The Atlantic: Love in the Time of Individualism

Mark Regnerus, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin, thinks a lot about the price of human relationships. His new book, Cheap Sex, is all about how the modern dating scene has been shaped by sexual economics, a theory which sees human mating as a marketplace. His idea, as you might suspect from the title, is that sex is not as costly to access as it once was—in terms of time, effort, and risk. Contraception makes sex less risky; online dating platforms make it more accessible. If that doesn’t work out, there’s always porn, which requires next to no effort to find. These factors, Regnerus argues, “have created a massive slowdown in the development of committed relationships, especially marriage.”

Marriage rates have indeed plummeted among young adults, to the point that a demographer cited by  Regnerus estimates that one-third of people currently in their early 20s will never get married. But another new book about modern relationships, Eli Finkel’s The All-or-Nothing Marriage, contends that while “the institution of marriage in America is struggling ... the best marriages today are better than the best marriages of earlier eras; indeed, they are the best marriages that the world has ever known.” [...]

Still, there is a lot in Regnerus’s analysis that is uncomfortably astute. He’s right that it can be hard to escape these old gender dynamics when dating, especially online dating. Popular dating apps put women in the position of gatekeeping, whether deliberately or not. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a smartphone will swipe right on basically everyone. This forces women to be choosier about who they say yes to. Even if they also swipe with abandon, they end up with more matches to sort through—yet more gatekeeping. On Hinge and OkCupid, which don’t require a mutual opt-in before people can send messages, women’s inboxes are deluged with men whom they must then sort through. Bumble just went all-in and made gatekeeping a selling point: Women have to message men first, putting them in control of who has access to their attention. [...]

What Americans want from their marriages nowadays, Finkel argues, is love, yes, but also someone who will give their lives meaning, and make them into the best versions of themselves. “Marriage has a self-expressive emphasis that places a premium on spouses helping each other meet their authenticity and personal-growth needs,” he writes. “The pursuit of self-expression through marriage simultaneously makes achieving marital success harder and the value of doing so greater.”

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Quartz: Humans have way less agency than we think. Be grateful for the illusion

It certainly doesn’t come from having access to the brain processes that underlie our actions. After all, I have no insight into the electrochemical particulars of how my nerves are firing or how neurotransmitters are coursing through my brain and bloodstream. Instead, our experience of agency seems to come from inferences we make about the causes of our actions, based on crude sensory data. And, as with any kind of perception based on inference, our experience can be tricked. [...]

These observations point to a fundamental paradox about consciousness. We have the strong impression that we choose when we do and don’t act and, as a consequence, we hold people responsible for their actions. Yet many of the ways we encounter the world don’t require any real conscious processing, and our feeling of agency can be deeply misleading. [...]

The bond between agency and mutual accountability goes back at least as far as 300 BCE. The Greek philosophers, Epicurus and the Stoics, wanted to defend the idea of free will despite believing the universe to be pre-determined by the laws of nature. Free will has two fundamental features, they said. The first is the feeling of being in control: “I am the cause of this event.” The second is a grasp of the counterfactual: “I could have chosen otherwise.” Pangs of regret – something we’ve all experienced – make no sense unless we believe that we could have done something differently. Furthermore, Epicurus believed that we acquire this sense of responsibility via the praise and blame we received from others. By listening to our peers and elders, we become attuned to our capacity to effect change in the world. [...]

What’s more, by considering our experiences and sharing them with others, we can reach a consensus about what the world and we humans are really like. A consensus need not be accurate to be attractive or useful, of course. For a long time everyone agreed that the Sun went round the Earth. Perhaps our sense of agency is a similar trick: it might not be “true,” but it maintains social cohesion by creating a shared basis for morality. It helps us understand why people act as they do – and, as a result, makes it is easier to predict people’s behavior.

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Social Europe: The Euro’s Narrow Path

But the two sides remain deeply divided. Macron, in long-standing French tradition, insists that the monetary union suffers from too little centralization. The eurozone, he argues, needs its own finance minister and its own parliament. It needs a budget in the hundreds of billions of euros to underwrite investment projects and augment spending in countries with high unemployment.

Merkel, on the other hand, views the monetary union’s problem as one of too much centralization and too little national responsibility. She worries that a large eurozone budget wouldn’t be spent responsibly. While not opposed to a eurozone finance minister, she does not envision that official possessing expansive powers.  [...]

The solution lies in bulletproofing the banks by strictly applying the demanding capital standards of Basel III and limiting concentrated holdings of government bonds. The paradox here is that European regulators, including German regulators, have in fact been arguing for looser application of those regulations in negotiations with the United States. In doing so, they have been arguing against their own best interests.  [...]

The EMF could then take the place of the ECB and the European Commission in negotiating the terms of financing programs with governments. The final decision of whether to extend an emergency loan would no longer fall to heads of state in all-night talks. Rather, it would be taken by a board made up of eurozone representatives, including from civil society, nominated by the European Council and confirmed by the European Parliament, giving the process a legitimacy it currently lacks.  

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Katoikos: Schulz’s original sin

“The initial enthusiasm around Martin Schulz’s candidacy was the result of two facts. He never took part in a grand coalition and he inspired a great hope,” commented SPD MEP Tiemo Wölken during a debate on the future of the French-German motor for the EU after the German elections, held at the European Parliamentary Association in Strasbourg on Wednesday 13 September.

“Schulz disappointed the hope he inspired. Europe and its future should have been more at the centre of his campaign. Who if not the former president of the European Parliament is the most legitimate person to talk about Europe?” continued Wölken.

