AP: Through an author's eyes: 50 years of Israeli occupation

"All of us have been surprised by the amount of architecture and engineering required to make sure one side is locked in and the other side is free to move," said Toibin, who has won several literary awards and whose novel "Brooklyn" about an Irish immigrant was adapted into a movie last year.

The anthology is meant to introduce a wider audience to this reality through the power of story-telling, said those involved in the project.

"I want to get to people who would normally avoid at all costs thinking about this issue because it makes them uncomfortable," said Israeli-American writer Ayelet Waldman, one of the book's editors [...]

Over the past five decades, Israel, citing security needs, established a military bureaucracy that enforces movement restrictions on Palestinians through a complex permit system. Successive governments have moved nearly 600,000 Israelis, or 10 percent of the country's Jewish population, to settlements on occupied land, a multi-billion-dollar enterprise the international community overwhelmingly considers illegitimate. [...]

In writing about his experience, Toibin said he will avoid words like "occupation" and "''settlements" that he believes convey little meaning. "What I want to use are the smaller words to let people actually see what it is like on the (given) day for people who are humans under the same sky," he said.

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The Atlantic: Why Are So Many Millennials Having Children Out of Wedlock?

A few years ago, researchers published an eye-opening statistic: 57 percent of parents ages 26 to 31 were having kids outside of marriage. Who were these unwed Millennials and why were they forgoing the traditional structure of American family?

New research from sociologists at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Melbourne has started to answer that question. These aren’t a random assortment of Millennials but disproportionately come from a specific group of young Americans who don’t have college degrees, live in areas with high income inequality, and tend not to have very bright job prospects. The study, published this month in the journal American Sociological Review, found that in areas with the greatest income inequality, young men and women were more likely to have their first child before marriage. The areas with the largest income gaps also tended to have the fewest medium-skilled jobs, which researchers define as jobs that only require a high-school diploma but still enable families to live above the poverty level—jobs such as office clerks and security guards. [...]

The impact on women was the most dramatic. Young women living in areas with the greatest inequality were 15 to 27 percent less likely to marry before having a child than women in areas with lower inequality. They also found that in areas where men outnumber women, a women is more likely to get married before having a child. The reasoning for this has more to do with money than love. “This is consistent with the idea that when women are in short supply, they can bargain more effectively for marriage or a partnership prior to childbirth,” the authors write. [...]

He argues that a college degree seems to be a good indicator of the choices millennials will make about getting married or starting a family. His previous research shows that millennials without college degrees are now more likely to have a child without getting married first. Among parents aged 26 to 31 who didn't graduate from college, 74 percent of the mothers and 70 percent of the fathers had at least one child outside of marriage, Cherlin found.

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Salon: How a six-month separation saved our marriage

It wasn’t really that I was unhappy in the initial decades of the marriage, but I wouldn’t have described myself as happy. I really didn’t feel very much of anything; it seemed simply like going through the motions. In many ways there had been an inadvertent trade: identity and career plans for motherhood, the settling for part-time freelance writing instead of the magazine editing career in New York complete with white cat and white shag area rug in a loft studio envisioned by a girl long ago. [...]

My husband and I started talking on the one day a week we saw each other. In the absence of the day-to-day pressures of a marriage, we found common ground. He had begun a relationship with a woman. I was surprised to find myself jealous of her given my own sexual exploits.  We spoke with sadness about the failings of our marriage, the desire we both had to have worked harder to make communication successful. We began couples therapy. We kept connecting on Sundays, and in those Sundays we found that the flame of our marriage had not totally burned out, that the spark we had felt all those decades ago as teenagers was still there. Was it possible it could be reignited? [...]

My “marriage sabbatical” could easily be written off as a mid-life crisis, and probably has all the trappings of such. It certainly didn’t seem that simple at the time. I can’t imagine the track my life would have taken if I had just continued going through the motions, doing the things society expects of us, that we expect of ourselves.

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Los Angeles Times: One thing the polls agree on: Voters don't like their choices

A new Washington Post/ABC News poll, for example, finds 58% of voters are dissatisfied with the choice between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Among those surveyed, 64% had an unfavorable view of Trump, while 54% felt unfavorably toward Clinton.

A new NBC News/Wall St. Journal survey offered a similar verdict: Trump was viewed favorably by 27% of those surveyed and unfavorably by 60%. That net negative rating of -33 points is the worst in the history of the poll.But Clinton's image is only somewhat better: 34% positive, 56% negative.  [...]

