Political Critique: Andrej Babiš: Change as Status Quo

Shortly after being elected, Donald Trump phoned three Eastern European politicians: the leader of the Polish PiS Jarosław Kaczyński, the Prime Minister of Hungary Viktor Orbán and the Czech President Miloš Zeman. The new American President has (correctly) realized that the Eastern edge of the European Union is a fertile ground for regimes that share his rhetoric, so he invited their representatives to Washington in mutual delight: these three leaders look up to Trump and finally they could boast international recognition, as until now, their anti-liberal views have not been exactly popular in the West. [...]

Ten years ago, the Hungarian philosopher Gáspár Miklós Tamás called the Central European mix of authoritarianism, hard asocial capitalism, and a formal take on democracy “post-fascism.” “Fascism is defined by denying the civic laws of certain groups of people, which is already happening,” said Tamás on Czech radio, supplying the example of criminalization of the homeless in Budapest. He stresses that the term post-fascism concerns the heading of society as a whole – individual politicians or parties need not be fascist or post-fascist in order to shift their society towards what Tamás considers post-fascism. After all, there is no perfectly satisfactory way to label the current wave of politics veering away from liberal values: the ultra-right tendencies (extreme nationalism, cultural conservatism and social darwinism) is just one of the many facets of this trend. And it is one of the least visible with Babiš. [...]

What does make Babiš similar to his authoritarian neighbors (or Trump) are his methods that require a center of power – primarily owning media or at least being able to influence it. In Poland, Kaczyński can lean on the Catholic Church and its influence, including sympathetic, conservative media like Radio Maryja or his own schools for future journalists. Kaczyński had access to this PiS-friendly support structure even before he won the elections and started subjugating state television. In Hungary, Orbán’s Fidész has created a structure of clientele networks of interconnecting state, party and business subjects. These shift the balance of power towards Orbán and decisively influence his media image. Babiš can rely on one of the biggest companies in the Czech Republic, which has – right before elections – also happened to eat up the biggest publishing house in the country. Babiš placed his people as the heads of the two biggest newspapers in the country – the professional loyalist Jaroslav Plesl at MF Dnes and his friend István Léko at People’s News. The first openly sympathizes with Trump, the second with Orbán.

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Katoikos: Mélenchon could be the French Bernie Sanders, and that’s not a good thing

We recently saw a revival of this in the US with the Bernie Sanders campaign. Although Sanders ended up endorsing Clinton, the fact that his campaign and particularly his ‘supporters’ had concentrated their fire on her using ammunition provided by Trump and Putin (most of it buckets of undifferentiated rubbish) and refused to sully their consciences by voting for someone ideologically tainted by neoliberalism meant that ultimately Sanders helped Trump win. In the UK we saw the example of ‘Lexit’: people on the left who voted to leave the EU because they thought a campaign led by far-right demagogues and sponsored by Rupert Murdoch and the Daily Mail might somehow help bringing about socialism in our lifetime. [...]

Nonetheless, I have no sympathy with those who voted for Le Pen. They know what she and her father have always stood for. Even if FN voters are unemployed or overworked, I cannot sympathize with their tendency to become suicidal as a result. They could have expressed their anger at their plight by voting for a candidate who at least nominally represented an alternative rather than one who (aside from being openly corrupt) denies France’s role in the Holocaust, scapegoats all Muslims as terrorists and would even stop all legal immigration. [...]

Anti-fascism has to be the absolute basis of what people who see themselves as on the left stand and fight for. Encouraging the illusion that there is no difference between a banker and a fascist is utterly irresponsible, puerile, infantile, juvenile and obscene. It’s like Slavoj Žižek at his most obtuse. Any mature adult with a basic understanding of history and political realities would vote for a neoliberal rather than a lifelong national socialist. As the French themselves say , ‘c’est du gâteau‘ – it’s a no-brainer. Just as in 2002, when the slogan was ‘it’s better to vote for a crook than a fascist’, the French left must swallow its pride and vote to stop Le Pen. [...]

The CGT is calling the next stage a contest between the plague (Macron) and cholera (Le Pen). Criticism of Macron is already focussing on his past as a banker for Rothschild, i.e. evoking and appealing to a deep-seated anti-semitic canard particularly prevalent on the internet among Putin, Trump and, bien sûr, Le Pen supporters.

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Slate: Will Le Pen Lose in 2017—and Win in 2022?

So you are quite right to ask whether this kind of ganging up on the National Front can only be good for it in the long term. I’d be surprised if she weren’t stronger in 2022. This sense of marginalization and grievance and being ganged up on is really, really quite helpful from the National Front’s point of view because they can say that the will of the people has been thwarted. It’s a tradition that she, or whoever succeeds her, can invoke by saying, “We have always been discriminated against. There’s always been a kind of conspiracy of the institutions and the establishment against us. We’re going to get clear of it, and we’re going to embody the will of the people.” [...]

Yeah, this is a candidate for regulated capitalism. He’s not the candidate of change, in my view. It seemed to us in Europe that Obama, whatever his shortcomings in his two administrations, was a huge symbolic figure. I’m not sure Macron will make it to that extent. I don’t think the symbolism in Macron will have the resonance of Obama’s symbolism. I think they may be very similar candidates. They’ll navigate the ship, and they’ll try to keep things going for as long as they can, and in 2022 Macron and his team will face a bigger challenge from Le Pen, just as Obama after two administrations got hit hard by Trump. [...]

That was a moment. It was also one which he possibly regretted, although he’s OK now. This was the nearest, in terms of internationalism, that Macron ever came to the Mélenchon campaign. Mélenchon is a genuine internationalist in his support of migrants, asylum seekers. He’s very conscious of the global south. Macron is more a market liberal and a proper social liberal at the same time. He would say, “Look, this is a globalized world. We have to let the history slide away if it’s inhibiting our relationships with other countries, and I feel that this whole past with Algeria needs to be cleared away.” He’s modern in that way. He doesn’t carry the weight of history in the way that old Marxists do or people whose politics descend from that tradition do. I think he’s free. He was punished, dragged across the coals for saying it, but actually it’s subsided. I think it was a strange and radical and controversial thing to say, and I admire him for it.

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Vox: A Cold War theory for why scientists and the government have become so estranged

One of the more compelling responses I’ve seen to this question can be found in this 2008 paper by W. Henry Lambright, a political scientist at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. To simplify a bit, he argues that the glory days of US science were an artifact of the Cold War and the arms race against the Soviet Union. That era has long faded, but if scientists want to bring about a new golden age, they should study that history closely. Because it contains some valuable lessons about how politics drives public attitudes toward science — and not, as is often assumed, the other way around. [...]

Politicians, after all, have a very different job than scientists. At least ideally, scientists seek only to uncover objective truths about the world. They follow a strict methodology, explicitly meant to filter out values, biases, or preconceptions that might color their research. Politicians, by contrast, must grapple with conflicting values and interests. Adjudicating those disputes is the whole job, and most such disputes can’t be resolved by scientific facts alone. So, not surprisingly, the two communities don’t always see eye to eye. [...]

It’s important to be clear on what motivated this warmer relationship. It was not politicians embracing the principles of objective scientific inquiry. Instead, both Democrats and Republicans had rallied around a larger common purpose — defeating the Soviet Union — and realized they needed scientists’ help in order to achieve that goal. Politics drove science’s golden age, not the other way around.

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SciShow Psych: Do Personality Tests Mean Anything?

Quartz: An astrophysicist used NASA data to make an insanely detailed map of US racial diversity

Tomasz Stepinski used to be focused on Mars, mapping its craters algorithmically. Now the astrophysicist and mathematician is into his home planet, Earth. His latest project is an incredibly detailed map of the US that shows shifting racial diversity down to the neighborhood.

