NPR journalist Michaeleen Doucleff suggests that parents consider throwing out most of the toys they’ve bought for their kids. It’s an extreme piece of advice, but the way Doucleff frames it, it seems entirely sensible: “Kids spent two hundred thousand years without these items,” she writes.

American child-rearing strategy comes away looking at best bizarre and at worst counterproductive. “Our culture often has things backward when it comes to kids,” she writes.

Doucleff arrives at this conclusion while traveling, with her then-3-year-old daughter. During her outings, she witnesses well-adjusted, drama-free kids share generously with their siblings and do chores without being asked.

Q. Aunt wants to “get over” racial slurs: My aunt (father’s sister) and I have had a fairly acrimonious relationship since I was in my teens, mostly because of her dislike of my mother. Fast forward to Christmas of this year, when I texted my aunt and her husband to thank them for some cookies they sent me. We started talking again, exchanging memes and discussing our shared love of photography, in what I had hoped was a fresh start. Talk turned to politics eventually, because we both believed our politics aligned somewhat—me more as a leftist, and her a liberal.

However, when I mentioned that I was happy to see white people experience consequences when they used slurs such as the N-word, she said it was a “choice” to be offended by slurs like that, and how people needed to get over it. She even spelled it out. I was totally bewildered. We are both white women. I told her it was inappropriate and racist for her to write or say that word. She continued to use it, saying she should be able to because it was “just a word.” I went on to provide her with multiple sources about why it was offensive and racist. She then said how I was “looking for reasons to have contempt for her” and how she and “the family” have never understood why I’ve always hated her. This went on and on until I eventually stopped responding. However, she’s texted me every day this past week, trying to talk again like nothing’s happened. So how do I address the obvious racism with someone who thinks she’s “the most accepting and multicultural person in our family” for one, and secondly, always makes herself out to be the victim when I disagree with her on anything?

The curriculum, written by Barnor Hesse, an associate professor of African American studies at Northwestern University in Illinois, claims, “There is a regime of whiteness, and there are action-oriented white identities.

“People who identify with whiteness are one of these,’’ Hesse writes above the eight-point list.

“It’s about time we build an ethnography of whiteness, since white people have been the ones writing about and governing Others,’’ Hesse adds.

Psychology and other “helping professions” such as counselling and social work are often regarded as quintessentially human domains. Unlike workers in manual or routine jobs, psychologists generally see no threat to their career from advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Economists largely agree. One of the most wide-ranging and influential surveys of the future of employment, by Oxford economists Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, rated the probability that psychology could be automated in the near future at a mere 0.43%. This work was initially carried out in 2013 and expanded upon in 2019.

We are behavourial scientists studying organisational behaviour, and one of us (Ben Morrison) is also a registered psychologist. Our analysis over the past four years shows the idea psychology cannot be automated is now out of date.

Psychology already makes use of many automated tools, and even without significant advances in AI we foresee significant impacts in the very near future.

Four years ago, I had an affair with my cousin’s husband. The fallout was exactly what you’d imagine: godawful. I felt terrible about it at the time and apologized immediately. My cousin severed ties with me and most of my immediate family. Recently our grandmother died from COVID, and we were all together for the funeral. My cousin was perfectly polite, and I was reminded of my immense guilt that I hurt her and broke up her marriage. I would like to send a note apologizing for my part in the dissolution of her marriage but am not sure it’s a good idea. I also realize sometimes it’s better to let sleeping dogs lie and don’t want to bring up a painful memory for her unnecessarily. I would ask my parents, but I don’t want to open an old can of worms with them. We’ve moved on, but I know they feel pain at losing their niece at my hands. Any advice you can give would be appreciated.

—Family Fallout

Men find that platonic friendships with other men 'emotionally rival' their romantic relationships with women, according to a study in Men and Masculinities.

Those surveyed said 'the lack of boundaries and judgment' in their friendships with other men resulted in 'elevated emotional stability, enhanced emotional disclosure, social fulfilment, and better conflict resolution, compared to the emotional lives they shared with girlfriends'.

Most of the participants answers to the survey also made reference to the fact they felt more like they could be their real self with their bros.

As one respondent said: "Tim knows I love listening to Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, but I keep that quiet [around my girlfriend] because she would judge me. I feel like I have to be more manly around her."

The support for nurses demonstrating outside South Coast Global Medical Center is clear. It was one of four protests at Orange County hospitals.
Nurses say that their safety and patient lives are at risk after the state allowed their hospital, part of KPC Health, to increase the patient to nurse ratio in the middle of a pandemic.

"So instead of giving us more nurses we got more work. Patients are going to die, nurses are gonna break, nurses are exhausted," says Karen Rodriguez, a registered nurse.

Nurses say that they are overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients, shifts go as long as 16 hours, four to five days a week, code after code, leaving them exhausted, waking up anxious in the middle of the night.

"It might be surge after surge and who knows, and they're not preparing for the worst," says Irene Brown, South Coast Global Medical Center ICU nurse

"I don't have any more to give when I get home, and that's really unfair to my family and myself because I just want to rest," says Vanessa Aguilar

She says it's also unfair to patients. Aguilar had this heartbreaking admission: Some may have made it if we had more resources.

Q. I accidentally made everyone hate me: I’m a first-year teacher at an urban Title I middle school. As is common for many teachers in my position, I’m using my personal paycheck to cover the gaps that classroom funding doesn’t. After I realized at the beginning of the year that many of my students were having trouble concentrating, I started keeping a stash of healthy snacks near my desk. The students know they can come take a snack when they need one. The costs add up quickly, but it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make if it helps my kids focus.

