The Atlantic: Understanding the Women of Pedro Almodóvar’s Movies

From his breakout screwball comedy Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) to his late-career melodramas of strong-willed protagonists, Almodóvar’s films find humor and beauty in female hardship. With Julieta, he’s centered an entire movie on a woman’s loss: The eponymous character is first unable to move on after her husband dies in a boating accident and later has to cope by herself when her only daughter leaves their shared home unexpectedly. Spanning several decades, the film marries Munro’s keen attention to the quiet lives certain women lead with Almodóvar’s flamboyant style. Moments of still reflection in Munro’s words become beautifully art-directed scenes that look like stylish tableaux vivants.

Writing for the feminist online magazine Píkara, the Spanish critic and author María Castejón Leorza negatively reviewed Julieta, arguing that in its stylized depiction of suffering, it contributed to what has become Almodóvar’s signature sensibility: the glamorization of pathos and victimhood. To her, this is an element that merely repurposes the latent misogyny of Spain’s patriarchal society. Castejón Leorza’s complaint against Almodóvar is not a new one. Already in 1992, for example, the film critic Caryn James had written a scathing appraisal of the director in The New York Times. Arguing that his films can leave a bitter aftertaste, James posited that while he creates strong women characters, he “then takes away their strength; there is a definite trace of misogyny lurking beneath his apparently fond creations of women.” [...]

The intersection between gay male culture and melodramatic femininity is at the heart of Almodóvar’s 1999 film All About My Mother. It earned the director some of the best reviews of his career—as Armond White wrote in his New York Press review of the film, the director’s “gay male identification with women frees him to do his best work.” The Oscar-winning movie is centered on a young queer artist, Esteban, whose death sets the plot in motion. It is Esteban’s fascination with cinema that opens the film (he’s watching the Bette Davis classic All About Eve with his mother) and his diva adoration that leads to his untimely death (he’s struck by a car while trying to get an autograph from the actress playing Blanche DuBois in a Spanish theatre production of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire). The film may not have been as explicitly autobiographical as Almodóvar’s later Bad Education (2004), but it nonetheless corralled many of his most famous themes and images—he even borrowed an organ-donor conversation at a hospital following Esteban’s death from his earlier film The Flower of My Secret (1995).

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Vox: Why Obama — and every president since Carter — failed to transform the Middle East

For Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army colonel and a professor of international relations at Boston University, the answers to these questions are muddled at best, depressing at worst.

Among the sharpest critics of American foreign policy in recent years, Bacevich has authored a number of books (including The Limits of Power and The Long War) documenting America’s entanglements abroad. His latest book, America’s War for the Greater Middle East, offers a sweeping look at America’s policies in the Middle East since the Carter administration.

The book begins with the Carter administration because two events in 1979 set America on its current course in the Middle East: the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Together these events cemented the view among American political leaders that access to Persian Gulf oil, then seen as indispensable, had to be protected. [...]

For Bacevich, America’s militarism is fueled by a false assumption about the reach and efficacy of military power. The presumption is that force, sufficiently employed, can achieve desired political goals across the world. This is a dangerous myth, Bacevich argues, and one our foreign policy establishment can’t seem to shake. [...]

That's a great point. This is why the Iran nuclear deal is potentially promising. On the face of it, the purpose is to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. But I believe the actual purpose looks well beyond that. The real purpose is to begin a process of bringing Iran back into the international community and allowing Iran to play a responsible role in regional politics if the Iranian government chooses to do so. [...]

And so the challenge we face is figuring out how to maintain a semblance of stability, how to make it possible for these various actors to tolerate one another. Mutual coexistence needs to be the goal. Not peace on earth or goodwill toward men. Mutual toleration has to be the realistic goal.

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Vox: The UN’s resolution on Israel doesn’t include any sanctions. It could hurt Israel’s economy all the same.

The high-profile United Nations resolution condemning Israeli settlements that passed last week does not impose any kind of financial sanctions or other punitive measures on Israel. What it does do, though, is essentially give the green light to activist groups and countries to accelerate campaigns aimed at striking Israel’s economic interests and weakening its international reputation. And that could potentially prove to be just as damaging.

In the past few years, movements like “boycott, divestment, and sanctions” (BDS), a campaign modeled off the economic activism that helped end apartheid in South Africa, have begun to gain traction in the West. And in November 2015, the European Union issued new guidelines on the labeling of imported goods that distinguish between goods from Israel proper and those from its settlements in occupied Palestinian territories, a policy that’s expected to hurt Israeli exports. Last month, France became the first country to enforce the new guidelines.

So far, the impact of these efforts have been modest, but if they continue to gain momentum with boosts like the UN resolution, real money is at stake: Experts estimate they could lop anywhere from $15 billion to $47 billion off the Israeli economy over the next decade. [...]

In the past few years, scores of universities, pension funds, churches, and unions in the US, Europe, and elsewhere have supported BDS by boycotting Israeli goods and investments. The United Methodist Church’s $20 billion pension board, the biggest pension fund asset manager in the US, blacklisted the five largest Israeli banks. Norway’s $810 billion Government Pension Fund Global, the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, blacklisted two Israeli companies over their involvement in settlement building in East Jerusalem.

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Vox: The real reason for Netanyahu’s showdown with Obama

The top US diplomat was instead making an accurate assessment of an important, and dangerous, shift in Israel’s domestic politics. With the country’s left wing hobbled by electoral losses and bitter infighting, Netanyahu believes his biggest political threat comes from the right, not the left. That’s leading him to adopt precisely the sorts of hawkish policies — like overseeing a massive increase in the population of Israel’s West Bank settlements — that prompted Kerry’s speech, and that have left Israel more isolated at the United Nations than ever before.

“Bibi is not concerned at all with anyone from the center left,” Gilead Sher, a former Israeli peace negotiator and chief of staff for Prime Minister Ehud Barak, tells me in an interview, using the prime minister’s nickname. “He’s concerned about far-right politicians inside and outside his own party that are totally against any division of the land or agreement with the Palestinians. Those are the only people that he thinks could push him out of office.” [...]

The dramatic change in Israel’s domestic politics has shaped Netanyahu’s handling of the moribund peace process with the Palestinians, the primary focus of Kerry’s blistering speech on Wednesday. Netanyahu has publicly committed himself to a two-state solution to the decades-old conflict. In practice, though, he has overseen a massive expansion of Israel’s web of West Bank settlements, which now house more than 500,000 Israelis and occupy so much territory that it would be almost impossible to cobble together a contiguous Palestinian state. [...]

The election also continued the right wing’s historical political dominance. Sher notes that of the 17 Israeli governments in the past 39 years, just two were led by left-wing prime ministers: the 1992 government of Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated by a far-right ideologue, and the short-lived one led by Sher’s former boss, Ehud Barak, after he beat Netanyahu in 1999. Even the left-wing, Nobel Peace Prize-winning Shimon Peres, whose death this year prompted mourning from leaders around the globe, ran for prime minister five times but never won an election outright.

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The New York Review of Books: The Rules of the Game: A New Electoral System

Americans have been using essentially the same rules to elect presidents since the beginning of the Republic. In the general election, each voter chooses one candidate; each state (with two current exceptions) awards all its Electoral College votes to the candidate chosen by the largest number of voters (not necessarily a majority) in that state; and the president-elect is the candidate with a majority of Electoral College votes.

Primary elections for president have also remained largely unchanged since they replaced dealings in a “smoke-filled room” as the principal method for selecting Democratic and Republican nominees. In each state, every voter votes for one candidate. In some states, the delegates to the national convention are all pledged to support the candidate getting a plurality of votes (again, possibly less than a majority). In others, delegates are assigned in proportion to the total votes of the candidates.

