March 2010 April 2010 May 2010 June 2010 July 2010
August 2010
September 2010 October 2010
November 2010
December 2010
January 2011
February 2011 March 2011 April 2011 May 2011 June 2011 July 2011 August 2011 September 2011 October 2011 November 2011 December 2011 January 2012 February 2012 March 2012 April 2012 May 2012 June 2012 July 2012 August 2012 September 2012 October 2012 November 2012 December 2012 January 2013 February 2013 March 2013 April 2013 May 2013 June 2013 July 2013 August 2013 September 2013 October 2013 November 2013 December 2013 January 2014 February 2014 March 2014 April 2014 May 2014 June 2014 July 2014 August 2014 September 2014 October 2014 November 2014 December 2014 January 2015 February 2015 March 2015 April 2015 May 2015 June 2015 July 2015 August 2015 September 2015 October 2015 November 2015 December 2015 January 2016 February 2016 March 2016 April 2016 May 2016 June 2016 July 2016 August 2016 September 2016 October 2016 November 2016 December 2016 January 2017 February 2017 March 2017 April 2017 May 2017 June 2017 July 2017 August 2017 September 2017 October 2017 November 2017 December 2017 January 2018 February 2018 March 2018 April 2018 May 2018 June 2018 July 2018 August 2018 September 2018 October 2018 November 2018 December 2018 January 2019 February 2019 March 2019 April 2019 May 2019 June 2019 July 2019 August 2019 September 2019 October 2019 November 2019 December 2019 January 2020 February 2020 March 2020 April 2020 May 2020 June 2020 July 2020 August 2020 September 2020 October 2020 November 2020 December 2020 January 2021 February 2021 March 2021 April 2021 May 2021 June 2021 July 2021 August 2021 September 2021 October 2021 November 2021 December 2021 January 2022 February 2022 March 2022 April 2022 May 2022 June 2022 July 2022 August 2022 September 2022 October 2022 November 2022 December 2022 January 2023 February 2023 March 2023 April 2023 May 2023 June 2023 July 2023 August 2023 September 2023 October 2023 November 2023 December 2023 January 2024 February 2024 March 2024
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29
30
31
News Every Day |

The Coming Meat Utopia Is Real

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.


Question of the Week

Last week, Spiegel International reported on a country where carnivores can already legally dine on meat that is produced from the stem cells of animals. As the article put it:

Just imagine for a moment that you could save the world with chicken nuggets. All you would have to do is just eat them. Your teeth would sink into real meat, yet no animal would have lost its life for your meal. It will have been grown in the laboratory from a single chicken cell. Imagine that there would suddenly be enough meat from the laboratory to feed everybody in the world. Hunger would be a thing of the past. The land now used to grow corn for animal feed could be repurposed, perhaps even for a forest that could draw CO2 out of our atmosphere. Industrial livestock farming would no longer be needed.

To be sure, solutions that sound so simple should be approached with caution. But there is a place where the utopia described above isn’t as far away as it might sound. Where such laboratory chicken can be tasted and where the nuggets are being served up on real plates.

That place is Singapore.

There’s lots more at the link, including a review of lab-grown “chicken.” And still more fodder on synthetic meat from Virginia Postrel. What do you think about meat grown in a lab? Would you eat it? Will your grandchildren? Will we ever stop eating non-laboratory-grown animals?

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.


Conversations of Note

Denying Treatment to the Imprisoned

Convicted criminals are among the most hated figures in most societies––and uncoincidentally, they suffer some of the most egregious injustices perpetrated by the state in America. Solitary confinement is often inhumane. Prisoners are sexually assaulted at inexcusable rates. And a Stat News investigation documents another practice that I find indefensible: the systematic withholding of lifesaving medical care from prisoners with hepatitis C.

Nicholas Florko’s report begins with John Ritchie, who was serving a 20-year sentence for armed robbery in Missouri when he sought a 12-week course of treatment that would cure his condition:

Ritchie begged repeatedly for the medicine ... The prison system knew he was getting sicker and sicker—it documented his deteriorating condition in his health records. The prison’s doctors wrote frequently he would benefit from hepatitis C treatment. But officials still denied him, in the same way a STAT investigation documented prisons around the country are still denying thousands of others the cure. So the virus infecting Ritchie’s blood continued to replicate, scarring his liver until it was so damaged that it could hardly function. Eventually he was diagnosed with liver cancer, a common complication of untreated hepatitis C. Now, the prison argued, he was too sick for the drugs to work. They refused him again. He died in June 2021 at the age of 64, nearly five years after his first request for medication.

