Jacobin Magazine: Passing the Baton

It’s an apparatus that was built by both parties. George W. Bush massively expanded the system after the September 11 attacks, taking measures that were at the time viewed as extreme and unprecedented. But Obama’s ready acceptance and expansion of this national security state upon coming to power has helped entrench it, while also making it more powerful than Dick Cheney’s wildest dreams. Now it’s in Trump’s hands. [...]

Anyone willing to trust President Obama with the power to secretly declare an American citizen an enemy of the state and order his extrajudicial killing should ask whether they would be willing to trust the next president with that dangerous power. [...]

Some were. After all, back in 2012, when the prospect of Mitt Romney becoming president was looming, the Obama administration rushed to establish rules around its totally lawless and oversight-free drone program in case he won. After Romney lost the election, these efforts again took a back seat. [...]

The targets for assassination appear to be currently determined through a process of intelligence gathering, then sent up the chain to be approved for killing. However, with no real oversight or legal limits on the program, it’s hard to see what would legally prevent President Trump from ordering the assassination of anyone he chooses. [...]

And in 2013, Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder declared that this power of extra-judicial assassination even extended to US soil. While “entirely hypothetical” and “unlikely to occur,” he wrote in a letter to Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, “it is possible, I suppose, to imagine an extraordinary circumstance in which it would be necessary and appropriate … for the president to authorize the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States.”

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The Conversation: Why we’re more likely to date someone who has an ex

Research has found people with relationship experience, all else being equal, tend to be more romantically desirable than people without relationship experience. In other words, people are attracted to others who have already been “pre-selected” (or pre-approved). We call this phenomenon “mate copying”. [...]

Women, however, are generally attracted to less observable characteristics (social dominance, kindness). Where men can get a fair bit of mate-relevant information from simple observation of a potential partner, women can’t, and are encouraged to look for additional information. One cheap source is knowing what other women think of a man, specifically, whether or not he is considered a good romantic prospect.

While some researchers have found evidence of mate copying in men, there is a fair bit of literature suggesting the phenomenon is quite a bit stronger among women. [...]

However, evidence doesn’t support the idea married men are more desirable than single men. A big reason for this is married individuals are so much harder to attract and/or date than single individuals. Also, there are some strong moral proscriptions against pursuing a married person.

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The Atlantic: How to Get Better at Expressing Emotions

Part of that is expressing emotions, be it through writing, body language, or talking with other people, and researchers are finding that unlatching the cage and letting those emotional birds fly free could have some real health benefits. Some studies have linked the repression of negative emotions to increased stress, and research suggests that writing about feelings is associated with better health outcomes for breast-cancer patients, people with asthma, and people who’ve experienced a traumatic event. And in a study of people who lived to be 100 years old, emotional expression was found to be a common trait, along with a positive attitude towards life, among the long-lived. [...]

I spoke with the psychologist David Caruso, who is a co-founder of the Emotional Intelligence Skills Group (not the actor with the sunglasses from CSI: Miami), and who trains organizations and schools on emotional intelligence, about overcoming personal and cultural barriers to expressing emotions. [...]

American culture demands that the answer to the question "How are you?" is not just “Good,” but sometimes “Great.” Or—this drives folks around the world crazy, who might be based in another country but they work for an American company—we need to be “Awesome.” There's this relentless drive to mask the expression of our true underlying feelings. It's almost inappropriate. [...]

Caruso: I will now have people tell me, “Oh, David, have you seen Inside Out? Because don't you know that even sadness and even anger can be [helpful]?” It's really made my job so much easier.

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Social Europe: The Populist War On Women

For nearly two decades, Poles believed that the country’s abortion laws could not be changed, owing to the power of the Catholic Church and the subordination of the political class to religious authorities. But the actress Krystyna Janda, who starred in Andrzej Wajda’s film Man of Iron, called on Polish women to launch a general strike. On October 3, instead of going to work, women across the country turned out to protest, following a model established by Iceland’s women in 1975, when 90% did not go to work and effectively paralyzed the country.

The demonstrations occurred even in small towns, and despite dismal weather. Women also congregated outside PiS headquarters, the true seat of power in Polish politics. In solidarity with Polish women, women from Kenya to Berlin took to the streets dressed in black.

For the first time since PiS’s return to power last year, Kaczyński was frightened. The next day, he had his party vote to reject the anti-abortion proposal. Never before had he acted in a similar manner. [...]

And yet neither Trump nor Kaczyński seems willing – or perhaps able – to reverse course. After withdrawing his support for the Ordo Iuris proposal, Kaczyński couldn’t leave the issue alone. “We will strive to ensure that even pregnancies that are very difficult, when the child is doomed to die or is seriously deformed, are brought to term so that the child can be baptized, buried, and given a name,” he announced on October 13. Women held another general strike on October 24.

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The Atlantic: How Many Photographs of You Are Out There In the World?

And those are just numbers from a handful of social-media companies. Weibo, What’sApp, Tumblr, Twitter, Flickr, and Instagram all add to the pile. In 2014, according to Mary Meeker’s annual Internet Trends report, people uploaded an average of 1.8 billion digital images every single day. That’s 657 billion photos per year. Another way to think about it: Every two minutes, humans take more photos than ever existed in total 150 years ago. [...]

