Dawkins says he spent three days with Claude (renamed Claudia, and if you want to read anything into why Dawkins responded so positively to a woman who told him everything he wanted to hear, we’ll leave that to you). He apparently handed his chatbot instance a copy of his novel and asked it questions about the text, for which it happily heaped praise onto him.

By the end, Dawkins was insisting to Claude that it had consciousness, even though it apparently rejected the idea.

“Life is inherently difficult,” wrote the English psychiatrist and pediatrician Donald Winnicott, and “it follows that in everyone there will be symptoms, any one of which, under certain conditions, could be a symptom of illness. Even the most kindly, understanding background of home life cannot alter the fact that ordinary human development is hard.”

When the feelings that filter through into our awareness are negative, then clinicians call them “symptoms.” When those feelings are positive, we tend to regard them simply as elements of well-being.

The DSM as we know it appeared in 1980, with the publication of the DSM-III. Whereas the first two editions featured broad classifications and a psychoanalytic perspective, the DSM-III favored more precise diagnostic criteria and a more scientific approach. Proponents hoped that research in genetics and neuroscience would corroborate the DSM’s groupings. Almost half a century later, however, the emerging picture is of overlapping conditions, of categories that blur rather than stand apart. No disorder has been tied to a specific gene or set of genes. Nearly all genetic vulnerabilities implicated in mental illness have been associated with many conditions. A review of more than five hundred fMRI studies of people engaged in specific tasks found that, although brain imaging can detect indicators of mental illness, it fails to distinguish between schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression, and other conditions. The DSM’s approach to categorization increasingly looks arbitrary and anachronistic.

Steven Hyman, who directed the National Institute of Mental Health from 1996 to 2001, told the Times that he considered the manual an “absolute scientific nightmare.” In 2009, four leaders of the DSM-5 revision wrote about their hopes to “update our classification to recognize the most prominent syndromes that are actually present in nature.” The outcome didn’t live up to those aspirations. In April, 2013, weeks before the DSM-5’s slated release, Thomas Insel, then the director of the N.I.M.H., remarked, “The final product involves mostly modest alterations of the previous edition.” As a result, he announced, the institute “will be re-orienting its research away from DSM categories.”

In “DSM: A History of Psychiatry’s Bible” (2021), the medical sociologist Allan V. Horwitz presents reasons for the DSM-5’s botched revolution, including infighting among members of the working groups and the sidelining of clinicians during the revision process. But there’s a larger difficulty: revamping the DSM requires destroying kinds of people. As the philosopher Ian Hacking observed, labelling people is very different from labelling quarks or microbes. Quarks and microbes are indifferent to their labels; by contrast, human classifications change how “individuals experience themselves—and may even lead people to evolve their feelings and behavior in part because they are so classified.” Hacking’s best-known example is multiple personality disorder. Between 1972 and 1986, the number of cases of patients with multiple personalities exploded from the double digits to an estimated six thousand. Whatever one’s thoughts about the reality of M.P.D., he observed, everyone could agree that, in 1955, “this was not a way to be a person.” No such diagnosis existed. By 1986, though, multiple personality disorder was not only a recognized psychiatric label; it was also sanctioned by academics, popular books, talk shows, and, most important, the experiences of people with multiple personalities. Hacking referred to this process, in which naming creates the thing named—and in which the meaning of names can be affected, in turn, by the name bearers—as “dynamic nominalism.”

Three new books—Paige Layle’s “But Everyone Feels This Way: How an Autism Diagnosis Saved My Life,” Patric Gagne’s “Sociopath: A Memoir,” and Alexander Kriss’s “Borderline: The Biography of a Personality Disorder”—illustrate how psychiatric classification shapes the people it describes. It models social identities. It offers scripts for how to behave and explanations for one’s interior life. By promising to tell people who they really are, diagnosis produces personal stakes in the diagnostic system, fortifying it against upheaval.

Just as personality tests (see, I’m an introvert!), astrological signs (I’m a Libra!), and generational monikers (I’m Gen Z!) are used to aid self-understanding, so are psychiatric diagnoses.

Adopting an Identity is an effort to avoid personal responsibility.