The free map tracks racial diversity spatio-temporally by laying census data from 1990 to 2010 over detailed grids from NASA satellite maps. The method was recently publicized in the journal Plos One, and on April 27, Stepinski will present his work at the annual Population Association of America conference in Chicago. [...]

The map—which allows users to zoom in and check out their neighborhoods—provides a previously unseen view of how the racial composition of neighborhoods is changing in the US. “People don’t realize that the United States is a diverse country but at the same time is still very segregated,” Stepinski says. [...]

Stepinski acknowledges that while the free flow of information is ideal, his map could also be used for less educational purposes. Arguably, it could enable racism, for example, by helping potential property owners seek demographic information that real estate agents are not legally allowed to provide.

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CityLab: The Case for Weed Reparations

For many decades, law enforcement has been directed to lock up anyone who tries to make a living in this field, especially if they are black. As criminal justice scholar Michelle Alexander wrote in a 2013 op-ed for The New York Times: “We’ve spent billions of dollars, arrested and caged millions of people, destroyed countless families and futures, and yet marijuana remains as popular and plentiful as ever. Why has this insanity continued for so long?”

Well, because racism. In Oakland, California, efforts are now underway to repair what the war on drugs destroyed through mass incarceration: In May 2016, the city amended its existing local medical marijuana regulation ordinance to provide more opportunities for people of color to open their own dispensaries. Most importantly, under the new equity permit program, people with prior convictions for weed-related crimes would have first dibs on getting a city license.

To flesh out the details for this program, the city commissioned a race and equity analysis report, to ensure that the new marijuana permitting process would benefit the right people. There is nothing more alarming in that report than the arrest data it relies upon for the program’s foundation: In 2015, African Americans made up 30 percent of the population but 77 percent of cannabis arrests, compared to 4 percent for whites.  

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CityLab: Mapping Global Air Pollution Down to the Neighborhood Level

A team of Yale University environmental researchers just released a map tool that shows concentrations of fine particulate matter (PM 2.5) across the whole world in pretty astounding detail: each pixel represents a 10-by-10 kilometer square. They also included visual representations of the world’s dirtiest power plants—a timely feature as the U.S. announces a sweeping new plan to reduce carbon emissions from power plants, especially coal-fired ones.

PM 2.5 inflicts critical damage on populations exposed to it in high concentrations, says map co-creator Alisa Zomer, manager of the Yale Environmental Performance Index. "PM 2.5 is invisible to the human eye,” she says. “But it penetrates into blood and organ tissues, and can lead to cardiovascular and respiratory diseases."

The map draws from satellite measurements to calculate average particulate matter. Users can also toggle on citywide PM 2.5 counts, which come from the WHO’s ambient (outdoor) air pollution in cities database from 2014. Power plants came from the database over at Carbon Monitoring for Action. The air pollution data represent averages, so Zomer notes that the best way to track particulate matter is to install more local sensors in at-risk neighborhoods. That can inform policies and political action to clean up the air.

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Nautilus Magazine: Why Doesn’t Ancient Fiction Talk About Feelings?

These examples illustrate Western literature’s gradual progression from narratives that relate actions and events to stories that portray minds in all their meandering, many-layered, self-contradictory complexities. I’d often wondered, when reading older texts: Weren’t people back then interested in what characters thought and felt?

Perhaps people living in medieval societies were less preoccupied with the intricacies of other minds, simply because they didn’t have to be. When people’s choices were constrained and their actions could be predicted based on their social roles, there was less reason to be attuned to the mental states of others (or one’s own, for that matter). The emergence of mind-focused literature may reflect the growing relevance of such attunement, as societies increasingly shed the rigid rules and roles that had imposed order on social interactions. [...]

It’s unlikely that these results arise from underlying genetic differences shared by parents and children—that is, that parents talk more about mental states because they themselves have better mentalizing abilities, which their children in turn are likely to inherit. Evidence for a direct role of language comes from psychologists Jennie Pyers and Ann Senghas, who studied deaf adults exposed to Nicaraguan Sign Language, a language that recently emerged when the Nicaraguan government began educating deaf children together in one national school.2 What began as a simple gesturing system has flowered into an elaborate and complex language, allowing researchers to study the birth and development of an entirely new language and its community.

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Haaretz: Why Orthodox Jews Tried and Failed to Block Israel’s First Woman Shariah Court Judge

Khatib, an Arab-Israeli lawyer, was confirmed Tuesday by a Justice Ministry committee responsible for appointing judges (qadis in Arabic) to the nine Islamic courts that adjudicate the country's Islamic family law. Although, with Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked’s support, the committee unanimously appointed Khatib, her appointment represents the fruition of a fraught 22 year struggle against conservative Muslim and Jewish ultra-Orthodox  leadership to open the benches of Israel's Islamic judiciary to women - exposing the complex relationship between Islam, women, and the Jewish state. [...]

From this perspective, Khatib's appointment represents a potential step towards transforming the Islamic courts into secular Israeli institutions. Academic specialists Mousa Abou Ramadan and Yuksel Sezgin have explained that Muslim leadership view patriarchal elements of the Islamic courts as protection for their religion’s authenticity and independence within a Jewish majority state. This attitude is intensified by the framing of Islamic courts as a last bastion of Muslim legal autonomy in Israel. Issues of identity were far less at play in the Palestinian Authority’s Islamic courts, where women became judges without obstruction in 2009. [...]

In a Knesset discussion, MK Issawi Freij (Meretz) explained the Haredi opposition: "They do not want to create a precedent that could return like a boomerang to us in Judaism... If it is possible to appoint a qadiya among the Muslims, which according to Islamic law is permissible, we are creating a precedent for ourselves in Judaism, that tomorrow there will be the demand to appoint female rabbis to rabbinic courts." Orthodox state-funded rabbinic courts in Israel, who have a denominational monopoly on religious legal services for the country’s Jews, do not accept women as judges.

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Haaretz: First-ever Photos of Yemen's Jews Stunned the Jewish World

The search for the authentic Jew was a common pursuit among Jewish communities in the 19th century. Many asked themselves the question in one form or another: “Am I really living according to the ways of my ancestors?”

In those years, a young German-Jew who had just turned 30 decided to leave the family business and set off on a journey around the world that would incorporate two of his great passions: photography; and the study of ancient and exotic peoples. Hermann Burchardt decided to use his substantial inheritance to rent an apartment in Damascus, which would serve as the base for his research expeditions and adventures. He had already studied Arabic and Turkish, which he hoped to use to his advantage. [...]

The images were nothing short of a revelation for European Jewry. After a break of thousands of years, there was at last a tangible sign of the existence of the Yemenite Jewish community. It seemed as if the world’s most authentic Jew, who had lived completely isolated from any foreign influence, had finally been found – at least, this is what they believed in Europe. The article so excited the journal’s readership that the photographs were turned into postcards, which were sold and circulated by the thousands.

read the aricle and see the photos 

America Magazine: Ending the death penalty is closer than you think

Opponents of the death penalty got some good news at the end of 2016. A year-end analysis from the Death Penalty Information Center finds that the use of the death penalty fell to historic lows across the United States with 20 inmates executed in 2016. That is the lowest number of executions since 1991, when 14 inmates were executed. [...]

The United States is one of 58 nations, China, Pakistan, Iran,India and Saudi Arabia among them, that have not abolished or otherwise declined to make use of capital punishment. Ms. Rust-Tierney believes the public sentiment away from the death penalty in the United States reflects a growing appreciation that “we don’t need it and the troubles it creates.” [...]

