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What should the US do with an unprecedented influx of immigrants seeking asylum? While many advocate deportation, research suggests the US could benefit economically by allowing immigrants currently in the US to stay and work.

Border state governors are busing thousands of immigrants to northern cities to pressure the Biden administration to stop a surge of border crossings. Critics call the gambit cruel and inhumane. But neither side has a plan to fix the underlying problem.

On May 11, Title 42 expired. The controversial, pandemic-era public health order banned migrants from claiming asylum at the US-Mexico border and allowed US agents to rapidly expel them from the country, claiming a risk to public health. Some Americans fear that with the law gone, migrants will overrun the southern border. Others, though, say the rule was ineffective anyway, and now that it’s gone, the US can pass better immigration policies.

Investigations continue after an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max 9 was forced to make an emergency landing when part of the aircraft's fuselage blew off. This latest safety issue could cause further reputational damage to Boeing, already burdened by past financial settlements and a drop in stock prices.

In Black Box Thinking, Matthew Syed argues that learning from failure drives human progress, from innovation in science and business to individual and organizational growth. Yet other areas of society—including the political, judicial, and health care systems—have yet to benefit from this process of rational learning.

As long as these institutions stigmatize failure, they create a culture of misguided exceptionalism that prevents them from improving. And if we neglect to improve our stagnating institutions, they’ll continue to take the lives of innocents—whether it’s death due to preventable medical error or wrongful conviction that leads to life in prison.

Syed explains how an organization’s culture and systems either promote or prevent learning, and he lays out several steps for learning from failure in our complex world. Any organization can change its culture and systems by embracing failure as a powerful source of learning. We’ve rounded out Syed’s ideas with advice from Tribal Leadership and The Fifth Discipline, which discuss the cultures and systems of effective businesses.

In the 21st century, we can do extraordinary things: We can predict dangerous storms, explore distant planets, and save people from life-threatening conditions and injuries. Yet highly trained, experienced, and capable people regularly make avoidable mistakes.

In The Checklist Manifesto, Boston surgeon Atul Gawande contends the reason is that knowledge and complexity in many fields have exceeded the capacity of any individual to get everything right. Under pressure, we make simple mistakes and overlook the obvious. Drawing lessons from spectacular successes and failures in recent years, he argues that the solution is a checklist. The book builds the case for checklists and issues a plea for adopting this backstop to human fallibility.

A record-breaking storm hit California in early February 2024, causing widespread flooding in major cities. Researchers predict that as global temperatures continue to rise, California will experience more intense storms with increased dry spells between them, creating challenges for water managers to maintain adequate supply year-round.

A recent scientific study suggests the Gulf Stream may slow or stop due to climate change, which would have dramatic effects on the world’s weather. This article will explain how that could happen, and what those effects might be.

A Promised Land is Barack Obama’s memoir of his early political career and the first two years of his presidency. Obama takes us on his journey from relative obscurity as a biracial kid from Hawaii to becoming a transformative figure as the nation’s first African-American president. At every step of his career, Obama was guided by a deep faith in the fundamental unity of Americans; the potential and promise of America; the necessity of compromise and seeking common ground; and above all, the power of the democratic system to heal our divisions and effect real change for ordinary people.