The Guardian: Exploring mazes with Henry Eliot – books podcast

Mazes are as old as humanity, with labyrinths etched into rocks 2,500 years before the birth of Christ. But according to Henry Eliot we’re living in a golden age of mazes.

This week, we follow Eliot as he explores labyrinths from the myth of Daedelus to the gardens of Longleat. Charting a path from the top of Crystal Palace park to the depths of Warren Street underground station in London, we hear how modern designers have given mazes a new dimension, why they are places where you can become both lost and found, and the inspiration they have offered writers from Raymond Queneau to Jorge Luis Borges.  

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Quartz: This physicist’s ideas of time will blow your mind

Rovelli’s new book, The Order of Time, published in April, is about our experience of time’s passage as humans, and the fact of its absence at minuscule and vast scales. He makes a compelling argument that chronology and continuity are just a story we tell ourselves in order to make sense of our existence. [...]

In fact, Rovelli explains, there are actually no things at all. Instead, the universe is made up of countless events. Even what might seem like a thing—a stone, say—is really an event taking place at a rate we can’t register. The stone is in a continual state of transformation, and on a long enough timeline, even it is fleeting, destined to take on some other form. [...]

Rovelli argues that time only seems to pass in an ordered fashion because we happen to be on Earth, which has a certain, unique entropic relationship to the rest of the universe. Essentially, the way our planet moves creates a sensation of order for us that’s not necessarily the case everywhere in the universe. Just as orchids grow in Florida swamps and not in California’s deserts, so is time a product of the planet we are on and its relation to the surroundings; a fluke, not inherent to the universe. [...]

Rovelli argues that what we experience as time’s passage is a mental process happening in the space between memory and anticipation. “Time is the form in which we beings whose brains are made up essentially of memory and foresight interact with our world: it is the source of our identity,” he writes.

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The New York Review of Books: The New Europeans

Although terrorist attacks in Europe continue to attract much attention, they don’t dominate the news as much as they did when they were a horrendous novelty back in 2014 and 2015. That terrorists can create localized but not widespread panic has been proved time and again; Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the former head of the United Nations’ counterterrorism committee, has aptly described Islamist terrorism as “a lethal nuisance.”  [...]

In contrast to attacks committed by non-Muslims such as Stephen Paddock, who massacred fifty-eight people at a concert in Las Vegas on October 1, 2017, jihadi attacks have repercussions on the communities and traditions that are believed to have encouraged them. Each atrocity increases by a fearsome multiple the distrust, surveillance, and interference to which Muslims in the West are subject. In the month following the Arena bombing, the Manchester police logged 224 anti-Muslim incidents, compared to thirty-seven in the same period a year earlier. On June 19, 2017, when a white Briton, Darren Osborne, plowed his van into a group of Muslims in North London, killing one, many Britons, including ones I spoke to, felt that the Muslims had had it coming.2 This is what Kepel means by fracture: jihadism engenders a reaction “against all Muslims,” while populist politicians “point the finger at immigrants or ‘Islam.’” [...]

According to an opinion poll commissioned by Le Figaro in April 2016, 63 percent of French people believe that Islam enjoys too much “influence and visibility” in France, up from 55 percent in 2010, while 47 percent regard the presence of a Muslim community as “a threat,” up from 43 percent. A poll conducted in Britain around the same time found that 43 percent of Britons believe that Islam is “a negative force in the UK.” Many British Muslims, I was told by a Muslim community activist in Leeds, spent the hours after the Las Vegas massacre “praying that the perpetrator wasn’t a Muslim,” for had he been, it would have led to furious responses online, in addition to the usual round of ripped-off hijabs and expletives in the street, if not actual physical threats. [...]

