The Atlantic: Why People Fall for Charismatic Leaders

Just to get back to Sara's thing about "voiceless" and "powerless," there was actually an article in The Atlantic that looked at the characteristics of Trump supporters, and although it talked about the usual triad of male, poor, and white, the article said that the two most strong predictions of who supports Trump were not having a college degree and people who feel voiceless and powerless. So that voiceless and powerless trait looks like it aligns with both supporting Trump and being prone to believing in conspiracy theories. [...]

It’s really striking how he lines up with some of these anti-science charismatic leaders on some of the basic characteristics. One of the big things for him is that he’s positioned himself as an outsider and being on the fringes. That actually helps him build up his charisma and his identity as a charismatic leader because it creates a very strong sense of him being able to come in and create a totally different order and a revolution. But it also allows him to create a very strong us-versus-them narrative, in which he can really point to a very large group of people—no matter what party they're in—it's all of the government is against him and against us, the Americans. [...]

 I once heard a speech by Wayne LaPierre, the director of the NRA.  And you could insert almost any cause into that speech, because he almost never actually used the word gun. He talked all about freedoms, fairness, protection, family—you could imagine a far left person talking about their cause putting it in the same words. You’ll very rarely hear Wayne LaPierre talk about the data about whether personal gun ownership is actually safe or not. He’ll talk about, “I’m protecting your freedom.”

And you have the same thing when Trump talks about immigration. He’ll never cite actual data on the number of crimes committed by immigrants vs. non-immigrants. You probably heard if you listened to the VP debate when the moderator said to Pence, "but you know the most recent incidents were all done by American citizens, how do you account for that?" and he ducked that question and went right back to very loaded emotional words — “tragedies occurring to families.”  So what he does is deflect attention away from the data onto these base emotions, and then they tell you, “we’re the only ones who can save you." And if you already feel like you're a person who doesn't have a voice, that's an extremely attractive way to put things. [...]

I think the example we use in the book is in a healthcare setting. So if you have a patient who comes in and says “vaccines cause autism.” There’s a tendency is to just immediately say, "That's not true—here's the data against that, blah, blah, blah.” That really antagonizes the person and actually can backfire and make their beliefs stronger. Which is a little bit frightening. What you could do instead is say, "As I understand it," in a calm measured voice, "Andrew Wakefield argues," and sort of list the arguments out. And if you do that multiple times, people really do start to calm down. They disengage the emotional part of their brain, which frees up space to engage a more rational part of the brain.

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TED Talk: Atheism 2.0 | Alain de Botton

What aspects of religion should atheists (respectfully) adopt? Alain de Botton suggests a "religion for atheists" -- call it Atheism 2.0 -- that incorporates religious forms and traditions to satisfy our human need for connection, ritual and transcendence.

The Daily Beast: The Rise of Hateful Little England

Since then an extraordinary thing has happened. It seems that all along there have been two Johnsons living under the same blond mop. There is Johnson the loyal servant of Little England and then there is Johnson the lover of England’s global hegemony. He told his party’s annual conference, to great applause:

“When I go into the Map Room of Palmerston I cannot help remembering that this country over the last two centuries has directed the invasion or conquest of 178 countries.” [...]

It may be that Johnson’s apparent schizophrenia does actually embody the real tragedy underlying the Little Englander mentality. They dream of the power that subjugated the peoples of 178 countries but they also accept that it can now only ever be a dream. Simultaneously they accept the diminishment of their country’s world role. It is a price worth paying if it preserves the values they believe to be uniquely English—the values that enabled and underpinned the glory of empire. [...]

The London School of Economics is much more than its name implies. For generations it has been an incubator of progressive political and social ideas as well as educating 34 future heads of state and 18 Nobel laureates. Some of its graduates even went on to lead revolutionary movements that ended British rule in the colonies. It was, and is, a symbol of British academic open-mindedness.

Imagine, then, the outrage when May’s government announced that the group of experts who would be advising officials in Johnson’s Foreign Office on the technical details of negotiating British exit from Europe would be purged of anyone who did not have a British passport—even though LSE academics who were not British citizens had already been recruited. [...]

