Opinion | I Hope Someone Somewhere Is Being Kind to My Boy | After Refusing to Fly, Climate Researcher Loses His Job | Airbnb's CEO isn't happy with how the business has grown, and wants hosts to lower their prices | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: ‘I Worry That What We’re Looking at Is the End of Curiosity’

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� � � � � � You Might Like � � � � � � � � � Opinion | I Hope Someone Somewhere Is Being Kind to My Boy- The New York Times    Ms. Goldberg is a mother of three living in Jerusalem, where she works as an educator and a student counselor. Ten years ago, we were preparing to celebrate the bar mitzvah of our son, Hersh. His Torah portion was the same as the one Jews around the world will read in the coming days — the story of Noah and how God destroyed much of the world with a terrible flood. But Hersh’s attention was not on destruction. Instead he focused on how water could save the world. So he swam laps to raise money for an organization that digs wells in Africa to provide clean, lifesaving water. Continued here After Refusing to Fly, Climate Researcher Loses His Job- The New York Times    To reduce emissions, he took five trains, nine buses, two ferries, two taxis, one shared car and one police convoy to reach a research site. Getting from the northern German city of Kiel to the South Pacific is a schlep no matter what. By commercial air, it takes about two days and several connecting flights. But Gianluca Grimalda, an Italian social scientist, opted to make the trip much, much longer when he set out from Kiel to Papua New Guinea on a research trip earlier this year. Continued here Don't like ads? Go ad-free with TradeBriefs Premium Airbnb's CEO isn't happy with how the business has grown, and wants hosts to lower their prices - Fortune    Many startups make the mistake of scaling too quickly, without getting the foundations right first – and despite its success, Airbnb is no different.  “Our system was designed for a much smaller company which grew like crazy,” its CEO Brian Chesky, who co-founded the home rental platform in 2008, recently admitted. Indeed from the outside, the rental giant looks like it’s thriving: It has just bounced back from the pandemic low of losing 80% of its business in eight weeks in 2020 to experiencing one of the most successful IPOs in history. Continued here Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: 'I Worry That What We're Looking at Is the End of Curiosity' - The Atlantic    Gal Beckerman: Recently, I rewatched your viral 2009 TED talk, “The Danger of a Single Story,” in which you describe the way that the people can sort of limit one another with very constricting narratives about who they are. I wanted to ask you about the state of the single story right now, with a slight twist. When I watched that TED talk, it seemed to me that you were talking about how people impose a single story on one another. But I also see that we’re in a moment where people are imposing single stories on themselves, whether it be race or gender or political affiliation. When you gave that talk, did you have that aspect in mind? Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: No, I didn’t. It’s interesting what you said about the single story no longer being just about an outside imposition, but almost in some ways a self-imposition. I think there’s a problem with the way that we’re living now. I think we now kind of live in these ideological tribes that have imposed on us an adherence to orthodoxy. And Ayad Akhtar, who’s this writer I really admire, says that there’s a moral stridency in the way that we respond to speech, and that there’s something punitive about it. I think it’s true. I think people are afraid and self-censor. The single story—they then impose it on themselves. You have people who now increasingly think that you cannot write about experiences that you have not personally had. And I think that’s terrible for literature and for the idea of an imagination that is allowed to grow and soar. I don’t think that there’s any human endeavor that requires freedom as much as creativity does. I worry that what we’re looking at is the end of curiosity, the end of creativity, the end of learning, even. Beckerman: You recently wrote an essay on the 10-year anniversary of the publication of Americanah, and we excerpted it in The Atlantic. And you had a lot of interesting things in there about the genesis of the book, including what you’re talking about right now. There was one line and one particular word that stood out to me. You said, “Of all the complicated emotions that animated the conception of this novel, bewilderment was the most present.” I wanted to ask you: What bewilders you today about America? Continued here

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