Quartz: A controversial museum is forcing Italy to talk about its fascist past

The shops that line the main street of Predappio, a small town in Italy’s Sangiovese countryside, seem innocent enough—the biggest one is simply called “Predappio Souvenirs.” But it’s what’s inside that makes them remarkable: a vast collection of fascist memorabilia, including statuettes, towels, books, posters, and postcards covered in fascist symbols; and images and busts of fascism’s founder, former Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. The window displays feature batons bearing Mussolini’s name or quotes, while pink and pale blue baby rompers are adorned with the dictator’s portrait and most famous slogans (“I don’t care!” and “We shall march forward!”), casually arranged as if they were any other kind of merchandise. [...]

A visit to Predappio can feel like an excursion into an alternative reality, one where fascism is displayed as a folkloric episode, and where revisionist history is displayed as fact. You wouldn’t find this type of scene anywhere else in Italy. Of course, fascist graffiti pops up from time to time in the country’s biggest cities; extreme right-wing soccer fans will raise their right arm straight in the air in the Roman salute while chanting their team’s name; and a neo-fascist group called Casa Pound (from the name of the British poet Ezra Pound, a fascist sympathizer) has attacked refugees, immigrants and left-wing opponents, while also developing an ideology that openly admires fascism. And yet, none of this compares to what a visitor sees in Predappio. [...]

A few things have contributed to this eagerly pursued amnesia. To start, Italians have chosen to focus on the resistance movement that helped to overturn the fascist regime rather than on its supporters, explains Giulia Albanese, professor of Contemporary History at Padova’s University. And Italy has also avoided reckoning with its own crimes by concentrating on “the comparison with Nazism, which has always been used to justify, and minimize, fascism’s crimes,” making what happened in Italy look more benign, Albanese says. Add to all this the fact that Italy became one of many pawns during the Cold War, meant to fight a further spread of communism, delaying indefinitely the day of reckoning.

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VICE: We Asked Couples Why They Opened Up Their Relationship

One in five Americans recently reported that at some point in their dating or married lives, they'd been in an open relationship. But what does it really mean to be open? And how does this conversation come about? Surely it's not as easy as pausing Netflix and asking, "so, um, you want to see other people?" [...]

Kasara: It took a while for me to realize this, but I'm not a monogamous person. I've always been able to have feelings for other people. I don't think jealously should be perpetuated as the norm in relationships, as it is with monogamy.

Chris: I have a similar mindset. We never place limits on emotions other than love, like we don't say you can only be sad or happy about this one thing, but with monogamy it's like only one person is allowed to feel your love. And love is such a crazy emotion, so why not experience it with a bunch of people? Polyamory is OK, guys! We're not all weird. [...]

Daniel: About five years ago, my ex-wife told me she had fallen in love with another man. But she taught me the most profound lesson: no matter who you are, your partner could wake up one day and not be in love with you anymore. And that's no one's fault. I realized that my next relationship needed to be open because I no longer have the desire to control my partner. Control is just an illusion anyway.

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The Atlantic: The Challenge of Memorializing America's Wars

ften the terms “monument” and “memorial” are used interchangeably to describe the iconic sites in the nation’s capital, but there is a difference. The New York Times recently cited philosopher of art Arthur Danto’s definition to illustrate this distinction: “We erect monuments so that we shall always remember, and build memorials so that we shall never forget.” While memorials are a source of remembrance, monuments seek to celebrate the purpose, the accomplishments, the heroic. They evoke the cause. As the Global War on Terror Memorial Foundation campaigns for a site to honor those who've died in Iraq and Afghanistan, its members will likely have to grapple with these definitions in deciding what exactly it should be. [...]

The design review committee selected the design of Yale University architecture student Maya Lin. Lin proposed a polished black granite wall with the inscribed names of the Americans who had died in the war. The proposed wall, with no decoration, not even a flag, provided a stunning tally of loss. Many of the early supporters of a memorial were troubled by the absence of any recognition of heroic service. [...]

Memories of patriotic sacrifice enrich national pride: The courageous dead were worthy of their city or their country. Now the survivors must be worthy of them. It is not necessary to go back 2,500 years to Athens to affirm this. In 1863, Abraham Lincoln stood at Gettysburg, on ground still stained by death and in air filled with the stench from shallow graves, and eulogized the dead only in the most general terms. He provided no tally of cost, focusing instead on the purpose of their sacrifice. He promised, “that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion,” and assured that “we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.”

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CityLab: The Highway Hit List

Built in the federal highway-building heyday of the early 1960s, Buffalo’s Scajaquada Expressway offered commuters an unusually scenic high-speed trip into the city: The highway’s planners routed the four-lane thoroughfare right through the middle of Delaware Park, the crown jewel of an ambitious city-wide network of parks and parkways designed by celebrated landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead and his partner Calvert Vaux in the 19th century. [...]

Upstate New York residents will find their region well represented. In addition to the Scajaquada, Rochester’s below-grade Inner Loop (“designed to wrap like a noose around downtown,” according to the report) and Syracuse’s sunken stretch of 1-81 (which “cuts like a knife through the heart” of downtown) make the list. Both highways bulldozed historic neighborhoods of color and kick-started downtown population purges. Demolishing and replacing them with wide, tree-lined avenues—as community groups and planners have proposed—could spur economic revitalization around them, according to the report. NYSDOT is currently considering such an approach for Syracuse, and thanks to a TIGER grant, the Inner Loop is already on its way getting filled in. Further east, Trenton, New Jersey’s waterfront-blocking, under-used Route 29 also makes CNU’s cut, and its demise, too, is being plotted. [...]

But some highways on this list are here to stay—and even expand. State highway engineers still love straight, wide roads, and this inertia cannot be underestimated. At the very least, some state DOTs are becoming more sensitive to impacted communities. Lately, “cap parks” have emerged as compromise solutions that restitch neighborhoods bifurcated by highways by literally covering up their air and noise impacts. Denver’s much-protracted fight over I-70 came to a decisive moment last week, when the Federal Highway Administration approved Colorado’s plans to lower the highway below grade, widen lanes from six to ten, and put a grassy “cap” over a small section of it. It will adjoin a local schoolyard. The I-70 saga offers one illustration of the challenges in such highway facelifts: Many residents love the prospect of a grassy cap park, while others fear that hiding the highway beneath it could draw in a tide of gentrification and displacement.

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Slate: The Elephant Buried Under the Vatican

For decades, no one inquired further into the provenance of the elephant skeleton buried beneath the Vatican, until in the 1980s and ’90s, the Smithsonian's Historian Emeritus, Silvio Bedini, uncovered the elephant's history. He published the results of his research in 1997, in "The Pope's Elephant", the most thorough study to date of the elephant that lived in the Cortile del Belvedere.

His name was Annone—or, once anglicized, Hanno—and he belonged to Pope Leo X, who was elected pope in 1513. Hanno was not just a pet: He played a part in the politics of Portuguese expansion and made a cameo in the Protestant Reformation. But above all, Hanno was a wonder. No elephant had been in Italy since the Roman empire fell, and the entire country clamored to get a glimpse of him. [...]

At the time that Giovanni di Lorenzo de'Medici (of the famous Florentine Medici family) became Pope Leo X, the Portuguese king, Manuel I, was working to solidify his country's hold on the spice trade. The Portuguese expansion over the oceans had threatened the monopoly that overland traders had held, and Egypt, which had long benefited from that monopoly, was pushing the Pope to pull back on Portugal. Egyptian leaders did have leverage: They controlled Jerusalem and could destroy Christian holy sites if the Pope sided against them.

