It has been four years! Starting today (July 7th, 2023) at 10am, the First Hill Farmers Market along 9th Avenue, between Seneca Street and University Street on Virginia Mason’s campus, will set up shop again. The market will be every Friday from July 7th to September 1st from 10am to 2pm. Go and check it out!
As a reminder, 9th Avenue will be closed to cars for one block between University and Seneca Streets.
The Memory Hub serves the community with a wide variety of activities and programs to help persons with memory loss. Check out and subscribe to their web site to get the excellent newletters.
Click here for information about the nearby Memory Hub and its current newsletter.
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Dr. Khan is a professor of sociology and American studies at Princeton who studies culture, inequality, gender and elites. He is the author of “Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School.”
Just four days after the Supreme Court rejected racial preferences in college admissions, a consortium of Black and Latino interest groups filed a complaint against Harvard concerning a different kind of preference: the special consideration given to the children of alumni. The filing notes that the practice of legacy admissions disproportionately benefits white applicants. If racial considerations are to be strictly limited, the plaintiffs argue, other considerations that effectively favor some racial groups must also go.
It’s a powerful argument. In 2018, Princeton University, my employer, accepted around 5 percent of applicants overall, yet for legacies the rate was around 30 percent. Why set aside a special access lane for predominantly white children who are already the beneficiaries of so many social and economic advantages? Factor in the evidence that legacy admissions don’t even increase alumni giving — presumably the strongest rationale for the preference — and the policy starts to seem not just immoral but downright nonsensical.
Yet before the dismantling of affirmative action, legacy admissions had some unexpected and surprising effects. Legacy students got a leg up in the admissions process, but they were already on the path to success, just by virtue of being born into privilege. In fact, there’s considerable evidence that going to an elite school like Princeton, as opposed to a less selective college, made no difference to their earnings later in life.
One group, however, got a big economic boost from going to elite schools: poor students, students of color and students whose parents didn’t have a college degree. And that’s because elite colleges connected them to students born into privilege — the very kind of student that legacy preferences admit in such large numbers.
We might assume that legacy admissions help privileged students at the expense of underprivileged ones. But I would wager that legacy students, if eliminated, are far more likely to be replaced by other kinds of privileged students than by underprivileged ones. And in ways that are far less obvious, legacy students, with their deep social and cultural connections, are part of the reason less advantaged students get so much out of elite schools.
With the end of affirmative action, this is all moot. Estimates suggest that the percentage of Black, Latino and Native American students at selective colleges will drop significantly in the coming years, in some cases returning to 1960s levels. Colleges and universities that are serious about fairness should eliminate all preferences — not just legacy ones — that advantage the privileged. But as they redesign their systems, it’s worth taking time to consider how the presence of privilege can aide the disadvantaged.
Start by asking yourself what students get out of elite schools. I would like to believe that the most important benefit of these colleges is the exceptional knowledge that professors can deliver in the classroom. But if elite schools delivered special intellectual growth and professional training — what social scientists call human capital — privileged students would benefit greatly from them. And there’s no good evidence that they do.
Instead, other forms of capital play a bigger role: symbolic capital (the value of being associated with prestigious institutions), social capital (the value of your network) and cultural capital (the value of exposure to high-status practices and mores). Graduating from an elite school pays off on all three counts: It affiliates you with an illustrious organization, offers you connections to people with friends in high places and acculturates you in the conventions and etiquettes of high-status settings.
Students who come from privileged backgrounds arrive for freshman year having already accrued most of this capital. Attending an elite college doesn’t add much for them. But for students from underprivileged backgrounds — students who are less likely to have a ready-made network of rich, influential connections, or to have a shared set of cultural references over which to bond with powerful gatekeepers — an elite college experience can be transformative.
Research repeatedly bears this out. Your odds of getting a job at any given workplace increase considerably if your social network links you to it, and the more prestigious the school, the more rarefied the network. The sociologist Lauren Rivera, a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, has also shown the effect of “cultural matching” when you apply for a job: Elite recruiters respond favorably to the kinds of cultural “similarities” — shared literary references, playing the “right” sport — that students pick up in fancy colleges, precisely because these shared traits remind hiring partners of themselves.
