Nautilus Magazine: How Your Brain Decides Without You

We form our beliefs based on what comes to us from the world through the window of perception, but then those beliefs act like a lens, focusing on what they want to see. In a New York University psychology laboratory earlier this year, a group of subjects watched a 45-second video clip of a violent struggle between a police officer and an unarmed civilian.3 It was ambiguous as to whether the officer, in trying to handcuff the person resisting arrest, behaved improperly. Before seeing the video, the subjects were asked to express how much identification they felt with police officers as a group. The subjects, whose eye movements were being discretely monitored, were then asked to assign culpability. Not surprisingly, people who identified less strongly with police were more likely to call for stronger punishment. But that was only for people who often looked at the police officer during the video. For those who did not look as much at the officer, their punishment decision was the same whether they identified with police or not. [...]

A recent study by Kara Federmeier and colleagues hints that something similar goes on in our formation of memories.5 They considered the example of someone with a mistaken belief about a political candidate’s policy stance, like when most people incorrectly thought Michael Dukakis, not George Bush, had declared he would be the “education president.” Studying subjects’ brain activity via EEG, they found that people’s “memory signals” were much the same toward the incorrect information as they were toward the things they correctly remembered. Their interpretation of the event had hardened into truth. [...]

None of which bodes well for the idea that policy or other debates can be solved by simply giving people accurate information. As research by Yale University law and psychology professor Dan Kahan has suggested, polarization does not happen with debates like climate change because one side is thinking more analytically, while the other wallows in unreasoned ignorance or heuristic biases.9 Rather, those subjects who tested highest on measures like “cognitive reflection” and scientific literacy were also most likely to display what he calls “ideologically motivated cognition.” They were paying the most attention, seeing the duck they knew was there.

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Vox: 6 questions about Washington, DC, statehood you were too disenfranchised to ask

This November, residents of Washington, DC, will vote on whether the District should become the 51st state.

The initiative is very likely to pass, given that statehood polls very well in DC. But it also very likely won't go into effect: The results aren't legally binding, and the referendum would require congressional approval — something that's almost certainly not going to happen.

Still, DC's lack of statehood affects every single law, even the budget, passed by the DC Council and voters. It also means the roughly 650,000 people living in DC — more than the population of Vermont or Wyoming — don't have full congressional representation, since only states get voting representatives in the US House and Senate.

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The Guardian: ‘I hate this beard. By God, I hate it’: Iraqi men celebrate their freedom by shaving

Isis implemented numerous absurd policies, often claiming their strict rules to be rooted in Islam. These included bans on smoking, watching football and wearing clothes with logos, as well as enforcing compulsory beards for men. [...]

As the Iraqi security forces proceed through Mosul, meeting resistance as they liberate Isis-controlled areas, civilians flee to secured Iraqi internally displaced persons (IDP) camps in order to avoid further conflict. For most of the men in the camps, this freedom means the chance to shave their scruffy, unkempt beards.

To provide for the needs of the IDPs, four young hairdressers from nearby Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan have travelled to the Hassanshama camp, sponsored by the Kurdish media group Rudaw. “I have come here as a volunteer,” says Dyar Stayl, a 25-year-old barber who runs his own shop. “This was illegal in Mosul and we are here to help.”

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Quartz: You probably won’t guess how many women have led countries since the last century

Clinton’s achievement would be a first—for America, that is. While the world is certainly nowhere near gender equality—in political representation, or otherwise—women have been elected to run countries for years, all over the world. With the exclusion of monarchs, over 170 women have been elected, appointed, or acted as heads of state or government in the modern era, beginning with Yevgenia Bosch who, in 1917, briefly functioned as acting leader of the Soviet government of Ukraine. She was followed in 1940 by Khertek Amyrbitovna Anchimaa-Toka of Tuva, a partially recognized state in territories that were once part of imperial Russia. Anchimaa-Toka was the first female head of state in the modern era who had not inherited her title. [...]

Overall in modern history, 77 women have been outright elected to serve as prime ministers, presidents, and, as in the case of Janet Jagan of Guyana, both. American-born, Jagan became prime minister after the death of her husband, the country’s president, in 1997; in the same year, she ran for president, winning the election. Today, 12 countries have a woman as chief executive of the government, commander-in-chief, or both.

The trend also appears encouraging for female leadership. In the 1960s, only three women led countries. The first, Sirimavo Bandaranaike in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) was elected in 1960, followed by India’s Indira Gandhi in 1966 and Israel’s Golda Meir in 1969. By the 1990s, that number was up to 22—and in the 2010s so far it’s already 30.

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CityLab: Berlin's Most Famous Street Will Go Car-Free

In 2019, the very heart of Berlin will go car-free. Following a decision Saturday, Berlin’s Unter den Linden avenue will soon be off limits to all private cars, allowing only buses, taxis, and bikes to ride along its mile’s length.