It was traditional for Christian rulers to send a gift to a new pope upon his election, and Manuel I knew that this was a political opportunity, as well. He could ask for money, to expand his fleet of ships and artillery, and he could obtain the Pope's blessing for Portuguese expansionism. He carefully planned what he would send—textiles, a gold chalice, a brocade altar cover, and other treasures wrought with gold and jewels. He sent a cheetah, leopards, parrots, strange dogs, and a Persian horse. And he sent Hanno.

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Quartz: Our obsession with GDP and economic growth has failed us, let’s end it

In my new book “Wellbeing Economy: Success in a World Without Growth” I point out that the “growth first” rule has dominated the world since the early 20th century. No other ideology has ever been so powerful: the obsession with growth even cut through both capitalist and socialist societies. [...]

Preserving our infrastructure, making it durable, long-term and free adds nothing or only marginally to growth. Destroying it, rebuilding it and making people pay for using it gives the growth economy a bump forward. Keeping people healthy has no value. Making them sick does. An effective and preventative public healthcare approach is suboptimal for growth: it’s better to have a highly unequal and dysfunctional system like in the US, which accounts for almost 20% of the country’s GDP. [...]

As a consequence, mitigating climate change forces industrial production to contract, thus limiting growth even further. What this means is that, on the one hand, growth is disappearing due to the systemic contraction of the global economy. On the other, the future of the climate (and all of us on this planet) makes a return of growth, at least the conventional approach to industry-driven economic growth, politically and socially unacceptable.

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Atlas Obscura: The WWI Memorial That Refuses to Glorify War

If this seems obvious now, it certainly wasn’t then. There are Grande Guerre monuments absolutely everywhere you go in France, and not by happenstance. After the war, the French government offered funds to every settlement in France—every city, town, village, hamlet, community—to build a Grande Guerre memorial. I’ve been told that in the entire country, from the North Sea to the Mediterranean, only five settlements declined to do so. I cannot name any one of those five, and I’ve never met anyone who can, but even if they do exist, the participation rate was still, effectively, 100 percent. [...]

And that’s the one thing that almost all French Great War memorial statuary has in common: romanticism. Not a trace of fear in the men’s faces, even the dying. They clutch their chests, thrust their arms out toward heaven, call out for their men to carry on!, stare out at the battle still underway. But they are not afraid. They do not experience regret. They may be a few seconds from death, but they are still fiercely alive, and looking only forward, never back. Even the dying figures seem more vibrant than I feel some days, and more noble than I am on my best ones.

That’s not what Landowski was going for. Rather than gone to a better place, he focused on: gone. Those empty dinner chairs, vacant bedrooms. He worked in granite, not marble or terra cotta. It took him 15 years to create eight figures, each standing in for roughly 170,000 poilus killed. They huddle together, eight towering stone men around 25 feet tall, arms hanging down, heads listing forward or to one side, eyes neither open nor closed. A Lebel rifle rests against one; another cradles a machine gun to his chest. The figure next to him carries two sacks full of grenades. Another rests his fingertips on a pick handle. A couple of them still wear their packs. Seven are in uniform; one appears to be naked. They are dead, but alive, but dead. Gone, to be sure, but definitely still right here. He called them Les Fantômes—the phantoms.

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Al Jazeera: Why young South Koreans are turning away from religion

Her trajectory of straying from religion in early adulthood is increasingly common among South Koreans, and is reflective of a national trend towards increasing secularism, particularly among young people.

Experts say that young South Koreans are too wrapped up in a demanding education system and job market to spend much time on religious activities.

In many South Korean cities, there are more churches than convenience stores. Around 20 percent of South Koreans identify as Protestant, the largest group in the country, followed by 15 percent who identify as Buddhists, and nearly eight percent as Catholics.

The abundance of churches is a legacy of how people turned to organised religion, mostly brought by US missionaries, for structure and guidance after the 1950-53 Korean War devastated the country and tore apart families. But according to Statistics Korea, a government body, the percentage of South Koreans identifying as having no religion rose from 47 percent in 2005 to 56 percent in 2015. This falling religiosity is especially pronounced among young adults: a poll the same year by Gallup Korea found 31 percent of South Koreans in their 20s identifying as religious, down from 46 percent 10 years earlier. [...]

Francis Jae-ryong Song, a professor at Kyung Hee University in Seoul, has conducted research into the phenomenon of churches attempting to retain young congregants, and argues that churches, like so much else in South Korea, are a competitive ecosystem.

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Quartz: How the world’s largest rodent became a superstar in Japan

Capybaras are typically described as the “world’s biggest rodent,” but their murine roots are rarely spoken of in Japan, where they are arguably the country’s favorite animal. According to recent data from the Japanese Association of Zoos and Aquariums, the number of capybaras kept in facilities around Japan increased to 422 in 2016 from 125 in 2006, far outstripping the growth in the number of animal parks. Capybaras, which are native to South America, can now be found in 59 parks across Japan, according to the association, up from 21 in 2006.

Katsuhito Watanabe, a capybara photographer in Japan, told Quartz that capybaras have been kept in zoos in Japan since the early 1960s. But how an animal that calls the tropical jungles of South America home became a bathing superstar in Japan is often attributed to one park in particular: Izu Shaboten Zoo in Shizuoka prefecture. The zoo pioneered the practice of keeping capybaras in hot springs, or onsen, in the winter. According to the zoo (link in Japanese), in 1982 a worker was cleaning an exhibition area with hot water when he found that a group of capybaras had congregated around a small pool of hot water, thus discovering that capybaras could survive the Japanese winter if zoos provided onsen for the critters.

Today, capybaras can be found soaking in hot springs in zoos all around Japan. There was even a capybara bathing competition earlier this year held in four animal parks in Japan to see which capybara could sit in an onsen for the longest, after the parks in 2015 signed a “capybara open-air-onsen agreement” to promote capybaras in Japan (link in Japanese). They also organized a watermelon speed-eating contest for capybaras in 2016—won by a rodent in Nagasaki Bio Park, also known by some as the “Holy Land of capybaras.”

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Political Critique: Surprise Breakthrough for the Radical Left in Croatia

In the 27 years since the collapse of Yugoslavia, Croatia has endured a profound crisis of deindustrialisation, agricultural collapse and a dearth of social services. Two figures in particular show the results of the capitalist experiment. In 2015 real wages were 27% lower than in 1978. In 2013, meanwhile, GDP was 7,1% lower than in 1986. [...]

Despite this bleak reality, the devastation of capitalist Croatia is masked by very strong nationalism, which was forged in the 1991-5 war with Serbia. This is grounded in strong anti-communist rhetoric the ideological goal of which is to deny any positive reminiscence of socialist times, and prevent the advance of any kind of new radical ideas. In the last few years this has also been accompanied a resurgence of neo-fascist tendencies. In the town of Jasenovac, for example, the Croatian equivalent of Auschwitz, there is a notorious plaque on which the salutation, za dom spremni the Croatian version of Sieg Heil, is written. The current government has no intention of removing this, satisfying itself by nominally condemning “both totalitarianisms.” [...]

In the capital, the United Left Front (consisting of five mostly new or newer parties – covering wide ideological range, from left-liberal, green, social-democratic to anti-capitalist) reached a remarkable 7.64% in the elections for the City Assembly. It won some 24,000 votes and four seats, thereby surpassing the much-publicized Bridge party (4.93%) and Human Shield (4.53%). In city districts and local councils the united left front did even better than Zagreb, winning tenths of positions on all levels, with results which occasionally went up to 30%, sometimes beating both HDZ and SDP. [...]

Although at first glance these results might seem small they are the highest the radical left has been able to gain since 1990. Entering local political structures will mean not only greater media attention, but increased key financial and spatial resources thus paving the way for further growth. What is particularly significant is that the Croatian national government is currently undergoing a great crisis, only temporarily deferred until the end of the local elections (the run-off is in just ten days or so). Snap parliamentary elections could be held again in the autumn.

