Even as cases of COVID-19 rise in Illinois,the state’s contact tracing program isn’t fully operational, and hospitals who got some reprieve over the summer are bracing for the possibility of a flood of new patients.
Reset talks with WBEZ’s Kristen Schorsch as well as two doctors from area hospitals who lay out what the situation is on the ground and what they’re doing to prepare for the coming wave.
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For more about the program, you can head over to the WBEZ website or follow us on Twitter at @WBEZreset.
NPR political correspondents Tamara Keith and Asma Khalid reflect on an election season shaped by unprecedented events: a global pandemic, President Trump's COVID-19 diagnosis, and the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — none of which seemed to dramatically change the shape of the race.
In a chaotic year of dueling recriminations and very different visions of the future, the real question of this U.S. presidential election is: Who is better for bitcoin?
After a surprisingly close Twitter poll with more than 1,600 respondents answering the question “Is Trump or Biden better for bitcoin?”, NLW breaks down the most common themes, including:
The COMMENTARY podcast does something a little different to celebrate Election Day eve. We went back into the archives to reexamine the last podcast ahead of Election Day 2016 and, upon review, there are a lot of eerie similarities between then and now.
Former Burundian President Pierre Buyoya received a life sentence in court for the murder of another former President: Melchior Ndadaye. A recent study confirms the issues discussed in the previous COVID series, showing worldwide trends regarding fears and misconceptions about infection. A bizarre invasive species of mutated, clonal, entirely female crayfish have been expanding across Europe -- one graveyard in Antwerp claims they've already lost the battle to this creature that sounds like something straight out of a comic book.
The final push with one last day to campaign. President Trump hits he'll fire Dr. Fauci. Johnny Depp loses his libel case. CBS News Correspondent Steve Kathan has today's World News Roundup.
The Camino de Santiago is one of the most significant and popular pilgrimage routes in the World. For over 1,000 years pilgrims have traveled to the tomb of St. James in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Some do it for religious reasons and some just to have an adventure.
Today, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims still make the journey every year.
Learn more about the Camino de Santiago, aka Way of Saint James, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson all but ruled out a second lockdown, but his hand has been forced by England’s caseload. What are the political costs of his U-turn? Myanmar’s coming election will almost certainly be marred by disinformation on Facebook—principally because so many Burmese people get their only news there. And examining the current glut of political biographies.
There’s an intuitive attraction to the idea that if we could just spend some quality time with someone from another group, we’d both come to appreciate, and maybe even like, the other person and perhaps even their group. Enormously simplified, that’s the basis of contact theory, which Gordon Allport posited in the 1950s as the United States grappled with desegregating its public schools.
If differing groups could be brought together cooperatively – not competitively – in a manner endorsed by both groups and where each side met on an equal footing, perhaps we could, as Salma Mousa puts it in this Social Science Bites podcast, “unlock tolerance on both sides and reduce prejudice.”
Mousa, currently a postdoctoral research fellow at Stanford University’s Department of Political Science, tells interviewer David Edmonds that since Allport’s heyday, “We have [had] a lot of studies about contact, but we need experimental tests of contact.” She’s been working to address that need, sometimes using the football pitch as a field site, with work that’s caught both the public and the scientific imagination.
One experiment she was part of examined the incidence of hate crimes once Mohamed “Mo” Salah, the talented Egyptian soccer star, signed with Liverpool Football Club. The results were heartening; Merseyside, where the club is located, experienced a 16 percent drop in hate crimes while anti-Muslim tweets from Liverpool’s fans dropped to half the number compared to fans of other Premier League clubs.
In this interview, Mousa details another experiment involving football and otherness, albeit an experiment made under harsher conditions: “We set out to learn if positive, social contact across social lines can reduce prejudice, can build friendships, can overall improve relationships between groups even in postwar settings, like Iraq.”
The experiment was conducted along the faultlines of northern Iraq where there’s a Kurdish enclave. Working with a Christian community organization which was helping Christians and Muslims displaced by ISIS, the researchers recruited Christian amateur soccer players for a football league. They then added three or four players to each team, randomly adding either all Muslims or all Christians as the newcomers, and tracked player attitudes and actions on the field and off for a half year after the season ended.
Amid some “really profound friendships” that formed, survey results and observed behavior showed that the Christian players came to be much more accepting and welcoming of their Muslim teammates. But that warming did not make the leap to their attitudes towards Muslims in general, suggesting some underlying prejudices remained in place.
While her promising findings nonetheless were not the “home run” people of good will would have liked, the research earned the cover of the journal Science, and left Mousa feeling optimistic about further possibilities of contact theory. Given the difficult context of postwar Iraq and subjects scarred by their flight from ISIS, “to find some evidence that these guys actually became friends and we changed something in these communities, I think is positive, especially given that these communities are persecuted and highly distrustful.”
Fostering tolerance and eroding prejudice, especially in the Middle East, matters personally to Mousa, an Egyptian-Canadian who grew up in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Canada. She’s focused on helping “fix” the region’s ethnic and religious divides: “I think of myself as an engineer but with a social science background.”
Mousa has held fellowships at the U.S. Institute of Peace, Stanford’s Immigration Policy Lab, the Freeman Spogli Institute, the Stanford Center for International Conflict and Negotiation, the McCoy Center for Ethics in Society, and the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. Her work has been supported by the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, the Innovations for Poverty Action Lab, the King Center on Global Development, the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences, the Program on Governance and Local Development, and the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies.
