The Atlantic: Understanding the Women of Pedro Almodóvar’s Movies

From his breakout screwball comedy Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) to his late-career melodramas of strong-willed protagonists, Almodóvar’s films find humor and beauty in female hardship. With Julieta, he’s centered an entire movie on a woman’s loss: The eponymous character is first unable to move on after her husband dies in a boating accident and later has to cope by herself when her only daughter leaves their shared home unexpectedly. Spanning several decades, the film marries Munro’s keen attention to the quiet lives certain women lead with Almodóvar’s flamboyant style. Moments of still reflection in Munro’s words become beautifully art-directed scenes that look like stylish tableaux vivants.

Writing for the feminist online magazine Píkara, the Spanish critic and author María Castejón Leorza negatively reviewed Julieta, arguing that in its stylized depiction of suffering, it contributed to what has become Almodóvar’s signature sensibility: the glamorization of pathos and victimhood. To her, this is an element that merely repurposes the latent misogyny of Spain’s patriarchal society. Castejón Leorza’s complaint against Almodóvar is not a new one. Already in 1992, for example, the film critic Caryn James had written a scathing appraisal of the director in The New York Times. Arguing that his films can leave a bitter aftertaste, James posited that while he creates strong women characters, he “then takes away their strength; there is a definite trace of misogyny lurking beneath his apparently fond creations of women.” [...]

The intersection between gay male culture and melodramatic femininity is at the heart of Almodóvar’s 1999 film All About My Mother. It earned the director some of the best reviews of his career—as Armond White wrote in his New York Press review of the film, the director’s “gay male identification with women frees him to do his best work.” The Oscar-winning movie is centered on a young queer artist, Esteban, whose death sets the plot in motion. It is Esteban’s fascination with cinema that opens the film (he’s watching the Bette Davis classic All About Eve with his mother) and his diva adoration that leads to his untimely death (he’s struck by a car while trying to get an autograph from the actress playing Blanche DuBois in a Spanish theatre production of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire). The film may not have been as explicitly autobiographical as Almodóvar’s later Bad Education (2004), but it nonetheless corralled many of his most famous themes and images—he even borrowed an organ-donor conversation at a hospital following Esteban’s death from his earlier film The Flower of My Secret (1995).

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Vox: Why Obama — and every president since Carter — failed to transform the Middle East

For Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army colonel and a professor of international relations at Boston University, the answers to these questions are muddled at best, depressing at worst.

Among the sharpest critics of American foreign policy in recent years, Bacevich has authored a number of books (including The Limits of Power and The Long War) documenting America’s entanglements abroad. His latest book, America’s War for the Greater Middle East, offers a sweeping look at America’s policies in the Middle East since the Carter administration.

The book begins with the Carter administration because two events in 1979 set America on its current course in the Middle East: the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Together these events cemented the view among American political leaders that access to Persian Gulf oil, then seen as indispensable, had to be protected. [...]

For Bacevich, America’s militarism is fueled by a false assumption about the reach and efficacy of military power. The presumption is that force, sufficiently employed, can achieve desired political goals across the world. This is a dangerous myth, Bacevich argues, and one our foreign policy establishment can’t seem to shake. [...]

That's a great point. This is why the Iran nuclear deal is potentially promising. On the face of it, the purpose is to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. But I believe the actual purpose looks well beyond that. The real purpose is to begin a process of bringing Iran back into the international community and allowing Iran to play a responsible role in regional politics if the Iranian government chooses to do so. [...]

And so the challenge we face is figuring out how to maintain a semblance of stability, how to make it possible for these various actors to tolerate one another. Mutual coexistence needs to be the goal. Not peace on earth or goodwill toward men. Mutual toleration has to be the realistic goal.

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Vox: The UN’s resolution on Israel doesn’t include any sanctions. It could hurt Israel’s economy all the same.

The high-profile United Nations resolution condemning Israeli settlements that passed last week does not impose any kind of financial sanctions or other punitive measures on Israel. What it does do, though, is essentially give the green light to activist groups and countries to accelerate campaigns aimed at striking Israel’s economic interests and weakening its international reputation. And that could potentially prove to be just as damaging.

In the past few years, movements like “boycott, divestment, and sanctions” (BDS), a campaign modeled off the economic activism that helped end apartheid in South Africa, have begun to gain traction in the West. And in November 2015, the European Union issued new guidelines on the labeling of imported goods that distinguish between goods from Israel proper and those from its settlements in occupied Palestinian territories, a policy that’s expected to hurt Israeli exports. Last month, France became the first country to enforce the new guidelines.