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The Washington Post: The case for preserving — and improving — brutalist architecture

Clearly, the beleaguered Metro system has bigger things to worry about — safety, reliability, plummeting ridership — than the color of its stations. Yet “Paintgate” does prompt tantalizing questions about the future of perhaps the world’s most polarizing architectural style: brutalism, derived from the French béton brut, meaning “raw concrete.” And few big cities in the United States or Europe have as much brutalism per square mile as Washington — thanks to the Metro, the FBI headquarters downtown, the Hirshhorn Museum on the Mall and the Department of Housing and Urban Development in Southwest Washington, among other federal buildings, as well as privately built structures like Georgetown University’s Lauinger Library.

Brutalist architecture in the United States emerged in the 1960s, the era of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, when progressive designers wanted to create buildings that fit their vision of a strong and benevolent public sector. They were also bucking the previous generation and its cool, glassy modernism, which by that point had become the architectural language of the corporate world. By contrast, brutalism showcases stark or rough exterior walls; deep-set, sometimes small windows; a sculptural or blocky form (often top-heavy); and a monumental scale.

Over the years, many Americans have come to associate brutalism with failed public housing projects and Soviet architecture. The fact that its signature material, concrete, was used for hundreds of forgettable knockoffs, not to mention storm drains and highway overpasses, didn’t help its reputation.

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America Magazine: The problem of violence in the modern world

First, the concept of ethnicity itself is a distinctively modern idea. Borrowing from Max Weber, Emile Durkheim and Benedict Anderson, Lange defines ethnicity in terms of a subnational “communal identity” and “collective consciousness” based on an imagined common culture and shared descent. Like national identity, ethnicity enabled people to envision themselves as part of the same community even though they “do not know most co-ethnics, commonly have major cultural differences, and rarely share blood ties.” In turn, the move from ethnic consciousness to ethnic violence depends on having a sense of “ethnic obligation” to one’s own in-group and “emotional prejudice” (for example, hate, anger, jealousy, fear and envy) against the ethnic out-group. [...]

Another modern concept, the nation-state, stands especially implicated in the rise of ethnic violence. Twentieth-century “ethnicized nation-states” were especially brutal. One thinks here of the ethno-national mythos of the Nazis’ “German volk,” Slobodan Milosevic’s “Greater Serbia” or Rwanda’s “Hutu Republic.” In turn, the modern nation-state model is linked to the idea of communal self-rule. This has created great instability and, often, violence in ethnically plural states, exacerbated by the fact that two-thirds of the world’s ethnic communities were excluded from political power between 1946 and 2005. [...]

A final important if more ambiguous point concerns Lange’s treatment of religion. For Lange, organized religion has been one of the key factors in mobilizing in-groups and out-groups in both premodern and modern times. (What Lange means by “organized religion” is less clear, especially since he simultaneously locates its roots in both biblical and modern times). Lange assigns considerable responsibility to Christian missionaries for creating ethnic consciousness among groups, including the Karen in Myanmar, the Assam in India or the Tutsi in Rwanda. In their determination to “convert and control,” missionaries often empowered marginalized community groups, reversing social hierarchies through Western education and thereby “politicizing” ethnicity. My own past studies of Rwanda bear out many of Lange’s claims.

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Soliloquy: Why does Homosexuality Evolve?

Homosexual sex doesn’t lead to reproduction. So given that evolution by natural selection favours genes that increase an organism's reproductive success, why does evolution not drive homosexuality to extinction?

Deutsche Welle: Italy to stop producing 1- and 2-cent coins

Italians were receiving the small copper coins as change but were not spending them, claimed Sergio Boccadutri, the member of the ruling center-left Democratic Party who proposed the measure. [...]

Since the euro was introduced in 2004, Italy has spent millions on manufacturing the coins, whose inside is made of iron and whose outside is copper.

In Belgium, Finland, the Netherlands and Ireland, prices are often rounded to the nearest multiple of 5 cents to avoid using the smaller denominations, though they remain legal tender. [...]

In 2013 the European Commission reported that the difference between production costs for the small coins and their face value since their introduction had grown to more than 1.4 billion euros (US $1.8 billion at the time).

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Haaretz: 15,000 Rally in Tel Aviv in Support of Two-state Solution

"The time has come to live, you and us, in peace, harmony, security and stability. The only way to end the conflict and the fight against terror in the region and the entire world is a solution of two states based on the 1967 borders, Palestine alongside Israel. We've accepted the decisions of the UN, recognized Israel and accepted the two-state solution, and the world has recognized the state of Palestine. Now the time has come for the State of Israel to recognize our state and end the occupation. The opportunity still exists, and it cannot be missed when our hand is extended in peace that is created between those who are brave." 

Herzog called for the creation of a political bloc representing the Israel's center-left that would replace the current government. "We must put aside ego and connect, all of us, to one large political bloc - a large political bloc that doesn't want a bi-national state; a large political bloc that doesn't want half of a democracy; a large political bloc that wants a Zionist, Jewish, democratic state that gives full equality to minorities and is open to a variety of opinions. This bloc needs to include many good people, from Tzipi Livni, my partner in the Zionist Union, to Moshe Kahlon, Yair Lapid and other people." [...]

A poll released by Channel 2 news on Friday found that 47 percent of Israelis still support a two-state solution to the conflict with the Palestinians based on 1967 borders, while 39 said were opposed, and 14 percent said they do not know. 

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The Conversation: Green space – how much is enough, and what’s the best way to deliver it?

There is a substantial evidence base to show that green space is good for us. It is associated with many health benefits, both physical and mental – including reductions in illness and deaths, stress and obesity – and a range of positive social, environmental and equity outcomes. [...]

These intervention types range from smaller green spaces, such as street trees and community gardens, to larger, more interlinked spaces, such as parks and greenways. This signals the need to think beyond the traditional urban park when considering how to meet the demand for green space among growing urban populations.

Another finding of the review was that urban green-space interventions seem to be most effective when a physical improvement of the space is coupled with social engagement. [...]

Another key finding was the importance of understanding that urban green-space interventions are long-term investments. They therefore need to be integrated within local development strategies and frameworks – such as urban masterplans, transport policies and sustainability and biodiversity strategies.

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VICE: How a Wrestling Club Became My New Home in Germany

I started wrestling four months ago. I never wrestled in Syria, though I did have the occasional scuffle with my brother, cousins and mates (but with less rules or tactics and more dirty tricks). My friend Abdul lives in the same dormitory in Berlin as me. He took me along to his wrestling club one time, and I immediately loved it.

These days we wrestle here together, three times a week. I get on with everyone, although we don't all speak the same language – there are Russian, Arabic, Polish and German guys here. We don't talk a lot, but I think you can say that we communicate with movement and really have become best friends through that. My friend Saleh, who speaks better German than I do, was happy to translate this article from Arabic to German for me. [...]

My day starts at 9AM. I have a language class until 1PM and an integration course until 2PM. During that course, I learn a lot about German culture and ethics. We've also already gone on two outings – one to the Environmental Protection Centre and another to the Egyptian museum. I also go to the mosque once a week. Otherwise I don't go out much, but instead go back to the dormitory after classes and cook. On the days that I have wrestling training, I prepare a lot of food – mainly potatoes and chicken. I learnt how to cook Arabic dishes at my school in Syria, and I think I've gotten pretty good at it.

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Politico: Why G7+2? It’s all about the EU

But Tusk and Juncker’s crucial, often little-noticed role is not just to represent a big market but also the smaller countries within it — nations such as Estonia, Malta and Cyprus — that don’t have their own seat at the table. At these swanky shindigs for big powers, their presence is a reminder that the EU operates collectively and might does not always make right.

“Many of the issues that are discussed at G7 level, for our EU member states, these are issues of [European] Community competence,” said a senior EU official who is part of the delegation to Sicily. [...]

