20 July 2016
The New Yorker: What Happened to the Ice Bucket Challenge?
All these critiques had the same underlying theme: the faddishness of the challenge undermined its value. This makes intuitive sense, but is it true? Actually, no. Silly though the Ice Bucket Challenge may seem now, it had far-reaching effects. It raised a reported two hundred and twenty million dollars worldwide for A.L.S. organizations; in just eight weeks, the American A.L.S. Association received thirteen times as much in contributions as what it had in the whole of the preceding year. Public awareness rose: the challenge was the fifth most popular Google search for all of 2014. Brian Fredrick, the vice-president for communications and development at the A.L.S. Association, told me, “The challenge suddenly made a lot of people who probably didn’t even know who Lou Gehrig was aware of the disease. It really changed the face of A.L.S. forever.” [...]
If the success of the challenge had come at the expense of other charities, ambivalence might be justified. But there’s almost no evidence that this was the case. According to Giving U.S.A., individual donations in the U.S. rose almost six per cent in 2014, which doesn’t suggest any cannibalization effect. Indeed, it’s likely that the very nature of the challenge, which belongs to a category known to anthropologists as “extreme ritual,” made people more openhanded. Dimitris Xygalatas, an anthropologist at the University of Connecticut who has studied the effects of such rituals, ran a fascinating experiment with people who were undergoing kavadi—a Hindu ritual that commonly involves piercing the skin with sharp objects and then making a long procession while carrying heavy objects. Xygalatas found that people who did kavadi, and even people who just joined in the procession, donated more to charity than people in a control group. And those who gave the most painful descriptions of the experience donated the most. As a result, Xygalatas has suggested that the Ice Bucket Challenge, far from stealing from other charities, almost certainly increased the total size of the pie.
The Atlantic: Erdogan’s Final Agenda
But maybe more importantly, the coup failed because Erdogan won the information battle on two fronts. The putschists staged a “1980s-style” coup, Cagaptay told me, proclaiming their takeover on the public broadcaster TRT, which isn’t widely watched in Turkey these days. “Erdogan goes on his smartphone, does a FaceTime interview, puts it on social media, millions saw it,” Cagaptay said. “It was a victory of digital over analog, in terms of communications styles.” (Turkish cellphone-service providers reportedly ramped up call, text, and data packages during the tumult.) [...]
Around the same time, according to Cagaptay, Erdogan urged imams to mobilize people as well, likely through communications channels maintained by the government’s religious-affairs directorate, which runs and funds Turkey’s 80,000 mosques. Mosque loudspeakers began issuing the call to prayer at an ungodly hour. “It would be the equivalent of church bells suddenly starting to toll all over the United States at 1:15 AM, and ringing for hours,” Cagaptay said. Erdogan was asking his political base, which includes many Islamists, to “flood the country.” The Wall Street Journal reports that Mehmet Gormez, the head of the religious directorate, “ordered thousands of imams to recite prayers known as ‘sela,’ ordinarily reserved for funerals and special religious occasions. When issued at other times, the prayers act as a call to arms for the Islamic community.” Within hours, people were clambering on top of tanks. The coup was a husk of its former self. [...]
The more likely scenario is that Erdogan capitalizes on his post-coup support to push constitutional amendments through parliament that change Turkey from a parliamentary system to a presidential one, with Erdogan at the helm. (Erdogan became president in 2014 after serving the limit of three terms as prime minister, though he has remained Turkey’s de facto leader even when occupying the ostensibly ceremonial presidential office.) This approach would be in keeping with Erdogan’s “pragmatic, gradualist” style, Cagaptay said. Erdogan has already amassed a great deal of power, Cagaptay noted, but he’s done so over 13 years, unlike Mohamed Morsi, the Islamist leader and former Egyptian president, who tried to consolidate authority all at once and was overthrown in a military coup as a result. [...]
All this is hard to stomach for Cagaptay, who just two years ago wrote a book titled, The Rise of Turkey: The Twenty-First Century’s First Muslim Power. Erdogan, he noted, has improved living standards in Turkey and fashioned Turkey into a middle-income country. But he never healed Turkish society’s most problematic schisms—between religious and secular Turks, between the government and the Kurds. In fact, those schisms have only grown more pronounced. Erdogan, Cagaptay told me, “is going to go down in history as the guy who transformed Turkey economically, and either messed it up politically or almost messed it up politically.”
