Vox:I analyzed 10,000 Craigslist missed connections. Here’s what I learned.

Over the course of January, I collected more than 10,000 missed connections from New York, LA, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, and Dallas. I analyzed the language, the people who looked and whom they looked for, the days they posted, the words they used, their ages, and a dozen of other points of comparison. And so, without further ado: the missed connections. [...]

To get a sense of the true likelihood of landing a missed connection in the cities I’ve mentioned, I worked out the number of postings for every 10,000 inhabitants. The news for lonely New Yorkers isn’t especially heartening: New York City sits on the tail end of the rankings, with just over three missed connections per 10,000 inhabitants; Los Angeles comes in dead last. The cities whose residents are most likely to seek out that alluring stranger are Dallas, Phoenix, and San Diego, but even with Dallas’s first-place ranking of some 12 missed connections for every 10,000 people, things are pretty bleak. Still, it could be worse: The Whitlams, an Australian indie-rock band, once pronounced, “She was one in a million, so there’s five more just in New South Wales.” Against that backdrop, your chances of a missed connection are orders of magnitude more promising. [...]

The times and days when people post, depicted in the heat map above, suggest that they do. Throughout the US, the most lovelorn days seem to be Mondays, from early to late evening. There is, nevertheless, a good deal of variation from one city to another: Angelenos hardly post, and the few relative spikes in postings occur almost exclusively toward the start of the week. Houstonites, meanwhile, try their hand at romance on early Tuesday afternoons; Dallas, with the highest concentration of missed connections, has an impressive spread from Monday to Friday, with its inhabitants posting throughout the workday and late into the evening. Those solitary nighttime yearnings strike me as the most genuine and unadorned, bringing to mind the words of Philip Larkin, that eminent English chronicler of death and loneliness, who writes of waking up “in soundless dark” and thinking: “Most things may never happen: this one will, and realisation of it rages out in furnace-fear when we are caught without people or drink.” Who better to reach out to, in those desperate moments, than an idealized stranger representing the sole bulwark against the hereafter? [...]

While women tend to post missed connections less frequently, the posts they write are often longer than those of men. From the scatter plot above, you can see that women’s posts, regardless of whom they’re directed at or what city they’re in, are lengthier. Men looking for men write the briefest messages, with straight men writing slightly more verbose ones; straight women write more still. Women looking for other women seem to write the most. It’s key to note, however, that whereas all men are fairly consistent regardless of their location or sexual orientation, women in different cities can differ by significant amounts, and are much less uniform in the amount they write.

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The Guardian: Through the gates of hell: Trump as America's first declinist president

The one thing you could say about empires is that, at or near their height, they have always represented a principle of order as well as domination. So here’s the confounding thing about the American version of empire in the years when this country was often referred to as “the sole superpower”, when it was putting more money into its military than the next 10 countries combined: it’s been an empire of chaos. [...]

From the moment of the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, in fact, everything the US military touched has turned to dust. Countries across the greater Middle East and Africa collapsed under the weight of American interventions or those of its allies, and terror movements, one grimmer than the next, spread in a remarkably unchecked fashion. Afghanistan is now a disaster zone; Yemen, wracked by civil war, a brutal US-backed Saudi air campaign, and various ascendant terror groups, is essentially no more; Iraq, at best, is a riven sectarian nation; Syria barely exists; Libya, too, is hardly a state these days; and Somalia is a set of fiefdoms and terror movements. All in all, it’s quite a record for the mightiest power on the planet, which, in a distinctly un-imperial fashion, has been unable to impose its military will or order of any sort on any state or even group, no matter where it chose to act in these years. It’s hard to think of a historical precedent for this. [...]

In the end, those seeds, first planted in Afghan and Pakistani soil in 1979, led to the attacks of September 11, 2001. That day was the very definition of chaos brought to the imperial heartland, and spurred the emergence of a new, post-constitutional governing structure, through the expansion of the national security state to monumental proportions and a staggering version of imperial overreach. On the basis of the supposed need to keep Americans safe from terrorism (and essentially nothing else), the national security state would balloon into a dominant – and dominantly funded – set of institutions at the heart of American political life (without which, rest assured, FBI director James Comey’s public interventions in an American election would have been inconceivable).