These rules are deeply flawed. For example, candidates A and B may each be more popular than C (in the sense that either would beat C in a head-to-head contest), but nevertheless each may lose to C if they both run. The system therefore fails to reflect voters’ preferences adequately. It also aggravates political polarization, gives citizens too few political options, and makes candidates spend most of their campaign time seeking voters in swing states rather than addressing the country at large.

There are several remedies. Perhaps in order of increasing chance of adoption, they are: (1) to elect the president by the national popular vote instead of the Electoral College; (2) to choose the winner in the general election according to the preferences of a majority of voters rather than a mere plurality, either nationally or by state; and, easiest of all, (3) to substitute majority for plurality rule in state primaries.

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The Guardian: Angela Merkel and the history book that helped inform her worldview

The historian rejects the idea that his book has had a direct influence on Merkel’s policies. But many sections of the work – on globalisation, migration and technology, to name a few pertinent topics – read differently in the light of decisions she has made since reading it, such as the treatment of Greece at the height of the eurozone crisis.

If Europe was able to pull ahead of China economically in the 19th century, Osterhammel argues, it was because the Chinese empire was hampered by a “chaotic dual system” of silver and copper coins, while much of Europe had created a “de facto single currency” with the Latin monetary union of 1866.

From a few brief conversations with Merkel, Osterhammel says he can see “she is very serious about the way world order (or disorder) has been evolving in the long run. She seems to understand, for instance, that migration and mobility have a historical dimension.”

The 19th century is often described as an era of rising nationalism, a period in which states across Europe first began to develop distinct ideas about their identity. Osterhammel, a professor at Konstanz University, who wrote his dissertation on the British empire’s economic ties with China, instead recasts the century as one marked by globalisation, with 1860-1914 in particular “a period of unprecedented creation of networks” that were later torn apart by two world wars.

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CityLab: Enlisting Cities in the War on Food Waste

That gulf between data and public knowledge shrunk in 2016—and cities helped bridge it. Dinged, oddly shaped, or surplus food can battle the pernicious problem of urban hunger, dished out at pay-what-you-wish cafes, reduced-price supermarkets, or redistributed from restaurant kitchens via apps. This coming spring, a British town will start tapping in to a slurry of degrading scraps as a power source.

There were steps forward on the policy side, too. Back in June, the World Resources Institute backed the Food Loss and Waste Protocol, a multi-agency effort that rolled out a comprehensive framework for standardizing terms and accumulating data, helping researchers gauge what’s working and what isn’t. Earlier this month, the USDA issued new, streamlined date labeling guidelines for manufacturers, in an effort to curb major customer confusion about parsing those stamps. [...]

Also this year, NRDC launched our Save the Food campaign. The goal of that is to provide both inspiration and information to people to waste less food. It’s a national public service media campaign: We have TV and online video ads, as well as billboards and bus ads. Our goal is to seed a shift in the cultural paradigm of wasting food, and get people to feel compelled to not waste food in their own homes. We’ve had great pickup across different cities—the campaign has been on buses in Chicago and waste trucks in California. Someone just sent me a picture from a bus stop in Manhattan. We’re hearing about it from all over the country.

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Quartz: The classic philosophical theory that nails why 2016 sucked so much

For Jean-Paul Sartre, the dawn of the 20th century brought with it a deep sense of philosophical angst. Religion’s failure to solve the world’s problems, the disorienting onslaught of worldwide wars, and huge leaps in science and technology fueled a deeply individualistic philosophy that we now broadly refer to as existentialism. In particular, Sartre and authors such as Albert Camus explored the more refined (and more macabrely apathetic) concept of existential nihilism, which posits that life has no intrinsic meaning or value—or, as Sartre put it, “existence precedes essence.”

The existentialists noticed that even though many people intuitively recognize the insignificance of their existence, it doesn’t stop them from searching for meaning anyway. This is what Camus called “the absurd,” and he believed there were three main options for dealing with this sense of existential angst: whole-heartedly embrace some religion, commit suicide, or flip it the bird and go back to life as usual. That last option he called “radical freedom,” writing that “the only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”

Contemporary society is currently grappling with a deep sense of existential angst—so it makes sense that a lot of the pop culture that captured our attention this year bears similarities to the novels of the original existentialists. Looking at these hits through the eyes of these philosophers could help us explain why 2016 has been meme-ified as “the worst ever”: Our favorite heroes are now the ones who grapple with the cruel, meaningless world we live in, and come out on the other side radically free. And just as truth imitates fiction, we are reflecting the culture we’ve created by acting like the existentialists’ anti-heroes ourselves.

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Quartz: New research suggests maternity leave is more important for mothers than it is for their kids

One study found that children from better-off families faced cognitive and behavioral setbacks when their mothers returned to full-time work within nine months of childbirth. But in another, children of poorer women (pdf) made both academic and behavioral gains, on average, when their mothers returned in that timeframe. Other research has come up with mixed findings (pdf). [...]

Caitlin McPherran Lombardi of the University of Connecticut and Rebekah Levine of Boston College published two studies on Dec. 19—one, in the journal Child Development, about children in the UK and Australia, and one, in Developmental Psychology, about American kids. The studies followed children and families from birth until they entered primary school. What they found: “There wasn’t any negative link between returning to work early and children’s development, both in terms of academic and behavioral skills,” Lombardi says. [...]

What makes this especially surprising is that the three countries they tested have very different attitudes to parental leave. The US has no federal paid maternity leave policy, and allows for only 12 weeks of unpaid leave—and even for that, the bar for eligibility is quite high. In the UK, the study says, women’s jobs are protected for 39 weeks after childbirth, with the first six weeks of maternity leave at full pay. In Australia, mothers can claim up to 18 weeks’ leave, paid at the national minimum wage.

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Alphadesigner: Europe According to the Future, 2022 (Feb 18, 2012)

This map premiered on the pages of UK’s Guardian newspaper this weekend.

Welcome to the bright future of Europe. The year is 2022, five years after the (what future historians would refer to as) Great European Schism, ending the dream of European political and economic unity. Sounds shocking? Well, it shouldn’t. There is a law in history stating that Europe can never be truly united. It always splits in the middle like bacteria yearning for propagation. The Eastern and Western Roman Empires, the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, the Communist East and the Capitalist West – each of those were a result of a failure to unify the continent, politically or spiritually. 2022 is the time when the dissolution of today’s Europe becomes final. [...]

I don’t remember exactly how I got the idea to make a satirical map of a future Europe but It was around the time when the Greek crisis went through one of its unexpected twists. There was a lot of talk about collapse and I thought it would be funny if I make a map on which Greece is totally missing with a note on it’s place saying Disassembled and transported to China’s art museums. I left the initial sketch to marinate on my hard drive and never looked back until I started discussing a possible publication with the Weekend team from the Guardian. They wanted to write an article about my Mapping Stereotypes project and asked if I had a new map that could premiere in the newspaper. I had two planned, the future Europe being one of them, but none was actually finished. It took me about two weeks to complete them and they finally premiered online on February the 17th.

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Nautilus Magazine: Why Sex Is Binary but Gender Is a Spectrum

Anyone who doubts that genes can specify identity might well have arrived from another planet and failed to notice that the humans come in two fundamental variants: male and female. Cultural critics, queer theorists, fashion photographers, and Lady Gaga have reminded us— accurately—that these categories are not as fundamental as they might seem, and that unsettling ambiguities frequently lurk in their borderlands. But it is hard to dispute three essential facts: that males and females are anatomically and physiologically different; that these anatomical and physiological differences are specified by genes; and that these differences, interposed against cultural and social constructions of the self, have a potent influence on specifying our identities as individuals.