In recent years, England’s encouragement of multiculturalism has weakened in response to terrorist attacks and a rapid increase in the Muslim population, which has doubled since 2000 to more than three million people. By 2020 half the population of Bradford—which, besides being one of the country’s most Muslim cities, has one of its highest birth rates—will be under twenty years old. Responding to this demographic shift and the fear of terrorism, Britain under David Cameron and, more recently, Theresa May has given the policy of multiculturalism a very public burial, a shift that seems entirely in tune with the defensive impulses that led a small majority of voters to opt for Brexit. (I was told in Bradford that many Muslim inhabitants of the city also voted for Brexit, to indicate their displeasure at the recent arrival of Polish and Roma immigrants.) Typical of the panicky abandonment of a venerable article of faith was May’s reaction to the terrorist attack on London Bridge in early June 2017, after which she demanded that people live “not in a series of separated, segregated communities, but as one truly United Kingdom.” A central element of the government’s anti-extremism policy is the promotion of “British” values such as democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and tolerance. [...]

President Emmanuel Macron has made friendly overtures to France’s Muslims, and during his campaign last year he acknowledged that terrible crimes were committed by the French in Algeria. On November 1 anti-terrorism legislation came into force that transferred some of the most repressive provisions of France’s state of emergency—which ended on the same day—into ordinary law. Prefects will continue to be allowed to restrict the movement of terror suspects and shut down places of worship without a court order, even if raids on people’s homes—a particularly controversial feature of the state of emergency—are now possible only with the permission of a judge. To be Muslim will be to remain under suspicion, to be belittled, profiled, and worse. As in Britain, the short-term imperative of keeping people safe is proving hard to reconcile with the ideal of building a harmonious society.

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Slate: What’s Happening to “Queer” Cinema in the LGBT Film Boom?

The critique would apply to any number of films from the past decade that are nominally LGBT in content, but not queer in structure. We’ve entered a boom time for LGBT film, and the movies released in the past decade boast a mainstream appeal, with straight actors now more than ever willing to play an LGBT character. There have been Oscar-validated prestige pictures (Milk, The Kids Are All Right, Dallas Buyers Club, Call Me by Your Name), and corresponding flops (Stonewall, Freeheld), indie films (Princess Cyd, Tangerine), and commercial middlebrow ones (Love, Simon). While these films vary in intent, provenance, and quality, they encapsulate a similar catholic spirit: rather than assert difference, they point out similarities. They apply salve instead of salt. They’re safe, often boring, and sentimental, following familiar emotional arcs to tell a “universal story.” In short, we’re in a movie moment defined by the political sensibility of the gay-marriage movement.   [...]

The political language around sameness—that “they” are just like “us”—moved out of the ballot box and into film. Part of this is a rhetorical strategy to sell movies to a heterosexual public. Luca Guadagnino has called Call Me by Your Name a “family film”; Rachel Weisz called Disobedience, her recent passion project about a lesbian relationship in an Orthodox Jewish community in London, a “universal story.” Alia Shawkat, the star and writer of Duck Butter, a movie about a 24-hour relationship between two women, emphasized the importance of normalization. “Eventually I want to get to the point where we’re watching movies and the story’s not about the fact that they’re gay, or about the fact that they’re black, or about the fact that they’re trans—they just are. And we’re just watching that person’s life,” she told Vulture. “That’s how it becomes more normalized.” [...]

It’s no surprise, then, that we’ve seen a slew of biopics in recent years: movies that eschew the darkly sexual, depraved, or fraught aspects of biography in favor of empowerment. Gay films have become more concerned with the process of canonization, and the biopic is a favorite vehicle through which to legitimize historical figures, as Gus Van Sant’s Milk did with San Francisco politician Harvey Milk or The Imitation Game did with British WWII code-cracker Alan Turing. The 2017 Billie Jean King biopic Battle of the Sexes sanitized the complicated and disturbing aspects of King’s relationship with Marilyn Barnett to turn her into an equal-rights hero. Then there’s Roland Emmerich’s 2015 film Stonewall, which went so far as to whitewash history by creating a fictional protagonist—a young, white male character named Danny (Jeremy Irvine)—who moves to New York from the Midwest to throw the first brick during the Stonewall riots of 1969. He’s the surrogate through which we meet the real-life, historical figures of color, including Marsha P. Johnson (Otoja Abit) and Sylvia Rivera, who becomes a “composite” character named Ray (Jonny Beauchamp). [...]

