The New York Review of Books: The Body and Us

Manzotti: Now you’re going too fast. Let’s stay with the body a moment. Of course it’s absolutely central. There would be no experience without it. Yet we are not our bodies. We are something else. Think about it. We do not experience being neurons and blood vessels. We do not experience being bowels and internal organs. Science teaches us that we are made of such stuff, and constantly invites us to contemplate models of our skeletons and innards and so on, and to identify with them. Yet for thousands of years people never thought of themselves like that at all. Because actually our lives are made up of external events, people, objects, landscapes, and of course the body’s interaction with these things. What was Homer’s experience made of? Chariots, walls, towns, spears, wounds, armors, seas, ships, sails, sacrifices. What was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s experience made of? Fast cars, designer clothes, expensive houses, pink cocktails, jazz. As regards their bodies, Homer and Fitzgerald were made of the same stuff, neurons and cells. But their experiences, hence their minds, have little in common. [...]

Manzotti: Of course. But you take my point. The body’s perceptual apparatus, eyes, ears, nervous system, selects which object becomes your experience, carves out a world that is you, but it does not concoct this object in the neurons in the brain. The object is out there. Your experience is out there and you with it. The body is a selector and a facilitator, not a host or a container. [...]

This is always the case with experience of the body. One part of the body perceives another part, but not itself. Notice that we never feel the brain, because there is nothing beyond it, as it were, in the nervous system, that might allow the brain to become manifest to us as an object. No anesthesia is required for the brain itself when a surgeon operates on it, because the brain doesn’t feel pain. It allows other objects to exist and become part of our world, within the body and without, but isn’t experienced itself. [...]

Manzotti: Yes. The self is just as physical as the body, and equally important. It exerts its influence through the causal conduit that the body offers; it is that particular world that the body both brings into existence and reacts to. The body is the fulcrum, if you like, but the external object, your experience, all your experience, over the years, is the lever, the self. The lever is only a lever because the fulcrum allows it to be so. But the fulcrum is only a fulcrum because there is the lever.

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Vintage Everyday: Inside the Everleigh Club, the Most Famous and Luxurious House of Prostitution in American History

Step into the perfumed parlors of the Everleigh Club, the most famous brothel in American history–and the catalyst for a culture war that rocked the nation. Operating in Chicago’s notorious Levee district at the dawn of the last century, the Club’s proprietors, two aristocratic sisters named Minna and Ada Everleigh, welcomed moguls and actors, senators and athletes, foreign dignitaries and literary icons, into their stately double mansion, where thirty stunning Everleigh “butterflies” awaited their arrival. [...]

The prices of services provided by the Everleigh Club were extremely inflated by the standards of the day, though these high prices were easily paid by wealthy patrons with an excess of funds. Typically, a patron would initially pay a $10 entrance fee. Patrons could also treat themselves to a variety of amenities that the club offers some of which include: a $12 bottle of wine, a $50 dinner, $25 for supper, or $50 to spend an evening with one of the "Everleigh butterflies." Regardless of what the patron chose to purchase, a minimum of $50 had to be spent by each patron in each visit or they risked having their admission permanently revoked. But patrons had no difficulty reaching the minimum spending. In fact, often clients would spend on an average of $200 to $1,000 a visit.

High costs resulted in high returns for the employees and owners of the Everleigh Club. The Everleigh Sisters netted an average income of an astonishing $15,000 a week compared to the average working wage of only $6 a week. Once the Everleigh sisters retired they had amassed a net profit of $1 million which was equivalent to $20.5 million today.

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Jacobin Magazine: Yemen’s Disaster

What led Yemen down this path to chaos? After all, the country includes the former People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, the only socialist state in the Arab world. In the 1970s, the other Yemeni state, the Yemen Arab Republic, had a strong rural movement based on community and tribal solidarity, which organized, financed, and managed development initiatives. The Republic of Yemen, born in 1990, was the only democracy in the Arabian Peninsula. However flawed, it held real multiparty elections. [...]

