BBC4 Thinking Allowed: The Housing Crisis, Squatting in Amsterdam

The housing crisis and beyond: Laurie Taylor talks to Anna Minton, Reader in Architecture at the University of East London & author of 'Big Capital: Who Is London For?' and David Madden, Assistant Professor in Sociology at the LSE. They explore the way in which homes have come to be seen as sites of capital investment and accumulation rather than as places of shelter and security.

Also, the anthropologist, Nazima Kadir, discusses her study of the 'autonomous' life of politically motivated squatters in Amsterdam.

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Vox: What the dip in US life expectancy is really about: inequality

Living in the US increasingly looks like a health risk. Average life expectancy here dropped for the second year in a row, according to recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The grim trend stems from a toxic mixture of more drug- and alcohol-related deaths and more heart disease and obesity in many parts of the country. And it puts Americans at a higher risk of early death compared to their counterparts in other wealthy countries.

But what’s often lost in the conversation about the uptick in mortality here is that this trend isn’t affecting all Americans. In fact, there’s one group in the US that’s actually doing better than ever: the rich. While poor and middle-class Americans are dying earlier these days, the wealthiest among us are enjoying unprecedented longevity.  [...]

They also found that men who were among the top 1 percent of income earners lived 15 years longer than men at the bottom 1 percent. For women at the extremes of the income distribution, life expectancy differed by 10 years. At Vox, we broke their data down by state, and you can see that wealthier Americans are living longer than poorer Americans all across the country. (Here’s the data on men, but the same trends hold for women.) [...]

We often think about health status in terms of access to doctors, hospitals, and medicines. But access to health care only accounts for about 10 to 20 percent of our health outcomes. Far more influential on our health is our socioeconomic status and certain health behaviors, like smoking, eating healthfully, and getting exercise.  

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Politico: Nikki Haley’s Split Personality at the U.N.

The U.S. ambassador made a strong plea for the world to back the Iranian people—whereupon a series of America’s friends wavered and equivocated over how to deal with Tehran. The French ambassador questioned whether the protests amounted to an international security threat deserving the council’s attention. The Swedish representative expressed doubts about the meeting’s timing. The Kuwaiti ambassador reminded his counterparts of how the early protests of the Arab Spring turned sour. It was clear that participants saw the meeting as a ploy for Haley to question the foundations of Iranian nuclear deal indirectly—and diplomat after diplomat flagged how strongly they support the agreement. [...]

The former South Carolina governor has enjoyed a stellar run in New York so far. A safe distance from the chaos of the White House, she quickly made friends with other important ambassadors, pushed through hefty cuts to the U.N. budget, in line with Trump’s wishes, and hammered out serious sanctions on North Korea with the Chinese. [...]

But while Haley the diplomatic fixer has won plaudits, there has always been a second Haley waiting the wings: a hardliner who is in lock-step with President Trump on the need to talk and act tough on many security issues. Above all, she has been one of the administration’s top public hawks on the Middle East. [...]

While last week’s Iran debate was a lower-profile affair, it was arguably a much more consequential one. If Haley alienates other powers over Iran, she could find that the goodwill she has built up will dissipate extremely quickly. Foreign ambassadors may treat run-ins with the U.S. over Israel as a standard professional hazard, but they broadly see the Iranian nuclear deal as essential to containing the metastasizing regional crisis in the Middle East. This belief unites all the permanent members of the Security Council other than the U.S.: Britain and France are liable to side with China and Russia to defend the nuclear agreement.

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Vox: How Southern socialites rewrote Civil War history (Oct 25, 2017)

The United Daughters of the Confederacy was a significant leader of the “Lost Cause,” an intellectual movement that revised history to look more favorably on the South after the American Civil War. They were women from elite antebellum families that used their social and political clout to fundraise and pressure local governments to erect monuments that memorialized Confederate heroes. They also formed textbook review committees that monitored what Southern schoolchildren learned about the war. Their influential work with children created a lasting memory of the Confederate cause, and those generations grew up to be the segregationists of the Jim Crow Era in the South.

The Atlantic: Why Women Prefer Male Bosses

Studies show that when women have a preference, they would choose to have a male boss instead of a female boss. Participants in one study described their female bosses as “emotional,” “catty,” or “bitchy.” Where does this aversion to female bosses come from? And why do some women seem to undercut each other at work?