99 Percent Invisible: Built to Burn

The Santa Ana winds of Southern California are sometimes called the “Devil Winds.” They pick up in the late summer and early fall, sweeping down from the mountains and across the coast. They’re hot and dry, and known for creating dangerous fire conditions.

In late November of 1980 — as the Santa Anas blew in at up to 90 miles an hour — an unknown arsonist lit a fire near Panorama Point in the San Bernardino Mountains. Pushed by the wind, the fire grew and quickly spread down the mountain toward the city of San Bernardino.

In just a few hours, the Panorama Fire destroyed hundreds of homes and killed four people. It was one of the worst wildfire disasters in California history at the time, which sent one man off on a mission to try and change the way we address wildfires.

Jack Cohen was a few years out of graduate school, and a recent transplant to California at the time of the fire. He was working as a research scientist for the Forest Service, studying fire behavior, and he was interested in how the Panorama fire had destroyed so many homes — especially when there was such a robust firefighting response.

One of the first things that Cohen did was to listen to emergency dispatch tapes from the day of the fire. And as he listened, he began to notice a pattern. People were calling in about houses on fire long before the fire front ever reached their neighborhoods.

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The Calvert Journal: Home from home

The Soviet sanatorium was a unique phenomenon that has now been well-documented. The central Georgian spa town of Tskaltubo was one of the most popular holiday destinations for workers and elites alike — Stalin was a fan — and at its peak this small town was home to 22 sanatoria welcoming over 100,000 visitors a year, with four trains arriving daily from Moscow. These guests arrived to intricate and stunning estates designed in the high post-war Neoclassical opulence that characterised the Soviet sanatorium at its finest. Their sprawling complexes housed hundreds of rooms, various spas and saunas, medical facilities and verdant outdoor space.

This history of grandeur and leisure is now a distant memory. The sanatoria were abandoned and then ransacked for scrap following the fall of the Soviet Union. These days they could serve as yet more fodder for the post-Soviet ruin porn industry. But another, often neglected story has been unfolding within these walls for practically the entire post-Soviet period, one that connects the 20th-century history of the sanatorium with the 21st-century crises surrounding refugees and migration. In 1992, war broke out in the secessionist northwestern Georgian region of Abkhazia and tens of thousands of people were displaced; the abandoned sanatoria of Tskaltubo were offered as “temporary” accommodation to thousands of these families. 25 years later and several generations deep, around 800 displaced people are still living in the ruins.

Photographer Ryan Koopmans didn’t know about the Abkhazian population of the sanatoria when he first arrived hoping to explore the “abandoned” Soviet complexes, but he realised soon enough what was happening. “The fact that farm animals could be found wandering through the corridors was clear indications that people must be caring for them,” he says. “Upon discovering the families, my interest went from a purely architectural focus to a fascination with the inside of these spaces and to learn about the people inhabiting them.” The result is Sanatorium, a series on these remarkable buildings and the people who live in them.

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The Atlantic: Why Do Humans Talk to Animals If They Can’t Understand? (AUG 18, 2017)

“First of all,” Herzog told me, “talking to our pets is absolutely natural. Human beings are natural anthropomorphizers, meaning we naturally tend to [ascribe] all kinds of thoughts and meanings to other things in our lives.”

Humans can do this with just about anything—one might feel bad for the colored pencil that never gets used, or get angry at the phone that won’t hold a charge, or feel real grief over news that a hitchhiking robot has been abused. But that impulse is especially strong for things that are or seem animate, like animals and AI—and when it comes to pets, people often think of them as little members of the family. So of course people talk to them. But even though it might feel like I’m talking to my pets the same way I talk to other people, studies show consistent distinctions between the two. [...]