Likewise, the Boston University sociologist Anthony Abraham Jack has shown that students from underrepresented communities can become relatively privileged as a result of attending elite schools, where they develop relationships with socially advantaged peers and pick up on valuable cultural cues.
Of course, no college ever set up a fast lane for legacy applicants just as a favor to minority and low-income students. But the fact remains that if elite colleges decided to admit only minority and low-income students, this effect would be much less pronounced. With the end of affirmative action, the peculiar upside of legacy admissions fades away — and the policy becomes impossible to justify.
I would be glad to see legacy admissions go. But I don’t imagine getting rid of them would do much to balance the scale in favor of those from historically marginalized and excluded backgrounds. Legacy students are just a tiny proportion of the pool of privileged kids who are rich in symbolic, social and cultural capital. Even without the extra boost legacies currently get, it would be almost impossible to offset the advantages of wealthy families who can pay for all the experiences and qualities that make their children seem miraculously, naturally, qualified.
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An electric car is charged at a roadside EV charge point, London, October 19, 2021. REUTERS/Toby Melville/File Photo
LONDON, July 5 (Reuters) – A lack of data on electric vehicle (EV) batteries continues to challenge insurers who are forced to scrap EVs after mild accidents, potentially undermining EV adoption, Thatcham Research said on Wednesday.
The British automotive risk intelligence company cited a “concerning lack of affordable or available repair solutions and post-accident diagnostics” in a report entitled “Impact of BEV Adoption on the Repair and Insurance Sectors” the UK Government’s innovation agency Innovate UK funded to examine differences between EVs and fossil-fuel models.
Insurers have complained that many EVs have no way to repair or assess even slightly damaged battery packs after accidents, forcing them to write off cars with low mileage – leading to higher premiums and undercutting gains from going electric.
Batteries can make up half of an EV’s cost and Thatcham found a replacement battery can cost more than the used price of the vehicle after only one year, making replacing them uneconomical.
Adrian Watson, Thatcham’s head of engineering research, said in an ideal world insurers could make informed decisions about whether to repair EVs or write it off based on access to data on its state of health after an accident.
“The reality is that’s not the situation we’re in at the moment,” he told Reuters. “The diagnostics we have do not enable you to really know what the status of the battery is.”
In a statement Mike Hawes, CEO of British industry group the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) said the car industry is “keen to engage with insurers to understand their challenges and ensure vehicles involved in an accident are properly assessed – rather than being written off by default – and the majority repaired and returned safely to the road.”
Only around 1.65% of cars on Britain’s roads are electric, but Thatcham said EV-related insurance claims are already 25.5% more expensive than for fossil-fuel equivalents and take 14% longer to repair.
Due to their potential fire risk, damaged EVs awaiting repair must be stored outside at least 15 metres (49 ft) from other objects.
An outside facility for 100 fossil-fuel cars today would have space to safely quarantine just two EVs, Thatcham said.
Reporting by Nick Carey; Editing by Josie Kao and Louise Heavens
By By Alexandra Moe in the Washington Post (thanks to Joan C.)
The choir met on Wednesdays in a London church, and if the Tube was on strike, it took Hazel Hardy two buses across the city to get there — but no matter. By the time she entered the hall, she says, she’d “escaped whatever was outside,” including her cancer.
The choir members, who met from 2016 to 2018, were all familiar with cancer — they were patients, caregivers and oncologists — but they didn’t discuss it. They were there to sing. To have a bit of fun and meet people. For Hardy, who had been diagnosed with breast cancer shortly before joining the group, it was a “new kind of family.”
After rehearsals,some of the singers provided a saliva sample to researchers examining whether singing affected their health and mood — and it did, positively. The “Sing With Us” study, which enrolled Hardyand 192 others, is part of a growing body of research that points to the physical and mental health benefits of singing with others. Sing With Us linked singing in the choir to reduced stress hormones and increased cytokines, proteins that can boost the body’s ability to fight serious illness.
Singing groups such as choirssupport the “total growth of the human being,” says Stanley Thurston, who founded the Heritage Signature Chorale in D.C. to preserve African American choral music and serves as its artistic director. Although many choirs in the United States operate out of churches, plenty of others are community based, including Heritage.
