The New York Review of Books: Not Another Brexit Jeremiad

Remainers and Leavers alike have been caught off-guard by the strength of feeling aroused. And it’s not even remotely fanciful to imagine that the schism within Britain will haunt the polity for decades. Remainers might still see themselves as British, but they might not now see themselves as British in the way some Leavers do. For that matter, perhaps Brexit will put one tedious debate about Britishness—namely, the never-ending one that followed the September 11, 2001, attacks in the US and, later, the 2007 terrorist outrages in London about the Britishness of the country’s immigrants, particularly its Muslim ones—on the back-burner for a while. One can only hope. [...]

Right after June 23, 2016, the day of the referendum, Britons of my acquaintance—native-born, white, home counties centrists of the almost interchangeable David Cameron or Tony Blair variety—commented that their country suddenly seemed alien to them, musing that they had more in common with me than with many of their fellow native-born Englishmen who’d voted to leave the European Union. This realization evidently came as a surprise to them. The sociological explanation for why I now feel closer to Britain might be that by confronting all Britons with this variety of native British identities, Brexit has created space for other British identities. [...]

The elites—roughly, the top fifth of earners—largely voted Remain. And relatively speaking, they will be insulated from whatever adverse economic consequences attend Brexit, but they will be reminded again and again of the cultural and social deficit that leaving the EU has meant to them. And since that fifth dominates the media and controls the public conversation, their grievance will continue to be heard in the public space. Their condescension, compounded by being right on almost all the verifiable facts, will continue, as will the mutual alienation.

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The Atlantic: A Strongman Falls, and a Post-Colonial Era Ends

An outspoken free spirit and a columnist for Le Quotidien d’Oran, an Algerian daily, Daoud has long written that his country deserves better than a choice between military dictatorship and Islamists. A former Islamist himself, Daoud, now 48, has been harshly critical of how conservative religious forces in Algeria have tried to suppress individual liberties and the rights of women—views that are progressive at home but that have also won him fans on the right in Europe. [...]

But I think this is the usual strategy that dictatorships turn to when they’re forced to. They try to start a dialogue and reforms, which is what I’d call the first phase. That’s what’s happening now in Algeria. I think the regime pushed Algerians’ sense of humiliation too far. We reached a point of electing a photo, which Algerians can’t tolerate.

There’s an even deeper force: demographics. Half of the Algerian population is under 30. The entire regime is old. The people of the regime are all 85 years old, and sooner or later this generational rupture was bound to cause a crisis. I also think that the generation of the decolonizers has come to an end all over Africa, but it arrived quite late in Algeria. And that was going to have consequences sooner or later. [...]

Daoud: Yes. For several years now, I’ve tried to write about how to get out of the post-colonial mentality. A lot of people reproached me for this—a lot of people in France and in the United States and elsewhere—because post-colonialism has become a comfort. For years, I’ve been writing about how we need to stop using post-colonialism as a complete and total explanation of reality. I think now we’ve reached a sort of political expression that’s very clear: People want to get out of the post-colonial era. They want to be done with that generation. [...]

Daoud: I think there are two major factors. First, to declare the end of the FLN, the old party [of Bouteflika] that won the war of liberation. This party must be defeated because it should no longer continue to be business as usual. And the second is the status of religion. Religion must respect secularism in the country. We need to separate the political from the religious. I think those are the two most important things. The third thing is to repair Algerian identity. Arab culture is a beautiful culture, but it’s not an identity; it’s a culture. We need to return to our real identity.

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Foreign Policy: Can Zuzana Caputova Save Slovakia?

A talented orator, Caputova comes across as reserved but confident, the qualities she first showed to the public in televised presidential debates in February and March. She speaks openly about truth, justice, and equality, which, according to her supporters, embodies a positive message reminiscent of Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright turned president of Czechoslovakia, who has remained a political and moral icon in both Slovakia and the Czech Republic since they split apart. [...]

Caputova’s greatest triumph as a lawyer—and her ticket to the national political stage—was a victory against an illegal dumpsite in her hometown of Pezinok in western Slovakia. The 14-year battle against a wealthy developer with ties to local authorities—which involved filing lawsuits, organizing protests, and petitions to European Union institutions—won her the 2016 Goldman Prize, a leading award honoring environmental activists often called the Green Nobel. [...]

