Brainwashing for Good

Make sure to read Sarah Stillman's latest in the New Yorker: "Can Behavioral Science Help in Flint?" It's the story of the water trouble in Flint, the quiet problem of helping people make change that will help themselves, and the stark division between race and state.

"Social science—or, more accurately, in some cases, pseudoscience—has a fraught history when it comes to communities of color. Eugenics; phrenology; the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male. It’s easy to grasp why, especially in many disenfranchised neighborhoods, the sudden appearance of two cheerful behavioral scientists doling out help 'for the good of the American people' (a phrase of which Shankar is fond) might be met with suspicion. Such wariness hovered over a morning meeting that Shankar and Tucker-Ray had on their second day, at the Genesee County health department."

Stillman is always a great read. She was my mentor at THREAD at Yale in 2015 and won a Genius grant last year.