With Trump and Brexit posing new and uncertain challenges, the joint press conference Tusk and Juncker normally hold before the start of the summit drew a large crowd Friday. They used that platform to push the EU’s fundamental priorities, which include the very idea of multilateralism itself.

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Salon: The Manchester bombing is blowback from the West’s disastrous interventions and covert proxy wars

In March 1998, Qaddafi’s Libya became the first country to issue an Interpol arrest warrant for bin Laden. The warrant was studiously ignored by American and British intelligence, according to French journalist Guillaume Dasquié and Jean-Charles Brisard, an adviser to French President Jacques Chirac. Five months later, Al Qaeda struck the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. (Among the participants in the attack were al-Libi and Ali Abdelsoud Mohammed, a spy for Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri who had entered the US on a CIA-approved visa and managed to rise to the rank of corporal at the John F. Kennedy School of Special Warfare at Ft. Bragg, where he smuggled special forces training manuals out to Al Qaeda cadres.) [...]

A secret 2008 US embassy cable described Qaddafi’s government as a bulwark against the spread of Islamist militancy. “Libya has been a strong partner in the war against terrorism and cooperation in liaison channels is excellent,” the cable read. “Muammar al-Qadhafi’s criticism of Saudi Arabia for perceived support of Wahabi extremism, a source of continuing Libya-Saudi tension, reflects broader Libyan concern about the threat of extremism. Worried that fighters returning from Afghanistan and Iraq could destabilize the regime, the [government of Libya] has aggressive pursued operations to disrupt foreign fighter flows, including more stringent monitoring of air/land ports of entry, and blunt the ideological appeal of radical Islam.” [...]

When the Libyan uprising broke out in March 2011, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates immediately pumped arms and logistical support into the armed opposition. Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton saw the insurgency as an opportunity for America to assert its influence amidst the tumult of the Arab Spring. She advocated arming the rebels on the grounds that Washington could get “skin in the game,” according to her Middle East advisor, Dennis Ross. [...]

Libya today is a failed state, its public coffers and oil reserves looted by the foreign powers that oversaw the war of regime change in 2011. Its shores are a main disembarkation point for migrants, where women fleeing conflict and poverty in sub-Saharan Africa are beaten, raped and starved in “living hellholes,” according to UNICEF. The United Nations International Organization for Migration has recorded testimony of open air slave markets in Libya where migrants from West Africa are bought and sold. The refugee crisis has propelled the rise of the far-right in Europe, fueling the demagogic politics of figures from Nigel Farage to Marine Le Pen that blame the victims of the West’s catastrophic interventions.

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Quartz: The pseudoscience that prepared America for Steve Bannon’s apocalyptic message

His views revolve around several key themes that can be explored at some length, but briefly summarized: American society is at a turning point in history and facing social collapse thanks to a decadent generation that has forgotten the values that made America great. Only by re-embracing white, Christian nationalism can the US regain its pioneering chutzpah. He even made a film on the topic, called Generation Zero. [...]

What Strauss and Howe added in their work was a comprehensive theory of generational repetition: US history moves in 80-year cycles, with generations moving through 20-year periods of influence called turnings. The cycles have highs and lows interspersed with major crises in history like the American revolution, the Civil War, and World War II. Each of the four generations embody fundamental characteristics, and these characteristics repeat themselves throughout history. Our current cycle calls for a major, defining crisis that will take place, well, any moment now. [...]

According to their theory of generational repetition, millennials will be a “heroic” generation, the modern analogues of the Greatest or GI Generation that came of age during World War II. Approximately 80 years later, millennials are destined to face a similar political and economic crisis, inherited from the poor management of their progenitors. No doubt the writers also enjoyed the parallels between their new generation, which looks forward to an epoch defining crisis, and the original Christian millenarianist movements, which looked forward to the end of the world. [...]

Elder illustrates the challenges in assuming a homogenous view of generations by citing research into the Greatest Generation that helped define the field. He tracked individuals born in California over 40 years in order to assess how the Great Depression affected them. The results show major differences within fairly small time spans: Children born in 1920 or 1921 and those born seven or eight years later had very different experiences, as did boys and girls. In contrast, Strauss and Howe consider the entire group to be part of the same “GI” generation.

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Katoikos: EU Defence Union: The end of soft power?

Rising insecurity is becoming the new normal in Europe. Armed attacks in Paris, Brussels, Nice, Ansbach, Würzburg, Rouen, Berlin and now Manchester have brought to light the potential of jihadist groups both to recruit and strike within Europe. In the wake of the military conflict in Ukraine, Russia has repeatedly violated the sovereignty of neighbouring countries, intruding regularly on member states’ airspace and territorial waters. From the south, organised crime and unrest resulting from the Libyan chaos is spreading towards European shores. War in the Middle East is causing a mass exodus to Europe, while cyber terrorism is becoming more and more dangerous with each passing day. [...]

France and Germany are the two member states most eager to take advantage of these opportunities. First of all, because a European Defence Union is the living proof that every cloud has a silver lining: it is one of the things that is only possible in an EU without the UK. Moreover, for France, it is an ideal occasion to remind other member states that, with Britain gone, it remains the EU’s sole great military power. For Germany, instead, it is an opportunity to increase its influence in Brussels when it comes to appointing top personnel and to help the German arms industry in the markets of other EU countries. [...]

Some Eastern European countries perceive new EU defence plans as a challenge to NATO, which has recently agreed to station 4,000 troops on their territory and which is, therefore, considered essential to their security. “The European Defence Union does not mean duplicating what we have with NATO,” said Michael Gahler. He added, “We have difficult NATO partners who may try to bloc NATO resources. That’s why we must build up the capabilities to act independently.”

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Jacobin Magazine: Modernism or Barbarism

When I was an undergraduate, modernity was everything we were taught to despise: totalizing, technocratic, rationalizing. It was the impersonal force that organized Africa into colonies and the motor behind the mechanized doom of fascism. As Theodore Adorno wrote, the logic of modernity ends in a death camp, or the mathematics of a strategic bombing campaign — in human beings becoming abstract numbers in a computerized death count.

Marxism itself is not immune from these kinds of critiques. As writers in the Frankfurt School maintained, our problem in advanced industrial societies is to be treated as an instrument, a thing — a problem as deeply felt in the Soviet Union as the United States. As Russell Means, one of the founders of the American Indian Movement, commented, Marxism is just another word for rendering people into resources. [...]

Capitalism is not only unique insofar as it hides its exploitation through the veneer of equal exchange between workers and owners. Capitalists must also constantly revolutionize production through time, space, and technology to produce more value: automating factories, moving the colossus of production around the world, transforming food into giant factories in the field, revolutionizing the human body through pharmacology. [...]

The conflict over the public space that graffiti provoked for Berman was much like the Baudelaire poem, in which the site and presence of the poor, suddenly erupting into the streets, creates a panic for the bourgeois order: their own processes of development have summoned forth voices that they cannot control and do not understand.

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IFLScience: Monkey Muggers Steal Tourists' Belongings, Holding Them For Ransom In Exchange For Food

Monkeys on the island of Bali grift hard to get their supper. Researchers have found that light-fingered macaques at one of the most popular temples on the island have learned to steal tourists' possessions, and then barter with them for food before giving them back.

The criminal underworld of long-tailed macaques is seemingly very fruitful – with some of the best purloiners holding their ill-gotten goods to ransom until they are offered only the choice bits of fruit – yet only some populations display this robbing and bartering behavior, leading the researchers to ask whether or not it is a cultural activity. [...]

Despite other places on Bali having groups of macaques coming into frequent contact with tourists, offering ripe opportunity for extortion, it is only those in the Uluwatu Temple that seem to have figured it out. This suggests that the robbing and bartering behavior is learned, rather than innate. But what the researchers were really interested in was finding out whether or not it was cultural, publishing their results in the journal Primates. 