One major reason for the overall national decline was a decrease in Texas, which executed seven inmates this year, a 20-year low, Pew reports. A declining homicide rate in recent years may have contributed to the reduction in capital sentences in Texas, but the state's highest criminal court also sent multiple cases back to trial courts in 2016 because of faulty evidence. [...]

While the numbers were dramatically down, “unfortunately, the 20 executions that took place demonstrate some of the problems with our criminal justice system,” Ms. Clifton said. “This year’s executions were geographically isolated, and many of the executed prisoners had serious mental illnesses or did not receive adequate representation or court review.”

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Politico: MEPs increasingly back kicking Viktor Orbán out of EPP

But many in the EPP view Orbán’s crackdown on the Central European University (CEU) as the last straw after a series of measures that went against the letter and the spirit of EU rules — from erecting fences against migrants through mounting an anti-Brussels communication campaign to passing a law targeting NGOs that receive foreign funding.

“We had sympathy for Fidesz, a sister party which did things a bit differently than we did,” said Frank Engel, a Luxembourgish MEP from the EPP.  “Now we think that the best thing they could do is just leave the EPP.” [...]

Whether Orbàn ultimately faces any sanction will depend on the stance of the EPP’s leaders. They have so far appeared cool on the idea of excluding Fidesz, which contributes 11 MEPs to the EPP group in the parliament. [...]

Orbán has long benefitted from leniency within the EPP leadership. He enjoys friendly relations with Joseph Daul, the president of the EPP and the only person with the power to expel Fidesz. Orbán has also benefitted from good relations with the Christian Social Union, an EPP member which is the Bavarian sister party of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats.

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Al Jazeera: The case for gender equality in the Muslim world

Two-thirds of the world's illiterate adults are women. Only half of the world's women are employed, compared to three-quarters of the world's men. In most developing countries, female employment is even lower, at around 25 percent. Yet, women spend two and a half times more time and effort than men on unpaid care work and household responsibilities.

The total value of the global employment participation gap and the wage gap between women and men is $17 trillion; in other words, women only have a 36 percent share of global income, measured in purchasing power parity terms. This generates massive inequalities in overall incomes, health and education.  [...]

These challenges are particularly pronounced in the Muslim world, where approximately 65 percent of women are illiterate, compared to 40 percent of men. The UN's Arab Human Development Report points out that in Arab countries, the high rates of gender inequality coincide with a lack of economic opportunities among women. Female labour force participation is slightly less than 24 percent, and among young women, less than 18 percent - the lowest rate among all regions. The share of women in GDP in the Arab region is only about 29 percent, against 50 percent in all developing countries. And the poverty rate is 31.6 percent among women, but 19 percent among men. [...]

The challenges women face in the Muslim world are often enshrined in archaic laws and practices on ownership, early marriage, female genital mutilation, education, healthcare, job opportunities and wages. Yet the irony is that these laws and practices are in violation of the letter and spirit of Islamic teachings on women's rights. 

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Political Critique: Marine Le Pen, or the Normalization of the Far-Right

In other words, the task now at hand is not just to show how much of a monster Le Pen is. Rather, the task requires calm evaluation of the points on which her politics reach an audience beyond her political party. This is something being witnessed all over Europe: far-right voices push the agenda to the far-right for the whole of the political spectrum. And this happens even more so when other parties not only incorporate these views out of political opportunism, but also collaborate with extremists.

This clearly happened when the extreme right political party LAOS participated in Lucas Papademos’ administration, despite its openly anti-Semitic views. It also happened when Nicolas Sarkozy adopted far-right views while supposedly condemning the far-right. This phenomenon resulted in tougher stances on immigrant rights in countries like Denmark and Austria, and a general shift to the right in countries where extreme right parties held office, such as in Poland, Slovakia, and Romania. [...]

The process of de-demonisation (dédiabolisation) of Marine Le Pen has started to bear fruit. Journalists working for Le Monde say that they believe it is better to treat the National Front just like any other party, “even though it’s not a party like any other.” Why? Because voters do not like it when they are intimidated, taken by the hand and told that they should avoid bad company. [...]

In the case of Le Pen, the fact that we are dealing with a political rhetoric that now focuses on “our European values” rather than blood or race, means that we are treading on the common ground of the central argument of modern day Islamophobia, which is reproduced across the political spectrum. The idea that France has “too many immigrants” also runs across the political spectrum.

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Broadly: Dogs Will Lie to Get What They Want, New Study Says

In other words, more than half of the dogs realized taking the competitive person to the box of sausages would not benefit them in the least, so they lied when asked to show her the food. In fact, two dogs named Arwen and Nelson were so smart, they always led the cooperative person, never the competitive person, to the sausages. Baxter, Cicca, Barni, and Caju also never led the competitive partner to the sausages, although they were less consistent with the cooperative partner. [...]

The question is: Should dog owners start to side eye their pets a little more? Marianne Heberlein, the lead author on the study, suggests maybe so. "A dog still is a loyal, lovely companion," she tells Broadly. "However, the study shows that dogs, like other animals, try to optimize [their] own profit. They seem to know what they want and also can manipulate humans to reach their goal." She recommends owners "be careful and precise in rewarding your dog" as it may have faked a behavior just to get a reward.

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Jakub Marian: Europe: Unemployment Rate by Region in 2016

(All three conditions must be fulfilled simultaneously.) Simply put, an unemployed person is someone who currently does not have a job, is in principle capable of having a job, and is actively trying to find a job. Therefore, unemployment statistics do not include people who choose not to seek employment although they would be physically able to, but the number of such people is relatively low (less than 3% of total population in most countries), and a large fraction of them are full-time students.

The following map is based on data by Eurostat from 2016. Note that Eurostat provides annual unemployment rates based on a survey that takes place quarterly, without clearly explaining the methodology used (they probably take the average of the results):

see the map

The Atlantic: Why Educated Christians Are Sticking With Church

New data from the Pew Research Center doesn’t disprove these claims, but it does challenge them. While Americans with college experience are overall less likely to attend services, pray on a regular basis, and say religion is very important to them, that’s not true within many faith groups. In fact, Catholic, Mormon, and Protestant college grads are all more likely to attend church on a weekly basis than their less educated peers. This was not the trend among religious minorities like Muslims and Jews, or among people who don’t affiliate with any religion at all, suggesting that education has a distinctive effect on religiosity within the world of Christianity.  [...]

Educational differences had a much bigger effect on religious practice. Sixty-eight percent of college-educated evangelical Protestants go to church every week, compared to 55 percent of those who only went to high school. In fact, college grads show up in the church pews more often in nearly every kind of Christian tradition: Among mainline Protestants, weekly attendance was 36 to 31 percent, more educated to less; among black Protestants, 59 to 52 percent; and among Catholics, 45 to 39 percent. The effect was perhaps greatest among Mormons: 85 percent of Mormon college graduates go to church at least once a week, compared to 66 percent of their peers with a high-school education or less. [...]

One other data point in the Pew study that supports this theory. Among people who don’t identify with any religion in particular, very few attend religious services every week, regardless of whether they’re educated or not. But 47 percent of high-school-educated people in this group still say religion is “very” or “somewhat” important to them, and 71 percent say they believe in God. Compare that to less than a quarter of their college-educated peers who say religion matters to then, and less than half who say they believe in God. This suggests that at least some of the less educated people identify as religious but don’t have a religious community, while a majority of the more educated people simply aren’t interested in religion at all.

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The Atlantic: Should France Have Its Own Version of Islam?