Given the ruling party’s close ties with an indicted tycoon, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Caputova, who was a frequent participant at anti-government demonstrations after the murders, has cast her campaign as a struggle between good and evil. With the catchy Star Wars-like election slogan “Postavme sa zlu, spolu to dokazeme” (“Let’s face the evil together”), she offered herself as a new breed of politician: exciting, different, and untainted by scandals. [...]

The most recent presidential polls show Caputova hovering around 60 percent of the vote, well ahead of second-place Maros Sefcovic, a current EU commissioner. A 52-year-old Soviet-educated career diplomat who has gained a reputation for being genuinely pro-European, he was accused by opponents of pandering when, in order to attract right-wing voters, he appealed to “traditional, Christian values” in contrast to what he called Caputova’s “ultraliberal agenda.”

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CaspianReport: Geoeconomics of Egypt's new capital

BAKU - For over a thousand years, Cairo has served as the heart of Egypt. Yet, some 40 kilometres to the east, the government is constructing a new city, and if all goes to plan, it will act as the new seat of Egypt’s government. It promises to be bigger, better and newer, but a project of this magnitude also carries significant geo-economic implications.

AJ+: Republicans Were Super Pro-Environment, So What Happened?

The Guardian: Japan poised to reveal name of new imperial era as Akihito abdicates

The early announcement will give companies and public bodies time to incorporate the new era’s name into their paperwork and computer systems, and avoid any Y2K-style glitches when Naruhito becomes emperor on 1 May. Local governments say they have been preparing for the change for months and are confident they will be able to update their records in time. [...]

The names given to Japanese imperial reigns can have far-reaching consequences. The choice of characters can help determine the national zeitgeist and, over time, the name becomes a byword for collective memories of the era in question. [...]

It remains to be seen if the new era will revive the popular use of gengo amid a preference for the Gregorian calendar. A recent poll by the Mainichi newspaper found that 34% of people used gengo most of the time, a similar proportion used both in roughly equal measure, while a quarter preferred the Gregorian calendar. In 1975, 82% of people said they used gengo more frequently.  [...]

But the panel of experts tasked with devising a shortlist of contenders – with the cabinet to make the final decision – will be eager to avoid accusations that their choice has political overtones, given the constitutional ban on postwar emperors from wielding political influence.  [...]

For the past few months, a secretive eight-member panel of experts, including scholars of Japanese and Chinese classical literature, has been debating the merits of scores of possible names for the new era, the latest of almost 250 gengo stretching back to the seventh century.  

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Quartz: The most common destination for African immigrants is neither Europe nor North America

A new Afrobarometer survey of respondents in 34 African countries shows that 36% of Africans are more likely to move to another country within the continent. The trend noted in the report is also backed by reality as only 20% of African migrants who decide to emigrate from their countries actually leave the continent, according to the African Union. For example, many more people move from the Horn of Africa to southern Africa than those crossing the Sahara to north Africa to reach Europe.

The destination preferences also vary by region, the report shows. While a majority of west and north Africans prefer to move to Europe, intending immigrants in central, east and southern African largely prefer to move to another African country, specifically one within their regions. [...]

Crucially, as Afrobarometer’s report shows, 47% of respondents aged between 18 and 25 have considered moving elsewhere—the most of any age group. The trend is a consequence of unabating local unemployment which respondents cited as the leading reason for looking to emigrate.

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Politico: EU countries reject proposal on social security coordination

But EU countries rejected the proposal in a meeting of diplomats on Friday, with Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Sweden banding together to block it from reaching the qualified majority needed for approval. Hungary, Malta and Poland abstained.

The battle over changing the rules on unemployment benefits had led to an unusual alliance between Eastern European countries and France, which is more typically aligned with the wealthier nations of Old Europe. France has a large number of workers who commute to work in neighboring countries like Germany. So a French worker receiving jobless benefits would get their payment from their employer's country — a change that France's unemployment benefits agency had estimated would save €550 million to €610 million. [...]

"The Romanian Presidency of the EU Council has been firmly committed to the complex and difficult discussions on the coordination of social security systems in the EU," the presidency said in a statement. "This was with the aim of achieving a balanced perspective on the implementation of progressive measures in the field of labour mobility in the EU and the Pillar of Social Rights. We regret that the provisional agreement reached by the Romanian Presidency and the European Parliament was not confirmed ... although a large majority of member states supported and appreciated it."

