Bloomberg: The Logical Next Step for Europe's Integration

The European Council at the end of June is widely seen as the last opportunity for some time to agree on an agenda of reforms. Afterwards, politicians will start to campaign ahead of the elections for the European Parliament next spring. With euroskeptic forces on the rise across the currency union, mainstream parties will have little appetite for negotiations over institutional reform in the run up to the vote. [...]

The creation of joint deposit insurance has been on the agenda at least since European leaders agreed to transfer responsibility for banking policy from national to EU level in 2012. This project -- referred to as Europe's "banking union" -- is formed of three pillars: the joint supervision of significant banks, a framework to wind down failing lenders and the creation of a European pot of money to guarantee deposits of up to 100,000 euros ($122,000). While the euro zone has taken the first two steps, the third has proven elusive. Germany and other low-debt countries such as the Netherlands fear they could be on the hook for troubles in banks in weaker member states.

These concerns are largely misplaced. Germany and the Netherlands have had their own recent history of severe banking crises. Joint deposit insurance would benefit them as much as Italy or Spain. A common safety net would also reassure all depositors that they will see their money back in case of a crisis; that helps reduce the risk of bank runs in all euro-zone countries. [...]

Leaders are discussing others ways to deepen monetary union ahead of the June summit too. There is talk of providing a backstop to the Single Resolution Fund (SRF), the pot of money used to wind down banks in crisis. At the moment, this is capped at 55 billion euros, an amount which will only be reached gradually. A meaningful backstop would see, for example, the SRF able to take money from the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), the much larger euro zone rescue fund. The EU would then have significant firepower to deal with a large bank in crisis (though, in the case of a very large lender such as Deutsche Bank there would remain concerns over the impact of a failure on the rest of the financial system). Another idea is to turn the ESM into a more flexible institution, which is capable of lending money to countries without them committing to fiscal adjustment and a full set of structural reforms.

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Quartz: You could be flirting on dating apps with paid impersonators

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that these ghostwriting services exist. Tinder alone produces more than 12 million matches a day, and if you’re a heterosexual American, you now have a one in three chance of meeting your future husband or wife online. But as e-romance hits an all-time high, our daily dose of rejection, harassment, and heartbreak creeps upward, too. Once you mix in the vague rules of netiquette and a healthy fear of catfishing scams, it’s easy to see why someone might want to outsource their online-dating profile to a pro, if only to keep themselves sane. [...]

“I’m not a psychologist or self-proclaimed expert in the multiple facets of human psychology,” Valdez told Quartz in a phone call. “I consider myself to be a marketer, a matchmaker, and a dating expert.” He lists the books he’s read that inform his methods: Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, David J. Lieberman’s Get Anyone To Do Anything, (“which kind of scared my mom”), and the classic Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. [...]

In my guise as a middle-aged American male, it’s my job to pursue women on our clients’ behalf. These people are often in their early 20s; young women with less dating savvy are easy targets for the company’s methods. “Rule 1: Don’t make her think too hard,” the manual says. “When writing sales copy…the goal is to reduce her ‘cognitive load’ so she’s more likely to reach the end and still have energy to write out a reply.” [...]

To this end, every message I send is logged into an automated system that analyzes response rates. Closers regularly discuss what works and what doesn’t, swapping tips in extensive email chains. There are required monthly team meetings, in which Closers help workshop opening messages and pitch new ideas. While the list of company-approved opening lines is constantly evolving, the formula is almost always the same: a vague reference to something on the match’s profile, followed by an extremely easy question, like “I see you’re into yoga…. so answer this question once and for all: which is better, hot or not?”

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The Atlantic: The Difference Between a Killer and a Terrorist

For most who deal with the issue day in and day out, though, terrorism is public violence to advance a political, social, or religious cause or ideology. Some variation remains as far as the details (many people distinguish between military and civilian targets, for instance, or stipulate that the perpetrator be a nonstate actor), but this broad definition has been widely adopted in the almost 17 years since September 11 and the launch of the Global War on … well, you know. [...]

Even if mental-health issues contributed to the attack, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t terrorism. While there are rare situations in which someone can be so unmoored from reality that their stated motive is irrelevant, there is little to suggest that is the case here (again, with the important caveat that the investigation remains in its early stages). The definition of terrorism does not contain an exemption for mental illness. In some cases, where the perpetrator is profoundly incapable of understanding the context of the act, it’s possible to mount an argument that a particular incident should be excluded. But such cases are extraordinarily rare. [...]

In 2012, a white-supremacist skinhead massacred six people at a Sikh Temple in Wisconsin. He was clearly an extremist, but he left no clues or insights into the motive for his attack. It is probably correct to classify this incident as terrorism or a hate crime. But it’s difficult to be definitive, because he didn’t tell us in explicit terms. Terrorism is about sending messages, and if there’s no clear message, we are left with questions.

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The Guardian: The US government should cede territory back to Native Americans

The US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has altered its mission statement, removing the characterization of America as a “nation of immigrants” in order to emphasize the new goal of “securing the homeland”. Some critics made the point that most citizens are immigrants or their descendants, while others noted that most Americans believed that immigration should remain stable or increase. [...]

The young American republic preserved this European doctrine. The US supreme court formalized the Doctrine of Discovery in three famous cases of 1823, 1831 and 1832. Chief Justice John Marshall took for granted the obvious fact that America was the homeland of the Native Americans, “the rightful occupants of the soil”. By the logic of “discovery”, Native Americans had no rights because America was their homeland: “Their power to dispose of the soil at their own will to whomsoever they pleased was denied by the original fundamental principle that discovery gave exclusive title to those who made it.” [...]