In this context, it is worth remembering that 70 percent of Yemen’s population lives in rural areas and depends on cultivation and livestock. The first decade of the twenty-first century, however, saw a shift from agriculture to casual urban labor as the primary source of rural households’ incomes. In towns and cities, men congregated in search of casual unskilled employment, where living conditions were also affected by water scarcity. [...]

Ordinary citizens, especially young people and women, demanded the downfall of the Saleh regime and an end to his regime’s corruption and nepotism. They also wanted jobs, a national economy that would benefit the population as a whole, and true democracy. Participants were often young — not surprising in a country where 80 percent of the population is under thirty-five. [...]

The coalition has maintained a blockade that is claimed to be designed to prevent Iran from providing weapons and ammunition to the Saleh-Houthi alliance, but its primary impact has been preventing food and fuel imports, which the Yemeni people need to survive. Due to population increase, climate change, and other factors, Yemen depends on imports for the overwhelming majority of their fuel and basic staples — 90 percent of wheat and 100 percent of rice, tea, and sugar come from external sources.

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CityLab: A Dream Of Good Housing In Moscow

Earlier this year, current mayor Sergey Sobyanin announced that the city would soon demolish 8,000 of them, displacing 1.6 million residents. More recently, Sobyanin revised that number downward: 4,566 buildings are currently targeted for demolition, which would displace 1 million residents. According to The Economist, owners and tenants of targeted buildings can vote on the matter until June 15. If two-thirds vote in favor of demolition or abstain, the building will be no longer and its residents will be moved into “replacement apartments of equal size, rather than equal value,” while anyone who refuses will face eviction and no chance to appeal in court.

A previous and more modest wave of Khrushchyovka clearance was initiated in the late ‘90s under then-mayor Yury Luzhkov, but that came with little public outcry. As explained in the Moscow Times, “Owners of apartments in buildings eligible for demolition were warned a year in advance. They were offered three alternatives in the same district, equivalent in market value. They could opt for a payout instead. Improved construction standards meant the new apartments tended to be larger and of a higher quality.”

Sobyanin’s plan, meanwhile, has caused great suspicion and anger. As reported by Ivan Davydov in Intersection, a Russia policy journal, it won’t just be Khrushchyovka biting the dust. Other historic buildings, late 20th-century homes, and even newly renovated residential buildings would be eligible for demolition under the most recent draft of the bill by the State Duma.

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Atlas Obscura: Resurrecting the Forgotten Bike Highways of 1930s Britain

In the 1930s, Britain’s Ministry of Transport built an extensive network of bike highways around the country—at least 280 miles of paved, protected infrastructure dedicated to cyclists alone. For decades, it was entirely forgotten—overgrown and overlooked—so much so that no one seems to remember that these lanes had existed at all. [...]

These bike highways were nine feet wide and surfaced in concrete, and they ran along major roads for miles. According to Reid’s research, the Ministry of Transport was inspired by newspaper reports of similar lanes in the Netherlands and contacted the Rijkswaterstaat, its Dutch counterpart. The head engineer of the Rijkswaterstaat sent the Brits “these incredible exploded diagrams of how they built cycleways next to the road and the railways and how they separated the traffic,” says Reid. “The Brits, in effect, were ‘going Dutch,’” decades before that phrase became a mantra among cycling enthusiasts who long for infrastructure as good as Amsterdam’s. [...]

In the years that followed the construction of the cycleways, though, cars became the predominant form of transportation, and the bike lanes fell out of use. Even the Ministry of Transport forgot that it had built them. “Within 40 years, it had been lost in their own department that they were doing this,” says Reid. He read the ministry’s minutes going through the 1960s and found records of ministers saying that they’d never built anything like a bike highway before.

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Motherboard: These Plastic-Eating Machines Will Filter Our Junk From the Ocean

This directly targeted the growing, almost incomprehensible problem of plastic in our oceans. As a result of our disposal of plastic waste into the ocean, five giant concentrated areas of garbage have formed across the world, the largest called the The Great Pacific Garbage Patch. [...]