But Tareq Oubrou, the popular imam of Bordeaux’s Grand Mosque and a prominent theologian, told me he is not concerned. Nor does he blame those elements in French society that harbor fears of Islam. The morning after the results were announced, he spoke about “legitimate fears” among the French, and seemed to put the burden on Muslims to make Islam more compatible with France and its strong flavor of state secularism, known as laïcité. [...]

Tareq Oubrou: These results were expected; they weren’t a big surprise. But the rise of the National Front is an indicator that French society is in crisis, an economic and identity crisis. The same questions that animate America—globalization, unemployment, terrorism—these questions play an important role in our elections today. French society is scared of Islam, is scared of terrorism, and the advance of the National Front is a sign of that fear. [...]

There are Islamic practices that haven’t been adapted to French culture. The French don’t understand that. And Muslims don’t manage to explain why they do these practices. So ignorance leads a minority of French people to be scared. Take the question of women, for example. A certain way of practicing the religion gives the impression that Islam doesn’t give women their rights. There are prejudices that sometimes get confirmed by the behavior of a certain number of Muslims. When a woman goes to the hospital in labor and refuses to be examined by a male doctor, in France they don’t understand this. It’s bizarre! It’s enough for this to happen twice in a hospital for people to start asking themselves questions. [...]

Islam is poorly understood, poorly explained, and people are scared of what they don’t understand. The question of the headscarf, of religious visibility in public spaces—France has a particular history with religion, and we need to take that into consideration. France has lived through wars between religions—Protestants, Catholics—in its past. French laïcité was constructed in opposition to Catholicism, which dominated society, so religious visibility in public spaces is still viewed as threatening. Muslims need to make an effort to adapt to the culture.

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The Guardian: Unequal Russia: is anger stirring in the global capital of inequality?

Measuring levels of inequality, rather than simply tracking absolute poverty levels, has become a watchword for economists of late, with some believing it is the uneven distribution of wealth that is one of the key factors driving political discontent and disenfranchisement globally.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, the head of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde, said increased inequality was one of a number of factors leading to the rise of populism around the world – adding she had first warned of these dangers four years ago, but that after the victory of Donald Trump in the US and the increasing popularity of far-right parties across Europe, she hoped people would now pay it more attention.

A recent report by Credit Suisse showed that Russia is the most unequal of all the world’s major economies. The richest 10% of Russians own 87% of all the country’s wealth, according to the report, compared with 76% in the US and 66% in China. According to another measure, by VTB Capital, 1% of the Russian population holds 46% of all the personal bank deposits in the country. [...]

Approximately 23 million Russians – about 16% of the population – now officially subsist below the poverty line, and there are increasing signs that the huge concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny percentage of the population is starting to annoy more Russians – especially as many of the richest people are government officials, or those close to them. A recent report found that 41% of Russians say they struggle to get enough money together for food and clothing.

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Vintage Everyday: 40 Breathtaking Black and White Photographs Capture Everyday Life in Palermo, Sicily in the 1950s and 1960s

Enzo Sellerio was born in Palermo, Sicily, in 1924. He studies law but in the meantime he discovers photography. He wins his first prize in 1952. He is considered one of the major photographers of the “Neorealismo”, an Italian artistic movement, which envisages a realistic approach in cinema, photography and literature.

In his photos he succeeds in capturing, thanks to a great technical quality and to an extraordinary sensibility, the soul of his homeland, Sicily, and of its people.

Among the street scenes, townscapes and landscapes, people working and at play, the ebb and flow of Sicilian life, the viewer of these photographs begins to recognise a master whose sense of composition has been influenced by the great European painters whose work he knows so well, by Breughel, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Vermeer and Millet.

see the photos

Quartz: In his TED talk, Pope Francis had some choice words for the world’s egotistical leaders

In the era of Brexit, the European refugee crisis and the Trump administration’s “America First” policies, the Pope preached solidarity, especially with the world’s 244 million immigrants displaced by war, calamity or poverty. “I myself was born in a family of migrants,” he said. “My father, my grandparents, like many other Italians, left for Argentina and met the fate of those who are left with nothing. I could have very well ended up among today’s ‘discarded’ people.” [...]

The pontiff also addressed TED’s tech-obsessed attendees, including SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who is scheduled to speak at the conference later this week. “If the growth of scientific and technological innovation would coincide with more equality and social inclusion,” the Pope Said. “How wonderful would it be if, while we discover far away planets, we could also rediscover the needs of the brother, or the sister, orbiting around us.” [...]

TED’s international curator, Bruno Giussani, explains that it took several tries to convince the popular pontiff to speak at the conference. “When I first approached the Vatican, it’s fair to say that not many there knew of TED,” Giussani said. “So there was a lot of explaining to do.”

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watch the TED Talk

Land of Maps: GDP per Capita for Europe by subdivision

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The Huffington Post: Someone Chained A Cross To Gay Street In NY. What Happened Next Was Beautiful.

On Good Friday, a mysterious giant wooden cross appeared on Gay Street in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City, chained and locked to an apartment gate.

Over the next nine days, the cross’ owner would return and chain the cross to different parts of the street making it impossible for others to move it.

“To be honest, I’m a Christian, and the cross means, love, peace and hope. And it was clear the owner of this cross did not share those values,” Gay St. resident Micah Latter, whose gate the cross was first chained to, told HuffPost. “Whatever [this person’s] point, [it] was lost in translation. Their actions were pointless and annoying.” [...]

On Sunday, Latter and ten neighbors and friends gathered to paint the cross the colors of the LGBTQ rainbow flag. They drank champagne and changed the locks so the original owner can no longer move it ― they’re now calling it “The Love Cross.”

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The Washington Post: The free press is in really bad shape around the world. A new report says populism is to blame.

This year, the experts say, things are worse than ever. In the past year, the outlook for journalists and the media has gotten worse in nearly two-thirds of the 180 countries surveyed. In the past five years, the level of media freedom constraints and violations has risen 14 percent worldwide. “Violations of the freedom to inform are less and less the prerogative of authoritarian regimes and dictatorships,” the report's authors write. “Once taken for granted, media freedom is proving to be increasingly fragile in democracies as well.”

A key explanation for this is the rise of populism around the world, the report's authors say. They write, “discrediting the media is the preferred weapon of those who are 'anti-system.' " So outsider candidates such as President Trump call the media “among the most dishonest human beings on earth” and accuse them of spreading “fake news.” (In part because the report says Trump has set off a “witch-hunt against journalists,” the United States dropped two spots in 2016.) Nigel Farage, of the anti-immigration U.K. Independence Party, frequently disparaged the media during his Brexit campaign. Beppe Grillo, the comedian who heads Italy's xenophobic Five Star Movement, prefers blogging to answering questions from the journalistic “caste.”

The report also raises alarm bells about another scary trend — spying on sources. Germany, for example, passed a law extending mass surveillance powers of the country's intelligence agency without an exception for journalists. This year, the United Kingdom passed a similar measure.

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The Telegraph: Hackers flood Isis social media accounts with gay porn

The hacker, who goes by the name WachulaGhost, started targeting the Isis accounts after being deeply affected by the notorious shooting at the Orlando Pulse nightclub in Florida in 2016, in which 49 people were killed and 53 wounded. [...]

WachulaGhost claims to have gained access to more than 250 social media accounts affiliated with Isis supporters and sympathisers - and has received threatening messages as a result of his efforts, which generally entail filling the accounts with rainbow flags, pro-LGBT+ messages, images of gay pornography and links to porn sites.

Speaking to CNN last year, he said. “I get beheading images… death threats. ‘We’re going to kill you’ and that’s good because if they are focusing on me they are not doing anything else." 