The surge of bigotry in the streets has been evident for some time. What is new is the way it has been made almost respectable by the recent actions of the government. A powerful editorial The Observer newspaper spelt it out. The paper said that ideas are emanating from senior ministers that are “as alarming as they are unpleasant. They carry a gross whiff of xenophobia. They convey an inescapable undertone of racism and intolerance. They are a return to the narrow, delusional world of Little England.”

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CityLab: The Golden Age of Gondolas Might Be Just Around the Corner

The gondola renaissance began, more or less, with Medellín. In 2004, the Colombian city built a gondola to connect one of its sprawling hillside neighborhoods to the trunk line of the Metro, which runs along the fold of the valley. The success of that project inspired the construction of two more lines, which in turn helped make the city an international destination for mayors and urban thinkers, and the winner of the Urban Land Institute’s Innovation City of the Year last month.

Medellín had imitators. In 2007, Portland, Oregon, built a tramway to connect a university campus to downtown. New York City renovated its Roosevelt Island Tram in 2010. In 2009, Manizales, Colombia, installed a gondola system in imitation of Medellin. The next year, Caracas built one; the year after, Rio de Janeiro did too.

Last year, London built an aerial cable crossing the Thames, and in the fall, La Paz announced it will build the world's largest gondola transit network, with eleven stations and over seven miles of cable. The French cities of Brest and Toulouse will complete cable transport in 2015 and 2017, respectively. [...]

And beyond that, according to Assman Ekkehard, a marketing director for Doppelmayr, there was an image problem. "Most people — politicians, the public itself, architects, the people who are doing the plans for cities, traffic specialists — they also had, and still sometimes have this association: ropeways are good for tourists, they're good for bringing people up the mountain, but they're not a good means of transport."

That's beginning to change, Ekkehard believes. "People see cities with ropeways and they see it works," he says. "It’s a very reasonable means of transit – you don’t need a lot of infrastructure. They need very little space. They're very environmentally friendly."

But perhaps more importantly in an era of diminished public funds, they can be built quickly and cheaply.

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Deutsche Welle: Gauck: German president's faith 'irrelevant'

Membership in a Christian church is not a requirement for Germany's head of state, current President Joachim Gauck said in an interview published Friday. The religious affiliation of his successor is "irrelevant," Gauck told Germany's Protestant news agency EPD.

Germany's next head of state could have another religious affiliation - or none at all, Gauck said. Specifically, the outgoing president remarked he did not want to rule out the possibility of a Muslim president for Germany.

One possible choice for the post being discussed is Navid Kermani, a Muslim scholar and writer of Iranian descent. Other possible candidates include the former Protestant Church leaders Wolfgang Huber and Margo Käßmann. The majority of Germany's previous presidents were Protestant, the news agency noted. Käßmann, however, announced Wednesday that she has no intention of running for the presidential post.

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CityLab: Egypt's Government Wants Out of Its Ancient Capital

When the Egyptian government announced plans last year to build a new capital in the desert 28 miles east of Cairo, analysts were skeptical. Not only were the components of the city extravagant—a green space twice the size of Central Park, an airport larger than Heathrow—but the basic idea seemed ludicrous. The Cairo-based urban planner David Sims told the site Africa-Middle East, “Egypt needs a new capital like a hole in the head.” [...]

Sisi is not only aiming to boost Egypt’s flagging economy through the new capital—the government has said, for instance, that the city will generate almost two million jobs—but also to enhance his own legitimacy.

At first, the plan didn’t seem likely to come to fruition, particularly with funding in doubt, despite some pledges from Arab Gulf investors. But now large-scale construction is looking more probable due to a different funding source: China. [...]

China’s financing bolsters its “One Belt, One Road” initiative, which seeks to increase investment and infrastructure along both the land and maritime routes of the old Silk Road, on whose western end Cairo sat. Today, China has become Egypt’s largest trade partner. In addition to the new capital, China is investing in such projects as Egypt’s Suez Canal industrial zone as a way to encourage more Chinese business in the region. Such investment thus serves China’s interests by giving it a stronger foothold in an area in which it aims to expand economically.

