Nautilus Magazine: How Nostalgia Made America Great Again

Of course America today has its problems, but many indices of standards of living show the general population is better off now than it was 60 years ago. We live on average 10 years longer, the education rate is higher, as is homeownership. When it comes to crime, The Atlantic reported last year, “By virtually any metric, Americans now live in one of the least violent times in the nation’s history.”

So why do so many people see the past as better than today? For many of them, it may well have been. Middle- and working-class Americans seduced by appeals to earlier eras may have had higher-paying jobs with better benefits, greater financial security, and a more defined place in the community. Perhaps they were happier. For some, cultural changes since the Saturday night sock-hop may have only strengthened their beliefs that American values have frayed. But an innate psychological trait may also explain why people tend to view the past as better than today: nostalgia. [...]

Subsequent studies further contextualized nostalgia’s utility, showing that it’s frequently triggered by low moods, loneliness, and even a sense of meaninglessness. These triggers suggested that nostalgia might be a kind of defense mechanism, a way to maintain resiliency during periods of anxiety, despair, and existential distress. “What seems to be the case is that nostalgia can be an adaptive tool to deal with a lot of psychological threats,” says Wijnand van Tilburg, a social cognition researcher at King’s College London. [...]

In the study, “nostalgic memories” were simply memories that specifically induced nostalgia, as opposed to, say, ordinary memories that elicited minimal emotional response. Routledge explains that the various phenomena associated with autobiographical memory—chiefly psychological biases called fading affect and rosy retrospection—are ideally suited to induce nostalgia. “The way these memories works, works perfectly for nostalgia,” he says. In other words, the memories inducing nostalgia have been burnished and idealized over time, shorn of their negative aspects. But these recollections serve an important adaptive purpose. “When people are experiencing situations that challenge that sense of self and make them feel uncertain about life, they naturally recruit nostalgia as a way to restore that self-continuity,” Routledge says. [...]

In a study by Colorado State University psychologist Richard Walker in 1997, participants recorded and rated events based on how pleasant they were. They then reevaluated those events, respectively, three months, one-and-a-half years, and four-and-a-half years later, again rating them based on pleasantness. Researchers found that while participants rated most experiences as less extreme over time—either less pleasant or less unpleasant—negative emotions faded faster. Walker’s findings have been corroborated many times over, including a study in 2014 that showed fading affect bias prevalent worldwide, in countries ranging from Australia to Germany to Ghana.

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Nautilus Magazine: Why Poverty Is Like a Disease

Now, new evidence is emerging suggesting the changes can go even deeper—to how our bodies assemble themselves, shifting the proportions of types of cells that they are made from, and maybe even how our genetic code is expressed, playing with it like a Rubik’s cube thrown into a running washing machine. If this science holds up, it means that poverty is more than just a socioeconomic condition. It is a collection of related symptoms that are preventable, treatable—and even inheritable. In other words, the effects of poverty begin to look very much like the symptoms of a disease.

That word—disease—carries a stigma with it. By using it here, I don’t mean that the poor are (that I am) inferior or compromised. I mean that the poor are afflicted, and told by the rest of the world that their condition is a necessary, temporary, and even positive part of modern capitalism. We tell the poor that they have the chance to escape if they just work hard enough; that we are all equally invested in a system that doles out rewards and punishments in equal measure. We point at the rare rags-to-riches stories like my own, which seem to play into the standard meritocracy template. [...]

In human children, epigenetic changes in stress receptor gene expression that lead to heightened stress responses and mood disorders have been measured in response to childhood abuse.4 And last year, researchers at Duke University found that “lower socioeconomic status during adolescence is associated with an increase in methylation of the proximal promoter of the serotonin transporter gene,” which primes the amygdala—the brain’s center for emotion and fear—for “threat-related amygdala reactivity.”5 While there may be some advantages to being primed to experience high levels of stress (learning under stress, for example, may be accelerated6), the basic message of these studies is consistent: Chronic stress and uncertainty during childhood makes stress more difficult to deal with as an adult. [...]

The standard American myth of meritocracy misinterprets personal narratives like mine. The accumulated social capital of American institutions—stable transfer of power, rule of law, and entrepreneurship—certainly create economic miracles every day. But these institutions are far more suited to exponentially growing capital where it already exists, rather than creating new capital where society needs it. Stories such as mine are treated as the archetype, and we falsely believe they are the path to escape velocity for an entire segment of the population. In doing so, they leave that population behind. I am the face of the self-made rags-to-riches success story, and I’m here to say that story is a myth. The term “meritocracy” was coined in 1958 as a mockery of the very idea of evaluation by merit alone. We’ve forgotten to laugh, and the joke is on us.

