Politico: How the GOP Gave Up on Porn

It was the height of the porn wars. More than abortion or homosexuality, the rising tide of pornography in America was, in the 1970s, becoming central to conservative Americans’ perception of a civilization in decline. For faith leaders, it was an easily exploitable issue; for Falwell, it was a crusade. He fought to remove adult content from convenience stores. He went to court to battle Hustler and Penthouse. And he never forgave Carter—who ended up winning the White House in 1976, carrying the evangelical vote along the way—for his original sin of talking to Hugh Hefner’s publication. “Giving an interview to Playboy magazine was lending the credence and the dignity of the highest office in the land to a salacious, vulgar magazine that did not even deserve the time of his day,” Falwell said in 1981. [...]

From the 1960s through the turn of the century, pornography played a dominant role in the American political argument—its morality and legality, its restrictions and regulations, its implications and unintended consequences. It was treated as a matter of urgency not just by the religious right, which decried the hypersexualizing of society, but by the radical left, which denounced the objectifying of women. Liberal feminists and conservative evangelicals found themselves unexpectedly allied in vilifying the adult entertainment industry. After decades of intensifying conflict, Ronald Reagan convened a Presidential Commission on Pornography in 1985; two years later, Reagan held a press conference to announce his administration’s plan to combat illegal obscenity—and issue a warning to the porn professionals: “Your industry’s days are numbered.” [...]

When it landed, the 1,960-page Meese Report surprised exactly no one: It concluded that pornography was a threat to society and recommended harsher enforcement of obscenity laws. In a particularly memorable passage, the report said the link between porn consumption and violence “requires assumptions not found exclusively in the experimental evidence,” yet concluded, “We see no reason, however, not to make these assumptions … that are plainly justified by our own common sense.” The commission came under immediate criticism for its lack of scholarly rigor; academics whose work was cited by Meese protested the report’s misapplication of their data, and even National Review concluded that the commission “has to some extent found the conclusion it was looking for.” That the report’s findings were by and large empirically unsupported mattered not. Its recommendations allowed the Justice Department to execute what Reagan’s supporters were agitating for: a crackdown on porn. [...]

Terrorism was suddenly an all-eclipsing concern for Americans across the ideological spectrum. As evangelical Christians grasped what this meant for their porn campaign, their concern turned to frustration and eventually anger. Religious conservatives watched in horror as big porn hitched itself to the rise of big tech, giving obscenity a foothold in corporate America and solidifying the adult industry’s product as culturally tolerable. In December 2003, the magazine published by Christian organization Focus on the Family noted how, in 2000, “conservatives celebrated what they thought marked the end of hard-core’s unchecked reign.” Three years later, the article concluded, “those celebrations have given way to disappointment.” [...]

One might think the #MeToo era, with its fierce backlash against toxic masculinity, would give new energy to the enemies of an industry that traffics heavily in the filmed subjugation of women. Some conservatives have tried to capitalize on this point; earlier this year, Ross Douthat wrote an op-ed in the New York Times titled, “Let’s Ban Porn.” Feminists, however, are decidedly less vocal than they were in past decades, split internally over the question of whether filmed sex empowers women or exploits them. “Some have broken with the faith-based organizations, but we haven’t, even though we’re a different breed—progressive, lefty feminists,” says Gail Dines, a prominent anti-porn activist. “For us, this is still all about gender equality. You can’t pick and choose. You either believe that women and men have the right to the same political, social and cultural respect, or you don’t.”

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Vox: Why marriages succeed — or fail

Sean Illing What makes good marriages good?

Eli Finkel That we bring significant expectations to them, and they meet those expectations.[...]

Eli Finkel Well, I wouldn’t necessarily say we’re asking less of it. We're asking less when it comes to things at the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs — basic things like security and safety. What I think we don't really appreciate these days is that 200 years ago, people literally looked to marriage for food, clothing, and shelter. It was precarious to live if you weren’t married. We need marriage less in those ways than we did before. Our expectations are lower in those ways, but they're higher in emotional and psychological sorts of ways. [...]