But though the instinct to anthropomorphize is innate, there are circumstances that make someone more likely to do so. In a 2008 study, researchers tested two motivations for treating non-human entities like thinking, feeling humans: first, that someone lacking social interaction needs to “create” a human to hang out with; second, that someone lacking control wants to feel more secure in uncertain circumstances, and anthropomorphizing allows him to predict an animal’s action based on interpersonal experience. Both hypotheses bore out. Chronically lonely participants were much more likely to describe their pets with words suggesting those pets provided emotional support—thoughtful, considerate, sympathetic—than participants with vibrant social lives, and participants who self-identified as desiring control in their daily lives were more likely to assign emotions and conscious will to dogs they were unfamiliar with than those who were more willing to hand over the reins, as it were. [...]

Beyond dogs, there’s little research on animal understanding of language, but evidence does suggest dogs process language similarly to humans. In a study led by Hungary’s Family Dog Project, dogs who went willingly into an fMRI were played recordings of their trainers, and their brains, like ours, processed familiar words in the left hemisphere and intonation on the right. It’s tricky to say dogs understand language, but they can at least recognize it. Or some of it.

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The Atlantic: Can Britain Deal With ‘No Deal’?

The comments, which coincided with the resumption of Brexit talks in Brussels this week, marked one of the most pronounced admissions yet from a senior British government official about the prospect of a no-deal Brexit—a scenario British Prime Minister Theresa May famously said would be “better than a bad deal for Britain” in a 2017 speech. Though many within the government have insisted that an agreement with the EU is still within reach, virtually no one has admitted that failure could be seriously costly for both sides. Indeed, Hunt’s predecessor Boris Johnson said such a scenario would be “perfectly okay.” [...]

Hunt wasn’t wrong about no deal. Indeed, the potential consequences of failing to reach an agreement have been widely documented. In addition to both the legal and financial challenges the U.K. would face, there are also questions surrounding the impact it could have on the country’s ports, its borders, and the legal standing of its more than 3 million EU residents—just to name a few. [...]

But if the government is convinced that no deal is in fact not better than a bad deal after all, it has yet to say that clearly, as Hunt’s backtracking demonstrates. Wright said that while the no-deal papers do signal the government’s desire to be prepared for any outcome, “it’s not an outward rejection of ‘no deal is better than a bad deal,’ because I think they are still convinced that perhaps the EU’s proposal for what a final deal would look like is not acceptable for various reasons,” she said. “But I think they absolutely realize that not planning for a no deal [Brexit] would be catastrophic.”

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The Atlantic: The World’s Failure in Rwanda Changed Kofi Annan’s Worldview

Prime among those failures was his perceived inaction to stop the genocide of 800,000 Rwandans in 1994 when he ran the UN’s peacekeeping operations, and, a year later, the Srebrenica massacre in which 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were murdered by Bosnian Serb forces. As Samantha Power, later the U.S. ambassador to the UN, wrote in Chasing the Flame, her biography of Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN diplomat who was killed in Iraq, Annan’s “name would appear in the history books beside the two defining genocidal crimes of the second half of the twentieth century.”

An independent investigation in 1999 into the 1994 genocide found the UN had failed Rwanda. Annan, by that time secretary-general of the UN, said: “All of us must bitterly regret that we did not do more to prevent it.” He said the UN force in Rwanda at the time “was neither mandated nor equipped for the kind of forceful action” needed to prevent the genocide. But he added: “On behalf of the United Nations, I acknowledge this failure and express my deep remorse.” Five years later, in a speech marking the 10th anniversary of the genocide, Annan said that if the UN, various governments, and the media had paid more attention to what was unfolding in Rwanda, the massacres might have been averted. [...]

At the UN, Annan, a Ghanian who spent his entire career at the institution, oversaw a period of reform, outlined an ambitious agenda to reduce global poverty, and set up a global fund to combat HIV/AIDS. But the experiences of Rwanda and Srebrenica prompted Annan in 1999 to question the role of the international community in protecting civilian populations.

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The Atlantic Putin’s Weekend of Trolling

As Putin looks to sow disunity across Europe, the juxtaposition of his two stops serves as a reminder of the increasingly divergent political paths the two German-speaking neighbors are taking, on Russia and otherwise. The rise of the 31-year-old immigration hardliner Kurz and his coalition government with the far-right, anti-refugee FPÖ have brought Austria into stark contrast with Germany on migration issues, inching Austria closer, at least rhetorically, toward illiberal neighbors like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. “You can consider both visits strategic investments,” Jan Techau, head of the German Marshall Fund’s Europe program, told me. “One is a strategic investment of convenience that Putin does with the Austrians, and the other is a strategic investment of necessity which he does with Merkel because he understands that Merkel is a powerful player.” [...]

