The Atlantic: Germany’s Summer of Identity Crisis

Over the summer, such questions have plagued Germany. A showdown between Merkel and Interior Minister Horst Seehofer over immigration policy nearly brought down Germany’s fragile government and highlighted the pressure the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has put on the country’s traditional parties. Soon after that, the German soccer player Mesut Özil, who is of Turkish descent, quit the national team over what he deemed discriminatory treatment from team members and fans alike. His comments about the everyday racism in Germany directed toward those who don’t look traditionally “German” prompted a wave of national soul-searching about what it actually means to be German. And the photos from Chemnitz forced difficult conversations about whether the country has learned from its past, and about the ways in which major cultural and economic differences in the former Communist East still persist. The situation shows “how nervous everybody is, and how little it takes to get the whole nation into a sense of general hysteria,” Jan Techau, the director of the German Marshall Fund’s Europe program, told me. [...]

Maassen’s comments were also particularly controversial because Germany’s intelligence services have a “problematic” history of being negligent when it comes to the far right, Matthias Quent, the director of the Institute for Democracy and Civil Society in Jena, told me. The Verfassungsschutz was created when the country was still divided and West German officials saw communism as the primary threat. In the years since, it has been criticized for not acting against right-wing extremists with haste. After the AfD won 12.6 percent of the vote in Germany’s federal elections last year, that issue took on an increased urgency. Experts have gotten “the impression that the Verfassungsschutz, [when it comes to] the right, is blind,” Quent told me. “It has in its historical tradition this very special focus on the left, but lets the far right do what the far right is doing.”

After his interview with Bild, Maassen quickly became a hero for supporters of the far right, who viewed him as a brave truth teller willing to defy the so-called lügenpresse (“lying press,” a term that traces its roots back to the Nazi era). At a demonstration in Köthen, a city in the east German state of Saxony-Anhalt, one protester held up a sign saying thank you for the truth, mr. maassen.

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Nautilus Magazine: Is It Time to Get Rid of Time?

In other words, time is a tool. In fact, it was the first scientific tool. Time can now be sliced into slivers as thin as one ten-trillionth of a second. But what is being sliced? Unlike mass and distance, time cannot be perceived by our physical senses. We don’t see, hear, smell, touch, or taste time. And yet we somehow measure it. As a cadre of theorists attempt to extend and refine the general theory of relativity, Einstein’s momentous law of gravitation, they have a problem with time. A big problem. [...]

You might say that quantum mechanics introduced a fuzziness into physics: You can pinpoint the precise position of a particle, but at a trade-off; its velocity cannot then be measured very well. Conversely, if you know how fast a particle is going, you won’t be able to know exactly where it is. Werner Heisenberg best summarized this strange and exotic situation with his famous uncertainty principle. But all this action, uncertain as it is, occurs on a fixed stage of space and time, a steadfast arena. A reliable clock is always around—is always needed, really—to keep track of the goings-on and thus enable physicists to describe how the system is changing. At least, that’s the way the equations of quantum mechanics are now set up. [...]

Unlike the clocks used in everyday physics, Kucha’s hypothetical clock would not stand off in a corner, unaffected by what is going on around it. It would be set within the tiny, dense system where quantum gravity rules and would be part and parcel of it. This insider status has its pitfalls: The clock would change as the system changed—so to keep track of time, you would have to figure out how to monitor those variations. In a way, it would be like having to pry open your wristwatch and check its workings every time you wanted to refer to it. [...]

Of course, as Isham points out, “having gotten rid of time, we’re then obliged to explain how we get back to the ordinary world, where time surrounds us.” Quantum gravity theorists have their hunches. Like Rovelli, many are coming to suspect that time is not fundamental at all. This theme resounds again and again in the various approaches aimed at solving the problem of time. Time, they say, may more resemble a physical property such as temperature or pressure. Pressure has no meaning when you talk about one particle or one atom; the concept of pressure arises only when we consider trillions of atoms. The notion of time could very well share this statistical feature. If so, reality would then resemble a pointillist painting. On the smallest of scales—the Planck length—time would have no meaning, just as a pointillist painting, built up from dabs of paint, cannot be fathomed close up.  