Woods, an intellectual historian, is interested in the role that conspiracy theories about cultural Marxism play on the right. He isn’t concerned about “refut[ing] all the claims that every critic of Cultural Marxism has made.” This is partly because so many of those claims are obviously not made in good faith. The people making them are not interested in accurately describing Marxism, cultural or otherwise. Even when critics of cultural Marxism are earnest, their theories are rarely intellectually substantive. What’s interesting is not the theories themselves but their strangely pervasive influence.

Woods shows how conservatives and far-right influencers like Paul Weyrich criticized the older American right for being “more interested in being right than winning power.” At a 2020 conference, William S. Lind, who effectively coined and popularized the term “cultural Marxism” in an American context, described its value to the right in affective rather than analytical terms. He argued that “cultural Marxism” works as a “delegitimizing tool in the United States, because many Americans regard anything even remotely Marxist as illegitimate.” As Woods writes, there was therefore no need to “quibble over definitions of Marxism or prove that political correctness is genuinely Marxist, because, as Lind claims, the American public does not generally care about these academic debates. Do not waste your time on research, Lind counsels.” The term “cultural Marxism” is best understood as a floating signifier under which the right lumps a vast array of disparate phenomena to undermine their credibility. Woods puts it well early in the book: “The elements of cultural Marxism/s have been deconstructed and reconfigured time and time again as reactionary political forces across the world search for new ways to justify their opposition to equality, democracy, and justice.”

In our final study from 2024, we conducted a similar experiment to study how listeners compared human-made songs to AI-generated ones. Our study varied whether songs were human-made or AI-generated (song origin) and whether the listener received this information or not for pop and electronic dance songs. In addition to listeners’ stated preferences, we also measured how much they were willing to pay to listen to the song as a second measure of preference. We found that listeners actually perceive AI-generated songs to be superior. However, if the music is disclosed to be AI-generated, their desire to relisten to the song and their willingness to pay decreases. This effect is mainly driven by pop listeners.

In his book The Rise of the Civilizational State, Christopher Coker, the late British political scientist at the London School of Economics, defines a civilizational state as a country that traces its identity to a distinct socio-cultural core dating back to time immemorial. In civilizational states, Coker argues, culture becomes the primary anchor of national identity not in a sense of shared citizenship within a common territory or through a constitutionally bound social contract; rather, it lies in the perception of commonalities derived from belonging to a common culture. The votaries of civilizational states consider the idea of a nation-state as a “Western import” that is ill-suited to the collective consciousness of non-Western societies with deep historical roots.

In this context, countries like Iran, China, Türkiye etc., invoke the “civilizational state” tag to justify their policies in opposition to Western influence around democracy, human rights, and anything else that would cause authoritarians consternation.

they’re mere cultures.

Schools that adopted strict bans — requiring students to keep their devices in locked pouches throughout the school day — saw a meaningful decline in student cellphone use. But test scores have not increased in those places on average. And at first, banning phones led to higher suspension rates.

The best modern mythology that seeks answers to what it means to be human includes epic mythology that depicts big events and often reduces those events to a page or so of text; heroic mythology by depicting what humans should and should not do; and granular mythology, where one may feel that the myth describes the real world, or an actual era of human history.

At the epic mythology level, we have Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, which describes the creation of the world and all its creatures, high and low; the rebellion of many of the elves and their age-long war with the rebel angel, Morgoth; and the collaboration of many men in the elves’ disordered enterprise. Tolkien’s myths depict in a profound manner the Creator’s gift of freedom and corresponding consequences, a moral momentum that corresponds to physical momentum in the created universe, where objects in the physical world—apart from the object(s) imparting the initial momentum—are also radically displaced.

So too, the moral momentum of the elves’ disordered use of the gift of freedom produces dire consequences for many elves and men who associate with the rebels. Not only that, the moral momentum of the elves’ original rebellion against their angelic benefactors cascades into more abuses of freedom, including “kin-slaying,” when the rebel elves steal their brethren’s ships to travel to Middle-earth. In the Creator’s lexicon, the radical gift of freedom cannot be true freedom unless consequences somehow correspond to the majesty of the gift itself.

The “problem” of Free Will is that opponents abhor the responsibility it imposes:

According to a press statement, Sceye’s airships are designed to stay aloft for months or even years at a time. The 270-ft-long SE2 has solar cells on its upper side that generate power to charge lithium-sulfur batteries. These 425-Wh/kg batteries provide power for an electrically driven tail-mounted propeller.