Schulz missed a great opportunity when he chose not to champion openly for “red-red-green” – the name normally given to a coalition between the SPD, the Linke and the Greens. This platform is the only one capable of proposing an “alternative” vision to the one of Merkel’s CDU. And this time, more than in the past, the three parties’ programmes had enough similarities to converge around a common project.  [...]

In this regard, the SPD proposes the creation of an economic government for the eurozone, endowed with a budget financed by taxes on the financial markets, which “were saved with public money and have not even paid a part of the costs for this intervention”. This plan is much more ambitious than the monetary fund Merkel promised Emmanuel Macron.

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Jacobin Magazine: A Shift to the Right?

The campaign has been excruciatingly boring. Most observers take Angela Merkel’s victory as a foregone conclusion. The televised debate between the current chancellor and the Social Democratic Party’s (SPD) lead candidate Martin Schulz on September 3 got mixed, but altogether negative, reviews, ranging from pure indifference to bewilderment and anger at the candidates’ painfully inoffensive style. This reaction is all the more remarkable given that German politics isn’t known for its confrontational style. [...]

The right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) casts its shadow not only over Merkel and Schulz but also over the resurgent liberals of the Free Democratic Party (FDP). For example, approximately 47 percent of the Merkel-Schulz debate concerned migration and refugees. No AfD spokesperson participated, but the party’s presence nevertheless permeated the room. [...]

We should not take such equations lightly. In recent months, Germany has been rocked by a series of neo-fascist scandals, including the discovery of Nazi cells within the army. Furthermore, the trial of the National Socialist Underground group, responsible for deadly attacks on Turkish and Greek residents over several years, has produced a constant stream of evidence that demonstrates authorities’ chronic negligence in response to the threat of far-right terrorism. [...]

Unfortunately, the CDU isn’t the only party that has tried to weaken the AfD by attacking the Left. In recent months, the liberal — but fiscally much more neoliberal — FDP has experienced a remarkable resurgence after being kicked out of the Bundestag during the last elections. [...]

The SPD has also joined this race to the right. When Schulz announced his bid for the chancellorship, he appeared somewhat popular: more honest than Gerhard Schröder and less tainted with the legacy of the Agenda 2010 neoliberal reforms than the rest of his party. But this image soon began falling apart. Trying to appeal to both the bosses and the German workers, Schulz pleased no one. While talking about scaling back some elements of Agenda 2010 at the start of his campaign, a series of electoral defeats on the state level saw Schulz orienting himself towards the center and proclaiming Emmanuel Macron his role model. This was a hopeless move, and not only because this political space is already occupied by Angela Merkel. The SPD has problems beyond its candidate. Most importantly, it belonged to a coalition with the CDU between 2005 and 2009 and another from 2013 until the present, a history that prevents the party from assuming a plausible anti-establishment posture.

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Political Critique: Theresa May in Florence, or an old-style socks-and-sandals Brit abroad

More significant was the fact that she yet again failed to say anything meaningful about citizen rights, freedom of movement or the contentious issue of the exit fee, all of which are high up the European Commission’s list of priorities and preconditions for the negotiations to continue. Even her audience of just over thirty, most of whom were flown over from London anyway, yawned their way through a speech whose final, edited version actually contained the sentence “Britain’s future is… bright”. No wonder nobody from the EU27 bothered to turn up. [...]

In reality, of course, and I can’t resist just one example, pre-EU Anglo-Tuscan history is hardly so rose-tinted. In the 14th Century the Tuscan Bardi and Peruzzi families leant a vast sum of florins to the English King Edward III to pay for his wars. After a string of defeats he failed to pay the sum back, ultimately leading to the collapse of both institutions, which in turn resulted in a serious Europe-wide economic crisis. Oops! Most Brits have forgotten this, but, as a resident, I can tell you, the Florentines most certainly haven’t. In a speech about these ambiguous creative trade deals this faux pas was carrion for the Italian media. [...]

May spoke passionately, for example, about British people caring about sovereignty and democracy and in the process managed to somehow imply that this wasn’t true for other European countries. To make such an earnest gaff in one of the birthplaces of modern republicanism whose citizens are by and large proud European democrats, and worse still to do so as the representative of a country that still has a monarchy and no constitution, was nothing short of absurd.

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Al Jazeera: What Germany's refugees think about the elections

It will, however, represent continuity only at a surface level. The narrative that this is an uneventful election belies the deeper rumblings in the German political landscape. Polls predict that on Sunday the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) will enter parliament for the first time. The party has used Merkel's policy around refugees to bolster the anti-immigration vision at the heart of their campaign.

Anxiety around the rise of the far right in the country is felt particularly acutely by many refugees. The topic of refugee policy and integration has been a centre of gravity for parties across the political spectrum. Yet with no right to vote, many of the thousands of refugees in the country feel without a voice - objects, and not participants in the political discourse.

Al Jazeera spoke to some refugees in the capital about what the election means to them.

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The Economist: Angela Merkel’s rise to power, in five steps

Angela Merkel is expected to win her fourth term as German Chancellor. In doing so she would become Europe's most successful elected female politician. Her biographer, Jacqueline Boysen, tells us why Mrs Merkel is a political force with staying power. 

How do you survive in modern-day politics? You might want to follow the example of Angela Merkel. Jacqueline Boysen is a journalist and writer, who's covered German politics for the past two decades. She's known Angela Merkel since the 1990s and has written a biography on Germany's first female chancellor.

Here are the tips Jacqueline Boysen has learned from Angela Merkel.