Culture and Arts

"When investigative journalist Corey G. Johnson started working at the Tampa Bay Times in 2017, he had been following national news coverage of lead poisoning the public water supply in Flint, Michigan, where he spent summers as a kid visiting family. Johnson decided to look into lead in Hillsborough County public schools and reported in 2018 that school district officials had found elevated levels on some campuses but didn’t tell families for 16 months — until he began asking parents what they knew about the tests. Amid that investigation, a source handed him a state health report showing Hillsborough had the highest number of adults diagnosed with lead poisoning of any of Florida’s 67 counties. The report pointed to an unnamed battery recycler as the key culprit. Their 18-month investigation also reveals why regulators failed to correct the problem and its impact on workers and the surrounding community." more »

"I have argued that cryptocurrencies may be creating a movement toward non-uniform currency in the U.S. — a system that society has disliked historically. In the pre-Civil War era, the majority of the U.S. money supply consisted of privately issued banknotes. Publications listed and frequently updated the going exchange rates for different currencies in particular locations. Similar to today’s global currency system, the pre-Civil War era was characterized by exchange rate chaos, with currencies constantly fluctuating against one another. People didn’t like that system, and a uniform currency was implemented in the U.S. during the Civil War. But cryptocurrencies may unwittingly be pushing us back in the direction of a non-uniform currency system." more »

"When inflation broke loose in March 2021, even though I had expected it to run above 2 percent in 2021 and 2022, I never thought it would reach the very high levels we have seen in recent months. Indeed, I expected it would eventually fade, due to the nature of these shocks. All the suspected drivers of this surge in inflation appeared to be temporary: the one-time stimulus from fiscal policy, supply chain shocks that previous experience indicated would ease soon, and a surge in demand for goods. In addition, we had very accommodative monetary policy that I believed would end in 2022. The issue in my mind was whether these factors would start fading away later in 2021 or in 2022." more »

“Just as an infant knows to tune into her mother’s voice, an adolescent knows to tune into novel voices,” said lead study author Daniel Abrams, PhD, clinical associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. “As a teen, you don’t know you’re doing this. You’re just being you: You’ve got your friends and new companions and you want to spend time with them. Your mind is increasingly sensitive to and attracted to these unfamiliar voices.” In some ways, teens’ brains are more receptive to all voices — including their mothers’ — than the brains of children under 12, the researchers discovered, a finding that lines up with teenagers’ increased interest in many types of social signals. more »