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Quartzy: Scandinavia may not be the happiest place on Earth, after all

We recently applied the scale in Denmark and compared the national mental well-being estimates of Danish people with people living in Iceland, Catalonia, and England. We found that people in Catalonia scored considerably higher on mental well-being than people in all three northern European countries—challenging the prevailing idea that places in northern Europe are typically happier than those in southern Europe.

In the World Happiness Reports, which tend to show the Nordic countries as leading, happiness is measured using Cantril’s ladder of life evaluation. This asks people to rate how they currently view their life on a ladder scale in which zero is the “worst possible life for you” and 10 is the “best possible life for you.” But such measures are strongly influenced by economic conditions and are poor proxies for mental health and well-being. [...]

In other words, high income may buy better life evaluations, but this is not the same as positive mental health and well-being. A recent report also showed that inequalities in life evaluation appear to be rising in several places in Scandinavia, and that a considerable amount of people in the Nordic countries appear to be struggling, contrary to what these countries are famous for.

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The Guardian: How violent American vigilantes at the border led to Trump’s wall

The border before Trump was no idyll. Conflict grew especially acute in California in the early 1970s. As San Diego’s sprawl began to push against agricultural fields, racist attacks on migrants increased. Vigilantes drove around the back roads of the greater San Diego area, shooting at Mexicans from the flatbeds of their pickups; dozens of bodies were found in shallow graves. Anti-migrant violence was fuelled by angry veterans returning from Vietnam, who carried out what they called “beaner raids” to break up migrant camps. Snipers took aim at Mexicans coming over the border. Led by a 27-year-old David Duke, the KKK set up a “border watch” in 1977 at California’s San Ysidro point of entry, finding much support among border patrol agents. Other KKK groups set up similar patrols in south Texas, placing leaflets with a printed skull and crossbones on the doorsteps of Latino residents, warning “aliens” and the federal government to fear the klan. Around this time, agents reported finding pitfall traps, modelled on the punji traps Vietnamese troops would set for US soldiers, in the swampy Tijuana estuary, an area of the border vigilantes began calling Little ’Nam. [...]

Separating migrant families was not official government policy in those decades. But border patrol agents left to their own devices regularly took children from parents, threatening that they would be separated “for ever” unless one of them confessed that they had entered the country illegally. Mothers especially, an agent said, “would always break”. Once a confession was extracted, children might be placed in foster care or left to languish in federal jails. Ten-year-old Sylvia Alvarado, separated from her grandmother as they crossed into Texas, was kept in a small cinderblock cell for more than three months. In California, 13-year-old Julia Pérez, threatened with being arrested and denied food, broke down and told her interrogator that she was Mexican, even though she was a US citizen. The border patrol released Pérez into Mexico with no money or way to contact her US family. [...]

In neighbourhoods filled with undocumented residents, the patrol operated with the latitude of an occupying army. Between 1985 and 1990, federal agents shot 40 migrants around San Diego alone, killing 22 of them. On 18 April 1986, patroller Edward Cole was beating 14-year-old Eduardo Carrillo Estrada on the US side of the border’s chain-link fence when he stopped and shot Eduardo’s younger brother, Humberto, in the back. Humberto was standing on the other side of the fence, on Mexican soil. A court ruled that Cole, who had previous incidents of shooting through the fence at Mexicans, had reason to fear for his life from Humberto and used justifiable force. [...]

But the occupations did go wrong. Bush and his neoconservative advisers had launched what has now become the most costly war in the nation’s history, on the heels of pushing through one of the largest tax cuts in the nation’s history. Yet news coming in from Baghdad, Fallujah, Basra, Anbar province, Bagram and elsewhere began to suggest that Bush had created an epic disaster. Photographs from Abu Ghraib prison showing US personnel cheerfully taunting and torturing Iraqis circulated widely, followed by reports of other forms of cruelty inflicted on prisoners by US troops. Many people were coming to realise that the war was not just illegal in conception but deceptive in its justification, immoral in execution, and corrupt in its administration. [...]

As the power of Ice and the border patrol grew, its impunity continued unabated. Since 2003, patrollers have killed at least 97 people, including six children. Few agents were prosecuted. According to a report by the ACLU, young girls have been physically abused and threatened with rape, while unaccompanied children apprehended by the border patrol experienced “physical and psychological abuse, unsanitary and inhumane living conditions, isolation from family members, extended period of detention, and denial of access to legal medical service”. It’s difficult to process this litany of abuse. The horrors blend into one another, as if the closing of the frontier has brought about a collapse of a sense of time. The violence that had been associated with moving outward in the world, which gave the illusion of leaving problems behind, now just accumulates. “We slash their bottles and drain their water into the dry earth,” writes a border patroller, describing what he and his coworkers did when they came upon a stash of supplies tucked away by hiding migrants. “We dump their backpacks and pile their food and clothes to be crushed and pissed on and stepped over, strewn across the desert and set ablaze.”