That genes have anything to do with the determination of sex, gender, and gender identity is a relatively new idea in our history. The distinction between the three words is relevant to this discussion. By sex, I mean the anatomic and physiological aspects of male versus female bodies. By gender, I am referring to a more complex idea: the psychic, social, and cultural roles that an individual assumes. By gender identity, I mean an individual’s sense of self (as female versus male, as neither, or as something in between). [...]

In fact, such humans existed—although identifying them was a much more complicated task than anticipated. In 1955, Gerald Swyer, an English endocrinologist investigating female infertility, had discovered a rare syndrome that made humans biologically female but chromosomally male. “Women” born with “Swyer syndrome” were anatomically and physiologically female throughout childhood, but did not achieve female sexual maturity in early adulthood. When their cells were examined, geneticists discovered that these “women” had XY chromosomes in all their cells. Every cell was chromosomally male—yet the person built from these cells was anatomically, physiologically, and psychologically female. A “woman” with Swyer syndrome had been born with the male chromosomal pattern (i.e., XY chromosomes) in all of her cells, but had somehow failed to signal “maleness” to her body. [...]

David Reimer’s case was not unique. In the 1970s and 1980s, several other cases of sexual reassignment—the attempted conversion of chromosomally male children into females through psychological and social conditioning—were described, each troubled and troubling in its own right. In some cases, the gender dysphoria was not as acute as David’s— but the wo/men often suffered haunting pangs of anxiety, anger, dysphoria, and disorientation well into adulthood. In one particularly revealing case, a woman—called C—came to see a psychiatrist in Rochester, Minnesota. Dressed in a frilly, floral blouse and a rough cowhide jacket—“my leather-and-lace look,” as she described it—C had no problems with some aspects of her duality, yet had trouble reconciling her “sense of herself as fundamentally female.” Born and raised as a girl in the 1940s, C recalled being a tomboy in school. She had never thought of herself as physically male, but had always felt a kinship with men (“I feel like I have the brain of a man”). She married a man in her 20s and lived with him—until a chance ménage à trois involving a woman kindled her fantasies about women. Her husband married the other woman, and C left him and entered a series of lesbian relationships. She oscillated between periods of equanimity and depression. She joined a church and discovered a nurturing spiritual community—except for a pastor who railed against her homosexuality and recommended therapy to “convert” her.

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Political Critique: The Berlin attack, Czech-style

It seems that terrorism in the age of information has deployed a new and interesting type of bomb: the explosion occurs in a place and time – reality, even – vastly different from the one where the actual violence took place. The blast wave does not travel in a sensible physics-based trajectory either; as it happens, it seems quite capable of vanishing without a trace only to suddenly reappear in force in a location that no perceivable reason would point to.

By way of explanation: the German President’s reaction was an urging for peace: “The hatred of those who committed this crime shall not lead to hatred on our side.”

When it comes to giving condolences, the Czech President, Miloš Zeman, and his sock puppet PR, Jiří Ovčáček, just love to express their support for mourning states – they are such softies that they even send condolences to the dictators of countries that they’d most likely have problems finding on a map. So when a major terrorist attack hits one of our neighbors, one – at least someone sufficiently naïve enough to expect some degree of civilized behavior from their President – could reasonably expect the utterance of a few choice words; after all, dignified sorrow tends to go down very well with the voters. Alas, that was not meant to be. “Regarding the terrible crime that took place in Berlin, the President can only regret that his repeated warnings about the risks of terrorism have come true,” stated Ovčáček, who has apparently become a hybrid between a prophet of inevitable doom and an advertising agent. He even proceeded to become a forensic expert by adding, “The perpetrator being a refugee just reinforces the President’s stance: no refugees shall set foot on Czech territory.” Wait, what? [...]

His mistake is symptomatic of the atmosphere of today, which is saturated and perpetuated by the media. It turns out that nationality and religion are now valid replacements for the motive of a crime. For contrast, let us take a look at another crime that took place on that day: the shooting in Zurich, where the police went out of their way to confirm that the suspect “is Swiss and we don’t know anything about the motives”. Yet for the Czech Government, the information received that the Berlin suspect was Pakistani was quite enough to judge, condemn and triumphantly announce his capture. One rather suspects that if it were an option, Chovanec would jump at the opportunity to display the suspect’s head mounted over his mantelpiece, or, more traditionally, on a pike; after all, the presumption of guilt is such a quaint medieval tradition.

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BBC: The serious artist behind a children's classic

Tove Jansson is known and loved around the world as the creator of the rotund children’s characters, the Moomins. However she always considered herself first and foremost a painter and the fact that this side of her work was often ignored caused her great frustration and sadness. Adventures in Moominland at the Southbank Centre in London and another exhibition of her art, currently in Stockholm and arriving at the Dulwich Picture Gallery next year, allow us to see both sides of her extensive oeuvre.  Although vastly different in approach, both exhibitions emphasise the tolerance which imbues her work and which derives from the courageous way she chose to live her life, refusing to submit to the restrictive norms of contemporary Finnish society. [...]

It was the horrors of that time that also served as inspiration for the first Moomin books. “She had to create alternatives to the world she was living in,” says Jansson biographer Boel Westin. Not that this alternative was any less bleak. The Moomins and The Great Flood contains images of refugees searching for their relatives while Comet in Moominland, completed just after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, sees the residents of Moominvalley facing possible annihilation from a comet hurtling towards earth. Her characters are granted happy endings but all the same, “they’re quite exceptional for children’s books at that time,” says Westin. [...]

Jansson returned to the Moomins in 1965 with Moominpappa at Sea, which deals with her troubled relationship with her father.  Feeling as if he is not needed, Moominpappa behaves with uncharacteristic chauvinism in whisking his family off to an uninhabited island to prove his worth. Moominmamma, who Jansson had always said was based on Ham, is so homesick that she paints countless pictures of Moominvalley, which miraculously come to life.

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CityLab: Is China Building a Ghost City on Malaysian Islands?

China is known for its hundreds of “ghost cities”—ultra-modern metropolises built for the country’s urbanizing population that have yet to attract many residents. High-rise apartment and office buildings, pavilions, sculptures, and even a man-made lake with music piped in among its surrounding paths sit almost devoid of human activity. The flip side to these eerily hollow cities are frenetic urban centers such as Beijing and Shanghai, where rural to urban migration has caused populations to explode. [...]

While such investment generally concerns existing housing, in Johor Bahru, Chinese companies are building their own high-rises and villas. One outfit, Country Garden, is building enough to accommodate a whopping 700,000 people. Though Malaysians, Singaporeans, and other nationalities will purchase some of the units, they are being heavily marketed to Chinese, with planeloads of potential buyers flown in to peruse model apartments. Luxury two-bedroom units are going for as little as $180,000—around a third of what buyers would pay in central Shanghai. [...]

Developers are banking on Johor Bahru’s proximity to Singapore, as well as the widespread use of Mandarin Chinese and Chinese dialects in the region, to make Forest City a desirable place for Chinese ex-pats to live. But even if there are enough buyers, owners may choose to simply keep the properties empty, as investments, or save them for retirement or their children—potentially creating an atmosphere not unlike a Chinese ghost city.

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Vox: This map should change the way you think about foreign aid

Critics of foreign aid often argue that it's ineffective at generating sustainable economic development or truly helping the world's poor. But as this great map from the cost information website HowMuch.net reveals, one reason for that is that promoting development and helping the poor isn't actually what motivates a lot of America's foreign aid:

As you can see, the biggest recipient by a long way is Israel (this is fiscal year 2014 data, but nothing's changing), and two other big ones are Egypt and Jordan, which both have aid packages that are tied up with their peace treaties with Israel. None of these are poor countries (indeed, Israel is downright rich), and the point of the money is to advance an American foreign policy agenda — not to help the poor. Pakistan and Afghanistan, which round out the top five, actually are pretty poor, but, again, the main American interest in them is clearly foreign policy rather than poverty.