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New Statesman: Corbynism 2.0: the radical ideas shaping Labour’s future

In recent years, however, the left has rediscovered the politics of futurism. Books such as Paul Mason’s PostCapitalism, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’s Inventing the Future, Rutger Bregman’s Utopia for Realists and Peter Frase’s Four Futures argue that technological advancements could render much work unnecessary and liberate humans – sustained by a state-funded universal basic income (UBI) – to pursue a new kind of freedom. Aaron Bastani’s forthcoming Fully Automated Luxury Communism (January 2019) will occupy similar terrain: “What if, rather than having no sense of the future, history hadn’t really begun?” But Labour’s swiftly assembled 2017 manifesto, For the Many, Not the Few, was largely unreflective of such thought. It made no mention of UBI, automation or a shorter working week. Though the manifesto’s headline proposals – the renationalisation of water, energy and rail services, the abolition of university tuition fees and higher taxes on top earners and corporations – were overwhelmingly popular, they were redolent of postwar social democracy.  [...]

A credible left should embrace what one could call incremental utopianism: progressive reforms situated within a radical framework. Alex Williams, the co-author of Inventing the Future (one of the defining texts of Corbynism), told me that the next Labour manifesto should promise a four-day working week. “It aligns with the history of the labour movement. Until the 1930s, cutting working hours was a key demand as well as increasing wages.” [...]

Increased investment in technology, as well as a higher minimum wage to raise the cost of labour, would accelerate automation and make a four-day week conceivable. A recent trial by the New Zealand trust manager Perpetual Guardian proved so successful – higher productivity, reduced stress – that the firm is considering making it permanent. On 10 September, Frances O’Grady, the general secretary of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), declared that “in this century we can win a four-day working week”. More than 1.4 million people work seven days a week, with 3.3 million working more than 45 hours a week, a TUC study found. [...]

Though overwhelmingly supported by the party membership, Corbyn has no more than 20 committed ideological followers among the parliamentary party. The project is heavily reliant on hard-working and trusted media performers such as McDonnell and the shadow foreign secretary, Emily Thornberry (though a vanguard of activist commentators such as Owen Jones, Novara Media’s Ash Sarkar, Aaron Bastani and Michael Walker, and former Corbyn aide Matt Zarb-Cousin adds ballast).

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The School of Life: The Golden Child Syndrome

It's tough of course not to have been loved much by one's parents; but there's a real challenge too in having been loved too much, or rather, admired in a stifling unreal way that lies at the core of what we call 'the golden child syndrome.' Golden children aren't - despite appearances - privileged at all; they suffer from the enormous burden of expectation placed on their too-young shoulders by over-eager parents.

The Atlantic: 'America Has Always Been a Tribal Society'

Author Amy Chua warns that some of tribalism's worst impulses, like demagoguery and scapegoating, are beginning to permeate American politics.

Vox: Why we say “OK”

How a cheesy joke from the 1830s became the most widely spoken word in the world.

CityLab: France’s High-Speed Rail Expansion Takes a New Direction

On Tuesday, the government of President Emmanuel Macron announced a €13.4 billion ($15.5 billion) injection of funds into the high-speed TGV network, with work due to be staggered over the next decade. This increase of 44 percent on the previous government’s investments will deliver five new high-speed links, connections that have long been suggested and now have their funds confirmed and first steps agreed to. [...]

