The New Yorker: Science & Technology.

"The truth about facts, the insurance crisis that will follow the California fires, and the deadly American diet."

Views expressed in this science and technology update are those of the reporters and correspondents.  Accessed on 11 January 2025, 1606 UTC.

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Russ Roberts (https://hawaiisciencejournal.blogspot.com).

 

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In today’s newsletter, the truth about facts, and then: • The insurance crisis that will follow the California fires • The deadly American diet • Do insects feel pain? What’s a Fact, Anyway? Journalists put more stress on accuracy than ever before. The problem is, accuracy is a slippery idea. By Fergus McIntosh Illustration by Ricardo Tomas Every tribe has its myths, and journalists are no exception. In America, one common story goes like this: once, in the prelapsarian era before social media—or before smartphones, or the Internet—there was a time when journalists were trusted. Back then, everybody read muscular daily newspapers and watched straight-down-the-line TV reporting. When citizens had to make political decisions, a robust social contract with the media insured that they were well informed; even if they couldn’t always agree on what to do or whom to vote for, they could rely on a shared set of facts. But then something changed: people stopped paying attention to the news, or decided that they didn’t believe it anymore. They got distracted by podcasts, Facebook, and Twitch. They became ill-informed, and started to act against their best interests. The media decayed and fragmented, along with the nation. Opinion and news became indistinguishable, misinformation ran amok, and that is how we came to live in the post-truth world. Keep reading Climate Change Dept.  The Lede On the Ground During L.A.’s Wildfire Emergency With four fires raging, tens of thousands have evacuated and others are confronting the precarity of where they live. By Emily Witt  The Lede The Insurance Crisis That Will Follow the California Fires For years, experts have warned that homeowner insurance in the state could easily collapse. By Elizabeth Kolbert  Annals of Appearances A City on Fire Can’t Be Photographed The images of a burning Los Angeles won’t last, simply because our ways of seeing are inadequate to our predicament. By Teju Cole If you know someone who would enjoy Science & Technology, please share it. Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up. Editor’s Picks  Annals of Inquiry Do Insects Feel Pain? Insects make up about forty per cent of living species, and we tend to kill them without pause. New research explores the possibility that they are sentient. By Shayla Love Annals of Medicine Why Is the American Diet So Deadly? A scientist tried to discredit the theory that ultra-processed foods are killing us. Instead, he overturned his own understanding of obesity. By Dhruv Khullar The New Yorker Radio Hour: Representative Ro Khanna knows tech moguls like Elon Musk—and knows how dangerous they are. “Some of them,” he tells David Remnick, “think they’re Nietzsche’s Superman.” Listen and follow » Annals of Technology  A Reporter at Large On TikTok, Every Migrant Is Living the American Dream Many people from the Andes have settled in New York. They face tremendous difficulties, but their online posts glamorize their lives, drawing others northward. By Jordan Salama  Infinite Scroll A Lesson in Creativity and Capitalism from Two Zany YouTubers Some of the optimism of the early Internet seems to live on in the whimsical videos of James Hobson and Colin Furze. By Cal Newport Cartoon by David Sipress P.S. “Each word in the piece that has even a shred of fact clinging to it is scrutinized, and, if passed, given the checker’s imprimatur, which consists of a tiny pencil tick,” Sara Lippincott, who worked in The New Yorker’s fact-checking department from 1966 until 1982, once explained. John McPhee tells a singular story of being rigorously fact-checked by Lippincott, in 1973, for a sixty-thousand-word piece about weapons-grade nuclear material in private industry. ✏️

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