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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Vox: Ramzan Kadyrov: brutal tyrant, Instagram star

The Atlantic: Why Do Americans Smile So Much?

Americans tend to smile more often than people in other countries. Olga Khazan digs into a couple scientific findings why — it turns out, American smiles signal excitement, confidence, and also have to do with a long history of immigration.

Quartz: People in China are claiming Taiwan’s same-sex marriage victory as their own

On the Chinese microblogging site Weibo, dozens of accounts have posted comments cheering Taiwan for becoming the first “Chinese province” to support gay marriage. Taiwan is a self-governing island but is kept at arm’s length by most countries thanks to Beijing’s long-time insistence that it is a breakaway region that is nevertheless part of the communist Chinese republic established in 1949.

“A Chinese province has legalized same-sex marriage” read a page description (link in Chinese) on Weibo. The page, which also uses the hashtag “Taiwan legalized same-sex marriage,” has been viewed more than 20 million times since it was set up yesterday, soon after Taiwan made the announcement. Thousands of comments, mostly hailing Taiwan’s progress are posted on the page.

“Taiwan has become the first one that allows same-sex marriage, does that mean China has become the first Asian country that allows same-sex marriage?” wrote ( link in Chinese) one person on Weibo, while another commented (link in Chinese), “[We] congratulate that Taiwan Province has become the first of its kind to legalize same-sex [marriage].” (The Taiwan ruling doesn’t exactly allow same-sex marriages to take place right away—instead the government must amend the laws to make it possible within two years.)

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Scientific American: Pets Improve Human Health—But We Improve Theirs Too

On any given day at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, specially selected individual patients from ages one to 18 make their way to a quiet second-floor wing to spend time with their precious companions, their own pets. At the Purina Family Pet Center—one of just four facilities in the world to permit in-hospital own pet visits—patients sit on chairs or floor mats with their four-legged guests. For patients in a wheelchair or a bed, pets climb up ramps to sit or lie perched atop adjustable and non-slip tables so that they can get as close as possible to their recumbent owners. [...]

The benefits of pet therapy are well-documented. The presence and tactile nature of being with pets lowers blood pressure, heart rate and anxiety in owners, and it can also elevate levels of “feel-good” hormones such as oxytocin. But recent studies suggest that the benefits could be even more profound. [...]

She points to one Tufts study (subscription required) in which two groups of elementary school-aged children were asked to read aloud to separate groups of dogs or humans at their local library. Those that read to dogs showed a greater improvement in reading skills and in attitudes toward reading. Pets have also been shown to reduce anxiety among nursing home residents and the children coping with a parent’s military deployment.

Experts at Purina also recognize that human interaction can have a positive effect on pets. The company recently examined the impact (subscription required) of a single, 15-minute petting session on 55 dogs at a local shelter. Researchers detected positive changes in the dogs after just one session, with lower heart rates, higher heart rate variability (associated with positive emotions) and an improvement in behavior among those canines involved in the study.

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The New Yorker: Does the Manchester Attack Show the Islamic State's Strength or Weakness

As its military losses mount, isis has turned its sophisticated online propaganda machine into an instruction manual for lone-wolf missions far from its own territory. Its main publication is the slick multi-language magazine Rumiyah, Arabic for “Rome,” taken from a prophecy that Muslims will one day conquer that city, which is a symbol of Christianity and the West. Rumiyah replaced Dabiq, a magazine named after a Syrian town where the prophecy claimed that Armageddon would take place. Then, last year, isis lost the town of Dabiq. Its sights, and its publication, shifted. [...]

In its latest online issue, released this month, isis offers a new terror tactic. It calls on followers “in the lands of disbelief” to use sites such as Craigslist and eBay to lure victims to meetings where they can be seized as hostages. It suggests advertising jobs, property to rent, or online sales as a way to set up meetings in controlled spaces. The goal is not the traditional use of captives to demand ransom or prisoner swaps but, instead, to execute the hostages and taunt the enemy. It instructs, “In order for the operation to gain wide publicity and more effectively plant terror into the hearts of the disbelievers, one can keep some of his victims alive and restrained, making for a more lengthy and drawn out hostage scenario.” [...]

The physical disruption of the isis proto-state may increase the danger of lone-wolf attacks in the West, experts told me. Over the past three years, an estimated five thousand Europeans joined extremist movements in Syria and Iraq; about twenty per cent have returned to their home countries, according to Ali Soufan, a former F.B.I. agent and the author of a new book, “Anatomy of Terror: From the Death of bin Laden to the Rise of the Islamic State.” Up to eight hundred British citizens joined isis and the smaller extremist movements, a British official told me.

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The New York Review of Books: A Better Way to Choose Presidents

Our essay proposed two improvements to US presidential elections. First, in both presidential primaries and the general election, we would replace plurality rule (in which each voter chooses a single candidate, and the candidate with the most votes wins, even if he or she falls short of 50 percent) with majority rule (in which voters rank candidates, and the candidate preferred by a majority to each opponent wins). Second, we would reform the Electoral College so that nationwide vote totals rather than statewide totals determine the winner. [...]

By contrast, majority rule avoids such vote-splitting debacles because it allows voters to rank the candidates and candidates are compared pairwise: if a majority of voters rank candidate A ahead of B, this ranking holds whether or not C runs too, and so there is no sense in which C can take votes away from A. Several readers have suggested going a step further by having voters grade candidates (say, on a scale of 1 to 5) and electing the candidate with the highest average score—much as gold medals are awarded in Olympic diving. But there is a big difference between grading in the Olympics—where standards are clear and judgments reasonably impartial—and grading in politics, where criteria are highly variable and personal. Thus we doubt that grading schemes could work successfully in political elections: grades would have no common meaning, and voters would have strong incentives to distort the grades they award candidates.

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