The growing number of U.S. households struggling to afford enough food could pose a problem for Biden at the November election.

Miami Dolphins star quarterback Tua Tagovailoa talked to Fox News Digital about his draft experience and fears about slipping out of the first round.

In his final letter before he vanished on Mount Everest, George Mallory said his chances of reaching the world's highest peak were "50 to 1 against us."

The word's most valuable carmaker is facing a number of headwinds ahead of its earnings report out on Tuesday.

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The brazenness of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vilification of India’s largest minority group made clear he sees few checks at home or abroad on his power.

Officials face the challenge of defusing tensions over pro-Palestinian protests while striking a balance between the right to protest and campus safety.

A chemotherapy alternative called immunotherapy is showing promise in treating cancer — and a new artificial intelligence tool could help ensure that patients have the best possible experience.

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The Democratic political group spent big in support of Joanna Weiss during the 47th District primary, only to see her finish third.

Jewish students on Columbia University's campus have been both accosted and terrified of anti-Israel protesters as the chaos grows in uptown Manhattan.

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A Los Angeles County initiative called Reaching the 95% aims to engage with more people than the fraction of Angelenos already getting addiction treatment.

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A new study found that empathy among young Americans is rebounding after having reached worrying lows a decade ago. | Getty Images/iStockphoto A decade ago, research showed a troubling dip in empathy. A new study provides more hope. Think back to the United States as it was a year ago, a decade ago, a generation ago. Is the US a more caring or less caring nation now than it was back then? If you think Americans have lost their compassion, the data would be on your side — until recently. Since the late 1970s, psychologists have measured empathy by asking millions of people how much they agreed with statements such as “I feel tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me.” In 2011, a landmark study led by researcher Sara Konrath examined the trends in those surveys. The analysis revealed that American empathy had plummeted: The average US college student in 2009 reported feeling less empathic than 75 percent of students three decades earlier. The study launched a thousand think pieces agonizing over what had gone wrong. There were plenty of theories: We were too lonely to care about each other, or too stressed, or too siloed, or too tech-addled. Younger generations took the most fire, labeled as too self-obsessed and too hyper-online to connect. Most of all, the research provided new fuel for old fears that American morality was on the decline. As Jennifer Rubin wrote for the Washington Post, “The empathy decline has manifested itself in an erosion of civility, decency and compassion in our society and our politics.” But the decline also revealed something else: Empathy is not a fixed trait. It’s easy to assume that each of us is born with a given level of care, and stuck there for life. But that’s not true; our experiences can grow or shrink our empathy. That’s true of individuals’ lives and across generations. Sara Konrath emphasized this back in 2011, telling me, “The fact that empathy is declining means that there’s more fluidity to it than previously thought. It means that empathy can change. It can go up.” By now, Konrath’s optimism might seem quaint. The news bludgeons us with stories of callousness and cruelty. If empathy indeed changes, these examples encourage us to think it’s taking a one-way trip downward. And yet, Konrath’s hopes from over a decade ago have turned out to be prescient. A few months ago, she and her colleagues published an update to their work: They found that empathy among young Americans is rebounding, reaching levels indistinguishable from the highs of the 1970s. Why aren’t we celebrating an increase in compassion? As with the decline, we might grasp for explanations for this rise. One possibility is collective suffering. Since the empathic lows of 2009, we have faced the Great Recession and a once-a-century pandemic. For all their horrors, hard times can bring people together. In her beautiful book, A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit chronicles disasters including San Francisco’s 1906 and 1989 earthquakes, Hurricane Katrina, and 9/11. In the wake of these catastrophes, kindness ticked up, strangers stepping over lines of race and class to help one another. More recently, researchers chronicled a “pandemic of kindness,” as donations to charity and volunteering increased in the face of COVID-19. Still, history is not a science experiment, and it’s impossible to know exactly why American empathy has risen, just like we can’t isolate with certainty why it fell. But we might ask another question: Will people react to this good news as strongly as they did to the bad news that preceded it? Human beings pay more attention to negative news compared to positive events. This makes evolutionary sense: It’s safe to ignore a sunset, but not a tsunami. But a bias toward badness can also give us the wrong idea about our world and the people in it. We judge people more readily based on the worst things they’ve done, rather than their best, and routinely underestimate how kind, caring, and open-minded others are. Humans are prone to seeing the worst side of each other, and to imagine things are getting worse, even when they’re not. Researchers recently amassed surveys in which nearly 600,000 people were asked how humanity in the modern era compared to years past. Across dozens of countries and several decades, people agreed: Human beings were less honest, kind, and moral than they had been before. This decline is almost certainly an illusion. In other surveys, people reported on kindness and morality as they actually experience it — for instance, how they were treated by strangers, coworkers, and friends. Answers to these questions remained steady over the years. And across the decades, even as people complained about society’s collapsing morals, some major trends like decreases in violent crime pointed in the opposite direction. Our biased minds tempt us to see the worst in people. The empathy decline reported 13 years ago fit that narrative and went viral. The comeback of American compassion, I worry, might instead fly under the radar. Konrath tells me that reporters still regularly contact her about her 2011 paper on empathy decline. She tells each one about the more optimistic update on this work, yet articles on this new work appear to be much scarcer than ones about the gloomier, earlier science. At least some of this is up to us. We can keep paying attention to callousness, cruelty, and immorality. There’s certainly plenty of it to occupy us. But we can also balance that perspective by looking for kindness and care in the people around us. The data is clear: There’s plenty of that, too.

Around a quarter of Democrats aren't currently planning to vote for the president in the 2024 election.

The former president's team insists to the jury that Stormy Daniels payments were legal and the DA cannot prove otherwise

Test your wits on the Slate Quiz for April 23, 2024.

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Alec Baldwin smacked an anti-Israel agitator's phone after she repeatedly begged him to say "Free Palestine" while the two were inside a coffee shop.

Shawn Thew/Getty ImagesRep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) thinks Donald Trump’s opponents don’t just want to see him jailed for his alleged crimes, they actually want him dead.Joining conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on his Infowars show on Monday, the Georgia Republican said she believes Democrats are using “rigged” trials against Trump in the hope that he will be imprisoned for the rest of his life and possibly “murdered somewhere in jail.” “This is how serious they are,” she said.Greene’s comments came after the opening of Trump’s trial in Manhattan where he faces 34 felony counts for allegedly falsifying business records in an effort to cover up an affair with porn star Stormy Daniels. Trump has denied the charges as well as all of the others in three other criminal cases.Read more at The Daily Beast.

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