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Quartz: Donald Trump’s conspiracy theories are making his supporters paranoid—and dangerous

This is not the first time Trump fans have threatened to take action if their candidate loses in November. Such threats date back to the primaries, when some Trump supporters began telling reporters that they would take up arms and form militias should their racist, sexist hero face defeat. The calls continued into the general election, when they were echoed by Trump advisors like Roger Stone, who proclaimed that there would be a “bloodbath” if Trump loses. On August 1, following a crash in the polls, Trump himself proclaimed that the election was rigged, a claim he has repeated constantly since. [...]

Scholars of authoritarian states have seen this pattern before. Paranoia is not only a trademark of an authoritarian leader, it is a method of movement building—one that is playing out at Trump rallies across the nation. As scholar Jonathan Bach writes, “The more paranoid a ruler becomes, the more essential it is that others share the ruler’s system of delusions and conspiracies … The successful paranoid ruler will make the people share his paranoia, and they will feed on it together.” [...]

What distinguishes Trump from his similarly paranoid predecessors, however, is the changing demography of the United States. As the country becomes less white, an incredible demographic gap has opened up between Trump supporters and everyone else in the US. White men are the only demographic category in which Trump still leads. Non-whites have largely rejected him, and women, especially after the release of the Access Hollywood tape, have largely turned on him as well. In Trump’s view, this is not a natural outcome of a campaign that has consistently insulted non-whites, non-Christians, and women, but a conspiratorial plot. [...]

Trump’s base already believes that a cadre of elites—not only Democrats, but GOP “traitors” as well – is out to get them. Calling for Trump to step down weeks before the election does nothing to counteract that suspicion. Trump dropping out would likely cause more chaos than him staying in (which means, of course, that he may do it.)

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The Atlantic: Trump May Be Finished—But Trumpism Is Just Getting Started

But, ironically, if that sequence of events proves the fatal blow to Trump’s tumultuous candidacy, it may help the ideas and animosities powering his campaign to live on inside the GOP. In other words, the manner of Trump’s political demise may extend the life of Trumpism. [...]

So there’s no question Trump is facing unprecedented friendly fire. But he faced dim odds of victory even before that opposition peaked. In general-election polls all year, Trump has almost never pushed his support past 42 percent. Though he has generated a visceral connection with voters who feel economically and culturally marginalized—particularly non-college-educated, non-urban, and evangelical whites—he has provoked intense antipathy from voters of color and millennials, and is underperforming any previous Republican nominee among college-educated whites, especially women. Even if Trump’s dismal polling this week is a temporary trough, that wall of resistance still looms.

Minorities, millennials, and white-collar whites have been the most likely groups of voters to reject Trump personally as unqualified and temperamentally unfit for the presidency. But in polls they are also most resistant to his insular agenda. Those voters display particular opposition to Trump’s most racially barbed proposals—including his plans for a Mexican border wall and the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, and his evolving proposals to bar Muslims from entering the United States—and are most inclined to view Trump as biased against women and minorities. As a new national survey from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs shows, they are also the most dubious about his protectionism on trade—and most likely to view greater global economic integration as benefiting both the country overall and their own living standards.

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Quartz: The New York Public Library has adopted a very unusual sorting system

Four million books are stored underneath New York City’s Bryant Park. Twenty-seven feet below the grassy patch in mid-town Manhattan are miles and miles of bookshelves at the New York Public Library’s (NYPL) newly expanded Milstein Research Stacks.

So many, many books has made storage a challenge for the 105-year old institution. When New Yorkers vehemently opposed the idea of shipping three million books to an off-site facility in New Jersey, administrators not only had to consider how to expand the library’s in-house storage facility but totally rethink the way it physically stores its collection.

To maximize space, the NYPL is now storing its collection based on a book’s physical dimensions instead of shelving them based on where they fall in the Dewey Decimal System. This means that Religion and Innovation: Antagonists or Partners? which measures roughly 6 x 9 in. would be placed next to the recipe book Oyster: A Gastronomic History which measures 7 x 9 in. “Content, color [of the cover]—it doesn’t matter. It’s all based on size,” explains Gerry Oliva, the NYPL’s head of facilities who gave Quartz a tour of the underground stacks–which are not open to the public–and the library’s newly refurbished reading room.

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