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We set speed limits, we put them on signs, and we expect people to follow them. But in reality, it plays out a little differently. People don’t really drive based on what a sign tells them. So if signs don’t work, what does?

Legal residents of the United States sent to foreign prisons without due process. Students detained after voicing their opinions. Federal judges threatened with impeachment for ruling against the administration’s priorities.

In this Opinion video, Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley, all professors at Yale and experts in authoritarianism, explain why America is especially vulnerable to a democratic backsliding — and why they are leaving the United States to take up positions at the University of Toronto.

Professor Stanley is leaving the United States as an act of protest against the Trump administration’s attacks on civil liberties. “I want Americans to realize that this is a democratic emergency,” he said.

Professor Shore, who has spent two decades writing about the history of authoritarianism in Central and Eastern Europe, is leaving because of what she sees as the sharp regression of American democracy. “We’re like people on the Titanic saying our ship can’t sink,” she said. “And what you know as a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can’t sink.”

She borrows from political and apolitical Slavic motifs and expressions, arguing that the English language does not fully capture the democratic regression in this American moment.

Professor Snyder’s reasons are more complicated. Primarily, he’s leaving to support his wife, Professor Shore, and their children, and to teach at a large public university in Toronto, a place he says can host conversations about freedom. At the same time, he shares the concerns expressed by his colleagues and worries that those kinds of conversations will become ever harder to have in the United States.

“I did not leave Yale because of Donald Trump or because of Columbia or because of threats to Yale — but that would be a reasonable thing to do, and that is a decision that people will make,” he wrote in a Yale Daily News article explaining his decision to leave.

Their motives differ but their analysis is the same: ignoring or downplaying attacks on the rule of law, the courts and universities spells trouble for our democracy.

The biggest chemical cover up in history. PFAS has polluted the entire global water system. Now, potentially dangerous forever chemicals are being found in the entire US population.

Trams FTW!!!

This is delightful, and not only for Ray's very game attempts at pronouncing Melbourne place names (even I hesitate at Prahran). Also mortifying, as he managed to see more of Melbourne in two weeks than I had in my first two years.

When two young American Jews raised to support Israel unconditionally witness the way Israel treats Palestinians, it changes their lives. They join a movement of young American Jews campaigning to redefine Judaism’s relationship with Israel and reveal a deepening generational divide over modern Jewish identity. Israelism sparked huge debate on American campuses even before the events of October 7, 2023.

It follows Simone Zimmerman, who visited Israel as a teenager, and Eitan who joined the Israeli army after graduating from high school as they discover the reality for Palestinians and radically revise their views. It includes interviews with academics and political activists, including Noam Chomsky, Cornel West, Lara Friedman and a former director of the Anti-Defamation League, Abe Foxman.

Contributors suggest the narrative that young American Jews are fed almost entirely erases the existence of the Palestinians through education and advocacy, sometimes involving groups that organise free trips to Israel partially funded by the Israeli government.

This film describes how influential this narrative is in shaping attitudes to Israel, not just in the United States but across the world.

ChatGPT can’t draw a glass of wine full to the brim. Why? And what might it have to do with David Hume and the missing shade of blue?

Wanted to share something very important and personal to raise awareness and hopefully help someone who’s struggling with similar feelings I felt back when I was diagnosed as intersex.