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BBC4 In Our Time: Baltic Crusades

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Baltic Crusades, the name given to a series of overlapping attempts to convert the pagans of North East Europe to Christianity at the point of the sword. From the 12th Century, Papal Bulls endorsed those who fought on the side of the Church, the best known now being the Teutonic Order which, thwarted in Jerusalem, founded a state on the edge of the Baltic, in Prussia. Some of the peoples in the region disappeared, either killed or assimilated, and the consequences for European history were profound.

With

Aleks Pluskowski Associate Professor of Archaeology at the University of Reading

Nora Berend Fellow of St Catharine's College and Reader in European History at the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge

and

Martin PalmerDirector of the International Consultancy on Religion, Education, and Culture

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Politico: Emmanuel Macron’s enemy within

While far-right leader Marine Le Pen’s odds of victory are long nearly two weeks before the runoff, Macron faces multiple dangers, from soft turnout to another embarrassing gaffe, that could narrow his margin of victory and undermine his authority as president, even though an outright upset isn’t yet feared.

Macron may be his own worst enemy, his team of aides and supporters feel. The independent centrist candidate, who came first in the presidential election’s first round with 24 percent of the vote, celebrated in an exuberant fashion that would have been more appropriate if he’d actually been elected president. “The key word should have been sobriety, and we forgot that,” said an aide in his inner circle. [...]

According to a Harris Interactive poll, 47 percent of Fillon voters, 52 percent of Mélenchon voters and 76 percent of those who went for Hamon say they will vote for Macron on May 7. [...]

Another possible pitfall would be a Russian hack attack. Computer security firm Trend Micro confirmed that the Macron campaign’s emails had been the target of numerous attacks from the Russian hacker group known as Fancy Bear, but so far, according to Macron aides, to no avail.

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The Conversation: More people than ever before are single – and that’s a good thing

Today, the number of single adults in the U.S. – and many other nations around the world – is unprecedented. And the numbers don’t just say people are staying single longer before settling down. More are staying single for life. A 2014 Pew Report estimates that by the time today’s young adults reach the age of 50, about one in four of them will have never married. [...]

I’m a social scientist, and I’ve spent the past two decades researching and writing about single people. I’ve found that the rise of single living is a boon to our cities and towns and communities, our relatives and friends and neighbors. This trend has the chance to redefine the traditional meaning – and confines – of home, family and community. [...]

But studies have also shown that single people are bucking those trends. For example, they are more likely than married people to encourage, help and socialize with their friends and neighbors. They are also more likely to visit, support, advise and stay in touch with their siblings and parents.

In fact, people who live alone are often the life of their cities and towns. They tend to participate in more civic groups and public events, enroll in more art and music classes, and go out to dinner more often than people who live with others. Single people, regardless of whether they live alone or with others, also volunteer more for social service organizations, educational groups, hospitals and organizations devoted to the arts than people who are married.

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Vox: How sanctuary cities actually work

Motherboard: In the Future, the Holocaust Is Just Another Hologram

Gutter's entire body is displayed on a giant, vertical, flat screen TV. When I push a button to talk, my question is processed by speech recognition and natural language processing to fetch the right answer from a library of over 1,900 video clips of Gutter, who's in his mid-80s today. The clips were recorded over 20 hours of interviews, so Gutter is able to answer almost any question about his life, including a whole line of interrogations about Holocaust denial.

The videos were captured with 120 4K cameras from all angles in order to future-proof Gutter's testimony, and he's not only able to respond to questions via a screen. At the Tribeca Film Festival last weekend, USC premiered a version of the survivor's story where he walks viewers in VR through the Majdanek concentration camp. In the future, USC hopes to turn Gutter into a responsive hologram that can be rolled into classrooms. [...]

The Illinois Holocaust Museum will be the first location to host a permanent installation of New Dimension in Testimony starting in October, but I also got to see a prototype of an online version that anyone will be able to access in the future.

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The Guardian: 100 days of gibberish – Trump has weaponised nonsense

Sixteen times during the interview, which took place in the Oval Office, Trump’s speech is recorded as “unintelligible”, either because he was mumbling like a weirdo or because an aide was talking over him and didn’t want to be quoted in the interview – both of which, the Toronto Star notes, are “highly unusual”. Highly unusual is our normal now.

Whether or not Trump is capable of calculation (and, judging by his largely noun-free syntax in this interview, it’s debatable), his rhetorical style, untethered from both meaning and reality, serves his agenda well. Language is where we find common ground, where we define ourselves and teach others how to treat us, where we name problems so we can see and fight them. There’s a reason why social justice movements care about things such as pronouns and racial slurs and calling a Nazi a Nazi and saying “abortion” out loud – it’s the same reason why rightwingers, Trumpists in particular, are so eager to cast language as a frivolous abstraction and any critique as “political correctness”.

Without language, there is no accountability, no standard of truth. If Trump never says anything concrete, he never has to do anything concrete. If Trump never makes a statement of commitment, Trump supporters never have to confront what they really voted for. If his promises are vague to the point of opacity, Trump cannot be criticised for breaking them. If every sloppy lie (ie: “Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower … This is McCarthyism!”) can be explained away as a “generality” or “just a joke” because of “quotes”, then he can literally say anything with impunity. Trump can rend immigrant families in the name of “heart”, destroy healthcare in the name of “life”, purge minority voters in the name of “justice”, and roll back women’s autonomy in the name of “freedom”. The constitution? Probably sarcastic. There are “quotes” all over that thing!

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The Conversation: Witch-hunts and surveillance: the hidden lives of queer people in the military

Officially, gay men and lesbian women were banned from serving in the Army, Airforce and Navy until 1992, when Prime Minister Paul Keating had the political courage to overturn the ban. Until then, it was argued that homosexuality threatened military cohesion and morale. By contrast, the US kept its “don’t ask don’t tell” policy, which officially barred entry for gays and lesbians to the military while allowing them to join as long as they didn’t disclose their sexuality, for two more than decades.

Before 1992 in Australia, those who did serve were forced to hide their sexuality, facing discharge if their homosexuality was exposed. The ban on transgender service lasted even longer, a further 18 years. The contribution of intersex personnel (those born with aspects of both sexes) is still to be fully unearthed. [...]

These men and women are courageous not just because of their military sacrifice, but also because they served knowing they were still considered unequal. Within the military, many were subjected to witch-hunts, surveillance, homophobia and dishonourable discharge, with all the future challenges that would present, ranging from limited employment opportunities to ongoing stigma in a homophobic society. Transgender personnel were treated with ignorance and denied the opportunity to serve in the capacities and at the levels they were worthy.

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CityLab: What Was Lost in the Fires of the L.A. Riots

The public life of Rodney King begins on March 3, 1991, when the African-American man was clubbed and kicked relentlessly by a gang of LAPD officers during a traffic stop. It ends on June 17, 2012, when he was found dead in his swimming pool at age 47. The autopsy showed that King an “alcohol and drug-induced delirium” led to his drowning. Before that point, he had been revolving in and out of rehab for substance abuse, a problem he attributed to trauma from the beating he took from cops. His death was ruled both accidental and self-inflicted, which is a common ending for the concussed.

Riots are also a common feature of communities that have been beaten down and traumatized by racism and poverty. Such was the case for South Central Los Angeles, which erupted in flames and violence on April 29, 1992, hours after a jury refused to convict the four LAPD officers who attacked King. The police got off the hook even though the beating had been captured on home video: That clip hit the local news, then CNN, and achieved pre-internet virality. [...]

