The New York Times: It's Time to Talk About the N.R.A.

The massacre of 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue on Saturday, allegedly by a man with 21 guns registered to his name, was terrifyingly predictable. Every day in America, about 104 people die from guns, while in Japan it takes about a decade for that many to die from gun violence.[...]

Why do we Americans kill each other, and ourselves, with guns at such rates? One answer as it relates to the Pittsburgh attack is a toxic brew of hate and bigotry, but the ubiquity of guns leverages hatred into murder. And let’s be blunt: One reason for our country’s paralysis on meaningful action on guns is the National Rifle Association. If we want to learn the lessons of this latest rampage, and try to prevent another one, then let’s understand that saving lives is not just about universal background checks and red flag laws, but also about defanging the N.R.A.[...]

In the 1920s and 1930s, the N.R.A. favored tighter gun laws, and its president, Karl Frederick, said that the carrying of weapons “should be sharply restricted and only under license.” In 1934, the United States helped pioneer modern gun laws with the National Firearms Act, with the blessings of the N.R.A., and came close to banning handguns. As recently as the 1960s, the N.R.A. supported — more grudgingly — some limits on guns.[...]

The group claims six million members, although many analysts believe that number is inflated. But even if membership is four million, that is still a huge number, and by all accounts the N.R.A. does an excellent job caring for its members and keeping them loyal; indeed, circulation appears to have risen for its magazines. Perhaps more important, there is nothing comparable on the other side; that’s why the N.R.A. wins.

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openDemocracy: Attacks on women's ministries are a threat to democracy

This experience is not unique to Brazil. Many countries with women’s ministries face right-wing and religious attempts to eliminate or downgrade their influence – and in some cases, to change their mandates altogether. When this happens, it’s a strong signal that other democratic structures may also be at risk.[...]

Protecting women’s human rights was an issue for new democracies, and more established ones. The United States had legalised abortion in 1973, yet marital rape was exempt from the criminal code, women could be fired for being pregnant, and they couldn’t apply for a credit card. Irish women weren’t allowed to sit in pubs; women In Nigeria didn’t have the right to vote; divorce was illegal in Brazil, Chile, and South Africa.[...]

This was a groundbreaking step and a critical necessity to ensure the health, security, and basic human rights of women and girls. It was also well-received by countries internationally. At the end of the World Decade for Women in 1985, 127 UN member states had some kind of national institution focused on women. By 2010, all but four countries had an office like this.[...]

Rising populist movements with regressive social agendas are widely seen as threats to democracy. They are often defined by their anti-free press, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim positions, but they also share an open hostility to women’s human rights.

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CityLab: How the Tuberculosis Epidemic Influenced Modernist Architecture

Death rates from TB peaked in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, exacerbated by overcrowding, lack of sanitation, and poor nutrition. Between 1810 and 1815, the disease accounted for more than 25 percent of deaths in New York City. In 1900, it was still the country’s third most common cause of death.[...]

The sanatorium movement began in Europe in the mid-19th century, with resorts in Silesia (now Poland), Germany, and Switzerland. (Davos was once “the tuberculosis capital” of Europe.) Although they began as collections of cottages in mountainous locales, sanatoria evolved into purpose-designed buildings, intended to limit the spread of germs while providing key ingredients for recovery: dry, fresh air and sunshine.[...]

The design and construction of specialized sanatoria coincided with the advent of Modernism. Architectural elements like flat roofs, terraces and balconies, and white- or light-painted rooms spread across Europe. Not unlike the sanatorium, the new architecture was intended to cure the perceived physical, nervous, and moral ailments brought on by crowded cities. Part of the appeal of flat roofs was the extra outdoor space they created, which could be used for sunbathing—then known as heliotherapy—and other healthful activities. In 1925, the Swiss architect Le Corbusier dreamed of a city where every citizen’s house was whitewashed and hygienic. “There are no more dirty, dark corners. Everything is shown as it is. Then comes inner cleanliness … .”[...]

