Quartz: Finland offered a state apology for the pain and abuse suffered by generations of children in its care

The apology follows research (link in Finnish) carried out by the University of Jyväskylä and published earlier this year by the government, which examined mistreatment and abuse in the country’s welfare system between 1937 and 1983. Around 150,000 children are estimated to have lived in child welfare institutions, orphanages, reform schools (which were founded for children with perceived behavioral problems), or foster homes during that period. The researchers interviewed some 300 of them, all of whom had experienced abuse while living there. [...]

“The apology is very significant,” she adds. “Finland does not have much of a culture of apology. This is the first large-scale public apology expressed on behalf of the state.” No decision has been made on whether compensation will be issued.

In the past few years several Western countries have owned up to the mass neglect of children by state welfare bodies. In 2008, the Canadian government formally apologized to its indigenous population for the physical abuse that occurred in church-run residential schools from the mid-19th to early 20th century. That same year Australia apologized to the “Stolen Generations” of indigenous and mixed-race children taken forcibly from their families during the first decades of the 20th century; the following year, it apologized also to some 500,000 Australians who suffered neglect and abuse in orphanages and children’s homes. In 2010 the UK apologized for its role in sending over 130,000 children to former colonies—Australia among them—between the 1920s and 1960s, where many ended up suffering abuse at the hands of those who were meant to care for them. And in 2013, Irish prime minister Enda Kenny issued an apology to the thousands of women and girls who were forced to perform unpaid manual labour at Ireland’s Catholic-run Magdalene Laundries from 1922-96.

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Quartz: The dark and sordid history behind America’s obsession with cranberries

Ocean Spray is the world’s leading supplier of cranberry-related products, controlling 75% of cranberry farms in the US and Canada since 1930. This includes their cranberry juice, fresh cranberries, craisins (which were created as an Ocean-Spray marketing ploy, by the way), cranberry sauce, and a whole smattering of other products. Ocean Spray sells 20% of their fresh cranberries during the week leading up to Thanksgiving—a whopping 80 million pounds of them. [...]

Cranberries are grown in bogs primarily in the northern part of the US in soft, marshy ground with acid-peat soil. They’re hard to harvest on the vines they grow on, so instead, the bogs are flooded at harvest time, water reels pull them off the vine, and the cranberries float to the top, allowing them to be collected and sent off to market. Those images you see of farmers in waders, up to their chests in water with cranberries floating all around them? Totally accurate. [...]

President Eisenhower did not eat cranberries for Thanksgiving that year, and neither did the majority of the country. In a single year, cranberry sales dropped by nearly 70% (pdf). According to the American Council on Science and Health, the great cranberry scare of 1959 set off the very first carcinogen panic in the United States. This scare was mostly overblown and overhyped: The lab rats would have had to consume truckloads of cranberries treated with aminotriazole before getting any tumor growths. Still, the negative publicity had a direct effect on sales, which should have been enough of an incentive to have Ocean Spray rethink their methods. It wasn’t. [...]

It would make sense for cranberry farms to be held to some US government oversight, such as the Clean Water Act, but due to a confusing loophole, they aren’t. Agricultural run-off from places like cranberry bogs and rice fields is not regulated, and Ocean Spray takes full advantage of that ambiguity. In Wisconsin, for example, cranberry bogs have destroyed more wetlands than all other uses combined, and the evidence is mounting that continuing non-organic farming of cranberries will continue to be an immense environmental hazard.

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CityLab: The Women Replacing Spain's Franco-Era Street Names

Though Franco died in 1975, many streets and squares still bear his and his associates’ names, surviving under a policy of forgiving and forgetting the crimes committed during his rule. Now, they’re finally being swept away, and a clutch of major cities are using the opportunity to commemorate more women, who currently lend their names to just 5 percent of Spain’s streets. The changes might rattle some traditionalists, and also annoy Spain’s lingering fascist sympathizers, but they also seem long overdue. So why now?

The simple reason is that Spain’s political map has changed radically since the 2015 elections, at least at the municipal level. After decades of see-sawing between the right wing Popular Party and the center-left Socialist Party, many Spanish voters opted for a host of smaller left wing parties that gather together under the umbrella of the Podemos party. Podemos-linked coalitions have taken power in many key cities, including Madrid and Barcelona, and they aren’t turning a blind eye to reminders of Spain’s bloody 20th century dictatorship. [...]

While street names are a key place to commemorate important figures in Spain, the scales are overwhelmingly tipped toward men. The women who are featured are typically saints or nuns, providing a skewed picture of women’s role in national life. An article from El Diario, for example, found 137 Madrid streets named after apparitions of the Virgin Mary (such as Our Lady of the Pillar) and 125 named after female saints, but only one named after a female teacher. As Professor Patricia Arias Chachero says in that article, “It’s almost as if the situation is the practical confirmation of the popular saying—that a woman’s place is not in the street, but in the house.”

ome cities have been trying to remedy this imbalance for a while. In 2005, for example, Córdoba mandated that 50 percent of all new street names commemorate women. This year, the tide seems to be turning faster. The northern city of León just invited the public to choose from a list of women to be honored, with Rosa Parks, Frida Kahlo, Jane Austen and the mathematician and philosopher Hypatia all in the running. The most popular choice was Ángela Ruiz Robles, an inventor and León native whose 1949-patented Enciclopedia Mecánica is widely considered the first prototype for the electronic book reader.

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The Atlantic: What’s So Great About American World Leadership?