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IFLScience: California Breaks Record After Getting 81 Percent Of Energy From Renewables

As reported by SF Gate, on Saturday, May 13, renewable energy sources – solar and wind – produced 67.2 percent of the electricity demand. This doesn’t take into account hydroelectric power, but when this is factored in, this figure rises to a remarkable 80.7 percent.

A combination of sunny and windy days, combined with peak operating capacities of California’s hydroelectric plants, helped set this record. Without the massive investment in clean energy, however, this laudable target would have never been met. [...]

By law, California requires utilities to get a third of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020, a figure that rises to 50 percent by 2030. They’re already close to meeting their goal – in 2016, California’s key electric utilities managed to eke 32.3 percent of their energy from wind, solar, and hydro sources.

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CityLab: Meet Mexico City's First Bike Mayor

Mexico City falls far short of the cycling infrastructure that bike activists dream of: as many residents say, it’s no Amsterdam. Although only 30 percent of daily trips in the city are made via private car (the other 70 percent are made by public transportation, by bike, or on foot), Mexico City is known for some of the worst traffic in the world and nearly toxic levels of pollution. Since 2006, there have been over 1,600 cyclist deaths. [...]

In the last decade, cycling has become especially relevant to the city’s agenda. In 2007 the city launched Muévete en Bici, a program that blocks cars from several main streets on Sundays so that cyclists can have the streets to themselves. In 2010, Mexico City implemented a bike share program, EcoBici, the first in Latin America. So far, the city’s only got 140 kilometers of the 600 kilometers of bike lanes that bike activists estimate it needs, but when EcoBici started, the city was virtually devoid of biking infrastructure. Ecobici now has around 6,500 bikes and over 240,000 registered users (which, they argue, is the largest in North America). In July 2014, a new mobility law placed cyclists and pedestrians at the top of a mobility hierarchy and introduced cycling language into urban plans for the first time. However, beyond moving into the next phases of EcoBici and implementing sorely needed safety measures, the plans were vague—plus, critics challenge the special hierarchy, noting that if cyclists were truly at the top, government infrastructure spending would reflect that. [...]

From blockades and protests to speeches and reports, Carreón has attempted to influence public opinion and city leadership in every way possible, including the production of the Urban Cyclist Manuel, the first comprehensive guide for cyclists in the city, and the first of its kind in Latin America. "We did workshops, led courses, put on parties, created art pieces and videos for museums. We have 20 years of innovation under our belts. We’ve tried by all possible means to convince, encourage, and promote this idea that we must move by different means,” she says. “But it took 20 years for city authorities to look at cycling as more than just a pastime.”

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Atlas Obscura: Getting to Know the Bathtub Marys of Somerville, Massachusetts

SOMERVILLE, MASSACHUSETTS DOESN’T ATTRACT MANY pilgrims. Spend enough time walking its narrow streets, though, and you’re guaranteed a particular kind of religious experience. It may reveal itself proudly in a front yard, or sneak up on you in a side yard. But eventually, undoubtedly, you’ll be blessed by the presence of a Bathtub Mary: a sculpture of the Madonna, generally about waist-high, carefully sheltered in its own protective nook. [...]

Bathtub Marys get their name from the structures they’re typically placed in: actual bathtubs, tipped up vertically and dug halfway into the ground to form graceful, arched shelters. Although domestic shrines and home altars are a long-lived Catholic tradition, it’s thought that this particular incarnation began just after World War II, when postwar economic recovery led to a rash of home remodeling. Families installed shower-bathtub combos, and their old claw-footed tubs, which were difficult to recycle, ended up out in the yard, repurposed as religiously inflected lawn art. [...]

Pacini is far from the first Somervillian to be captivated by the statues. Cathy Piantigini, a lifetime resident and children’s librarian, has spent the past few years walking every street in the city in an attempt to map them. A local brewery, Slumbrew, has even put out a limited-edition beer called the Bathtub Mary. (It’s a pale wheat ale.) Some of the city’s newer residents have put their own spin on things—one bathtub arch now houses a toy robot.

read the article and see the photos

Al Jazeera: Crying baby sumo in Japan

Babies, a sumo ring, and lots of crying. This centuries-old tradition is believed to bring good health to kids in Japan.

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Jacobin Magazine: Donald’s Myths

Indeed, the hate now directed toward Donald Trump closely resembles the hatred many progressives felt for Richard Nixon in the early 1970s. Tricky Dick personified all the ills of the United States’ political culture: secrecy, lies, wars, and misuse of state power. Because liberals fully identified their political critique with one figure, they were left completely defenseless the day Nixon left office.

Personifying the problem blocked obvious and important questions: how did American political culture produce someone like Nixon? How did his administration reshape this culture? What would he leave behind? By failing to pose these questions, his opponents left the door open for the militarism, racism, and neoliberalism of our first B-list celebrity president, Ronald Reagan. [...]

Fact-checking does nothing to disabuse people of the myths that structure their worldviews, which are neither factual nor completely fictional. Myths play a central role in people’s moral orientation, because they reduce reality’s murky struggles into simplified stories of good and evil, greatness and failure. The failure of liberal moralizing to stop Trump has everything to do with the power of myths. [...]

His opponents could successfully debunk these myths, but his supporters won’t abandon a narrative that gives their world coherence without having another framework on hand. Unfortunately, liberal myths are either so weak or so close to Trump’s own story that they provided no alternative. [...]

The liberal refusal to recognize structural racism and diverging class interests has created space for Trumpism. Understanding this entails that we move the struggle against racism beyond diversity management and begin developing economic policies that genuinely benefit working-class people — not just those white working-class voters whom Trump mobilized, but also the white and non-white working-class people whom Hillary failed to mobilize, and the vast number of people who have been disenfranchised, never enfranchised, or simply chose not to vote.

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Vox: The abortion rate is at an all-time low — and better birth control is largely to thank

US women are having abortions at the lowest rate on record since Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court’s landmark 1973 decision that legalized abortion, according to a new report. In fact, contrary to popular opinion, the abortion rate has been steadily declining for decades. [...]

The abortion ratio — the proportion of abortions to live births — is also down to historic lows. In 1995, the abortion ratio was about 26 abortions for every 100 live births; in 2014, it was 18.8.

The abortion rate and the abortion ratio tell us different things. The abortion rate is a bigger-picture snapshot of how common abortion is among women every year, while the abortion ratio gives us a sense of how many women who get pregnant decide to stay pregnant. [...]

Abortion rates have been falling for three decades in the developed world, as Vox’s Sarah Kliff has explained. But in developing African, Asian, and Latin American countries, rates have either held steady or increased since the 1990s. That’s because women in developed countries, such as in Europe and North America, have much better access to higher-quality methods of birth control, and live in a culture that treats contraception as less of a taboo. [...]

To abortion rights supporters and most medical providers, lower abortion rates are good because they mean that women are having fewer unintended pregnancies. In this view, abortion isn’t inherently wrong, nor is it possible to get rid of entirely — even the best birth control methods fail sometimes, and health complications or fetal abnormalities mean that not every pregnancy can be carried to term. But it’s best for women if they can control their fertility from the outset with access to reliable, affordable birth control.

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Haaretz: It's Not Islam That Drives Young Europeans to Jihad, France's Top Terrorism Expert Explains

“An estimated 60 percent of those who espouse violent jihadism in Europe are second-generation Muslims who have lost their connection with their country of origin and have failed to integrate into Western societies,” Roy says. [...]

“Unlike second generations like Abedi’s, third generations are normally better integrated in the West and don’t account for more than 15 percent of homegrown jihadis,” Roy says. “Converts, who also have an approach to Islam decontextualized from any culture, account for about 25 percent of those who fall prey to violent fundamentalism.” [...]