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Quartz: A political historian explains why Republicans’ shift to the extreme right could backfire

Once in power, Republicans operatives did everything they could to keep themselves there by gaming the system. First, they added six new western states to the Union from 1889-1890, trying to guarantee that Republicans could hold the Senate for the foreseeable future and swing the Electoral College to Republicans. They replaced partisan color-coded ballots with secret, impartial ballots that required a voter to know how to read, then warned that continued Democratic victories only proved that the electoral system was rigged. They ginned up supporters to turn on the immigrants and organized workers who voted Democratic ballots, arguing that their calls for basic rights were in fact un-American demands for special treatment.

In the short term, the Republicans’ strategy worked. Republicans continued to hold at least one branch of the federal government, and they undermined faith in the electoral process. The popular mood turned dark and dangerous toward minorities and workers perceived to be “corrupting” the popular vote.

But in the long term, their strategy doomed the Republican ideologues. As they became increasingly convinced that they, and they alone, knew what was good for the country, Republican leaders shifted further and further right. They turned to religion, racism, and social Darwinism to justify their ideology and continue favoring business. They silenced alternative ideas. And as they manipulated the political system, they had less and less reason to compromise. They became convinced that compromise itself would kill the nation.

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The New Yorker: Is Putin’s Russia Ready for Trump’s America?

Trump as President is a different matter. The last weeks before the vote were telling: the tone of Russian state media shifted, and news sources did not praise Trump so much as relish the foul state of the election, throwing a pox on everyone’s house. The country’s most bombastic television host, Dmitry Kiselyov, declared the U.S. campaign so “horribly noxious that it only engenders disgust toward what is still inexplicably called a ‘democracy’ in America.” The victor will be a lame duck from the start, he declared. “Threat of impeachment will hang over whoever wins the White House.” It could be inferred that the Kremlin was preparing for the enemy it knew, and only hoped she would enter power as weakened and distracted as possible. [...]

It is hard to imagine that Trump will push Moscow hard about Ukraine, where Russia has supplied arms, money, diplomatic cover, and Army soldiers to prop up separatists in the rebel-held east. Given Europe’s waning interest, Kiev will be more alone than ever. (The government of Petro Poroshenko may have to finally get serious about confronting the country’s real enemy: a corrosive oligarchy and unchecked corruption.) Regarding the rest of the region, Trump’s skeptical statements about nato unnerve leaders in the Baltic countries and Eastern Europe. It’s not that Russia has territorial designs on those states—at least, not for the moment—but any provocations meant to test nato’s security guarantees are less likely to face resistance when the alliance’s largest military is led by a man who wonders aloud about the whole point of the thing. In Syria, Trump’s preference for a bomb-first approach that elevates the danger of the Islamic State above the horror of Bashar al-Assad is nicely suited to Putin’s own policy there. More broadly—and perhaps most important for Putin—Trump’s alpha-male fondness for Putin, combined with his self-professed willingness to make a deal on just about anything, suggests that he is willing to see the world as Putin does: a Second World War map waiting to be divided up between the great and powerful, in the manner of Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta.

Yet Putin must surely be worried about exactly what he is getting in the next U.S. President. Alexei Venediktov, who is the editor of Echo of Moscow, a liberal radio station, and who has extensive contacts in the Russian élite, told me a story about Putin’s reaction to the Brexit vote, last June. The word in Moscow was that, by creating a crisis for E.U. unity, Brexit was a positive thing for Russia. “A part of our political establishment was celebrating the result, congratulating one another,” Venediktov said. “But at the first foreign-policy meeting that Putin led that morning, he told them, roughly speaking, ‘What’s wrong with you, have you gone crazy? Economic turbulence in Europe will now hit us, too. What have we won?’ “

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Vox: Why chips taste better when you can hear the sound of their crunch

The piece details the work of Charles Spence, a professor of experimental psychology at Oxford University who has conducted studies showing that people's perceptions of flavor and taste are influenced by how food looks — and even how it sounds.

