BBC: The time when America stopped being great

It is tempting to see Trump's victory this time last year as an aberration. A historical mishap. The election all came down, after all, to just 77,744 votes in three key states: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. But when you consider the boom-to-bust cycle of the period between 1984 and 2016, the Trump phenomenon doesn't look so accidental. [...]

Consider how the fall of the Berlin Wall changed Washington, and how it ushered in an era of destructive and negative politics. In the post-war years, bipartisanship was routine, partly because of a shared determination to defeat communism. America's two-party system, adversarial though it was, benefited from the existence of a shared enemy. To pass laws, President Eisenhower regularly worked with Democratic chieftains such as House Speaker Sam Rayburn and Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson. [...]

Clinton's impeachment signalled the emergence of another new political trend: the delegitimisation of sitting presidents. And both parties played the game. The Democrats cast George W Bush as illegitimate because Al Gore won the popular vote and the Supreme Court controversially ruled in the Republican's favour during the Florida recount. [...]

US universities dominate global rankings, but its top colleges could hardly be described as engines of intergenerational mobility. A study by the New York Times of 38 colleges, including Yale, Princeton and Dartmouth, showed that students from the top 1% income bracket occupied more places than the students from the bottom 60%. Of this year's intake at Harvard, almost a third were the sons and daughters of alumni.

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Haaretz: In Praise of Intermarriage: Why Are Israeli Jews So Afraid of Relationships With Arabs?

The author of these words, written in 1910, was British journalist W.T. Stead. Such views were not uncommon in early 20th-century Europe. It’s true the race theory that was prevalent then prompted many Christians to believe in the ideology of racial purity and to oppose “contamination of the purity of blood” by Jews. However, a different approach that was widespread at the time, albeit less known in terms of contemporary historical consciousness, was based on an ideology of racial mixture. Belief in that hybridization project was popular in elite circles in Europe, among Jews and Christians alike, particularly Germany in the age of the empire, between the end of the 19th century and the early 20th. Even German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck remarked that “Christian stallions should be mated with Jewish mares” (source: “Jews, Race and Environment,” by Maurice Fishberg). [...]

The ideology of racial intermingling was based on racist assumptions and aspired to assimilate Jews into the European population. At the same time, the fact cannot be ignored that this notion rested on recognition of the Jews’ personality traits, which were viewed as a necessary element in society. From this perspective, the views commonly heard in present-day Israel are more benighted than those espoused in Germany 120 years ago. [...]

Racist segregation is a mainstream stance in Israel. But unlike the situation in the German Empire, in Israel’s ethnic democracy, there was hardly any significant political or cultural force campaigning in favor of mixed marriages between Jews and Arabs. A rare exception was Gershom Schocken, publisher and chief editor of Haaretz from 1939 to 1990. In a 1985 article in the paper, titled “Ezra’s Curse,” Schocken lashed out against Israel’s xenophobia and isolationism, which he claimed were preventing the toppling of barriers between Arabs and Jews. [...]

This is regrettable, because the growing legitimization accorded homosexuality in the past two decades could have served as a model for toppling barriers between Jews and Arabs. Every family in Israel that has a gay or transgender child tends to gradually adopt positive views of the LGBT community. By the same token, we can only imagine how different the attitude toward Arabs would be if tens of thousands of Jewish families in Israel had a Palestinian member.

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Vox: Plague is spreading at an alarming rate in Madagascar. Yes, plague

n some countries, particularly Madagascar, plague is endemic, and flare-ups cause public health emergencies on an almost annual basis — and right now, an uncontrolled epidemic that’s brewing there appears to be exceptionally worrying.

As November 1, more than 1,800 plague cases have been identified, including 127 deaths. Madagascar typically sees about 400 cases each year, when the disease surfaces from September to April. “This outbreak is unusually severe, and there are still five more months to go before the end of the plague season,” the World Health Organization reported. [...]

