The Atlantic: When Bigotry Paraded Through the Streets

But the Klan was easily at its most popular in the United States during the 1920s, when its reach was nationwide, its members disproportionately middle class, and many of its very visible public activities geared toward festivities, pageants, and social gatherings. In some ways, it was this superficially innocuous Klan that was the most insidious of them all. Packaging its noxious ideology as traditional small-town values and wholesome fun, the Klan of the 1920s encouraged native-born white Americans to believe that bigotry, intimidation, harassment, and extralegal violence were all perfectly compatible with, if not central to, patriotic respectability. [...]

The Klan drew historical inspiration from the Reconstruction-era Southern past and had its headquarters in the South, but white Americans flocked to the organization all across the United States. Klan chapters could be found in cities, towns, and rural areas alike, and the organization had strongholds not only in former Confederate states like Arkansas, Georgia, Alabama, and Texas, but also in Indiana, Oregon, Kansas, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Washington, and Ohio. Typical members were neither wealthy and powerful nor impoverished and dispossessed. Rather, they were middle-class white American men and their families: small-business owners and salesmen, ministers and professors, clerks and farmers, doctors and lawyers.

Ideologically, the Klan blended xenophobia, religious prejudice, and white supremacy together with a broadly conservative moralism. Amidst a global recession that came in the aftermath of World War I, fear and anxiety were widespread among native-born white Protestants that the country they had known and been accustomed to dominating was coming undone. They worried about an influx of eastern European immigrants who adhered to Communism and other supposedly subversive political creeds, about the seemingly growing influence of Catholics and Jews in American life, and about the migration of African Americans out of the South. The intellectual vogue for religious modernism, the expansion of political and sexual freedoms for women, and the perception that immorality, crime, and vice were all on the rise only confirmed the sense that the world was spinning beyond their control.

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Quartz: The rise of Modi and Trump actually reflects the revolt of the elite, not the poor as claimed

Comparisons with Indian prime minister Narendra Modi whose rise predates Trump’s by two years, are inevitable. The two leaders share an evident admiration for each other. Both are hugely popular among their respective constituencies—Hindu nationalists for Modi and white supremacists for Trump—and highly resented by those who disagree with them. Both are polarising figures, who espouse deeply divisive agendas. Despite their many similarities, however, they are also remarkably different in important ways.

First, the commonalities. Modi and Trump are both powerful orators who connect well with their audiences. They speak with rhetorical flourishes, cleverly appropriating popular discontent with existing governments. Humour is key to their communication as they drive home their propaganda. Both show themselves to be strong leaders who can get things done. They deride the complex bureaucratic mechanisms that have come to characterise the polities of their respective countries. [...]

Both are shrewd strategists. They exploited the first-past-the-post system to their advantage so that even as they won a minority of the popular vote—Modi and his allies won less than 40%, Trump, 46.7%—they also secured thumping majorities in the legislatures and steered their respective parties to comfortable victories. [...]

Despite their similarities, it is important not to overlook the differences between the two men, particularly in their personal backgrounds, political experience and attitudes towards globalisation.

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The Atlantic: Would a Work-Free World Be So Bad?

But it doesn’t necessarily follow from findings like these that a world without work would be filled with malaise. Such visions are based on the downsides of being unemployed in a society built on the concept of employment. In the absence of work, a society designed with other ends in mind could yield strikingly different circumstances for the future of labor and leisure. Today, the virtue of work may be a bit overblown. “Many jobs are boring, degrading, unhealthy, and a squandering of human potential,” says John Danaher, a lecturer at the National University of Ireland in Galway who has written about a world without work. “Global surveys find that the vast majority of people are unhappy at work.” [...]

The roots of this boredom may run even deeper. Peter Gray, a professor of psychology at Boston College who studies the concept of play, thinks that if work disappeared tomorrow, people might be at a loss for things to do, growing bored and depressed because they have forgotten how to play. “We teach children a distinction between play and work,” Gray explains. “Work is something that you don’t want to do but you have to do.” He says this training, which starts in school, eventually “drills the play” out of many children, who grow up to be adults who are aimless when presented with free time. [...]

It’s unlikely that a world without work would be abundant enough to provide everyone with such lavish lifestyles. But Gray insists that injecting any amount of additional play into people’s lives would be a good thing, because, contrary to that 17th-century aristocrat, play is about more than pleasure. Through play, Gray says, children (as well as adults) learn how to strategize, create new mental connections, express their creativity, cooperate, overcome narcissism, and get along with other people. “Male mammals typically have difficulty living in close proximity to each other,” he says, and play’s harmony-promoting properties may explain why it came to be so central to hunter-gatherer societies. While most of today’s adults may have forgotten how to play, Gray doesn’t believe it’s an unrecoverable skill: It’s not uncommon, he says, for grandparents to re-learn the concept of play after spending time with their young grandchildren.

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The School of Life: Why Small Pleasures Are a Big Deal

Artnet: Director of Polish Culture Institute in Berlin Fired for ‘Too Much Jewish Content’

The cultural manager and director of the polish culture institute in Berlin, Katarzyna Wielga-Skolimowska, was fired this past Tuesday from her position. According to the German left-leaning daily TAZ that broke the story, Poland’s right-wing PiS-led government called for her immediate departure due to her programming, which included “too much Jewish-themed content,” as Poland’s ambassador in Germany Andrzej Przyłębski complained. [...]

In a recent internal assessment of the institute carried out by the foreign ministry, her work received a negative evaluation due to the focus on Jewish themes, and insufficient engagement with social media, the Berliner Zeitung reports.

Earlier this year, Poland’s minister of culture, Piotr Gliński (PiS) called for an end to the “culture of shame” regarding WWII and the Holocaust, and Wielga-Skolimowska’s work has irked the government ever since. [...]

This is not the first time that Warsaw interferes with cultural programming abroad. The Vienna branch of the Polish culture institute was not allowed to work with the Austrian author and journalist Martin Pollack, who had criticized the PiS party. According to the Polish paper Gazeta Wyborcza, 13 institute directors in different countries were fired this past summer. The director of the Madrid branch was criticized for not placing enough focus on the work of Polish composer Frédéric Chopin.

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