The Guardian: Concrete jungle: why brutalist architecture is back in style

Thus was the stage set for the resurgence of brutalism. You can’t put a brutalist building in a gold lame party dress: raw concrete is raw concrete. It’s down-to-earth, honest, unpretentious, egalitarian, and creates buildings rooted in place: Boston City Hall, New York’s Whitney Museum (now the Met Breuer), the city of Brasília.

Unlike steel and glass, concrete has terroir: the reddish concrete of Boston, for instance, looks and feels very different from the fine-grained concrete of Japan. You take the local rock, bind it with cement and water, and there you have your concrete. Its very nature is local rather than blandly international.

When they’re treated with care and respect, brutalist buildings can become treasured by a city in a way that glass-and-steel towers very rarely are. In London, for instance, locals and tourists alike swarm to the concrete cultural buildings on the south bank of the Thames at Waterloo Bridge. These masterpieces – the Royal Festival Hall, the Hayward Gallery, Denys Lasdun’s National Theatre – are a beloved part of the capital, a destination even for people with no particular reason to go there. [...]

Great brutalist buildings, it turns out, have soul, in a way that antiseptic glass curtain walls never will. And they have undeniable power, too. Consider Peter Eisenman’s haunting holocaust memorial in Berlin: it would be unthinkable in anything but concrete. [...]

It’s easy to see, then, how brutalism is flourishing in the age of Occupy. But there’s another force driving the brutalist resurgence, which is maybe less austere and selfless: photography, in general, and Instagram, in particular. [...]

Say what you like about brutalist buildings, you have to admit they look gorgeous in photographs and in coffee-table books such as This Brutal World, recently published by Phaidon. Brutalism might still be a bit austere for many people’s taste. But when you live in something that good looking, you can’t help but feel a little bit of glamor by association.

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Quartz: What if the Danes’ secret to happiness is largely about bad weather?

Romanticizing Scandinavians’ way of life is becoming a popular pastime. Sweden has the best parental leave policy in the world. Finland’s education system magically mixes low pressure and high achievement. And the Danes, the happiest people in the world, have higgle. [...]

“Hygge practices are, broadly, things that we do that our ancestors would recognise; besides lighting fires, eating, drinking, eating cake and drinking things that are hot,” she writes. “Yet there is certainly a Danish specificity in the prominence of pyromania, and principles crop up repeatedly that are highly specific to the Scandinavian climate.”

Williams looks at a few books on the hygge list, including The Little Book of Hygge by Meik Wiking, which notes some of the downsides of hygge, namely that it is based on small groups which can be pretty exclusionary. That suggests that its comforting nature may have as much as anything to do with being in a tight-knit, familiar group of friends or family, and that the fire, hot cocoa, and artfully woven woollen blankets are more the trappings of hygge than the source of it. [...]

Perhaps, then, the craze for hygge is just a manifestation of the desire to be more connected. Westerners generally live in less cohesive communities than they did a few decades ago, and technology dominates their waking hours, which is both isolating and overwhelming.

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Salon: Yes, clowns are creepy: “The phantom clown theory” explains why we’re terrified of them

This isn’t the first time there has been a wave of clown sightings in the United States. After eerily similar events occurred in the Boston area in the 1980s, Loren Coleman, a cryptozoologist who studies the folklore behind mythical beasts such as Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, came up with something called “The Phantom Clown Theory,” which attributes the proliferation of clown sightings to mass hysteria (usually sparked by incidents witnessed only by children).

It’s impossible to determine which of these incidents are hoaxes and which are bona fide tales of clowning around taken to the extreme. Nonetheless, the perpetrators seem to be capitalizing on our longstanding love-hate relationship with clowns, tapping into the primal dread that so many children (and more than a few adults) experience in their presence.

In fact, a 2008 study conducted in England revealed that very few children actually like clowns. It also concluded that the common practice of decorating children’s wards in hospitals with pictures of clowns may create the exact opposite of a nurturing environment. It’s no wonder so many people hate Ronald McDonald. [...]

Jesters and others persons of ridicule go back at least to ancient Egypt, and the English word “clown” first appeared sometime in the 1500s, when Shakespeare used the term to describe foolish characters in several of his plays. The now familiar circus clown – with its painted face, wig and oversized clothing – arose in the 19th century and has changed only slightly over the past 150 years. [...]

Unusual or strange physical characteristics such as bulging eyes, a peculiar smile or inordinately long fingers did not, in and of themselves, cause us to perceive someone as creepy. But the presence of weird physical traits can amplify any other creepy tendencies that the person might be exhibiting, such as persistently steering conversations toward peculiar sexual topics or failing to understand the policy about bringing reptiles into the office.

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Salon: Queer rights are human rights: Fighting for freedom is polarizing the world

In much of the world, gay rights, and recognition of sexual and gender diversity, appear to be progressing. In Europe, the United States, Latin America and Australasia, acceptance is growing of the idea that queer rights are human rights. Still, in large parts of the world, people face rape, murder and torture if they are perceived to be openly homosexual or transgendered. [...]

The global situation suggests increasing polarization, both between and within states. As the authors of a 2016 report on state-sponsored homophobia point out, some Latin American countries have been leaders in legal recognition of queer rights, yet “the region shows the highest levels of violence and murder against LGBTI population, and in the most of the cases [sic] impunity is the rule.”

Progress is always ambiguous: South Africa has constitutional recognition of the need to prevent discrimination based on sexuality, and has legalized same sex-marriage; Australia has neither. Yet the real-life experience of most queer South Africans is almost certainly more difficult than for most Australians. [...]

Governments and religious leaders both create and reflect public opinion, and there are few issues where different attitudes are as stark. Research suggests that more than 80 percent of the population of some western countries accept homosexuality, whereas the figure drops below 10 percent across much of Africa and the Middle East. [...]

In 2016, the U.N. Human Rights Council appointed an “independent expert” to find the causes of violence and discrimination against people due to their gender identity and sexual orientation, and discuss with governments how to protect those people. At its best, the United Nations can create what U.S. scholar Ronnie Lipschutz called “an incipient global welfare system,” able to provide global norms and rules, and to prevent local opposition to basic human rights principles. U.N. resolutions can be used by local activists in lobbying governments, and an increasing number of U.N. agencies, led by UNDP and UNESCO, are incorporating queer issues into their agendas.

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The Guardian: Do you live in a Trump bubble, or a Clinton bubble?

I can totally understand why the New York Times has departed from its usual practice. As it argued in an editorial, Trump is “the worst nominee put forward by a major party in modern American history”. He is a threat to civil peace at home and the country’s standing abroad. An Italian friend compares it to the reaction of the newspaper La Repubblica when faced with the resistible rise of Silvio Berlusconi.

Unfortunately this taking sides may reinforce a structural trend that is itself corrosive of US democracy. The most characteristic American argument for free speech and for what we still anachronistically call a free “press” – as explicitly mentioned in the first amendment – is that this is necessary for democratic self-government: only if citizens can hear all the relevant arguments and evidence, as ancient Athenians did when they gathered on the Pnyx at the foot of the Acropolis, will they be able to make an informed choice and therefore meaningfully be said to be governing themselves. First voice, then vote. So you have to hear the arguments and evidence from both sides.

But in this respect Monday’s television duel between the two candidates is the exception that proves the rule: a brief moment of shared experience in the public square. The rest of the time, American voters are off in their own echo chambers, hearing views that reinforce their own.

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Al Jazeera: Israel's strip searches at airports 'illegal'

The practices occur at Israel's international Ben Gurion airport, as well as at many foreign airports where Israeli security officials are entitled to carry out pre-flight checks on behalf of Israeli carriers.

In addition to being forced to undress for body searches, Arab passengers are often detained in secure rooms in the departure area before their flights and escorted on to planes by security staff in full view of other passengers. They may also have their hand luggage confiscated.