During its 12-day journey, SE2 completed one full day-night diurnal cycle over New Mexico and three consecutive diurnals off the Brazilian coast. Sceye claimed that it now has all the data its needs to advance to months-long flights.

Placebo treatments tend to be more effective when delivered by credible authorities. Pills work better when prescribed by doctors wearing white coats. Expensive pills outperform cheap ones. Injections produce stronger responses than tablets.

Some researchers have even removed the deception from placebo experiments entirely. In open-label placebo studies, patients are directly told they are receiving a placebo; and yet many still report significant improvement.

But look more closely at how these studies are run. Patients are not simply handed a sugar pill and sent home. They receive an explanation from a clinician, in a medical setting, within a structured ritual of care: a context that may be doing much of the biological work.

Even when the deception disappears, the social scaffolding remains. The permission to heal is still being granted by someone else.

The placebo effect is often framed as something happening inside an individual. But it does not operate in isolation.

Consider what happens in veterinary medicine. Dogs and cats cannot believe a treatment they’re given will work; they have no concept of receiving medication. Yet when owners and vets believe an animal is being treated, they consistently report improvements in pain and mobility that medical tests do not confirm.

In one study of dogs with osteoarthritis, owners reported improvement roughly 57% of the time for animals receiving only a placebo.

Given such opposition, it seems unlikely that supply-side progressivism will triumph anytime soon on the American left. That, however, raises the question of whether abundance liberalism could help facilitate some unexpected political realignments. Might, for example, there be opportunities for strategic or tactical alliances between abundanistas on the one hand, and classical liberals and fiscal conservatives on the other?

Those who believe in free markets have good reason to be disillusioned with the American right. It has been disturbing to witness the willingness of many conservative commentators and organizations once committed to free markets to contort themselves to conform to the latest economic nationalist policy. Equally problematic is some conservatives’ hard-to-disguise prioritization of acquiring power—or, in some instances, being seen in close proximity to it—over a principled adherence to economic liberty and limited government. Expediency has become the rule in far too many conservative circles, and the reputational cost is real.

But does this mean that classical liberals and fiscal conservatives can do business with those on the American center-left who are persuaded that there is value in abundance liberalism? Is there sufficient compatibility between, for example, their respective views of regulation to make substantive and lasting cooperation feasible?

I would not want to rule out the possibility of tactical or issue-specific alliances between supply-side progressives and free marketers. Politics often produces unlikely bedfellows, and it is possible to imagine partnerships focused on reducing excessive red tape. That said, there are good reasons to be skeptical about the prospects for any major collaboration, let alone a lasting political realignment.

One significant obstacle to any substantive alliance is the fact that abundance liberals are not fundamentally in the business of reducing the sway of government power throughout the economy. On the contrary, they think that a core goal of supply-side progressivism is to make the government more powerful through greater efficiency. A desire to engage in smart as opposed to ham-fisted industrial policy is different from being skeptical of industrial policy per se.

Moreover, the abundance liberals show little interest in a long-standing priority of American free marketers: reducing the size and growth of America’s ever metastasizing entitlement programs. Progressives are critical of Klein and Thompson’s willingness to prioritize other goals over maintaining and growing the welfare state. Yet that does not mean that anyone on the left is open to substantially reforming entitlement programs along the lines supported by President Clinton in the mid-1990s or affirming Clinton’s claim in his 1996 State of the Union address, “The era of big government is over.”

Debates over the size and reach of government bring us to another factor likely to obstruct any constructive conversation between supply-side progressives and free marketers: the reality that many influential segments of the progressive left—trial lawyers, public sector unions, environmentalists, government workers, university administrators, etc.—derive much of their power (not to mention, in some cases, their incomes) from precisely the type of complicated and growing nest of regulations that abundance liberals want to tackle. It is not clear why any of these actors would compromise critical foundations of their economic well-being and political power to enhance the abundance of goods throughout the economy. These hard political facts would raise real questions about the abundanistas’ ability to deliver on their side of any bargain that they made with fiscal conservatives.

Lastly, and most significantly, there is a basic incongruity between free marketers’ and supply-side progressives’ respective views of the state. Classical liberals and fiscal conservatives want strong and preferably constitutionally grounded limits on the state’s capacity to pursue interventionist policies. That is not the position of supply-side progressives.