STAT’s investigation found that 1,013 people died of hepatitis C-related complications in states’ custody in the six years after the first cure, a Gilead antiviral drug called Sovaldi, hit the market in late 2013. This tally, based on an analysis of 27,674 highly restricted death records, has never before been reported. Many of those 1,013 people were not serving life sentences; they would likely have had the chance to return home, reapply for jobs, and reconnect with parents, spouses, and children—or, in Ritchie’s case, his one grandchild, Gabe. Many should not have died. In fact, the treatment for hepatitis C is a modern medical marvel. The scientists who paved the way for its discovery won a Nobel Prize. Public health experts say it’s possible to cut hepatitis C deaths to virtually zero, and effectively eliminate the virus as we’ve done with smallpox or polio.

This article reminds me of a proposal I’ve been meaning to air despite the fact that it is almost certain to anger many and seems unlikely to be politically viable: much as Washington, D.C., and various territories have nonvoting members in the House, I think there should be a nonvoting House member who represents the interests of incarcerated people in the United States.  

When Educators and Parents Disagree

This week I published an Atlantic article about what ought to happen when parents and educators disagree about how to handle the gender identity or expression of very young children. It begins with a case study taken from the premier journal of early-childhood educators:

Meet Michael, a 4-year-old who “usually comes to school in jeans and a T-shirt but always goes to the dress-up area as soon as he arrives and puts on a dress or skirt.” The preschooler is the subject of a 2019 case study in the education journal Young Children’s “Focus on Ethics” column, a recurring feature about how educators ought to respond in fraught situations––in this real case, a parent objecting to their child’s gender expression.

Take off that skirt, Michael’s mother tells her child one day while volunteering in the classroom. She orders him instead to put on firefighter gear, a cowboy hat, or “something that boys do,” the authors Stephanie Feeney, Nancy K. Freeman, and Katie Schaffer recount. Later, the parent tells the teacher, Ana, that Michael “plays female roles at home and shows little interest in toys and activities typically associated with boys.” She asks Ana to prohibit Michael from playing with “girl stuff” at school. “Ana also has observed that Michael strongly prefers playing with girls,” the authors add, “and chooses activities that are stereotypically feminine, like having tea parties and wearing dress-up clothes that have lots of ribbons and sequins. He also frequently tells the other children that he is really a girl and that he wants to be called ‘Michelle.’”

What should Ana do?

The National Association for the Education of Young Children, which publishes Young Children, has a Code of Ethical Conduct that directs teachers to “recognize and respect the unique qualities, abilities, and potential of each child”; to “develop relationships of mutual trust and create partnerships with the families we serve”; and to “acknowledge families’ childrearing values and their right to make decisions for their children.” In essence, this case study explores what ought to happen when those obligations are in conflict.

In the case study’s telling, Ana has an ethical obligation to side with the child. For my own viewpoint, click through and read the rest, because I want to focus here on some reader responses.

D.M. writes, “I just wanted to echo my agreement with what I’d call your position of ‘principled ethical humility.’ We *know* what our principles are in general, and we should stick to them, but we shouldn’t pretend to have all the answers. This is a brand-new area of ethics, it’s really fraught among *all* cultures, and it’s OK to pause and appreciate that instead of making absolutist pronouncements.”

An anonymous reader who teaches high school in New England reports struggling with the issue of kids wanting to keep their gender identity from their parents.

He emailed:

There are wonderful things about the school: the kids are very intelligent, they explore their passion and care about their classes, and the community is accepting of everyone. However, there is a strange paradox where students are simultaneously seen as helpless children who deserve month-long extensions on assignments, a minimum grade of 50% on missing work, and hours and hours of social/emotional learning while also given radical self-determinism in how they present themselves, which teachers must hide from their families. There have been a number of policy decisions related to gender identity that have made me uncomfortable.

