Growing up in Mankato, Minnesota, John Biewen heard next to nothing about the town’s most important historical event. In 1862, Mankato was the site of the largest mass execution in U.S. history – the hanging of 38 Dakota warriors – following one of the major wars between Plains Indians and settlers. In this documentary, originally produced for This American Life, John goes back to Minnesota to explore what happened, and why Minnesotans didn’t talk about it afterwards.
6 May 2018
Spiegel: Europe's Last Ditch Effort to Save Iran Deal
It was a particularly bitter moment for the Europeans. The nuclear deal had long been seen as a crowning achievement of EU diplomacy. It was regarded as proof positive that a problem like the Iranian nuclear threat could more effectively be solved through discussion and economic incentives than through military strikes and punitive actions. The world celebrated the deal -- and then Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. The same man who has blasted the agreement as "terrible," as "a catastrophe," as "insane" and "horrendous." [...]
It is a tightrope walk. The Europeans are trying to preserve the deal by making additions to it. It is an approach designed to satisfy the Americans without scaring off the Iranians. But with just one week to go before the expiration of Trump's ultimatum, there are two important problems that still haven't been solved. [...]
The second problem has to do with a European demand. They want the U.S. to issue a clear commitment to the nuclear agreement. From the European perspective, such a statement is important to bolster Iranian moderates who have thrown their support behind the deal. Iranian hardliners, after all, are just as skeptical of the pact as Trump is. [...]
The experts are unified in their belief that the deal works. Helga Schmid, secretary general of the European External Action Service and a key player in deal's negotiation, says: "I hope that the U.S. continues to stand behind the deal. The JCPOA is not based on assumptions of good faith or trust. It is based on concrete commitments, verification mechanisms and a very strict long-term monitoring done by the IAEA."
CityLab: America, Land of the Young and Lonely
Cigna surveyed more than 20,000 American adults, ages 18 and up. The online survey included 20 questions and statements about relationships, feelings of isolation, and interactions with other people, and researchers scored responses based on UCLA’s Loneliness Scale (commonly used to measure subjective feelings of loneliness). A score between 20 and 80 indicates possible loneliness, with higher numbers signifying greater levels.
The national average loneliness score is 44, according to the survey, with just under 50 percent reporting that they sometimes or always feel alone or left out. Two in five adults feel as though they lack companionship or a meaningful relationship, and almost 60 percent say their ideas aren’t shared by those around them. When the researchers broke those numbers down by different groups, they found that the average loneliness score drops with age: Gen Z-ers and Millennials on average score 48.3 and 45.3, respectively—higher than the national average and well beyond the scores of Baby Boomers and the so-called Greatest Generation (those ages 72 and up). [...]
As CityLab has reported before, the “state of solitude” affects millions across the U.S., and can make us more vulnerable to physical illnesses like heart disease and diabetes. This survey doesn’t delve into why Gen Z reports feeling more isolated, but the results suggest that for all groups, isolation is linked with factors like overall health, amount of sleep, and time spent with friends and family.
The Economist: Was Karl Marx right?
Karl Marx remains surprisingly relevant 200 years after his birth. He rightly predicted some of the pitfalls of capitalism, but his solution was far worse than the disease.
The Conversation: Big city gaybourhoods: where they come from and why they still matter
The first LGBTQ clubs on Oxford Street were Ivy’s Birdcage and Capriccio’s, which both opened in 1969. By the beginning of the 1980s, Oxford Street was home to a string of bars, clubs, saunas and cafes and had become known as Sydney’s gay “Golden Mile”.
The emergence of this gay heartland represents extraordinary social change. Male homosexuality remained illegal in New South Wales until 1984. The homosexual men socialising in 1950s CBD hotels were required to do so with discretion – the consequences of discovery could be devastating. [...]
Members of a marginalised social group were thus using urban space to resist oppression and build a community. For some, this produced a kind of utopia. In an interview with Sydney’s Pride History Group, DJ Stephen Allkins described his first visit to the Oxford Street disco Patch’s as a teenager in 1976. [...]
Despite changes in Oxford and King streets, efforts to keep Newtown “weird” highlight the continued value of urban space to LGBTQ communities. Indeed, among a younger generation, new forms of queer identity continue to inspire the search for spaces in which to celebrate difference.
CityLab: A Drone's Eye View of Spain's Housing Bubble
After a decade of astonishing growth in the housing market, the bubble had burst. Unemployment climbed to 20 percent in 2008, peaking in 2013 at 27 percent with heavy losses in the construction sector. Housing prices would eventually decrease in 37 percent between 2007 and 2013. Redondo became obsessed with these empty neighborhoods which had come to symbolize what was wrong with Spain’s economy. He started driving around the country looking for them for what would become his photo series, “Sand Castles.” A decade later, he has published the second part of the project, “Sand Castles (Part II).” [...]
“Many of these sites are now locked down or there is security. And from the ground I was always frustrated because I didn’t had a shooting angle that would give a general perspective,” Redondo explains. “From the air this all becomes easier to understand.” [...]
“In Spain, you don’t talk about these sites anymore,” Redondo explains. “They are far from the cities, a little lost from plain sight. And politicians are always telling us that Spain is better—that we are growing again.” These projects remain there as scars in the landscape, without plans to either finish them or demolish them.
IFLScience: Bill Gates Thinks A Coming Disease Could Kill 30 Million People Within 6 Months
Gates acknowledged that he's usually the optimist in the room, reminding people that we're lifting children out of poverty around the globe and getting better at eliminating diseases like polio and malaria. [...]
The likelihood that such a disease will appear continues to rise. New pathogens emerge all the time as the world population increases and humanity encroaches on wild environments. It's becoming easier and easier for individual people or small groups to create weaponized diseases that could spread like wildfire around the globe.
According to Gates, a small non-state actor could build an even deadlier form of smallpox in a lab. [...]
In some ways, we're better prepared now than we were for previous pandemics. We have antiviral drugs that can in many cases do at least something to improve survival rates. We have antibiotics that can treat secondary infections like pneumonia associated with the flu. [...]
And we're getting better at rapid diagnosis too — which is essential, as the first step toward fighting a new disease is quarantine. Just this week, a new research paper in the journal Science touted the development of a way to use the gene-editing technology Crispr to rapidly detect diseases and identify them using the same sort of paper strip used in a home pregnancy test.
Quartz: Rural India left hurting as wages drop sharply under Modi government
Rural wages have reduced dramatically since 2014, making it a period of distress according to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). At this rate, Modi’s dream of doubling farmers’ income by 2022 seems like a tall order.
“During the last 10 year period, a high growth phase in rural wages from 2007-08 to 2012-13 was followed by a phase of significant deceleration,” said the RBI report, released last week. [...]
Inflation turned out to be a double whammy. After November 2014, there was the gap between the rise in prices and growth in wages narrowed, further impacting the purchasing power of Indian farmers. [...]
The grim situation has also driven about 12,000 farmers to suicide every year since 2013. In the last few years, farmers have made several desperate attempts to attract the government’s attention. Last year, there were prolonged protests in New Delhi, where farmers from Tamil Nadu consumed their own excreta in a show of desperation. In March this year, about 35,000 protesting farmers from the drought-hit areas of Maharashtra walked about 180 km over six days to reach Mumbai, the country’s financial capital, seeking loan waivers and land ownership.
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