We have goals, we have aspirations. We're reasonably proud of who we are, but we can think of ways that we can be better, more ambitious, more energetic, or maybe better at relaxing. We're trying to achieve those goals, and the reality is that humans aren't individual, isolated goal-pursuers. Our social relationships have profound influence on the extent to which we get closer to versus further from our ideal self.

The best marriages these days take that seriously. They take the responsibility for trying to help each other grow and live authentic lives to an extent that would have seemed bizarre in 1950. [...]

I talk a lot about calibrating expectations to what the marriage can realistically provide. In some sense, it's basically a modified supply and demand perspective. It says you're welcome to ask for as much as you want of the marriage, but you need to make sure that the marriage can actually achieve those things. That the marriage can supply enough to meet the demand. When I say supply, I'm talking about, yes, compatibility, but also time, commitment, and effort.

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Nautilus Magazine: Roger Penrose On Why Consciousness Does Not Compute

Most scientists regard quantum mechanics as irrelevant to our understanding of how the brain works. Still, it’s not hard to see why Penrose’s theory has gained attention. Artificial intelligence experts have been predicting some sort of computer brain for decades, with little to show so far. And for all the recent advances in neurobiology, we seem no closer to solving the mind-brain problem than we were a century ago. Even if the human brain’s neurons, synapses and neurotransmitters could be completely mapped—which would be one of the great triumphs in the history of science—it’s not clear that we’d be any closer to explaining how this 3-pound mass of wet tissue generates the immaterial world of our thoughts and feelings. Something seems to be missing in current theories of consciousness. The philosopher David Chalmers has speculated that consciousness may be a fundamental property of nature existing outside the known laws of physics. Others—often branded “mysterians”—claim that subjective experience is simply beyond the capacity of science to explain.[...]

Still, you’d need more than just a continuous flood of random moments of quantum coherence to have any impact on consciousness. The process would need to be structured, or orchestrated, in some way so we can make conscious choices. In the Penrose-Hameroff theory of Orchestrated Objective Reduction, known as Orch-OR, these moments of conscious awareness are orchestrated by the microtubules in our brains, which—they believe—have the capacity to store and process information and memory. [...]

This is a heady brew, but unconvincing to critics. Most scientists believe the brain is too warm and wet for quantum states to have any influence on neuronal activity because quantum coherence only seems possible in highly protected and frigid environments. The most damning critique has come from Max Tegmark, a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who calculated that any quantum effects within microtubules would break down after 100 quadrillionths of a second. “For my thoughts to correspond to a quantum computation, they’d need to finish before decoherence kicked in, so I’d need to be able to think fast enough to have 10,000,000,000,000 thoughts each second,” Tegmark writes in his 2014 book Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality. “Perhaps Roger Penrose can think that fast, but I sure can’t.” Even Penrose’s old collaborator Stephen Hawking is dubious. “I get uneasy when people, especially theoretical physicists, talk about consciousness,” he’s written. “His argument seemed to be that consciousness is a mystery and quantum gravity is another mystery so they must be related.” Penrose dismisses Hawking’s criticism, saying their disagreement is really about the nature of quantum mechanics.

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The New York Review of Books: World War I Relived Day by Day

The dramatic panoply of people, places, and events, however, only occasionally rises to the fore. For the most part, the war is a steady stream of ordinary people doing ordinary things: washing their clothes, attending a concert, tallying supplies, fixing a car. History books give us a distorted sense of time, because they fast forward to major events. A day may take a chapter, a month may be passed over in a sentence. In fact, there were periods where nothing much happened—plans were being made, troops trained, supplies positioned—and when you live-tweet, you experience that waiting. Sometimes, it led to intriguing surprises, like photographs of dragon dances performed by some of the 140,000 Chinese laborers brought over to France to lend muscle to the Allied war effort. Mostly, it was a matter of endurance. Each winter, the fighting came to almost a complete stop as each country hunkered down and hoped its food would last. The “turnip winter” of 1916–1917, when the potato crop failed, nearly broke Germany; the increasingly desperate craving for “bread and peace” did break Russia the following year.