Also unlike previous outbreaks, this year’s involves mostly pneumonic plague, a more dangerous form of the disease than the much more common bubonic plague. Pneumonic plague attacks the lungs and spreads from person to person through droplets from coughing, like a cold, while bubonic plague spreads only from fleas to humans. (Sixty-two percent of cases so far were classified as pneumonic plague, according to the WHO.) [...]

Because of trade and travel links to Madagascar, there are nine countries and territories that could see plague cases turn up: Comoros, Mauritius, Mozambique, the French regions of Réunion and Mayotte, Seychelles, South Africa, the United Republic of Tanzania, Ethiopia and Kenya. For this reason, the WHO has been beefing up exit screening in Madagascar to make sure people with plague aren’t bringing the bacterium to other countries and helping these nine countries strengthen their epidemiological and laboratory surveillance capabilities. [...]

But there are other factors that help spread plague: Humans have been encroaching on wildlife areas, putting them into contact with potential carriers of the disease. And this is as true for poorer countries as it is for developed places like the US. As this scientific study on US plague reports, "Plague in New Mexico has increasingly occurred in more affluent areas" — the result of building out suburban and exurban communities in previously underdeveloped areas where plague had been circulating in wild animals.

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The New York Review of Books: War of All Against All

In Arab mythology, the al-Sada bird, or death owl, emerges from the body of a murdered man and shrieks until someone takes revenge. “Today there are undoubtedly tens of thousands of al-Sada birds crying out for revenge all over Syrian skies,” writes Yassin al-Haj Saleh in “The Destiny of the Syrian Revolution,” one of ten essays in his collection The Impossible Revolution. Extreme violence, including the incarceration and torture of teenagers, characterized the Syrian regime’s response to the street protests that erupted in 2011. As the uprising morphed into civil war, rebels also jailed their enemies, adopting methods of abuse and killing they had learned in the regime’s prisons. Malevolent spirits, or jinn, hover. Nearly half a million Syrians are believed to have lost their lives in six years of conflict. [...]

The sentence bears rereading: so terrible is the situation in Syria that one of the regime’s most long-standing and fervent critics, a man who has dedicated his whole life to fighting the Assads, father and son, is forced to wonder if it would have been better not to rebel at all. The author’s head may have remained clear while his heart was breaking, but the carefully modulated prose of these essays does not provide the whole story. How can we understand the Syrian revolution unless we hear the shriek of the al-Sada bird and consider in more depth how it feels to blame yourself for your wife’s disappearance and probable death? [...]

Syria was not the cradle of the Islamic State, but the revolution created a vacuum into which the militants stepped to impose their experiment in living. Their propaganda films show the glory of martyrdom for Allah, set to a soundtrack of heroic Koranic chanting, but reality is more banal: last year, a few days after Syrian government forces drove ISIS out of Qaryatayn, a largely Christian village near Homs, in the ruins of a desecrated monastery I found a notebook detailing payments to fighters, including a record of who had been on leave, extra money allocated to those with disabled relatives, a log of loan repayments, and a note about a fighter who had missed his wedding because he was with the tank division at the time.

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The New York Review of Books: How to Solve the Catalan Crisis

The reason neither the European Union nor Spain’s neighbors are doing anything to allay the crisis is that we Europeans complacently believe that violent conflict will not return to the continent. Other European leaders do not believe the cost of annoying Spain’s prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, by intervening and losing his support on EU or bilateral issues is justified since they do not believe the Catalan situation is so serious that it will turn violent or directly affect them. [...]

The conflict in Catalonia over self-determination will not end by itself, either. Although it has so far been a largely peaceful dispute, if both sides persist in escalating the dispute, they could turn it into another bloody conflict inside Europe’s borders—with consequences for all of us. In other similar disputes, it has been a short step from heads being broken in the streets in clashes between protesters and police to young, over-enthusiastic partisans responding with violence of their own. Far better to solve the conflict now, before real violence begins, than allow the blood to flow and then try to stop it. [...]