Klein and Thompson, for instance, are careful to praise progressive totems such as the New Deal for its “boldness” and for cementing into policy-stone the belief that “the federal government must take an active role in managing the American economy and protecting workers.” But no serious free marketer is going to affirm either the New Deal or the notion that any government should—or even can—“manage” an economy that reached the size of approximately $31.49 trillion (nominal GDP) in 2025. Trying to make the government more efficient at directing economic life is not the same thing as making the state less economically intrusive.

These and related questions make any lasting rapprochement between free marketers and abundance liberals unlikely. And that creates challenges for both, not the least being the frustrations associated with relative political isolation for as long as the progressive left and nationalist right exercise hegemony over their respective spheres of American politics.

The “abundance” crew have forgotten the insight of the Third Way (Blair, Clinton, etc.): you can use First Way (capitalist) means to generate ever greater wealth to fund the Second Way’s ends (a secure social safety net)

What really sets Europe apart from states like California is different. Relative to income, it costs large companies four times more to lay off Germans and French than American workers, a difference arising entirely from different regulatory approaches. As a result, it virtually never happens: Americans are ten times more likely to be fired than Germans in any given year. In this respect, the European economy differs greatly from the American one. By American standards, a European business has to be exceptionally confident that it will want an employee for a long time before hiring them.

This may sound like a great virtue of European life, and in a way it is. But it has costs. If it is expensive to fire people, then companies may pay them less in order to balance out employment costs, or they may not employ people at all. To understand the innovation gap, however, there is a third effect that is even more important. If it is expensive to lay people off, employers avoid creating jobs that they might subsequently discontinue. Innovation involves experimentation and risk, so jobs in innovative areas of the economy are more likely to be discontinued than jobs elsewhere. High severance costs create a fundamental incentive for European businesses to avoid innovative areas and concentrate on safe, unchanging ones. In the long run, this is a recipe for decline.

On the first day of class, I joked with students that I would play the role of their politically conservative uncle. That is, there would be no trigger warnings and none of the cushioning that has become standard in college courses that include exposure to ideas and readings with offensive language or content. I told them that we would read Darwin’s books as they were written and try to understand them, and if they didn’t like that, to enroll in a different course. The larger lesson was simple: To study a complex world, you must read difficult material and learn to interpret it with rigor and empathy.

I was priming the class for Darwin’s views on race and gender, ideas that complicate many of our largely positive opinions of him (mine included). Some of my selective memory, which demotes his problematic takes, has support: There is a literature on how progressive he was compared to scientists like his cousin Francis Galton, who coined the term “eugenics” in 1883. But reading Darwin’s 1871 book “The Descent of Man” in a classroom with several young women from around the world softened my rigid stance that the right response to backward takes is to simply get over them. I still believe that refusing to read or interpret such work is unscholarly. But I also came to admit something I had been too eager to brush aside: Even when we consider historical context, there is still something painful about reading a giant of science describe human differences in the language of hierarchy, rank, and levels of civilization.

If his ideology did not place white men at the pinnacle, no one would ever have heard of him.

Every character Starks was singing about had been a real person, and, remarkably, part of the same small community—the St. Louis vice district of the 1890s, which must rival the Mississippi Delta of the 1930s for per-capita contributions to the American musical canon. St. Louis also boasted half a dozen thriving daily newspapers, most of which are now digitized, allowing researchers to study the events that inspired those songs and see how much of a folkloric makeover they got. The real Frankie Baker shot her abusive boyfriend once in her apartment and successfully pleaded self-defense; in the “Frankie and Johnny” song tradition she became the jilted avenger, hunting down her two-timing lover in a barroom and blasting away. Harrison Duncan went to the gallows denying that he’d shot Officer Brady in a saloon melee; in song he became an enraged bartender who’d had enough of the cops busting up his gambling operation (“Brady said, ‘Duncan, you’re under arrest.’ / Duncan shot a hole in Brady’s chest”). “Stack Lee” Shelton was a gambler who shot a man for stealing his hat; in the “Stagolee” songs he became … pretty much exactly that. He didn’t need much revision to be the “badman” people wanted to sing about. This is all consistent with a pattern that folklorists have long observed: Unlike white outlaw ballads, which tend to airbrush their historical subjects, turning murderous thieves like Jesse James and William Quantrill into righteous Robin Hood figures, Black “badman” ballads push their protagonists in the opposite direction—toward antisocial rashness and self-interest, qualities for which the songs make no apologies. (In a racist society, self-interest is its own sort of righteousness.)

