Haaretz: Synagogues Become Nightclubs in Eastern Europe

In a recent and controversial development in Eastern Europe, former Jewish houses of worship left abandoned after the Holocaust are being renovated for commercial ends by contractors who capitalize on their Jewish history and incorporate it into a brand. 

Critics view the businesses as exploitative cultural appropriation in the wake of a tragedy. Advocates argue it reflects respect and nostalgia for Jews in addition to providing a vehicle for at least some preservation of heritage sites.

The trend is especially visible over the past decade with the commercialization of several former synagogues and houses of worship. In 2013, Krakow’s Chewra Thilim was turned into a nightclub and, in 2016, into the Hevre bar, whose interior design highlights its Jewish past. [...]

It occurs also in Western Europe: A 207-year-old synagogue in the city of Deventer, in the eastern Netherlands, is in the process of becoming a restaurant whose design will reference its previous function, according to the new owners. [...]

Europe had some 17,000 synagogues before World War II, according to groundbreaking research published this year by the London-based Foundation for Jewish Heritage. But the foundation has been able to locate throughout the continent only 3,318 structures that have been known to function as synagogues, and just 762 are used as such today. [...]

Some noted that Israel and the United States have their fair share of deserted or defunct synagogues that have been turned into something else. The former Ansche Chesed Synagogue on New York’s Lower East Side is now an arts center. The Beth Abraham Synagogue in Auburn, Maine, was sold last year to a developer to be turned into apartments. 

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Jacobin Magazine: In Praise of White Elephants

While most “icon” buildings are demonstratively useless — often galleries and museums whose form is of far greater importance than their functions — what Calatrava specializes in is infrastructure, or rather, making things that should be entirely functional utterly useless. He is not a particularly original designer. His railway stations are visibly inspired by the faintly kitsch futurism of the high Cold War era, evoking especially the “organic” concrete structure of Eero Saarinen’s TWA Terminal for JFK Airport. Calatrava’s railway stations in Zurich and Lisbon, or the incongruously immense (and frankly, breathtaking) Guillemins Station in the Belgian steel town of Liège, are intended to give the effect of an immense organism into whose concrete ribs you are plunged in order to buy your ticket and get your train.  [...]

But that constant maintenance is only one of the problems with Calatrava’s work. For a trained engineer, he has notoriously little interest in economy of structure. As a rule, since the mid nineteenth century, the aim in bridge design has been to achieve the greatest structural feats with the scarcest of means — to do “more with less,” in Buckminster Fuller’s phrase. That line probably reached its peak in recent years with Norman Foster’s Millau Viaduct, which spans a vast canyon with little more than thin spindles of concrete and steel. For Calatrava, though, organic metaphor trumps all, and the structural purpose of his bridges — in Dublin, Salford, Dallas, Venice and elsewhere — is subordinated to their rhetorical purpose, as sweeping statements of the transformation of industrial docks and canals into showpieces of real-estate speculation. They must billow, swoop, and spiral, because otherwise they wouldn’t be eye-catching as advertisements. The preference for shiny cladding leads to some literal pitfalls — his bridges in Venice and Bilbao both have tiles which, it’s been claimed, are too slippery to walk on. The resultant lack of interest in economy is now rebounding on the architect, although he could fairly plead this is what he was hired for.  [...]

The Left should be very careful here, as this is an austerity argument — an argument against public space and the public good. An argument, essentially, that we cannot have nice things — that bridges, railway stations, and art galleries are somehow dubious means of spending “taxpayers’ money.” The twisted right-wing mutation of social democracy that dominated Europe during the boom seldom had the public interest at heart, and every concession to it had to be balanced by something profit-making. But for its conservative successors, the public interest is entirely nonexistent.  

Public buildings and structures that are luxurious, dramatic, even excessive — if hopefully less whimsical and egotistical than those of Calatrava — should be ours as a right, not as a reservation for the wealthy.

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Slate: A Brief History of Dick

But gay subtext managed to insinuate itself into the Dynamic Duo’s dyad from the very start. The opening page of Robin’s debut story in the April 1940 issue of Detective Comics No. 38 featured an introductory scroll jammed with breathless declamatory copy about “THE SENSATIONAL CHARACTER FIND OF 1940 … ROBIN, THE BOY WONDER!” [...]

Thus young Dick became Bruce Wayne’s ward, and many stories in the ’40s and ’50s began by depicting the man and boy engaged together in some leisure-time pursuit. Again and again, however, said tableaux stubbornly bore a romantic, lavender-scented shading. [...]

And of course there were the plots, many of which turned on Robin’s seething jealousy over Batman’s romantic interests and his paranoia that he might get replaced at Batman’s side by some rival crimefighter. In this era, elaborate ruses and misdirection were the twin engines of comic book storytelling, which meant many a comic began with Batman performatively rejecting Robin as his partner, an act that would send the tearful lad to his sumptuously appointed bedroom to (choke!) and (sob!) his guts out. [...]

This is the issue with gay readings. Any given bond between males can be homosocial without being homoerotic, and even the most explicitly homoerotic bond can exist without ever rubbing up against homosexual desire. To willfully and sneeringly misinterpret what was clearly intended as a familial connection as a romantic one—as Wertham did in 1954 and as so many Tumblr feeds do today— seems ungenerous at best and snide at worst, no? [...]

Alfred the butler had joined them in 1943, serving as a 24/7 chaperone. Now, between a Bat-Hound, a Batwoman, a Batgirl, a Bat-5th-Dimensional-Magical-Imp, and—all too briefly—a Bat-Ape, Batman and Robin could hardly find any time alone together. This was no coincidence. The shadow of Wertham lingered long into the ’60s, and Batman editors resolved to do what they could to dispel it, even if doing so came with a body count: When asked why Alfred the butler was killed off—briefly—in 1964 to be replaced by the dithering Aunt Harriet, editor Julius Schwartz averred, “There was a lot of discussion in those days about three males living in Wayne Manor.”