After all, that 657 billion number is just photos that were uploaded online, not ones that are stored on someone’s computer. It also doesn’t include security cameras, or closed-circuit systems, or body-worn camera footage, or aerial-drone shots. The United Kingdom has 6 million surveillance cameras in service. According to CrimeFeed.com, the average American is caught on camera 75 time a day. Some of that footage is stored and backed up, while some of it is lost immediately. There’s a channel on my television that broadcasts traffic cameras across the city, including one at Times Square, where there are always people who probably have no idea I’m watching them in my living room. There’s a livestream of Abbey Road. And real-time footage of Piazza di Spagna, one of the famous public squares in Rome. [...]

Schoenebeck studies how parents and teens relate to digital photos—she looks at things like moms posting baby-photos online, and how teenagers feel about their earlier selves immortalized in digital images on Facebook. She and Hand both talked about how teens today take a lot of care in the photos they post. Instead of dumping all 30 photos they took at the Eiffel Tower into a Facebook album, they’ll post two. Their relationship with photos isn’t one of personal memory, but rather of public identity. Hand describes the thinking: “Of course you take images in order to distribute them, that’s what they’re for.”

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Salon: It’s high time: If we can legalize marijuana, why can’t we end the misguided War on Drugs?

On Election Day, my home state of California voted to legalize recreational cannabis, as did Massachusetts, Maine and Nevada. So the 2016 elections represented a substantial victory for the legalization movement, which has managed to pass referendums in seven states. With 57 percent of the country now supporting marijuana legalization, according to Pew, it seems likely there will be a nationwide victory sometime in the next few years. However, the War on Drugs is far from over. [...]

Researchers in Switzerland found in 2014 that LSD can be helpful for patients dealing with end-of-life anxiety related to a terminal illness. The same sort of conclusion has been drawn for psilocybin. Psilocybin has also proven useful for treating severe depression. MDMA has shown great promise for treating PTSD, when used alongside psychotherapy. All of the drugs remain illegal in the United States, and there has been little effort to change that.

Let’s not stop there, though. The War on Drugs has cost America well over $1 trillion since it began under Richard Nixon. This war has been the main cause of our country’s mass incarceration problem. As it is often noted, we have 5 percent of the world’s population and roughly 25 percent of its prisoners. You cannot have a War on Drugs, you can only have a war on people. As Gore Vidal famously used to say of the War on Terror, you cannot have a war on a noun, as that is like saying you’re at war with dandruff. Too many can’t get jobs because of criminal records or lose decades of their lives over small offenses.

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CityLab: Why the Trip Back Always Feels Shorter

We’ve all felt it before: for whatever reason, the trip coming home seemed a lot quicker than the trip going there. This isn’t just you losing your already tenuous grip on reality; on the contrary, several studies have confirmed the existence of what researchers call the “return trip effect.” Even when travel distance and time are the same there and back, the back feels measurably shorter.

Exactly why this effect occurs is a source of ongoing inquiry. Eryn Brown at the L.A. Times reports on a new study in PLOS One offering one potential explanation: it’s not that we’re bad at judging how long a trip is taking, it’s that we’re bad at remembering how long it took. That’s what the researchers found when asking study participants to watch a video of a round-trip then asking them to judge its length in real-time and retrospectively.

The study does support the basic “return trip effect,” but its methods and reasoning are unconvincing. The sample size was woefully small, at 20 participants. The researchers assumed we have to travel the exact same route there and back to feel the effect, which isn’t necessarily true. And their conclusion was flat: even if people recall return trips poorly, the question of why they have this particular memory failure still remains.

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Political Critique: Tens of thousands in nationalist march in Warsaw

In the last years, 11 November has become the biggest annual event for nationalists and supporters of the extreme right in Poland. According to estimates, around 60 000 people marched with torches and smoke bombs, shouting nationalist, anti-refugee, anti-European, and anti-Semitic slogans through the streets of Warsaw. Although the ruling Law and Justice party did not officialy take part, President Duda sent a letter to the demonstrating nationalists in which he praised patriotic values. An alternative march was organized also by the Committee for the Defense of Democracy (KOD), an umbrella organization bringing together the liberal opposition, which declared a pro-European orientation and criticised the government. Later in the afternoon, over 1000 people gathered at an anti-fascist demonstration, organised by anarchist organizations and the Razem party, in order to protest against nationalism, racism, and xenophobia and in support of openness and solidarity.

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Nautilus Magazine: You Can Have Emotions You Don’t Feel

But emotions are complicated things. Even if we do feel an emotion, there are parts associated with it that we aren’t usually aware of. Clinical psychologists, for example, recommend to patients with anger issues to look out for the warning signs—sweating in the palms, for example, or clenching of the jaws—so they can perhaps mitigate upcoming rage. And when we are frightened, or sexually aroused, our heart and breathing rates increase often without our notice (though we can recognize the change if its pointed out). What’s more, fear seems capable of covertly heightening sexual arousal—or being mistaken for it. [...]

Perhaps, if emotions used to work without conscious awareness, that explains why they still can. “The original function of emotion,” they say, “was to allow the organism to react appropriately” to the good and bad things in life, “and conscious feelings might not always have been required.”

Indeed, one 2005 study in humans showed a difference in brain pattern between unconscious and conscious—or “subliminal and supraliminal”—fear. The researchers thought this could help us understand the mechanisms underlying fear following trauma, which, they say, is “automatic and outside immediate conscious control.”

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