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    polarization

    Barred owl.

    I Was Attacked by an Owl and This Is What I Learned

    I projected my desires and perspectives onto the owl without endeavoring to understand the owl’s perspective, something all to common when we approach people with differing viewpoints from our own.

    Zoe Weil
    Oct 06, 2024

    Last month I was walking through the woods by my house at sunset when a nearly fully grown juvenile barred owl swooped over my head and landed on a branch in front of me. I was awestruck by this gorgeous bird and began doing what I’ve always done with wild animals who do not flee from me: I talk to them. We looked at each other for a long time before I decided to move on. The last thing I said to the owl after a nearly 10-minute one-sided "conversation" was, “Good night. I love you.”

    Moments later, I felt a blow to my head, after which the stealthy culprit swooped to another branch to stare intently at me once more. I crouched down to grab a stick to hold above me in case the owl came after me again and slowly backed up to return home, where my husband, a veterinarian, could tend to my bloody talon wounds.

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    Opinion
    polarization
    A supporter of President Donald Trump insults counter-protesters during a rally in Washington, D.C., on November 14, 2020

    How to Achieve Your Goals Without Increasing Polarization

    If we're not careful, expressing our strong feelings through words and actions can deepen polarization and prevent us from collaborating with others to solve the problems we care about.

    Zoe Weil
    Feb 25, 2024

    Many of us are infuriated by issues in our communities, nation, and world. No matter where we stand on the political spectrum, there's a good chance we have strong feelings and opinions, whether about the war in the Middle East, the presidential election in the U.S., guns, school curricula, immigration, abortion, transgender issues, animal agriculture, or any number of topics that have inflamed and divided our citizenry. But here's the Catch-22: If we're not careful, expressing our strong feelings through words and actions can deepen polarization and prevent us from collaborating with others to solve the problems we care about.

    These two realities—polarization and strongly held beliefs—exist in a state of tension. For some of us, the desire to right the wrongs we see is so strong that we don't want to self-censor our (justified) speech or modify our (righteous) actions, even if we contribute to polarization. It's also possible we don't even realize that we may be undermining our effectiveness because our language and actions have become so normalized to us that we have not examined their full impacts. We use the words and phrases we've heard and have come to embrace within our personal spheres, and we act in the ways others who share our beliefs behave, even if these undermine the likelihood of reaching solutions.

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    Opinion
    polarization
    A man in red-white-and-blue face paint and horns yells in the U.S. Senate chamber.

    Are These the End Times?

    A conversation with Peter Turchin, author of End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration, about the prognosis for social breakdown in 2020s.

    Richard Heinberg
    Jul 19, 2023

    Peter Turchin’s latest book, End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration, is receiving glowing reviews. Its message is highly relevant to our collective understanding of the emerging global polycrisis and what needs to be done to minimize it.

    Turchin began his career as an evolutionary biologist, analyzing large datasets to clarify patterns in population dynamics in insects and other organisms. Throughout the last 25 years, he has applied these analytical methods to questions having to do with changes in human societies over time, a study to which he and his colleagues have given the name cliodynamics (after Clio, the Muse of history). Turchin, who now refers to himself as a complexity scientist, is an emeritus professor at the University of Connecticut, a project leader at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna, and a research associate at the University of Oxford. I was delighted when Peter consented to engage with me in an emailed interview about his most recent book.

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    Opinion
    inequality

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