It’s hard to overstate the symbolic significance of the move. Unter den Linden is the most famous street in Germany, a kind of Teutonic Champs Elysées that contains museums, libraries, monuments, a university, and two opera houses. The East Berlin avenue, whose name means “under/among the linden trees”, used to function as an east-west highway through the city’s heart and was the focus for military parades from the era of Napoleon to that of Gorbachev. Banishing cars from such a central space won’t just remove private motorists from the city’s tourist heart, it suggests a change of heart that could steadily see such traffic increasingly sidelined. [...]

For some, however, it doesn’t go far enough. A writer for the Berliner Zeitung has damned the plan as half-hearted, saying that the city is losing a roadway without actually gaining a new pedestrian zone. Tourist buses and taxis will still prowl the street, while surrounding alternative roads could become even more crowded. This argument seems a little defeatist, but there is a good point lurking in there. If it is going to become a true pleasure, Unter den Linden will need more than a car ban.

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Atlas Obscura: An Illustrated Guide of the World's Weirdest Panics, From A to Z

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The New York Times: What Russia After Putin?

The map of post-Putin Russia might undergo other changes. The country inherited a complicated federal structure from the Soviet Union: It contains 83 republics, regions and administrative districts — or 85, according to Russian law, including annexed Crimea, which alone counts for two — all of them with different formal rights relative to the government in Moscow. Since Mr. Putin took power in 1999, members of the Russian Federation have lost most of their autonomy: They can no longer elect their governors, and they control only a tiny portion of the taxes collected on their territories. But even as Moscow has exerted ever-greater control, the centrifugal pull on the regions has increased.

Parts of the Far East have forged stronger economic ties with China and South Korea, and Moscow has had to expend both brutal force and extravagant investment to keep Chechnya and other republics of the North Caucasus in line. Participants in October’s Free Russia Forum generally took it as a given that in the event of regime change, Moscow’s relationship with the other 82 regions will have to be renegotiated — and that the chances of those negotiations being peaceful, and of Russia retaining its current borders, were slim. [...]

The transition will require a wide-ranging public discussion. But what will be the language of a post-Putin Russia? That is, where will the Russian words for a new country be found? Key concepts have been distorted by misuse and discredited by decades of Soviet and then Putin-era propaganda. “Democrat” has become an insult; “freedom of speech” is invoked to legitimize hate speech even while people are being jailed for expressing their political views. The corruption of language reflects a general lack of trust in democratic mechanisms and widespread dismissal of democratic values.

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Bloomberg: Erdogan Hopes Tough Talk Will Win New Fans

That has led to speculation that Erdogan, fresh from surviving an attempted coup, wants to crown his 14-year rule in Turkey by annexing chunks of its neighbors. But analysts see a more mundane domestic calculation behind the rhetoric: they say the president is really trying to expand his own powers, not his country’s frontiers.

Erdogan still hankers after making his office the focus of all power in Turkey, instead of the largely ceremonial post it was before he took over -- and, on paper, still is. But he doesn’t have support in parliament to make that constitutional change -- and maybe not in the country, either, if it went to a referendum. In both cases, the likeliest bloc of voters to be won over are nationalists who aren’t at all averse to talk of Turkey’s historic claims on nearby lands, or military attacks on Kurdish groups who live there. [...]

Erdogan’s foreign policy has become more assertive since the coup attempt. In August, he sent troops into Syria, where they’re pursuing Islamic State but also clashing with fighters linked to the separatist Kurdish PKK -- the group that’s a main target of Erdogan’s crackdown at home. Its Syrian affiliates have established control over much of that country’s north during five years of civil war, and in doing so, emerged as a favored U.S. fighting force in the ground war against Islamic State. [...]

There are also sectarian allegiances at stake. Erdogan is a Sunni Muslim, like most Turks, and his politics are rooted in religion. He portrays Turkey as the protector of Sunnis in Iraq and Syria who face oppression at the hands of rulers backed by Iran, the region’s main Shiite power. “Erdogan is unhappy -- as would be any Turkish leader, secular, Islamist, you name it -- to see Iran rising,” Cagaptay said.

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Deutsche Welle: French bishops hold day of prayer, fasting for sex abuse victims

French priests and bishops took part in a day of prayer and fasting Monday to plead for forgiveness for the "sexual abuse scandals that have rocked the Catholic Church over the previous months.

Bishop Luc Crepy, who gave the homily during a Mass at the Rosary basilica, said his fellow members of the church will play their part in "this fight against scandalous and criminal actions."

Crepy, who was appointed as the head of a church panel regarding pedophilia earlier this year, announced a series of measures to fight sexual child abuse in the church. "We had to end the guilty silence, which lasted too long, of both the church and wider society and hear the suffering of the victims…we must have the courage to take every measure possible so that the church becomes a safe place," said Crepy.

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