The future president Herbert Hoover made his reputation by coordinating food relief shipments to German-occupied Belgium, and later as the US “food czar” ensuring Allied armies and populations were fed. The vast mobilization was effective: by 1918, the Allies were able to relax their food rationing, while Germany and its confederates, strangled by an Allied naval blockade, were on the verge of starvation. America’s war effort was accompanied by a vast expansion in the federal government’s power and reach. It nationalized (temporarily) the railroads and the telephone lines. It set prices for everything from sugar to shoes, and told motorists when they could drive, workers when they could strike, and restaurants what they could put on their menus. It seized half a billion dollars of enemy-owned property, including the brand rights to Bayer aspirin, and sold them at auction. The US government also passed espionage and sedition laws that made it illegal to criticize the war effort or the president. Some people were sent to prison for doing so, including the Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs, who ran for president for a fifth and final time from a cell. [...]

The fact that nobody saw the end coming, the way it did, highlights the value of going back, a hundred years later, and reliving events day by day, as they took place. What may seem obvious now was anything but so then, and we do the people who lived through it, and our understanding of them, a real disservice when we assume that it was. “Life can only be understood backwards,” the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard observed, “but it must be lived forwards.” The British historian C.V. Wedgewood elaborated on the same idea: “History is lived forwards but is written in retrospect. We know the end before we consider the beginning and we can never wholly recapture what it was like to know the beginning only.” We can’t entirely forget that we know what happened next, but when we at least try to identify with people who did not know, we shed new light on them, and on what did happen. [...]

Did it really matter who won the war? In its aftermath, the Great War came to be seen as a colossal waste, a testament to the vanity of nations, of pompous older men sending foolish younger men into the meat-grinder for no good reason. War poems like “Dulce et decorum est” and novels like All Quiet on the Western Front have crystalized this impression. But this was not how people felt at the time. German atrocities in Belgium and on the high seas—some exaggerated, but others quite real—convinced many people that civilization, as they knew it, really was at stake. I was consistently and often surprisingly struck by the sincerity of support, not just on the home front, but among soldiers who had seen the worst of combat, for pursuing the war unto victory. The tone matures, but remains vibrant: these were, for the most part, people who believed in what they were fighting for. At what point the bitter cynicism set in, after the war ended, I cannot say. But at some point, that enthusiasm, and even the memory of it, became buried with the dead.

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Vox: Museums don’t just want gift shops to make money — they want them to shape our understanding of art

Contributing up to as much as a quarter of museum revenue, gift shops can be crucial to a museum’s bottom line, but their contributions aren’t only economic. These unique retail spaces help educate visitors, build the museum’s brand, and work to highlight — and sometimes even influence — the aspects of art the institution views as important.[...]

That’s because the same people responsible for putting together exhibitions have a say in what makes it onto store shelves. On a practical branding level, the museum’s curatorial team helps store buyers make sure colors are correct in reproductions and checks out copyrights, which can sometimes be impossible or overly expensive to secure.[...]

These curatorial collaborations ensure that whether the store is commissioning its own products, working with brands, or buying them from the trade, their pieces connect directly or thematically to the collection — and many museums underscore that relationship by including information in product displays or packing about the artworks that inspired them. [...]

Because beyond all the responsibility that art museum stores have to financially contribute to their institution and help curators further communicate their vision, Tudor says stores are just a great way to keep visitors hanging around a little longer and interacting with the art. That’s because, no matter how intimidating people might find museums or how much (or little) they like the artworks themselves, there’s always one guarantee.

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Social Europe: The Finnish Basic Income Experiment – Correcting The Narrative

Well, not quite. The Finnish government’s refusal to extend or expand the experiment may not come as much of a surprise once the budgetary implications are taken into account but it nevertheless amounts to one more disappointment amongst those closely watching how the experiment is progressing. And disappointments have been plentiful with this project. After a promising start, the first blow came when the Sipilä government ignored most of the suggestions and recommendations of the research consortium led by Kela (the Social Insurance Institution of Finland) and charged with preparing the experimental design — incidentally, appointed by the very same Juha Sipilä.

