Lab-grown models of embryos increasingly resemble the real thing - The Economist | Newark may have found a fix for chronic homelessness - The Economist | When Charlie Chaplin was cancelled - The Economist | Anti-woke activists are winning the culture war in America

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Lab-grown models of embryos increasingly resemble the real thing - The Economist

The traditional way to make an embryo is to combine a sperm cell with an egg, often after dinner and a bottle of wine. But a new way may be around the corner. In recent years scientists have discovered that they can persuade stem cells—those with the ability to transform into many other sorts of cells—to form structures that look and behave very much like embryos.

“Embryoids”, as such creations are called, can help with the study of embryology and pregnancy, and how they can go wrong. Some of the facsimiles look strikingly real. In 2022 two teams, one led by Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, who works at the California Institute of Technology and the University of Cambridge, and another by Jacob Hanna at the Weizmann Institute of Science, in Israel, published papers describing mouse embryoids with rudimentary guts, brains and beating hearts. In June Dr Zernicka-Goetz published a paper describing a human embryoid designed to mimic the earliest stages of development, shortly after a real embryo would have implanted into its mother’s womb.

That study was controversial, though, with some other scientists dubious that it represented as much of an advance as its authors claimed. But the state of the art is moving fast enough that some think embryoids may soon become hard to distinguish from the embryos they are meant to model. In many ways, that would be a good thing: the more accurate a model, the more useful it is. Human embryoids could shed light on developmental heart defects or diseases like spina bifida, and boost the success rates of in-vitro fertilisation (IVF).

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Newark may have found a fix for chronic homelessness - The Economist

ON A SINGLE night every January, volunteers all over America search parks, woodlands, subway tunnels and pavements to count those without shelter. It is part of the annual count mandated by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. The point-in-time count results were released, at last, on December 15th. Roughly 650,000 people were homeless, a 12% increase over the year before. The count is the highest since reporting began in 2007. The snapshot is useful for spotting trends and attracting federal funding. Most experts agree it is an undercount and often out of date.

After seeing their own figures for homelessness increase by 20% between 2022 and early 2023, New Jersey officials were shocked into action. Officials tweaked existing programmes and spent more on rental assistance for those at risk of becoming homeless. More services for people living rough has led to a rise in sheltered homelessness. The state also gathers near-real-time data, rather than taking an annual snapshot. In November New Jersey’s Office of Homelessness Prevention released its own figures. They showed unsheltered homeless falling across the state by 23% year on year.

Newark, New Jersey’s largest city and home to the state’s largest homeless population, recorded the biggest decrease. A year ago Ras Baraka, the mayor, unveiled a plan bringing together state, local and private-sector financial support to reduce street homelessness, improve the shelter system and expand housing and prevention services. Mobile crisis teams, behavioural-health providers, community leaders and the police formed a coalition. It seems to be working. Newark has achieved a 58% reduction in unsheltered homeless since the start of the year.

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When Charlie Chaplin was cancelled - The Economist

Charlie Chaplin vs America. By Scott Eyman. Simon & Schuster; 432 pages; $29.99 and £18.99

IN TODAY’S CULTURE wars, Hollywood has a starring role. Films tend to trigger debates about America’s history and values. That has long been the case, as a new book, “Charlie Chaplin vs America”, shows. Chaplin, a British citizen, was harassed by the American government, culminating in the revocation of a re-entry permit in 1952. It is a sobering account of cancel culture in action. Indeed, it makes some of the current spats seem toothless by comparison.

“I don’t want to create revolution,” Chaplin said. “I just want to create a few more pictures.” But the FBI, suspecting Chaplin of communist sympathies, started surveilling the film-maker in 1922. In a paranoid climate, many looked for evidence of Marxism. Those convinced Chaplin was “red” pointed to his screen persona, the Tramp, an embodiment of the beleaguered everyman. They perceived it, too, in “Modern Times” (1936), a dramatisation of workers’ plight due to unemployment and automation, and in “The Great Dictator” (1940), which called out America’s isolationism.

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Anti-woke activists are winning the culture war in America - The Economist

Two years ago it seemed that a conservative movement against “wokeness” was taking over America’s schools. Seen by many on the right as an insidious liberal outlook emphasising race, gender and sexuality, wokeness has many guises: among them critical race theory (CRT), gender theory and queer theory. According to its opponents, it all amounts to the same thing, it is thriving in schools and it has to go.

Activists set out to uproot it, and quickly made their mark. Moms for Liberty, a conservative group founded in 2021 that opposes CRT and other supposedly progressive policies in schools, says that in 2022 over half its candidates won their school-board elections. Other anti-woke groups claimed success, too. But is their momentum waning? Tiffany Justice, co-founder of Moms for Liberty, says that its candidates won 43% of its elections this year. News outlets reported that the movement was losing steam.

The reality is not so simple. An analysis by the Wall Street Journal of the November 2023 school-board elections found that the group exaggerated its success, winning about one-third of its elections. The Moms also seem to have been weakening before last month’s elections. A separate analysis by The Economist shows that less than one-third of the group’s endorsed candidates won their elections in spring 2023.

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