However, it is the first time it has been suggested that Israeli security staff are carrying out procedures that break Israeli law. Nadeem Shehadeh, an Adalah lawyer, told Al-Jazeera the organisation had written to Israel's attorney general, Avichai Mandelblit, and the Israel Airports Authority demanding that strip-searches and security escorts be stopped immediately. [...]

Shlomo Harnoy, a former senior officer with Israel's secret intelligence service, the Shin Bet, which oversees airport security checks, told the Jerusalem Post newspaper in July that Israel was "unique" in profiling passengers. Israel's supreme court refused last year to outlaw racial profiling, though it expressed discomfort with the policy and urged the Airports Authority to find technological solutions to lessen its impact.

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Alternet: A 50-Year Civil War That Killed Over 250,000 and Devastated Colombia Has Finally Reached a Peace Agreement

Tension sits heavy across sections of Colombia. Polls suggest that the majority of the population will vote to ratify the peace deal. Exhaustion is the mood. Colombians want the war to end. This was not a war with a frontline necessarily, although there were frontlines between the FARC areas and the government zones. This was a war across the country, with precious resources squandered in the battle and fear pervasive even far from the battlefield. [...]

Tension sits heavy across sections of Colombia. Polls suggest that the majority of the population will vote to ratify the peace deal. Exhaustion is the mood. Colombians want the war to end. This was not a war with a frontline necessarily, although there were frontlines between the FARC areas and the government zones. This was a war across the country, with precious resources squandered in the battle and fear pervasive even far from the battlefield. [...]

But there is no guarantee that the referendum on October 2nd will pass. Santos was the Defence Minister under former President Álvaro Uribe, who left office in 2010. Uribe is leading the charge against the deal. He is now a Senator, whose Democratic Centre party hopes for a defeat of the referendum. Uribe believes that the Colombian state should not negotiate with the FARC. Amnesty for fighters should be off the table, and indeed, the full force of the Colombian army – backed by the United States – should crush the FARC. Uribe shares a great deal with Sri Lanka’s Mahinda Rajapaksa, who prosecuted a war unto the death against the Tamil Tigers. Rajapaksa set aside the peace process in Sri Lanka that began in 2002. He then turned to his military to destroy the Tigers. The UN Report on the Sri Lanka’s government’s war showed that it was almost genocide. It makes for difficult reading. It is what Uribe hopes for Colombia.

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Advocate: Insightful Poll Reveals Who Opposes LGBT People on Two Big Issues

The survey is also enlightening because it explains what makes people want to deny service to same-sex couples getting married. It’s not an issue of civil rights. To them it’s a “moral” issue. Pew found that among the 35 percent of people who still say homosexual behavior is morally wrong, a whopping 76 percent said businesses should be able to refuse wedding services to same-sex couples.

The moral questions on these issues are more complicated if a person knows someone who is LGBT. Pew found that those who don’t know a gay person are more likely to be OK turning away same-sex couples. The difference was most sharp on the question of access to bathroom. “Knowing someone who is transgender is closely linked with views on the use of public restrooms,” Pew wrote in its analysis of findings. “Most people who personally know someone who is transgender say that transgender people should be allowed to use public restrooms that match their current gender identity (60%).” The problem is only three in 10 Americans said they knew a transgender person.

There was another way to predict whether a person would support refusing service: look at their political party registration. Republicans said businesses should be able to refuse service by a 71-26 margin. On access to restrooms for trans people, Republicans opposed it 67-30.

While Jews and Catholics and those unaffiliated with any religion were more likely to say businesses should be required to serve everyone (64 percent, 54 percent, and 65 percent, respectively), Protestants went in the other direction. Just 36 percent were opposed to discrimination. Then among Protestants, race played a factor, with black churchgoers evenly split on the question, while white churchgoers lined up strongly against serving everyone no matter their sexual orientation. Not surprisingly, white evangelical Protestants were most likely to support refusing service (77 percent).

That phenomenon largely held up on the issue of bathroom access, with one exception. Catholics are evenly split on that question, with 47 percent backing access and 50 percent opposed.

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The Guardian: Police with body cameras receive 93% fewer complaints – study

Police equipped with body-worn cameras receive 93% fewer complaints from the public, according to a new study that suggests the technology helps to cool down potentially volatile encounters.

Academics at Cambridge University, whose research looked at nearly 1.5m beat hours across more than 4,000 shifts by officers in the UK and California, claim their findings suggest the cameras herald a “profound sea change in modern policing”. [..]

Throughout the year-long experiment, researchers were said to have randomly assigned about half of the officers starting their shifts with cameras. All officers in the forces taking part worked with cameras at some point, the researchers said.

During the 12 months before the study, a total of 1,539 complaints were lodged against police in the areas examined, amounting to 1.2 complaints per officer. By the end, the number of complaints had fallen to 133 for the year across all sites – 0.08 per officer.

The researchers were surprised to find that there was no statistically significant difference between the number of complaints received by officers wearing cameras and those without, a result they said may be a result of “contagious accountability”.

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CityLab: Protecting the Street Art of Athens

Greece and graffiti go way back: The world’s earliest surviving graffito may in fact be an ancient Greek advertisement for a brothel. More contemporary Greek taggers expressed their political beliefs during World War II and the country’s ensuing civil war and military dictatorship of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

In the 1990s, a wave of elaborate public street art—an extension of graffiti that’s often more figurative than (and sometimes in tension with) its progenitor—spread throughout Athens. Today, with much of its surfaces coated in images that often comment on the country’s economic crisis, Athens has been hailed as a “mecca” for street art in Europe.

With such a long and storied history, it’s perhaps no surprise that a group has taken it upon itself to preserve the city’s street art. Four years ago, art and conservation students at the Technological Educational Institute of Athens founded st.a.co.—short for Street Art Conservators—to maintain some of their city’s works of public art. The students had been documenting street art for a class, and were so taken with some of the examples that they decided to help protect them from the elements (and other graffiti artists).

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BBC: The cat man of Aleppo

Mohammad Alaa Jaleel lives in Aleppo, Syria, where he looks after more than a hundred stray and abandoned cats.

Independent: Shimon Peres was no peacemaker. I’ll never forget the sight of pouring blood and burning bodies at Qana

A few days later, Israeli troops inside Lebanon came under attack close to Qana and retaliated by opening fire into the village. Their first shells hit a cemetery used by Hezbollah; the rest flew directly into the UN Fijian army camp where hundreds of civilians were sheltering. Peres announced that “we did not know that several hundred people were concentrated in that camp. It came to us as a bitter surprise.”

It was a lie. The Israelis had occupied Qana for years after their 1982 invasion, they had video film of the camp, they were even flying a drone over the camp during the 1996 massacre – a fact they denied until a UN soldier gave me his video of the drone, frames from which we published in The Independent. The UN had repeatedly told Israel that the camp was packed with refugees. [...]

There was a UN enquiry which stated in its bland way that it did not believe the slaughter was an accident. The UN report was accused of being anti-Semitic. Much later, a brave Israeli magazine published an interview with the artillery soldiers who fired at Qana. An officer had referred to the villagers as “just a bunch of Arabs” (‘arabushim’ in Hebrew). “A few Arabushim die, there is no harm in that,” he was quoted as saying. Peres’s chief of staff was almost equally carefree: “I don’t know any other rules of the game, either for the [Israeli] army or for civilians…” [...]

Yes, of course, Peres changed in later years. They claimed that Ariel Sharon – whose soldiers watched the massacre at Sabra and Chatila camps in 1982 by their Lebanese Christian allies – was also a “peacemaker” when he died. At least he didn’t receive the Nobel Prize. 

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IFLScience: Riding A Roller Coaster Can Help Get Rid Of Kidney Stones

The study, which appears in the Journal of the American Osteopathic Association, was inspired by anecdotal reports about people passing their kidney stones after enjoying a spin on the Magic Kingdom’s Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. One man even claimed to have gone on the roller coaster three times in a row, passing one stone after each ride. [...]

