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Happy Sunday – and welcome to the best of The Conversation.
In one of last week’s readers’ picks, a professor who teaches the modern history of the Middle East, Rochelle Anne Davis, and one who focuses on modern Eastern Europe, Eileen Kane, look at “educational gag orders.” They call Florida Law SB 266, which passed last month, an “extreme example.”
Among other provisions, the Florida law forbids professors to teach that systemic racism is “inherent in the institutions of the United States.”
It’s easy to dismiss these types of laws as just another battle in the country’s culture wars or political grandstanding on the part of presidential hopefuls. But Davis and Kane see troubling parallels in the “war on woke” to illiberal democracies like those in Russian and Poland.
Later this week we’ll bring you stories about the cybersecurity benefits of working from home, the European Union’s new human rights law and using poetry to teach math.
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Emily Costello
Director of Collaborations + Local News
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Readers' picks
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Recent heat waves underscore Earth’s new climate state.
Sean Gladwell via Getty Images
Darrell Kaufman, Northern Arizona University
Long before thermometers, nature left its own temperature records. A climate scientist explains how ongoing global warming compares with ancient temperatures.
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Michaela Barnett, University of Virginia; Leidy Klotz, University of Virginia; Patrick I. Hancock, University of Virginia; Shahzeen Attari, Indiana University
New research shows that Americans may have absorbed public messaging about the importance of recycling too well.
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Rochelle Anne Davis, Georgetown University; Eileen Kane, Connecticut College
Tactics used to censor the teaching of American history in Florida schools bear much in common with those seen in the illiberal democracies of Israel, Turkey, Russia and Poland.
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Peter A. Joy, Washington University in St Louis
Trump appointed Cannon to the bench, but that alone is not a good enough reason for her to recuse herself from the case.
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Paul D. Terry, University of Tennessee; Jiangang Chen, University of Tennessee; Ling Zhao, University of Tennessee
An expert panel found a potential association with liver cancer, but too little research exists to assume a causal connection. For now, the WHO left current consumption guidelines unchanged.
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Editors' picks
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Buoy barriers are shown in the middle of the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass, Texas, on July 18, 2023.
Brandon Bell/Getty Images
Jean Lantz Reisz, University of Southern California
Setting up buoys in a section of the Rio Grande is more likely to result in migrants seeking pathways elsewhere, rather than deterring migration altogether.
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David Mednicoff, UMass Amherst
Benjamin Netanyahu has helped reshape Israel and the broader world in profound ways. And there’s a dark side to those changes.
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Catherine A. Sanderson, Amherst College
People often privately feel uncomfortable about bad behavior they see around them but mistakenly believe their peers don’t share their concerns.
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Deborah Carr, Boston University; Giacomo Falchetta, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA); Ian Sue Wing, Boston University
Health and climate change researchers explain the risks and why older adults, even those in northern states, need to pay attention.
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Julie Ellen McConnell, University of Richmond
Research on developing brains has helped bring about a sea change in attitudes toward juvenile life without parole. But many people who committed crimes as minors are still serving such sentences.
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