City officials around the country often point to policing as a key component of why crime falls, highlighting how many officers a city has or how they're being deployed. That can play an important role, but crime analysts say the reasons behind these drops are more complex and broader. (Anderson, NPR)
Read MoreWhat started as an effort to promote racial unity in Edenton by reconsidering its most prominent downtown symbol has done the opposite. A chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, long extinct locally, sprang to life. The forgotten Confederate Memorial Day was resurrected and commemorated again last month with a wreath-laying and roll call of the rebel dead. (Schneider, The Washington Post)
Read MoreResearchers used an EEG to record the writers’ brain activity across 32 regions, and found that of the three groups, ChatGPT users had the lowest brain engagement and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Over the course of several months, ChatGPT users got lazier with each subsequent essay, often resorting to copy-and-paste by the end of the study. (Chow, TIME)
Read MoreEnticing a modern-day tween to attend cotillion classes, something that sounds as outdated as calling a refrigerator an icebox or using finger bowls to cleanse the hands before petit fours are served, requires a little finesse. (Gachman & Durst, The New York Times)
Read MoreThe subterfuges, ruses, tricks, and other maneuvers filmmakers used were often ingenious as well as diverting and, most importantly, from the filmmakers’ perspective, they allowed movies to give audiences what they’d paid to see—the very thrills the Code was supposed to deny them. (Pullman, ListVerse)
Read MoreWhile some predictions—that the Obergefell ruling would lead to a decline in marriage rates and an increase in divorce rates—did not pan out, the concern that it would lead to schisms among American Christians has proven prescient, according to political scientist Mark Caleb Smith. (Prude, Christianity Today)
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