Rather than flocking to a third choice, many voters are being driven by negative feelings about the candidate they don't like, more than positive feelings about their own candidate. That's particularly true for Trump, who leads a party still badly divided between his supporters and detractors. [...]

One political figure Americans do like: President Obama. His job approval continues to stay above 50%, at some of the highest levels of his presidency. That has helped buoy Clinton, even as concerns over her handling of classified information in her email while secretary of State have pulled her downward.

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FiveThirtyEight: The End Of A Republican Party

According to the American National Election Studies, the white percentage of the national vote overall has dropped fairly steadily from around 95 percent during the period from 1948 to 1960 to the low 80s by 1992 to 73 percent in 2012. The Republican party did not keep pace with this change, nor did it do much to win younger voters. 2008 featured a gaping chasm between the over-65 vote and the 18- to 29-year-old vote: There was a 43-point difference between how the two groups voted, with the older crowd going for John McCain by 10 percentage points, even as he lost the overall election by a 7-point margin to Barack Obama, the country’s first black president. [...]

Despite its demographic inertia, the Republican Party has not been without its moments of change. The tea party movement, which rose up from the grassroots in 2009, has significantly altered the way the GOP conducts its business. But the party’s “revolution” was led not by young men and women storming the barricades but by the gray-haired masses sitting down in their Adirondack Chairs and fighting to keep things as they have been. According to a 2010 New York Times/CBS News poll of tea party supporters, 75 percent were 45 or older. In keeping with Republican Party trends, the group was also overwhelmingly white, at 89 percent, and only 23 percent had a college degree. [...]

In addition to dissatisfaction with the state of immigration and rounding off what might be called the trifecta of cultural grievance, the FiveThirtyEight/SurveyMonkey poll found that among the top indicators of Trump support were feelings of anger at the country’s direction and a sense that things would be worse for the next generation. [...]

“We have before us the task of trying to create a society of lifelong learners because people’s jobs are going to expire every three years forevermore at a pace that’s going to continue to accelerate. And so what’s the Republican’s Party solution to that? What’s the Democratic Party’s solution to that?” Sasse said. “The Democrats have a really crappy product — they’re trying to sell more central planning and more monopolistic rule of experts in the age of Uber — and Republicans, no one knows what we stand for.”

Yuval Levin, whose recent book, “The Fractured Republic,” tackles this idea of where the Republican Party might go in a more decentralized, economically and demographically diversified country, has made a career out of thinking through what path the party might take, editing the quarterly policy review, National Affairs.

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Politico: Greenpeace covers up Brexit battlebus ‘lies’

The battlebus used by the Leave campaign during the Brexit referendum has been snapped up by Greenpeace, which plans to use it to ask the British government questions about its environmental policies.

The bus, which drove Boris Johnson and other leading Brexiteers around the country, was highly controversial as it claimed that the U.K. sends £350 million a week to the EU. That figure was always hotly debated and was disowned by prominent Leave campaigners, including Nigel Farage, after the referendum.

Greenpeace on Monday parked the double-decker bus outside parliament, saying it was “covering up the bold-faced lie” with “messages of hope.”

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Jacobin Magazine: The Problem With Gun Control

Yet most politicians have shied away from discussing the social and political attitudes shaping homophobia — the actual motivation for the attack. Several members of Congress conducted a theatrical “sit-in” on the House of Representatives floor to push for a bill banning those on the “no-fly” list from purchasing guns, but those same representatives have had little to say on the climate of hate leading up to the massacre. [...]

Nor is violence and discrimination against LGBT people merely a product of individual acts. While the United States proclaims itself to be a bastion of democracy and liberation, over twenty-two states have legalized hate through anti-LGBT laws. More than a hundred anti-LGBT bills have hit legislative houses from local city councils to the United States Senate in recent years, much of it in response to the federal legalization of same-sex marriage in 2015. [...]

The current effort for gun control is also explicitly racialized. The typical mass shooter is a right-wing white man from a Christian background, yet Democrats’ strongest action for gun control has been based on the no-fly list, a racist Bush-era measure that targets Muslims almost exclusively. [...]

Channeling the conversation toward gun control erases, and thus legitimates, violence perpetuated by the police. The rhetoric asking for the banning of assault rifles seems built on the pretense that the police are surrounding our protests with teddy bears and candy, not barricades and the very same assault rifles.

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