The New Yorker: The Witches of Salem (September 7, 2015 Issue)

In 1692, the Massachusetts Bay Colony executed fourteen women, five men, and two dogs for witchcraft. The sorcery materialized in January. The first hanging took place in June, the last in September; a stark, stunned silence followed. Although we will never know the exact number of those formally charged with having “wickedly, maliciously, and feloniously” engaged in sorcery, somewhere between a hundred and forty-four and a hundred and eighty-five witches and wizards were named in twenty-five villages and towns. The youngest was five; the eldest nearly eighty. Husbands implicated wives; nephews their aunts; daughters their mothers; siblings each other. One minister discovered that he was related to no fewer than twenty witches. [...]

From the pulpit came reminders of New England’s many depredations. The wilderness qualified as a sort of “devil’s den”; since the time of Moses, the prince of darkness had thrived there. He was hardly pleased to be displaced by a convoy of Puritans. He was in fact stark raving mad about it, preached Cotton Mather, the brilliant twenty-nine-year-old Boston minister. What, exactly, did an army of devils look like? Imagine “vast regiments of cruel and bloody French dragoons,” Mather instructed his North Church parishioners, and they would understand. He routinely muddied the zoological waters: Indians comported themselves like roaring lions or savage bears, Quakers like “grievous wolves.” The French, “dragons of the wilderness,” completed the diabolical menagerie. Given the symbiotic relationship of an oppressed people and an inhospitable landscape, it was from there but a short step to a colluding axis of evil. [...]

In 1641, when the colonists established a legal code, the first capital crime was idolatry. The second was witchcraft. “If any man or woman be a witch, that is, has or consults with a familiar spirit, they shall be put to death,” read the Massachusetts body of laws. Blasphemy came next, followed by murder, poisoning, and bestiality. In the years since, New England had indicted more than a hundred witches, about a quarter of them men. The first person to confess to having entered into a pact with Satan, a Connecticut servant, had prayed for his help with her chores. An assistant materialized to clear the ashes from the hearth and the hogs from the fields. The servant was indicted in 1648 for “familiarity with the devil.” Unable to resist a calamity, preternatural or otherwise, Cotton Mather disseminated an instructive account of her compact. [...]

The English witch made the trip to North America largely intact. She signed her agreement with the Devil in blood, bore a mark on her body for her compact, and enchanted by way of charms, ointments, and poppets, doll-like effigies. Continental witches had more fun. They walked on their hands. They made pregnancies last for three years. They rode hyenas to bacchanals deep in the forest. They stole babies and penises. The Massachusetts witch disordered the barn and the kitchen. She seldom flew to illicit meetings, more common in Scandinavia and Scotland. Instead, she divined the contents of an unopened letter, spun suspiciously fine linen, survived falls down stairs, tipped hay from wagons, enchanted beer, or caused cattle to leap four feet off the ground. Witches could be muttering, contentious malcontents or inexplicably strong and unaccountably smart. They could commit the capital offense of having more wit than their neighbors, as a minister said of the third Massachusetts woman hanged for witchcraft, in 1656.

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The Conversation: Getting rid of plastic bags: a windfall for supermarkets but it won’t do much for the environment

It’s estimated that Australian retailers give away 6 billion plastic bags each year. Woolworths alone say they provide 3.2 billion each year. Coles has not provided an estimate of bag use, but claim to process 21 million transactions each week. With fewer stores than Woolworths, I estimate that Coles may give away up to 2.7 billion bags annually.[...]

The past impact of applying a charge to the use of plastic bags has provided positive, but mixed results. In Australia, Bunnings reported an 80% reduction after implementing a charge for plastic bags, while a 2008 trial undertaken in three Victorian regional towns by Coles, Woolworths and IGA resulted in a 79% reduction.

n 2002, Ireland applied a 15 pence (22c) charge to single-use plastic bags, claiming a 90% reduction within 6 months (this was before the transition to the euro currency in the same year). Then in 2007 it increased the charge to 22 euro cents (32c) in response to increased bag usage. Sadly, shoppers had become conditioned to the 15p charge and returned to their old habits.

The UK government likewise reported an 85% reduction in single-use plastic bags in the first 6 months after a 5p charge (8c) was implemented in 2015. Similar results have been reported in the US, with a 94% reduction in Los Angeles County from the introduction of a charge for bags. [...]

Unfortunately, introducing a charge for bags doesn’t help the environment in isolation. While plastic bags represent only about 2% of landfill, there is certainly sufficient scientific evidence that plastic bags do present risks to marine life and clog waterways.

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Quartz: Two centuries later, researchers say the French revolution was an act of radical privatization

In 1789, the revolutionary government seized French lands owned by the church, about 6.5% of the country, and redistributed them through auction. This move provided a useful experiment for the researchers—Susquehanna University’s Theresa Finley, Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Raphaël Franck, and George Mason University’s Noel Johnson.

They tracked the agricultural outputs of the properties and the investment in infrastructure like irrigation, and find that areas with the most church property before the revolution—and thus the most redistribution afterward—saw higher output and more investment over the next 50-plus years. They also found more inequality in the size of farms, thanks to consolidation of previously fragmented land, than in areas with less redistribution.

Why does this matter? The authors argue that this is a case that helps explain one of the most important concepts in economics and law, the Coase theorem, developed from the work of the Nobel-prize winning economist Ronald Coase. The theorem says that bargaining should result in optimal outcomes regardless of how economic institutions are designed. However, the lack of perfect bargains in the world led economists to refine this prediction—these optimal outcomes only happen when there are no transaction costs. In reality, the high costs of making a deal often block mutually beneficial deals. [...]