A common refrain when unrest grips black communities is that black rioters are only hurting themselves by burning and looting businesses in their own neighborhoods. That wasn’t the whole story in the ‘92 riots, though. Much of the damage was done in Koreatown, where over 1,700 businesses were destroyed, compared to 2,800 African-American businesses elsewhere. Koreans were targeted because they owned and controlled so much real estate across South Central, while African Americans felt they didn’t have the same entrepreneurial opportunities. The Harlins killing only accentuated the disconnect between these two communities. One Asian-American man captured in a news clip in the doc tries to make the connection, though, noting how no fire trucks were coming to Koreatown to put out the fires. “This is no longer about Rodney King,” says the man, who’s not identified. “This is about the system against us, the minorities.”

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Al Jazeera: Inside Tehran's monument to US 'arrogance'

The embassy building - which still contains much of the old equipment used by US embassy staff to send coded messages - became a collection point for anti-American posters, sculptures and paintings. In years past, officials have opened its doors to mark special occasions, such as the anniversary of the hostage crisis. But a few months ago, it was formally established as a museum accessible to the public year-round - and the timing, coming on the heels of the election of US President Donald Trump, is no coincidence. [...]

Payam Mohseni, the director of Harvard University's Iran Project, noted that in light of Iran's "long arm" in conflicts throughout the Middle East, the Trump administration cannot approach any major regional crisis without dealing with Iran in some capacity. "Iran will be a top priority for Trump's Middle East policy, and whether he chooses to increase tensions or de-escalate, he will be forced to deal with Iran over issues ranging from Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen to Persian Gulf security in the Middle East," Mohseni told Al Jazeera. [...]

"They view it as their pride and their strength," Torfeh told Al Jazeera. "Khamenei still models himself on Ayatollah Khomeini, and has not as yet taken Iran out of that revolutionary mode 38 years later. In almost every speech, he makes references to the legacy of Khomeini. Yet there is hardly any legacy that could be put to Khamenei's own name once he passes away. And his one and only image, sitting or standing in his long black robe on a raised platform addressing his loyal followers, is symbolic of the fact that he has been frozen in the same political position, almost too worried to do anything different to his predecessor."

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BBC4: Afghanistan: The Lessons of War

A former commander of British and Coalition forces in Helmand embarks on a personal journey to find out what has been achieved by the thirteen-year campaign in Afghanistan. It is a quest that leads Former Major General Andrew Mackay to some of the key military and political figures of the past decade.He puts searching questions to former US General David Petraeus and ISAF Commanders General John McColl and General David Richards, to discover if there ever was a coherent strategy for coalition troops.

He reflects on what was achieved in Afghanistan with leading politicians including former US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and former UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband.And he looks to the future of the country with a senior figure from the current Afghan government - Mohammad Mustafa Mastoor, Deputy Minister for Finance.

General Mackay also believes that any future interventions should be based on lessons learnt in the Afghanistan campaign. But what are those lessons? He hears from experts who have studied the campaign to help him consider the role he played and to find out what conclusions can be drawn.

Andrew Mackay : "I think whoever you are when you go to an extreme environment such as Helmand, you are never the same person when you come back. I was interested in considering the role that I played as the commander of British forces in Helmand and the journey that it had taken me on."

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Bloomberg: Eight Maps That Explain France’s Macron-Le Pen Election

For the first time in modern-day France, neither of the two mainstream parties made the second round of a presidential election. In their place, Emmanuel Macron, a former Socialist economy minister who left the party to run for the presidency, and Marine Le Pen, head of the far-right National Front, will face off on May 7.

Here are eight maps to help make sense of all that’s scrambling the political landscape in France—from anti-establishment frustration to blue-collar angst and urban-rural divide.

In Sunday’s presidential first-round election, Macron won many departments—like counties—that went Socialist in 2012. Le Pen, by contrast, made most of her gains in the heartlands of the center-right. Both were aided by the poor performance of the candidates from those parties. Macron ultimately won 33 departments and territories that current President Francois Hollande had won in 2012, while Le Pen picked up 30 that had gone to UMP candidate Nicolas Sarkozy. (France has 96 mainland departments plus several overseas departments and territories.)

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Political Critique: Shutting the Door Behind Them

But what the British and Polish populist far right share in common ideologically is also what may be dividing their communities from each other within Europe itself. While anti-Muslim attitudes have exploded, ethnic nationalism among individual European nations is also rising. Outside of Poland’s borders, Poles themselves paradoxically sometimes become “the others.” In many communities in the UK, Polish migrants are viewed as “uncivilized” outsiders from the East who sponge off government handouts. Polish right-wingers put the “East” or “the uncivilized” further east, however, and view Poles abroad as “part of the European family,” since they are white, Christian and, as members of the EU, entitled to free movement and employment across borders in other EU countries. [...]

Most Poles can’t see the irony of the situation in which they see immigrants coming to Poland through the same lens Polish immigrants are seen in Western Europe. The far right tries to differentiate Polish emigration to other EU nations, by citing a desire for “special treatment” from richer EU countries due to hardships imposed by economic transformation and the legacy of the Cold War and soviet rule. The belief in “cultural proximity” is also widespread – “we have the right to migrate because, unlike others, we are similar to Western Europeans.” [...]

One thing that xenophobia in the States, Western Europe and Eastern Europe share in common is cultural egotistism: we all know that good days are in the past and whatever remains we prefer to redistribute among ourselves all the while pushing “newcomers” to the social bottom. And even when the newcomers move up in the social ladder, they themselves are quick to marginalize those who follow a few steps behind them.

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The Telegraph: Plastic-eating wax worm 'extremely exciting' for global pollution crisis

Researchers have described the tiny caterpillar’s ability to break down even the toughest plastics as “extremely exciting” and said the discovery could be engineered into an environmentally-friendly solution on an industrial scale.

Around a trillion plastic bags are used around the world each year, of which a huge number find their way into the oceans or are discarded into landfill.

Commonly found living in bee hives, or harvested as fishing bait, the waxworm proved it could eat its way through polyethylene, which is notoriously hard to break down, more than 1,400 times faster than other organisms.

Scientists believe the creature has potent enzymes in its saliva or gut which attack plastic’s chemical bonds, in the same way they digest the complex wax found in hives.

The waxworm’s potential was discovered by accident when biologist and amateur beekeeper Federica Bertocchini cleaned out her hives and temporarily placed the parasites in a plastic shopping bag.

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FiveThirtyEight: Marine Le Pen Is In A Much Deeper Hole Than Trump Ever Was

Although vote counts are still being finalized, the first-round result should be a good one for pollsters, which correctly had Macron and Le Pen in the top two positions. In fact, the pre-election polls — which had shown Macron at 24 percent, Le Pen at 22 percent, the center-right François Fillon at 20 percent and the far-left-wing Jean-Luc Mélenchon at 19 percent — should come within a percentage point or two of the final result for each of the top four candidates.

The same polls show Macron in a dominant position in the runoff. He leads Le Pen by 26 percentage points in polls testing the two-way matchup, according to data compiled by G. Elliott Morris of The Crosstab. [...]

But in my view, the conventional wisdom espoused by analysts such as Bremmer is more likely to be way more out to lunch. Before the U.S. election, Trump trailed Hillary Clinton by only about 2 percentage points in the average swing state.1 In the Brexit vote, the “Remain” campaign’s lead was at least as narrow: about 2 points according to a simple average of polls, or just 0.5 percentage points according to a more complex averaging method. So while Trump’s victory and Brexit were historic events in world history, they were utterly routine occurrences from a polling standpoint; 2- or 3-point polling errors are extremely common. [...]