However flawed it may be, the Doctrine of Discovery is the law of the land, affirmed regularly by our highest court. In the 21st century, in New York v Oneida Indian Nation of New York, the supreme court cited Marshall’s rulings and relied upon the Doctrine of Discovery as the basis of the federal government’s dominion over land once controlled by Native Americans – which is to say, the entirety of the United States of America.

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Independent: As First Dates proved this week, it's hard to be a feminine gay man in the dating world

Coming out as gay is often pictured as the ultimate act of queer defiance; but we cannot kid ourselves that it alone exempts us from the pressures of heteronormative society. As we watched on First Dates, the pressure to be perceived as “normal” by the standards of society makes many men unable to come out – and when they do, they replicate homophobic language towards other gay men who don’t “pass as straight”. Gay shame is a deeply systemic condition; it is ingrained into every fibre of our heteronormative culture, and it’s an impossible thing to shake yourself of entirely. [...]

White cisgender masculinity is celebrated as the ultimate triumph in many gay spaces, coming with it a rejection of non-conformism in our communities. It’s telling that possibly the most celebrated gay male couple mass-culturally is Tom Daley and Dustin Lance, a fairytale picture of gay men who have won by the sign posts of heteronormative idealism– one is an Olympian, the other a Hollywood veteran, both are white, cisgender, masculine, wealthy, they’re married and expecting children. Their conformism makes them palatable to the tastes of the masses. [...]

I have rarely seen femme gay men portrayed as sexually empowered subjects – when we see them in the media, they are often eunuchs, or serve as comic relief. Now I’m not saying that desiring a man who is masculine or who enjoys football is a problem. The issue at hand is the way representation has presented these “straight-acting” men as the zenith of success, which has resulted in internalised homophobia and damaging hierarchies within gay spaces. All forms of culture have an urgent responsibility to represent gay people in their spectrum of identities, so that white masculinity isn’t the ultimate goal.  

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The Conversation: Why losing a dog can be harder than losing a relative or friend

Many times, I’ve had friends guiltily confide to me that they grieved more over the loss of a dog than over the loss of friends or relatives. Research has confirmed that for most people, the loss of a dog is, in almost every way, comparable to the loss of a human loved one. Unfortunately, there’s little in our cultural playbook—no grief rituals, no obituary in the local newspaper, no religious service—to help us get through the loss of a pet, which can make us feel more than a bit embarrassed to show too much public grief over our dead dogs.  [...]

Our strong attachment to dogs was subtly revealed in a recent study of “misnaming.” Misnaming happens when you call someone by the wrong name, like when parents mistakenly calls one of their kids by a sibling’s name. It turns out that the name of the family dog also gets confused with human family members, indicating that the dog’s name is being pulled from the same cognitive pool that contains other members of the family. (Curiously, the same thing rarely happens with cat names.) [...]

The loss of a dog can also seriously disrupt an owner’s daily routine more profoundly than the loss of most friends and relatives. For owners, their daily schedules—even their vacation plans—can revolve around the needs of their pets. Changes in lifestyle and routine are some of the primary sources of stress.

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Bloomberg: Why Trump Gets Away With Lying

But more than 50 years ago, an American sociologist and political scientist predicted that extreme social conditions might make it possible for a vulgar, lying demagogue to appeal to a broad group of ordinary people. Three psychologists have now run experiments reproducing the effect in a set of volunteers holding a mock election — demonstrating how Trump’s vulgarity can be a feature, not a flaw, and a key part of his appeal to a huge swath of America that feels abandoned by the economic and political establishment.

As Oliver Hahl of Carnegie Mellon and colleagues note, a survey taken after the 2016 U.S. Election found that Trump supporters don’t believe many of his lies, especially his most egregious ones. When Trump claimed that global warming is a Chinese hoax, most recognized it as false, but they didn’t much care. They saw his language as expressing deeper truths. [...]

Lipset suggested that a crisis of legitimacy would have psychological consequences — and set the stage for a lying demagogue to be perceived by many people as bravely speaking suppressed truths. In normal conditions, voters shun any candidate who obviously lies and abuses widely shared social norms. But in a crisis, Lipset argued, disenfranchised voters may see such violations as a symbolic protest, and a deliberate poke in the eye to the elites they have come to despise.

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Bloomberg: A Brexit Choice Between Bad and Worse

Staying in the European Union's customs union after Brexit, or joining some specially tailored version of it, would leave the U.K. with a worse deal than the one it currently enjoys as a full member of the EU. All Remainers think so, and a good many Leavers would probably agree. Proposing such an outcome comes close to admitting that the whole Brexit project has gone wrong. It has gone wrong — but, understandably, that's something May and her colleagues are unwilling to say. [...]

The problem is that a customs union stops the U.K. from striking new deals of its own, negating one of the main supposed benefits of Brexit. Worse, Britain would be bound by EU trade deals with third parties, despite having no vote on them, and no guarantee of sharing in the reciprocal benefits the deals would confer on EU partners. Membership in the EU is already unpopular with roughly half the country. Such a grossly asymmetrical arrangement would be even more toxic. [...]

Exactly how this catastrophic failure of leadership will be resolved is hard to say. No forthright pro-EU candidate for the highest office has emerged in either party. The country seems exhausted, and calls for a second referendum to reverse the Brexit choice are falling on deaf ears. Nothing short of a major political crisis seems capable of breaking the collective paralysis.

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