So far, the impact of these efforts have been modest, but if they continue to gain momentum with boosts like the UN resolution, real money is at stake: Experts estimate they could lop anywhere from $15 billion to $47 billion off the Israeli economy over the next decade. [...]

In the past few years, scores of universities, pension funds, churches, and unions in the US, Europe, and elsewhere have supported BDS by boycotting Israeli goods and investments. The United Methodist Church’s $20 billion pension board, the biggest pension fund asset manager in the US, blacklisted the five largest Israeli banks. Norway’s $810 billion Government Pension Fund Global, the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, blacklisted two Israeli companies over their involvement in settlement building in East Jerusalem.

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Vox: The real reason for Netanyahu’s showdown with Obama

The top US diplomat was instead making an accurate assessment of an important, and dangerous, shift in Israel’s domestic politics. With the country’s left wing hobbled by electoral losses and bitter infighting, Netanyahu believes his biggest political threat comes from the right, not the left. That’s leading him to adopt precisely the sorts of hawkish policies — like overseeing a massive increase in the population of Israel’s West Bank settlements — that prompted Kerry’s speech, and that have left Israel more isolated at the United Nations than ever before.

“Bibi is not concerned at all with anyone from the center left,” Gilead Sher, a former Israeli peace negotiator and chief of staff for Prime Minister Ehud Barak, tells me in an interview, using the prime minister’s nickname. “He’s concerned about far-right politicians inside and outside his own party that are totally against any division of the land or agreement with the Palestinians. Those are the only people that he thinks could push him out of office.” [...]

The dramatic change in Israel’s domestic politics has shaped Netanyahu’s handling of the moribund peace process with the Palestinians, the primary focus of Kerry’s blistering speech on Wednesday. Netanyahu has publicly committed himself to a two-state solution to the decades-old conflict. In practice, though, he has overseen a massive expansion of Israel’s web of West Bank settlements, which now house more than 500,000 Israelis and occupy so much territory that it would be almost impossible to cobble together a contiguous Palestinian state. [...]

The election also continued the right wing’s historical political dominance. Sher notes that of the 17 Israeli governments in the past 39 years, just two were led by left-wing prime ministers: the 1992 government of Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated by a far-right ideologue, and the short-lived one led by Sher’s former boss, Ehud Barak, after he beat Netanyahu in 1999. Even the left-wing, Nobel Peace Prize-winning Shimon Peres, whose death this year prompted mourning from leaders around the globe, ran for prime minister five times but never won an election outright.

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The New York Review of Books: The Rules of the Game: A New Electoral System

Americans have been using essentially the same rules to elect presidents since the beginning of the Republic. In the general election, each voter chooses one candidate; each state (with two current exceptions) awards all its Electoral College votes to the candidate chosen by the largest number of voters (not necessarily a majority) in that state; and the president-elect is the candidate with a majority of Electoral College votes.

Primary elections for president have also remained largely unchanged since they replaced dealings in a “smoke-filled room” as the principal method for selecting Democratic and Republican nominees. In each state, every voter votes for one candidate. In some states, the delegates to the national convention are all pledged to support the candidate getting a plurality of votes (again, possibly less than a majority). In others, delegates are assigned in proportion to the total votes of the candidates.

These rules are deeply flawed. For example, candidates A and B may each be more popular than C (in the sense that either would beat C in a head-to-head contest), but nevertheless each may lose to C if they both run. The system therefore fails to reflect voters’ preferences adequately. It also aggravates political polarization, gives citizens too few political options, and makes candidates spend most of their campaign time seeking voters in swing states rather than addressing the country at large.

There are several remedies. Perhaps in order of increasing chance of adoption, they are: (1) to elect the president by the national popular vote instead of the Electoral College; (2) to choose the winner in the general election according to the preferences of a majority of voters rather than a mere plurality, either nationally or by state; and, easiest of all, (3) to substitute majority for plurality rule in state primaries.

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The Guardian: Angela Merkel and the history book that helped inform her worldview

The historian rejects the idea that his book has had a direct influence on Merkel’s policies. But many sections of the work – on globalisation, migration and technology, to name a few pertinent topics – read differently in the light of decisions she has made since reading it, such as the treatment of Greece at the height of the eurozone crisis.

If Europe was able to pull ahead of China economically in the 19th century, Osterhammel argues, it was because the Chinese empire was hampered by a “chaotic dual system” of silver and copper coins, while much of Europe had created a “de facto single currency” with the Latin monetary union of 1866.

