The killing of a coloured teenager in Johannesburg exposed the fraught state of race relations in South Africa—and how the racial hierarchies created by apartheid continue to plague the country

Time to start new thread on GOP Senate pile-on; rats..sinking...ship. The Republican Senate majority is imperiled, and the president is tweeting about 50 Cent.

By Will Thorne @ Variety.com, Oct. 15

Patrisse Cullors is making a big step into the television business.

The co-founder of Black Lives Matter has signed her first over overall deal with Warner Bros. Television Group. Characterized as multi-year and wide-ranging, the pact will see Cullors develop and produce original programming across all platforms, including broadcast, cable and streaming.

Cullors’ agreement encompasses [....]

By Peter Kafka @ Vox.com, Oct. 20

The Massachusetts senator wants the attorney general to resign. She also wants him to sue Google.

Looks like it's all free access to the articles! Get the lowdown on what psychologist types are currently thinking about you, your friends and your enemies...

By Ryhs Blakely, Science Correspondent @ TheTimes.co.uk, Oct. 20 (free access link; with graph)

Millennials in democracies throughout the world are more disillusioned with their system of government than any young generation in living memory, a study has found.

A survey of nearly five million people showed that those in their 20s and 30s, born between 1981 and 1996, had less faith in democratic institutions than their parents or grandparents did at the same stage of life.

The collapse of confidence is particularly pronounced in the “Anglo-Saxon democracies” of Britain, the United States and Australia. However, similar trends are seen in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and southern Europe.

“This is the first generation in living memory to have a global majority who are dissatisfied with the way democracy works while in their twenties and thirties,” Roberto Foa, lead author of the study from the Centre for the Future of Democracy at Cambridge University, said. Of the 2.3 billion people in countries covered by the report, 1.6 billion, or seven out of ten, are in nations with declining democratic satisfaction from one generation to the next. This did not mean that voters would support autocratic alternatives, Dr Foa said. Rather, they were frustrated that their systems were not working for them [....]

The study, the most comprehensive of its kind, drew on data from 4.8 million people in more than 160 countries between 1973 and 2020. It found that millennials and members of Generation X had grown steadily less satisfied with democracy as they aged [....]

By Spencer S. Hsu @ WashingtonPost.com, Oct. 18

A federal judge on Sunday formally struck down a Trump administration attempt to end food stamp benefits for nearly 700,000 unemployed people, blocking as “arbitrary and capricious” the first of three such planned measures to restrict the federal food safety net.

In a scathing 67-page opinion, Chief U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell of D.C. condemned the Agriculture Department for failing to justify or even address the impact of the sweeping change on states, saying its shortcomings had been placed in stark relief amid the coronavirus pandemic, during which unemployment has quadrupled and rosters of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program have grown by more than 17 percent, with more than 6 million new enrollees.

The rule “at issue in this litigation radically and abruptly alters decades of regulatory practice, leaving States scrambling and exponentially increasing food insecurity for tens of thousands of Americans,” Howell wrote, adding that the Agriculture Department [....]