Amazingly, they found that stones placed in the kidney’s upper passage were dislodged on all 20 rides, although those in the lower passageways were somewhat more stubborn. They also found that sitting at the back of the ride led to a passage rate of just under two in three, while sitting at the front caused a passage rate of one in six. [...]

Large stones normally have to be surgically removed, although smaller stones are sometimes spontaneously passed out of the body in urine. In their study, the researchers found that riding on roller coasters can increase the likelihood of these smaller stones passing without the need for any intervention, thereby preventing the build-up of large stones.

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Independent: Government forced to release 'secret arguments' for triggering Article 50 ahead of anti-Brexit legal challenge

A legal bid challenging Brexit has secured its first major success ahead of a High Court hearing. A senior judge has ordered the Government to reveal 'secret' legal arguments which it says means parliament does not have to be consulted on when to trigger Article 50. The decision has been heralded a major victory as a series of legal challenges trying to block Brexit are beginning.

High Court Judge Mr Justice Cranston has ruled that prior to a hearing of a case from the crowd funded initiative People’s Challenge on 13 October, the Government must publish its previously undisclosed legal arguments about why Article 50 can be triggered without parliamentary assent. As a majority of MPs backed Remain, some anti-Brexit campaigners believe this mechanism could enable them to stall or entirely cancel Brexit. [...]

A number of legal challenges against Brexit have been launched. In addition to the People’s Challenge, a cross-community coalition of politicians in Northern Ireland is bringing a case arguing that the Northern Irish parliament must approve plans to leave the EU due to the detrimental impact it may have on Northern Ireland.

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The Atlantic: Taking the Fear and Desperation Out of Online Dating

One old eHarmony commercial on YouTube starts with a man saying “I was skeptical about anything that was on an internet.” (Yes, an internet.) Later, in the same commercial, a woman says, “I don’t think anybody, no matter how old they are, should ever give up.” Evoking skepticism and giving up may not be the best way to make people excited for a dating service. [...]

Wolfe said she hoped her app could erase some of those fears for heterosexual women who are online dating; the gimmick of Bumble that separates it from Tinder, Hinge, and the scads of others is that the woman has to send the first message. Unfortunately, men regularly send women harassing messages on dating platforms like Tinder and OKCupid, and the culture around online dating can seem toxically misogynist at times. (Wolfe herself is a former Tinder employee, and settled a sexual harassment and sex discrimination lawsuit against her former bosses in 2014.) [...]

More generally, Wolfe thinks dating apps can, contrary to the old stereotype, make people’s searches for love less desperate. When the opportunity to meet new people is always available, there’s less need to scan every bar and party for prospects, panning for gold in a river of bros.

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Quartz: Police are investigating a bizarre wave of reports of creepy clowns scaring people around the US

There have been reports since this summer from around the US of people dressed in clown costumes yielding weapons and trying to lure children. They struck in South Carolina in late August, where authorities were on high alert after some children said clowns were trying to lure them into the woods. Investigations haven’t turned up suspects yet. [...]

Police suspect many of these clowns are harmless pranksters and some of the reports are hoaxes. Four children admitted to lying about seeing clowns in and around Annapolis, Maryland. A 24-year-old North Carolina man was charged with fabricating a story about a clown knocking on his window. On Sept. 20, the police department in Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, warned people that false reports could lead to prosecution. [...]

With this latest wave of creepy clown sightings, real clown businesses are being hurt, the AP reports. “In South Carolina, two of the clowns were afraid to go out and perform, and they’re two of my customers,” said Tricia Manuel, owner of the Mooseburger Clown Arts Camp in Buffalo, Minnesota. “If they don’t perform, they don’t need supplies.”

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Böll-Stiftung: The European Union and its Southern Neighbourhood

Prior to the Arab Spring, the policies pursued by the EU and most of the Member States were focused on dealing with the regimes. In most cases, European governments shied away from dealing directly with the small, courageous and genuinely independent civil society movements or groups of individuals who campaigned for human rights. The EU’s interlocutor was the status quo. Moreover, the EU really had no unified, coherent long term strategy towards the region. As for the Member States, they had their own network of bilateral economic and trade ties built up over many years. [...]

At the time, the aim of the ENP was to foster stability, security and prosperity in these countries. It reflected the EU’s first European Security Strategy drawn up by Javier Solana. That document referred to establishing an arc of stability, from Europe’s east around to Europe’s south. Clearly for those campaigning for democracy in the MENA countries, neither the ENP nor the EU’s Security Strategy addressed the underlying tensions in the region: the irreconcilability of authoritarianism and democratisation; that the kind of stability prevailing in the MENA countries was inherently unstable.

The Arab Spring could have and should have provided the EU with a new and bold opportunity to radically overhaul its policies toward the region as a whole and towards particular countries. Certainly, in the immediate aftermath of the Arab Spring, the EU did realise that its previous policies had been flawed. But because of the sheer scale of the upheaval engulfing that Syria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt particularly, the EU scrambled for a reactive policy. [...]

The long term consequences of Europe’s role as bystander in the Syrian war is extremely damaging. Salam Kawakibi summed it up in a piece he wrote for Carnegie Europe. He argued that if the Europeans do not take the Syrian conflict seriously, other global actors will not take the Europeans seriously either. Indeed, one wonders if European governments now see its southern neighbourhood through the lens of security and stability in order to ensure the security of EU citizens. [...]

Echoing the Commission’s Review, the official insisted that the EU’s policies would be able to reconcile security and stabilisation with promoting good governance, ‘democracy, rule of law and human rights.’ But as the Commission itself states throughout the 21-page long review, it is the security and stabilisation issues that take priority.

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IFLScience: Here’s How People Judge You Based On Your Face

Scientists have identified countless ways that we judge people based on their looks, even when those judgments have no basis in reality.

"We form these immediate impressions of people — we just can’t help it," Alexander Todorov, a psychology professor at Princeton University, told Business Insider.

Todorov’s lab tests responses to computer-generated faces to model traits associated with perceived attractiveness, trustworthiness, competence, and more.

Todorov warns that these impressions are highly inaccurate. People have many biases, including halo effects — where we assume one positive trait will be followed by others — and stereotypes — where we associate behaviors with looks. Still, the professor says it’s worth understanding them, if only to fight them.

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The Daily Beast: Has It Really ‘Gotten Better’ for Gay Kids?

In 2005, when GLSEN conducted its first “From Teasing to Torment” national survey, nearly 62 percent of U.S. middle and high schoolers reported that students at their schools were victimized based on sexual orientation. In 2015, when GLSEN collected data for this follow up report a decade later, that figure was still just shy of 50 percent.

Other decreases in anti-LGBT bullying were similarly gradual. From 2005 to 2015, the percentage of students who reported witnessing victimization based on gender expression fell from 60 to 49 percent, and the percentage who reported hearing the word “gay” used in a derogatory fashion dipped slightly from 89 percent to 75 percent.

Even more disturbing is the fact that race-based victimization remained flat, with nearly 38 percent of students reporting it 10 years apart. [...]

Fifteen percent of the students even said teachers and administrators were making homophobic comments. Nearly 13 percent reported hearing “negative remarks about transgender people” from school staff. And less than 20 percent said staff intervened “often” when they heard negative remarks about gender expression, which is especially concerning given that nearly a quarter of the students did not identify in a strictly gender-conforming way. [...]

“What our research shows is that [bullying] doesn’t toughen you up and get you ready for the ‘real world,’” said Villenas. “It actually leads to poor psychological outcomes. It leads to lower educational aspirations. It leads to more likely experiences with school discipline and higher absenteeism. We see no evidence here that it prepares students for the ‘real world’ or for college. Quite the opposite, actually.”