For the Pringles experiment, Spence had 20 participants eat chips while wearing headphones. He flooded their ears with crunching sounds at different volume levels and frequencies. Although the chips were all identical, those eating while listening to louder, high-pitched crunches actually perceived their chips as fresher and crisper. [...]

This line of research has many public health implications, as you can imagine. It suggests that environments carefully designed for health — from the colors and size of our food packaging to the sounds we listen to while eating — can nudge people in the direction of healthier behaviors.

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Quartz: How a Swedish biologist is forcing people take responsibility for their own part in climate change

To combat its “throwaway consumer culture,” Sweden has announced tax breaks on repairs to clothes, bicycles, fridges, and washing machines. On bikes and clothes, VAT has been reduced from 25% to 12% and on large household products (also known in Sweden as “white goods”) consumers can claim back income tax due on the person doing the work.

The incentives are intended to reduce the environmental impact of the things Swedes buy. The country has ambitious targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but has found that the impact of consumer choices is actually increasing.

The scheme is expected to cost the state some $54 million in lost taxes, which will be more than outweighed by income from a new tax on harmful chemicals in white goods. Moreover, Sweden’s economy is growing strongly and the government has an $800 million budget surplus.

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Salon: Marriage equality is safe: Trump probably can’t take it away — and probably won’t try

But the one thing that’s almost certainly safe? Same-sex marriage rights. Whatever nasty bigot Trump invariably nominates to the court will almost certainly oppose gay rights, but he won’t really be able to reverse the decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 decision that legalized same-sex marriage. [...]

For one thing, simply replacing Scalia with another right-wing judge isn’t enough to tip the court against gay rights. Scalia was alive for the Obergefell decision and voted against it. But Justice Anthony Kennedy, a conservative on many issues, broke for gay rights on this decision. That balance will not change.

There’s always a chance that one of the more liberal justices, like Ruth Bader Ginsburg (who is 83 years old) or Stephen Breyer (who is 78), retires or passes away. If that happens, Trump and his Republican Congress will be able to appoint another conservative and tip the court definitively against gay rights. That might be a problem with other cases, but it almost certainly won’t mean that conservatives will be able to undermine legal gay marriage.

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Atlas Obscura: What Counts As Wilderness? It Depends On Where You're From

When you hear the word “wilderness,” what do you picture? Vast woods full of leaping stags? A mountain rearing up into the clouds? Jungles tangling in all directions? Or something else entirely

Your answer likely depends on your formative experiences—which books you’ve read, the types of landscape you visited growing up, and, of course, your native language. For American English-speakers well-versed in Ralph Waldo Emerson and his literary descendants, “wilderness” might bring to mind endless trees, raging rivers, and “the distant line of the horizon” described in his 1836 essay, “Nature.”

But for those who grew up elsewhere, the word, and the concepts behind it, could conjure up something entirely different. In Japan, for example, the closest analog to “wilderness” is kouya, which means “rough, dry fields.” In Iceland, the concept includes vast, sublime landscapes, but no wildlife, as even untamed animals are more likely to live near warm human settlements than in what Icelanders think of as “wilderness.” [...]

The whole idea of wilderness is relatively recent. “Go back 250 years in American and European history, and you do not find nearly so many people wandering around remote corners of the planet looking for what today we would call ‘the wilderness experience,’” the environmental historian William Cronon wrote two decades ago.

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Politico: Farmers vs supermarkets: 4 takeaways on key EU report

The issue of balancing power between farmers and the businesses they sell to has been on the agenda for years. But the crises in European farming over the past two years — particularly in the dairy sector — have seen many thousands of farms fail and injected new urgency into calls to shore up those on the brink of collapse.

The task force makes a host of recommendations — ranging from deeper futures’ markets for agricultural products and more explicit leeway for farm co-operatives to control pricing — but it is the recommendations on how farmers interact with big supermarkets such as Carrefour, and processors such as Lactalis, that are set to dominate the political agenda. [...]

Retailers’ responses to the farmers’ arguments are failing to resonate. Brussels supermarket lobbies have acknowledged that unfair trading practices exist but they have uniformly opposed European legislation. They point to existing national legislation in 20 EU countries and vastly differing national markets as reasons against common European rules.

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