In the last decade we have witnessed within popular culture wonderful innovation in forms of hip hop and rap. Compare that phenomenon to the 1960s when the Black Panther Party emerged and note the big difference between the two movements. One has to do with sacrifice, paying the price, dealing with the consequences as you bring power and pressure to bear on the prevailing status quo. The other has to do with marketing black rage

Unfortunately, neighborhoods often took shape in my boyhood under patriarchal and homophobic conditions, and that history must be called into question. Still, we must recover its flow of nonmarket values and nonmarket activity.

The roots of democracy are fundamentally grounded in mutual respect, personal responsibility, and social accountability. Yet democracy is also about giving each person a dignified voice in the decision-making processes in those institutions that guide and regulate their lives.

The most effective disinformation has always been that which has a kernel of truth to it, and indeed most of the content being disseminated now is not fake—it is misleading.

Online misinformation has been around since the mid-1990s.

Stress testing technology in the context of the worst moments in history might have illuminated what social scientists and propagandists have long known: that humans are wired to respond to emotional triggers and share misinformation if it reinforces existing beliefs and prejudices. Instead designers of the social platforms fervently believed that connection would drive tolerance and counteract hate. They failed to see how technology would not change who we are fundamentally—it could only map onto existing human characteristics.

Fang Fang, the pen name of Wuhan-based writer Wang Fang, believes China's younger generation — those born after the 1980s — are particularly susceptible to more nationalistic signaling within China. They "are followers of the will of the authority, excelling in discerning what the authorities think," she tells NPR via email.

Another possible reason: seeing the contrast between China's experience of the pandemic and that of other countries, say public opinion experts. China has confirmed just over 85,000 coronavirus cases this year. Globally, there are more than 25 million confirmed cases, and nearly 7 million in the U.S. "The disappointing performance of Europe and the U.S. increased Chinese confidence in their own political system," says Qi Zhongxiang, the head of Womin Technology, a public relations consultancy that advises Chinese Communist Party and government bodies.

"There were two major reasons for people to support the Communist regime. One is nationalist sentiment. The other is a desire for political stability," explains Jie Chen, a political scientist at James Madison University who conducted past public opinion surveys in China.

The grandson of a former reformist party secretary, Ren, 40, says his own patriotism comes from disillusionment with American democracy under President Trump and U.S. pushback against China's control of Hong Kong. His blog is popular for its frank foreign policy analysis and observations of both Chinese and American cultures, which Ren became interested in while studying at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

"On a scale of 1 to 10," researchers report, "the average favorability toward the U.S. dropped from 5.77 in June 2019 to 4.77 in May 2020." They attribute the decline to factors including "the dismal performance of the United States in handling the virus" and President Trump's blaming China for COVID-19. "Many who were once very friendly towards the U.S., who went to school there, including the so-called elites, the middle class, the cosmopolitan, urbanites: they have become very critical of the U.S., because they are patriots now too," says Ren Yi, a Beijing-based Chinese political blogger who writes under the moniker "Chairman Rabbit," a reference to his childhood nickname.

Sociologists outside China constantly debate whether polling data from China is accurate. Participants likely lie to avoid political retaliation, some warn.

In China, though, the coronavirus pandemic appears to have solidified public approval for the government — even after an early outpouring of public anger. "Surprisingly, [the coronavirus epidemic] actually increased people's satisfaction and support for their government," says Cary Wu, a sociology professor at Canada's York University who studies public opinion. In April, Wu and several hundred Chinese student volunteers polled nearly 20,000 Chinese citizens about their government's handling of the coronavirus epidemic. Nearly half of respondents said they had become more trusting of their national government since the outbreak. Only 3.3% said they had less trust in national leaders after the epidemic. The remainder said their levels of trust had not changed. Overall, more than 90% of respondents said they were satisfied with how China's national leaders managed the outbreak.

Negative U.S. opinion extends to Chinese business as well. An August poll of 2,200 American adults led by Morning Consult, a data intelligence firm, found more than half of respondents "saw China as a 'major threat' to America's technology and innovation dominance, making it the country with the highest-perceived threat level of any other listed in the survey." Nearly two-thirds of respondents were "very" or "somewhat concerned" by the prospect of a Chinese company operating social media apps and 77% expressed doubt that a Chinese company would protect data security.