Canada found perhaps the best answer to the conundrum of self-determination after decades of separatist agitation in Quebec. The question went to the Canadian Supreme Court, which decided in a landmark judgement in 1998 that unilateral secession was not legal; the various international documents that support the existence of a people’s right to self-determination also contain parallel statements that support the conclusion that the exercise of such a right must be sufficiently restricted to prevent threats to an existing state’s territorial integrity. However, the justices ruled that if a referendum found in favor of independence, the rest of Canada “would have no basis to deny the right of the government of Quebec to pursue secession.” Negotiations would have to follow to define the terms under which Quebec would gain independence, should it maintain that goal. [...]

The Rajoy administration’s ostrich-like attitude is in many ways what created the problem in the first place. After lengthy and torturous negotiations, a previous, Socialist government had agreed a Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia that devolved further powers to the region in 2006. This statute was put to a vote in the Spanish and Catalan parliaments and endorsed in a referendum in Catalonia. At that stage, support for Catalan independence stood at just 14 percent. The conservative People’s Party (PP), then in opposition, promised to reverse the statute unilaterally and took the issue to the Constitutional Court. In 2010, the court struck down a large part of the statute. The response in Barcelona was a huge demonstration of more than a million people under the slogan “We are a nation. We decide.” The following year, Rajoy’s PP won an outright majority in the general election.

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Social Europe: Mourning Poland’s Burning Man

Late in the afternoon on October 19, a 54-year-old man outside the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw distributed several dozen copies of a letter addressed to the Polish people. Then he set himself on fire – a protest and sacrifice that called to mind the protests of Buddhist monks against the Vietnam War a half-century ago, and that of the Czech student Jan Palach against the Soviet crushing of the Prague Spring in 1969. [...]

The letter accuses the government, controlled by the Law and Justice (PiS) party, of restricting civil liberties and undermining the judiciary. Specifically, it condemns the PiS for its discrimination against immigrants, women, LGBT people, Muslims, and others, and for destroying the environment, by supporting coal-based energy, hunting, and logging in Białowieża Forest.  [...]

But the letter also implores the party’s opponents – 16% of Poles support the largest opposition party – “to remember that PiS voters are our mothers, brothers, neighbors, friends, and colleagues.” As such, they should not be vilified, but rather reminded of “the rules of democracy.” The letter concludes by calling on all Poles to “wake up” and change their government before it causes irreparable damage to the country. [...]

Meanwhile, the renowned Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland issued a strong rebuke against liberal media outlets that would attribute Piotr’s protest to mental illness. It is an “act of extreme moral laziness,” she wrote on Oko.press, to explain “such extreme civic despair and self-sacrifice as a result of depression, mental illness, and a related desire to end one’s own life.”

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CityLab: Saudi Arabia's $500 Billion Fantasy of a Utopian Megacity

Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman announced Neom last month. The $500 billion megacity, whose name is an amalgamation of neo—Latin for “new”—and “m” for the first letter in mustaqbal, the Arabic word for “future,” will span 10,000 square miles. That’s 33 times the size of New York City. The metropolis will skirt the northwest coast of the country on the Red Sea, even reaching north into Jordan and across the sea, via a bridge, into Egypt.

Prince Mohammed envisions Neom as a hub for manufacturing, renewable energy, biotechnology, media, and entertainment, filled with skyscrapers, five-star hotels, and robots to free humans from repetitive labor. The website dedicated to the city proclaims that it will offer “an idyllic lifestyle…founded on modern architecture, lush green spaces, quality of life, safety, and quality in service of humanity paired with excellent economic opportunities.” [...]

Saudi leaders have understood for years that their country’s economy must change, but the projects launched to further that goal, including planned “economic cities,” have not always succeeded. King Abdullah Economic City, a metropolis and port located south of where Neom will sit, houses fewer than 10,000 people after more than 10 years, though its projected population was two million. And King Abdullah Financial District north of Riyadh, meant to rival Dubai as an economic hub, is still incomplete after more than a decade. As of last April, nary a financial institution had agreed to occupy any of the district’s 73 buildings.

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