I want to provide a window into my school's policy:

1. I’d estimate 25% of all students identify as trans or gender non-conforming. Perhaps the number is higher, but it is certainly not lower. Many of these kids have never gotten a medical diagnosis; some even make no effort to present as the opposite gender yet insist on using different names and pronouns. The majority of these students are white females.

2. I have students who have changed their name/gender identity multiple times throughout a semester. It became pretty exhausting to keep up with.

3. Many students insist on being called a different gender than they present as with the plea “do not tell my parents.” School policy is to use their legal first name and assigned gender at birth in conversations with their parents while simultaneously using the student’s preferred pronouns in all internal school communication.

This seems to be a ticking time bomb.

There are absolutely students who suffer from gender dysphoria and have made the appropriate medical/social arrangements with their families. However, these students are few and far between, and the vast majority of students that identify as gender non-confirming have done so with no medical/psychological intervention.

Without medical or psychological intervention, students live one way at school and another way at home. I cannot imagine how traumatizing and confusing that must be. There is little dialogue or communication about how to handle these situations. Instead, we accept a radical tolerance, often at the expense of struggling teenagers’ mental health. To me, hiding such important and consequential decisions from parents seems entirely unethical. But there has been virtually zero pushback from staff, most of whom I think agree with these policies.

The gender identity issue is a sensitive topic. Treating it as something as inconsequential as a nickname will lead to disastrous results for a generation already struggling with mental health to the degree that is crippling. As you said, this rigidness is not the way forward, especially if medical professionals are not involved. I am uncomfortable and worried about the liability of working in this environment. Unfortunately, I will leave this school—and possibly education—after this school year.

Michael articulates one view of the relationship between educators and parents:

Is defying the parents ever an ethical choice? It could be, in rare cases when a judge decides to remove the children from their parents’ custody. This course is reserved for extreme cases of abusive parenting. Otherwise the only ethical choice is to cooperate with the parents. Remember that the educators are not co-parents, they are essentially agents hired by parents (directly or through taxation) to attend to their children while the parents focus on the day job. If an educator notices some problem with the child, it is their duty to inform the parents, and—optionally—to offer their professional opinion on how to fix it.

Now if the parents insist on the educator doing something that the teacher finds unacceptable, e.g. forcing the child to drink milk or calling the child by a name that causes a distress to the child or disruption to the others, the educator should have an option of denying the family access to child care. That way the parents could seek to fix the problem themselves, find a therapy or specialized care facility or do homeschooling. Using your words, usurping parental rights is not an ethical choice, nor is it legal due to fiduciary duty of the educator.

I suspect some readers agree and others would describe the relationship very differently.

Jaleelah would defer less to parents as a general matter:

I can’t tell what your actual stance on parental rights is, but I strongly disagree with the premise that parents morally have any kind of final say (apart from input about severe health conditions) over what goes on in their children’s public classrooms. Consider the following “ethical dilemma.” A 4-year-old girl comes to school wearing a religious veil and takes it off upon entering the classroom. Her mother notices one day and instructs the teacher to make her put it back on. When the teacher approaches the girl, she starts crying about how she doesn’t believe in God.

What should the teacher do?

What is the difference between this situation and the trans one? In both cases, a child has understandable preferences about their identity and their preferred clothing. In both cases, a parent wants a teacher to overrule these preferences on the basis of religious belief. Much of the language you use in your article to describe the potential outcomes of the trans kid applies to the atheist kid too. “A teacher has no way to know for sure whether any preschooler or kindergartener will grow up to be atheist or otherwise non-religious.” How does this uncertainty justify forcing the kid–—or at least humouring the request to force the kid—to try out the parent’s preferred religion?

Personally, I think children deserve the same rights to belief and expression as adults. This view is shared (at least in theory) by nearly every country in the world: the US was one of the only UN members to refuse to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Children who grow up in an environment that teaches them their parents’ and communities’ political and religious beliefs have authority over their own grow up to be adults who believe it is justified to pass laws restricting expression in schools and universities.

I confess that I don’t have fully formed views about the rights of children at various ages, but I don’t think it is tenable to proceed as if American or Canadian children “deserve the same rights to belief and expression as adults.” An adult can decide, say, that all doctors are quacks, that eating vegetables is for suckers, and that they’re going to stand on a street corner and denounce women to all passersby. A parent would be derelict in their duty if they didn’t compel their 6-year-old to visit the pediatrician, eat all the required nutrients, and cut out the name-calling. I do believe that children possess some rights, including some expressive rights, but deciding exactly when kids are owed deference strikes me as complicated.