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Jacobin Magazine: The Dangers of Detoxification

We’ve heard the media’s detoxification narrative over and over: a fringe group has cleaned up its act and joined the political mainstream, becoming a party like any other. The liberal press has been telling itself this story for years, uncritically relaying assertions that the FN has got rid of “the knee-jerk racists,” offering up fawning profiles of party figureheads, and imagining that Marine Le Pen took a principled stand against her father Jean-Marie’s antisemitism. A recent article described her niece, the profoundly homophobic and racist Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, as “a political star. Beautiful and fervently Catholic.” [...]

Le Pen’s recent claim that France bears no responsibility for the 1942 roundup of over thirteen thousand Jews at a Paris velodrome should remind everyone taking these detoxification claims at face value that when it comes to the FN, all is not as it seems. [...]

The controversy comes just as the mainstream right is trying to reframe the national narrative. Les Républicains candidate François Fillon famously claimed that France should not feel guilty about its former colonies: it did not invent slavery, and it was just trying to “share its culture” with the people of Africa, Asia, and North America. This is part of the Right’s broader strategy of ridding itself of its “complexes” and acting “without inhibition,” notably by rehabilitating France’s imperial past. [...]

Second, the mainstream right has radicalized. Unable to secure enthusiastic consent for neoliberal economic policies, the Sarkozy agenda focused on issues that boosted the FN: national identity, law and order, immigration, and Islamophobia. The development of a radical social authoritarianism among mainstream right voters was expressed most dramatically in mobilizations against gay marriage in 2013 but also in rising racist attitudes among right-wing voters and an increasing readiness to back the FN in second-round electoral contests against the Socialists.

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Political Critique: France’s Wild Card Elections

If 2016 was the year of Brexit and the surprise election of Donald Trump, 2017 is shaping up to deliver its own new and unpredictable results starting this Sunday. The French presidential elections have in fact in the past months delivered one of the most uncertain competitions in the history of the Republic. With two days to go until the first round, four candidates are competing within three percentage points of one another, all of them in plausible reach of the Palais de l’Élysée. Rocking the foundations of the French political system, which is historically based on a solid bipolarism, the electoral campaigns have seemed to synthesise in a single country all of the strengths and weaknesses of a changing Europe which is looking to Paris to see its future. [...]

Last December on live TV Hollande announced that he had no intention of renewing his candidacy on the basis that he wished to give space for the French left to reunite around a shared leader capable of opposing the advances of the right. Next month the chapter will close on the most unpopular President of the Republic in French history. More important still is the nature of the forces in play that are in a position to claim final victory. Excluding Fillon Les Républicans, who are anyway behind in the polls, all of the other parties or movements lie outside the traditional definition of a political party, a phenomenon that is characterising many other European countries. [...]

Whatever the outcome of the vote it is clear that the French parliamentary system is destined to change, and to do so very quickly given the forthcoming vote for the Legislative Assembly which will enable the future President to create his or her government, a decision which itself will have repercussions across borders. It will be an intense month in France then, with all eyes on Paris to understand the future of Europe.

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Jacobin Magazine: Center-Left in No Man’s Land

But there was also the success of Benoît Hamon. And I think that came about because left voters wanted to feel like they were voting for something rather than simply against things all the time. They accepted a utopian program because there has been so much despair over the last five years. They used the primary to support a “futur désirable” (“desirable future”), which is Hamon’s slogan. His program was quite ecological, much moreso for example than the program of Arnaud Montebourg, which was more classically leftist. [...]

Hamon was more popular with the media and eventually succeeded with a clear, ambitious, and strategic agenda. Campaigning on universal basic income, decriminalizing drug use, and so on won over leftist electors. Additionally, he performed quite well in televised debates, which contributed to a youthful image that was important in allowing him to dispel early notions that he was a career politician. This strange mixture of factors along with his focus on running a “positive campaign” — he did not attack Hollande directly, for example — contributed to his success in the primary. [...]

It has been quite striking. There has been a lot of discussion of the European Union in the campaign — and out of eleven candidates, only two are uncritical: François Fillon and Emmanuel Macron. There have been extreme-right criticisms and some left variants but overall a critical stance has become dominant among a majority of candidates. Specifically, the question is often framed in terms of Plan A and Plan B. Plan A means a reconstitution of the terms of France’s involvement, whereas Plan B would be an exit.