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Quartz: How much money do people need to be happy? (February 24, 2018)

According to a recently released study (paywall) in the burgeoning field of happiness research, the two higher-earning women are likely to report more satisfaction with their lives than the one who makes $40,000. But, perhaps surprisingly, the psychologists who conducted the study find that the one making $200,000 is probably no happier than the one making $120,000. This is because both the $120,000 and $200,000 women have incomes above $105,000, which according to their research is the point at which greater household income in the US is not associated with greater happiness. The technical term for this cutoff is the income “satiation point.” [...]

The researchers analyzed the relationship between this score and household income. They find that in every region of the world, after accounting for a person’s age, gender, and marital status, people with higher incomes are happier. But they also find that there is a level of income at which happiness no longer increases with more money. This varies by region, with Australia and New Zealand the highest and Latin America and the Caribbean the lowest. They even find some evidence that in certain places, when incomes rise above the cutoff level, life satisfaction gets lower. [...]

These psychologists, from Purdue University and the University of Virginia, are not the first to study how income relates to life satisfaction. In 2010, the Nobel prize-winning duo of economist Angus Deaton and psychologist Daniel Kahneman, famously found that the satiation point for US households was about $75,000 (about $84,000 in 2016 dollars). This new research improves on Deaton and Kahneman’s work, because the data is able to account for the number of people in a household, has more detailed income numbers, and includes responses from many more countries. [...]

Not at all. Research suggests that the average person who makes $150,000 is no happier than the average person who makes $120,000. But it could be that the sort of person who makes $120,000 is different in some fundamental way from the sort of person who makes $150,000. Perhaps, the people who make $150,000 would be less happy if they made $120,000, so their satiation point is higher than the sort of person who is happy with $120,000 and doesn’t want for anything more.

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Al Jazeera: Beijing's Brutal Evictions | 101 East

The Chinese authorities call them the "low-end population" - thousands of rural migrant workers who flee the poverty of rural China for better-paid jobs in metropolises like Beijing.

Big Think: Is the Trump presidency a religious cult? | Reza Aslan

Are fundamentalist Christians a dangerous religious cult? Possibly. The controversial author and religious scholar Reza Aslan posits that President Donald Trump has much of his evangelical fan-base believing that he's somehow been anointed by God to become President. Nevermind the Russian election scandal, his affairs with porn stars and unwarranted sexual acts towards women, or his inability to remember even a single Bible verse when asked. Evangelical Christians are abandoning their core moral beliefs to follow, as Reza suggests, someone who exhibits every trademark of a cult leader. 

National Public Radio: Hooking Up Gets Easier To Do In Saudi Arabia

She's wearing stylish high-heeled shoes and a black abaya, a traditional floor-length cloak. But her flowing hair is not covered. She asks NPR not to use her name for fear her family would find out about her dating past. Until recently, she says, it was "taboo to be seen with a man who was not your relative."

Nowadays, things are getting easier for many Saudis on the heterosexual dating front. The Gulf kingdom now allows things like movies, music and theater that it once forbade. More men and women are openly mixing in public than before. Though some in the deeply conservative country are bothered by it, a growing hookup culture is one of the latest signs of gradual social change. [...]

"I've seen girls who are pro-active and if they like a guy, they would go to him, and that's happening a lot right now," she says. "Girls are becoming more powerful — I love it."

Others are unsettled by it, like one young man who spoke to NPR in a different area of Riyadh. He also doesn't want to use his name, saying his family would be angry with him for talking to foreign media.

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Quartz: Ethiopia will end its state of emergency early, as part of widening political reforms

The council of ministers sanctioned the decision on Saturday (June 2) after noting that “law and order has been restored,” prime minister Abiy Ahmed’s chief of staff, Fitsum Arega, said on Twitter. The parliament, where all 547 members belong to the ruling party, was expected to rubber-stamp the order, even though it is unclear when that would take place. [...]

For over two years, Oromo and the Amhara communities agitated for social change, economic equality, and political inclusion. The government’s crackdown has been brutal, with more than 1,000 people dead and tens of thousands of people put behind bars, according to advocacy groups. Ethiopia’s authorities also imposed emergency rule between Oct. 2016 and Aug. 2017, following deadly demonstrations.

Calling time on the emergency order marks a significant moment for Abiy’s nascent administration, which has promised and undertaken reforms since coming to power in April. Besides releasing thousands of political prisoners and journalists, the government has ended an internet blackout, started talks with exiled opposition members, and dismissed charges against diaspora-based media outlets. Yet despite the improvements, many observers and critics awaited the end of the state of emergency—the last one was extended for four months at the end of its term—as a signal that Abiy was truly walking the talk.

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Deutsche Welle: UN report slams US for criminalizing poverty as destitution grows

Philip Alston, UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty, said the Trump administration appears determined to pull the social safety net out from under millions of poor people while rewarding the wealthy with tax cuts. [...]

In a country of about 325 million people, nearly 41 million live in poverty — including 18.5 million in extreme poverty. Alston said children accounted for 33 percent of the poor. No other industrialized country had so many children mired in poverty, he said. [...]

Women, Hispanics, immigrants and American Indians also suffer disproportionately high rates of poverty and unemployment.

He criticized the criminal justice system, noting that it sets large bail bonds for a defendant seeking to go free pending trial. This means wealthy suspects can afford bail while the poor remain in custody and often lose their jobs as a result, even if they are ultimately acquitted.

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