But choirs and singing have also been associated with the spread of the coronavirus during the pandemic, although at least one study has raised questions about this. These days, many have scaled back covid protocols such as requiring masks at all rehearsals but still ask singers to monitor their health and stay home with a sore throat, fever, congestion or excessive coughing.
Other ensembles now offer virtual rehearsal options. It’s a new world, and “trying to keep everyone healthy” is part of a choir director’s job, Thurston says.
Dance classes are not only fun, but they may also benefit your well-being. A dance class may improve your physical fitness, cognitive functioning, and mood, and a recent study shows it may also make you less depressed. Specifically, new research published in the Journal of Applied Gerontology examined associations between dance classes and depressive symptoms in adults over age 60.
The researchers conducted a meta-analysis of 23 research studies conducted between 2006 and 2022 to examine the impact of dance interventions on depressive symptoms in older adults. Their efforts resulted in a sample size of 1,398 healthy older adults with a mean age of 72 years. Studies included multiple types of dance, such as Chinese square dancing, ballroom dance, and tango, and the programs ranged from 4 to 48 weeks. Results showed that adults who participated in a multi-week dance program had significantly fewer depressive symptoms at the end of the study than those who did not participate (i.e., who were part of the control group).
More research is needed on the program duration needed to see benefits, which types of dance are most effective, and whether dancing alone vs. in a group influences outcomes. The programs included a diverse range of dance classes, demonstrating that a wide variety of dance styles may be beneficial for mental health. To mitigate your risk of future mental health symptoms, join a dance class! Or just turn up the music and dance.
Source:
Rittiwong, T., Reangsing, C., & Schneider, J. K. (2023). The Effects of Dance Interventions on Depression in Older Adults: A Meta-Analysis. Journal of Applied Gerontology, 07334648231172357. https://doi.org/10.1177/07334648231172357
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Canada’s wildfires have burned 20 million acres, blanketed Canadian and U.S. cities with smoke and raised health concerns on both sides of the border, with no end in sight. The toll on the Canadian economy is only beginning to sink in.
The fires have upended oil and gas operations, reduced available timber harvests, dampened the tourism industry and imposed uncounted costs on the national health system.
Those losses are emblematic of the pressure being felt more widely as countries around the world experience disaster after disaster caused by extreme weather, and they will only increase as the climate warms.
What long seemed a faraway concern has snapped into sharp relief in recent years, as billowing smoke has suffused vast areas of North America, floods have washed away neighborhoods and heat waves have strained power grids. That incurs billions of dollars in costs, and has longer-reverberating consequences, such as insurers withdrawing from markets prone to hurricanes and fires.
In some early studies of the economic impact of rising temperatures, Canada appeared to be better positioned than countries closer to the Equator; warming could allow for longer farming seasons and make more places attractive to live in as winters grow less harsh. But it is becoming clear that increasing volatility — ice storms followed by fires followed by intense rains and now hurricanes on the Atlantic coast, uncommon so far north — wipes out any potential gains.
“It’s come on faster than we thought, even informed people,” said Dave Sawyer, principal economist at the Canadian Climate Institute. “You couldn’t model this out if you tried. We’ve always been concerned about this escalation of damages, but seeing it happen is so stark.”
As a naturalized U.S. citizen and an immigration lawyer, I’m struck by the throughline of immigrant entrepreneurship throughout America’s history.
This Independence Day, I hope we take a moment to think about whether we as a country can become as innovative with our immigration laws as immigrants have been in developing our country’s status as a global leader in commerce and culture.
For years, I’ve pushed for a “startup visa” because our current immigration laws don’t address the needs of entrepreneurs and the global workers that startups need to stay competitive.
It wasn’t always this way. It’s only been since the latter half of the 19th century that our country has clamped down on immigration, despite history showing that economic prosperity and increased immigration go hand in hand.
For example, in the 1600s, British settler John Rolfe came to Virginia to develop the tobacco industry, which eventually became the economic juggernaut that fueled the colonies’ success.
