In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the 20th century Czech novelist Milan Kundera unpacks the etymology of the word “compassion.” Languages that【C1】_____their understanding of compassion from Latin (com-, “with”; passio, “suffering”) tend to【C2】__compassion as synonymous with pity. For Kundera, such a disposition “connotes a certain superiority【C3】__the sufferer. ’To take pity on a woman’ means that we are【C4】__than she, that we【C5】_____to her level, lower ourselves.”

【C6】_____, languages such as Czech, Polish, German, and Swedish form their words for compassion by combining a(n)【C7】__prefix with a word that means “feeling.” Compassion thus becomes a kind of co-feeling that enables one to feel what wretches feel. It is the empathic ability to think one’s way into the minds of others and spend time walking around in their【C8】_____.

In the age of【C9】_____videos and identity politics, when media is prevalent and increasingly【C10】__to generate clicks, this fuller form of compassion seems to be on the【C11】__. We are bombarded daily with images of cruelty,【C12】__, and the indifference of human affairs. Corporations and politicians fuel our desire for【C13】__in an effort to monopolize our attention. Who can resist such alluring【C14】_____and love the sinner while hating the sin, as Gandhi suggests?

Mental health clinicians are【C15】_____each day with stories of meanness, abuse, and neglect. We treat the ravages of trauma and【C16】__the destruction that profound suffering leaves in its wake. And while our clients are often the victims of unspeakable【C17】__, they are also often the authors of the pain and sorrow that they【C18】__. To say this is to acknowledge the【C19】__humanity of the sufferers we meet. It is to be honest about the compassion and lack thereof that【C20】_____side by side in the messiness of human existence.

Social platforms large and small are struggling to keep their communities safe from hate speech, extremist content, harassment and misinformation. Most recently, far-right agitators posted openly about plans to storm the U.S. Capitol before doing just that on January 6. One solution might be AI: developing algorithms to detect and alert us to toxic and inflammatory comments and flag them for removal. But such systems face big challenges.

The prevalence of hateful or offensive language online has been growing rapidly in recent years, and the problem is now rampant. In some cases, toxic comments online have even resulted in real life violence, from religious nationalism in Myanmar to neo-Nazi propaganda in the U.S. Social media platforms, relying on thousands of human reviewers, are struggling to moderate the ever-increasing volume of harmful content. In 2019, it was reported that Facebook moderators are at risk of suffering from PTSD as a result of repeated exposure to such distressing content. Outsourcing this work to machine learning can help manage the rising volumes of harmful content, while limiting human exposure to it. Indeed, many tech giants have been incorporating algorithms into their content moderation for years.

One such example is Google’s Jigsaw, a company focusing on making the internet safer. In 2017, it helped create Conversation AI, a collaborative research project aiming to detect toxic comments online. However, a tool produced by that project, called Perspective, faced substantial criticism. One common complaint was that it created a general “toxicity score” that wasn’t flexible enough to serve the varying needs of different platforms. Some Web sites, for instance, might require detection of threats but not profanity, while others might have the opposite requirements. Another issue was that the algorithm learned to conflate toxic comments with nontoxic comments that contained words related to gender, sexual orientation, religion or disability.

Following these concerns, the Conversation AI team invited developers to train their own toxicity-detection algorithms and enter them into three competitions hosted on Kaggle, a Google subsidiary known for its community of machine learning practitioners, public data sets and challenges. To help train the AI models, Conversation AI released two public data sets containing over one million toxic and non-toxic comments from Wikipedia and a service called Civil Comments. The comments were rated on toxicity by annotators, with a “Very Toxic” label indicating “a very hateful, aggressive, or disrespectful comment that is very likely to make you leave a discussion or give up on sharing your perspective,” and a “Toxic” label meaning “a rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable comment that is somewhat likely to make you leave a discussion or give up on sharing your perspective.”

One obsession unites the rich world: housing. As restrictions have eased, house prices have started to go through the roof. In America prices increased by 11% in the year to January, their fastest pace in 15 years. Among the 25 countries being tracked, real house prices rose by 5% on average in the latest 12-month period, the quickest in over a decade.

Home values, like the price of other assets, have been boosted by low interest rates and fiscal stimulus. Many households have spare cash sloshing around and borrowing has rarely been cheaper. Separately, COVID-19 has caused a shift in demand away from big cities to housing in less crowded places. The expectation that commuting may no longer be daily has caused house prices in suburban locations to rise faster than in cities—reversing a decade-long trend.

Governments and central banks, haunted by the financial crisis of 2007-09 and aware of public unease about expensive housing, are worrying about exuberance. In New Zealand the finance minister has asked the central bank to “consider the impact on housing” in its monetary-policy decisions. In recent years many municipal governments have implemented rent controls as knee-jerk responses to rising prices.

Policymakers in rich countries should resist. One reason is that house prices do not look as if they threaten financial stability. Although some people are wild for new properties, overall household borrowing remains restrained in the rich world. In contrast to 15 years ago, banks’ balance-sheets today have solid foundations.

