BBC4 A Point of View: Finding Our Roots

Will Self reflects on the joys of genealogy - truffling in census returns and parish records and establishing "our genuine links to multiple generations of nonentities"!

"As a passionate Londoner", he writes, "I wanted to establish when the first Self had arrived in the city".

Entire family sagas, he says, are today vanishing into thin air, in an era of nuclear families. Gone are those generations of extended families where over a cup of tea, the same old stories were told about the same old relatives.

listen to the podcast

VICE: This Man Had Sex with 365 Men in 365 Days, for Art

Two years ago, Mischa Badasyan, a Russian-born, Berlin-based performance artist, set himself a challenge: to organize a date every day for a year. More importantly, he forced himself to have sex every day, whether with that date or not. While it may sound like a convenient way to live out a fantasy, for Badasyan, the project—titled Save the Date—was often a harrowing experience.

The concept made for easy headlines, and Badasyan received a slew of American media attention at its outset, both positive and critical. (I wrote about his project for Mic at the time.) But none of those outlets have followed up with Badasyan since its end. One year later, having had a chance to reflect, what may be more interesting is how it has changed him. The 28-year-old, who had not previously been in a relationship, says he now may never be in a serious relationship ever. [...]

Badasyan was also aware of the similarity of his work—which was becoming an occupation—to that of sex workers. He began interviewing people on Kurfuerstenstrasse, in the red light district of Berlin, and having sexual encounters with escorts there. Eventually he started working there as a sex worker himself, though he didn't take money. [...]

Other artists have painted his portrait. An undergraduate thesis was written about him. One dancer in Los Angeles, Kevin Lopez, created a piece inspired by Save the Date and then visited Berlin to be one of Badasyan's dates.

read the article 

Business Insider: Putin has 2 major problems

Removing that many governors is a bit odd. Replacing them with bodyguards is very odd. Then removing someone like Ivanov is extremely odd. [...]

I have already written about how Russia’s economy has been in free-fall since oil prices dropped. Russia recently released its Q2 GDP estimate that showed a slowing in economic contraction. That is good news, in a way.

The second problem is Putin’s failure in Ukraine. The West sees him as the aggressor, and he was. Yet, the tale began with Western-backed protesters ousting a pro-Russian government and replacing it with a pro-Western one. [...]

Further, Putin would replace former key players with people who never dreamed of attaining such a high rank. They know that if anything happened to Putin, they would be return to the cold.

That explains the firings and replacements. I think that Putin knows there is a threat but is uncertain of its origin. His actions are a way to declare that he knows more than he actually does. [...]

The coup in Turkey—and Erdoğan’s apology for the downing of a Russian jet—opened the door for him. A strategic alliance with Turkey would disrupt the American containment policy and allow Russian influence in the Middle East to surge.

Putin needs to convince Erdoğan to enter into an alliance. As a down payment, he offered Armenia’s national interests. I doubt that Erdoğan is buying, but he will use it to extract concessions from the Americans.

read the article 

The Atlantic: Ukraine's Bittersweet Independence Day

As these European spaces have sprung up, Ukraine’s old Russian place names have begun to disappear, swept away by the surge of nationalism that accompanied the events of 2014, which also paved the way for a concerted decommunization campaign to rid the nation of its Soviet trappings. Twenty-eight towns and 800 villages are being renamed, not to mention countless streets and squares; once again, after centuries of being shunted between powers, ideologies, and languages, Ukraine’s political and lexicographical makeup is under revision. [...]

2016 is a year of anniversaries for Ukraine, not all joyous: April marked the 30 years since the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and September marks the 75th anniversary of the Nazi massacre at Babi Yar. It has been two years since Russia launched its surreptitious invasion of Eastern Ukraine. It is also the 25th anniversary of the failed Soviet coup of August 1991, an event that precipitated independence movements in Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, and the Baltics, but passed without much ceremony in Moscow last week. [...]

In some ways, Ukrainians now enjoy more freedom than ever. They have been promised continued military aid from the United States and, eventually, visa-free travel to the European Union. With Western support, the country has been able, thus far, to avoid complete financial collapse. The “Ukrainian gaze” in much of the country is turned steadfastly toward Europe. [...]