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99 Percent Invisible: Palaces for the People

Over the course of his life, Carnegie helped to fund more than 2,500 libraries around the world—about 1,700 of which were in the United States. He called greatest of them “palaces for the people.” The great Carnegie libraries had high ceilings, big windows, and spacious rooms where a person could read, think, and achieve something that they felt proud of. Although it should be noted that these palaces were not always for everyone. Many of the great Carnegie libraries remained racially segregated throughout the early 20th century, and they later became battlegrounds in the civil rights movement. [...]

Klinenberg started spending time in the neighborhoods, and what he observed was that the places that had low death rates turned out to have a robust social infrastructure. They had sidewalks and streets that were well taken care of. They had neighborhood libraries and community organizations, grocery stores, shops, and cafes that drew people out of their home and into public life. What that meant was that on a daily basis, people got to know each other pretty well and used the social infrastructure to socialize. When this heat wave happened in Chicago, neighborhood residents knew who was likely to be sick and who should have been outside but wasn’t. This meant they knew whose door to knock on if they needed help. [...]

Having spent a lot of time thinking about the power of social infrastructure and physical places, Klinenberg asked himself this question: what would have happened if we had responded to broken windows not by sending in so many police officers, but instead by fixing the windows?

It turns out, someone at the University of Pennsylvania had been asking a similar question. This person teamed up with the city of Philadelphia which has tens of thousands of abandoned properties and empty lots. The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society started an exciting social science experiment, and for more than a decade have been making simple interventions to randomly selected blocks. If there was an abandoned house they would board up the building to prevent squatters or potential drug dealers from using the property, and mowed and maintained the yard.

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Failed Architecture: Speer in Qatar or: How Architects Stopped Caring and Learned to Love the Client

Albert Speer is one of the most infamous architects in history. During his time working for the Nazi Party he was responsible for designing the Reich Chancellery and the Zeppelinfeld Stadium in which the Nuremberg rallies took place, as well as being in charge of Germany’s war production during the Second World War and having responsibility for the plan to reconstruct Berlin as Germania. Yet by emphasising his detachment from the general conditions in which he was working, he was able to avoid the death sentence after the war.

While his is an extreme example, it offers a compelling jumping off point to explore the wider issue of an architect’s responsibility for the wider system that they work in. Moving from mid-20th Century Germany to the present day, this episode explores the specific role certain architects have played in developing the stadiums and infrastructure for the 2022 Qatar World Cup. 

Here, gross violations of human rights and international labour law throw up serious questions about the moral ramifications of designing projects in such a country. How can architects balance the benefit of bringing a smooth, shiny new project against the human cost required to produce it?

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Nautilus Magazine: How Designers Engineer Luck Into Video Games

Fairness is the unspoken promise of most video games. Controlled by an omniscient and omnipotent designer, a video game has the capacity to be ultimately just, and players expect that it will be so. (Designers also have an incentive to be even-handed: A game that always beats you is a game you’ll soon stop playing.) And yet, when video games truly play by the rules, the player can feel cheated. Sid Meier, the designer of the computer game Civilization, in which players steer a nation through history, politics, and warfare, quickly learned to modify the game’s odds in order to redress this psychological wrinkle. Extensive play-testing revealed that a player who was told that he had a 33 percent chance of success in a battle but then failed to defeat his opponent three times in a row would become irate and incredulous. (In Civilization, you can replay the same battle over and over until you win, albeit incurring costs with every loss.) So Meier altered the game to more closely match human cognitive biases; if your odds of winning a battle were 1 in 3, the game guaranteed that you’d win on the third attempt—a misrepresentation of true probability that nevertheless gave the illusion of fairness. Call it the Lucky Paradox: Lucky is fun, but too lucky is unreal. The resulting, on-going negotiation among game players and designers must count as one of our most abstract collective negotiations. [...]