In other words, this research argues that radicals who wanted to do more than simply abolish feudal privileges, but actually redistribute the land itself, had an economic point: Without reallocating resources directly, it seems it took far longer for revolutionary reforms to take hold and the advantages felt in areas with more redistribution to subside.

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Vox: The Middle East's cold war, explained

BBC4 A Point of View: What To Call Him?

"You can't call him crazy, because it isn't fair to crazy people", writes Adam Gopnik.

"You can't compare him to a four-year-old because four-year-old children are not in fact tyrannical or egotistical".

Six months into Donald Trump's presidency, Adam Gopnik searches - almost in vain - for a descriptive category to fit.

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Deutsche Welle: Opinion: Autocracy versus pluralism in the Qatar crisis

If only this were the case. Unfortunately, it's not. Wherever you search for them – in newspapers, including the Arabic-language press, on television or in conversations with colleagues from the region – no one can cite any sensible, comprehensible reasons for the blockade of the country and the accusations that have accompanied it.

Take the accusation that Qatar is supporting terrorism. This is absurd, given that it is being made by representatives of a country deemed to be one of the biggest – if not the biggest – sponsor of fundamentalist movements. While this does not refer to the government itself, there are several foundations active in Saudi Arabia that are reportedly promoting the kingdom's conservative – some would say reactionary – state religion of Wahhabism around the world. Indonesia and the Balkans are among the regions that have recently experienced the beneficial effects of this ideology. [...]

But Al-Jazeera has other voices as part of its programming, too. It also presents other positions that are very far from the questionable pronouncements of bearded clerics. Its program is pluralistic and, above all, far removed from the Wahhabi voices, fierce men with their fatwas, and pious aphorisms coming out of Saudi Arabia.

Qatar is certainly not a human rights paradise, as is demonstrated by the emirate's treatment of its guest workers, the majority of whom are Asian. As elsewhere in the Gulf region, this treatment is shameful.

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VICE: Ravens Are So Smart, One Hacked This Researcher's Experiment

In fact, these birds are so intelligent that they're able to plan ahead for future events—something that has only been seen in humans and great apes until now—and will give up an immediately available reward to get a better one in the future. This is according to a new study published today in Science. [...]

He described to me how one experiment took an eerie turn: One raven in the experiment figured out how to work their rock/box contraption first, then began teaching the method to other ravens, and finally invented its own way of doing it. Instead of dropping a rock to release a treat, the future Ruler of the Raven Kingdom constructed a layer of twigs in the tube, and pushed another stick down through the layer to force it open. The bird had to be removed from the experiment before it could teach any other birds how to do it. [...]

The fact that corvids have brains the size of a walnut might not be a disadvantage. A study published last year revealed that though their brains are much smaller than some apes, like the capuchin monkey, the brains of corvids and large parrots have large numbers of neurons in some parts of their brains, at high density. Kabadayi said that their connection speeds might be even faster than those of mammals due to these neurons' close proximity to one another.

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The New York Review of Books: Liu Xiaobo: The Man Who Stayed

When the Tiananmen protests erupted, Liu was abroad but chose to return. After the protesters were bloodily suppressed, many of the Tiananmen leaders who could left the country; Liu, too, after a brief stint in prison, had opportunities to leave. But like Tan Sitong, he chose to stay in China, where he mattered most. Even after a second, harsher stint in jail, Liu was determined to remain and keep pushing for basic political rights. He was risking not the immediate arrival of soldiers, but the inevitable and life-threatening imprisonment that befalls all people who challenge state power in China today. [...]

This didn’t mean shunning protests or direct action, but prioritizing the more realistic and—even though Liu often provocatively said he was in favor of complete westernization—very Confucian idea of promoting social change through one’s own life and actions. He said Chinese should study “the non-democratic way we live,” and “consciously attempt to put democratic ideals into practice in our own personal relationships (between teachers and students, fathers and sons, husbands and wives, and between friends).”

Liu’s moderation culminated in Charter 08, a petition for political change that relied heavily on rights already enshrined in China’s constitution and in internationally recognized UN treaties. He helped draft Charter 08’s careful language, and he did much to persuade others to sign it. As a result, in 2009 he was sentenced to eleven years for “subversion of state power.” [...]

In a way, this is in fact the crux of the issue: what is China’s historic arc? China’s authoritarian leaders justified their reign through mysticism: that the forces of history had chosen the Communist Party. Then, after thirty years of political upheaval and famines ended in the late 1970s, the Party adopted the role of a development dictatorship: it developed, therefore it ruled.

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Quartz: The gulls are alright: How a lesbian seagull discovery shook up 1970s conservatives

The discovery, published in 1977, triggered a controversy that shook the core of conservative Christianity and right wing of US politics. “At the time it was, I believe, the first published work on homosexuality in any wild animal,” George says. “The extreme right was very distressed.”

Their prevailing argument against homosexuality was that it wasn’t found in nature—God’s creation—and was therefore unnatural, and against God’s will. The presence of happily coupled female gulls poked a pretty big hole in that logic. “When people have their fundamental arguments compromised, they aren’t happy about it,” George says. [...]

The Hunts found that 14% of the gull pairs on the island were comprised of two females. One telltale sign of a lesbian nest was a “supernormal clutch,” meaning more eggs than a single female could possibly produce. [...]

And once paired, the lesbian couples stuck together. Gulls are known monogamists. “The female-female pairs stayed together from one year to the next. Those that had viable eggs were perfectly able to raise them,” George says. [...]

Since then, homosexual behavior has been documented in many hundreds of species, though an exact number is hard to come by (the New York Times suggests 450, the University of Oslo put the figure at 1,500), with various animals—albatrosses, for example—exhibiting the same type of apparently non-sexual, long-term, same-sex pairing the Hunts found in the gulls.

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