However, there’s no evidence that candidates such as Le Pen systematically outperform their polls. Across dozens of European elections since 2012, in fact, nationalist and right-wing parties have been as likely to underperform their polls as to overperform them.

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Political Critique: This is Why Orbán Will Capitulate on the Question of the CEU

It cannot be emphasized enough that Orbán’s politics are powercentric. His decisions are based on whether a policy will strengthen or weaken his position. He only understands force. With regard to the question of the CEU, there are four different groups who are challenging his authority: Hungarian protesters, EU politicians, American diplomats and the academic elite. But it is clear that these ʿattacks’ do not carry the same weight when it comes to whether or not the prime minister will reverse the decision. [...]

The impact of these demonstrations is questionable. Orbán doesn’t waver in the face of a crowd of thousands unless one of his loyal research institutes says that potential voters may also take to the streets (see the demonstrations against a proposed internet tax in 2015). In any case, Fidesz doesn’t rely on Budapest to win elections. The demonstrations held in other cities, moreover, attracted only a couple hundred protesters, so they have not caused much alarm either. [...]

It seems that the CEU scandal, the law on NGOs and the national consultation campaign slandering Brussels has been too much for the European People’s Party (EPP) too. Fidesz has recently received a few unexpected blows from them as well. However, overestimating the power of the EU front would be a mistake. Firstly, the EU machinery reacts very slowly, and secondly, if they were to sanction Hungary too strictly, they run the risk of pushing Orbán into the arms of his new best friend, Putin. Such a blatant break with the EU would likely mean the end of Orbán though, so perhaps the Union has more room to maneuver here than they think. If Brussels were to tighten the leash Fidesz would lose face in Hungary, and lose the favour with Putin which Orbán has recently been courting more openly. Let’s leave that problem to Fidesz though.

The attack against the CEU will likely fail, however, because Orbán had expected the Trump administration, which also considers George Soros a political opponent, to turn a blind eye to this assault upon an American university. However this was a big mistake. Even in Trump’s New World, American interests and the protection of democracy are still more important than political skirmishes. Trump’s administration backed the CEU completely, and Orbán hasn’t yet lost all common sense. He won’t be willing to actually pick a fight with the USA just yet.

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Land of Maps: Percentage of people that rank Europe as the first or second most important group to which they belong

see the map

Nautilus Magazine: The Case For Leaving City Rats Alone

Prior to Himsworth’s work, in fact, the sum total knowledge of Canada’s wild rats could be boiled down to a single study of 43 rats living in a landfill in nearby Richmond in 1984. So, six years ago, she stocked an old mini van with syringes, needles, and gloves and live-trapped more than 700 of V6A’s rats to sample their DNA and learn about the bacteria they carried.

Her research has made her reconsider the age-old labeling of rats as invaders that need to be completely fought back. They may, instead, be just as much a part of our city as sidewalks and lampposts. We would all be better off if, under most circumstances, we simply left them alone. [...]

Which brings into question the constant human quest to disrupt rats and their habitats. As much as rats thrive in disrupted environments, Byers says, they’ve managed to create very stable colonies within them. Rats live in tight-knit family groups that are confined to single city blocks, and which rarely interact. The Rat Project hypothesized that when a rat is ousted from its family by pest control, its family might flee its single-block territory, spreading diseases that are usually effectively quarantined to that family. In other words, the current pest control approach of killing one rat per concerned homeowner call could be backfiring, and spreading disease rather than preventing it. [...]

A significant finding from the project’s original phase, Byers tells me, is that not every rat in V6A carried the same disease. Rat families are generally confined to a single city block, and while one block might be wholly infected with a given bacteria, adjacent blocks were often completely disease free. “Disease risk doesn’t really relate to the number of rats you’re exposed to as much as it does which family you interact with,” says Robbin Lindsay, a researcher at Canada’s National Microbiology Lab who assisted the Vancouver Rat Project screen for disease. If those family units are scattered, diseases could potentially spread and multiply—something Byers is hoping to figure out through her Ph.D. work.

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The Guardian: French polls show populist fever is here to stay as globalisation makes voters pick new sides

One of the forces driving the populist dynamic is the gradual sapping of the social categories which used to form the basis of the middle classes. In France, Britain, the Netherlands, Austria and the US the same people – blue- and white-collar workers, intermediate occupations and farmers – are joining the populist revolt. Moreover, this movement started long ago. Support for Trump is rooted in the rise of financial capitalism which started during the Clinton era. Brexit goes back to the rollback of industry initiated by Thatcher. In France, the (far-right) Front National (FN) began gaining momentum when heavy industry went into decline in the 1980s.

So does this mean that the globalised model is not working? Not at all, but it is absurd to look at the global economy in binary terms, for or against. For or against neoliberalism. The truth is that this model, primarily based on an international division of labour, creates substantial wealth but does nothing to bond society as a whole. The job market has become deeply polarised and mainly concentrated in big cities, squeezing out the middle classes. For the first time in history, working people no longer live in the places where jobs and wealth are created. [...]

All over the developed world the populist vote is gathering strength outside the big cities, in small and middling towns, and the countryside. In France these “peripheral” territories are driving the FN dynamic. In the US, the peripheral states put Trump in power, much as Brexit prevailed thanks to peripheral areas of the UK. In Austria support for Norbert Hofer, the far-right candidate in the recent presidential contest, comes from similar places. They are home to the majority of the working classes, disconnected and increasingly sedentary. Such territorial dynamics gather momentum as more mobile groups – the higher social classes, immigrants and minorities – concentrate in the cities. In this way the new social geography renews the old divide between sedentary and nomadic.

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BBC4 Thinking Allowed: Elite education

ELITE EDUCATION: Laurie Taylor explores the ways in which the most prestigious schools and universities around the world sustain inequality. Debbie Epstein, Professor of Cultural Studies in Education at Roehampton University, talks about a far reaching study looking at the origins and costs of the 'export' of the British public school to other countries including Hong Kong and South Africa. Also, Natasha K. Warikoo, Associate Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education consider how elite students in America and Britain think about merit, race and privilege having gained admittance to one of the world's top universities.

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New York Magazine: Cities Vs. Trump

Columbus, Ohio, saw the light of liberalism only decades later, not because of some grand political realignment but as a by-product of creeping prosperity. A varied economy of largely white-collar employers is now drawing a population that is increasingly young, diverse, well educated, and addicted to pleasant living. “When I first moved there 20 years ago, Columbus was a dull, sleepy midwestern city, a solidly Republican city. It isn’t anymore,” says Steven Conn, a history professor at Miami University in Ohio and the author of Americans Against the City: Anti-Urbanism in the Twentieth Century. “People are interested in better public schools and better urban amenities like bike trails and so on, and the Republican Party is against everything they care about week to week.” In some areas, that process is ongoing. Just this month, in a single congressional district in one of the reddest states, Sedgwick County, the Kansas jurisdiction that includes Wichita, swung to the Democratic underdog in a special election; he was swamped by the surrounding rural vote and lost, but not by much. [...]

Trump — like many Americans who duck from house to car to office to mall — rarely experiences an unplanned encounter. He has spent much of his life in gilded rooms, surrounded by people he employs. His idea of transit consists of elevators, limos, helicopters, and private jets. Until he moved into the White House, he hardly set foot in a place he didn’t own. Maybe that’s why he knows so little and appreciates less about his own hometown, why a president who was born and bred in New York City spends his time stoking ancient fears about it. When he started planning Trump Tower in the late 1970s, it was an expression of confidence in the deluxe appeal of midtown Manhattan at a time when a seemingly ungovernable city had bled nearly a million people. Now, when urban crime sits in the eerily low range in many cities, when companies follow their most desirable employees into revitalized downtowns, and when many metropolitan areas are more worried about housing shortages and gentrification than about falling apart, the president has revived a vision of cities suppurating with violence and sin. Once he sold urban real estate to customers who wanted to live there; now he sells fantasies of urban horror to those who prefer to shudder from afar. [...]

