Rea Hederman

Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, “Talking to Strangers,” is out, while he’s hosting the podcast, “Revisionist History.”

A cartoon on the cover of the Economist says it all: leaders of the world’s two foremost democracies are scrambling to hold on. President Trump is faced with the possibility of impeachment. In the interests of Brexit, Boris Johnson is accused of lying to the Queen and defying Parliament. In both countries, voters are losing trust not just in their elected leaders but in their governments. The UK and the US aren’t alone, as the ideals of western democracy are being challenged by demagogues in other parts of the world.

The two international giants are linked in inextricable ways, and yet Americans’ understanding of China consistently lacks nuance.

These are some interesting texts.

Twelve candidates are taking the stage at 5 PM PT at the CNN/New York Times Democratic Debate, hosted at Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio

When Gavin Newsom signed AB387 into law today, he ended 16 years of unsuccessful attempts by daycare providers statewide to unionize.

Twelve candidates are taking the stage at 5 PM PT at the CNN/New York Times Democratic Debate, hosted live at Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio

A bone-chilling documentary about Roy Cohn, Donald Trump’s mentor, reveals the all-American evil that brought us modern-day politics.

66 million years ago, an asteroid caused Earth’s Fifth Extinction, destroying the dinosaurs and most other life forms. Now Earth is facing another extinction, as fish, plants and animals vanish forever. But this time, it’s not the asteroid, it’s us. This week, hundreds of people, both young and old, took to the streets in cities all over the world to begin weeks of protest called the Extinction Rebellion. In the natural course of evolution, the decline and disappearance of a life form takes thousands of years. In the course of a human lifetime, not even one species might disappear. But now, some 28,000 species are vanishing all of a sudden. Elizabeth Kolbert of the New Yorker magazine has written a book called “The Sixth Extinction.” She says, “Extinction rates are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times higher than what is known as the background extinction rate that has pertained over most of geological history.” In her words, “You should not be able to see all sorts of mammals -- to name just one group -- either going extinct or on the verge of extinction. And that is a tipoff that something very, very unusual, and I would add, very dangerous, is going on.” “We’re running geological history backwards. Fossil fuels that were created over the course of hundreds of millions of years buried a lot of carbon underground. We’re now combusting it, putting that carbon back into the atmosphere over a matter of centuries. So we’re taking a process that hundreds of millions of years to run in one direction and then, in a matter of centuries, running it in another direction.” We’ll hear what that means now and for the future of life as we know it.