The New York Review of Books: Eggleston’s Empty America

Many of William Eggleston’s great photographs make a point of seeming to show nothing at all. Consider The Democratic Forest, a new book published in conjunction with an exhibition at the David Zwirner Gallery, including selections from 1983 to 1988 that convey quiet and sparse scenes of America (and not to be confused with his 1989 album of the same title). In his remarkable picture of a laundry room, for example, the white appliances sit squarely at angles to themselves, defining the neat and inglorious space in a harmony of edges. A vacuum cleaner and chair pose side by side, and a yellow laundry basket sits atop one of the machines, just to one side of a water heater in the corner, all of them like the attributes of a saint who forgot to appear in her own altarpiece. [...]

Eggleston’s laundry room, by contrast, avoids the feeling of existential crisis. Instead the beauty of the scene derives from the simple geometries of a feminine space, a domestic one, not unlike some of the other subjects in this book (Eudora Welty’s simple curtained kitchen window, for example). And those beauties, allowed to remain unsung, begin to echo with their own emptiness. [...]

But Eggleston’s emptiness has other forms. Take his great photograph of the vacant concession stand. Painted pink with a yellow interior, the stand is flanked by matching plastic garbage cans and set back on cement painted in a four-square pattern of pale blue and yellow. The solemnity of this frivolous structure! It reminds me strangely of the villa of Pontius Pilate at background left in Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation of Christ, painted in the 1450s. The architecture of Pilate’s home, with its mathematical recession of floor and ceiling, is no more stately than Eggleston’s vacant refreshment booth. The dignity of Eggleston’s scene is enough to make one think of Piero having been commissioned to paint an altarpiece for an amusement park, only to have abandoned his would-be Madonna of the Sno-Cone Stand because of lack of payment, or a sudden war or plague, the painting remaining forever after with only the architecture and not the figures finished.

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The Atlantic: Understanding America’s Moral Divides

“Everyone viewed themselves as though they were at the top of the scale,” says Ben Tappin, a graduate student in psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London, and an author of the study. The study went on to say that this makes people’s self-inflated morality more irrational than their bumped-up views of their intelligence, or friendliness. In the latter two realms, there was more variability—one person might think they were a little smarter than average, another might think they were a genius, another might think they were a little below average. [...]

Moral superiority and moral tribalism were on full display in the recent U.S. presidential election. Who someone was going to vote for was often cast as a moral decision. Donald Trump did his best to make Hillary Clinton seem like an immoral choice, repeatedly calling her a liar and “Crooked Hillary.” The Democrats called Trump out on his many lies, but also demonized the people planning to vote for him, as in Clinton’s famous dismissal of them as a “basket of deplorables.” Many times, Clinton’s message seemed to be not only “if you’re not with us, you’re against us,” but “if you’re not with us, you’re a bad person.” Michelle Obama, in a powerful speech that was as much arguing against Trump as it was arguing for Clinton, summed up the campaign: “This isn’t about politics,” she said. “It’s about basic human decency. It’s about right and wrong.” [...]

Haidt’s work identifies six different moral metrics—liberty, fairness, loyalty, authority, care, and purity. Different groups and cultures prefer to emphasize these domains to different degrees. For example, people in Eastern countries tend to emphasize purity and loyalty more than people in Western countries. People who live in countries where there has historically been higher prevalence of disease also place a higher value on purity, as well as loyalty and authority. In the United States, liberals tend to focus mostly on care, fairness, and liberty, while conservatives generally emphasize all six domains. Other research shows that people rate the moral values a group holds as the most important characteristic affecting whether they’re proud to be a member of the group, or more likely to distance themselves from it. [...]

For many issues, moral divides are also political divides. In the U.S., liberals and conservatives are equally morally convicted about most issues Skitka and her colleagues have looked at, including same-sex marriage, welfare, capital punishment, surveillance, social security, and taxes. (That’s not to say they feel the same way, just that they feel the same amount of moral conviction about these issues, on average.) There are a few issues that liberals feel more moral conviction about—climate change, the environment, health care, education, income inequality, and gender inequality—and a few that conservatives feel more moral conviction about—immigration, gun control, abortion, states’ rights, physician-assisted suicide, the federal deficit, and the federal budget.

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Broadly: China's 'Tongqi': The Millions of Straight Women Married to Closeted Gay Men

Though China decriminalized homosexuality in 1997, it remained classified as a mental illness until 2001. According to a 2013 Pew survey, only 21 percent of Chinese people approved of homosexuality; just this March, the government banned the depiction of homosexuality on film and TV as "pornographic or vulgar," putting it in the same category as portrayals of incest and sexual abuse.