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The Jerusalem Post: Palestinians left wondering as Saudi paper takes Netanyahu’s side

The editorial, published Sunday in the Saudi Gazette, a daily published in Jeddah that has a woman editor-in-chief, seemed to depart in tone from the widely-held position in the Arab world that Israel is responsible for the impasse with the Palestinians. It likened Netanyahu’s proposal that the two leaders address each other’s parliaments, to Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s 1977 invitation to Egyptian president Anwar Sadat to visit Israel, and implied it could also lead to a breakthrough. Begin made the invitation “and the rest is history,’’ the editorial said. [...]

The editorial comes two months after a Saudi delegation of academics and businessmen, led by retired Saudi general Anwar Eshki, touched off criticism in the Arab world for openly visiting Israel and meeting with officials and MKs. There was speculation that the trip reflected a quiet development of discrete ties between the countries based largely on their having a common enemy, Iran.

Palestinians are wary that any normalization with Israel by Saudi Arabia or other Arab countries would represent a sellout of their cause and undermine their position vis-à-vis Israel.

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Vox: The head of Hezbollah has found someone he hates even more than Israelis

In other words, things have gotten so bad that Hezbollah, Israel’s mortal enemy, now considers Wahhabis — that is, fellow Muslims — to be worse than Israel. Bear in mind, this is coming from the same man who has described Israel as “a cancerous entity and the root of all the crises and wars” and pledged that Israel’s destiny “is manifested in our motto: 'Death to Israel.’” [...]

But despite how it may seem, Nasrallah’s statement is not, at its base, a conflict about religion. Though there are certainly strong religious disagreements between Sunni and Shia — and especially between extreme fundamentalist Sunnis and extreme fundamentalist Shia — the conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia has little to do with dogma. It’s actually about something far less exotic: power and influence. [...]

This proxy war plays out in conflicts all over the Middle East. For instance, Saudi Arabia, with US military assistance, is engaged in a brutal air war against Iranian-backed Houthi fighters inside Yemen that has sparked a massive humanitarian crisis in the impoverished country. The United Nations recently estimated that at least 10,000 civilians have died, and acknowledged that that number was almost certainly lower than the actual toll.

Saudi Arabia’s proxy fight with Iran is also helping to fuel the bloodshed in Syria, where an estimated 400,000 people have been killed over the past five years while millions more have fled the country and sparked the biggest refugee crisis in decades.

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Quartz: There’s no such thing as a protest vote

But it doesn’t matter what message you think you are sending, because no one will receive it. No one is listening. The system is set up so that every choice other than “Republican” or “Democrat” boils down to “I defer to the judgement of my fellow citizens.” It’s easy to argue that our system shouldn’t work like that. It’s impossible to argue it doesn’t work like that.

This is frustrating, of course, but that’s how our presidential elections are set up. Democracies alternate the coalition in power, but different systems do so in different ways. In multi-party systems, voters get the satisfaction of voting for smaller, ideologically purer factions—environmental parties, anti-immigrant parties, and so on. The impure compromises come when those factions are forced to form coalitions large enough to govern. The inevitable tradeoffs are part of the governing process, not the electoral process. [...]

Boycotts can work in countries where voting is mandatory, because not voting can be an act of civil disobedience. In the United States, however, voting is not and has never been required. (Our elites have always preferred minimal participation, and laziness is a cheaper tool than suppression.) In presidential elections, non-voters always outnumber voters who choose the winning candidate. With that much passive non-participation, active non-participation gets lost. [...]

It’s clear why third-party candidates want votes, but it’s not clear why voters would want third parties. The Green Party, for example, hasn’t elected so much as a member of Congress, much less fielded a credible presidential candidate, and their organization does no actual environmental work. Greenpeace helps the environment more in any given week than the Green Party has in its entire existence—a problem common to third parties generally. If you’re a Libertarian, you’re better off donating to Cato than voting for Gary Johnson. If you’re a paleoconservative, you’re better off donating to the Rockford Institute than voting for Darrell Castle.

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CityLab: A Peek Inside Brazilian 'Love Motels'

In Brazil, where young people tend to live in pretty close quarters with mom, dad, and other members of their families until they get married, it isn’t easy to get some privacy with a romantic partner. But it’s possible—at “love motels.” These are sometimes-seedy, sometimes hilariously lavish sanctuaries for the sex-deprived.

The Dutch art director Vera van de Sandt had heard of these motels during her travels to Brazil. She was intrigued by all the shapes and sizes they came in, and wanted to see what they were like from the inside. In 2014, she read that some in Rio de Janeiro were being converted into boring old regular hotels for the 2016 Olympics. Before they were all gone, she and the photographer Jur Oster set off to document them.

They visited Rio and many other areas in the country in two trips in 2014 and 2015. With locals’ help, they found some really wacky motels that weren’t listed online. “You find motels everywhere, even in the smallest village,” van de Sandt says. ”They are easy to spot—mainly because of their names, which are often quite suggestive,” she adds. “We thought they were only meant for cheating and prostitution, but along the way we found out that the love motels meet a social need.” She and Oster posed as a couple to gain entry, and then captured the architecture and the interior decor of these buildings. They’ve compiled their images into a series called “Love Land Stop Time.”

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Reader Supported News: Over Eight Years, President Barack Obama Has Created the Most Intrusive Surveillance Apparatus in the World. To What End?

In a sense, this was a fitting tribute to President Barack Obama as his administration entered its last six months in the White House. Over his two terms, Obama has created the most powerful surveillance state the world has ever seen. Although other leaders may have created more oppressive spying regimes, none has come close to constructing one of equivalent size, breadth, cost, and intrusiveness. From 22,300 miles in space, where seven Advanced Orion crafts now orbit; to a 1-million-square-foot building in the Utah desert that stores data intercepted from personal phones, emails, and social media accounts; to taps along the millions of miles of undersea cables that encircle the Earth like yarn, U.S. surveillance has expanded exponentially since Obama’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2009.

The effort to wire the world — or to achieve “extreme reach,” in the NRO’s parlance — has cost American taxpayers more than $100 billion. Obama has justified the gargantuan expense by arguing that “there are some trade-offs involved” in keeping the country safe. “I think it’s important to recognize that you can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience,” he said in June 2013, shortly after Edward Snowden, a former contractor with the National Security Agency (NSA), revealed widespread government spying on Americans’ phone calls. [...]

The foundations of Obama’s shadow state date back to the immediate post-9/11 period. Six weeks after the attacks, the Patriot Act, which greatly expanded the government’s surveillance powers, was rushed through Congress and signed by President George W. Bush. A few months later, the Bush administration created the Information Awareness Office, part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). That led to the development of the Total Information Awareness program, designed to vacuum up vast amounts of private electronic data — banking transactions, travel documents, medical files, and more — from citizens. After the media exposed and criticized the program, which didn’t use warrants, Congress shut it down in late 2003. Much of the operation, though, was simply transferred to the NSA. [...]

On Oct. 2, 2013, when called to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the general backtracked. Alexander cited only one instance when an intercept detected a potential threat: a Somali taxi driver living in San Diego who sent $8,500 to al-Shabab, his home country’s notorious terrorist group. That winter, a panel set up by Obama to review the NSA’s operations concluded that the agency had stopped no terrorist attacks. “We found none,” Geoffrey Stone, a University of Chicago law professor and one of five panel members, bluntly told NBC News in December 2013. Since then, despite mass surveillance both at home and abroad, shootings or bombings have occurred in San Bernardino, California; Orlando, Florida; Paris; Brussels; and Istanbul — to name just a few places.

Beyond failures to create security, there is the matter of misuse or abuse of U.S. spying, the effects of which extend well beyond violations of Americans’ constitutional liberties. In 2014, I met with Snowden in Moscow for a magazine assignment. Over pizza in a hotel room not far from Red Square, he told me that the NSA puts innocent people in danger. In his experience, for instance, the agency routinely had passed raw, unredacted intercepts of millions of phone calls and emails from Arab- and Palestinian-Americans to its Israeli counterpart, Unit 8200. Once in Israeli hands, Snowden feared, this information might be used to extort information or otherwise harm relatives of the individuals being spied upon.