The design now being rolled out is much more limited than many had hoped for. Repeated requests for additional budget or postponing the starting date were ignored. Much-needed coordination between the different ministries involved was not forthcoming. The government also delayed appointing the team charged with evaluating the result until the experiment was well into its second year – with detrimental effects for any attempt to gain a more comprehensive insight into the experiment’s wellbeing effects.

Meanwhile, the coalition government didn’t dither and recently embarked on a series of highly contentious reforms, such as introducing a new regime for the unemployed consisting of trimonthly interviews, increased waiting periods and substantial cuts in the eligibility periods for unemployment benefits. All of this is topped by a so-called “active model” that requires jobseekers to either work on a part-time basis or intensively participate in activation measures or face a 4.65 percent benefit cut. Together these new measures represent a major attempt to shift the Finnish social security system even more in the direction of an activation welfare state at the same time as the government is experimenting with unconditional basic income.

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Vox: The 2018 electorate was older, whiter, and better educated than in 2016

Exit polls have historically been unreliable in capturing the demographic composition of the electorate, so the main exit polling consortium changed its methods this year to mitigate the problem. That creates a new problem — you can’t compare this year’s exit polls to past years.

Fortunately, Catalist, a progressive data vendor company, developed a new methodology for estimating the composition of the electorate that gives us demographics that are both accurate and comparable.

This means Democrats improved on their 2014 performance in terms of youth and minority turnout. But they were unable to overcome the normal dynamic by which the midterm turnout slump disproportionately impacts young people and nonwhites. If Democrats could get the same kind of results they had in 2018 but with a more typical presidential election electorate, they might do even better in 2020.

The education story, by contrast, looks a little different. With college graduates making up 37 percent of voters, it was the best-educated electorate of all time. And the non-college educated whites who form the base of the Republican electorate fell to “only” 47 percent of voters.

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Quartz: Iranian women won a small victory in a long quest to join the “public happiness” of football

Before the soccer match in Tehran even began on Saturday (Nov. 10), Iranian women already felt the thrill of victory. For the first time since a de facto ban on female attendance was instituted after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, about 1,000 women were permitted to attend a live soccer game at a public stadium. [...]

Notably, women from other countries are allowed to attend games at the stadium in Tehran. For example, last year, Syrian women were permitted entrance to a qualifying match for the World Cup while Iranians of the same gender protested outside. Some local women had purchased tickets but were barred entrance because the sale was due to a “technical glitch,” organizers said.  [...]

For women and men in other countries who aren’t excluded from this kind of public participation, it’s difficult to imagine just what attending such events signifies, and what it might feel like to be included for the first time. In a piece in The Lily in January, Iranian sports fan Yeganeh Rezaian wrote that her “life changed forever” the first time she had the “breathtaking experience” of attending a game at a major stadium when she watched the National Basketball Association’s Golden State Warriors play in the Oakland Arena in California.

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Quartz: In photos: The chaos and contradictions of suburban Mumbai

Bialobrzeski’s fascination with Mumbai’s suburbs began in 1987, when he first visited the city and saw its “contrast, the poverty, and the energy.” Unlike other photographers who were charmed by the historic appeal of South Mumbai, Bialobrzeski was captivated by the suburbs, where “everything is really happening and you can feel the change around you.”

He returned to some of those neighbourhoods in October-December 2017, during an art residency at the Goethe Institut-Max Mueller Bhavan. In Bandra, Andheri, Goregaon, Juhu, Vikhroli, and Malad, he photographed the contradictions in the landscape—from the sprawl of shanties to the construction of high-rises. Their disorder was a far cry from the leafy, quiet suburbs of Hamburg, where he lives. Twenty-five of those photographs are currently on display in the institute at a solo exhibition titled Mumbai Suburbia: Urban Environment in Crisis. [...]

In an accompanying note to the exhibition, architect and urban planner Rahul Mehrotra writes: “With globalisation and the emergence of a post-industrial service-based economy in Mumbai, as in several other cities in India, urban space has been fragmented and polarised with the rich and poor jostling for access to amenities. Further, the state has more or less given up the responsibility of projecting an image of the city leaving this to be constructed on ad hoc basis by the market.”

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