It's little wonder that WorkForLGBT, a China-based NGO, found that only 18 percent of gay men have come out to their families. Their parents' generation was raised in the tail-end of the Mao era, when comprehensive general education was disrupted by the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution and sex ed was non-existent. Wish Lanterns author Alec Ash, who has written about the lives of young people in China, says that the cultural divide between parents and their children is enormous: "It would be the equivalent of if my parents were born in 1880." [...]

Zhang's conservative guess is that there are at least 10 million straight women in China married to gay men. Similar research by Chinese sexologist Li Yinhe puts the figure at around 16 million, and research quoted in Yale anthropologist Tiantian Zhang's 2015 study puts the figure at 19 million, which is about the population of Romania. [...]

Zhang says over 30 percent of tongqi will contract a sexually transmitted disease—for many, this is how they discover that their husbands sleep with men. Around 10 percent of tongqi will attempt suicide, he adds. In his office, he gestures towards the rows of filing cabinets that sit floor to ceiling. They contain thousands of letters and correspondence sent from women in these sham marriages. Zhang has recently begun digitizing this archive with the help of assistants; they have scanned 43,000 pages so far.

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FiveThirtyEight: All Of A Sudden, Russia Has Become A Partisan Issue

Over the past several presidencies, American opinion about Russia has changed rapidly based on how presidents have treated the country. During the presidencies of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Russia’s favorability rating1 rose initially as both presidents attempted public overtures to improve relations.2 But opinions fell steadily throughout each man’s second term after crises in U.S.-Russian relations.

These kinds of events can create short-term volatility as well as longer-term changes in U.S. public opinion of Russia (though there is not enough polling to measure Americans’ reaction to every event). For example, Russia’s favorability rating fell 11 points between February and April 1999 during tensions related to the NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, and its favorability plummeted 22 points as Russia opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Both of those changes were relatively short-lived, but the polling suggests that public opinion underwent more lasting changes after events like Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia, the granting of political asylum to Edward Snowden in 2013, and political and military intervention in Ukraine in 2014, all of which were strongly criticized by the White House. [...]

The share of Americans who had a favorable opinion of Russia in that time has ranged from 24 percent to 66 percent, a span of 42 percentage points. None of the other five countries has had a range greater than 33 percentage points. The second-widest range belonged to Cuba, which became more popular after President Obama started normalizing relations with its government.

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Places Journal: What If, America

Artist and urban planner Neil Freeman has been redrawing the United States for years. His “Electoral College Reform Map” imagined 50 states with equal population, where a vote in Mendocino counts the same as a vote in Muskogee. Last month, he released “Random States of America,” a bonkers tool that generates a new electoral map each time you click, mashing up actual voting results with arbitrary state borders. On some maps, Hillary Clinton wins with 320 electors; on others, she loses with 220. Randomness reigns. If you need further persuasion that we should elect a president by national popular vote, you’ll find it here.

But let’s not get too far from reality. I reached out to Freeman and asked him to calculate who would win the 2016 election if the states were redrawn under plausible scenarios. Call it the Random-But-Realistic-(Hey-This-Kinda-Makes-Sense!) States of America. For inspiration, we looked at maps that use big data like phone calls and commute flows to draw state borders that reflect the way Americans live today.

Here are the electoral colleges that could have been.

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CityLab: Mapping the Changes in Europe's Drug Use

The map above, which you can navigate interactively here, confirms what many people learned from the TV series Breaking Bad. The Czech Republic and Slovakia are indeed the European heartland for methamphetamine, aka crystal meth. Its prevalence there is partly due to the countries’ long history as a source of production. It’s not just that the territory’s chemical industries provided the necessary precursors in abundance for illicit production. Official manufacture also continued as a stimulant for soldiers on active duty, after it had been largely discontinued elsewhere after World War II.

As the map above shows, the drug is now spreading, notably to eastern Germany and Finland. Beyond the three Czech and Slovak cities in the centre of the map (Bratislava, České Budějovice and Piešťany) the largest circle belongs to Dresden. This is not great surprise given Dresden’s close proximity to the Czech border. But what could explain the new constellation of cities showing evidence of meth use in Finland, a country absent from the meth map as recently as 2013? EMCDDA analysts themselves are wary of providing simplistic answers, but suggested in conversation with CityLab that one possible answer is that this is not necessarily a case of users consciously switching to a new drug. Dealers may have switched the substances they sell without necessarily alerting users to the fact that what they are buying is anything more than a standard amphetamine. [...]