The big message of 2016 is that large numbers of American voters, Democrat and Republican, do not buy what their political leaders have been selling for so long, and that includes foreign policy. The evidence of this from Trump’s victory is reinforced by Senator Bernie Sanders’ remarkable showing in the Democratic primaries, and by years’ worth of public-opinion surveys showing the widespread view that the United States “does too much in helping solve world problems.” It is also reinforced by the high poll numbers of an outgoing president who has mounted his own quiet campaign against key elements of Washington’s foreign-policy orthodoxy. [...]

Does that sound harsh? Here is a list, in no particular order, of some key goals both the Bush and Obama administrations set for themselves in foreign policy: Prevent North Korea getting nuclear weapons; prevent Iran getting nuclear weapons and contain its growing influence in the Middle East; transform Iraq and Afghanistan into stable, progressive, pro-Western states, or at least leave them as minimally functioning countries; contain and eventually crush jihadist extremism; harness the Arab Spring to enhance U.S. influence in the Arab world; reconcile Russia to the U.S.-led order and resist its efforts to rebuild a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe; resist China’s challenge to the U.S.-led order in Asia; broker a durable settlement between Israel and the Palestinians; and prevent another 9/11 on U.S. soil. [...]

But now it seems the American electorate has told them to think again. Perhaps democracy works after all, at least to identify problems if not to choose the right person to find solutions. It is hard to imagine anyone less suited to conceive and create a new and more sustainable vision of America’s role on the world than its president-elect. His mix of bullying belligerency and “America First” isolationism suggests that he will apply American power either too forcefully or not forcefully enough. That risks escalating crises and raising the chances of major war, a complete unravelling of U.S. influence beyond the Western Hemisphere—or quite possibly both.   

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Vox: Why small talk is so excruciating

The problem, of course, is that small talk precedes big talk in the normal course of human affairs. Most people feel the need to get comfortable with one another before they jump into the deep end of serious conversation or ongoing friendship. Which means if you hate and avoid small talk, you are also, as a practical matter, cutting yourself off from lots of meaningful social interaction, which is a bummer. Also, research shows that more frequent small talk, even among those who identify as introverts, makes people happier. Also, despite recent advances in technology, small talk remains an unavoidable part of many basic life tasks. [...]

In the 1970s, however, sociolinguistics became more attuned to the everyday forms of speech that, after all, constitute the bulk of our verbal communication. And feminist sociolinguistics in particular noted that a dismissive attitude toward speech that establishes and maintains relationships — as opposed to task-oriented or informational speech — was of a piece with patriarchal disrespect for traditionally female roles. Think of the derogatory implications of the term "gossip," which is, after all, social talk about social dynamics. [...]

Malinowski was wrong — small talk is not just important for those seeking companionship (or avoiding silence). It's also important in a whole range of social, commercial, and professional settings. It weaves and reweaves the social fabric, enacting and reinforcing social roles. Think of the different varieties of small talk between doctor and patient, vendor and customer, employer and employee. Each has its own rhythms and rules. And of course the character of small talk differs from place to place, culture to culture. For example, silence, contra Malinowski, is not viewed as threatening or uncomfortable in all cultures.

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Vox: Bernie Sanders — and many Democrats — keep confusing identity politics with tokenism

It’s a perfect illustration of why the debate over “identity politics” in the 2016 election has been so maddening. Sanders’s comments represent a flank of the Democratic party that partly blames Clinton’s loss on her strong embrace of race and gender issues, which could have turned off white male voters in particular. Meanwhile, the marginalized groups who overwhelmingly vote for Democrats fear being thrown under the bus, as they have many times before, so that the party can curry more favor with white Americans. [...]

But to people who actually practice “identity politics,” Sanders is presenting a straw man. He’s describing tokenism — the idea that you need a certain quota of “token” members of marginalized groups for the sake of “diversity,” regardless of whether those members are actually qualified or actually represent their group’s interests. [...]

Generally speaking, identity politics is about recognizing and acting on the fact that different groups can have different interests, goals, and policy needs. It doesn’t require pitting those groups against each other, although it’s often presented that way. Rather, it’s about acknowledging that American politics tends to treat the “white male” identity as the default — and every other identity as some sort of optional bonus feature. [...]

What Sanders doesn’t seem to understand, though, is that these issues are at the heart of “identity politics.” He gives identity-focused progressives much too little credit for their willingness to support other progressive issues — and also gives himself too little permission to champion identity issues without the “yes, but” qualification.

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The Guardian: Dogs have 'episodic memories' just like humans, suggests study

A team from Hungary have discovered that dogs are able to recall their owner’s actions, even when they were not specifically instructed to do so, suggesting that dogs, like humans, have what is known as “episodic memory” – memories linked to specific times and places. [...]

While 94.1% of dogs successfully mimicked their owner when expecting to do so, 58.8% correctly copied their owner when unexpectedly asked to “do it!” a minute later, and 35.3% correctly copied their owner when unexpectedly given the commanded an hour later. [...]

The authors note that the rapid drop-off in success rates over time, together with evidence that the command was unexpected, shows that the dogs were recalling events that had not been imbued with importance – suggesting that they were relying on a type of episodic memory. The conclusion, they add, is backed up the dogs’ ability to mimic actions despite having never physically done them before.

“Traditionally episodic memory has been linked to self-awareness but as we do not know whether dogs are self-aware we call it episodic-like memory,” said Fugazza.

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