What began as a $2 million startup in 2013 developed into a foundation that has raised 21.7 million dollars since November 2016 and 31.5 million dollars since their origin in 2013. The funds have allowed them to deploy their pilot technology at the end of 2017 and begin their 10 year mission to remove half of the plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in 2020. [...]

Thanks to the new discoveries he and his scientists made, and the updates to The Ocean Cleanup machine, they now plan on removing 50 percent of the plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in just five years, with the first machine set to launch within the next 12 months.

Slat's plan is not foolproof. Some scientists have pointed out that land-based interventions would work more effectively than cleaning up in the sea itself. And others say the funding would be better used to treat the problem at its source: waste management.

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The Atlantic: Church Militant: A Right-Wing Media Empire in the Making

Since being established nine years ago, ChurchMilitant.com (then St. Michaels Media) has grown from a tiny media outfit on the fringes of the Catholic world to a 35-person powerhouse reaching an estimated 1.5 million viewers a month. Michael Voris, the founder of Church Militant, is fighting what he sees as the “tyranny” of a liberal America. But, Voris—charismatic, pious, untiring—is grappling with his own complicated past.

The Conversation: The forgotten origins of the modern gay rights movement in WWI

“He has lost his bright life … for the Fatherland,” wrote S. That Fatherland had a law on the books that banned sex between men. But the sodomy law was just the tip of the iceberg: S. and men like him generally could not reveal their love relationships in public, or even to family members. Homosexuality meant the loss of one’s job, social ostracism, the risk of blackmail and perhaps criminal prosecution. [...]

Many veterans agreed with S. When the war ended, they took action. They formed new, larger groups, including one called the League for Human Rights that drew 100,000 members.

In addition, as I argue in my book, the rhetoric of gay rights changed. The prewar movement had focused on using science to prove that homosexuality was natural. But people like S., people who had made tremendous sacrifices in the name of citizenship, now insisted that their government had an obligation to them regardless of what biology might say about their sexuality. [...]

Ideas of citizenship led activists to emphasize what historians call “respectability.” Respectability consisted of one’s prestige as a correctly behaving, middle-class person, in contrast to supposedly disreputable people such as prostitutes. Throughout the 20th century, gay rights groups struggled for the right to serve openly in the military, a hallmark of respectability. With some exceptions, they shied away from radical calls to utterly remake society’s rules about sex and gender. They instead emphasized what good citizens they were.

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The Washington Post: Iran’s president faces a tough fight for reelection

Nevertheless, the election campaign in Iran is exposing curious divisions. In televised debates, Rouhani has sparred with his more hard-line rivals, deeming them “extremists.” He has accused Iran's influential Revolutionary Guard Corps of attempting to sabotage the 2015 nuclear deal signed with world powers. And, at his rallies, Rouhani's supporters have chanted for the release of the country's two most prominent reformist leaders, who remain under house arrest. [...]

Rouhani, a former cleric who is hardly a reformist himself, surged to power in 2013 with the support of voters eager for a moderate leader who could lead Iran away from the legacy of his firebrand predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Rouhani sought to bring Iran out from its deepening isolation with the nuclear deal, which imposed strict curbs on the country's nuclear capabilities in return for an easing of sanctions. But sluggish economic growth has cooled enthusiasm for his government. [...]

Rouhani's closest challenger, Ebrahim Raisi, a conservative cleric who runs one of Iran's holiest shrines, has seized on widespread frustrations over an economy in recession. Not unlike Ahmadinejad in a previous era, Raisi has campaigned on a platform of populist nationalism — a “Make Iran Great Again” agenda, if you will — promising to triple handouts to the poor and create 1.5 million jobs while also taking a more confrontational stand against the West. Another hard-line candidate, Tehran Mayor Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, said 5 million jobs would be created under his watch.

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