This isn’t to say that a queer sensibility—something subversive, punk, and anti-authoritarian—has vanished. Queerness, by nature, is hard to define, and equally hard to stamp out. There have certainly been queer films in the intervening years, including But I’m a Cheerleader and Hedwig and the Angry Inch. More recently, you can see it in BPM, Robin Campillo’s expansive film about ACT UP in the early ’90s in Paris, where love for community, and a symphony of voices arguing, protesting, and fucking fill the film; it’s in the liminality of Moonlight, where what often resonates are the things left unsaid; it’s in the wildness of The Ornithologist, the brashness of Xavier Dolan films, the claustrophobia of the aforementioned Duck Butter, and the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Cui Zi’en. You may notice that many of these weren’t made within the Hollywood machinery. And if this year’s Cannes Film Festival lineup is any indication, queerforeign films will continue to lead the charge, with the Kenyan coming-of-age story Rafiki, the Argentinian murder-twink film The Angel, and a slew of French films including Gaspar Noé’s dance-horror movie Climax, Sauvage, Knife + Heart, and Sorry Angel. Meanwhile, in America, coming up we have The Miseducation of Cameron Post (think a humorless But I’m a Cheerleader); Ideal Home, a comedy where Paul Rudd and Steve Coogan play a wealthy couple suddenly raising a kid; the Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody starring Rami Malek that has already been accused of “hetwashing”; and a Love, Simon look-alike, Alex Strangelove.

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The Atlantic: In Europe, Standing Up to America Is Now Patriotic

“Even mass media are talking about extraterritorial measures, sovereignty, and standing up to the U.S.,” Delhpine O, a French lawmaker with President Macron’s En Marche party, said at a panel discussion Wednesday at the Atlantic Council in Washington. She added: “And all of a sudden this becomes something of national pride, which I’ve not seen … for a number of years. We have to be careful with this because it will probably become a matter of public opinion … of sovereignty, or pride, of standing up to protect our own interests.”

Those two countries are also party to the JCPOA, and have signaled their intention to remain in it. But working with them presents its own challenges: Europe, like the U.S., views China as an unfair trade partner; and Russian actions in Ukraine and Syria, where it is involved on the side of President Bashar al-Assad, make Moscow an unlikely ally. Yet German Chancellor Angela Merkel has visited Russia twice in the past month—visits that prompted Russian media to ask  whether a thaw in relations was imminent. [...]

The most potentially significant response from Europe came Thursday when European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said the EC would work to enact a never-used statute that blocks European companies from complying with U.S. sanctions. That statute—the so-called blocking regulation—would make it illegal for European companies to comply with U.S. sanctions laws that have extraterritorial reach. But European officials have acknowledged that the blocking regulations have limited impact, and the U.S. reportedly is considering ways to ensure European compliance.   

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The Guardian: Scotland had to reject the EU withdrawal bill. It was a power grab

The constitutional battle, which may well end up in the supreme court in July, centres around the C-word. Since its inception the Holyrood parliament needs to pass a legislative consent motion any time Westminster wants to introduce legislation in areas that are devolved. Under the withdrawal bill Westminster is only offering to consult, rather than seek consent. And, it adds in a less than winning rider, we will go ahead if you agree, and we will go ahead if you don’t. [...]

But this is not merely a debate about the dry legal niceties. Under governments of various political hues, the Scottish government has forged a path distinct from that of its Commons cousins. It has just passed social security legislation that veers sharply from the punitive model of the Department for Work and Pensions. Previously it spent a small fortune mitigating the effects of the “bedroom tax”. It pioneered legislation on free personal care for the elderly, a smoking ban in public places, and minimum pricing for alcohol. It has comprehensively more ambitious politics on renewable energy. Its NHS has not been atomised or privatised and its education system has not embraced the academy or free school model. You can legitimately debate the quality of Scottish services, but not that they are philosophically distant from the worlds of Michael Gove, Iain Duncan Smith and Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Scotland voted by almost two to one to remain in the EU. Its legislators have not forgotten that they were told the only way to protect EU membership was to vote no in the 2014 independence referendum. They are acutely conscious of the potential damage of Brexit to core Scottish interests such as agriculture, fishing, financial services and biotechnology as well as exports of whisky and other branded products. The Tories like to pretend Tuesday’s vote was all about another bid for independence. But it wasn’t a bid to grab more power for Scotland. It was a bid to prevent Westminster stripping Holyrood of its existing powers.