Another reason to resist intervention is that housing markets are still being distorted by the effect of lockdowns. The price rises in the past year reflect a relatively small number of transactions, as the volume of activity in the housing market has dropped—it is hard to invite scores of potential buyers to snoop around your bedroom and check your plumbing during a lockdown.

Instead of being impetuous with rent control and other regulations, governments should expend more energy on tackling the housing market’s long-term problems. Top of the list is phasing out tax breaks for homeownership. Mortgage-interest deductions are a windfall to the well-off that does not boost homeownership. Despite recent reforms, America’s tax perks will still cost the Treasury $650bn over the next decade. Governments should liberalise planning rules and support new developments by providing better transport infrastructure. The strength of the property market in the pandemic confounded early expectations of doom and gloom. Even so, the laws of supply and demand dictate that housing will be cheaper if more homes are built.

To state the extremely obvious, the chief economist of the Bank of England, Andrew Haldane, is an intelligent man. His speeches on subjects as varied as how to reform economics and the importance of the voluntary sector have been model interventions— both serious and slightly disruptive. Yet when Mr. Haldane writes a newspaper column that claims the post-COVID economy is “poised like a coiled spring”, as he did last week, he risks looking not only silly but, worse, choking the debate over the future of the UK.

To be sure, his argument rests on firm logic. Many workers have spent the past year still employed but with few outlets to spend their incomes, so have built up around ￡125bn in household savings. And indeed the recent economic news from the UK and elsewhere has been better than hoped.

Yet this is not a normal recession. Too much rests on factors completely out of the hands of chief executives, finance ministers and central bankers. Mr. Haldane has already sat this class. Last summer, he forecast the UK would quickly rebound from its lows, in a recovery shaped like a V. Not long after, the country went into its second lockdown. That V turned into a W. The unknowns about this virus, its mutations and their tendency to spread suggest a need for caution and openness to a wide range of outcomes, rather than unrealistic enthusiasm.

Take the most recent unemployment reports, which suggest wages are rising strongly even as joblessness goes up. Sounds like good news—while also making zero sense. Another explanation might be that low-paid workers are dropping out of the labor market, distorting the data towards high earners. That would be terrible news, but we can’t be sure either way. Or look at the latest study from University College London, showing that this pandemic and its lockdowns have left Britons feeling gloomy. No surprise there, except the usual life-satisfaction score is 7.7 out of 10, while it is now around 5.5—a worryingly large drop. Some may come bouncing out of lockdown ready to socialize, but others may feel lasting isolation.

Today, just as the new US government turns against this austerity, key economic policymakers in the UK are preparing for a big belt-tightening. Overconfident projections such as Mr. Haldane’s only encourage that outcome. And consider the recovery that even this self-confessed optimist promises: the well-off spending extravagantly while the less fortunate face unemployment or struggle with the fallout from a lack of schooling and tightly squeezed public services. Is this the best we can do?

Like magic mushroom spores, e-scooters occupy a mysterious grey area in UK law, being legal to buy but illegal to use—in public, at least. Yet sales of these unlawful micromobility devices are booming.

In the eyes of their promoters, they are a one-stop solution for reducing congestion and carbon emissions, replacing short car journeys and providing crucial “last mile” connectivity to public transport hubs. In the eyes of their critics, they are “absolute death traps”, “silent killing machines”, and lithium-driven devices whose green claims don’t stack up.

But so far the figures suggest that rather than replacing car journeys, the scooters are replacing less carbon-intensive modes of travel. A Department for Transport (DfT) evaluation report of the trials, published in December 2022, found that 42% of users said they would have walked if they hadn’t taken an e-scooter, while only 21% would have taken a car or taxi.

The “low carbon” claims are also questionable, given the energy that goes into extracting the raw materials and manufacturing the scooters. A 2019 study by researchers at North Carolina State University found that riding an e-scooter typically produces more emissions per passenger than taking the bus, once the carbon footprint of production and distribution is taken into account.

Safety remains one of the biggest concerns. E-scooters are heavy, around three times the weight of a regular e-bike, and can be difficult to control for first-time users, while their comparatively small wheels make them susceptible to the lumps, bumps and potholes that riddle Britain’s roads. The number of collisions involving e-scooters has tripled in the last several years, from 460 in 2020 to 1,402 in 2022, while there have been 34 e-scooter deaths since 2019.

The Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety has made several recommendations, should the government decide to legalize private e-scooters, including a minimum front wheel size of 12 inches, a maximum speed limit of 12.5 mph, and mandatory helmet wearing. But the e-scooter industry remains sceptical. Lime says that user feedback in London, where the speed is capped at 12.5 mph, is that it is too slow and makes people feel more vulnerable. Similarly, when it comes to helmets, the operators encourage and incentivise their use, but argue that infrastructure must adapt to prioritize bikes and scooters—citing cities such as Amsterdam and Copenhagen, where cycling infrastructure is exceptional, and few people wear helmets.