Two hundred years later, German immigrant Levi Strauss developed the strong metal-riveted denim trousers that were needed by the miners who ventured out West to mine and pan for gold in California. In 2022, Levi’s generated almost $3 billion in revenue.
About 100 years after Levi patented his jeans, Sergey Brin, a Russian immigrant, co-founded Google, the revolutionary search engine. In 2022, Google generated more than $270 billion in revenue.
Twenty-five years after Google became a verb, the world kept functioning during a global pandemic thanks to Zoom, a video platform created by a Chinese immigrant, Eric Yuan. And the world opened up again, thanks in part to a vaccine developed at Moderna with the help of an immigrant co-founder, Noubar Afeyan.
And those are just the high-profile stories — not including the countless mom-and-pop store owners, restaurateurs, investors, inventors and startup founders who fuel our local economies and global industries.
Today’s America continues to build on past successes. And immigrants’ innovation, entrepreneurship and leadership are key factors in continuing our global influence. About 70% of graduate students in A.I. related fields are international students. And 43% of Fortune 500 companies were founded by an immigrant or the child of an immigrant — with a combined revenue of $6.1 trillion in 2018.
America is a land of immigrants who shaped its democracy, built its infrastructure and honed it, brick by brick and invention by invention, into the world’s greatest economy. Today, on Independence Day, we celebrate America and all that it is.
But what about America for all that it can be in the future?
Today companies are battling for the best talent.
In fact, there is a global shortage of talent. Other countries are making moves to jump ahead of us by adopting immigration laws to remain competitive. Canada recently announced open work permits to U.S. H-1B visa holders. Britain created the High Potential Visa to attract graduates from mostly U.S. schools. Australia, Germany and other countries are following suit.
Where does that leave the United States? With complex laws making it difficult for immigrants and employers alike, we are on a fast-track path to losing our competitive edge.
The challenges are unprecedented. In March, more than 780,000 H-1B applications were filed, for only 85,000 available visas, leaving smaller companies and startups losing out.
When businesses cannot fill positions and entrepreneurs cannot get their innovations off the ground, it is the American worker, consumer and economy that miss out.
The Biden administration has updated policies, but it is not enough. Immigration reform has never been more urgent.
In the absence of Congress taking action, I took my own. I wrote a book “The Startup Visa: U.S. Immigration Visa Guide for Startups and Founders” to help my clients and others navigate the increasingly complex laws that have been weighed down by political factors instead of directed by people’s needs. I also hope that policymakers and other economic development leaders will understand how our current immigration system is hurting the American entrepreneurial spirit to our collective detriment.
When I became a U.S. citizen in 2010, the song “God Bless the U.S.A.” by Lee Greenwood was played during the oath ceremony. To this date, that song rings in my ear and especially on July Fourth. Being a citizen brings the responsibility to make your country better. I work hard on this issue because I see firsthand that immigrants do not take their love of America for granted — they get the job done to make it better for all.
Tahmina Watson is an immigration attorney and founder of Watson Immigration Law. A naturalized U.S. citizen born in London, U.K., she is the author of the book series “The Startup Visa” and host of the podcast The Startup Visa.
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Wine growing has evolved into one of Washington State’s major industries. Our corner is second in the nation (after California) for wine production and boasts more than 1,000 wineries.
Up to the 1970s, California, Europe, and New York State produced wines of choice for Pacific Northwesterners. Today, major wine AVA’s (American Viticultural Areas) are scattered throughout Washington state. The big producers are in the Walla Walla Valley, the Yakima Valley, and the Columbia Valley. Wineries are also found alongside Hood Canal, on Bainbridge Island, in Kirkland and Bellevue, and nestled in the foothills of tiny Dixie in southeast Washington and in the Horse Heaven Hills south of Prosser.
The industry’s history buzzes with names and dates from the early Fur Trade at Fort Vancouver (1825) and the later surging Western Migration of Euro-Americans (1850s), including Italians who settled in the hills of Walla Walla. Washington was placed by the wine gods between 30 degrees and 50 degrees latitude north and south of the equator – the historic region for grape growing in Europe. Even better, the southern half of Washington state lies within the same latitudes as the famous and fabled wine-producing regions in Europe near Burgundy and Bordeaux. Those factors are abetted by Eastern Washington’s long, warm summer days, blessed with one of the nation’s earliest and largest irrigation systems, and enriched by light-textured silt loams, remnants of the area’s ancient volcanoes.