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Vox: Marine Le Pen is trying to win the French elections with a subtler kind of xenophobia

When Marine was just 8 years old, her family’s apartment building was bombed, destroying 12 apartments and injuring two adult and four children. No one in the Le Pen family was harmed, but French authorities came to believe it was an attack aimed at her father for his far-right views. The bombers were never caught. [...]

The original far-right supporters were very often religious, or at least believing, Catholics. Marine is twice divorced. A mother of three, she now lives with her longtime partner, a man named Louis Aliot, whom she has not married. She has been very vocal about women’s rights and refuses to oppose abortion or contraception. Her closest aide is gay. The original FN was considered homophobic; Marine has won gay supporters. [...]

Marine, on the other hand, had begun to try to reach out to Jews, in a slow but steady effort to untangle herself from the party’s anti-Semitic reputation. In January 2005, she sat down with the Jerusalem Report, an Israeli news magazine, and opined that Jews should turn to the FN for help against those from Muslim immigrant neighborhoods who had carried out attacks on Jewish targets around the country that prompted a country-wide concern about a new anti-Semitism. Beginning with the second intifada in 2000, tensions between Jews and Muslims in France had increased dramatically. [...]

“She wants to campaign on the core issues of the National Front: immigration and identity,” says Jean-Yves Camus, an expert on the far right. “It is on those topics that she is really different from the mainstream conservative party. And we all know that immigration is the first and foremost topic when you ask people who vote for the National Front.”

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The Intercept: Trump Hopes Paris Attack Boosts Le Pen, One Day After Obama Calls Macron

Trump’s barely concealed endorsement of Le Pen — who wants to deport or prosecute more than 10,000 people on a terrorism watchlist and take France out of the European Union — comes one day after his predecessor, former President Barack Obama, tried to boost the chances of the centrist, pro-European candidate, Emmanuel Macron, with a friendly phone call trumpeted by Macron’s campaign. 

Despite the hopes of Trump, and his strategist Steve Bannon, who previously championed Le Pen through rapturous Breitbart News coverage, it remains unclear if the majority of French voters, who tell pollsters they will vote for anyone but Le Pen if she makes it to a second-round runoff, will be swayed by the shooting. [...]

In other news that might have gotten more attention if not for the attack in Paris, Francois Fillon, the center-right candidate polling in third place, suggested that a journalist who was interviewing him had failed to understand his platform because she was pregnant during the campaign, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the left-wing candidate surging in recent weeks, welcomed the endorsement of Pamela Anderson, who praised his promise to offer asylum in France to Julian Assange.

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The Conversation: Cycling to work: major new study suggests health benefits are staggering

Cycling or walking to work, sometimes referred to as active commuting, is not very common in the UK. Only three per cent of commuters cycle to work and 11% walk, one of the lowest rates in Europe. At the other end of the scale, 43% of the Dutch and 30% of Danes cycle daily. [...]

We then grouped our commuters into five categories: non-active (car/public transport); walking only; cycling (including some who also walked); mixed-mode walking (walking plus non-active); and mixed-mode cycling (cycling plus non-active, including some who also walked).

We followed people for around five years, counting the incidences of heart disease, cancers and death. Importantly, we adjusted for other health influences including sex, age, deprivation, ethnicity, smoking, body mass index, other types of physical activity, time spent sitting down and diet. Any potential differences in risk associated with road accidents is also accounted for in our analysis, while we excluded participants who had heart disease or cancer already. [...]

We found that cycling to work was associated with a 41% lower risk of dying overall compared to commuting by car or public transport. Cycle commuters had a 52% lower risk of dying from heart disease and a 40% lower risk of dying from cancer. They also had 46% lower risk of developing heart disease and a 45% lower risk of developing cancer at all.

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Motherboard: Great Britain Is Leaving the Coal Age—For a Whole Day

The UK is poised to go an entire day without using any energy from coal sources, according to British electricity network National Grid—the first time Britain will have done so since the late 19th century.

Britain's reliance on coal has been falling steadily since the 1950s and peak coal production, some 287 million tonnes, occurred way back in 1913. But at around 11pm tonight, the UK is expected to witness an entire 24-hour period passing without electricity generated by coal, as alternative power sources such as wind, solar, and nuclear become more popular and the warming months reduce electricity demand in the country. [...]

The importance of coal in the UK power economy may have dwindled quickly of late, but it may still have a part to play in the future, Staffell suggested. It's likely that for several years to come, coal could be useful as an on-demand energy source to help the National Grid deal with peak periods.

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