Olaf Haraldsson, an 11th-century Norwegian king, once wagered a kingdom in a faith-testing game of dice. Olaf was locked in a territorial dispute with the king of Sweden over the island of Hising; eventually the two agreed to settle the matter with a dice throw. The Swedish king rolled two sixes, the highest possible score, and said there was no point in continuing the game. Olaf insisted on taking his throw; a recent convert to Christianity, he was certain that God would steer the dice in his favor. His faith was vindicated with double sixes. The men continued to take turns throwing their dice, twelve after twelve. The matter was finally settled when, during Olaf’s final throw, one of the dice split in two, to show both a six and a one, winning him the kingdom on an unprecedentedly lucky 13.[...]

“As soon as the player becomes aware of any sort of pseudo-randomness, it risks undermining the joy of getting lucky,” said Paul Sottosanti, a designer at Riot Games, publisher of League of Legends, the world’s most-played online game. Games in which you’re given seemingly random rewards often employ a device known as a “pity timer,” Sottosanti explained, which guarantees that something seemingly fortunate will happen to you after a sustained period of misfortune—anything from 10 minutes to an hour, depending on the game. In World of Warcraft, every time players defeat a foe, they hope to receive a “Legendary”—one of the game’s highly powerful weapons. Legendaries have an infinitesimally small chance of being “dropped,” but are also on a pity timer. “Fatigue can set in where a player is just waiting for the pity timer to kick in,” Sottosanti said. “The primary emotion they feel upon finally finding a Legendary is often not joy but relief, perhaps tinged with sadness.”[...]

Natasha Schüll is an associate professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, and the author of Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. When a player feels favored by luck, she said, “you can pin it to certain neurotransmitters spiking, and you know dopamine is released. Even the compulsive search and hunt for recreating that sense of euphoria is driven by the reward center in the brain.” Dopamine’s power to turn us into luck-chasers can be seen most vividly in the effects of some drugs used to treat Parkinson’s disease, which, in flooding the brain with dopamine, have been shown to turn patients into gambling addicts.  

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The Conversation: We need to stop conflating Islam with terrorism

As a New Zealander academic, my work deals with questions related to Islam and multiculturalism. In the past, I have argued both that Wahhabism – the Sunni fundamentalist form of Islam practised in Saudi Arabia – is not compatible with liberal democratic values, unlike some other Islamic schools of thought.

As Muslims in the West come under attack, it is essential to understand and distinguish between these different kinds of Islamic thought and how the West responds to them. W⁠h⁠i⁠l⁠e⁠ ⁠t⁠h⁠e⁠r⁠e⁠ ⁠i⁠s⁠ ⁠a⁠ ⁠p⁠r⁠o⁠b⁠l⁠e⁠m⁠ ⁠a⁠t⁠ ⁠t⁠h⁠e⁠ ⁠g⁠l⁠o⁠b⁠a⁠l⁠ ⁠l⁠e⁠v⁠e⁠l⁠ ⁠w⁠i⁠t⁠h⁠ ⁠e⁠x⁠t⁠r⁠e⁠m⁠e⁠ ⁠S⁠u⁠n⁠n⁠i⁠ ⁠m⁠i⁠l⁠i⁠t⁠a⁠n⁠c⁠y⁠,⁠ the fact is this is a⁠ ⁠m⁠i⁠n⁠o⁠r⁠i⁠t⁠y⁠ ⁠p⁠h⁠e⁠n⁠o⁠m⁠e⁠n⁠o⁠n⁠ ⁠w⁠i⁠t⁠h⁠i⁠n⁠ ⁠I⁠s⁠l⁠a⁠m⁠ – and one that ⁠i⁠s⁠ ⁠m⁠o⁠r⁠e⁠ ⁠o⁠f⁠ ⁠a⁠ ⁠t⁠h⁠r⁠e⁠a⁠t⁠ ⁠t⁠o⁠ ⁠M⁠u⁠s⁠l⁠i⁠m⁠s⁠ ⁠i⁠n⁠ ⁠t⁠h⁠e⁠ ⁠M⁠i⁠d⁠d⁠l⁠e⁠ ⁠E⁠a⁠s⁠t⁠ ⁠t⁠h⁠a⁠n⁠ it is ⁠t⁠o⁠ ⁠W⁠e⁠s⁠t⁠e⁠r⁠n⁠ ⁠n⁠a⁠t⁠i⁠o⁠n⁠s⁠.⁠[...]