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The Guardian: Trump is wrong over Iran, but Europe can’t afford to divorce the US

This US move amounts to an open assault on multilateralism – something that, as history has taught us, Europeans have an existential interest in protecting and upholding. Trump’s decision can only be an own goal. US credibility will be severely affected. When a German chancellor declares – as Angela Merkel has just done, for the second time in a year – that Europe can no longer rely on the United States, you know something is amiss. Many others will now ask: how can we ever again trust a country that can withdraw overnight from solemn international agreements?

This could end badly. When Trump realises his strategy is bound to fail, he may want to resort to military force. His decision on Iran comes after a year and a half of insults, disparaging comments, and decisions that run counter to European and western interests. He cares little about Nato, and believes the US isn’t getting a fair return on its investment in European security. He has withdrawn from the Paris climate agreement, and has imposed tariffs on steel and aluminium. [...]

We need to be firm with Washington. The nuclear deal, or what remains of it, needs to be supported. If it collapses entirely, that should not be because of us. Trump has taken an extraordinary gamble, and we in Europe would be the first, outside the Middle East, to suffer the consequences if yet more chaos and war erupts. Our least bad option is to show we’re ready to do what we can to preserve the 2015 deal. We need to mitigate the impact of US sanctions on European business.

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Social Europe: Saudi Arabia Opens A Movie Theatre, But Is It Ready To Open More?

To answer that question, we must remember the prince’s reform programme is focused on economic modernization. By tearing down barriers to access and streamlining the business environment, Vision 2030 is designed first and foremost to attract new investors. Diversification towards a service- and knowledge-based national economy is not only designed for Saudi growth – which stagnated in 2017 – but also upstream preparation for a post-oil era. Despite having some of the most substantial fossil fuel reserves in the world, Riyadh has accepted oil rents cannot constitute a sustainable basis for the economy. [...]

Movie theatres and expanded rights for women – the right to drive, act on stage, join the army, become a lawyer, start a company, etc. – are important, as are the partial disenfranchisement of the religious police (the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, also generally known as the Mutawa) and the pursuit of new cultural policies. However, all of these steps remain limited for the time being. Still missing from the equation is concrete evidence of a deeper shift in Saudi mindsets. [...]

While Saudi Arabia is far from conforming to Western norms of personal liberties, the development of economic ties to Riyadh, accompanied by clear political dialogue, constitutes a means of influencing the Kingdom’s evolution. To this end, Vision 2030 can be considered a mutually beneficial opportunity for gradual democratisation, even if organised and directed from above. For now, we have no choice but to take the gamble, all while remaining vigilant with regards to the rapid developments sure to come from both inside and outside the country.

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Quartz: White House chaos is the reason North Korea talks are faltering, not a fickle dictator

North Korea is reconsidering holding a summit with Donald Trump, a senior diplomat said May 14. Past deals with the West—in 1985, 1995, and 2005—have also fallen apart.  [...]

Soon after secretary of state Mike Pompeo returned from Pyongyang last week, it seemed clear that Kim had “made a commitment, in his mind, to get rid of part of his program in order to get sanctions relief and economic aid,” says Ken Gause, director of the International Affairs Group at CNA, a Virginia research group, who has written three books on North Korean leadership. Indeed, on May 11, Pompeo said that conversations between him and Kim were “warm.” South Korea’s foreign minister said it had been “very clear that the sanctions [would] remain in place until and unless we see visible, meaningful action taken by North Korea on the denuclearization track.” [...]

But the US’s public demands quickly morphed. Two days after his post-Pyongyang presser, Pompeo said in an interview with CBS the the US expected “complete and total denuclearization of North Korea, and it is the President’s intention to achieve that.” He added that the US would lift sanctions and allow private US investors into the country “if we get denuclearization.” The same day, he told Fox News: “If we get what it is the President has demanded–the complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization of North Korea,” rewards could include electricity and infrastructure investment “in spades.”

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