The Atlantic: Today’s Masculinity Is Stifling

With that, the seal was broken. Most days since, he’s worn a dress from his small collection, though he also favors a light-blue guayabera—the classic collared button-down worn by men and boys in Cuba and the Philippines. Classmates’ objections continued, but with less frequency and conviction. One day when my husband dropped him off, he heard a little girl stand up to a naysayer and shout, “Boys can like beautiful things, too!”

But they can’t. Not without someone looking askance. To embrace anything feminine, if you’re not biologically female, causes discomfort and confusion, because throughout most of history and in most parts of the world, being a woman has been a disadvantage. Why would a boy, born into all the power of maleness, reach outside his privileged domain? It doesn’t compute.

As much as feminism has worked to rebalance the power and privilege between the sexes, the dominant approach to launching young women into positions that garner greater respect, higher status, and better pay still mostly maintains the association between those gains and masculine qualities. Girls’ empowerment programs teach assertiveness, strength, and courage—and they must to equip young women for a world that still overwhelmingly favors men. [...]

It’s important to note that there are children who do feel they’ve been born in the wrong body, who long for different anatomy, a different pronoun. Trans kids need to be supported and accepted. And, at the same time, not every boy who puts on a dress is communicating a wish to be a girl. Too often gender dysphoria is conflated with the simple possibility that kids, when not steered toward one toy or color, will just like what they like, traditional gender expectations notwithstanding. There is little space given to experimentation and exploration before a child’s community seeks to categorize them. Boyhood, as it is popularly imagined, is so narrow and confining that to press against its boundaries is to end up in a different identity altogether.

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Quartz: Can there be a “very good dog?” Philosophy has an answer

In other words, Kant didn’t believe a dog like Mu could think or distinguish between bad and good because she isn’t self-aware. For this reason, she is not moral.

This view—which is known as human exceptionalism—persists today. But increasingly philosophers and scientists argue that animals are moral and that we humans may just be insufficiently aware of their inner lives to understand how or why they decide to do what they do. For example, Mark Rowlands, a professor of philosophy at the University of Miami, and author of The Philosopher and the Wolf, among other books, believes his dog and wolf are good. [...]

However, because animals may not necessarily be able to scrutinize their behavior—or reflect on the reason they act—he argues in the Philosopher’s Magazine, they cannot be held responsible for their actions even if they are bad. From Rowland’s perspective, they are moral creatures even if they are not rational; in this sense, he is like Zhao Zhou, recognizing their Buddha nature but doubtful of their self-awareness. [...]

Not only that, animals can extend their sense of justice or empathy to other species, not just their own kind. Bekoff wrote a book called Wild Justice with moral philosopher Jessica Pierce, also from the University of Colorado. She told the Telegraph in 2009, “There are cases of dolphins helping humans to escape from sharks and elephants that have helped antelope escape from enclosures. While it is difficult to know for certain that there is cross species empathy, it is hard to argue against it.”

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Vox: This is what 500 Christians think “God’s face” looks like. It’s full of bias

God has often been painted in Christian art, but the Bible provides no consistent clues about how the Almighty is supposed to look (or if God has a face at all). And as the researchers found, when the images of all the more God-like mug were averaged together, it looked like this. [...]

This picture isn’t meant to be a definitive image of how Americans view God. “It is really about appreciating the psychological factors behind why we might see God differently than somebody else,” says Joshua Conrad Jackson, the lead author of the study. And the results hint that our views of God reflect our biases and identities. That is, we want a God that looks and thinks like us. [...]

A new set of participants (who didn’t rate the original photos) described the averaged photo of God as being younger, more masculine, attractive, whiter, intelligent, and loving compared the anti-God photo. Jackson says that despite individual differences in how people might perceive God, it’s nice to know that, on average “the warmth and the lovingness comes first in our minds, at least.” [...]

They look very, very similar, nearly identical. But there are some small differences when participants rated them side by side. “The conservatives’ God was perceived as more masculine, older, more powerful, and wealthier than the liberals’ God,” the study finds.

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The Atlantic: Bill Clinton’s Novel Isn't a Thriller—It's a Fantasy

Instead of a ticking time-bomb for the hero to defuse, The President Is Missing offers a ticking computer virus, code-named Dark Ages, that threatens to wipe out the nation’s infrastructure. This is the work of a group of bad guys known as Sons of Jihad—who, despite their name, we are assured are not Islamic terrorists, but rather some kind of “secular extreme nationalist” group that “opposes the influence of the West in central and southeastern Europe.” It is all vague enough to make clear that the Sons of Jihad are like SPECTRE in the Bond movies—generic bad guys, not a comment on actual world politics. And they meet the fate reserved for bad guys in this kind of book. It’s not much of a spoiler to reveal that, in the end, the virus is disarmed with seconds to spare, and the hero emerges covered in glory.

The difference is that the hero in this story is not a secret agent like James Bond or Jack Ryan, but the president of the United States himself. To say that this president, Jonathan Duncan, is based on Bill Clinton would be putting it mildly. Clintonologists will recognize many details of his life story in Duncan’s, with a few desultory changes: Duncan was raised by a hardworking single mother in North Carolina, rather than Arkansas; he meets his idealistic, no-nonsense soulmate at UNC, rather than Yale Law School. [...]

