The World That's Coming

If we continue to make black children nonpersons by excluding them from books and by degrading the black experience, and if we continue to neglect white children by not exposing them to any aspect of other racial and ethnic experiences in a meaningful way, we will have a next racial crisis.

While younger users get more news from Facebook, they are less familiar with many sources of news than their older counterparts, the survey found. The survey asked about familiarity with 36 different news sources — ranging from The New Yorker to Breitbart — and millennials had heard of half of the outlets at “substantively lower rates” than the older cohorts.

Conversely, there were only two news sources about which millennials were more aware than their elders: BuzzFeed and Google News. A third of millennials find news on Google News, compared to 18 percent for those in Gen X and 15 percent of baby boomers.

As staunchly pro-American as he is, it’s no surprise that Saakashvili ranks pretty near the top of Vladimir Putin’s very long enemies list. During the 2008 August War between Russia and Georgia, Putin famously told French President Nicolas Sarkozy that he planned to overthrow the Georgian leader and “hang him by the balls.” Saakashvili reportedly referred to the Russian president as “Lili-Putin,” a reference to his height. Things haven’t improved much since then. Saakashvili said last year that Putin “likes to lie.” And when asked in a televised Q&A this April whether he had really threatened to hang Saakashvili “by a certain body part,” Putin quipped, “Why just one?”

Many trans people are forced into sex work in order to pay for the medical aspects of gender transition, and often this puts them at risk of drug abuse and physical harm. I’ve been there myself. I live in Britain, where transgender people are entitled to surgery and psychotherapy on the NHS – but even here we have to pay for things such as laser hair removal, seen as a “cosmetic” luxury by the NHS, but essential for any trans woman cursed with thick stubble. In the US, health insurance varies from state to state, leaving some transgender Americans covered, others to fend for themselves.

That doesn’t mean Caitlyn Jenner’s transition isn’t significant. We need trans people from all walks of life challenging perceptions at every level of society. Transgender knows no boundaries when it comes to age, race or social class. As Laura Jane Grace, another American trans hero, pointed out to me on Sunday, Jenner matters culturally – and we need people who inhabit that space to complement the work being done at grassroots level to improve life for trans people.

Google is largely failing to diversify its workforce beyond white and Asian men even though it hired women to fill one in every five of its openings for computer programmers and other high-paying technology jobs last year.