prevalence in culture, carpe diem has been sabotaged
by the language of the advertising slogan and the hashtag: ‘Just do it’ or
‘Yolo’ (you only live once). Krznaric argues that this has helped strip the
concept of its true meaning. “The hijack of carpe diem is the existential crime
of the century – and one that we have barely noticed,” he writes.
“Consumer culture has
captured seizing the day,” he tells BBC Culture. “That idea that instead of
just doing it, we just buy it instead: shopping is the second most popular
leisure activity in the Western world, beaten only by television. Instead of
seizing the day, we’re really seizing the credit card.”
Carpe diem has also been
hijacked by our culture of hyper-scheduled living, argues Krznaric. “‘Just do
it’ becomes ‘just plan it’ – people are filling up their electronic calendars
weeks in advance with no free weekends. In terms of cultural history, most
people are unaware that their spontaneity has been stolen from them over the
past half a millennium.”
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