By contrast, the five new links are scattered across the map. There’s still one to Paris in there, a relatively short line between the capital and the Normandy port of Le Havre, where work will begin with the extension of Paris’s Saint Lazare Station. Further south, an important fast link will be built between Bordeaux and Toulouse, cities with a combined metro area population of 2.5 million. The city of Montpellier will see its TGV line extended to the southern border city of Perpignan, ultimately facilitating a much faster service south to the Barcelona region, with which Perpignan is already linked by high-speed rail. [...]

As CityLab has reported, Ouigo offers substantially cheaper high-speed services that cut costs by mainly relying on suburban stations, ditching first-class or buffet cars, and selling tickets online only. Those suburban stations undercut their convenience somewhat, but the prices are irresistible. Since Ouigo launched in 2013, 65 percent of its 33 million passengers to date paid €25 or less for an intercity trip. Now SNCF plans to double Ouigo’s ridership, increasing passenger numbers to 26 million annually by 2021. In doing so, they’re making a new departure. While their Paris terminuses have so far been in the suburbs, next month, they’ll begin departing from the central Gare de Lyon.

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Quartz: Do we still need the United Nations?

As is often the case with bureaucracies, the rules-heavy system was set up to guarantee fairness, fight nepotism and block corruption—but it has ended up protecting and empowering the few who know how to navigate protocol. UN career officials are hard to fire, while the short-term contractors who work for them have little job security. This has contributed to a culture of impunity in which responsibility for mistakes, harassment and abuses of power is passed “from desk to desk, inbox to inbox” without resolution. In 2016 alone, there were over 300 reported episodes of violence by UN peacekeeping staff against minors. [...]

John Weiss, a professor of history at University of Cornell, argues that the UN still has the power to get things done through “good old diplomacy.” While the UN may never overcome the veto of China or the other Security Council permanent members on resolutions targeting them or their allies, it can still raise awareness of bad behavior.

To return to the example of China: While UN sanctions were never imposed, the UN Commission on Human Rights did publicly condemn Beijing’s violent suppression of protests in 1989, drawing international attention. That ultimately prompted individual sanctions from the US and embargoes from European Union states. [...]

Ironically, losing the financial support of the US (as Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened) could bolster the UN’s credibility in the rest of the world. As Weiss points out, though the financial loss would limit the UN’s activities, it would be an opportunity to reform the organization so that it represents member states more democratically.

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The Guardian: President Macron should be lauded for confronting France’s last great taboo | Andrew Hussey

Macron is a shrewd operator and some French commentators saw this, like his recently announced “war on poverty”, as his attempt to ingratiate himself with the left, especially the French Communist party, for whom Audin has long been a cause célèbre. But a more generous view would be to see Macron’s act as a brave and noble gesture, as his “Vichy moment”. This is a reference to the famous statement made in 1995 by President Chirac that France had been complicit in the deportation of 76,000 Jews to German death camps during the Second World War. As such, it marked a turning point in French history – the beginning of reconciliation with a recent, shameful past. [...]

This was the great moral dilemma for the French during the Algerian war and was taken up by the likes of Albert Camus and other intellectuals, who argued that torture was not just a crime against humanity but degraded the torturer. Having endured the Nazis in the Second World War, so the argument ran, the French were now themselves behaving like Nazis. And, as the Audin case reveals, they were also torturing and killing their own citizens. This much was revealed as far back as 1958 by Henri Alleg, a journalist in Algiers. Alleg was suspected of sympathies with the nationalists and so arrested and tortured at the same time as Audin. Unlike Audin, Alleg survived and wrote about his experiences in a book called La Question, which was immediately banned in France and Algeria but which nonetheless circulated underground at the height of the war, doing much to undermine the French cause. [...]

The open question is whether this model will change much in contemporary French society, particularly in communities of Algerian heritage, which have now been established in France for decades. One of the ever-present taboos on the French left is to make a link between the violence of radical Islamists and the French colonial legacy. This is dismissed as crude determinism or, worse still, pure racism. But it is a fact that a disproportionate number of homegrown French terrorists have Algerian origins, as do Muslim prisoners in French prisons.

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