The overlap between Modernism and sanatorium design is one reason for the movement’s association with sterility—the Modernist obsession with hygiene was real. But this overlap also complicates the notion that Modernism was coldly indifferent to human concerns. Modernists like Alto and the Eameses appealed to the senses and paid close attention to the dimensions and comfort of the human body. Those qualities inspire architects working today.

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FiveThirtyEight: Why Are Democrats Looking So Strong In The Midwest?

It’s not just the House, either. Democratic incumbents are clear favorites to win their Senate races in Michigan, Minnesota (two races there, actually), Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. They are modest favorites to hold on to seats in Indiana and Missouri — which were very red in 2016. Democrats are favored to win gubernatorial races in Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota and Pennsylvania. The gubernatorial contests in Ohio and Wisconsin are toss-ups, and Democrats even have a chance in two very conservative states, Kansas and South Dakota. A win by Tony Evers in Wisconsin would be particularly significant for Democrats, who have failed in three different attempts to defeat Gov. Scott Walker.[...]

But why are the biggest gains likely to come in the Midwest? First of all, 2018 is confirming what previous election cycles had suggested — this is an area that swings a lot between the two parties. Democrats made major gains in the Midwest in 2006, then faltered in the Obama years and look to be having a revival now. And because Democrats lost in many key races in the Midwest in 2010 and 2014, there was some low-hanging fruit for Democrats to pick off in a year like this. (Like the governor’s mansion in traditionally-Democratic Illinois, for example.) Contrast the Midwest with the South, where Republicans have steadily gained ground for two decades and are likely to lose relatively few seats even in what appears to be a Democratic wave year.

Secondly and relatedly, national polls suggest that white voters without college degrees favor Republicans in 2018, but the margin between the two parties is likely to narrow compared to 2016, when Clinton lost that bloc by more than 30 percentage points. That shift has outsized influence in the Midwest, which has higher populations of white voters without college degrees than many other parts of the country. So the Democrats’ problem with white working-class voters may not be as severe as it looked on Election Day 2016 — which perhaps had more to do with the conditions in that election than the party overall. What we are seeing in 2018 suggests that working-class whites are not a single national bloc, but still vote much differently by state and region. Working-class whites in Southern states like Georgia and Texas are overwhelmingly opposed to Democratic candidates in key races this year, but they are less GOP-leaning in Midwest states like Ohio and Wisconsin.

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Quartz: Venture capitalists are discovering they don’t like where their money comes from

In the last 10 years, startups’ and VCs’ doors were flung open to accept their money. The Chinese government and state-owned entities back more than 20 Silicon Valley venture capital firms, Reuters reports. Russian oligarchs have seeded multiple investment funds. Yet no one has been embraced by the US technology industry like Saudi Arabia. Saudi investors have directly participated in investment rounds totaling at least $6.2 billion over the last five years with big bets on Lyft, Uber, and Magic Leap, among others. A $45 billion investment (with one more on the way) in SoftBank’s venture funds makes Saudi Arabia the largest single investor in US startups (paywall). That doesn’t even account for private investments, potentially worth billions of dollars, by the Saudi royal family and its inner circle. Just the top known investment rounds with Saudi participation are included in the table below.[...]

So the Saudis are personae non gratae for the moment in the tech world. Executives from Uber to Google bailed on Saudi Arabia’s “Davos in the Desert,” and abandoned advisory roles on Saudi projects. A few entrepreneurs are putting their money where their mouth is. Richard Branson, who suspended a $1 billion Saudi investment in Virgin’s space ambitions, said ”the disappearance of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, if proved true….would clearly change the ability of any of us in the West to do business with the Saudi government.”[...]

Is this the beginning of a trend? So far, the only investors to make explicit statements rejecting Saudi money are not major players in Silicon Valley’s ecosystem, or already get their cash from elsewhere. Most would not respond to inquiries. Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, True Ventures, 500 Startups, Y Combinator, along with other firms and industry associations in venture capital and limited partnership investors all declined to comment on the record.

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Social Europe: Why The Left Must Talk About Migration

Immigration may be in most EU countries a topic of high salience but it is toxic and almost taboo for the left. Those who dare to address it, such as the Leftish new movement, Aufstehen, in Germany, or some social democratic local mayors who warn of immigrant ghettos in their towns are often attacked. Colin Crouch warned in a recent piece here of “anti-immigrant sentiment”.[...]

