The Narcissism of the Angry Young Men | Blind Spot in Planetary Threat Detection | The Trust Gap, and more

But 2023 BU sits on the smaller end of a size group, asteroids 5-to-50 meters in diameter, that also includes those as big as an Olympic swimming pool. Objects that size are difficult to detect until they wander much closer to Earth, complicating any efforts to brace for one that could impact a populated area.

Whiplash Weather: What We Can Learn from California’s Deadly Storms  (Madison Pobis, Stanford Earth Matters Magazine)
Stanford and local experts discuss ways to mitigate risk to communities and infrastructure amid dramatic swings between flood and drought.

The Narcissism of the Angry Young Men  (Tom Nichols, The Atlantic)
Some years ago, I got a call from an analyst at the National Counterterrorism Center. After yet another gruesome mass shooting (this time, it was Dylann Roof’s attack on a Bible-study group at a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, that killed nine and wounded one), I had written an article about the young men who perpetrate such crimes. I suggested that an overview of these killers showed them, in general, to be young losers who failed to mature, and whose lives revolved around various grievances, insecurities, and heroic fantasies. I called them “Lost Boys” as a nod to their arrested adolescence.
The NCTC called me because they had a working group on “countering violent extremism.” They had read my article and they, too, were interested in the problem of these otherwise-unremarkable boys and young men who, seemingly out of nowhere, lash out at society in various ways. We think you’re on to something, the analyst told me. He invited me to come down to Washington and discuss it with him and his colleagues.
The meeting was held in a classified environment so that the group’s members, representing multiple intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, could more easily share ideas and information. (I was a government employee at the time and held a clearance.) But we could have met in a busy restaurant for all it mattered—the commonalities among these young men, even across nations and cultures, are hardly a secret. They are man-boys who maintain a teenager’s sharp sense of self-absorbed grievance long after adolescence; they exhibit a combination of childish insecurity and lethally bold arrogance; they are sexually and socially insecure. Perhaps most dangerous, they go almost unnoticed until they explode. Some of them open fire on their schools or other institutions; others become Islamic radicals; yet others embrace right-wing-extremist conspiracies.

The Trust Gap  (Thomas J. Bollyky, Ilona Kickbusch, and Michael Bang Petersen, Foreign Affairs)
At the end of 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden signed into law a bipartisan package of reforms to make the United States and the world safer from future pandemics. The new law encourages faster development of vaccines and diagnostic tests, bigger stockpiles of protective equipment, and greater surveillance to more swiftly detect deadly viruses.
These and the other countermeasures are sensible, but they are not enough. A key lesson of the COVID-19 pandemic is that better vaccines and tests, more plentiful masks, and earlier warnings only work if people are willing to make use of them—and that willingness depends on a level of public trust that many Americans no longer have.
In the United States and other democracies, responding effectively to pandemics depends on persuading people to protect themselves and others. Measures such as contact tracing, gathering restrictions, and vaccination involve behaviors that free societies cannot easily compel or monitor. Trust, therefore, is vital at every stage of a pandemic response. And governments will need to find ways to fight pandemics, even when trust is low.