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Tag: Technology

Michael D. Gordin
Philosopher Karl Popper famously asked how to tell the two apart. His answer—falsifiability—hasn’t aged well, but the effort lives on.
Eric Reinhart

As more and more doctors awaken to the political determinants of health, the U.S. medical profession needs a deeper vision for the ethical meanings of care.

Michelle Morse, Bram Wispelwey

Colorblind solutions have failed to achieve racial equity in health care. We need both federal reparations and real institutional accountability.

David McDermott Hughes
A new “solar homesteading law” could harness rays of sun that fall on roofs and parking lots in cities and advance the aims of energy democracy.
Duana Fullwiley
Home DNA ancestry kits include no ancestors, instead comparing customers to other present-day people based on assumptions about race and ethnicity. So what are they actually selling?
Rachel Thomas
As Big Data tools reshape health care, biased datasets and unaccountable algorithms threaten to further disempower patients.
Andrew Jewett

For a century, critics of all political stripes have challenged the role of science in society. Repairing distrust today requires confronting those arguments head on.

Adam Gaffney
COVID-19’s disproportionate impact on Black communities is just one of many respiratory inequities shaped by systemic racism.
Charles Sabel, David G. Victor

Biden may have rejoined the Paris Agreement, but diplomacy isn’t enough. To decarbonize the economy, we must integrate bottom-up, local experimentation with top-down, global cooperation.

Ravi Gupta
We must reimagine how to make life-saving vaccines available to everyone.
David G. Victor, Charles Sabel
Biden should rejoin the Paris Agreement, but diplomacy isn’t enough. To decarbonize the economy, we must integrate bottom-up, local experimentation with top-down, global cooperation.
Nanjala Nyabola

To ask why COVID-19 hasn’t been deadlier in Africa is to suggest that more Africans should be dying. We need better questions.

David McDermott Hughes
Waiting to ensure uninterrupted power for everyone as we transition away from fossil fuels will cost too much time—and too many lives.
Leah C. Stokes, Matto Mildenberger

Only a bold approach that centers politics can meet the scale of the climate crisis.

Zachary Dorner
Global trade, enslaved labor, and colonial warfare created demands for medicines that would work for anyone, anywhere. That pressure to view patients as interchangeable remains with us today.
Arnab Acharya, Sanjay G. Reddy
Ensuring a COVID-19 vaccine is available to all makes both moral and economic sense.
Elaine Scarry

On the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, it is clear that white supremacy sustains the U.S. nuclear arsenal. 

Natalie Dean
There’s no silver bullet, but local experiments and global experiences can help us control the pandemic.
Madison Condon
Huge investors like BlackRock are forcing corporations to take action on emissions. But what does their power mean for democracy?
Iris Chandler, Tess Lanzarotta, Marco Ramos
American medicine has long functioned as an elitist institution, putting professional prestige over the well-being of patients and physicians alike.
Roberto Rey Agudo, Alberto Bruzos Moro, Yuliya Komska
Media stories praising online language learning as an inexpensive way to take a “vacation” during COVID-19 have expressed astonishingly little curiosity about the conditions under which gig-economy language teachers labor.
Jonathan Fuller
The debate over pandemic response is not only about the facts—including the grim death toll. It's also about the relationship between science and decision-making, where values inevitably play a role.
Sunaura Taylor

Nineteenth-century reformers understood the deep connections between public health and environmental protection. That's why struggles for Medicare for All and a Green New Deal are two sides of the same coin.

Byron Williston

Contrary to the boosterism of billionaires, the need for space colonization must be argued for, not assumed. And the arguments aren’t good.

Bianca Wylie
Sidewalk Labs would have turned a large plot of Toronto’s public land into a private lab for data collection. Cities need better digital governance to protect against such attempts.
Genevieve Fried, Meredith Whittaker, Erin McElroy

Proptech is leading to new forms of housing injustice in ways that increase the power of landlords and further disempower tenants and those seeking shelter.

Daniel Grossman
A doctor's case against COVID-19 abortion bans. 
In this ongoing series, leading researchers debate how to turn knowledge into action.
Adam Gaffney
In addition to masks and ventilators, doctors demand a fundamental transformation of our health care system.
Amy Kapczynski, Gregg Gonsalves

Claims that the cure is worse than the disease rely on a false tradeoff between human needs and the economy.

Gregg Gonsalves, Amy Kapczynski
Decades of neoliberal austerity will make it harder to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, more than ever, we must rebuild our social safety net and forge a New Deal for public health.
Kenneth A. Taylor

Rumors of thinking robots are greatly exaggerated. Still, we cannot leave decisions about even lesser AI in the hands of those who stand to profit from its use.

Anne Fausto-Sterling
Appeals to the biological facts conceal a deeper contest over political equality—and scientific authority itself.
Christian List
A growing chorus says that science has shown free will to be an illusion. But it actually has offered arguments in its favor.
David Michaels
By using a variety of ploys to manufacture doubt, a whole industry of science-for-hire experts helps corporations put profits over public health and safety.
Hochan Kim, Elena Di Rosa, Annette Zimmermann

We need greater democratic oversight of AI not just from developers and designers, but from all members of society.

Robert A. Aronowitz
In place of the hype over personalized medicine, we need a more sober evaluation of the meaning of health and health care.
Alexis L. Boylan

Two new books about machine creativity mostly reveal how little appreciation we still have for the full range of human creativity.

Adam Gaffney

Atul Gawande helped popularize the idea that health care spending is high because we use too much medicine. He was wrong: it’s the prices, and who pays them.

Troy Vettese

On the lure of climate entrepreneurism.

Tim Maudlin

Allured by the promise of Big Data, science has shortchanged causal explanation in favor of data-driven prediction. But ultimately we must ask why.

Michael D. Gordin
Many take the separation between science and politics for granted, but this view of science has its own political history: it was developed, in part, as an anti-communist tool of the Cold War.
C. Malik Boykin, C. Brandon Ogbunu
Two new books from intellectual giants Robert Plomin and Nicholas Christakis revive the “nature vs. nurture” debate about what makes people different from one another.
John Crowley

Science fiction author Ted Chiang wrote the story for the Academy Award–winning film Arrival. Now his new collection of short stories gives us further glimpses of possible futures.

Nara Milanich

The meaning of fatherhood remains elusive, even in the age of DNA-based paternity testing.

Robin McDowell
In Revilletown, which was founded by freed slaves, a petrochemical company has seized ownership of an ancestral cemetery. But an attack on the dead is an attack on the living.
Henry Farrell, Bruce Schneier
How can democratic societies protect—and protect themselves from—the free flow of digital information?

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