(cache) Is Trump Pivoting on Immigration, or Is He Just Talking About Pivoting?

Why One Neuroscientist Started Blasting His Core

James Hamblin

A new anatomical understanding of how movement controls the body’s stress response system

Elite tennis players have an uncanny ability to clear their heads after making errors. They constantly move on and start fresh for the next point. They can’t afford to dwell on mistakes.

Peter Strick is not a professional tennis player. He’s a distinguished professor and chair of the department of neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh Brain Institute. He’s the sort of person to dwell on mistakes, however small.

“My kids would tell me, dad, you ought to take up pilates. Do some yoga,” he said. “But I’d say, as far as I’m concerned, there's no scientific evidence that this is going to help me.”

Still, the meticulous skeptic espoused more of a tennis approach to dealing with stressful situations: Just teach yourself to move on. Of course there is evidence that ties practicing yoga to good health, but not the sort that convinced Strick. Studies show correlations between the two, but he needed a physiological mechanism to explain the relationship. Vague conjecture that yoga “decreases stress” wasn’t sufficient. How? Simply by distracting the mind?

The Coddling of the American Mind

Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt

In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like. Here’s why that’s disastrous for education—and mental health.

Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense. Last December, Jeannie Suk wrote in an online article for The New Yorker about law students asking her fellow professors at Harvard not to teach rape law—or, in one case, even use the word violate (as in “that violates the law”) lest it cause students distress. In February, Laura Kipnis, a professor at Northwestern University, wrote an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education describing a new campus politics of sexual paranoia—and was then subjected to a long investigation after students who were offended by the article and by a tweet she’d sent filed Title IX complaints against her. In June, a professor protecting himself with a pseudonym wrote an essay for Vox describing how gingerly he now has to teach. “I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me,” the headline said. A number of popular comedians, including Chris Rock, have stopped performing on college campuses (see Caitlin Flanagan’s article in this month’s issue). Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Maher have publicly condemned the oversensitivity of college students, saying too many of them can’t take a joke.

Good School, Rich School; Bad School, Poor School

Alana Semuels

The inequality at the heart of America’s education system

HARTFORD, Conn.—This is one of the wealthiest states in the union. But thousands of children here attend schools that are among the worst in the country. While students in higher-income towns such as Greenwich and Darien have easy access to guidance counselors, school psychologists, personal laptops, and up-to-date textbooks, those in high-poverty areas like Bridgeport and New Britain don’t. Such districts tend to have more students in need of extra help, and yet they have fewer guidance counselors, tutors, and psychologists, lower-paid teachers, more dilapidated facilities and bigger class sizes than wealthier districts, according to an ongoing lawsuit. Greenwich spends $6,000 more per pupil per year than Bridgeport does, according to the State Department of Education.

Trump on Immigration: Schrodinger's Candidate

David A. Graham

The Republican nominee is talking about softening his view on deportations and amnesty, but he makes it hard to tell whether he has actually done so.

Maybe Donald Trump has changed his position on immigration, and maybe he hasn’t. But it’s hard to get any sort of clarity from the candidate or his campaign on what policy he really supports.

As my colleague Priscilla Alvarez reported on Wednesday, the Republican nominee has made several comments in recent days that suggested he might be softening up his views, veering away from the hardline stance in which the only suitable solution to illegal immigration was a massive deportation of some 12 million people. Trump only deepened the mystery later that day. As Benjy Sarlin wrote of a town-hall meeting taped Tuesday in Austin, Texas, “He sounded unsure of his own immigration position on Tuesday, at one point turning to the audience to survey them on the issue.”

All the Ways Your Wi-Fi Router Can Spy on You

Kaveh Waddell

It can even be trained to read your lips.

City dwellers spend nearly every moment of every day awash in Wi-Fi signals. Homes, streets, businesses, and office buildings are constantly blasting wireless signals every which way for the benefit of nearby phones, tablets, laptops, wearables, and other connected paraphernalia.

When those devices connect to a router, they send requests for information—a weather forecast, the latest sports scores, a news article—and, in turn, receive that data, all over the air. As it communicates with the devices, the router is also gathering information about how its signals are traveling through the air, and whether they’re being disrupted by obstacles or interference. With that data, the router can make small adjustments to communicate more reliably with the devices it’s connected to.

Why Democrats Keep Winning Presidential Elections

Ronald Brownstein

If Hillary Clinton beats Donald Trump, her party will have set a record in American politics.