Great Expectations

A longtime teacher of teenagers joins the conversation about sports by lamenting the unrealistic fantasies they can stoke:

I lost count of the number of kids who had the attitude, “why do I need an education? I’m going to be the next Kobe Bryant/Derek Jeeter/Patrick Mahomes/Lionel Messi!” A majority of male students labored under the idea that their future was as a famous, rich, pro athlete. When you tried to point out the statistical improbability of this happening, they always assumed they were the exception that proved the rule.

Then there were the parents. I had one student, a really great kid, friendly, helpful, eager, who struggled academically. When teachers or counselors would try to address his struggles with his parents, his father would deflect with, “he’s going to QB for UCLA, who cares about his grades!” Never mind that his grades would be a problem for any college, much less UCLA––this kid was 5’5”, was not in the running to QB the high-school team, and would get killed by the guys on a college team. He loved welding. He’d come to class with art pieces he’d created. I hope he got to pursue that passion.

One more kid: actual star of the high school team. In 11th grade, he was in line to be the lead QB. Instead, he spent most of that season on crutches after a twisted knee in practice required multiple surgeries. This kid had lots of options, given his relative strength academically, but so much of his focus that year was on trying to get healthy again. We as a society need to get better at managing kids’ expectations about their purpose.

A Low Point for the Catholic Church

In The Atlantic, Elizabeth Bruenig writes on Pope Benedict XVI and the Catholic Church’s child-molestation scandal:

This was and is the sort of darkness not seen for centuries, a historic catastrophe. It affected its direct victims, their families and loved ones, the parishes and dioceses that became responsible for settling with them, the parishioners who now had to salvage their faith. The world—and the Church—post-crisis can feel like a place too violent, too exploitative for the vulnerability of enchantment. Perhaps the pope emeritus saw the magnitude of the damage himself, and perhaps his retreat came nearest to acknowledging it.

How heavy the toll is—how it colors the Church’s recent history with a streak of predatory menace, how it demands an accounting for itself even in moments of celebration and loss for the Church, how it irrevocably complicates simple lay faith. The summary Catholic novel of the post-crisis era may well be Mary Doria Russell’s prescient The Sparrow, whose protagonist cries out before a council of his brother priests: “I had nothing between me and what happened but the love of God. And I was raped.” To speak of the Church now is always to speak after the crisis; to write about the faith now is always to grapple with this ghastly inheritance. But where there remains something whatsoever to be said, there remains some hope, and some capacity for redemption. That belief may at last be the very one upon which the entire faith survives.


Provocation of the Week

In Nature, Emily Sohn defends the colonoscopy against a recent study that questioned its effectiveness at preventing deaths:

Colonoscopy is much less common in Europe, in part owing to questions about whether the test is too invasive and expensive to be worth recommending, says Michael Bretthauer, a gastroenterologist at the University of Oslo. To address these questions, he and his colleagues planned a randomized trial of colonoscopies. Starting in 2009, they recruited more than 84,000 people aged 55 to 64 from Norway, Poland and Sweden. Some were invited to get screened. Others received their usual health care but no such invitation. With about ten years of follow-up data, Bretthauer and colleagues released their attention-grabbing results in October 2022, seemingly suggesting that colonoscopies had a smaller benefit than expected.

There was just an 18% reduction in the risk of developing cancer among those who had been invited to get colonoscopies, and no significant reduction in the risk of death. But the study itself offered layers of interpretation that cast colonoscopies in a more favourable light. Overall, only 42% of people in the group that had been invited to get colonoscopies actually got one. If the compliance rate had been 100%, the researchers’ analysis showed, the test would have reduced cancer risk by 31%—from 1.22% to 0.84%—and it would have reduced the risk of death from colorectal cancer by 50%—from 0.3% to 0.15%.