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Al Jazeera: Tattoos in Kinshasa: Overcoming conflict and taboos

Since he got his first tattoo in 2012, the 35-year-old has covered his body in ink designs. Modern tattoo art is still not fully accepted in Congolese society; the markings are still seen as an imitation of Western influences, rather than remnants of the traditional African practice of body art dating back millennia.

Still, for their bearers, the designs are a way to share their past experiences visually.

According to anthropologist Lars Krutak, a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution who has spent more than two decades studying tattoos and indigenous tattooing practices, unlike the instability of the turbulent Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)  with its continuously shifting political, economic and social climates - tattoos provide a sense of permanency and stability, forever imprinted on the skin. [...]

"There are no official tattoo schools in DR Congo. It's the school of the streets," he tells Al Jazeera. Despite his lack of formal training, he claims to have tattooed thousands of people since joining the profession in 2006. The price for a design ranges from $5 to $50, depending on the size and colours.

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Al Jazeera: The cemetery of unknown refugees from the Mediterranean

There is nothing to indicate that this is a cemetery, where hundreds of people have been buried after drowning while attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea from Libya to Italy. One of the latest victims, an African woman in her 30s, was found on the beach in Zarzis without any documents after floating in the sea for about a month.

More than 4,400 people have died or gone missing this year while trying to make the deadly crossing, according to the International Organization for Migration's Missing Migrants Project. Most bodies are never found, but the largest number wash ashore in Libya or Italy and are buried there. [...]

Nobody knows how many people have been buried here exactly, although Marzoug estimates that there have been at least 200 in the past six years. In the late 1990s, as more people started to cross the sea, those who drowned were initially buried in a separate corner of the main cemeteries of Zarzis and Ben Guerdane - but as their numbers grew, some locals started protesting. [...]

Over the past few years, a number of Syrians have come to Zarzis to ask about their loved ones, says Marzoug's Red Crescent colleague, Dr Mongi Slim. But under current circumstances, none of the bodies can be identified. Last month, Slim recalled receiving a phone call from a Syrian man who had been rescued in Italy and was looking for his wife and daughter.

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Politico: French politicians salute Hollande decision to free Jacqueline Sauvage

Her case — that of a woman who shot her husband dead with a hunting rifle after suffering decades of abuse — captivated France as an example of justice trumping morality, and triggered a flurry of initiatives to have her conviction overturned. During her trial Sauvage’s lawyers detailed how her husband, Norbert Marot, had not only beaten his wife, but also raped and assaulted their four children, including three girls.

In a rare display of unity, politicians ranging from center-left presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron to far-right leader Marine Le Pen hailed the pardon, which was granted by a president who has already announced he will not run for re-election next year. [...]

At the time of her conviction, rights groups estimated that 200,000 women per year suffered domestic abuse in France. Only 10 percent of them ever pressed charges against their abuser. And while more than 100 women are killed by their male partners each year in France, on average, about 25 men are killed by their female partners.

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The Atlantic: Why People Vote for Counterproductive Policies

New research suggests people distrust policies that inflict short-term pain but benefit everyone by encouraging a shift in behavior. They prefer alternatives that seem better at first, but merely reinforce bad decisions. This isn’t as simple as the marshmallow test—have one now, or have two 10 minutes from now—that demonstrates the average person’s preference for immediate rewards. Rather, it seems people have difficulty predicting a law’s “equilibrium effects,” or how it will change future behavior for the better. That, or they don’t trust it will actually work. [...]

In a study released earlier this month, researchers tested this bias by having college undergraduates play a few rounds of the prisoner’s dilemma. The original version of the two-player game rewards both participants if they agree to share a prize, but gives one player the full bounty if he or she betrays the other. However, if both players betray each other, they get nothing.

The researchers offered students a variant: same rules, but taxes took a bite out of any payout, and betrayers had to pay a bit more. Even though everyone made less money, the new penalty for betrayal encouraged cooperation, meaning fewer players ended up with nothing, and everyone got richer in the long run.

But when offered a choice between the games, most participants stuck with the original setup, turned off by the reduced payouts.

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Political Critique: Elections in Romania: a Polish perspective

Having won 45 per cent of the votes, Romania’s Social Democrats, PSD, have managed to win the general election, and as such will form the new government with support from the smaller, center-right ALDE. Interestingly enough, it is still not clear whether the party’s leader, Liviu Dragnea, can become the prime minister because he is currently serving a suspended 2-year sentence for vote rigging in 2012. The law does not allow a person with a criminal record to become Prime Minister but the constitutionality of that law might be challenged as part of a political deal to let Dragnea, a powerful politician, run the executive anyway. [...]

Compared to the PiS, PSD’s nationalism is considerably “tamer”.  They have played the „Romania for Romanians” card during their campaign, they speak about focusing on home economy and they are not above taking a stab at foreigners. The Romanian President is ethnically German and the wife of outgoing Prime Minister Dacian Ciolos, as well as Clotilde Armand, one of the leaders of the rival part USR, are French born. Dragnea has made xenophobic comments about them all, though he was not the only one: in fact, most parties running in the elections have resorted to some form of nationalism, which resonates well with voters in Romania. But PSD is still quite far from the ultra-nationalism that is being shown by PiS. The rhetoric is lighter, as is the instrumentalisation of history, and the Romanian Orthodox Church, though close to PSD, can only dream of ever having the influence of the Polish Catholic one. Romanians – at least until recently – have generally maintained a self-deprecating attitude towards their nationality. While it is certainly quite possible this will change, especially given the current international climate, it is important to note that there were also new, well-financed far-right parties running in these elections and none of them made it into the Parliament. [...]

As with Poland, there is no real left-wing party in Romania. The PSD, despite its promises of minimum wages and tax breaks, is quite far from being an actual social-democratic party. Even if we ignore the corruption, they have repeatedly been in power and have done little to reduce income inequalities, alleviate poverty, improve working conditions or offer good quality social services. The cuts they propose for their upcoming mandate include both the rich and the poor and it remains to be seen what funding they intend to allocate to social services. Their social conservatism and nationalism also have no place in a left-wing movement.

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Jacobin Magazine: The Hammer and Cross

Working-class Christians have seized on the progressive elements in Christianity to challenge hierarchies and inequalities within churches; to advocate for labor, land, and housing rights; and to agitate against militarism, racism, and poverty. Among Protestants in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the Social Gospel pointed the way toward not just individual but social salvation. The Catholic Worker movement continues to preach anti-militarism and service to the poor.

Some Christians — including Thomas J. Hagerty, a key figure in the formation of the Industrial Workers of the World — have incorporated socialist and communist (if not explicitly Marxist) ideas into their social analysis and political practice. In the South American context, Christianity and Marxism fused to form liberation theology, which cast the poor and oppressed as primary agents fighting economic exploitation and challenging dictatorship, repression, and US imperialism. [...]

Some thinkers have tried to work through some of these tensions, arguing that there are grounds for a rapprochement. Andrew Collier’s book Christianity and Marxism: A Philosophical Contribution to Their Reconciliation is one such attempt. [...]

On the other side, Collier decries the “bourgeois aspirations” of the Soviet’s “privileged bureaucracy” and laments the inability of states that called themselves socialist to forge a “socialist civil society,” leaving “atomised individuals confronting a top-heavy state.” Here, Collier suggests, socialists can learn from Christians’ reflexive opposition to “totalitarian commercialism” and resistance to modish ideas. [...]