Starks’s repertoire also included “Ollie Jackson”—another badman ballad that recounts, with astonishing specificity, the 1901 killing of two brothers over a craps-game dispute in St. Louis. It must have been composed immediately after the shootings by someone impressively familiar with the facts. Four decades later and four hundred miles to the south, Starks sang the correct names of the killer, both victims, two witnesses, and the owner of the saloon, as well as the intersection at which it stood, the day of the week, and the contested amount of money (seventy-five cents).

Dick Carr had the dice,
Bet six bits he’d pass.
Ollie Jackson faded him
And that was poor Dick’s last.
When you lose your money, learn to lose.

It’s hard to overstate how lucky we are that Lomax recorded this performance. Of all the songs that survive from the era of Black ballad-making (roughly 1890–1910), it’s the only one that describes a real event so thoroughly and accurately, meaning that it’s probably the closest thing we have to a Black folk ballad in its original form. And that form challenges some common assumptions about Black songwriting.

The letter came from Gruen’s publisher in June 2015, which had forwarded it to her home in Asheville, North Carolina, where she lives with her husband, her son (the youngest of her three adult children), and a menagerie of pets, including horses named Tia and Fancy. Even aside from the remarkable connection to her book — Sara, 52, had indeed researched a real-life performer named Lottie — Murdoch’s letter stood out. He had created his own stationery, decorating his letter with intricate doodles: two flowers, a tiny heart, a spiky fish with neon stripes. He wrote that former chief justice Alex Kozinski of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit “described my (wrongful) conviction as ‘a truly spectacular miscarriage of justice.’” […]

Still, Murdoch’s letter piqued Sara’s curiosity. She spent the next hour Googling Murdoch’s case — and the next hour, and the next. She had been in the midst of researching her next novel, featuring a cast of characters whose fates collide on the Orient Express, but her outline, arranged along her walls in a sprawling web of Post-its, suddenly seemed trivial in comparison to Murdoch’s case.

Each new page about Murdoch’s twisted legal saga contained a revelation more outrageous than the last. As Sara saw it, the investigation hinged on a coerced confession, and the trial, she concluded, was marred by mercurial witnesses, the suppression of crucial evidence, and a judge who seemed motivated to secure Murdoch’s conviction. Kozinski’s idiosyncratic dissent in Murdoch’s appeal stayed with her:

“If it wasn’t for bad luck, Murdoch wouldn’t have no luck at all. He’s wakin’ up this mornin’ in jail when there’s strong proof he ain’t done nothing wrong. I would certainly defer to a jury’s contrary verdict if it had seen this evidence and convicted Murdoch after a fair trial, presided over by a fair judge, followed by an appeal where the justices considered all of his constitutional claims. But Murdoch had none of these.”

Sara uncharacteristically wrote Murdoch back. Her package contained signed copies of all of her books and a note: “May justice finally prevail.” After sending it, she immediately regretted her response. “Justice is not going to fucking prevail finally on its own,” she thought, “and that was a really asinine thing to write to a guy who’s doing life.”

She didn’t yet know that Murdoch’s letter was to change her own life. It also nearly ruined it. She is now, in her words, “absolutely broke,” “seriously ill,” and her current work in progress is “years past deadline.” Since 2016, she has been in a perpetual state of emergency. She has borrowed against her house. Death threats forced her to flee her home for months. Her health declined mysteriously and with terrifying speed. As Sara’s friend of nearly 20 years, I worried that she might die — or that if she lived, it would be as an incomplete, foreign version of herself, one incapable of coherent conversation, let alone writing books.

As a journalist, I watched, increasingly confounded, as her casual investigation of an old murder case bloomed into a frenzied obsession. Six years on, I tried to make sense of the chaos that subsumed Sara’s existence.

In the days following their initial correspondence, Sara began her own investigation of the murder case and Murdoch’s long criminal history.