Not long after I started keeping the food in my room, I began noticing it disappearing dramatically between the time I left each afternoon and the time I clocked in the next morning. The only staff who have a key to my room are the custodians and the administrators—both of whom are fed a meal by the cafeteria if they work nights. Because I rarely stay late enough to see the night staff in person, I started leaving notes on the snacks, stating that they were for students. When that didn’t work, I eventually hid them in my desk or closet (neither of which lock). They were still being taken. I weighed my options and realized I was either going to have to stop buying food for the kids or tell someone, so I mentioned what was happening to our head of facilities. Unbeknownst to me, our head of security hid a camera in the classroom, caught the custodian who was stealing, and promptly fired him.

My students’ food is no longer disappearing, but now I have another problem: All my co-workers hate me! The administrative assistant told anyone who would listen what happened, and now everyone is angry that I caused someone to lose his job. Some of the other teachers had also grumbled in the teachers’ lounge about food going missing from their rooms, so I know I’m not the only one who was upset, but apparently I broke some unspoken rule about tolerating food theft. Was I wrong to report it? I’m seriously considering quitting because so many people are suddenly being hostile and treating me like an entitled Karen.

Tyson Foods has fired seven plant management employees after an independent investigation into claims that leaders at the company bet on how many workers would become infected with COVID-19, the company announced Wednesday. The allegations against managers at the Waterloo, Iowa, plant were part of a lawsuit filed by the son of an employee who died of the coronavirus in April.

"We value our people and expect everyone on the team, especially our leaders, to operate with integrity and care in everything we do," Tyson Foods President and CEO Dean Banks said in a statement. "The behaviors exhibited by these individuals do not represent the Tyson core values, which is why we took immediate and appropriate action to get to the truth. Now that the investigation has concluded, we are taking action based on the findings."

The lawsuit, filed in early November, alleges that the plant manager of the Waterloo facility "organized a cash buy-in, winner-take-all betting pool for supervisors and managers to wager how many employees would test positive for COVID-19."

“I am not feeling this vaccine, and I’m certainly not feeling like being in the guinea pig phase,” Rev. Emmett Price shared with me on our podcast All Rev’d Up. Like many Black ministers across the country, Price is not confident in telling his congregation to be the first in line for the vaccine.

On November 26, Walker conducted a webinar, “Where do we go from here? Coping in the next season of the COVID-19 pandemic,” where Dr. Fauci spoke to the Roxbury community. Fauci recognized our distrust in the medical system but assured the audience that the speed of the vaccine does not compromise its safety nor scientific integrity.

However, Fauci mentioned the lack of diversity in the clinical trials for the vaccine and wished more minorities were in them, stating “what’s safe and effective should not be only for whites.”

The presidents of Xavier University and Dillard University, both historically Black universities in Louisiana, volunteered for COVID-19 trials with the hopes of recruiting their students as a way to bridge the chasm between the Black community and its distrust with the medical system. Students at both schools would have access to free COVID-19 tests and a lab equipment company made a donation worth $15 million to the schools.

A mother has lashed out at 'Karens' for accusing her of neglect after she shared a photograph of her daughter's newly decorated room on Facebook.

Scientists have made some great advancements in the field of age-related illnesses, but actually turning back time on the DNA of a living creature remains an elusive holy grail. We know that DNA gradually breaks down as a person grows older. We see that damage as aging and various age-related illnesses tend to pop up the older a person gets and the more their genes degrade.

Now, researchers from Harvard Medical School appear to have made a big leap in reversing aging in mice. More specifically, the researchers managed to revitalize the vision of aging mice by giving them a boost using genes that are present during early development.

Colorado public health experts planning for an imminent Covid-19 vaccine recommended a vulnerable population living in crowded housing for early vaccination – the state’s prison and jail inmates.

It is a population living in tight quarters where it’s almost impossible to social distance, and these institutions have seen some of the largest outbreaks of Covid-19 in the nation. For all those reasons, they were part of an early phase of the state’s vaccination plan.

But inmates are not, as a rule, a politically popular constituency.

As Covid-19 has spread around the world, it’s challenged preconceptions about which places would best tackle the worst public health crisis in a generation.

Advanced economies like the U.S. and U.K., ranked by various pre-2020 measures as being the most prepared for a pandemic, have been repeatedly overwhelmed by infections and face a return to costly lockdowns. Meanwhile, other countries—even developing nations—have defied expectations, some all but eliminating the pathogen within their borders.

Bloomberg crunched the numbers to determine the best places to be in the coronavirus era: where has the virus been handled most effectively with the least amount of disruption to business and society?

The three Nordic nations in the top 10 reflect how border control has been used effectively in Europe. Finland and Norway have blocked entry to most outsiders since mid-March, though they’re part of Europe’s passport-free Schengen area. The top-ranked European nations managed to avoid the resurgence now engulfing countries like France, the U.K. and Italy caused in part by summer vacation travel.

My parents are currently trying to “help” my 29-year-old brother by allowing him to move out to their new beach house and subsidizing his rent so he can get a fresh start in life.

My parents have always seemed to favor my brother, and I was finally able to heal and move on from the hurt a few years ago. I am two years younger and my husband and I have our own house, own two new cars, and have two stable incomes.

I have worked for everything that I have in life, and I am grateful for how I was raised because being forced to earn everything, including my parents affection, has allowed me to have the life I do now

My parents have always supported my brother emotionally and financially. They currently pay for his phone plan, his cell phone, his car loan — after he totalled his last car two weeks ago — and now his rent.

He depends on them for almost everything in life. They are encouraging him to move to get a fresh start on their dime instead of taking a leap and getting an apartment. They are doing this because they didn’t want him to have a mortgage.

Meanwhile, I am finishing my accounting degree before sitting for the CPA (my husband and I are paying 100%), and my parents are encouraging me to NOT get my master’s degree because it’s useless and would make my brother feel worse. They say that we are already married and have a house so why do we need more.