Still, while the government remains intent on preserving the sacred rights of the motorist—most recently withdrawing the post-pandemic guidance for active travel—such infrastructural changes look like wishful thinking. As the government keeps kicking e-scooter legislation into the long grass, the country’s streets and pavements will continue to be flooded with unregulated machines delivered to your door with small wheels, no lights and possible speeds of up to 60 mph.

[A] Mexico has been pushing for more such legal routes for migrants. At the “Three Amigos” summit in January between Canada, Mexico and the United States, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said, “Social problems cannot be solved only by coercion measures.”

[B] Illegal migration across America’s southern border first accelerated in the 1980s, with the number of US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) “encounters” (apprehensions or expulsions) often exceeding 1m a year since then. In March 2020 Donald Trump’s administration used a pandemic inspired measure, known as Title 42, to seal the border. It allows migrants to be expelled on public-health grounds, either to their own country or, in some cases, to Mexico, which has agreed to accept some nationalities along with Mexicans.

[C] This change has the potential to significantly cut the volume of people entering the United States: the number of recorded attempts to cross its south-western border illegally in January, when some components of the new regime were put in place, fell to 128,410, or by 42% compared with December. But even as the United States asserts more control over its own border, the picture remains dangerously chaotic farther south, in Mexico and its southern neighbours.

[D] Over the past four decades migration flows over America’s southern border with Mexico have grown to become epic in scope—and an epic headache for American politicians. On February 21st President Joe Biden’s administration announced a new approach that it hopes could be transformative. The proposed policy allows the United States to immediately expel most people who cross its border illegally. It opens up a new, narrow, legal pathway for migrants: asylum-seekers will be able to try to secure an interview using a smartphone app.

[E] The Biden administration has been working on a semi-permanent replacement for Title 42, which is due to expire this year. The proposed rules would require asylum-seekers to try to secure an appointment using a smartphone app. If they do not the rules would establish a presumption that people who enter the United States are doing so illegally and are ineligible for asylum, although in some circumstance this could be contested. At the same time the policy would confirm as permanent a new system of “humanitarian parole” in which some 30,000 people a month, from selected countries (Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela), can enter the United States, providing they meet certain conditions. To be eligible, they must typically get approval before they travel to the United States, have a financial backer there, have a passport and pay for a flight.

[F] So will the new strategy work? According to the CBP, the largest drops in migrant flows have involved the nationalities facing a mix of the Title 42 regime and the parole system. A week after visas were announced for Venezuelans in October, the number encountered at the south-west border of the United States fell from an average of over 1,100 a day to under 200. By November this had fallen to 67, and by January to 28. Likewise, the numbers of Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans fell to 92 per day on January 21st, down from 928 on January 5th, when the parole system was extended to them. The administration is betting the new regime will make it harder for people to get into the United States. It may hope that this in turn weakens the incentives for migrants to leave their home countries.

[G] That raises the possibility that while the location of the migrant crisis may shift to Mexican soil, it remains unresolved. Mr Biden’s plans are being analysed by Mexican officials, who are unlikely to be impressed. They have long resisted pressure to be deemed a “safe third country”, requiring asylum-seekers who pass through their territory to seek refuge there instead of the United States—something Mr Biden’s proposal purports to do.

【G1】_____→【G2】__→G→【G3】__→E→【G4】__→【G5】_____

The importance of science in changing the relations of men to the physical universe about them is easy to discern and is generally more or less recognized.【T1】That the present conditions of life are better than those which prevailed in earlier times proves the value of science, and the more it is considered from this point of view, the more valuable it is found to be.

【T2】The changes in the mode of living of man which science has brought about will probably in the course of time give rise to marked alterations in his physique. The better food supply, shelter, clothing, and sanitation which have been introduced as a consequence of scientific discoveries, correspond in a measure to the means by which the best breeds of domestic animals have been developed, and without which they degenerate toward the wild stock from which they have been derived. And probably, also, as the factors which cause changes in living organisms become better known through scientific investigations, man will consciously direct his own evolution.

But there is another less speculative respect in which science is important and in which its importance will enormously increase.【T3】It has a profound influence on the minds of those who devote themselves to it, and the number of those who are interested in it is rapidly increasing. In the first place, it praises truth and honestly seeks it, wherever the search may lead. In the second place, its subject matter often gives a breadth of vision which is not otherwise obtained. For example, the complexity and adaptability of living beings, the irresistible forces which elevate the mountains, or the majestic motions of the stars open an intellectual horizon far beyond that which belongs to the ordinary affairs of life. The conscious and deliberate search for truth and the contemplation of the wonders of nature change the mental habits of a man.【T4】They tend to make him honest with himself, just in his judgment, and peaceful in the midst of petty annoyances. In short, the study of science makes character, as is splendidly illustrated in the lives of many celebrated scientific men.【T5】It would undoubtedly be of very great benefit to the world if everyone could have the discipline of the sincere and honest search for the truth which is given by scientific study.