A century ago, the immigrants from across the Atlantic included settlers and sojourners. Along with the many folks looking to make a permanent home in the United States came those who had no intention to stay, and who would make some money and then go home. Between 1908 and 1915, about 7 million people arrived while about 2 million departed. About a quarter of all Italian immigrants, for example, eventually returned to Italy for good. They even had an affectionate nickname, “uccelli di passaggio,”birds of passage.

Today, we are much more rigid about immigrants. We divide newcomers into two categories: legal or illegal, good or bad. We hail them as Americans in the making, or brand them as aliens to be kicked out. That framework has contributed mightily to our broken immigration system and the long political paralysis over how to fix it. We don’t need more categories, but we need to change the way we think about categories. We need to look beyond strict definitions of legal and illegal. To start, we can recognize the new birds of passage, those living and thriving in the gray areas. We might then begin to solve our immigration challenges.

Crop pickers, violinists, construction workers, entrepreneurs, engineers, home health-care aides and physicists are among today’s birds of passage. They are energetic participants in a global economy driven by the flow of work, money and ideas. They prefer to come and go as opportunity calls them. They can manage to have a job in one place and a family in another.

With or without permission, they straddle laws, jurisdictions and identities with ease. We need them to imagine the United States as a place where they can be productive for a while without committing themselves to staying forever. We need them to feel that home can be both here and there and that they can belong to two nations honorably.

Accommodating this new world of people in motion will require new attitudes on both sides of the immigration battle. Looking beyond the culture war logic of right or wrong means opening up the middle ground and understanding that managing immigration today requires multiple paths and multiple outcomes, including some that are not easy to accomplish legally in the existing system.

Scientists have found that although we are prone to snap overreactions, if we take a moment and think about how we are likely to react, we can reduce or even eliminate the negative effects of our quick, hardwired responses.

Snap decisions can be important defense mechanisms; if we are judging whether someone is dangerous, our brains and bodies are hard-wired to react very quickly, within milliseconds. But we need more time to assess other factors. To accurately tell whether someone is sociable, studies show, we need at least a minute, preferably five. It takes a while to judge complex aspects of personality, like neuroticism or open-mindedness.

But snap decisions in reaction to rapid stimuli aren’t exclusive to the interpersonal realm. Psychologists at the University of Toronto found that viewing a fast-food logo for just a few milliseconds primes us to read 20 percent faster, even though reading has little to do with eating. We unconsciously associate fast food with speed and impatience and carry those impulses into whatever else we’re doing. Subjects exposed to fast-food flashes also tend to think a musical piece lasts too long.

Yet we can reverse such influences. If we know we will overreact to consumer products or housing options when we see a happy face (one reason good sales representatives and real estate agents are always smiling), we can take a moment before buying. If we know female job screeners are more likely to reject attractive female applicants, we can help screeners understand their biases—or hire outside screeners.

John Gottman, the marriage expert, explains that we quickly “thin slice” information reliably only after we ground such snap reactions in “thick sliced” long-term study. When Dr. Gottman really wants to assess whether a couple will stay together, he invites them to his island retreat for a much longer evaluation: two days, not two seconds.

Our ability to mute our hard-wired reactions by pausing is what differentiates us from animals: dogs can think about the future only intermittently or for a few minutes. But historically we have spent about 12 percent of our days contemplating the longer term. Although technology might change the way we react, it hasn’t changed our nature. We still have the imaginative capacity to rise above temptation and reverse the high-speed trend.

Europe is not a gender-equality heaven. In particular, the corporate workplace will never be completely family-friendly until women are part of senior management decisions, and Europe’s top corporate-governance positions remain overwhelmingly male. Indeed, women hold only 14 percent of positions on European corporate boards.

The Europe Union is now considering legislation to compel corporate boards to maintain a certain proportion of women—up to 60 percent. This proposed mandate was born of frustration. Last year, European Commission Vice President Viviane Reding issued a call to voluntary action. Reding invited corporations to sign up for gender balance goals of 40 percent female board membership. But her appeal was considered a failure: only 24 companies took it up.

Do we need quotas to ensure that women can continue to climb the corporate ladder fairly as they balance work and family?

“Personally, I don’t like quotas,” Reding said recently. “But I like what the quotas do.” Quotas get action: they “open the way to equality and they break through the glass ceiling,” according to Reding, a result seen in France and other countries with legally binding provisions on placing women in top business positions.

I understand Reding’s reluctance—and her frustration. I don’t like quotas either; they run counter to my belief in meritocracy, governance by the capable. But, when one considers the obstacles to achieving the meritocratic ideal, it does look as if a fairer world must be temporarily ordered.

After all, four decades of evidence has now shown that corporations in Europe as well as the US are evading the meritocratic hiring and promotion of women to top positions—no matter how much “soft pressure” is put upon them. When women do break through to the summit of corporate power—as, for example, Sheryl Sandberg recently did at Facebook—they attract massive attention precisely because they remain the exception to the rule.

If appropriate pubic policies were in place to help all women—whether CEOs or their children’s caregivers—and all families, Sandberg would be no more newsworthy than any other highly capable person living in a more just society.

Women have made great strides in the employment market over the past 50 years. But many still feel that their progress is being obstructed.

A new book by feminist writer tackles the issue. In “The Fix” Michelle King, director of inclusion at Netflix, a video-streaming giant, observes that women are constantly told they need to change themselves—be more assertive, work longer hours and so on. Instead, she argues, working practices should change to accommodate the needs of half the adult population.