If Donald Trump can’t erase Hillary Clinton’s lead in the presidential race, the Republican Party will cross an ominous milestone—and confront some agonizing choices. Democrats have won the popular vote in five of the six presidential elections since 1992. (In 2000, Al Gore won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College and the White House to George W. Bush.) If Clinton maintains her consistent advantage in national and swing-state polls through Election Day, that means Democrats will have won the popular vote in six of the past seven presidential campaigns.

That’s unprecedented.

Since the 1828 election of Andrew Jackson that historians consider the birth of the modern two-party system, no party has ever won the presidential popular vote six times over seven elections. Even the nation’s most successful political figures have fallen short of that standard.

welzevoul / Cameron Whitman / Shutterstock / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic

The Plight of the Overworked Nonprofit Employee

Jonathan Timm

Do mission-driven organizations with tight budgets have any choice but to demand long, unpaid hours of their staffs?

Earlier this year, at the encouragement of President Obama, the Department of Labor finalized the most significant update to the federal rules on overtime in decades. The new rules will more than double the salary threshold for guaranteed overtime pay, from about $23,000 to $47,476. Once the rules go into effect this December, millions of employees who make less than that will be guaranteed overtime pay under the law when they work more than 40 hours a week.

Unsurprisingly, some business lobbies and conservatives disparaged the rule as unduly burdensome. But pushback also came from what might have been an unexpected source: a progressive nonprofit called the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG). “Doubling the minimum salary to $47,476 is especially unrealistic for non-profit, cause-oriented organizations,” U.S. PIRG said in a statement. “[T]o cover higher staffing costs forced upon us under the rule, we will be forced to hire fewer staff and limit the hours those staff can work—all while the well-funded special interests that we're up against will simply spend more.”

Zika Seems to Thrive in the Vagina

Julie Beck

A study in mice looks at the risks of vaginal infection.

It was just last month that the first case of a woman spreading Zika sexually to her male partner was documented, and around the same time that a study found the virus in a woman’s cervical mucus 11 days after infection. Before that, most of the talk about sexual transmission of the normally mosquito-borne virus focused on semen, where Zika can survive for a long time. (A recent report puts it at up to six months.)

But it’s starting to look like the vagina is very hospitable to Zika as well. Which is alarming, given the severity of the birth defects Zika can cause. So far there are only case studies in humans, but a new study in mice found that the female reproductive tract is “a highly susceptible site of ZIKV replication.”

A technician repairing a broken iPhone — Michaela Rehle / Reuters

Update Your iPhone Now

Kaveh Waddell

Apple just released a patch that fixes three giant vulnerabilities in iOS.

The software update that Apple just released for every iPhone and iPad doesn’t activate any new features—but it does patch three enormous security holes that would allow a savvy hacker to access just about every corner of an iOS device.

If exploited correctly, those flaws allow an intruder unprecedented access to an iPhone. They allow attackers to read every email, text message, calendar item, and file saved on the device; peruse photos and videos; listen in on phone calls; track the device’s location; and remotely turn on its microphone and camera. The phone’s owner would have no idea that anything out of the ordinary was going on.

The vulnerability was discovered by security researchers at Lookout, a mobile software security company, and Citizen Lab, a technology-focused academic research center at the University of Toronto. The researchers there were tipped off by a human-rights activist in the United Arab Emirates, who forwarded a pair of suspicious-looking text messages he received earlier this month from an unknown number. When they examined the link included in the text, they found that it led to a site designed to infect phones with a very advanced virus. The discovery was first reported by Motherboard and The New York Times.

Bad Omens for Bernie's Political Revolution

Clare Foran

His efforts to champion progressive grassroots activism have been troubled so far.

Bernie Sanders wants to prove his political movement won’t end now that his presidential campaign is over—and so far, it’s not going very well. An organization set up to carry on his legacy, Our Revolution, has faced legal scrutiny in the press, and a number of key staffers have departed. Meanwhile, Tim Canova, the candidate Sanders endorsed as a challenger to former Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, may be defeated badly in Florida’s upcoming Democratic primary race. Instead of unity and progressive victory, the next phase of the political revolution may be marked by bitterness and disappointment.

Canova certainly seems to feel like reality hasn’t lived up to his expectations. “There are a lot of people who feel disappointed,” he told me in an interview on Wednesday, lamenting that Sanders has not campaigned with him ahead of next week’s primary, despite publicly flirting with the idea. “There are a lot of people in South Florida who wanted Bernie Sanders to come down.”