Collier’s attempts to reconcile Marxism and Christianity underscore not just the political possibilities of an alliance but the persistent gulf between the two. A meeting of the hammer and the cross — it may not be a far-fetched Christmas miracle, but rather a political necessity in the age of Trump.

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VICE: How to Know When You're Masturbating Too Much

Although I have met many people in my life that I'd label "masturbation experts," Laqueur is a true authority on the subject: In 2003, he wrote Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation. When we speak on the phone, he's just gotten home from walking his dog and had gotten a late start because he went to the opera the night before. [...]

According to Laqueur, the concept of "too much masturbation" is relatively novel, since in ancient times the great thinkers were unconcerned with the subject. "It's not like Plato wasn't thinking about sex," he specifies. "He just wasn't thinking about that particular form of sex." And so the timeless art of self-pleasure cruised under the radar until the Enlightenment era.

This sea change in the discourse of diddling has roots in a 1712 tract written by an anonymous physician, who decried the practice of masturbation as a disease he termed "Onanism." This comes from the the biblical story of Onan, who, rather than marrying his dead brother's wife and raising his children as his own, chose to "spill his seed on the ground." (This was the Old Testament, so God ended up smiting him as punishment.)

Until then, people interpreted the story as a parable about why you shouldn't shirk your responsibilities. However, the anonymous physician interpreted the text as evidence that if you jacked off, God would punish you. "It was totally cynical," Laqueur tells me. "This guy said, 'How can I make some money? I can say masturbation causes illness!'" [...]

And mind you, Katehakis isn't a vigilant anti-masturbation crusader—she's a licensed sex therapist. "Porn and masturbation should be a pleasurable part of a person's healthy sexuality," she declares, specifying that she just wants people of all genders to be safe when they jank it. That means making sure your masturbatory habits aren't interfering with your daily life, handling your equipment gently, and using lubrication.

One of the reasons people might not know safe masturbation techniques is that we're never encouraged to learn about them. "Adults are shamed about masturbation since day one," said Elise Franklin, an LA-based therapist who promotes pro-sex attitudes through her practice. "When you're two years old and your parents catch you touching yourself, they tell you, 'Don't do that!' When you're in school and take sex education, the topic is greeted with discomfort and giggles."

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Politico: No country for old fascists

While no far-right party has managed to get a single lawmaker into the national parliament or any of the 17 regional assemblies in the past three decades, Spain looks to be as fertile ground for right-wing populism as any other country in Europe. It just seems to be awaiting a charismatic leader to upset the established order.

Anti-immigration and anti-establishment sentiment — key factors driving the right-wing revival elsewhere — are at least as strong in Spain as the rest of Europe, according to research by Sonia Alonso and Cristóbal Rovira, who studied opinion polls across the Continent and found no meaningful differences. [...]

Spain’s fragmented far-right parties are largely driven by nostalgia for Franco and live up to the stereotype: a few thousand bickering extremists who gather to commemorate the dictator’s death carrying Francoist flags, doing the Nazi salute and singing the Falangists anthem “Cara al sol.” [...]

If that is to happen, the right-wingers will not only have to overcome their own strategic shortcomings and stop the infighting. They must also cope with the biggest factor that limits their growth: the ruling Popular Party’s largely unchallenged hegemony among far-right Spaniards. It is estimated that more than 80 percent of people who describe themselves as far-right voted for Rajoy in the past two national elections.

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Al Jazeera: Web extra: Is boycotting Israel anti-Semitic?

In this Web Extra, we ask a panel of journalists and academics whether the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions movement has any relation to anti-Semitism."

What it does is it hits a very raw nerve that's used because they have a memory of boycotts. So, as a tactic it has a very unfortunate history," says Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland.

"[Israeli leaders have] incapacitated all other forms of intervention and resistance, including legal forms, diplomatic forms, and otherwise," says Palestinian-American human rights lawyer, activist and academic Noura Erakat. "This is not about BDS alone, this is about making sure that Palestinians have no form of resistance left available to them that's legitimate."

"I find the BDS movement pretty innocuous. It hasn’t had any impact whatsoever on the facts on the ground," says Israeli-Canadian journalist Lisa Goldman, a contributor to the left-wing Israeli news site +972. "Boycotting is nothing new inside Israel either."

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Atlas Obscura: You Can Follow a Hidden Stream Beneath Indianapolis—If You Know Where to Look

Not far from Pogue’s cabin was the site that Indiana’s newly organized General Assembly had picked, in 1820, for the capital of the four-year-old state. The assembly hired Alexander Ralston, who had worked with Washington. D.C.’s famed planner Pierre L’Enfant, to draw up a scheme for the new city. Ralston’s elegant design echoed D.C’s: Indianapolis would be a square grid, a mile on each side, with a circular plaza in the center and four wide, stately boulevards radiating out towards each of the square’s corners.

Except—in the southeast corner of the city, the gridded blocks tilted, askew. There was a black line snaking through the plan, throwing the grid off kilter. That was Pogue’s Run, ruining the city’s planned symmetry. [...]

Eventually, city planners decided they’d had enough. By 1905, they were planning a “straightjacket” for the stream, to keep its water contained, and in 1915, they trapped the run underground. [...]

Hyatt walked the whole length of the tunnel, twice, with “an urban explorer type of dude who had been through it before,” he says. It’s not entirely clear which government agency has responsibility for it, or whether they were trespassing. Inside the pitch-black tunnel built more than a century ago, the water can be deep, or, depending on the rainfall, can slow to almost nothing, leaving dry concrete pathways on either side.

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Atlas Obscura: Rudolph and Ruins: Photographs of Abandoned Santa Parks

Whether the early displays of holiday cheer fill your heart with anticipation for the coming winter months, or dread and irritation for another long, bombastic season of endless carols and swarming lights, there’s no denying that the Christmas spirit is again taking its hold.

Some places have tried to capture this fleeting joy year-round with “santa parks” where there are always prancing reindeers and busy elves. Yet even this attempt at capturing holiday joy as a sort of amusement park has its expiration date, and like a pine tree tossed to the curb with its tinsel and garland still tousled around its branches, these santa parks have been abandoned and left to ruin. 

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Al Jazeera: Whitewashing Assad and his allies must be challenged

In the past few months, three Western women have gone to Syria, two of them by invitation and the third on a regime-approved reporting trip. The first two are now on "speaking tours" to explain "what's really happening in Syria" to the Western public. The third one, however, was kicked out of Syria by the Bashar al-Assad regime. Her crime? "Untrue reporting" in the form of sharing tweets containing photos and witness accounts from people in besieged Eastern Aleppo, because the regime wouldn't give her or the other journalists with her access to that part of the city. [...]

The first two of these women, however, call themselves independent journalists, yet post gushing photos of themselves posing with Bashar al-Assad on social media, appear on Russian state television to peddle the Assad regime's lines and travel across the United States to accuse anyone opposing Assad of being an al-Qaeda sympathiser.

Channel 4, Snopes, EA Worldview and Pulse Media and others have done thorough fact-checking debunking Bartlett in particular. There is no need to rehash their findings. [...]

For six years now, even the United Nations, which itself is guilty of being biased towards the regime in more ways than one, cannot but admit that the biggest criminals in Syria are the regime and its allies. [...]

Nuance in analysing Syria has been and continues to be a problem across pro-regime, opposition and even "neutral" media. This has been particularly evident as the world suddenly woke up to the fact that something bad was indeed happening in the country only in the past few weeks as eastern Aleppo made headlines.

