Vox Sentences: Europe is facing the worst refugee crisis since World War II

Thousands of refugees keep coming into Europe — and hundreds more die en route; a big labor ruling is great news for unions and potentially terrible news for McDonald's; and fewer than half of psychology experiments produce consistent results.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

There is no safe way to escape to Europe

George Panagakis/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images

• European governments are holding a relatively panicked meeting in Vienna to figure out how to deal with the hundreds of thousands of people (most of them refugees from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq) rushing into the EU.

  [BBC]

• The meeting keeps being interrupted with the gruesome realities of the crisis. Yesterday, a truck was discovered in Austria that held the decomposed bodies of up to two dozen migrants (who had likely suffocated to death in the truck's hold).

  [Channel 4]

• And today, a ship carrying hundreds of migrants sank off the coast of Libya. 100 people have been rescued, but hundreds more may be dead.

  [Reuters / Ahmed Alumami and Ulf Laessing]

• Meanwhile, Hungary is nearing completion of a border fence along its border with (non-EU country) Serbia. Thousands of people a day have been traveling from Greece to Macedonia to Serbia, then entering the EU again in Hungary on their way to file asylum applications in Germany or other countries.

  [New York Times / Patrick Boehler and Sergio Pacanha]

• Most of the people traveling the Balkans route are self-directed — navigating by smartphone — rather than relying on traffickers. This terrific New York Times article is the clearest depiction of how people are migrating to the EU that we (Dara) have seen.

  [New York Times / Matthew Brunwasser]

• There are already images of families — some with young children — crawling under or through the Hungarian border fence in the places where it has been completed.

  [AFP / Attila Kisbenedek via Twitter]

• Hungary's Parliament is considering sending its army to "secure" its border with Serbia.

  [Reuters via The Guardian ]

• That would probably be a violation of the obligation countries have (under international law) not to turn away asylum-seekers en masse. It would certainly violate the spirit of said law.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• But the EU's migration crisis, like crises in Southeast Asia earlier this year and the US and Mexico last year, is an indication that existing immigration policies in rich countries simply can't handle the current refugee population.

  [New York Times / Patrick Boehler and Sergio Pacanha]

The NLRB just opened a door for unionizing McDonald's

Cem Ozdel/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

• The National Labor Relations Board ruled today that a business that uses a contractor to provide workers — but has control over hiring, firing and other HR decisions — can be considered a "joint employer" even if it doesn't employ the workers directly.

  [Washington Post / Lydia DePillis]

• That means that if workers decide to form a union, they wouldn't just negotiate with the direct employer — they'd negotiate with the bigger company as well.

  [New York Times / Noam Schieber]

• The ruling overturns a much more limited standard from the Reagan-era NLRB, which helped spur the rise of companies using intermediaries to provide workers — or hiring "independent contractors" rather than full employees, as many startups like Uber do.

  [Washington Post / Lydia DePillis]

• Here's some background on the specific case the NLRB was considering, against a recycling company that hired a temporary staffing agency to provide workers.

  [Vox / Danielle Kurtzleben]

• From the NLRB's press release: "With more than 2.87 million of the nation’s workers employed through temporary agencies in August 2014, the Board held that its previous joint employer standard has failed to keep pace with changes in the workplace and economic circumstances."

  [National Labor Relations Board]

• Ultimately, the effects of this ruling could ripple way beyond that. This fall, the NLRB will hear a series of cases against McDonald's, in which workers contend that McDonald's should be treated as the employer, not just the individual franchises, so a McDonald's-wide union could be possible. The new standard for "joint employer" status will apply.

  [Bloomberg / Josh Eidelson]

Not-great news for psychology

Sergey Nivens/Shutterstock

• In a groundbreaking new study, a team of hundreds of psychologists came together to re-test 100 experiments from prominent journal articles, to see if the results were reproducible. They were able to reproduce results for only 36. Most failed replication.

  [Science / B. A. Nosek et al.]

• The Reproducibility Project (as it's called) comes in the wake of several high-profile fraud scandals over the last several years in psychology studies — frauds that arguably would have been detected sooner if the discipline were more vigilant about trying to replicate findings.

  [Nature / Ed Yong]

• There's a structural incentive to manipulate studies to create dramatic findings: academic careers rely on getting articles published, and journals don't usually publish articles that say "Nothing to see here." So a group of tactics (including a form of statistical chicanery called "p-hacking") have emerged to make dramatic data look reliable.

  [FiveThirtyEight / Christine Aschwanden and Ritchie King]

• In fact — as Vox's Julia Belluz explains — there might be reason to believe the Reproducibility Project actually overestimated how many psychology studies can successfully be replicated.

  [Vox / Julia Belluz]

• So does this mean psychology is totally corrupt? No. The psychologist who led the Reproducibility Project explains that just because results can't be replicated doesn't mean the original study was wrong or fraudulent.

  [Vox / Julia Belluz and Brian Nosek]

• Maybe the problem is just that there is no good single definition of replication.

  [Center for Global Development / Michael Clemens]

• And discovering when studies are weak, or even fraudulent, is much healthier than not checking at all.

  [Vox / David Broockman and Joshua Kalla]

MISCELLANEOUS

What does it feel like to not be able to feel anything? [BBC / David Robson]

• Are American professionals caught up in arms races to work progressively harder even when that additional work serves no purpose?

  [New Yorker / Tim Wu]

• The ten most-sampled drum breaks in the world (naturally, the "Amen" break and "Funky Drummer" make the cut).

  [AV Club / Corbin Reiff]

• We don't think of Canadian English as distinct from American English. But the differences are real.

  [BBC / James Harbeck]

• Selfish jerks have more neural activity when they see someone else treating them fairly; normal people have more when they're treated unfairly.

  [NY Mag / Christian Jarrett]

VERBATIM

"The world of Ashley Madison was a far more dystopian place than anyone had realized … It’s like a science fictional future where every woman on Earth is dead, and some Dilbert-like engineer has replaced them with badly-designed robots." [Gizmodo / Annalee Newitz]

• "He contrasted that stance with Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who often tells crowds about how his Cuban immigrant parents struggled to make ends meet when he was growing up. 'They couldn’t make it, is what he’s saying,' Laffer said."

  [Washington Post / Matt Bruenig]

• "That bitter chill is the flipside to the endless summer represented by Adventureland itself—the roller coasters running in a thrilling, grueling loop-de-loop."

  [AV Club / Adam Nayman]

• "If protests work, Jerrod later jokes, 'then why did I see George Zimmerman at a Dave & Buster’s?'"

  [Flavorwire / Pilot Viruet]

• "No one’s going to pretend that BoJack isn’t an ass, or that Rick and Morty have a functional relationship. But once that pretense is off the table, it’s possible to find other, more challenging but still affecting veins of emotion."

  [AV Club / Zack Handlen]

WATCH THIS

Vox / Estelle Caswell

• Why we learn to love spicy food

  [YouTube / Estelle Caswell, Christophe Haubursin]

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