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Al Jazeera: Boko Haram refugees in Niger find safety, but lack aid

As Nigerian forces have progressed against Boko Haram, the cornered terror group has been carrying out more attacks in neighbouring countries. In Niger's Diffa region on the northeastern border of Nigeria, more than 280,000 people have been displaced.

Most of the displaced, do not live in refugee camps, but in ramshackle settlements next to a national highway. The situation continues to deteriorate and new families arrive on a daily basis, fleeing violence and hunger in the Lake Chad Basin. Humanitarian aid organisations struggle to reach everyone in need of assistance. [...]

According to the United Nations, the people of Diffa are arguably the poorest on earth, living in the least developed region in the least developed country of the world. Meanwhile, one refugee for every four residents has arrived in their communities as a result of the conflict. [...]

Some of the displaced received basic tents from humanitarian actors, but the vast majority built improvised shacks with whatever materials they could find: straw, tarpaulins or wooden twigs. Some of the recent arrivals still live in the open. [...]

Of the 20 million people living in the Lake Chad Basin, a region stretched over Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Cameroun, at least 9.2 million are in urgent need of life-saving assistance and more than five million people are severely food insecure [PDF]. At least four million people have no access to aid, say humanitarian organizations.

According to UNICEF, an estimated 475,000 children across Lake Chad will suffer from severe acute malnutrition this year. In the northeast of Nigeria, where Boko Haram has been seeking to carve out a hardline Islamist state since 2009, the military confirmed that three to four people a day are dying due to malnutrition. However, humanitarian organisations say this figure is probably much higher as many areas remain unreachable.

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The Intercept: Donald Trump Leads the War on Truth — but He Didn’t Start It

Where was all this hard-nosed skepticism in 2002 and early 2003, during the Bush administration’s run-up to the Iraq War? In Kristof’s column, he presents himself as a prescient Cassandra during this period. Indeed, he did warn his readers that governing Iraq after Saddam Hussein would be difficult. But several weeks after the invasion of Iraq began, Kristof still wasn’t ready to call George W. Bush out on his lies about Iraqi connections to al Qaeda and the mythical weapons of mass destruction. He still wanted to believe in the administration’s good intentions. “I don’t want to believe that top administration officials tried to win support for the war with a campaign of wholesale deceit,” he wrote, in May 2003, and then gingerly pointed out “indications that the U.S. government souped up intelligence.” Three months before, his paper’s editorial board wrote that the Bush-Cheney WMD allegations were different from their “unproved assertions” about al Qaeda. For the WMDs, the Times wrote, there was “ample evidence.”

The backlash against Trump isn’t really about his lying. It’s that he is lying too clumsily, too openly, and in the service of the wrong causes. Earlier this month, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released a summary of their report on Edward Snowden’s disclosures. They wrote that Snowden washed out of the Army because of “shin splints,” “doctored his performance evaluations,” and never received a high school degree. All three of these claims are lies, as spelled out by Barton Gellman. These lies came from 24 sitting members of Congress who are charged with overseeing the intelligence community. But there has been little outcry, no correction, and no demands that these assertions be backed up by evidence. This may be because our political culture has come to accept certain abuses of the truth as normal, and the lack of accountability for those officials behind the Bush-era deceptions has not improved matters. [...]

Trump’s lies are an essential part of his candidacy. Debunking them is crucial. But the attention given to logging Trump’s lies often comes at the expense of addressing the deeper truths that run through his “rigged system” rhetoric. Trump, more than Clinton, has played to the growing sense that the country is run by an elite network of self-dealing oligarchs. Economic frustration is what allows Trump to convincingly set himself up as a worthy outsider, the champion of the people, the guy who can fix the broken system because he was so skilled at exploiting it for his own benefit. This is an almost messianic image. It has and will continue to survive barrages of fact-checking.

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Atlas Obscura: The Strange Victorian Computer That Generated Latin Verse

In July 1845, British curiosity-seekers headed to London’s Egyptian Hall to try out the novelty of the summer. For the price of one shilling, they could stand in front of a wooden bureau, pull a lever, and look behind a panel where six drums, bristling with metal spokes, revolved. At the end of its “grinding,” what it produced was not a numeric computation or a row of fruit symbols, but something quite different: a polished line of Latin poetry. [...]

The Eureka was the brainchild, and obsession, of a man in southwest England named John Clark. The eccentric Clark was a cousin of Cyrus and James Clark, founders of the Clarks shoes empire (which went on to popularize the Desert Boot in the 1950s and is still going strong). Clark built the Eureka at a time when such devices were all the rage. As literature scholar Jason David Hall explains in an academic article on the Eureka, the machine joined other proto-computers like the Polyharmonicon, a machine that composed polkas, and the Euphonia, which “spoke” when a person played an attached keyboard. [...]

The number of possible permutations the Eureka can run through is a dizzying 26 million. “If we had it running continuously, it would take 74 years for it to do its full tour before it started repeating itself,” says Karina Virahsawmy, a curator at the Alfred Gillett Trust, the nonprofit that preserves the history of the Clark family and their company. “Every time I think about it, I’m still mind-boggled as to how somebody did that in the early 19th century.”

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BBC4 Beyond Belief: Turkey

Turkey's president Recep Tayyip Erdogan blamed July's failed military coup on the exiled Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen and his followers. Since a 3-month state of emergency was declared, more than 50,000 people have been rounded up, sacked or suspended from their jobs in the military, educational institutions, the judiciary and the media. Gulen has denied involvement in the attempted coup.

Turkey is around 97% Muslim. However, there have been growing concerns among many who see the conservative religious reforms of Erdogan's Islamist-rooted AK Party as being in opposition to the modern secular republic established in the 1920s by nationalist leader Kemal Ataturk.

What do recent events say about the place of religion in Turkey? How strong is the tension between secularism and Islamism? What does the future hold for religious freedom in Turkey?

Ernie Rea discusses religion in Turkey with Bill Park, senior lecturer at King's College London and policy advisor for the Centre for Turkey Studies; Ozcan Keles, Muslim chairperson of the Gulen-inspired UK charity, the Dialogue Society; and Hakan Camuz; Muslim international legal consultant and supporter of the Turkish government.

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Vox: Donald Trump is no longer starring in Politics: The Reality Show, and it’s hurting him

Clinton, accidentally, ended up spending a lot of time preparing for just this format this very year when she took part in a handful of debates against her one serious challenger: Bernie Sanders. She also ran for the US Senate and one-on-one against Barack Obama for months of the 2008 primary. And this showed throughout performance choices both made in the debate.

For instance, when there’s a two-person debate, the networks customarily keep both onscreen the full time. (In the Republican debates, Trump often only had to share space with a news ticker.) And where Trump’s reality show turns work really well in those wider shots — probably thanks to The Apprentice, where he’s most often held in a mid-shot that allows for his frequent gestures to land — they don’t work in the much tighter shots used in this debate. [...]

In contrast, Clinton’s dream outcome for the night was essentially to bait Trump into responding to her attacks on him, thereby making the debate all about him. (In a debate where both candidates have low favorability ratings, both are essentially trying to make the election about how much voters don’t like their opponent.) When he couldn’t resist taking her up on her invitations, he ended up playing exactly into the narrative she wanted to lay out: He can’t be trusted to stand firm.

I don’t want to overstate Clinton’s performance here. She was too canned in places, and it was all too obvious when she was reciting a line she had worked on in her debate prep. But it was also obvious that she knew, on some level, what she was doing and she had come prepared to do the job. It’s almost like a meta-commentary on both campaigns, expressed in 90 minutes of live television.