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Al Jazeera: India to build giant statue of medieval king Shivaji

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has laid the foundation stone for what is set to be the world's tallest statue nearly four kilometres into the sea off Mumbai, as its projected cost and environmental impact drew criticism.

The 192-metre statue of Chhatrapati Shivaji, a medieval Hindu ruler in the western state of Maharashtra who fought the Muslim Mughal dynasty and carved out his own kingdom, is expected to be completed by 2019.

To be built at a cost of about $530m, it will be more than twice the size of the Statue of Liberty in New York and five times higher than Christ the Redeemer in Brazil's Rio de Janeiro. [...]

By Saturday evening, about 27,000 people had signed a Change.org petition asking that the government spend the money on infrastructure and development instead.

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Deutsche Welle: Pope tells Vatican to appoint lay women and men to Curia

Francis laid out 12 principles Thursday that he wanted to see, one of which was making Catholicism "all embracing." Francis called for an end to promoting unqualified or problematic staff to a higher office, calling it "cancer."

The pontiff expressed dissatisfaction with resistance to his proposed reforms to the Catholic Church that he laid out in 2013. He said the resistance from Curia members hampered his reforms so much, that the reforms were seen as a "facelift…to embellish the aging body of the Curia, or as plastic surgery to remove its wrinkles." Francis warned that Curia members should not fear "wrinkles" in the church, but its "stains."

Francis has made similar statements during previous addresses to the Curia during his time as pope. In 2014, he accused the Curia of suffering from "spiritual Alzheimer's," and listed 12 guidelines for reform and being open to "the signs of the times." Francis told the Curia in 2015 of a "catalogue of virtues" that the church was supposed to show, including honesty, sobriety and humility.

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Bloomberg: The Politics of a Constitutional Crisis

Many constitutional systems around the globe have been tested in 2016. Turkey, Poland, the UK, the U.S. -- each case sheds some light on how different constitutional arrangements respond to the challenges of political factions. [...]

But the failed coup this past summer changed Turkey’s constitutional landscape drastically. Not only did Erdogan purge the military, but he took the opportunity to purge the judiciary, too, badly undermining the rule of law. The purge was based partly in party politics, and partly on the religious-cultural movement led by Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish leader in exile in the U.S. whom Erdogan blames for the coup attempt.

The lesson is that when a government believes one faction is trying to bring it down undemocratically, it will be sorely tempted to suppress that faction outside the constitution. Although Turkey’s constitution has been fairly functional, the country’s prospects for remaining democratic have been weakened considerably. [...]

Poland’s constitutional system may rally if international support and civil society can pressure PiS to respect political liberties. The next year will be crucial -- and if the system doesn’t succeed, Poland could become a victim of gradual constitutional failure, like Turkey and closer to the heart of Europe. [...]

In comparative constitutional terms, this may seem like progress -- but it’s probably regress. Faced with a deep political divide over Brexit, Britain is relying on new constitutional technologies rather than its own traditions, which have historically handled partisan division well.

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The Huffington Post: Blaming Terrorist Attacks On Refugees Isn’t Going To Make Europe Safer

Terror arrived in Germany long before the Berlin incident. But it was the first in recent times that caused such significant casualties. This is very tragic, but to exclusively blame it on Syrian refugees defeats the purpose of trying to understand how to combat terrorism and prevent future attacks from happening. The suspect, Anis Amri, who was killed in a shootout with police near Milan today, was a Tunisian who came to Europe in 2011, entering through the Italian island of Lampedusa. This was back before the Syrian civil war had become the regional conflagration that it is today; it was also during the aftermath of the Arab Spring, when order in some countries in northern Africa was on the verge of collapsing. How many asylum seekers came to Europe then with bad intentions? How many of them were already eager and keen to become terrorists? The honest answer is: we don’t know.

But the right wing’s take on the Berlin attack is shortsighted. As a matter of fact, when southern Europe groaned under the pressure of refugees, the rest of the continent was indifferent about it. Europe’s refugee policy is flawed. The continent needs to get its act together: the regions around it may most likely remain in upheaval and turmoil for quite some time. Not having done so yet has nurtured the rise of anti-establishment activism, right-wing parties and xenophobic violence across the continent.

For now, Angela Merkel’s fate depends on how she handles the crisis in her government and the reaction of her electorate unfolding after the Berlin attack. Politicians from her Bavarian ally party, the Christian Social Union, already toured TV and radio stations showing little solidarity with the chancellor. Their fear is that the AfD may gain voters from the CSU and Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union in the federal election next fall.

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Salon: Conservatism turned toxic: Donald Trump’s fanbase has no actual ideology, just a nihilistic hatred of liberals

The horror show that was the 2016 election will be examined and reexamined for years, and depending on how bad things get, quite likely decades to come. There were, of course, a lot of factors: Cultural change, economic change, racism, liberal complacency after Barack Obama, the FBI manipulating the election, the Russian government manipulating the election, hatred of feminism and so on.

But it’s also important to notice that Donald Trump’s election is the culmination of decades of right-wing media teaching its audience that liberals are subhuman scum, and that hating liberals — whatever their stereotype of a “liberal” looks like — is far more important that minor concerns like preventing war or economic destruction. [...]

But what’s fascinating is how few of them, had anything positive to say about Trump and his coming presidency, despite their apparent love of the Great Orange Grimace. On the contrary, the contributions of Trump supporters on the thread were almost exclusively negative: They are gleefully certain that he will rain destruction on the heads of the hated liberals.

Trump’s fans on Twitter don’t seem to think that he’ll improve the economy or foreign relations or anything at all, really. In fact, they seem wholly opposed to the concept of improvement. Their worship of the man lies with their belief that he’s an agent of destruction, who will hurt people they have been trained by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity to believe are evil.

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The New York Times: Pastor, Am I a Christian?

What does it mean to be a Christian in the 21st century? Can one be a Christian and yet doubt the virgin birth or the Resurrection? I put these questions to the Rev. Timothy Keller, an evangelical Christian pastor and best-selling author who is among the most prominent evangelical thinkers today. Our conversation has been edited for space and clarity. [...]

Jesus’ teaching was not the main point of his mission. He came to save people through his death for sin and his resurrection. So his important ethical teaching only makes sense when you don’t separate it from these historic doctrines. If the Resurrection is a genuine reality, it explains why Jesus can say that the poor and the meek will “inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:5). St. Paul said without a real resurrection, Christianity is useless (1 Corinthians 15:19). [...]

You imply that really good people (e.g., Gandhi) should also be saved, not just Christians. The problem is that Christians do not believe anyone can be saved by being good. If you don’t come to God through faith in what Christ has done, you would be approaching on the basis of your own goodness. This would, ironically, actually be more exclusive and unfair, since so often those that we tend to think of as “bad” — the abusers, the haters, the feckless and selfish — have themselves often had abusive and brutal backgrounds.

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Bloomberg: Germany Gets Free Power for Christmas as Wind Power Set to Surge

The price of power for delivery on Christmas Day in Germany turned negative as a surge in wind generation is forecast to boost supply.

Prices may be below zero for hours or even whole days during the holiday season as German wind output is predicted to climb to near-record levels and temperatures are set to increase more than 5 degrees Celsius (9 Fahrenheit) above normal.

The negative prices are “driven by low power demand during the holiday season when factories are shut, and people go on vacation or visit their families,” Elchin Mammadov, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence said. “There are far fewer outages this year than the same time last year and wind availability is expected to be high.”

Germany’s grid operators can struggle to keep the network balanced when there are high amounts of wind generation that need to be moved from the north to demand centers in the south. Negative prices mean that producers must either shut down power stations to reduce supply or pay consumers to take the electricity off the grid.

