The New Yorker: Brazil After Dilma Rousseff

A majority of Brazilians had wanted Rousseff out, but few in the country appear to fully grasp the technical grounds for her impeachment: she was convicted of breaking budgetary laws by decreeing minor outlays without congressional approval and delaying payments to state banks. In practice, the impeachment trial served as a vote of no confidence in a President who had led the country into its longest recession in decades. The party she belongs to, the left-leaning Workers’ Party, had also been implicated in a corruption scheme that funnelled billions of dollars into political campaigns and offshore bank accounts during its thirteen years in power. The irony here is that many of the lawmakers who voted for Rousseff’s impeachment are themselves suspects in the scheme. [...]

In framing herself as a tragic hero fighting for the poor, Rousseff elided her own party’s pragmatic deal-making with Brazil’s corrupt establishment. She also underplayed the gravity of her budget maneuvers, which covered up a gaping deficit while she ran for reëlection, in 2014, in a campaign allegedly funded with bribe money. But questions about the process used to impeach her resonated with many Brazilians. According to one survey, only forty-nine per cent of Brazilians believe that the impeachment proceedings obeyed constitutional norms. This contrasts sharply with the broad consensus behind the last impeachment, in 1992, when Fernando Collor de Mello was forced from office amid allegations of personal enrichment. He later returned to political life, as a senator, and this week he voted for Rousseff’s impeachment—a typical twist in Brazilian politics. [...]

Another omission: not once in his first address in office did Temer speak about corruption. For Temer, this made sense. Rousseff’s downfall began when a task force leading an investigation known as Lava Jato (Car Wash) uncovered a scheme to siphon off billions from the state oil company, and Temer’s own P.M.D.B. was soon identified as the Workers’ Party’s main partner in the scheme. For a while, in the mass demonstrations calling for Rousseff’s impeachment, many protesters vowed to keep marching until they brought Temer down, too. But, for now at least, those pledges appear to have faded—even as fresh revelations raise new questions about Temer and high-ranking figures in his new administration. According to the plea-bargain testimony of a construction tycoon, for instance, Temer was the beneficiary of some three hundred thousand dollars skimmed from a nuclear-energy contract. (Temer has denied the accusation.)

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The Atlantic: Apeirophobia: The Fear of Eternity

Woody Allen once said, “Eternity is a very long time, especially toward the end!” Eternity sounds great on the surface, but actually experiencing it may be an entirely different matter. For some people, the very notion of infinity sends chills up the spine. In fact, for many who suffer from “apeirophobia”—a term for the fear of eternity—the thought of an existence that goes on forever amounts to torture. [...]

Despite all this discussion, there is so little research on apeirophobia that it lacks its own Wikipedia entry. It is not explicitly recognized by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the American Psychiatric Association’s standard reference for psychiatry, but it does meet their criteria for a “specific phobia,” which is classified as an anxiety disorder. It is included on many sites with informal phobia lists, but it is absent from the websites of the Mayo Clinic and the National Institute of Mental Health, as well as WebMD. A Google Scholar search doesn’t yield a single quantitative study on the phobia. [...]

Martin Wiener, a former colleague of mine at George Mason University who researches the neural underpinnings of time perception, notes that the brain region hypothesized to control long-term planning, the frontal lobe, is one of the last to develop in humans as they grow. “In adolescence, there is a dawning realization that occurs where one realizes they will become an adult,” Wiener says. “I suspect that, in apeirophobia, one comes to the ‘realization’ that after death you will live forever (if you believe this), and in simulating that experience in your mind, one realizes that there is no way to project ahead to ‘forever’—and that experience is, inherently, anxiety-provoking. As such, the anxiety that these folks are feeling may not be much different than the fear of growing up, getting old, or death.” [...]

“Terror Management Theory, which is derived from Ernest Becker’s 1973 Pulitzer Prize-winning work of philosophy and psychology The Denial of Death, essentially says people in modern civilization are all walking around in denial of our mortality—and that culture, religion, and entertainment all exist for the purpose of distraction,” Wiener explains. “The idea is that these things keep us from thinking about our own deaths, and that systematically, people are repressing this fear. The fear of eternity could just be that same fear manifesting itself in a different way.”

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Quartz: The biggest mistakes people make when choosing a life partner

And at first glance, research seems to back this up, suggesting that married people are on average happier than single people and much happier than divorced people. But a closer analysis reveals that if you split up “married people” into two groups based on marriage quality, “people in self-assessed poor marriages are fairly miserable, and much less happy than unmarried people, and people in self-assessed good marriages are even more happy than the literature reports.” [...]

Studies have shown people to be generally bad, when single, at predicting what later turn out to be their actual relationship preferences. One study found that speed daters questioned about their relationship preferences usually prove themselves wrong just minutes later with what they show to prefer in the actual event.

This shouldn’t be a surprise—in life, you usually don’t get good at something until you’ve done it a bunch of times. Unfortunately, not many people have a chance to be in more than a few, if any, serious relationships before they make their big decision. There’s just not enough time. And given that a person’s partnership persona and relationship needs are often quite different from the way they are as a single person, it’s hard as a single person to really know what you want or need from a relationship. [...]

In other words, people end up picking from whatever pool of options they have, no matter how poorly matched they might be to those candidates. The obvious conclusion to draw here is that outside of serious socialites, everyone looking for a life partner should be doing a lot of online dating, speed dating, and other systems created to broaden the candidate pool in an intelligent way. [...]

uman biology evolved a long time ago and doesn’t understand the concept of having a deep connection with a life partner for 50 years.

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BBC4 Beyond Belief: Hair

A person's hair is one of the few visible indicators we might have about their religion. A long beard, for example, can be a powerful symbol of devotion for many Muslims, Jews and Christians. In Orthodox Jewish communities, married women wear a wig or hat rather than expose their hair in public. Sikhs consider hair to be so special that it can't ever be cut. Some of these practices are based on rules written in texts from long ago. So what is their relevance today? Why do some communities continue to hold on these rituals? Are they on the increase or in decline in British society?

Ernie Rea discusses the connection between hair and religious belief with Dr Christopher Oldstone-Moore, author of "Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair"' Dr Jasjit Singh, an expert in religious and cultural identity from the University of Leeds; and Rabbi Dr Barbara Borts, a Reform Rabbi and expert on women and Judaism.

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The Telegraph: Meet the cat who rescued a tourist lost in the Swiss Alps

The Reddit user, known only as sc4s2cg, happened upon the black and white cat when exploring the Bernese Oberland. He was unsure how to get back to his hostel after finding that the only trail back had been closed.

“[The cat] was just wandering around, [then] found me while I was resting from a hike,” the traveller said.

“Then he was walking and kept looking at me to follow [and] led me straight to the path that would take me back down to the valley.”

The man filmed his adventures with the moggy, uploading the video onto YouTube with English subtitles showing the meeting with the cat that saved him from a cold night in the hills.

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