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The New Yorker: Why Ted Cruz Surrendered to Donald Trump

But Ryan, despite his charming air of moderation—one not backed up by his actual hard-line conservative policies—was the one presiding at the Convention. He endorsed Trump months ago, and lately seems to have given up even offering alibi-attempting criticisms of Trump’s policies. (Last Thursday, at his weekly press conference, Ryan told reporters that, basically, he’d rather talk about himself.) For all the talk of the Republican establishment’s rejection of Trump, very few of its leaders or its elected officials have been willing to do so publicly. Last week, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the former lieutenant governor of Maryland (and R.F.K.’s daughter) excitedly told the world that George H. W. Bush had told her privately that he would vote for Hillary Clinton. Bush’s spokesperson quickly told the press that he would not confirm such a thing. Whatever the elder Bush’s reservations about his party’s nominee might be, he was keeping them private. Only half a dozen Republican senators have come out and opposed Trump, a couple of them in highly hedged terms. There was a fair amount of excitement when Susan Collins joined their ranks in early August. Since then, though, it’s been quiet. For all the complaints about how the press has “normalized” Trump, it is the Republican Party, institutionally, that has done so. Ryan has said that giving Trump a chance to appoint Supreme Court Justices was high among his reasons for voting for him. (Ryan said that soon after Trump suggested that a judge whose family roots were in Mexico could not be trusted to deliver justice, which might give a person pause before letting Trump pick any.) The Supreme Court was also the first reason Cruz listed in his endorsement.

It wasn’t really harder for Cruz than for most of them; if anything, it was easier. He agrees with Trump in most policy areas, and where he doesn’t he is to the right of Trump. Trump has acknowledged that Planned Parenthood provides useful health services; Cruz has portrayed the organization as a criminal gang. (Both, though, would ban abortion in most circumstances.) Cruz has had his own flights of religious bigotry, calling for new police powers to “patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods.” And, although he may have objected to his father’s being linked to Lee Harvey Oswald, via a grainy picture and a lot of illogical leaps, his own rhetoric is rife with plots against America. In his Facebook post, Cruz described “eight years of a lawless Obama administration, targeting and persecuting those disfavored by the administration,” and warned that Hillary Clinton “would continue the Obama administration’s willful blindness to radical Islamic terrorism,” in part by “importing” refugees who might be terrorists. “Our country is in crisis,” Cruz wrote. “Hillary Clinton is manifestly unfit to be president, and her policies would harm millions of Americans. And Donald Trump is the only thing standing in her way.” That is the same Trump he called a “pathological liar” and a “bully.” “The man is utterly amoral,” Cruz said at a press conference in May. At the time, his tone was viewed as one of outrage. The endorsement suggests that it may have been something more like jealous admiration.

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CityLab: Welcome to the World's First 'Waste Supermarket'

It’s not just the concept behind Britain’s first “waste supermarket” that’s impressive, it’s also the project’s sheer scale. Run by food-waste-busting nonprofit the Real Junk Food Project, this pay-what-you-can store housed in a Leeds warehouse connects local shoppers with food donated by supermarkets, restaurants, and wholesalers that would otherwise end up in the trash. Set up this summer, the store is already channeling a remarkable volume of otherwise wasted resources to people who need them, according to co-founder Adam Smith. [...]

What the Real Junk Food Project (TRJFP) has dubbed an “anti-supermarket” is really just the tip of their vast iceberg of discarded provisions: The group has a created a network of 126 cafés across seven countries, all serving meals on a “Pay as You Feel” basis. The project fixes no prices to goods, but many patrons contribute, and both the project’s main website and sites run by individual cafes accept donations. TRJFP set up their first café in Leeds in 2013, serving meals made with food destined to be thrown away by stores or restaurants. The U.S. is next on their expansion plans, as the project has already opened a pop-up café in Buffalo, New York, and hopes to expand nationwide in 2017. [...]

The success of such efforts is cheering, but it also reflects the enormity of the food waste problem, which is estimated to devour about a third of the edible food produced each year globally. Britain’s largest supermarket chain, Tesco, threw away the equivalent of 119 million meals last year. And Smith is outspoken about the needless, grand-scale squandering of resources that is built into the business model of the grocery industry. “I’m sick to death of the media and supermarkets who say it’s all to do with consumers,” he told The Guardian. “It’s nothing to do with them. We didn’t want this saturation of supermarkets on our high street selling food 24 hours day, manipulating us into purchasing more.”

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Independent: Paris approves controversial plan to ban cars along stretch of River Seine

A controversial plan to pedestrianise a stretch of road running alongside the Seine River through central Paris has been approved by the city council.

The "historic" scheme, which has been described by the Mayor of Paris as "the end of an urban motorway and the taking back of the Seine", will see 3.3km of an express way on the Right Bank of the river permanently shut to vehicles, in an effort to tackle pollution in the city.

The length of road stretching from Tuileries gardens near the Louvre to the Henri-IV tunnel near the Bastille, which is part of a UNESCO world heritage site, was previously used by around 43,000 cars a day, Le Monde reports.

The project, expected to cost around €8 million, will add wooden walkways and foliage to the river bank, while leaving a lane for emergency vehicles. [...]

Medical experts have blamed air pollution for 2,500 deaths each year in the city and 6,600 in the greater metropolitan area. 

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FiveThirtyEight: The Income Gap Began To Narrow Under Obama

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump don’t agree on much. But there’s one theme that’s central to both of their campaigns: The U.S. economy too often benefits the powerful few over the struggling many. Trump has pledged to be the “voice” of the masses fighting against a “rigged” system. Clinton, though less fiery in her rhetoric than either Trump or Bernie Sanders, her former Democratic rival, has pledged to make the “super-rich” start paying “their fair share.” As I wrote last month, the 2016 election has marked a distinct shift in the political message of both parties, away from promises to grow the economic pie and toward discussions of how to divide it up more fairly. [...]

In recent years, inequality has shifted from being an issue that mostly concerns the political left to one that worries even mainstream economists. Groups such as the International Monetary Fund and the OECD have released reports arguing that a greater concentration of wealth among the rich leads to slower overall economic growth. And while economists disagree about the causes and consequences of rising inequality (and, even more, what to do about it), there is relatively widespread agreement that the recent trend of explosive income growth among top earners and minimal gains for everyone else is unhealthy for the economy. [...]

The CEA report argues that Obama has fought inequality in three main ways. First, the administration’s actions during the recession — extending unemployment benefits, temporarily cutting payroll taxes to stimulate growth and bailing out the auto industry, among others — kept unemployment lower than it would otherwise have been. Since recessions tend to hit the lowest-earning workers hardest, policies that mitigate their impact will tend to reduce inequality. Second, the CEA argues that the Affordable Care Act, by making health insurance more affordable for and accessible to low-income workers, has greatly reduced disparities in health care. And third, the CEA argues that the administration’s tax policies — which raised taxes on the rich, cut them for the middle class and expanded programs such as the Earned Income Tax Credit that help poor families — made the tax code more progressive. All told, the CEA estimates that the poorest fifth of American households will earn 18 percent more in 2017 than they would have without the administration’s policies.

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CityLab: Germany Has the World's First Hydrogen-Powered Passenger Train

When it comes to rail innovations, it’s usually the fastest, longest and most expensive new connections or rolling stock that grab people’s attention. Next year, however, Germany will buck that trend with something that’s both ground-breaking and singularly modest. German rail’s most innovative project for 2017 won’t go especially fast, and you’ve probably never heard of the cities it will link. It will still revolutionize rail travel, quite possibly across the world, with one dramatic change. In December 2017, Germany will launch the first ever passenger rail service powered by hydrogen.