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Vox: A law professor's warning: we are closer to oligopoly than at any point in 100 years

In the early 1900s, the biggest monopolists of the day had virtually complete control of their markets. Standard Oil. US Steel. The American Sugar Refining Company.

Today we don’t so much have single companies dominating an entire industry as much as a handful of extremely powerful ones. Over the past few decades, the number of markets consolidated by a few mega-companies has skyrocketed, according to Columbia law professor Tim Wu. [...]

Wu points to the beer industry as a perfect example. “People may not realize this, but domestically, there are two companies that sell 75 percent of the beer in the United States — Molson Coors and Anheuser Busch, both owned by foreign companies,” he says. “That is an industry that used to have five or six actors and now has two.” [...]

It is essentially a battle between the economists and the lawyers. The economists do believe we should have no sense of right and wrong, but that it’s about economic performance. The champion of this view was [conservative legal scholar] Robert Bork, and his basic argument was that a lot of what looks like evil or malicious conduct — the so-called “bad guys” — may be very economically efficient and therefore good for the economy. So [to Bork] antitrust lawyers should get out of the business of calling good or evil.

The opposite tradition I’d associate with [Supreme Court Justice] Louis Brandeis, who took the antitrust law not as merely an economic tool — though it was that — but a promotion of certain values he thought were central to the American public, like decentralization and a certain kind of virtue in business. Brandeis believed business could be a profession and pursued in a virtuous way. He also thought that the whole goal of the American Republic was to inculcate virtue and good character in people.

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Quartz: Data shows that using science in an argument just makes people more partisan

If only we would all just use our rational, scientific minds. Then we could get past our disagreements.

It’s a nice thought. Unfortunately, it’s wrong.

Yale behavioral economist Dan Kahan has spent the last decade studying whether the use of reason aggravates or reduces partisan beliefs. His research shows that aggravation easily wins. The more we use our faculties for scientific thought, the more likely we are to take a strong position that aligns with our political group. That goes for liberals as well as conservatives. [...]

Kahan’s research began as a challenge to the contention of some behavioral economists that public policy disagreements are the result of an over reliance on emotion-driven decision making—what the Nobel prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls “System 1” thinking. These researchers argued that public policy formed by experts using deliberate, analytical decision making processes (“System 2” thinking in Kahneman’s lingo) would be better and less partisan. [...]

Perhaps Kahan’s most disconcerting finding is that people with more scientific intelligence are the quickest to align themselves politically on subjects they don’t know anything about. In one experiment, Kahan analyzed how people’s opinion on a unfamiliar subject are affected when given some basic scientific information, along with details about what people in their self-identified political group tend to believe about that subject. It turned out that those with the strongest scientific reasoning skills were the ones most likely to use the information to develop partisan opinions.

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Quartz: Why do Greek statues have such small penises?

In ancient Greece, it seems, a small penis was the sought-after look for the alpha male.

“Greeks associated small and non-erect penises with moderation, which was one of the key virtues that formed their view of ideal masculinity,” explains classics professor Andrew Lear, who has taught at Harvard, Columbia and NYU and runs tours focused on gay history. “There is the contrast between the small, non-erect penises of ideal men (heroes, gods, nude athletes etc) and the over-size, erect penises of Satyrs (mythic half-goat-men, who are drunkards and wildly lustful) and various non-ideal men. Decrepit, elderly men, for instance, often have large penises.” [...]

Only grotesque, foolish men who were ruled by lust and sexual urges had large penises in ancient Greece. Art history blogger Ellen Oredsson notes on her site that statues of the era emphasized balance and idealism.

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The Guardian: World's first solar panel road opens in Normandy village

France has opened what it claims to be the world’s first solar panel road, in a Normandy village.

A 1km (0.6-mile) route in the small village of Tourouvre-au-Perche covered with 2,800 sq m of electricity-generating panels, was inaugurated on Thursday by the ecology minister, Ségolène Royal.

It cost €5m (£4.2m) to construct and will be used by about 2,000 motorists a day during a two-year test period to establish if it can generate enough energy to power street lighting in the village of 3,400 residents. [...]

Normandy is not known for its surfeit of sunshine: Caen, the region’s political capital, enjoys just 44 days of strong sunshine a year compared with 170 in Marseilles.

Royal has said she would like to see solar panels installed on one in every 1,000km of French highway – France has a total of 1m km of roads – but panels laid on flat surfaces have been found to be less efficient than those installed on sloping areas such as roofs.

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Mic: She didn't consent. Now he says he didn’t, either.

The night of March 22, 2016, is hazy for Irene Fagan Merrow, a 24-year-old comedian who lives in New York City. After performing at the Experiment Comedy Gallery in Brooklyn — an eclectic venue known for welcoming performers from underrepresented groups — she began imbibing with a few friends and fellow comics. Having recently gone through a difficult breakup, she drank heavily. By about 11 p.m., Merrow had blacked out.

When Merrow came to a few hours later, she found herself downstairs at the Experiment with the owner of the venue, Mo Fathelbab. Fathelbab was, as Merrow later put it, "on top of and inside of" her, engaging in penetrative sex. [...]

But when news broke in October that prominent New York City comedian Aaron Glaser had been banned from Upright Citizen's Brigade for sexually assaulting multiple women, Merrow decided she could no longer perform at Fathelbab's venue and wanted him to know why. She sent him an email, explaining she had blacked out when they had sex and felt she "was taken advantage of in a time of emotional and physical vulnerability." [...]

Fathelbab has been vocal about the need to combat sexism in the comedy scene; he has become known for promoting and supporting female and nonwhite comics. His reputation, combined with his insistence he did not consent to sex with Merrow, raise questions about gender dynamics and consent when both parties are intoxicated. Under New York state law, if both were incapacitated, neither was able to legally consent to sex. However, that hasn't stopped the community from believing Merrow's side of the story, which she attributes to a switch to a "believe women" mindset. [...]

The quick response could signal a shift within the community toward believing accusers instead of deriding them — a notable departure from the response to the Glaser allegations, which were followed by victim-blaming defenses of the accused that shook the comedy world.

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Atlas Obscura: How Racism Was First Officially Codified in 15th-Century Spain

You probably know about the widespread mistreatment of Jews in Spain, even if your first thought when someone says “Spanish Inquisition” is a Monty Python sketch. But Spanish and Portuguese antisemitism isn’t just a historical artifact. According to historians like David Brion Davis, the Spanish categorization and treatment of Jews “provided the final seedbed for Christian Negrophobic racism,” and “gave rise to a more general concern over ‘purity of blood’—limpieza de sangre in Spanish—and thus to an early conception of biological race.”

The discrimination against Spanish Jews peaked decades earlier, in 1391, when a fanatical priest incited anti-Jewish mobs with the slogan “convert or die.” A third to a half of the Spanish Jews—the largest community in Europe at the time—were converted to Christianity, the greatest mass conversion in modern Jewish history. [...]

The most important of these conflicts took place in Toledo, and began as a tax revolt. On January 25, 1449, Alvaro de Luna, a favorite of King Juan II, demanded from Toledo a loan of one million maravedis. The townspeople actively resisted payment, and a mob quickly obtained control of the city gates.  [...]

On June 5, 1449, Sarmiento issued the Sentencia-Estatuto, the first set of racial exclusion laws in modern history. It barred conversos, regardless of whether they were sincere Christians, from holding private or public office or receiving land from the church benefices unless they could prove four generations of Christian affiliation.  [...]

The crime of which those of Jewish lineage were guilty was deicide. The alleged Jewish role in killing Christ was a kind of original sin, inherited by Jews and passed down in the blood. Because the act superseded the rite of baptism, baptism could not purge conversos of this crime. [...]