The political gulf between city and non-city has deepened even as the physical boundaries between them have blurred. Cities have become more suburbanized and suburbs more citified, pushing the dividing line farther and farther from downtown. These two contrary currents have been in motion at least since the 1940s, when the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company built Stuyvesant Town as a verdant middle-class enclave in the middle of Manhattan, its blocky, high-rise architecture softened by planted courtyards and the absence of cars. More recently, ubiquitous mall brands, an influx of educated young transplants, and a citywide tree-planting spree have given formerly gritty parts of Brooklyn an almost bucolic air. [...]

Conflict between urban and rural areas is a worldwide phenomenon. The Brexit vote shocked Londoners into the realization that they are outnumbered. The right-wing party of Marine Le Pen represents rural France’s revenge on Paris. Tokyo grows while Japan’s population shrinks, and India’s exploding cities are leaving its villages ever poorer, sicker, and less educated.

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The Atlantic: The Case Against Reality

Hoffman: There’s a metaphor that’s only been available to us in the past 30 or 40 years, and that’s the desktop interface. Suppose there’s a blue rectangular icon on the lower right corner of your computer’s desktop — does that mean that the file itself is blue and rectangular and lives in the lower right corner of your computer? Of course not. But those are the only things that can be asserted about anything on the desktop — it has color, position, and shape. Those are the only categories available to you, and yet none of them are true about the file itself or anything in the computer. They couldn’t possibly be true. That’s an interesting thing. You could not form a true description of the innards of the computer if your entire view of reality was confined to the desktop. And yet the desktop is useful. That blue rectangular icon guides my behavior, and it hides a complex reality that I don’t need to know. That’s the key idea. Evolution has shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive. They guide adaptive behaviors. But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be. If you had to spend all that time figuring it out, the tiger would eat you. [...]

Hoffman: The idea that what we’re doing is measuring publicly accessible objects, the idea that objectivity results from the fact that you and I can measure the same object in the exact same situation and get the same results — it’s very clear from quantum mechanics that that idea has to go. Physics tells us that there are no public physical objects. So what’s going on? Here’s how I think about it. I can talk to you about my headache and believe that I am communicating effectively with you, because you’ve had your own headaches. The same thing is true as apples and the moon and the sun and the universe. Just like you have your own headache, you have your own moon. But I assume it’s relevantly similar to mine. That’s an assumption that could be false, but that’s the source of my communication, and that’s the best we can do in terms of public physical objects and objective science. [...]

Hoffman: The formal theory of conscious agents I’ve been developing is computationally universal—in that sense, it’s a machine theory. And it’s because the theory is computationally universal that I can get all of cognitive science and neural networks back out of it. Nevertheless, for now I don’t think we are machines—in part because I distinguish between the mathematical representation and the thing being represented. As a conscious realist, I am postulating conscious experiences as ontological primitives, the most basic ingredients of the world. I’m claiming that experiences are the real coin of the realm. The experiences of everyday life—my real feeling of a headache, my real taste of chocolate—that really is the ultimate nature of reality.

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Vox: How Republicans came to embrace anti-environmentalism

It’s ironic that today’s Republicans see America’s environmental state as such a liability, given that Republican presidents had such a big hand in constructing it. In the early 20th century Teddy Roosevelt pushed a federal system of parks, forests, and monuments. In 1970, it was Richard Nixon who created the Environmental Protection Agency and signed many foundational laws. Even during the last Republican administration of George W. Bush, longtime EPA employees have told me there was considerable if often tacit support by party leaders. [...]

For starters, it helps to recall where the strongest environmental support came from in the 1960s and 1970s, during the great bipartisan build-out of America’s environmental laws and agencies: those regions where urbanizing and industrializing had gone the furthest, across the cities of the coasts and the Great Lakes and especially in their suburbs. A new political language of “the environment” was born along urban edges; it interwove homeowner concerns about pollution and developer intrusions that state and local governments had failed to address. [...]

The other strand of early anti-environmentalism ran through the South, where traditional Democratic dominance was in flux. Democrats like then-Georgia governor Jimmy Carter embraced environmental causes. Some Republicans did as well. When college professor Newt Gingrich ran for Congress starting in 1972 in a West Georgia district extending into Atlanta’s suburbs, it made sense that he did so both as a Republican and an environmentalist. [...]

Racial and geographic realignments over the 1980s and ‘90s favored the anti-environmental Republicanism Gingrich now sought. Better-off black Americans moved to suburbs of their own, as civil rights groups spearheaded a new movement for “environmental justice.” White environmental groups gained bases in well-off older suburbs as well far-flung newer ones, but energy concerns inclined them to identify with a gentrifying downtown and the “walkability” espoused by a New Urbanism. At the same time, black majority districts were also being created to bring racial equity to Georgia’s Congressional delegations, starting with the 5th district, which was won in 1986 by John Lewis. Black representatives became the state’s foremost supporters of environmental causes in Congress.

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The Spectator: Pope is planning to retire, say allies – but only once he’s appointed enough liberal cardinals

Allies of Pope Francis are saying that he’s planning to follow the example of Benedict XVI and retire. But he’ll only do so once he’s appointed enough liberal cardinals to make sure that the next conclave doesn’t elected a conservative who will interpret Catholic doctrine more strictly than he does.

This, at least, is what allies of the Pope have been telling colleagues – claiming that they’ve heard it from the pontiff himself. (Francis himself is a notorious chatterbox and so are some of the cardinals close to him.)

The Pope, now 80, apparently wants to hold three more consistories at which he will bestow the red hat on bishops who share his vision of reform (whatever that may be: the details are still sketchy, four years in).

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Vox: Syria's war: Who is fighting and why (Apr 7, 2017)

BBC: How Western civilisation could collapse

The political economist Benjamin Friedman once compared modern Western society to a stable bicycle whose wheels are kept spinning by economic growth. Should that forward-propelling motion slow or cease, the pillars that define our society – democracy, individual liberties, social tolerance and more – would begin to teeter. Our world would become an increasingly ugly place, one defined by a scramble over limited resources and a rejection of anyone outside of our immediate group. Should we find no way to get the wheels back in motion, we’d eventually face total societal collapse. [...]

Safa Motesharrei, a systems scientist at the University of Maryland, uses computer models to gain a deeper understanding of the mechanisms that can lead to local or global sustainability or collapse. According to findings that Motesharrei and his colleagues published in 2014, there are two factors that matter: ecological strain and economic stratification. The ecological category is the more widely understood and recognised path to potential doom, especially in terms of depletion of natural resources such as groundwater, soil, fisheries and forests – all of which could be worsened by climate change.

That economic stratification may lead to collapse on its own, on the other hand, came as more of a surprise to Motesharrei and his colleagues. Under this scenario, elites push society toward instability and eventual collapse by hoarding huge quantities of wealth and resources, and leaving little or none for commoners who vastly outnumber them yet support them with labour. Eventually, the working population crashes because the portion of wealth allocated to them is not enough, followed by collapse of the elites due to the absence of labour. The inequalities we see today both within and between countries already point to such disparities. For example, the top 10% of global income earners are responsible for almost as much total greenhouse gas emissions as the bottom 90% combined. Similarly, about half the world’s population lives on less than $3 per day.  

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