Unveiled by French manufacturers Alstom this month, the new Coradia iLint will feature a motor that gains its power from a hydrogen tank and a fuel cell. Stored in a tank large enough to fuel a 497-mile journey, the hydrogen’s chemical energy will be converted into electricity by the fuel cell, propelling the train at up to 87 miles per hour. Any energy not used immediately is stored in Lithium batteries attached to the car bottom. Producing nothing but steam as a by-product, the motor will run far more quietly and cleanly than a diesel engine. What’s more, the train’s new fuel source will effectively make it carbon-neutral, albeit in a roundabout sort of way. [...]

This new hydrogen train is thus perfect for shorter, quieter stretches of the network that electrification hasn’t yet reached. Germany’s first Coradia iLint models are thus being tried out first on an internationally obscure 60-mile link between Buxtehude, a city lying just beyond Hamburg’s southern suburbs, and the small port and beach town of Cuxhaven. Outside this region, three other German states signed letters of intent in 2014 expressing a serious interest in adopting the model, and so the trains could soon be a fixture across many of Germany’s smaller lines.

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The Intercept: Here Are Eight Policies That Can Prevent Police Killings

With 788 people killed by police this year alone, death at the hands of law enforcement has become so routine in this country that it risks becoming expected and predictable, as if it were inevitable. Every time a new video emerges, anger soars, as do calls to end police violence. Then invariably, within days or sometimes mere hours, police somewhere else kill again. [...]

But as commonplace as they have become, police killings are neither inevitable nor even that hard to prevent, and a new report released today suggests that curbing police violence is really not rocket science when departments and local officials are committed to doing it.

The “Police Use of Force Project” is an initiative of Campaign Zero, a group that came together in the aftermath of the Ferguson protests to research and recommend solutions to end death at the hands of police. Not surprisingly, their latest research showed that police departments that implement stricter use of force regulations kill significantly fewer people. [...]

But even common-sense practices such as de-escalating situations or exhausting alternatives before resorting to deadly force were required, respectively, of only 34 and 31 of the 91 departments examined. Only 30 departments required officers to intervene to stop a colleague from exercising excessive force, and only 15 required officers to report on all uses of force, including threatening civilians with a firearm.

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Good Food: This Infographic Shows How Only 10 Companies Own All The World’s Food Brands

Just when you think there’s no end to the diversity of junk food lining supermarket aisles, an insanely detailed infographic comes along to set us all straight. Out of the hundreds of products at our disposal, only ten major corporations manufacture the bulk of what we toss in our shopping carts.

So whether you’re looking to stock up on anything from orange soda to latte-flavored potato chips, Mondelez, Kraft, Coca-Cola, Nestlé, PepsiCo, P&G, Johnson & Johnson, Mars, Danone, General Mills, Kellogg's, and Unilever own just about everything you could hope to buy. It seems that six degrees of separation theory has been proven after all, if only because we all drink Diet Coke every now and then.

In order to visually elucidate that point, Oxfam International created a comprehensive infographic that reveals the extensive reach of the “Big 10” food and beverage companies. Unlikely ties between brands we largely don’t associate with one another show how easy it is to be misinformed about the American food system. For example, PepsiCo produces Quaker granola bars, and Nestlé makes Kit Kat bars but also frozen California Pizza Kitchen pies. To the surprise of many, Pineapple Fanta isn’t sourced straight from the mythical Fanta Islands, but canned right alongside Barq’s root beer at the Coca-Cola factory.

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BBC4 A Point of View: The Real Meaning of Trump

John Gray assesses what lies behind the Trump phenomenon and the remarkable political upheaval that could - possibly - see Donald Trump propelled into the White House.

From the start, he says, Trump's campaign has been an audacious experiment in mass persuasion. "His uncouth language, megalomaniac self-admiration and strangely coloured hair....all deliberately cultivated" to help him profit from the popular resentment against the elites of the main parties.

"Whatever happens", writes Gray, "there will be no return to pre-Trump normalcy".

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The Telegraph: Four Mexican priests ‘outed’ by gay marriage activists

A day before a large anti-gay marriage march, they released the names of four priests they claim are in gay relationships, outing them to the whole country.

“Everyone deserves the right to be in the closet,” says Cristian Galarza, an organiser for the National Pride Front, an LGBT rights group. “But when you come out and condemn homosexuality, condemn gay marriage, and try to influence a secular state, you’ve lost the right to the closet.”

Mr Galarza says the Catholic church has improper influence in public policy and is subtly leading a backlash against the LGBT community. But at a time when LGBT rights are facing more opposition from “pro-family” groups, the controversial decision to out priests is dividing activists.

“They can spin it anyway they want, but they're ultimately using someone's sexual orientation as a tool against that person, which is exactly what the LGBT movement is not about,” says Enrique Torre Molina, the campaigns manager for LGBT rights group All Out. “If anyone knows how tough it can be to have your sexual orientation used against you, it is a gay or lesbian person.” [...]

“They say people like us can’t form a family,” says Alison Crash, who lives on the outskirts of Mexico City. “A family is based on love and it can be made up of any combination of genders.”

The legislation would directly impact her. She is a lesbian and her partner Nicole Solis is a transgender woman. They are exploring in vitro fertilisation to start a family, but if that doesn’t work, they would hope to adopt a child, which isn’t legal outside of Mexico City. 

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Deutsche Welle: Linguists seek to preserve endangered regional German dialects

One recurring assertion in the debates about refugees in Germany has been the demand that migrants have to be fluent in German in order to integrate into, and function within, the society. Standard or High German is what's meant. But amidst the drive to get everyone who lives in Germany speaking "Hochdeutsch," others are concerned with preserving the many diverse regional dialects inside and outside the country.

On Wednesday, September 28, the University of Erlangen is to host a four-day conference devoted to German dialects. Organizers say fewer and fewer Germans speak dialects, and many of those have lost some of their local color. [...]

The original Low German dialects of the Ruhr Valley, for instance, died out when the region was industrialized, with a large number of non-speakers moving there. And school authorities in Hamburg once estimated that the speakers of traditional northern variant of Low German declined from 29 to 10 between 1984 and 2007.

Currently, UNESCO considers seven dialects, including Bavarian, to be "vulnerable." Four, including Yiddish, are deemed "definitely endangered," and two (Saterlandic and North Frisian) "critically endangered."[...]

Dialects are a major part of this linguistic diversity. Distinctions between dialects and languages often have more to do with political expediency than with any objective differences. Northern German Frisian, for instance, differs more from Bavarian in southern Germany than Spanish does from Portugese - even thought the former pair are considered dialects and the latter as two separate languages.

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Fortune: Someone is Testing Methods for Taking Down the Entire Internet

Earlier this month, security expert Bruce Shneier revealed that companies responsible for the basic infrastructure of the Internet are experiencing an escalating series of coordinated attacks that appear designed to test the defenses of its most critical elements. He says that, based on the scale of the attacks, the most likely culprit is a large state cyberwarfare unit, with China at the top of the list of suspects.

The ultimate goal of the efforts could include a “global blackout of all websites and e-mail addresses in the most common top-level domains.” [...]

Also notable, as pointed out by Graham Templeton at ExtremeTech, is that both China and Russia have made significant strides in building systems that would resist any such mass takedown. Templeton also suggests that these tests were “meant to be seen,” for much the same reason that nations in the past have made their nuclear weapons and missile tests highly visible—as a means of flexing global power by demonstrating the ability to blow it all up.

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Salon: High Times: Vertical farming is on the rise — but can it save the planet?

The basic idea is not new. For centuries, indigenous people in South America pioneered layered farming techniques, and the term “vertical farming” was coined by geologist Gilbert Ellis Bailey in 1915. But the need for its large-scale implementation has never been greater. Under our current system, U.S. retail food prices are rising faster than inflation rates, and the number of “food insecure” people in the country — those without reliable access to affordable, nutritious options — is greater than it was before the era of agricultural industrialization began in the 1960s. And we’re only looking at more mouths to feed; according to the UN, the world’s population will skyrocket to 9.7 billion by 2050, an increase of more than 2.5 billion people.