U.S. levels of anxiety about China are at historic highs. The latest Pew Research poll, from July, found 73% of American respondents have negative attitudes toward China — the highest percentage since Pew began collecting such data in 2005, when 35% reported negative attitudes toward China. In the July poll, 78% of respondents said they put "a great deal or fair amount of the blame" for the coronavirus pandemic on how China initially handled the first outbreak.

Polls show widespread distrust toward China is growing in the U.S. over how China initially handled its coronavirus outbreak and ongoing human rights abuses. At the same time, Chinese attitudes toward the U.S. are souring — while popular satisfaction with the Chinese state has grown since the central government quickly brought the pandemic under control through sometimes brutal methods. These recent trends in public sentiment run parallel to a dramatic deterioration in U.S.-China relations, as nationalistic officials in each government play on popular fears and perceptions.

The gambler’s fallacy makes us absolutely certain that, if a coin has landed heads up five times in a row, it’s more likely to land tails up the sixth time. In fact, the odds are still 50-50. Optimism bias leads us to consistently underestimate the costs and the duration of basically every project we undertake. Availability bias makes us think that, say, traveling by plane is more dangerous than traveling by car. (Images of plane crashes are more vivid and dramatic in our memory and imagination, and hence more available to our consciousness.)

Some of the 185 are dubious or trivial. The ikea effect, for instance, is defined as “the tendency for people to place a disproportionately high value on objects that they partially assembled themselves.” And others closely resemble one another to the point of redundancy. But a solid group of 100 or so biases has been repeatedly shown to exist, and can make a hash of our lives.

am staring at a photograph of myself that shows me 20 years older than I am now. I have not stepped into the twilight zone. Rather, I am trying to rid myself of some measure of my present bias, which is the tendency people have, when considering a trade-off between two future moments, to more heavily weight the one closer to the present

The Internet may cause our minds to wander off, and yet a quick look at the history of books suggests that we have been wandering off all along. When we read, the eye does not progress steadily along the line of text; it alternates between saccades—little jumps—and brief stops, not unlike the movement of the mouse’s cursor across a screen of hypertext. From the invention of papyrus around 3000 B.C., until about 300 A.D., most written documents were scrolls, which had to be rolled up by one hand as they were unrolled by the other: a truly linear presentation. Since then, though, most reading has involved codices, bound books or pamphlets, a major advantage of which (at least compared to the scroll) is that you can jump around in them, from chapter to chapter (the table of contents had been around since roughly the first century B.C.); from text to marginal gloss, and, later, to footnote.

There’s no question that digital technology presents challenges to the reading brain, but, seen from a historical perspective, these look like differences of degree, rather than of kind. To the extent that digital reading represents something new, its potential cuts both ways. Done badly (which is to say, done cynically), the Internet reduces us to mindless clickers, racing numbly to the bottom of a bottomless feed; but done well, it has the potential to expand and augment the very contemplative space that we have prized in ourselves ever since we learned to read without moving our lips.

When Augustine (the future St. Augustine) went to see his teacher, Ambrose, in Milan, in 384 A.D., he was stunned to see him looking at a book and not saying anything. With the advent of silent reading,

A more practical suggestion came from J. S. Mill, in the nineteenth century: give extra votes to citizens with university degrees or intellectually demanding jobs. (In fact, in Mill’s day, select universities had had their own constituencies for centuries, allowing someone with a degree from, say, Oxford to vote both in his university constituency and wherever he lived. The system wasn’t abolished until 1950.) Mill’s larger project—at a time when no more than nine per cent of British adults could vote—was for the franchise to expand and to include women. But he worried that new voters would lack knowledge and judgment, and fixed on supplementary votes as a defense against ignorance.

It’s vulcans, presumably, who Brennan hopes will someday rule over us, but he doesn’t present compelling evidence that they really exist. In fact, one study he cites shows that even people with excellent math skills tend not to draw on them if doing so risks undermining a cherished political belief.

He had a sneaking suspicion that a polity ruled by educated voters probably would perform better than a democracy, and he thought that some of the resulting inequities could be remedied