As the map above reveals, European cities with apparently high levels of cocaine use have something in common. Almost without exception they’re on  the continent’s western half. The one major exception is Cyprus which, beyond being on major sea routes, also receives large numbers of tourists from Western Europe.

By contrast, Europe’s users of amphetamine (commonly known as speed) are mostly located away from the Mediterranean, clustered in Scandinavia, Central Europe, Germany and the Low Countries. This drug divide, it seems, is part cultural and part caused by the logistics of smuggling.

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The Conversation: The Electoral College could end Trump’s presidency before it begins – but it probably won’t

Consequently, the electors are an eclectic group of people. Some of them are well-known state politicians, including current and past members of state legislatures and governors. Others are just unknown private citizens with loose ties to a political party, including at least one teenager involved in politics for the first time.

While there is no federal law or constitutional mandate that presidential electors actually vote for the candidate they have originally agreed or pledged to vote for, 29 states have state laws and regulations that try to restrict their freedom.

The law in each state is, once again, slightly different. But most states with restrictive regulations simply state that electors are “required” to vote for the nominee of the party that selected them. [...]

In 1952, the US Supreme Court argued that states and state parties are allowed to require a pledge from their potential electors. The decision said such a requirement was not unconstitutional, even though it was legally unenforceable because it would violate the electors’ assumed constitutional freedom. [...]

An online petition, which has collected nearly 5 million signatures, is calling on Trump electors to vote for Clinton instead. If only 38 out of the 306 Trump electors decided to do so, Clinton would be elected president. [...]

If given a choice, Republican members of the House may be able to reach a compromise with their Democratic colleagues and elect “the other Republican”. This would prevent Trump becoming president, and avoid having an obscure institution such as the Electoral College simply change the election outcome with a move many would perceive as anti-democratic.

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The Conversation: Simple thinking in a complex world is a recipe for disaster

We humans are like the ants. For all our sophistication, we react to the world in simple ways. Our world is complex, but our ability to cope with it is limited. We seek simple solutions that hide or ignore the complexity.

The result is that our actions often have unintended side-effects. These produce unwelcome trends, accidents and disasters. [...]

The limits of short-term memory further increase the need to simplify. The psychologist George Miller found that short-term memory can process only a few chunks of information at a time (the so-called “seven-plus-or-minus two” rule).

Given a string of random letters, you might recall just seven at a time, but if the letters form identifiable chunks, such as words or phrases, then you can remember longer strings of text.

Our brains cope with complexity by identifying important features and filtering out unnecessary detail. On seeing that the space you enter has four walls, a floor and a ceiling, you know you have entered a room and can usually ignore the details. This is an example of what the French psychologist Jean Piaget termed a “schema”, a mental recipe we learn for responding to common situations. [...]

Our inability to fathom complexity leads to a belief that any worthwhile solution to a situation must be simple. This attitude perhaps explains the widespread mistrust of science today: it has become too complex and technical for the public to understand. So people often ignore or reject its messages, especially when its findings are unpalatable.

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Motherboard: Scientists Are (Finally) Studying LSD Again

The first controlled LSD study in more than 40 years was released today in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. The study, which evaluated 12 individual subjects, focused on the treatment of "anxiety, depression, as well as unresolved family and relationship issues" that accompany life-threatening illnesses. In the study, researchers found that there was a significant and lasting reduction in anxiety in the participants.

Of the dozen subjects, only one person had any prior experience with LSD. Aside from facing life-threatening illness, these were normal, otherwise healthy test subjects. Researchers excluded anyone with alcohol or drug dependence; psychological disorders (psychosis, bipolar or dissociative disorders); as well as neurocognitive impairment or women who were pregnant or nursing. 

While the clinical trial—which was phase 2 double-blind, active placebo-controlled, and randomized—had a limited sample size, researchers wrote that it was "sufficient for a study primarily focused on safety and feasibility." Researchers reported that neither the experimental dose (200 µg of LSD) nor the active placebo (20 µg of LSD) "produced any drug-related severe adverse events, that is, no panic reaction, no suicidal crisis or psychotic state, and no medical or psychiatric emergencies requiring hospitalization." This is encouraging news for any future LSD research, which has battled decades of anti-psychedelic hysteria claiming the drug is unsafe for users.

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