Despite recent progress, women still face a glass ceiling. A couple of stories in Ms King’s book illustrate the point. Sarah was an executive at a multinational who worked late, underwent management training and enthusiastically received and acted on feedback. After many years of rejection, it seemed she was due for promotion to the next tier, which was 100％ male. But at the key meeting a male executive said: “I don’t know. She has those glasses and she wears that clip in her hair.” Not exactly “scientific management”.

In the other tale Ms King, on her first day in a new job, walked into a kitchen full of men. Her boss said “Hey, Michelle, there are dishes in the sink and you are a woman, so, you know, wash them.” His colleagues laughed. When she protested, she was told to learn to take a joke. Bullying disguised as humour is still bullying. And women are expected to put up with it.

Sometimes the excuse for the lack of female progress in certain professions is that women and men naturally choose to pursue different career paths. Yet those outcomes may simply be the result of formal or informal barriers against female success. At the end of the 19th century, when only 4-5％ of American doctors were women, some men no doubt put this down to a lack of talent. In Britain women were not allowed to become practising lawyers until they were admitted to the Law Society in 1922.

Another common argument is that it makes sense for married people to specialise, with the man taking on higher paid employment and the woman doing more of the chores. It is equallyfar-fetched. One study, for instance, found that husbands who earn less than their wives do even less housework than those who earn more.

Many of the arguments that women’s lack of progress is down to talent or choice look like a convenient fiction for men, who do rather well out of the bargain. Women, who end up doing most of the chores as well as working long hours, get a raw deal. It is not them who need to change—it is the attitudes of men.

This month, a video about violence in New Zealand has been uploaded on YouTube. Facebook, the owner of YouTube, blocked 1.2m of those videos before they could be viewed. Still, thousands of people saw the footage as it spread to other sites. In spite of the swift response, the question remains: why on earth do we tolerate technology that can be used to inflame hatred and normalise violence at lightning speed and global scale?

The answer lies largely in a 26-word sentence in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act passed by the US Congress in 1996. “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider,” it states. So the likes of Facebook, Google and Twitter can play by different rules to traditional media companies (i.e. Financial Times) which are legally responsible for all the content they publish.

Jeff Kosseff, author of The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet, argues that Section 230 has proved an “awesome benefit” for the tech platforms. It has encouraged astonishing innovation and accelerated the growth of some of the richest companies on the planet. But it has also allowed billions of people to post anything they like online with almost no constraint. Some of that content is inspirational, much of it trivial, and a small sliver grotesque and harmful. Social networks do not discriminate.

Of course, not all countries abide by US law nor share the same extreme instinct for free speech. In New Zealand, the public censor declared the video “officially objectionable”, meaning that anyone uploading it could be jailed. Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s prime minister, has argued that the tech companies should be considered “the publisher not just the postman “.

The balance between free speech and censorship must be the subject of never-ending debate, fluctuating according to social convention and law. But society has, in effect, rashly outsourced much of this debate to the tech platforms. We should not want them to become our official censors; nor do they appear capable of assuming such responsibility. But they should be in permanent dialogue with societies around the world about their rules, practices, and services.

Mr Kosseff says that Congress had two purposes in adopting Section 230. One was to promote free speech and innovation. The other was to ensure the tech companies maintained oversight of their content. “They have utterly failed on that job and did not realise that it was a two-way contract,” Mr Kosseff says. “Their services have been weaponised by bad people.” The tech companies appear belatedly to have woken up to the dangers and are trying to respond. But they still have a long way to go.

It took three presidents, four finance ministers, and countless setbacks, but Brazil finally completed an overhaul of its pension system—one of the world’s most generous and a perennialdrainon government finances. The bill, which is at the core of President Jair Bolsonaro’s economic agenda, was approved by the Senate on Oct. 23 after months of debates.

The legislation hasn’t supplied the confidence boost that many analysts had anticipated, however. Growth remains stalled, foreign investors are mostly on the sidelines, and the implementation of the rest of the government’s economic agenda is unclear. “The pension reform was a change to avoid Brazil going bankrupt,” says Mario Mesquita, chief economist at Itau Unibanco Holding SA. “Reforms to get Brazil to grow, like the tax overhaul, are more complicated.”

Pension reform has been debated, promised, and protested for years. Former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in 2003 succeeded in cutting the pension deficit, but the legislation didn’t go far enough in attacking the root causes of the shortfall. Dilma Rousseff didn’t get around to tackling the issue before she was impeached in 2016. Her replacement, Michel Temer, had gathered just about enough support for his own bill when Joesley Batista, the owner of meat-processing giant JBS SA, taped the president allegedly endorsing the payment of a bribe to a lawmaker.

Investors, who’d already priced in approval of the measure, have turned their attention to the rest of the government’s agenda. While there’s plenty to be done, from privatizing dozens of state-run companies to revamping a complicated tax system and cutting red tape, some fear momentum has dissipated. “We’re a little anxious about the pace of things in Congress,” says Mariana Guarino, a money manager at Truxt Investimentos in Rio de Janeiro. “Things are moving much more slowly than we expected.” That’s a concern, because Brazil’s economy desperately needs a jump-start. The country has been slow to rebound from a deep recession in 2015-16. This year, even with record-low interest rates and no major internal or external shocks, growth will be only 0.9％, according to a Bloomberg survey of economists.