The Russian leader’s visit to Berlin, announced Monday, comes amid increasingly tense relations between the two countries. Merkel spokesman Steffen Seibert named the ongoing conflict in Syria, violence in east Ukraine, and the progress of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline as the primary three topics the two leaders will discuss. These are all issues on which both sides have clearly defined positions, and on which foreign-policy observers in Berlin see little chance for significant progress. Russia remains Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s strongest ally on the world stage; Germany has strongly condemned Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons and said her country would stand with its Western allies (non-militarily) should they choose to take action against him. In eastern Ukraine, Putin supports pro-Russian rebels; Germany has worked with France to coordinate a ceasefire there, though the violence has continued. And while Russia is on board for Nord Stream 2, the pipeline’s construction remains controversial in Germany. [...]

Austria, however, is another story. Unlike Germany, which under Merkel has positioned itself as a counterweight to Putin and his attempts to influence Europe, Austria has long regarded itself as a “bridge-builder” between East and West. And the new government, run by Kurz and the far-right FPÖ, has positioned itself as Russia-friendly. Where previous governments have been more subtly tolerant of Russia, the FPÖ, at least, is not quiet about its pro-Russia views: Party leader Strache traveled to Moscow back in 2016 to sign a cooperation agreement with Putin’s United Russia party. The idea that the Russian president would attend the wedding of Austria’s foreign minister, even given the ties between her party and the Kremlin, sends a strong message about how close the FPÖ wants that relationship to be.

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Quartz: Hedonism holds the secret to a happier life, but not for the reasons you think

There are several branches of “hedonism” in philosophy, and one of the most well-known—advanced by Ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus—ultimately advocates for a rather simple life. “Epicurus’s version agrees that pleasure is the greatest good and the best life is the most pleasant life,” says James Warren, professor of Classics at Cambridge University. “But he thinks the highest pleasure you can achieve is the absence of pain. Once pain has been removed, you don’t increase pleasure from that point on, you just vary it.” [...]

For Epicurus, a hedonistic life is one free from bodily and mental pains. Most people live miserable lives because they’re so worried and anxious, and so the key to Epicurean hedonism is eradicating all anxiety. [...]

It’s easy to fall into false beliefs about what matters, based on the expectations of those around us. Hedonistic philosophy helps to puncture those views and reminds us what’s truly valuable. True pleasure, far from being frivolous, is the ultimate indication of a life well lived.

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Quartz: The pressure to put on a happy face can make us miserable. “Positive thinking” has turned happiness into a duty and a burden, says a Danish psychologist

Happiness is simply not the appropriate response to many situations in life, says Brinkmann, whose Danish bestseller Stand Firm: Resisting the Self-Improvement Craze is published in English by international publisher Polity this month. Even worse, faking it can leave us emotionally stunted.[...]

There’s nothing wrong with those who have a naturally sunny disposition or who enjoy the odd self-help book, says Brinkmann. The problem is when happiness becomes a requisite. In the workplace, for example, where performance reviews often insist on focusing on positive growth rather than genuine difficulties, demanding displays of happiness is “almost totalitarian.” Brinkmann likens insistence on employee happiness to “thought control.”

In the US, mandatory happiness became the subject of an official workplace ruling against T-Mobile in May 2016, where the National Labor Review Board determined that employers cannot force employees to be consistently cheery. All the same, many companies spend huge sums of money trying to ensure employee happiness, and not out of altruism. “When you engage with people and you work in teams, then these personality traits become much more important. That’s why we put much more emphasis on them, because we want to exploit humans and their emotional lives,” says Brinkmann. “I think this is a dark side of positivity. Our feelings tend to become commodities and that means we’re very easily alienated from our feelings.”

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