By conflating Wahhabism and mainstream Islam, the far-right is creating and reinforcing the strength of its own enemy. Alienating and harassing Muslims in the West runs the risk of radicalising some of them. And making the argument that Islam is incompatible with democracy and human rights suggest that the Wahhabi reading of Islam is in fact the correct one.  [...]

Historically, right-wing policy makers in some Western nations have reinforced the economic and military power of Wahhabi ideologues by creating alliances with proponents of the doctrine in places such as Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan. Even Israel (usually considered as a bastion of democratic values in the Middle East) is now cosying up to the Wahhabi kingdom because of their mutual fear of Iran.  

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VICE: Nazis Explain Why They Became Nazis

Radtke's letter was just one of 683 personal accounts sent to Abel in the years after Hitler was elected in 1933. Last January, the Hoover Institution – a public policy think-tank based at Stanford University in California – published 584 of those letters online. These personal testimonies are not only useful in understanding why so many people were attracted to the Nazis in the 1930s, but also provide insight into the minds of the millions of Germans today who are still turning to far-right political parties, like the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).  [...]

Many of the letter writers were happy to see the end of the Weimar Republic, which was founded in 1919 after the German defeat in the First World War, and which they blamed for the economic state the country was left in after the war and for the Great Depression. The writers were excited by Hitler's promise to introduce strict political order; Bernard Horstmann, a miner from Bottrop in western Germany, wrote that he thought the previous government had promoted "the betrayal of the people and our fatherland". [...]

At the time, left-wing groups tried to counter the surge in nationalist support. Fights would often break out between Communist Party members and thugs from the Nazi paramilitary wing, the Sturmabteilung (SA), while some more liberal groups called for the boycott of shops owned by Nazi Party members. But that only seemed to make Hitler and the Nazis more appealing to many. "It was because Adolf Hitler and his party faced so much criticism and resistance among the press that I became particularly interested in joining their movement," wrote a party member named Friedrich Jörns.  

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The Guardian: Calls grow for public inquiry into Brexit

Bob Kerslake, the former head of the civil service, said an inquiry was needed into “the biggest humiliation since Suez, certainly since the IMF crisis [in 1976]”. The cross-party peer said he believed the civil service “is both expecting and preparing for this”. [...]

Peter Ricketts, the former national security adviser and former head civil servant in the Foreign Office, cited the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war. “Chilcot took a long time, but it was cathartic,” he said. “The report was widely seen to have done the job and I think you can say the British system is better for it. I think the handling of Brexit has been such a failure of the process of government, with such wide ramifications, that there needs to be a searching public inquiry.[...]

Many figures are already pointing to May’s early decision to set out strict red lines that seriously limited Britain’s ability to negotiate. John Kerr, Britain’s former EU ambassador who drafted the article 50 process of leaving the bloc, said: “Those red lines laid down in 2016 emerged with no consultation with the country, the devolved assemblies, parliament or with the cabinet. Then there was the decision to trigger article, 50 still with no agreement in cabinet of where we wanted to end up.”

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The Guardian: The European Union has bigger problems to deal with than Brexit

The EU’s biggest problem is that its economic model has aged alongside its population. Europe has plenty of world-class companies but, unlike the US, none of them were set up in the past 25 years. In Europe’s golden age, Volkswagen was a rival to Ford, and Siemens could go toe to toe with General Electric. But there is no European Google, Facebook or Amazon and in the emerging technologies of the fourth Industrial Revolution, such as artificial intelligence, Europe is nowhere. [...]

When plans for the euro were being drawn up 30 years ago, the assumption was that the single currency would make the single market work more efficiently and so generate faster growth. It hasn’t happened. The performance of the eurozone countries has got worse not better, but so much political capital has been invested in the monetary union project that there is an unwillingness to accept as much. [...]

Italy has tired of waiting for monetary union to deliver. Its banks are in even worse shape than Germany’s, Rome has no control over monetary policy and its attempts to boost growth by running a bigger budget deficit have fallen foul of Europe’s hardline fiscal rules. Last week, Italy’s government announced it would be the first EU country to take part in China’s Belt and Road initiative – an attempt to link Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Europe with a series of ports, railways, bridges and other infrastructure projects. Italy’s willingness to take part in the attempt to recreate the old silk road reflects its desperation to revive its economy by any means available. It also reflects Europe’s diminished status in the global pecking order.  

