What the American dream looks like for immigrants

When you’re an immigrant coming from another country where you may be middle class or upper-middle class and privileged in many ways, you lose that status when you move to the US. All of that social capital that you and your family may have accumulated over the years, and that opened doors for you in your home country, that was your safety net — that no longer exists. No one in your new country knows what your background is. The new culture doesn’t know what to make of you. Back in India, my family was by no means wealthy, but we had a high social status because of education, because my parents had been to some of India’s top schools and colleges. That carried with it a real weight but was not acknowledged or known in the US.

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Anne Helen Peterson — Vox

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The president’s job is to manage risk. But Trump is the risk.

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But he has always played with other people’s money and other people’s lives. “The president was probably in a position to make riskier decisions in life because he was fabulously rich from birth,” says Murphy. “But it’s also true he has had a reputation for risk not backed up by reality. His name is on properties he doesn’t own. We think of him as taking risk in professional life, but a lot of what he does is lend his name to buildings with risks taken by others. He’s built an image as a risk taker, but it’s not clear how much risk he’s taken.”

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Ezra Klein — Vox

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What Google searches tell us about our coronavirus thoughts and fears

Which searches are trending?

There are things that are concerning for society like the spike in searches for “loneliness,” people searching for “having trouble sleeping,” “depression.” All of those things are concerning to me, and I worry for people that don’t have people with them or are feeling it. Then the other misinformation thing is really interesting, because normally around any political thing, you always see spikes and searches where people are trying to find out if a misinfo story is true.

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Rani Molla – Vox

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Lion King 2019 vs. the original: what’s better and worse about the remake

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Now that most of you are planning to watch The Lion King, this is good to know.

But on the whole, it seems clear that the 1994 version still stands head and shoulders above its younger cousin. It’s inventive and imaginative. The songs were written for that film, and the animations that accompany them are often whimsical and visually inventive in the way that only hand-drawn animation, which lets the imagination of the audience fly free, can do. And that’s especially important in a movie about talking, singing wild animals.

There’s little doubt that many audiences, especially hardcore Lion King fans, will find the new version charming, like a really faithful cover album of a beloved record. But in the end, it’s sad to see Disney shed the hand-drawn glory of its former days. Nobody, after all, really needs a documentary about lions, but with lip-syncing.

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Alex Abad-Santos & Alissa Wilkinson — Vox

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Why willpower is overrated

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The famous marshmallow experiment showed that children who showed self-restraint went on to do better in their lives. But, what if people who look like they are resisting the temptation are not actually feeling the temptation that strongly in the first place.

If resisting temptation is a virtue, then more resistance should lead to greater achievement, right? That’s not what the results, published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, found.

The students who exerted more self-control were not more successful in accomplishing their goals. It was the students who experienced fewer temptations overall who were more successful when the researchers checked back in at the end of the semester. What’s more, the people who exercised more effortful self-control also reported feeling more depleted. So not only were they not meeting their goals, they were also exhausted from trying.

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Brian Resnick — Vox

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The assassination of Kim Jong Un’s half-brother keeps getting weirder

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There are times when reality is stranger than fiction. The assassination of Kim Jong Un’s half-brother is getting weirder by the day.

On the morning of February 13, Kim Jong Nam, 45, arrived at Kuala Lumpur International Airport to catch a flight to his home in Macau.
As Kim waited to check in, two women approached him and rubbed a still unknown toxic liquid in his face. CCTV footage released by the airport purportedly shows the attack. The women immediately washed their hands and fled.
Kim died on the way to the hospital minutes after the attack.

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Lindsay Maizland — Vox

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Understanding Britney Spears through her hair

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In this age of endless obsession with celebrities, all celebrities go through one change after another. This needull discusses different hair styles of Britney Spears to show that they reflect the phases in her life and career.

Soon enough, though, Britney couldn’t escape the blonde — nor, arguably, did she want to. Though her team kept assigning her a virginal narrative even throughout her high-profile relationship with cocky N’Sync leading man Justin Timberlake, Britney pushed back against that sterile persona, becoming more openly sexual, even a little dangerous.

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Caroline Framke — Vox

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