All this is good news for the wine connoisseur and the growing tourist industry. Wineries are now making bold attempts to attract visitors. Tasting rooms – often with musical productions, lectures, and restaurants – often boast sweeping views of hills and rivers. Corollary activities have crowded around: bed and breakfast accommodations, bistros, wine cellars, special tours larded with local history, readable histories and related publications, and tools of the industry such as artistically designed cork pullers and decanters. Several years ago, I boarded the Spirit of Washington dinner train, which departed Yakima on weekends, taking a three-hour round trip to Ellensburg (brunches during the winter) and making winery stops along the route.
We found small wineries, located in relatively remote nooks and at the end of unmarked farm roads, and a variety of informal experiences. For example (and there are many more in the state): Bonair Winery near Zillah, with rich reds and a soft Chardonnay, offers a pleasant hide-away-in-the-hills; Biscuit Ridge in Dixie, east of Walla Walla, produces a dry, quiet Gewurtztraminer; prize-winning Neuharth winery overlooks the hills of Dungeness and balmy Sequim; Mercer Ranch and its rich Cabernet is hidden among the Columbia River hills; Columbia Crest winery near rural Paterson overlooks mythical Native lands.
Washington’s 1,000 wineries have taken large strides to accommodate visitors. Visiting our state’s wineries now offers a large helping of cultural enrichment, geological wonders, home-spun sustenance, aromatic treats from the land and the tasting rooms, and congenial surroundings. Bon Appetit! Salute!
A new generation of treatment facilities is aiming to integrate dementia patients with the communities around them, blurring lines between home and hospital.
By Joann Plockova
Reporting from Weesp, the Netherlands
July 3, 2023 in the NYT
On a recent morning in this quiet village outside Amsterdam, an older woman stocked shelves inside the local supermarket. In the plaza just outside the store, a group of men sat around a table, chatting the hours away. Over in the town square, a woman in a hijab sipped coffee outside the cafe.
If it looked like a typical Dutch town — with a restaurant (which is open to the public), a theater, a pub and a cluster of quaint two-story brick townhomes on a gridded street map — well, that’s the point. Many of the people here don’t realize that they are living in the world’s first so-called “dementia village,” and it can be difficult for visitors to tell the difference between the residents and the plainclothes staff.
Gert Bosscher, whose wife Anneke, received an Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis six years ago and has been a resident for nine months, said the decision to have her at Hogeweyk was an easy one. “My first impression after entering Hogeweyk was an open area, decorated with flowers, with a relaxed atmosphere in which clients and relatives were walking around freely or sitting on a terrace drinking a cup of tea,” he said. “To be honest, at that moment I had made my choice already.”
Since 2009, the Hogeweyk, which sits on four acres in the Amsterdam suburb of Weesp, has aimed to “emancipate people living with dementia and include them in society,” according to its website. The community, which is funded by the Dutch government and currently serves 188 residents in 27 houses, marked an evolution from traditional nursing homes — the authors of the 2020 World Alzheimer Report called it a “paradigm shifter” — by offering residents (and their families) humanized care that feels more like home.
Outpatient treatment with metformin reduced long COVID incidence by about 41%, with an absolute reduction of 4·1%, compared with placebo. Metformin has clinical benefits when used as outpatient treatment for COVID-19 and is globally available, low-cost, and safe.
Mr. Stetler is a journalist who writes about French politics and culture.
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PARIS — “I’m a fully-grown adult, but my mother still seems nervous whenever I leave the house,” Djigui, one of the thousands of protesters who took to the streets on Thursday afternoon in Nanterre, a working-class suburb of Paris, told me. “I can hear the crack in her voice when she checks to make sure I have my ID card or just says, ‘Watch out.’”