The Atlantic: The Return of American Hunger
And yet, when it comes to the number of Americans who go hungry, it’s almost like the recovery never happened. The U.S. Department of Agriculture defines food security as "access by all people at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life,” and in 2006, the year before the housing market stumbled, the USDA estimated that fewer than 10.9 percent of American households were food insecure. By 2009, that figure had spiked to 14.7 percent. And now? As of 2014, the most recent year on record, 14 percent of all American households are not food secure. That’s approximately 17.4 million homes across the United States, populated with more than 48 million hungry people. By the time the USDA reports its 2016 figures in September 2017, new food-stamp restrictions could make that number higher. [...]
As a result, in one of the richest countries that has ever existed, about 15 percent of the population faces down bare cupboards and empty refrigerators on a routine basis. That fact alone meets any reasonable definition of the word “crisis,” but it is rarely treated like one. In a lot of states, benign neglect is the most that hungry Americans can expect from their government. What they get instead is usually worse: new restrictions on food-stamp eligibility, in the form of a reimposition of work requirements, mandatory drug testing, and so on. [...]
The Farm Bill and its fallout epitomize post-recession hunger policy. In the face of widespread hunger and federal budget cuts, some states try to mitigate the crisis with whatever policy levers are available. Meanwhile, others do nothing—or worse. For now, at least, state-level food-stamp policies range from inadequate to disastrous.
My Modern Met: Monumental 1,320-Ton Sculpture of Chinese War God Watches Over the City
An enormous, commanding 1,320-ton sculpture of the Chinese god of war, Guan Yu, was unveiled on July 11th in China’s Hubei province in Jingzhou city. Guan Yu, was a Chinese military general who had tremendous martial prowess during his time, and was deified as a god of war after his death. He is also an epitome of loyalty and righteousness.
Guan Yu lived during a restless period in Chinese history known as the Three Kingdoms, and is often depicted holding his “reclining moon blade” named the Green Dragon Crescent Blade, which he wielded against his enemies and was said to weigh an impressive 40 lbs (18.25 kg).
A sight to behold, the entire sculpture stands at just over 190 feet (58 meters) tall, seeming to watch over the city and its residents. Over 4,000 strips of bronze were glued over the sculpture, and Guan Yu is portrayed as a fearless warrior who is ready for battle, proudly posed atop his pedestal which was modeled after a warship. Curious visitors can enter the pedestal and visit the Guan Yu Museum which is housed inside.
The Guardian: Boris Johnson grilled over past ‘outright lies’ at uneasy press conference
Boris Johnson was embarrassingly forced on to the back foot during his first London press conference as foreign secretary on Tuesday as he was repeatedly pressed to explain his past “outright lies” and insults about world leaders, including describing the US president as part-Kenyan and hypocritical.
Standing alongside John Kerry, the US secretary of state, Johnson claimed his remarks had been misconstrued, that his past journalism had been taken out of context, and world leaders he had met since his appointment fully understood his past remarks. [...]
The event was probably Johnson’s bumpiest ride since his appointment as foreign secretary less than a week ago, although he was booed by a section of the audience after speaking at the French ambassador’s party on Bastille Day.
Pressed by an American reporter on a series of remarks he had made about world leaders, Johnson was asked whether he wanted to apologise or instead take them with him as foreign secretary. He joked that it would take “too long” to issue an apology for all the things he had written.
VICE: How Scotland Could Ruin Theresa May's Career as British Prime Minster
When David Cameron arrived in power in May 2010, one of his first actions was to jump up to the Scottish parliament for a chat with then first minister Alex Salmond. A new "agenda of respect" with Scotland was to be established, Cameron promised, as he committed to making the UK work for all of its different nations and regions.
And so to 2016: David Cameron has just resigned, UK politics are a total mess, and the country is as divided as ever. His three-days-into-the job successor, Theresa May, followed his example and came up to Scotland for talks on Friday with First Minister Nicola Sturgeon. Symbolically, it was May's first official visit as prime minister. The concerns of Scotland will be listened to, May promised, as she committed to working for "all parts of the United Kingdom and for all people." Her words sounded vaguely familiar, but the context couldn't be more different from six years ago. [...]
The two manic days after the referendum saw some of the last remaining bastions of Labour Scotland—namely Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling and the Daily Record newspaper—indicate a new acceptance of independence in the changed climate. Given that Rowling donated around $1.33 million to the No campaign last time and the Record is public enemy number one as far cybernats are concerned, this was pretty big news. Independence supporters are hoping this trend will continue, keenly aware that some of the areas that delivered the strongest Remain vote in June, including Edinburgh, voted heavily for No in 2014. Post-Brexit polls are now placing support for independence at more than 50 percent—maybe not quite safe enough ground for another referendum yet, but unprecedented nonetheless.
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