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Quartz: Japan court rules that married couples must use the same last name

Last year, a group of plaintiffs including Yoshihisa Aono, CEO of software firm Cybozu, and three other plaintiffs filed suit seeking ¥2.2 million ($20,000) damages for what they called “psychological damage” for being forced to use their spouse’s names, and the costs of the expensive bureaucratic process of changing one’s name on official documents. The plaintiffs also claimed that by excluding Japanese married to foreigners from that law, the law is discriminatory and therefore unconstitutional.[...]

Japanese couples can only revert to using their own names after they divorce—a law that prompted one Tokyo woman interviewed last year by Quartz to divorce her husband in order to use her own name, instead of her husband’s, even though the two remain a couple. Another woman, who only has sisters, told the Japan Times last year (paywall) that her parents only wanted her to marry a man who would be willing to take her family name in order to continue the family name.

The court’s ruling is the first on the matter since 2015, when five women challenged the law on the grounds of gender discrimination. Japan’s top court ruled then that the law in question, Article 750 of the civil code, would be upheld as it did not harm ”individual dignity and equality between men and women,” and because maiden names can still be used informally.

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Jacobin Magazine: AMLO’s First One Hundred Days

Whereas former presidents restricted press access to a combination of carefully scripted public events and fluffball interviews with friendly media, AMLO gives a morning press conference every day for upwards of two hours at a time. Far from saturating his image and subjecting him to debilitating attacks — the warnings of high-paid handlers the world over — the mañaneras, as they have come to be known, have set the agenda for both the nation’s politics and its front pages. In a sign of the times, the archive of past conferences is now available on Spotify.

AMLO’s results in the policy terrain have, inevitably, been more nuanced than his masterful public image maneuvers. As promised with disciplined insistence during the campaign, AMLO wasted no time in attacking the kleptocratic state inherited from Peña Nieto, lowering the bloated salaries of top bureaucracy, reforming the bidding process for government tenders, and launching a war on the multibillion-dollar industry of gasoline thievery that literally fuels the nation’s criminal economy. He’s also quickly rolled out a series of social programs, including a modest universal pension for over-68s and those with disabilities, a scholarship program to allow young people who are neither studying nor working (known in Mexico as “ninis“) to receive training and apprenticeships, a system of microcredits for areas of high marginalization, and a centralization of the nation’s scattershot health care system with the promise of phasing in some form of universal coverage over two years.[...]

Other aspects of AMLO’s relationship with the US, however, have been less forthright. Since taking power, he has accommodated — to a fault — Trump’s border policy, seeking to provide visas and jobs to Central Americans in an attempt to curb migration, allowing asylum seekers to be returned to Mexico while their cases are processed with only a mild statement of disagreement, and refusing to speak out against both the American president’s inhumane policy of family separation and his repeated insistence on building a border wall. AMLO is clearly banking on behind-the-scenes persuasion standing a better chance of success than a high-profile, asymmetric war of words. But, although Trump has been unusually measured when referring to his Mexican counterpart, it is unclear what else Mexico is gaining by opting for the soft sell. [...]

On February 14, in another awkward miscommunication, a presidential order announced the cessation of governmental subsidies to all social organizations, unions, civil, and citizen movements. At stake was $30 million pesos in direct government subsidies. In the neoliberal era, the leeching of core state functions to an unelected, unaccountable army of NGOS and “civil society organizations” has represented a deliberate strategy of undermining the state. In that context, AMLO’s decree was clearly in the right. “They created this idea of civil society, satanizing and stigmatizing the government. If the work is done by the government it won’t be efficient and they’ll rob it all, so better to give it to us [civil-society organizations],” he stated at a press conference.

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The New York Review of Books: The Impact of #MeToo in France: An Interview with Lénaïg Bredoux

It is enormous. The balance of power has changed. People can no longer minimize these issues. During the Baupin trial, the effect was evident. There are words that can’t be used anymore. His defense said that he was an obnoxious seducer but that he wasn’t violent. But the media have covered the trial in ways that I didn’t expect. For instance, text messages by the women who accused him were presented in court. The women answer his texts, or they don’t rebuff him, or even sometimes go along, and they explain that they didn’t know how to get out of a bad situation—the media believed them. [...]

We must discuss what qualifies as consent and place that at the heart of the conversation. How do we manage to have relationships free from male domination? It’s not simple. We must discuss how women internalize this domination. We can discuss if legal action is the solution or if we need to find measures to prevent these things from happening in the first place. [...]

