Yordán Díaz Gonzales pulled weeds from his fields with a tractor until Cuba’s summer rainy season turned them into foot-deep red mud. Now it takes five farmhands to tend to Díaz’s crop. That shrinks Diaz’s profit margin and lowers Cuba‘s agricultural productivity, already burdened by a U.S. embargo and an unproductive state-controlled economy. Like the...
Tens of thousands of people packed the Mexican capital’s main boulevard Sunday to protest President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s proposal to overhaul the country’s electoral authority in the largest demonstration against one of the president’s efforts during his nearly four years in office. The massive turnout was a strong rebuke of the president’s assertion that...
The Mexican government is using video of homeless people and open-air drug users in Philadelphia’s embattled Kensington neighborhood in a national ad campaign to try to scare young people away from drugs. The spots never identify the city or neighborhood shown. But just how or why the Mexican government decided to use street scenes from...
In the wake of Elon Musk’s noisy takeover of Twitter, people have been looking for alternatives to the increasingly toxic microblogging social media platform. Many of those fleeing or hedging their bets have turned to Mastodon, which has attracted hundreds of thousands of new users since Twitter’s acquisition. Like Twitter, Mastodon allows users to post,...
As someone who teaches and writes about Afrofuturism, I’ve been eagerly awaiting the release of “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.” I’m particularly excited about the introduction of Namor and the hidden kingdom of Talokan, which he leads. The first “Black Panther” film adhered to a longstanding practice in Afrofuturist stories and art by engaging in what...
With inflation at a 40-year high and an economy that is growing at a sluggish pace, concerns about a recession are real. But it may be avoided if consumer spending continues to persist and if more workers enter the labor force, according to a forecast released today by the Indiana University Kelley School of Business. Economists...
One of the first and most controversial policy changes Elon Musk proposed after taking the helm at Twitter last week, was to overhaul Twitter’s verification and identity systems by making users pay for Twitter’s blue verification checks. After claiming that “widespread verification will democratize journalism and empower the voice of the people,” Musk also suggested applying identity cues to...
A desire to succeed despite adversity motivates people to pursue a legal career, but barriers caused by finances and careers advice are obstacles, a new study suggests. Those who have become solicitors and barristers said experiencing difficult circumstances in their lives and their personal qualities had been a bigger influence than any structural class or...
In an experimental study, participants’ first impressions of photos of strangers’ faces were strongly influenced by disclosure of the stranger’s political partisanship. Brittany Cassidy of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, U.S., and colleagues present these findings in PLOS ONE on November 9, 2022. Previous research suggests that levels of ideological polarization are rising in...
The death of a loved one, financial or food insecurity, or a newly developed disability were some of the strongest predictors of whether a patient hospitalized for COVID-19 would experience symptoms of long COVID a year later, a new study finds. Led by researchers from NYU Grossman School of Medicine, the study found that adult...