With little if any understanding of religion or Islamic culture, young people like Abedi turn to terrorism out of a “suicidal instinct” and “a fascination for death,” Roy says. This key element is exemplified by the jihadi slogan first coined by Osama bin Laden: "We love death like you love life.”

“The large majority of Al-Qaida and Islamic State jihadis, including the Manchester attacker Abedi, commit suicide attacks not because it makes sense strategically from a military perspective or because it’s consistent with the Salafi creed,” Roy says. “These attacks don’t weaken the enemy significantly, and Islam condemns self-immolation as interference with God’s will. These kids seek death as an end-goal in itself.”

In his recent book “Jihad and Death: The Global Appeal of Islamic State," Roy argues that about 70 percent of these young people have scant knowledge of Islam, and suggests they are “radical” before even choosing Islam. He dubs them “born again Muslims” who lead libertine lives before their sudden conversion to violent fundamentalism.

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Vox: Japan's rising right-wing nationalism | Border Dispatch #1

Like many nations, Japan is undergoing a surge in right-wing nationalism, the brand of nationism that is skeptical of globalization and outsiders. But while Japan's nationalism looks similar to other right-wing movements in the West, when you look under the surface, you see a totally different story. 

Vox: Want to save animal lives without going veg? Eat beef, not chicken.

Slate: The Architect of Marriage Equality on Why the Freedom to Marry Is Going Global

In addition, Taiwan has strived to solidify and establish its commitment to democratic values. Allowing the freedom to marry is part of the maturation of a democracy, a way of securing pluralism and the rule of law. We’ve seen that freedom-to-marry countries, like Spain and Argentina and Portugal, where leaders said, “This is not just about gay people, this is about our commitment to being a true constitutional republic.” Taiwan has also been on that journey and had that conversation. [...]

Absolutely. Some activists on the mainland have already said that the ruling is giving them more momentum and more to talk about. Obviously, China’s position is that it’s all one country—so now, from their point of view, the freedom to marry has come to China. Taiwan might take a different position, of course. Regardless, there’s no question that having the freedom to marry in Taiwan will energize advocates throughout China and have a major impact on the conversation there. [...]

We’re also doing a lot of work and conversation-building in countries as diverse as Japan, the Czech Republic, Chile, and other Asian countries like Vietnam, Thailand, and South Korea. The conversation there isn’t as far along as it has been in Taiwan, but this decision is going to energize advocates in so many places around the world. We need to see advocates stepping up their work in Italy and Germany, too, and keep building toward the tipping point in Europe.

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Quartz: More people fled conflict in DR Congo than in Syria and Iraq last year

In 2016, around 922,000 people—the highest number of displaced people due to conflict recorded globally—fled their homes in DRC, according to data from the latest Global Report on Internal Displacement by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC).

Much of the displacement in DRC is linked to the country’s political instability with president Joseph Kabila refusing to leave office after the end of his tenure last December. Political tensions were heightened much earlier as the elections, initially slated for November 2016, have now been postponed with the country’s budget minister saying the DRC cannot afford the $1.8 billion cost of the elections. [...]

While DRC saw the most displacement caused by conflict, globally, there were 6.9 million new internal displacements caused by conflict and violence in 2016. Significantly, Sub-Saharan Africa surpassed the Middle East to become the most affected region, despite Syria, Iraq and Yemen accounting for almost two million new displacements in 2016. Asides from the DRC, incidents across the continent have seen Africa become the most affected region. Nigeria, where a fight against Boko Haram continues across the northeast, and South Sudan, where a fragile peace pact has been broken are among worrying flash-points on the continent.

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The Economist: The triumph of Iran’s liberals

Defeat is growing familiar to the hardliners. The last time they won was in the parliamentary election of 2012, and that they owed to a mass boycott by reformists. This time the hardliners campaigned particularly hard because they sensed they were not only picking a president, but also, perhaps, the next supreme leader (a more powerful post). The incumbent, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is 77. This presidential election may be his last. Formally, the Assembly of Experts selects a successor from among its 88 Muslim scholars. But the last time it did so, in 1989, it picked the then president. “The vote isn’t just about four years of presidency,” says a confidant of Mr Khamenei. “It’s about Iran’s future for 40 years.” Mr Khamenei is said to favour Mr Raisi as his successor; this will be harder to pull off following his drubbing. [...]

Can Mr Rouhani now fulfil his promises? Within hours of his victory, reformists whom the authorities had detained in the run-up to the election were released. His advisers also predict that he will appoint his first female minister, and perhaps even the Islamic Republic’s first-ever Sunni one. More radical change as well, they say, could be coming. Certainly, Mr Khamenei might have been happier had Mr Rouhani won by a less convincing margin.

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The Atlantic: First He Became an American—Then He Joined ISIS

In 2013, six Bosnian immigrants in the United States allegedly sent money, riflescopes, knives, military equipment, and other supplies to jihadists in Syria and Iraq through intermediaries in Bosnia and Turkey. According to the U.S. government’s allegations, individual ISIS fighters would make specific requests—mostly for money and military equipment—and the group would then raise funds and send supplies to Syria. The requests included what was surely an unexpected revelation of nostalgia—packets of Swiss Miss hot cocoa. By sending the cocoa mix and other supplies, federal prosecutors argue, these U.S.-based Bosnians provided what is known as “material support” to terrorists, in violation of the Patriot Act. [...]

Whichever side Pazara was on during the Bosnian War, understanding his experiences during those years is critical to making sense of his radicalization. After the civil war ended in 1995, and after Pazara and his father completed their alleged tour of duty for the VRS, they were still not allowed to return to their hometown of Teslic. Staying in Teslic or refusing the VRS would have surely resulted in imprisonment and torture. Ultimately, Pazara and his father were subject to the same ethnic cleansing inflicted on the rest of the Bosnian-Muslim residents. And so, Pazara carried the baggage of the Bosnian War to his new home in the United States. [...]

It is impossible to know with certainty what led Pazara to radicalize. The distance from his homeland, his professional failures, and his divorce all likely played some role. Certainly, a turn toward conservative religiosity in a period following personal loss is a well-documented phenomenon in the literature on radicalization. What is known is that Pazara found solace on social media, where an online community of Bosnian Salafists created a philosophical echo chamber. Within that echo chamber, the Islamic State’s ideology reverberated, exploiting personal grievances, laying out a narrative of victimhood (“Muslims are under attack”) that seemed to excuse Pazara from responsibility for his failures, and offering a new chance at success and redemption.

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Places Journal: Socialism and Nationalism on the Danube

The Social Democrats may not have been radical but they were embattled. Even today this is evident in the architecture of the apartment blocks — the Gemeindebauten, or “municipally built” housing— that were constructed from the mid 1920s to the mid ’30s. These were not simply tenements: they were monumental tenements, stretching over entire city blocks, following the local model of the Hof-Haus, or perimeter block. In fact the Gemeindebauten were a response not only to the housing crisis but also to a more existential dilemma. What would be the identity of the city, now that it no longer ruled an immense land empire that extended from Trieste on the Adriatic to Lviv beyond the Carpathians? To the Social Democrats the answer was clear: Vienna would be a metropolis dedicated to the welfare and edification of its inhabitants, particularly the long-neglected working classes. And so over more than a decade they proceeded, through various means, especially massive taxation of the wealthy, to transform the imperial capital into a socialist city: Red Vienna.

