Learn about why you can blame redlining for US cities being so segregated; why Earth’s magnetic north pole is drifting every year; and how virtual therapy can be just as effective as in-person therapy.
Learn about why you can blame redlining for US cities being so segregated; why Earth’s magnetic north pole is drifting every year; and how virtual therapy can be just as effective as in-person therapy.
Redlining is the totally legal reason why US cities are so segregated by Steffie Drucker
Earth's magnetic north pole is drifting every year by Cameron Duke
Virtual therapy can be just as effective as in-person therapy by Andrea Michelson
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/virtual-therapy-vs-in-person-therapy-how-redlining-deepened-segregation-in-us-cities-and-earths-drifting-magnetic-poles
CODY: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity-dot-com. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about why you can blame redlining for US cities being so segregated; why Earth’s magnetic north pole is drifting every year; and how virtual therapy can be just as effective as in-person therapy.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
Segregation was outlawed in the United States more than 50 years ago. Yet neighborhoods in cities across the country are still segregated by race. That’s not an accident. It’s due to redlining, which is the totally legal, government-created policy of residential segregation in the United States. Here’s how it all started.
It all goes back to The New Deal, a program started in 1933 that was meant to bring the United States out of the Great Depression and into an era of prosperity. It’s where we got social security, and unemployment benefits, and federally-insured bank deposits. It’s also where we got the idea of the 30-year mortgage.
That came out of The National Housing Act of 1934, which aimed to make homeownership more accessible by insuring loans made by private banks. That law created the Federal Housing Administration, which encouraged lenders to fund new construction, and the Home Owners Loan Corporation or H-O-L-C, which made mortgages affordable.
Of course, the government wasn’t just giving away free money. They wanted to make sure loans went to people who would pay them back. That’s where the racist policy of redlining came in. The HOLC created color-coded maps reflecting the economic risk of different neighborhoods: The quote-unquote “best” areas were green; blue was more white-collar; yellow was working-class; and red areas were what they called “hazardous.” This is where poor whites, immigrants, and black residents lived. But these weren’t just low-income areas — neighborhoods where wealthy black celebrities lived were redlined too. Banks routinely denied loans in redlined areas.
So, landlords abandoned those properties. City services like public transportation stopped serving those neighborhoods. Property values plummeted. And because property values are intimately linked to public school funding, the schools suffered too. Basically, redlining created poor neighborhoods in majority-Black areas, which led to underfunded schools, more poverty, lower quality healthcare, and more Black people ending up in prison.
Following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr, in 1968, Congress passed the Fair Housing Act. The policy was intended to prevent discrimination in the sale, rental, or financing of a home. But the damage was already done: property values were already unequal, and they remain that way today.
Even in 2020, it’s harder for a Black person to get a mortgage or a loan than it is for a white person. Banks have been caught using redlining maps as recently as 2017. But some politicians are hoping to help — surprisingly, by using those same redlining maps to offer home loan assistance to residents of formerly redlined areas. It’s could be a small step toward reversing a problem that’s embedded in the fabric of our cities.
Let’s talk about the weird science of Earth’s magnetic poles. Compasses point north. But if you started walking where the compass needle points, you wouldn’t end up at the north pole. Not the one you see on a globe, anyway. That’s because Earth has two north poles: the geographical one at its axis of rotation, and the magnetic one, where your compass points. This point is in northern Canada — for now. I say “for now” because unlike the geographic north pole, the magnetic north pole is drifting.
Ever since scientists located Earth’s magnetic north pole in 1831, they’ve known that it moves. At that point, it was near the northern tip of Canada, and for decades afterward, scientists watched it stagger around the Canadian arctic at a rate of around 15 kilometers, or 9 miles, per year. But in 1970, the magnetic north pole’s movement accelerated. It started zooming north at 50 to 60 kilometers or 30 to 40 miles per year. In 2017, it zipped past the geographic north pole, and now it’s moving south over the other side of the planet toward Siberia’s north coast.
To help you understand why this is happening, lemme back up and explain why we have magnetic poles in the first place. It’s thanks to our planet’s core, which has two layers. The inner core is a solid, pressurized mass of iron, about the size of the moon and as hot as the surface of the sun. The outer core is mostly liquid iron. The churning of hot liquid around solid metal creates a magnetic field that surrounds the planet and shields it against high-energy radiation from space. The planet’s rotation gives that churning a direction, which is why its two magnetic poles are roughly located at either pole of rotation. It’s kind of like we have a bar magnet inside the planet, with each end pointing toward each pole.
But unlike a bar magnet, this magnet is, y’know, liquid. It doesn’t stay put. As a result, there are small anomalies in the magnetic field at different points on Earth. Scientists studying our magnetic north pole have found that its movement seems to line up with two big anomalies in the Earth’s mantle, one around northern Canada and one around Siberia. At the moment the one around Canada is weakening its grip on the pole, so the pole is heading straight for the one around Siberia.
Movement of the Earth’s poles is not a new phenomenon. In fact, over geologic time, it’s a relatively regular event. Even full geomagnetic reversals happen — where the magnetic north and south poles switch places — around every 200,000 to 300,000 years. And the last reversal event was 780,000 years ago, more than twice the length of the previous interval. Maybe it’s about time?
Living through a global pandemic is not great for anyone’s mental health, and if you’ve considered talking to a therapist lately, you’re not alone. But since most health professionals have transitioned to telemedicine for the foreseeable future, virtual therapy is your best bet for psychological support. Luckily, studies have found that talking to a therapist online can be just as effective as in-person therapy.
The most recent evidence comes from the Karolinska Insitituet in Sweden, in a study published last month (May 2020). A team of researchers there directly compared the effects of in-person and Internet-based cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, for adults suffering from health anxiety. (That’s surprisingly appropriate for our current situation, given that the treatment took place years before the pandemic hit and the whole world was worried about catching a virus.) For the study, half of the participants received face-to-face therapy once a week. The other participants logged on to an online portal where they could email their therapist any time, and also access a guided self-help text whenever they wanted.
At the end of the 12-week experiment, the researchers determined that Internet-based therapy was no less effective than in-person CBT. Both methods helped participants make the changes they wanted, but the online option came at a much lower cost for both the therapist and the patient. The professionals only spent about 10 minutes per week on each Internet-based patient, compared to an average of 45 minutes per week for patients they saw in person. And for those receiving therapy, communicating with a therapist online eliminated barriers to access like time and distance.
Of course, there are some downsides to seeing a therapist online. If someone hasn’t met their therapist in person before starting virtual sessions, they may have a hard time opening up. Non-verbal cues like body language are also lost in therapy conducted via phone or email, although video chat can offer a middle ground.
But these trade-offs may be worth it for people living in places where the nearest professional may be hours away, or for people who just can’t afford the expense of traditional therapy. Even people who would say they’re too busy for therapy because of work or parenting responsibilities may be able to find time to see someone virtually. And at a time when more people than ever are staying home, online therapy may be the safest and most convenient option we’ve got.
Let’s recap today’s takeaways
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CODY: Today’s stories were written by Steffie Drucker, Cameron Duke, and Andrea Michelson, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Today’s episode was produced and edited by Cody Gough.
CODY: Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!