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My godmother, Margaret Bailey (above at work on her allotment in Alexandra Palace, north London), who has died aged 92, had a long career as a medical social worker and as a lecturer in psychiatric social work, much of it at the Middlesex hospital in central London.
Algorithms and artificial intelligence have dramatically expanded the ability of law-enforcement institutions to identify, track, and target individuals or groups. And civil rights activists say the new technologies erode privacy and due process. Community groups are beginning to understand the ramifications of AI for privacy, discrimination, and social movements and are pushing back.
If colleges are interested in real diversity work, their spousal accommodation policies for dual-career academic couples should be much clearer and more supportive, argues Mireille Rebeiz.
Nancy Pelosi’s office is blocking Social Security expansion, while Congress prepares to pass a windfall for rich retirees, insurance companies, and large asset managers like Vanguard and Fidelity.
The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, signed by Clinton in 1994, was perhaps one of the harshest laws in the history of the country…. It allocated nearly $10 billion for the construction of new prisons, expanded the number of death-penalty eligible federal crimes from two to fifty-eight, eliminated a statute that prohibited the execution of mentally incapacitated defendants, created special deportation courts for noncitizens accused of “engaging in terrorist activity,” added new mechanisms for tracking sex offenders after they had served their sentences, introduced a “three strikes” law that gave mandatory life sentences for third offenses, gave $10.8 billion dollars to local police departments to hire one hundred thousand new officers, introduced “truth in sentencing” requirements and allowed children as young as thirteen to be tried as adults.
Trump has been very clear about his intent to “drain the swamp” by destroying the nonpartisan civil service that is the foundation of anything resembling a democracy.
Lower rates of depression in larger cities seem to be a consequence of how cities are built and can be explained by a new scientific view of cities called urban scaling theory. Urban scaling theory has helped us understand why some experiences are common to all urbanites and provides us with new perspectives on how these collective experiences influence innovation, crime, economic productivity and, now, mental health.