There is comprehensive research on the effect migration on wages by labour economists and there is ground to believe that migration affects the wages of those with similar skills negatively and those with higher skills positively. This should not come as a surprise.[...]

As long as migration is a messy business it remains an easy scapegoat for the far right. Unlike the UK government, which has an immigration target it fails to achieve year in year out, the German government has no explicit migration policy. Net migration into Germany has exceeded 500,000 annually since 2014. Immigration currently stands at more than 1m per year. At the same time, rents in cities such as Berlin have been rising by 10% per year and it is estimated that there is a lack of 2m affordable flats in Germany. While the housing crisis is not caused by migration but by government decisions to end social housing a decade earlier, it shows how little the country is prepared for high levels of immigration.[...]

The left has to find a policy on migration which is strong on anti-racism but does not ignore reality. If Germany wants to avoid the nationalist and anti-migrant turn of British and US politics it has to fight for the values of the open society by making sure that the lower middle class will not suffer from migration. The initial ‘refugees are welcome’ attitude of 2015 is being replaced by a creeping suspicion of economic migration to escape poverty not least because the current mess caused by mixing asylum with labour migration is deeply irritating for many people.

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CityLab: Why Google Rejected Berlin

Zoom in a little closer, however, and a more complex picture emerges. The fight over Google’s Berlin campus was not about rejecting a tech leviathan as such. It was about preserving the integrity of a specific neighborhood—one in which Google would have struggled to fit.

Had Google chosen an office block in one of the Berlin business districts that are already home to many corporate HQs, or pledged to build a campus out on the city fringe, they would have probably been welcomed with open arms. The forceful local backlash, which involved two years of counter-campaigning (including a brief site occupation) from a memorably titled activist coalition called Fuck Off Google, came about partly because they chose a neighborhood that was already under considerable stress. Kreuzberg, the western Berlin location picked by Google, has both an especially distinct recent past and a pretty fragile present status quo.[...]

The withdrawal of Google’s Kreuzberg campus plan should thus be framed more as one neighborhood’s successful effort to avoid being disrupted, rather than a wholesale rejection of Big Tech. This doesn’t mean that Berlin is suddenly an inherently anti-business city. Indeed, there is already talk of a counter-proposal, with the center-right CDU (the party of Chancellor Angela Merkel) inviting Google to set up shop in the less-hip eastern district of Lichtenberg. (Absent Google, that Kreuzberg power station is now slated to have a more on-brand tenant: two humanitarian NGOs.) But the Kreuzberg saga should be a lesson for other major companies as they ponder where to place their giant corporate feet in cities: They must carefully consider the effect their intervention can have on a district expressly chosen for its desirability.

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Politico: The dispensable chancellor

Visions of the German chancellor as the only person standing between humanity and the apocalypse became fashionable after U.S. President Donald Trump’s election to the White House. But they were always overblown. Merkel herself knows that Germany — with its poorly-equipped military, deeply ingrained pacifism and historical hang-ups — is in no position to defend the West.[...]

But now Germany, too, has become more politically unstable, with the rise of the far right populist Alternative for Deutschland and support for the two establishment parties of the post-war order — Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union and the Social Democrats — collapsing.[...]

But Merkel is also the victim of larger social forces sweeping the West, which have led to the collapse of the political center she bloodlessly embodied. Given Germany’s history and taboos, the sort of mass, nationalist political movements present in most other Western countries had eluded it since the end of World War II. That special dispensation, regretfully, is now over. In this sense, Germany is becoming more “normal.”

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Politico: Merkel metrics: Measuring a legacy

With Angela Merkel’s announcement that she will stand down as leader of the Christian Democratic Union, the political career of the chancellor who became known for her staying power is drawing to a close.

Merkel has been Germany’s chancellor since 2005, but took the reins of the CDU five years prior, when the party was in opposition.

As the race to replace her as leader of the party — and eventually the country — kicks off, here is a look back at Merkel’s years as chancellor and CDU chief.

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