Hasan speaks with Ta-Nehisi Coates about whether or not America is the "bad guy"

This is where my McCants ancestors lived. There’s something different about seeing the actual land and places connected to your family—not just names on a genealogy chart, but a physical landscape where people lived, worked, raised families, survived, and built lives. For Black families, especially those of us tracing our ancestry through slavery and its aftermath, these connections can be complicated. So much of our history was recorded through the people and institutions that owned, exploited, or controlled our ancestors rather than through our ancestors’ own voices. Finding the places they occupied feels like recovering another little piece of the story. They were here. They lived lives here. And I come from them. This is a virtual tour where the sounds of birds, and nature play while you explore the grounds. I feel lucky to have this resource, but also horrified and grief stricken to be able to see where my ancestors lived like this. Most cannot track their lineage. Most don't have people who care enough to construct something like this. Between The Waters http://www.betweenthewaters.org/hobcaw-house-entrance/

Albert Bandura's theory of Moral Disengagement explains how ordinary people can commit harmful acts without seeing themselves as immoral. Rather than abandoning their conscience, people temporarily disconnect it through psychological mechanisms that justify or conceal wrongdoing. Harm can be presented as serving a noble cause, hidden behind sanitized language, shifted onto authority figures, spread across many participants, or directed at people who have been dehumanized or blamed for their own suffering. Bandura argued that these processes are not merely individual failings but are often encouraged by institutions that reward obedience, divide responsibility, and distance decision-makers from the consequences of their actions. His work shows that the greatest threat to morality is not the absence of conscience, but the ease with which conscience can be switched off under social and institutional pressure. Moral Disengagement, Conscience, Responsibility, Obedience, Dehumanization, Violence, Social Psychology, Institutions, Ethics, Moral Agency. #albertbandura #moraldisengagement #socialpsychology #ethics #authority #obedience #dehumanization #violence #politicaltheory #socialscience #politicalscience #polscience https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1AMLuw2RjC/

It's been 250 years since Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, a document that declared all men equal even while hundreds of thousands of people remained enslaved. Judy Woodruff traveled to his Virginia home of Monticello to learn more about the third president and how his own contradictions reflected the nation's. It's part of her series, Crossroads: America at 250.

Here are some questions that I consider self-evidently compelling about the modern world: Why is the news media so interested in telling you how much the world sucks all the time? Why are so many of us obsessed with distraction and managing our attention? Why is it so hard to stop comparing ourselves to others? And why does everything in art and design seem the same these days? A week ago, I didn’t think these questions were related. I’m not sure I would have told you I had a good answer to most of them. And I certainly wouldn’t have made the audacious and borderline bonkers claim that one single theory could begin to explain all of them, at once. But then I had the pleasure of speaking to Agnes Callard, the University of Chicago professor, about her new theory called “the uni-context.” It’s easily one of them most interesting conversations I’ve had all year. And once you’ve heard or read it, I think you might find it hard to think about anything else. One way to prepare your mind for Callard’s theory of the uni-context is to think about the better-known concept of “context collapse.” If you post something to social media, it will be simultaneously visible to your boss, your parents, your ex, and total strangers. So, while your offline life might be distinct with each of these groups—you might be differential to your boss, childish with your parents, and bawdy with your friends—all of those distinctions are flattened on the internet. That’s context collapse, and you can think of it as the answer to a question: How do informational norms change when we’re all living in the same universal room? Callard takes the idea significantly further. She asks: How do all other norms—our morals, our ethics, our sense of what is good for us and for others—change when we continually imagine ourselves to be living in a universal room with everybody else? The connections that Callard makes are consistently surprising, often quite funny, and ultimately mind-exploding. The Uni-Context, Explained