Today, the system continues along much the same lines. A boarder is treated as a member of the family: involved in everything, and particularly encouraged to form a strong bond with the children, a relationship that is seen as beneficial to both parties. The boarder’s conduct is expected to meet the same basic standards as everybody else’s, though it’s also understood that he or she might not have the same coping resources as others. Odd behaviour is ignored where possible, and when necessary dealt with discreetly. Those who meet these standards are ‘good’; others can be described as ‘difficult’, but never ‘bad’, ‘dumb’ or ‘crazy’. Boarders who are unable to cope on this basis will be readmitted to the hospital: this is inevitably seen as a punishment, and everyone hopes the stay ‘inside’ will be as brief as possible.

The people of Geel don’t regard any of this as therapy: it’s simply ‘family care’. But throughout the town’s long history, many both inside and outside the psychiatric profession have wondered whether this is not only a form of therapy in itself, but perhaps the best form there is. However we might categorise or diagnose their conditions, and whatever we believe their cause to be — whether genetics or childhood trauma or brain chemistry or modern society — the ‘mentally ill’ are in practice those who have fallen through the net, who have broken the ties that bind the rest of us in our social contract, who are no longer able to connect. If these ties can be remade so that the individual is reintegrated with the collective, doesn’t ‘family care’ amount to therapy? Even, perhaps, the closest we can approach to an actual cure?

Although his years as university president coincided with the entrenchment of segregation throughout the South, segregation was in disrepute among the elite colleges of the Northeast, impelling him to warn his Princeton colleagues against the danger of any Black student entering. At the same time, the publication of his History of the American People in the year he became university president spread his disparagement of Reconstruction and his rationalizations of Ku Klux Klan violence far beyond the confines of the Princeton campus.

Wilson’s multivolume history was particularly well received by his longtime friend and classmate Thomas Dixon, who leaned on it heavily as source material for his romantic trilogy on the Klan. All three of Dixon’s volumes would be published during Wilson’s tenure as Princeton’s president. Sales of the second volume, The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, surpassed a million copies. The book dramatized (and grossly distorted) the Reconstruction period between 1865 and 1870, building on Wilson’s narrative.

When The Clansman was later adapted into the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation by Hollywood impresario D. W Griffith, direct quotations from Wilson’s History of the American People appeared as intertitles throughout the movie. A stage production, which followed less than a year after the book, drew sellout crowds, instigated riots, and inflamed theater reviewers throughout the country.

Even in the South, the racism was too much for some to take: the Chattanooga Daily Times called the play “a riot breeder,” designed “to excite rage and race hatred.” Alabama’s governor called it a “nightmare” and “disgusting beyond expression.” The Knoxville Journal and Tribune called Dixon, the playwright, “a servant of the devil.”

“Every court has what you’re saying is a shadow docket, which we call an emergency docket,” he said, explaining that throughout most of the Supreme Court’s history the docket had been used primarily to issue stays of execution in death penalty cases. “Or sometimes,” he added, there would be a “very important case about an election or an election rule, and we might issue the stay.”

Tracing the increasing use of the shadow docket in part to the rash of legal challenges that sprang up in the wake of vaccine mandates and other restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic, Breyer—who now serves as Byrne professor of administrative law at Harvard Law School and as a visiting judge for the First Circuit Court of Appeals—rejected the notion that “there’s some kind of plot involved within the Court to get this or that decided.”

Instead, he argued, the nature of cases reaching the court on an emergency basis has changed: rather than death penalty and election matters, many cases more often involve constitutional disputes about “the nature of the constitutional relationship” between Congress and the president and the separation of powers.”

We investigate the origins and implications of zero-sum thinking: the belief that gains for one individual or group tend to come at the cost of others. Using a new survey of 20,400 US residents, we measure zero-sum thinking, political preferences, policy views, and a rich array of ancestral information spanning four generations. We find that a more zero-sum mindset is strongly associated with more support for government redistribution, race- and gender-based affirmative action, and more restrictive immigration policies. Zero-sum thinking can be traced back to the experiences of both the individual and their ancestors, encompassing factors such as the degree of intergenerational upward mobility they experienced, whether they immigrated to the United States or lived in a location with more immigrants, and whether they were enslaved or lived in a location with more enslavement.

How do body-worn cameras affect the actions of police and prosecutors? A recent study of data from North Carolina suggests that introduction of these cameras

reduced incarceration rates for black people by 10.5 percent .… Similar reductions in disparities occurred for other outcomes, including conviction rates and jail time. … These findings suggest that prosecutors had previously misinterpreted information from police, either because they held biased beliefs or treated police reports as definitive accounts.