From a few brief conversations with Merkel, Osterhammel says he can see “she is very serious about the way world order (or disorder) has been evolving in the long run. She seems to understand, for instance, that migration and mobility have a historical dimension.”

The 19th century is often described as an era of rising nationalism, a period in which states across Europe first began to develop distinct ideas about their identity. Osterhammel, a professor at Konstanz University, who wrote his dissertation on the British empire’s economic ties with China, instead recasts the century as one marked by globalisation, with 1860-1914 in particular “a period of unprecedented creation of networks” that were later torn apart by two world wars.

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CityLab: Enlisting Cities in the War on Food Waste

That gulf between data and public knowledge shrunk in 2016—and cities helped bridge it. Dinged, oddly shaped, or surplus food can battle the pernicious problem of urban hunger, dished out at pay-what-you-wish cafes, reduced-price supermarkets, or redistributed from restaurant kitchens via apps. This coming spring, a British town will start tapping in to a slurry of degrading scraps as a power source.

There were steps forward on the policy side, too. Back in June, the World Resources Institute backed the Food Loss and Waste Protocol, a multi-agency effort that rolled out a comprehensive framework for standardizing terms and accumulating data, helping researchers gauge what’s working and what isn’t. Earlier this month, the USDA issued new, streamlined date labeling guidelines for manufacturers, in an effort to curb major customer confusion about parsing those stamps. [...]

Also this year, NRDC launched our Save the Food campaign. The goal of that is to provide both inspiration and information to people to waste less food. It’s a national public service media campaign: We have TV and online video ads, as well as billboards and bus ads. Our goal is to seed a shift in the cultural paradigm of wasting food, and get people to feel compelled to not waste food in their own homes. We’ve had great pickup across different cities—the campaign has been on buses in Chicago and waste trucks in California. Someone just sent me a picture from a bus stop in Manhattan. We’re hearing about it from all over the country.

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Quartz: The classic philosophical theory that nails why 2016 sucked so much

For Jean-Paul Sartre, the dawn of the 20th century brought with it a deep sense of philosophical angst. Religion’s failure to solve the world’s problems, the disorienting onslaught of worldwide wars, and huge leaps in science and technology fueled a deeply individualistic philosophy that we now broadly refer to as existentialism. In particular, Sartre and authors such as Albert Camus explored the more refined (and more macabrely apathetic) concept of existential nihilism, which posits that life has no intrinsic meaning or value—or, as Sartre put it, “existence precedes essence.”

The existentialists noticed that even though many people intuitively recognize the insignificance of their existence, it doesn’t stop them from searching for meaning anyway. This is what Camus called “the absurd,” and he believed there were three main options for dealing with this sense of existential angst: whole-heartedly embrace some religion, commit suicide, or flip it the bird and go back to life as usual. That last option he called “radical freedom,” writing that “the only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”

Contemporary society is currently grappling with a deep sense of existential angst—so it makes sense that a lot of the pop culture that captured our attention this year bears similarities to the novels of the original existentialists. Looking at these hits through the eyes of these philosophers could help us explain why 2016 has been meme-ified as “the worst ever”: Our favorite heroes are now the ones who grapple with the cruel, meaningless world we live in, and come out on the other side radically free. And just as truth imitates fiction, we are reflecting the culture we’ve created by acting like the existentialists’ anti-heroes ourselves.

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Quartz: New research suggests maternity leave is more important for mothers than it is for their kids

One study found that children from better-off families faced cognitive and behavioral setbacks when their mothers returned to full-time work within nine months of childbirth. But in another, children of poorer women (pdf) made both academic and behavioral gains, on average, when their mothers returned in that timeframe. Other research has come up with mixed findings (pdf). [...]

Caitlin McPherran Lombardi of the University of Connecticut and Rebekah Levine of Boston College published two studies on Dec. 19—one, in the journal Child Development, about children in the UK and Australia, and one, in Developmental Psychology, about American kids. The studies followed children and families from birth until they entered primary school. What they found: “There wasn’t any negative link between returning to work early and children’s development, both in terms of academic and behavioral skills,” Lombardi says. [...]

What makes this especially surprising is that the three countries they tested have very different attitudes to parental leave. The US has no federal paid maternity leave policy, and allows for only 12 weeks of unpaid leave—and even for that, the bar for eligibility is quite high. In the UK, the study says, women’s jobs are protected for 39 weeks after childbirth, with the first six weeks of maternity leave at full pay. In Australia, mothers can claim up to 18 weeks’ leave, paid at the national minimum wage.

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