Additionally, climate change is threatening the sustainability of our current food production system. Rising temperatures will reduce crop yields, while creating ideal conditions for weeds, pests and fungi to thrive. More frequent floods and droughts are expected, and decreases in the water supply will result in estimated losses of $1,700 an acre in California alone. Because the agricultural industry is responsible for one-third of climate-changing carbon emissions, at least until Tesla reimagines the tractor, we’re trapped in a vicious cycle. [...]

In vertical farming, that food source starts with a building – any building – usually comprising more than one floor. On every level are flat racks of plants taking root not in soil, which is unnecessary for growth, but instead in a solid, sustainable, and pesticide-free substrate, like mashed-up coconut husk. In these hydroponic systems, plants are fed a nutrient solution from one of a variety of devices, including a misting nozzle, a slow-feed drip, and a wicking tool (like the volcanic glass called perlite) that carries nutrients from an in-house reservoir directly to the roots. [...]

But not everyone is convinced the idea won’t go to seed. Early this year, in an article for Alternet, environmental writer Stan Cox argued against growing food in high-rises because of the method’s large energy requirement — specifically, the need for LED lighting in lieu of sunshine. Louis Albright, PhD, emeritus professor of biological and environmental engineering at Cornell University, called vertical farming “pie in the sky” for the same reason.

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BBC News: How Ethiopian prince scuppered Germany's WW1 plans

In January 1915 a dhow slipped quietly out of the Arabian port of Al-Wajh. On board were a group of Germans and Turks, under the guise of the Fourth German Inner-Africa Research Expedition.

Led by Leo Frobenius, adventurer, archaeologist and personal friend of the German Emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, its aim was nothing less than to encourage Ethiopia to enter World War One.

Germany believed that the Suez canal was Britain's "jugular vein" allowing troops and supplies to be brought from Australia, New Zealand and India. [...]

Iyasu took a number of Muslim wives and soon rumours began spreading that the prince had adopted Islam himself.

Although his ancestors had included Muslim nobility who had converted to Christianity, the idea that Iyasu returned to Islam is contested by scholars.

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The Daily Beast: They Have Faith Their Church Will Change

It’s a internal divide that’s forced some progressive evangelicals to part ways with the name. Just this week, co-founder of the progressive Red Letter Christian movement, Tony Campolo, told Premier that “A lot of people who are evangelical in their theology, do not want to be called ‘evangelicals’ anymore.” Being evangelical in the United States means “you're anti-gay, you're anti-women, you're pro-war,” he adds. [...]

Robertson accepts evolution, climate change, the reality of systemic racism, and that “black lives matter.” He’s “somewhere in the middle” of the pro-life/pro-choice debate. He longs for the end of “gender binaries” and patriarchy; he also hasn’t been afraid to make his progressive evangelical spirituality known. His activism has garnered attention—he’s spoken at the White House Summit on Bullying, been interviewed on NPR, and has bylines in TIME, The Washington Post, and Religion News Service.

But it hasn’t been all smooth-sailing for him; he once lost a book contract when his evangelical publisher asked him to disavow his bisexual identity and his work for marriage equality. There are Christian distributors who have blacklisted his name. He’s lost friends and was called a heretic in college.

Brandan is representative of a small and less-explored demographic of religion in America; one that is currently overshadowed by prominent, straight conservative evangelical leaders who openly oppose progressive, liberal thinking.

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Al Jazeera: Bosnia's Serbs vote over disputed national holiday

Bosnia's ethnic Serbs have begun voting in a referendum over a disputed national holiday, defying a ban by the country's highest court and Western pressure to call off a process that risks stoking ethnic tensions in the divided Balkan country.

The referendum, on whether to mark January 9 as "Statehood Day" in the Serb Republic part of Bosnia, on Sunday is the first since a 1992 vote on secession from then-Yugoslavia that ignited three years of conflict in which 100,000 were killed. [...]

The Sarajevo-based Constitutional Court has ruled that the holiday would be illegal because it coincides with a Serbian Orthodox Christian holiday and so discriminates against Muslim Bosniaks and Catholic Croats living in the Serb Republic. The court also banned the referendum.

January 9 is the date when Bosnian Serbs declared independence from Bosnia in 1992, precipitating the country's devastating war marked by mass killings and persecution of Bosniaks and Croats in Serbian territory. It was Europe's bloodiest conflict since World War II. [...]

The Serb region's administration has said it would comply with the court's ruling on the "Statehood Day" and make changes to its law on holidays to ensure it was not discriminating against other peoples - but only after the vote.

The Serbs celebrate the holiday by hanging out Serb flags and holding Orthodox Christian ceremonies in public institutions, which non-Serbs say is aimed at excluding them.

Western diplomats warn that the referendum violates the 1995 Dayton peace accords that ended the Bosnian war.

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The New York Times: David’s Ankles: How Imperfections Could Bring Down the World’s Most Perfect Statue

The implication was clear: Italy was a backward country, incapable of protecting its cultural treasures. To be fair, the tourist was not the first person to make this accusation. In his history “The Italians,” Luigi Barzini writes that one of the basic pleasures Italy reliably provides for visitors is “that of feeling morally superior to the natives.” I sometimes felt this pleasure myself. The inefficiency of the Italian bureaucracy, whether selling you a postage stamp or fixing a street, was often marvelous to behold. And indeed, the statue the man was pointing at had obviously suffered from standing outside: The marble was striped with dirt. 

But the tourist was, in one very important respect, wrong.

He was pointing not at the actual David but at a full-scale marble replica. Michelangelo’s real statue did once stand in this spot, but it was moved, for its own protection, 143 years ago. The original is now in a museum across town, shielded from the elements, perfectly safe.

Or at least that’s how we like to think of it. We are conditioned to believe that art is safe, beyond the reach of the grimy world. We don’t hang the Mona Lisa next to an archery range. We put her in a fortress: walls, checkpoints, lasers, guards, bulletproof glass. There are scholars, textbooks, posters — a whole collective mythology suggesting that the work will live forever. But safety is largely an illusion, and permanence a fiction. Empires hemorrhage wealth, bombs fall on cities, religious radicals decimate ancient temples. Destruction happens in any number of ways, for any number of reasons, at any number of speeds — and it will happen, and no amount of reverence will stop it.

Few humans on earth know this melancholy truth better than the citizens of Florence. They are born into a profound intimacy with decay. The city was the epicenter of the Renaissance — home to such art-history superheroes as Giotto, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Cellini and Leonardo da Vinci — and the relics of that period have been under siege, more or less constantly, ever since. In 1497, the fanatical monk Savonarola sent his followers door to door to gather the city’s nonreligious art, books, clothing, musical instruments, then piled it all 50 feet high in the central square and set it on fire: the infamous Bonfire of the Vanities. (The spectacle was such a success that he repeated it the following year.) In 1895, earthquakes shook Florence so hard that citizens, fearing aftershocks, spent the night sleeping out in the streets. The 20th century brought Nazis and Mafia car bombs. This November will mark the 50th anniversary of the great Florentine flood of 1966, an inundation that overtook much of the city center, killing dozens of people and destroying old masterpieces. [...]

The trouble is the David’s ankles. They are cracked. Italians first discovered this weakness back in the 19th century, and modern scientists have mapped the cracks extensively, but until recently no one claimed to know just how enfeebled the ankles might be. This changed in 2014, when a team of Italian geoscientists published a paper called “Modeling the Failure Mechanisms of Michelangelo’s David Through Small-Scale Centrifuge Experiments.” That dry title concealed a terrifying story. The paper describes an experiment designed to measure, in a novel way, the weakness in the David’s ankles: by creating a small army of tiny David replicas and spinning them in a centrifuge, at various angles, to simulate different levels of real-world stress. What the researchers found was grim. If the David were to be tilted 15 degrees, his ankles would fail.

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