In this light the Hofs can be understood as not merely practical but ideological. No less than Gothic churches, they are absolutely loaded with rhetoric: massive mid-rise superblocks articulated with towers, archways, loggias, and bays; embellished with bas-reliefs, tiles, metalwork, and sculptures depicting workers and worker families. The labor-intensive construction was itself an integral part of the program: a means of employing as many workers as possible. The most famous of the Gemeindebauten, Karl-Marx-Hof, looks like the architectural equivalent of a mass demonstration, with its series of arched entryways and flagpole-topped towers seeming to step arm in arm into a glorious future. Designed by Karl Ehn (a student of Otto Wagner) and opened in 1930, the building is immense — comprising 1.6 million square feet, with the main facade running for three-quarters of a mile — and accommodates an astonishing 5,000 tenants in 1,400 apartments. Yet Karl-Marx-Hof was only the largest of the 400 apartment blocks constructed by the Social Democrats during their relatively brief period in power. The clarity of purpose is powerfully evident in the focus on the collective: in the provision of generous and open courtyards and a remarkable range of shared facilities. [...]

This was surely the case in the last decades the 20th century. Although many observers argued that the fall of communism would lead to increasing convergences among the nations once divided by the Iron Curtain, in Hungary the major architectural trend of the 1990s stressed not global solidarity but national difference. That decade saw the growing prominence of the self-described school of “Organic Architects,” led by the guru-like Imre Makovecz. Starting to practice in the 1960s, but receiving few commissions until the 1980s, Makovecz, a devout Catholic, was equally anti-Soviet and anti-globalist. (He died in 2011.) He is best known for designing tent-like structures inspired by speculation about what the yurts of the Magyars, who traveled from Central Asia to Hungary sometime in the medieval era, might possibly have looked like. Over the years he created a fascinating and deeply odd style characterized by swelling, maternal domes, phallic protrusions, and anthropomorphic face-like elements. Obsessed by trees, Makovecz disdained industrial fabrication and preferred to build in wood; his celebrated design for the Hungarian pavilion at the 1992 Seville Expo, constructed in timber and containing an actual tree whose roots were visible through a glass floor, was described at the time as a “dizzy fantasy.” But above all Makovecz and his followers were driven by nationalist visions of Hungarian uniqueness; they favored an “authentic” and rural Hungary and expressed distrust for urbane and cosmopolitan Budapest. It was all clearly a reversion back to the imaginary worlds of Hungarian form that so excited Lechner and his protégés at the start of the century.

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Quartz: A night at India’s first capsule hotel

Urbanpod, founded by entrepreneur duo Shalabh Mittal and Hiren Gandhi, draws inspiration from a similar chain in Singapore, which in turn is based on Japan’s famous capsule hotels from the 1970s. Originally created as accommodation for businessmen looking for a few hours to spend the night after they missed the last train home, capsule hotels have steadily become a global trend. [...]

Despite its compact appearance, the pod is sufficiently spacious, and not claustrophobic as one would presume. It is similar to the sleeper compartment of a double-decker overnight inter-city bus, minus the worn-out, unhygienic appearance and odour. The corridors of the hotel are quiet; the shared bathrooms are clean and smell fresh. Every inch of the space is highly designed, there are buttons for everything, a smoke detector blinks in the background next to a miniature fire extinguisher. Despite the attention to detail, or maybe because of it, the experience feels highly cinematic. I realise that things could easily go wrong, just like they do in the countless science fiction films this set seems inspired by. A capsule doesn’t exactly allow for easy escape. [...]

But capsule hotels or capsule-sized homes might be the future of urban housing some day—tiny houses and micro-apartments are already being considered in increasingly overcrowded cities. After the 2008 recession, a major chunk of laid-off workers, left homeless, sought refuge in the coffin-like pods in Japan. This type of living is not restricted to Asia but is gaining acceptance across the world—the American Tiny Living Movement, for instance, has seen people forced by never-ending debt to move to compact, Ikea-like homes. Buzzfeed News recently uncovered plans by London developers for homes of 6.7 metres, 30 metres below the minimum requirement for one-bed flats, with no bathrooms. These movements ensconce the reality of a housing shortage under the terms “innovation,” “sustainable,” and “minimal,” and put the onus on tenants, instead of addressing the problems that led to the housing crisis.

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TED-Ed: The world’s most mysterious book - Stephen Bax

Deep inside Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library lies a 240 page tome. Recently carbon dated to around 1420, its pages feature looping handwriting and hand drawn images seemingly stolen from a dream. It is called the Voynich manuscript, and it’s one of history’s biggest unsolved mysteries. The reason why? No one can figure out what it says. Stephen Bax investigates this cryptic work. 

Vox: Meet the designer cats with wild blood (Mar 13, 2017)

By breeding house cats with wild animals, humans developed hybrid cats that look like little leopards. Bengal cats are a breed that was developed by breeding domestic cats with asian leopard cats. The first American bengal breeder is a woman named Jean Mill, but her work has continued through other breeders. We met one of those breeders, Anthony Hutcherson, when we went to film the cats at the Westminster Dog Show. Besides bengals, we also saw another hybrid breed: savannahs. Instead of asian leopard cats, savannahs were developed by breeding house cats with servals. Unlike the other two breeds, the last breed we met, toygers, are not hybrid cats. Breeder Judy Sugden created the breed by carefully breeding domestic cats with qualities that resemble wild tigers. To learn more about the cats and the breeders that made possible, watch the video above.

Quartz: What makes us human? Scientists just found a defining feature of the human brain in monkeys

It’s no surprise that humans and many types of monkeys have a lot in common; we’re both social creatures and share about 93% of our DNA. But when scientists from The Rockefeller University peeked inside four rhesus monkeys’ brains with an fMRI machine, they were still surprised to find something they’ve only ever encountered in humans: A unique choreography of brain activity, which activates when the monkeys are processing social interactions.

In humans, researchers have long believed this system is the mental network that underlies humans’ most defining feature: The ability to go farther than merely identifying other people’s behavior, to actually interpreting what they’re thinking. This “theory of mind” is the basis for how humans read situations and choose to act themselves. And it’s the bedrock of complex human society.

Finding an almost identical pathway in monkeys is remarkable, because it means that our ability to read thoughts has deep evolutionary roots. By studying the homologous network in monkeys, scientists may be able to figure out exactly how this important human ability developed.

watch the video

CityLab: Fortress Britain's Coming Crackdown

It’s unusual, and alarming, to see soldiers in key sites such as London’s Downing Street. But their presence on Britain’s streets will probably not be the most striking aspect of the U.K. government’s post-Manchester security crackdown. What will likely have a far greater long-term effect is the acceleration of proposed laws to give British security forces unprecedented access to monitor citizens’ internet use—above all, their use of encrypted messaging services such as WhatsApp. It is believed that the Manchester attacker sent a WhatsApp message shortly before Tuesday’s attack. On Tuesday, government sources told the Sun newspaper that, in the event of a Conservative Party victory in Britain’s June 8 election, they would push through powers granting security services the right to hack encrypted messages within weeks.

The attack has certainly stepped up calls to tighten digital surveillance, but Britain’s current government has had end-to-end encryption in its sights for a while. Last year, Theresa May, then Britain’s Home Secretary, introduced the controversial Investigatory Powers Act, which grants government agencies the right to amass large quantities of personal data, including medical and tax records, on a level unknown elsewhere in Europe. As revelations from Edward Snowden in 2013 revealed, British security services had in fact been collecting and retaining this kind of data illegally for some time. The Investigatory Powers Act made this data collection legal, a move that Britain’s Open Rights Group damned as “more suited to a dictatorship than a democracy,” Snowden himself called it “the most extreme surveillance in the history of western democracy.” [...]

There’s no clear evidence, however, that the transformation of Britain into a vast surveillance post would necessarily thwart further attacks. Terrorists are nothing if not adaptable. As numerous security experts have noted, they could easily switch to other communication systems, or revert to ones already used in the past. The perpetrators of the 2015 Paris attacks communicated via unencrypted SMS messages. Security forces failed to prevent the assault not because the attackers’ communications were inaccessible, but because Belgian security officials short on highly trained staff failed to communicate with their colleagues.