Along with slavery, Spain exported limpieza. In 1552, the Spanish Crown decreed that emigrants to America must furnish proof of limpieza. The Spanish deployed limpieza throughout Spanish America and the Portuguese adopted it in Brazil. In its new environment, limpieza began to mutate, beginning to refer to an absence of black blood as well as an absence of Jewish blood.

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Politico: Ireland’s love affair with Apple triggers hate at home

The European Commission slapped Apple with a €13 billion penalty for allegedly accepting a sweetheart tax deal from Ireland earlier this year. Cork residents resent Dublin’s unwavering defense of the tech giant, most recently its support of the company’s appeal Monday that claimed the EU Commission overstepped its powers. Instead of banking an amount roughly the size of the country’s annual health budget, Irish leaders recoiled at the order and defended its four-decade-long relationship with Apple. [...]

Apple has been a lifeline for many in a city where the suicide rate is twice the national average and the economy continues to be weak, though the recovery appears to be happening faster than the rest of the country in part because of the tech industry. Apple’s workforce in the city swelled from a few hundred employees in the early 1980s to more than 4,000 today. There’ll be more work in 2018 when a new facility opens in the center of a scrappy housing estate. It’s one of three Apple locations in the city but the only one with wild horses grazing nearby.

Though Apple employs more than 4,000 people in a city of 125,000, many locals are appalled that the company hasn’t contributed more to the local economy through taxes. Apple paid an effective corporate tax rate of 1 percent on its European profits in 2003. That slid to 0.005 percent in 2014, vastly lower than Ireland’s corporate tax rate of 12.5 percent, according to the European Commission. [...]

The government in Dublin is an awkward position. A €13 billion windfall would buffer some of the effects of Brexit but squash overseas investment from Apple and other multinationals. Without foreign cash, jobs will disappear.

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Politico: The EU’s Morocco problem

On Wednesday, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) delivered a vindication for the people of Western Sahara. In a long-awaited ruling on a trade deal between the European Union and Morocco, the court reiterated long-established international law that Western Sahara is not part of Morocco, and therefore that trade agreements that include Western Sahara cannot be signed with Morocco.

The EU must now convey a clear message to Morocco that, in keeping with this judgment, it will immediately halt all agreements, funding and projects used by the Moroccan government to reinforce its illegal occupation of Western Sahara. The EU and its member countries must also ensure that all private companies and entities under their jurisdiction also cease their engagement with Morocco, in respect of any exploitation of the natural resources of Western Sahara. [...]

Furthermore, as the ECJ ruling makes clear, the EU would be in violation of international and regional human rights law if it fails to comply. Morocco reports details of its development projects to the European Commission, which must approve them individually if they are to receive EU funding. With the ECJ’s judgment, there is no ambiguity about the situation: Western Sahara is not part of Morocco, and EU funding for Moroccan developments in the territory only entrenches a brutal and illegal occupation. A plea of ignorance will no longer suffice for those who illegally exploit the resources of the people of Western Sahara. [...]

The challenge for the EU is how to help end Morocco’s illegal occupation of Western Sahara — an occupation characterized by brutal, systematic and well-documented human rights abuses, including mass detentions and routine threats by security services to rape the wives and sisters of Sahrawi activists.

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CityLab: Stockholm's Ingenious Plan to Recycle Yard Waste

Instead of tossing trees into the shredder, the city is launching a program this month to collect them and turn them into an environmental workhorse known as biochar. This charcoal product can be mixed into soil to greatly improve its drainage and nutrient levels, spurring vibrant growth for more plants. Meanwhile, the heat created by the charcoal-making process will be siphoned off and fed into the city’s district heating system.

So far, so great. But while the idea of Christmas trees re-entering the soil and helping new trees to flourish is delightful, it’s only the tip of the iceberg here.

That’s because Christmas trees are just among the first sources of green waste to be used in what could be one of the most ambitious, potentially influential projects coined by a European city thus far. By bringing together the parks department, the city’s waste disposal service, energy providers, and urban gardeners, Stockholm’s biochar project will create a virtuous cycle so ingenious—and ultimately so simple—that it could provide a template for cities across the world. [...]

Embrén and his colleagues started helping city trees with a new type of soil covering that proved effective in stimulating growth: crushed bedrock on top of sand, clay, and peat. By making the ground more porous, this substance also helped the ground absorb more stormwater, creating an urban soil management process that has already gained some renown as the so-called Stockholm Solution.

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The Intercept: Obama Allows Toothless UN Resolution Against Israeli Settlements to Pass

THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION on Friday finally allowed the UN Security Council to call on Israel to halt its settlement expansion on Friday. The resolution essentially re-states U.S. policy that settlement activity in the West Bank is illegal and counterproductive, and that Israel’s security must be protected.

The U.S. did not support the resolution, but it did not utilize its veto power either. [...]

The resolution is toothless — it does not, for example, authorize any form of sanctions to compel Israel to respect international law. Yet prior to its passage, a long list of both Democrats and Republicans called on the administration to veto it, including President-elect Donald Trump, New York’s Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, and Wisconsin-based House Speaker Paul Ryan: [...]

The pressure to veto a toothless resolution shows how constricted U.S. policy on Israel-Palestine has become in recent years, even though the American public appears to favor tougher UN action on the issue. A recent Brookings poll finds that nearly two-thirds of Americans favor UN resolutions demanding a halt to settlements and that a majority of self-identified Democrats support some form of sanctions towards Israel to bring about peace.

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Big Think: Is World History Becoming More Peaceful or More Violent?

If you want to understand trends in the history of global violence, look to data, not headlines, says Harvard psychology professor and linguist Steven Pinker. The news cycle will never be a good indicator of historical trends because no reporting occurs where problems aren't also occurring. "Because you never see a reporter standing outside a school saying, 'Here I am in front of Maplewood High School, which hasn't been shot up today,' or, 'here I am in the capital of Mozambique and there's no Civil War.'" So what does the data show?

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CodePen: 3D Map Visualizations with the 2015 unemployed rate in Europe,

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Motherboard: Information Won't Make Us Immortal

In the blogosphere, a curious notion is spreading and gaining momentum: namely, the idea that information is the new soul—a kind of Soul 2.0. Something over and above the nitty gritty of the brute matter. Something better. Information is taken to be something different from matter and yet real. This view is becoming the metaphysical undertone of many state-of-the-art technological breakthroughs and commonly-accepted opinions. The view has been propelled by flamboyant declarations of savants and entrepreneurs–the ubiquitous Elon Musk, the futurist Ray Kurzweil, bold entrepreneurs like Martine Rothblatt–let alone the impact of movies–from the classic Wachowski’s Matrix trilogy to the upcoming Rupert Sanders’ adaptation of Ghost in the Shell (2017)–and countless sci-fi novels. [...]

The philosopher Luciano Floridi suggests that we live in an infosphere made of information that is getting more real than the world of objects. Several philosophers have wondered whether the universe might ultimately be non-material—a notion recapped by John Archibald Wheeler’s motto “It from bit." [...]

It is only a sad irony that the number of serious injuries and deaths in which the victims gets either wounded or killed to take a selfie is increasing every year. The craving to upload ourselves into the collective and immaterial cloud is so strong that many individuals seem ready to risk their lives to do so. Yet, this is only the logical consequence of conceiving the digital version of themselves as important as the original, or maybe even more, since it will not decay and perish. The digital version of ourselves, a sort of digital version of Dorian Gray’s painting, will remain forever young and beautiful. In a sense, death-by-selfie could be seen as a form of proto-martyrdom to the dream of a fully digital self.

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