Those benefits are significant, says Chyke Doubeni, a family doctor and colonoscopy researcher at the Ohio State University in Columbus, and there are reasons to think that they could be larger in other circumstances, especially in populations that experience disproportionately high rates of the disease. And despite the huge scale of the European study, ten years of follow-up is a relatively short period of time for colorectal-cancer development, says Amy Knudsen, who studies disease simulation models to inform cancer-care policy at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, both in Boston. “I think we’re only going to see the impact of colonoscopy increase the longer we follow up,” she says. The European study is continuing to track participants.

That’s all for this week––see you on Monday.

Москва

Творческий конкурс для школьников стартовал в столице

I was diagnosed with cancer aged 39… you are never too rich, too famous or too young, says Dr Philippa Kaye

Top 5 Websites to Watch FREE Movies - TV Shows (No Sign up!)

Top 10 Love Affair Movies of the 2000s and 2010s

Top 10 Emmanuelle Seigner Movies

Ria.city






Read also

Hoodlums set Anambra police station ablaze

UCY MBA’s EFMD accreditation renewed a fourth time

Rays' Wander Franco placed on administrative leave amid probe into alleged relationship with minor

News, articles, comments, with a minute-by-minute update, now on Today24.pro

News Every Day

Top 5 Websites to Watch FREE Movies - TV Shows (No Sign up!)

Today24.pro — latest news 24/7. You can add your news instantly now — here


News Every Day

Top 10 Emmanuelle Seigner Movies



Sports today


Новости тенниса
WTA

Россиянка покинула WTA-1000 из-за проблем со здоровьем



Спорт в России и мире
Москва

Блиц-матч по шахматам между двумя командами провели в павильоне «Спорт для каждого»



All sports news today





Sports in Russia today

Москва

Федерация бокса России на ВДНХ


Новости России

Game News

Шапки женские вязаные на Wildberries, 2024 — новый цвет от 392 руб. (модель 466)


Russian.city


Архангельск

В Архангельске состоится II Межрегиональный симпозиум «Региональные аспекты рыбного хозяйства»


Губернаторы России
БГАТОиБ

ДИРЕКТОР БРХК ВЛАДИМИР КОЖЕВНИКОВ ПРОВЁЛ "КЛАССНУЮ ВСТРЕЧУ" ДВИЖЕНИЯ ПЕРВЫХ


Московская область - Изготовление металлических навесов

Пассажир рейса Москва — Пермь попал в реанимацию

Пользователи соцсетей обсуждают теорию о силовиках на концерте в "Крокусе"

Мажор в Османской империи: в Турции переснимут российский фильм «Холоп»


Провести свой Большой Концерт. Тариф Большой Концерт.

Ольга Бузова стала человеком-невидимкой на ТВ-3 в новом сезоне легендарного шоу о звёздах

Джиган раскрыл свой вес и описал причину похудения словами «надоело быть жирным»

Прокуратура Сочи помогла жителям решить вопрос с бездействием управляющей компании


Рыбакина, наряду со Свёнтек, имеет 70% побед на WTA-1000 против соперниц из топ-10

Хачанов победил Черундоло и пробился в 1/8 финала турнира ATP в Майами

Хачанов: хочу вернуться в топ-10 ATP

Российская теннисистка Калинская покинула WTA-1000 из-за проблем со здоровьем



Рынок вторичной недвижимости Крыма: цены растут, а спрос?

МЧС предупредило о рисках подтоплений в 47 регионах России

«Радио Зенит» – информационный партнер форума «Мы вместе. Спорт»

Заказать недорогой ремонт кухонной мебели в районе в Москве и Московской области


США включили ряд российских блокчейн-платформ в список SDN

Бизнес в огне. Почему так часто горят склады

Путин оценил перспективы строительства ВСМ «Москва — Санкт-Петербург»

Я – фартовая! Слушательница ENERGY отправилась в Мексику на выступление Джареда Лето


В списках погибших во время теракта оказался переехавший из Брянска в Москву  Дмитрий Башлыков

Турист из Красноярска впал в кому на борту самолета в аэропорту Бангкока

Обратная связь

Разин — о победе над «Спартаком»: не ищем лёгких путей, надо нервы потратить



Путин в России и мире






Персональные новости Russian.city
Концерт

Провести свой Большой Концерт. Тариф Большой Концерт.



News Every Day

Top 5 Websites to Watch FREE Movies - TV Shows (No Sign up!)




Friends of Today24

Музыкальные новости

Персональные новости