On the other hand, there are thousands of displaced, impoverished, injured, and ill Ukrainians suffering from the depleted currency, dearth of goods, and blockades preventing medical supplies from reaching occupied territories in the east of the country. The city’s speakeasies and high-end restaurants are places “for people who seem to live in another country,” and probably do, as Sergiy Solodkyy, first deputy director of Ukraine’s Institute of World Policy, put it. Ukrainians whose savings evaporated overnight walk past these (often half-empty) businesses with understandable frustration at their country’s slow pace of reforms and a sense that the EU, preoccupied with other problems, has abandoned them. It can be difficult for Ukrainians to understand why the EU isn’t doing more in their nation.

read the article 

Al Jazeera: The Trump Takeover

Beyond Trump's questionable conservative values, he has also raised concerns because of his often violent rhetoric, particularly towards immigrants and non-white communities.

"This message of economic anxiety, this message of ethnic scapegoating, those two things being this confluence that provides a real spark for potential violence in American society, I don't think anybody can take that light," says Jelani Cobb, a writer for The New Yorker.

How did the billionaire businessman manage to rise from reality TV star to presidential nominee? How did he get so far? And what does his nomination mean for the GOP and the country?

watch the video

The Atlantic: Millennials: The Mobile and the Stuck

In the aftermath of the recession and weak recovery, the share of 18- to- 34 year olds—a.k.a.: Millennials—who own a home has fallen to a 30-year low. For the first time on record going back more than a century, young people are now more likely to live with their parents than with a spouse. [...]

On the first track, there are high-achieving students, who disproportionately come from richer districts. This group is more likely to move away to go to college and then settle in one of a handful of dense cities, where they delay buying a house (and delay starting a family) in order to rent throughout their 20s and focus on their careers. For example, about half of college graduates are working outside their state of birth by the age of 35. This group is also mostly white. They are the supermobile: ambitious, devoted to their professional lives, and comfortable with a life path that has them getting married in their late twenties-to-mid-thirties. [...]

The primary reason that the U.S. now has a record-high number of 18-to-34 year olds living with their parents is not because some rich white twentysomethings are taking a year after graduation to save money. It is because black and Hispanic Millennials who didn’t go to college, or did not finish college, are more likely to live with their parents than any time since the late 1800s.

read the article 

The Atlantic: An Epochal Discovery: A Habitable Planet Orbits Our Neighboring Star

The dim red star soon entered the collective imagination, inspiring dreams of interstellar travel. Gravity has linked the star to the Alpha Centauri system, but our culture of science and storytelling has linked it to the solar system. Today, that link will grow stronger, when an international team of astronomers announces that this nearest of stars also hosts the closest exoplanet, one that might look a whole lot like Earth.

No one will ever find a closer alien world than this. This is it. No other faint, cool stars lurk in the abyss between the Alpha Centauri system and our solar system. In a way, the first discovery of a possibly habitable planet in our backyard is also a final discovery. In the hunt for our cosmic neighbors, this planet is as good as it gets.

For now, the planet is unceremoniously called Proxima Centauri b. It zips around its namesake star every 11.2 days, and is likely locked in place—like the moon, which always shows the same face to Earth. It’s at least 1.3 times as massive as our planet, and based on its likely size, astronomers think it is rocky. Its home star is only .15 percent as bright as the sun, so the planet isn’t as scorched as you might expect, given its tight orbit. Instead, it circles around in a sweet spot that might allow for liquid water on its surface. “It’s in about the same position in the habitable zone of Proxima as the Earth is in the habitable zone around the sun,” says James Kasting, an astronomer at Penn State who was not involved in the new finding.

read the article 

The Guardian: US warns Europe over plan to demand millions in unpaid taxes from Apple

The US has warned the European commission that it will consider retaliating if Brussels goes ahead with plans to demand billions of dollars in unpaid taxes from Apple and other US multinational companies.

The Obama administration warned the EU on Wednesday that its investigations into alleged tax avoidance by US firms, including Apple, Amazon and Starbucks, could “create an unfortunate international tax policy precedent”. [...]

A US Senate investigation in 2013 found that Apple paid little or no tax on profits of at least $74bn over four years by exploiting gaps in the Irish and American tax code. The investigation found no evidence of illegal activity and both Apple and Ireland deny any wrongdoing.

read the article 

NBC News: Dream Team of Historians Proposed to Advise U.S. President

Professors Graham Allison and Niall Ferguson are calling on the next U.S. president to create a Council of Historical Advisers that would tackle present problems by looking to the past.

Trying to take down a terrorist group? The council would scour historical records to find similar groups, and then analyze which strategies worked against them.

Facing a financial crisis? The council would glean lessons from past meltdowns and report their findings to the president.

"I think there would be more than enough work for a council of applied historians," said Allison, a professor of government and director of Harvard's Belfer Center, a university think tank.

read the article