In Nanterre, on Tuesday, this concern turned out to be a matter of life and death. Nahel M., a 17-year-old male of Moroccan and Algerian descent, was fatally shot by a police officer at a traffic stop, setting off a countrywide revolt over police violence and racism. Over the past several nights, protests have erupted in spectacular fashion. From Toulouse and Lille to Marseille and Paris, groups of protesters have sacked police stations and looted or vandalized scores of businesses, hurling Molotov cocktails and setting off barrages of fireworks at public buildings and the riot police. Nearly 1,000 people have been arrested.
The anger shows no sign of abating. The killing of Nahel M. — which to many appeared more like a summary execution — exposed the most extreme form of the police violence that has long targeted communities of color in France. It’s also acted as a catalyst for the discontent simmering throughout the country. For President Emmanuel Macron, it was another blow to his authority, as he was forced once again to confront a France on fire.
Still, the killing of Nahel M. might have ended up as little more than a secondary news item. Early press accounts portrayed the police officers as acting in self-defense, shooting an erratic driver willing to plow through officers to escape custody. This version of events would have placed the officers under the protection of a 2017 law, passed by Mr. Macron’s predecessor, François Hollande, that loosened police restrictions on the use of firearms in cases where a driver refuses to stop at an officer’s order. (This law has been cited as one cause of an uptick of fatal police shootings in recent years, which have risen to a peak of 52 deaths in 2021 from 27 in 2017.)
But cellphone footage taken by a bystander quickly shifted the narrative. The video, which surfaced soon after the killing, shows two officers standing beside the vehicle, one aiming his pistol toward the driver’s window at point-blank range. Though it’s unclear who uttered them, the words “I’m going to put a bullet in your head” can be made out before the car began to accelerate and the fatal shot was fired. Nahel M. died an hour later.
The government’s first reflex was to portray a cautious sensitivity, in the hope of avoiding the type of street flare-ups that are often called a “contagion” of the banlieues — the economically depressed, multiracial urban areas that experience the brunt of French policing. “Nothing justifies the death of a young person,” Mr. Macron said on Wednesday, calling the actions of the police “inexcusable” and “inexplicable.” For Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne, the officers’ conduct was “clearly not in conformity with the rules of engagement.”
That’s probably as far as the president will go. After all, the government rarely takes opportunities to engage seriously with the problem of police violence. Mr. Macron has tended to attribute deaths at the hands of the police to the regrettable errors of individual public servants. In December 2020, when Mr. Macron made the relatively blunt concession that “someone with a skin color that isn’t white is much more likely to be subjected to searches,” he was rebuked by France’s powerful police unions, whose members refused to carry out traffic stops and ID checks.
Part of the problem is Mr. Macron’s relationship to the police. Since coming to office in 2017, the president has relied on the police forces, cementing their central role in French political life. The spate of protests rejecting Mr. Macron’s various social reforms — most recently of the pension system — has been countered by a heavy use of the police. During the worst of the pandemic, police officers were the frontline executors of Mr. Macron’s stringent lockdowns and curfews. Now that the police forces are at the center of a national controversy, it is no surprise that Mr. Macron’s hands are tied.
Then there’s the political pressure from the right. Trumpeting a presumption of “legitimate self-defense,” many figures on the right are calling for the government to unapologetically clamp down on protesters. The “poll of the day” for Thursday on the website of the conservative daily Le Figaro asked, “Is it time to decree a state of emergency?” Behind that question lurks the memory of 2005, when weeks of riots after the deaths of two young men of color during a police chase led to the use of France’s emergency powers law.
They may well get their wish. With Mr. Macron’s efforts to achieve social “appeasement” clearly in ruins, the hard-liners in his coalition, such as the tough-on-crime interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, are likely to be strengthened. At a cabinet crisis meeting on Thursday, Mr. Macron suggested as much when he castigated rioters for their “unjustifiable violence against the institutions of the republic.”
He’s half right. These protests are against the institutions of the republic, and one in particular. For many French people, especially marginalized young men of color, Nahel M.’s killing is the latest demonstration of the intrinsic violence of the police — and beyond it, evidence of a society that wants little of them and would rather they disappear. But they, and their anger, are not going anywhere. “We’re exhausted and just strung out by stories like this,” Djigui, the protester, told me. “For years, France has been like a pressure cooker.”
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