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Motherboard: Dubai Wants to Use Data to Become the 'Happiest City on Earth'

Dubai doesn't ever do anything halfway. They've got the tallest skyscrapers in the world, police that drive Lamborghinis, resorts on man made islands, and profound income inequality. In that spirit, city officials are now working on connecting and digitizing all aspects of urban life into a single platform. The goal is to make Dubai the most efficient and "happiest" city on Earth. Her Excellency Dr. Aisha Butti Bin Bishr, the director general of Smart Dubai—the office overseeing this grand plan—sat down with Motherboard at the Smart Cities NYC 2017 conference to explain it all. [...]

Yes, it is called the Dubai Now Application, or the Dubai Now Platform and anybody can download it and use it for services like health, driving, residency visas, businesses, housing, education, security and justice, transportation—people can manage their day to day aspects and become more mindful about what's going on in the city around them. [...]

But when it comes to cognitive and deeper needs, we don't fully understand them. We want to discover these needs and hopefully change our policies, our systems, our services to fulfill these needs. The Happiness Meter is not the end of our story when it comes to happiness. We have an agenda to make sure everything we design and build in our city is around making people happier.

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Land of Maps: How do Americans deal with their dead? Here are the Burial vs. Cremation rates for 2015

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The Guardian: Brexit is entrenching some dangerous myths about ‘British’ culture

While the empire was founded on racist beliefs about the supposed inferiority of the people it subjugated, humanitarianism was its proudly flaunted justification. This was manifested perfectly in Winston Churchill, who was able to boast of killing “savages” in Sudan, while also playing a leading role in creating the international humanitarian norms that many consider one of the great accomplishments of the 20th century. It’s only a matter of time before Britain’s membership of the Council of Europe – along with the rest of the European institutions developed by patriotic Brits who are keen to avoid a repeat of war – faces the same fate as our membership of the EU. [...]

But in Britain something specific is happening. The survey found that more than half of British people feel hostile not just to refugees, but to ethnic minorities – many of them British people themselves – already living here. This can be put down to various perceived economic and social threats – a quarter think immigrants take away jobs, and a third that they remove more from society than they contribute. But more sinister is its generality. More than half of the British people surveyed felt that people from ethnic minorities threatened their “culture”. [...]

It was also the reason why, according to an Opinium poll, ethnic minority British people are now less likely to identify as British since the EU referendum. Instead, many are more likely to claim the identity of their ethnic minority heritage. British people who are not white feel less British now because that hostility is palpable, because there is an agenda of regressing to a time, before the European Union, that many remember not for the joys of complete sovereignty, but for the absence of protection from racism in the workplace, or at the hands of the police, or for being openly chased in the streets by white racists.

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The Atlantic: How Far Should Societies Go to Prevent Terror Attacks?

It isn’t that terrorism, or gun deaths, are unimportant; or that status quo policies are obviously correct; or that those who want to do more are necessarily incorrect; or that it is wrong to point to costs of inaction when making one’s case for action. The problem with these arguments is the implication that disagreements about what policies to pursue are rooted in some people caring enough to stop children from dying horribly, and others not so much. In fact, there are deep disagreements about the likely effects of many policies. And while the willingness to adopt some policies even though dead children will result is real, it is also universal; if you favor allowing cars to drive faster than 25 miles per hour, or allowing kids to ride in them, then you are willing to say that a certain amount of deaths are the price we pay to live as we want.

Unless you are willing to mandate tracking chips in everyone’s bodies, so that counterterrorism authorities can know the locations of all people at all times—and forbid the purchase of fertilizer, pressure cookers, bolts, and knives, all common terrorist weapons—then you too are unwilling to take measures that would stop an undetermined number of civilians from dying horribly, and you believe that “a certain amount of terrorism is just the price we have to pay to live the way we want to live.” [...]

For many Americans, myself included, the Iraq War was not a counterterrorism success. It was a conflict that killed many more Americans than died on September 11, 2001; and the instability that it spawned was a major root cause of the rise of ISIS. The bipartisan consensus against more ground invasions in the Middle East is not rooted in an unwillingness to make the necessary sacrifices to reduce terrorism; it reflects a belief that the Iraq War seems to have increased rather than reduced global terrorism.

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The New York Review of Books: The Pleasures of Pessimism

Pessimistic essayists and philosophers may not cast the same narrative gloom as fiction writers, but the implications of their work tend toward the universal. Indeed, to believe that unhappiness was merely a question of immediate circumstance and particular character might be seen as a crass form of optimism. “Our chief grievance against knowledge is that it has not helped us to live,” observes Emil Cioran, dismissing the whole Enlightenment enterprise in a few dry words. Or again: “No one saves anyone; for we save only ourselves, and do so all the better if we disguise as convictions the misery we want to share, to lavish on others.” Or again, “Being busy means devoting oneself to the fake and the sham.” And: “Trees are massacred, houses go up—faces, faces everywhere. Man is spreading. Man is the cancer of the earth.” [...]

Perhaps the best way to understand our engagement with pessimism is to observe those occasions when it does not attract us, when we put it aside with distaste or boredom. In novels this occurs when we feel the author is merely piling on the pain, without our feeling there was anything necessarily fatal about the combination of character and circumstance. A car accident occurs at the point when someone is happiest. Or our hero contracts a fatal disease. So what? We know that there are people who have interminable bad luck. Why torture us with it? We can all forgive, or at least condone, an unconvincing happy ending—David Copperfield, for example—for the ambiguous relief it brings, but not an unconvincing unhappy ending, or an ending that seeks to generalize distress from the merest individual accident. We have been made to suffer for nothing. [...]

Invincible victims! Here is a curious optimism lurking at the very heart of pessimism. And notice again how important form is. Life is chaos, a long sequence of uncontrollable disasters, but this idea is expressed with great control and elegance, suggesting heroic adaptation, appropriation even, rather than capitulation; in the midst of disasters we can formulate witty sentences. “No, future here,” observes Beckett’s narrator in Worstward Ho. And proceeds: “Alas, yes.” With even greater virtuosity, Robert Lowell, in “Her Dead Brother,” creates a punchline by omission when he gives us: “All’s well that ends.” With these flashes of creativity it’s as if a turbulent seascape were fleetingly illuminated by lightning; we are shown our shipwreck brilliantly.

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Vox: I ate at North Korea’s state-run restaurant chain in China. It was weird.

Bathed in the fluorescent glow of bright red, purple, and blue lights, a group of young and enthusiastic North Korean women there sang pop songs before a rapt audience of mainly Chinese men (in my two hours there, I saw maybe two female customers). Between songs, the performers sometimes left the stage to mingle with the crowd, chatting with the middle-aged male clientele. At one point they invited diners onto the stage for a particularly awkward performance.

This wasn’t a place you went to for the food. I paid too much for a beef dish that tasted like hot sauce; the pricey cold noodles were bland. But the chain is able to justify high prices because of the entertainment, renowned for both its energy and its, well, overall strangeness. The performers are government employees known for expressing their love of country using glow sticks.

 came into the restaurant expecting to see gaudy totalitarian propaganda from a country whose leader routinely threatens to turn the US “to ashes.” Instead, I found that the performance and the waitstaff often came across as a source of cultural diplomacy. The restaurant workers didn’t speak Chinese well, but most of the songs they sang were classic Chinese songs, not North Korean ones. They performed many classic Chinese ballads from the ’70s and ’80s, and the Chinese customers were singing along. [...]

There is a paradox about this line of restaurants. They are designed to put on staggeringly eye-catching performances — the stage is awash in neon colors, the attire is garish, the performances are slightly manic, there are glowing props — and yet they officially prohibit photography. When I tried taking pictures, I was repeatedly chided by the waitresses, who came running over to stop me every time I took out my camera (which is why my hastily taken photos are so blurry). The combined effect of the visuals that draw you in and the ban on photography is that you feel you’re being let in on a secret.

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