Whatever Clinton’s precise role in the writing of the book, he agreed to put his name on it—it is an authorized product. And I read The President Is Missing with the sense that he relished the opportunity that fiction provides to give the public a perfected version of himself. For Jonathan Duncan is the president Bill Clinton seems to wish he had been, or that he believes the public wanted him to be, or both. Thus Clinton, who famously avoided the draft in Vietnam, supplies his alter-ego with a heroic military record that seems to be based on John McCain’s: Duncan is an Army Ranger who was taken prisoner in Iraq and refused to crack under torture. (For good measure, he was also a semi-pro baseball player.) And in what reads like an embarrassing instance of wish-fulfillment, Rachel Carson, the Hillary figure, is safely dead, leaving Duncan footloose and free to enjoy the world’s sympathy.

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IFLScience: Taking Photographs Does Something Extremely Weird To Your Memory, And No One Knows Why

This earlier paper, by psychologist Linda Henkel of Fairfield University, found that people had a poorer recall for objects, and for the objects’ specific details, when they took photographs of them. The research was inspired by Henkel’s own experiences, recounting how we so easily and automatically take photographs of things rather than directly experience them in that moment.

In fact, for her experiment, she took students around an art gallery, a place infamous for constant snaps of the works of art. At the time, this was termed the photo-taking impairment effect, which we’ll helpfully abbreviate to PIE. It wasn’t clear why it was happening, but Henkel had a hypothesis. [...]

Of course, taking photographs helps us remember things in the long-term, but this impact on our short-term memory and our ability to remember nuances and details is nevertheless curious. PIE, however, was diminished if the photographs were zoomed in – suggesting perhaps the broader the scene, the poorer our recall may be. [...]

Speculating that the subjects are experiencing a sort of “metacognitive illusion”, they wonder if the act of carefully taking a photograph may erroneously convince our brains that we have already recorded the images, via both our camera and our own memories.

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CityLab: Terrorism and the De-Gentrification of Istanbul

Istanbul's central Beyoğlu district experienced sweeping gentrification throughout the 2000s, as its popularity increased among locals and a boom in tourism brought more and more visitors. But a devastating string of terror attacks and woeful city planning have driven away locals and tourists alike, prompting a swift process of decline. [...]

Long known for its intellectual and bohemian character, Cihangir of the early ‘90s was home to one of the city’s first punk venues, which occupied the top floor of a building that looked out at the iconic strait that divides Europe and Asia. The neighborhood was also a hub for the city's transgender community until a wave of new cafes and bars swept through in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, leading to higher rents. Until recently, Cihangir was among the most coveted spots in the city but “for rent” signs are increasingly common now. Rental prices have dropped 20 percent since last year, according to Yalçın Bayazıtlı, a real estate agent who has lived and worked in Cihangir his entire life. Bayazıtlı said that most homeowners won't go any lower, though some properties have managed to depreciate in value even further. “One apartment that was going for TL 5,000 ($1,400) a month is now listed at TL 3,500 ($980),” says Bayazıtlı. [...]

For Güvenç, the city planning decisions made in Istanbul during its boom were oriented toward affluent globetrotters. Though they don't live in the city, urban areas are often restructured to suit their tastes, Güvenç says. “These are the people that can travel the world, stay 10 days in New York, 10 days in Los Angeles, and then fly to Tokyo,” he says. “Their wishes and desires dictate what is to be done and what is to be put aside,” says Güvenç of the weight they carry in the planning of a typical 21st century global city. And as Turkish Airlines, the country's flagship airline, expanded its routes to connect Istanbul to cities throughout the world, cruise ships also docked in the city with more frequency. The long-neglected Istanbul, and its breathtaking views, had become a must-see for this coveted demographic.

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Al Jazeera: Greek PM Tsipras survives no confidence vote over Macedonia deal

The coalition's junior partner - the Independent Greeks (ANEL), a right-wing party - says it opposes the deal but only one of its MPs backed the censure motion in parliament. Panos Kammenos, leader of ANEL and defence minister, subsequently kicked the lawmaker out of the party.

The motion was brought by the conservative New Democracy party which accused the government of making too many concessions over the agreement which will eventually see the small country -  which declared independence from Yugoslavia in 1991 - renamed the Republic of North Macedonia. [...]

"It not only includes a compound name with a geographic qualifier, used erga omnes, but also sets as a condition a change of the constitutional name by which the country has been recognised by 140 countries. It includes a constitutional change to eradicate every irredentist term in their constitution," Tsipras pointed out. [...]

In Skopje, there has also been a heavy backlash against the agreement, with the president declaring his refusal to sign off on the deal. The agreement must clear the hurdles of parliamentary ratification, a referendum in September and a constitutional amendment. 

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Al Jazeera: Return to Berkovo, the village where Serbs and Albanians coexist in Kosovo

When I first got to know Berkovo, in 2008, the handful of Serb families had only just returned to the village, having fled during the 1999 war when their homes were set on fire and destroyed. [...]

The result was that Berkovo was one of the very few villages in Kosovo where Serbs and Albanians were living side by side. It was a tentative experiment in ethnic co-existence, and there was no guarantee it would succeed. [...]

"We were starting again from scratch back in 2008," said Savo, "that's not easy when you're 50 years old. But life goes on, we tried, and now we can stand again on our own two feet." He looked about proudly.  [...]

 Lubinka told me: "I'm not a Serbian, I'm a Kosovar, this is where I was born. I lived here, I'm growing old here. If I visit Serbia for two days, I can't wait to come back here, to my home." [...]

"There's one young girl, eight or nine years old, and my son is 27, and another boy who drives a van, but the rest of us are old, 50 or 60 years or older. We will disappear because we will die, but we'll stay here as long as we're alive," said Savo.

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