French law has a pretty narrow definition of what sexual harassment is. It is very hard to prove. That seems easier in the United States. I do think it protects many women. In companies in the United States, factory workers have denounced sexual harassment. I am not exactly sure what tools they can use here to do the same thing.

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The New York Review of Books: A Minister, a General, & the Militias: Libya’s Shifting Balance of Power

Military and financial support from foreign patrons—the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, France, and Russia—has been essential to his drive. For its part, the United States has long eyed him warily and has officially backed the Tripoli government, even while maintaining an intelligence and special operations presence among his forces in Benghazi. Increasingly, however, US diplomats see Haftar as crucial to moving Libya beyond a drawn-out “transition” period. Washington is now backing a United Nations effort to try and convert his campaign into momentum for a dialogue conference and national elections later this year. [...]

Central to this effort are the pacts and alliances that Haftar has negotiated with the Libyan communities that lay in his path. Some towns and tribes allied with Haftar out of desperation at the impotence of Tripoli-based Government of National Accord. Others did so to obtain leverage against local rivals. This was certainly the case in the desert south, where crime and economic misery created a vacuum that Haftar’s forces filled with cash and supplies—even as they stoked communal tensions by favoring some tribes over others. In western Libya, towns are divided, with some armed groups having aligned themselves with his forces even while nominally still under the authority of his rival, the government in Tripoli. [...]

Another seeming contradiction is the general’s aversion to Islamists. “We don’t need Sharia [Islamic law] here,” he told me in 2014. “Sharia is already in our hearts.” And yet, adherents of a conservative, literalist interpretation of Islam known as Salafism are his staunchest military supporters. My hosts in Sabratha were also Salafists, including the owner of the farm and the commander of the militia, a man named Musa al-Najem. [...]

I asked him about whether he and his fellow Salafists followed Haftar, but they demurred, citing the Salafi doctrinal tenet about obeying the local political authority in one’s geographic area—which, these days, looks like Haftar. It is a belief that forms the bedrock of a Salafi current often described as “quietism,” nurtured with Saudi petrodollars to eschew overt political activism. In Libya, however, these Salafists are hardly apolitical: they are a rising force, in schools and mosques, but also in the policing sector, where they patrol against illicit drugs and alcohol—as well as activities they deem un-Islamic, such as art exhibitions. They have also fought the terrorists of the Islamic State and are opposed to rival political Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood.

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Political Critique: Could Slovakia Elect A (Somewhat) Progressive President?

Interesting times have come upon Slovakia: while the mass gatherings remembering that it has been a year since the murder of investigative journalist Ján Kuciak still chanted slogans protesting against the rule of the SMER-SD party (social democrats in name only, in reality your garden variety populists with a conservative bent), they only served as a sad punctuation of the fact nothing really happened apart from the resignation of the then-PM. Robert Fico, apparently finding himself without anything to do, decided that ruling the country should be followed up by being appointed a judge of the Constitutional Court after having brilliantly convinced the Parliament that 13,5 is, in fact, more than 15 when it comes to the required number of years spent working as lawyer. Almost immediately afterward, the genius mathematician’s judicial career was nipped in the bud by the current President, who – not unreasonably – pointed out that the function has a moral dimension and a man forced to resign over mass public protests concerning the process of investigating a murder might not be the best candidate for a judge. Fico responded by having his party boycott the nominations of all the other candidates, leaving the Constitutional court effectively paralyzed as the four remaining judges is a number insufficient to reach a verdict in most issues. Which might pose some problems as the Slovaks are about to elect a new President and the Constitution’s wording regarding the amount of votes required to win the first round is unclear. And the only one with the authority to re-interpret that is, you guessed it, the Constitutional Court, currently lacking the manpower do anything about the mess thanks to a vengeful ex-PM. Interesting times, interesting times. [...]

52% is an optimistic estimate, especially for a liberal candidate in mostly conservative Slovakia. But there are several factors playing in Čaputová’s favor. One, people are disillusioned with the current government as the Ján Kuciak anniversary protests showed, and Čaputová has no connections to that; her biggest claim to fame before the elections was environmental activism, specifically (and more shockingly, successfully) fighting against an illegal landfill built by a business connected to both SMER and Kuciak-implicated businessman Kočner – according to her website, anyway. Two, she is potentially acceptable to voters who do not necessarily share her views but are rightly terrified of having their country represented by a conspiracy freak or a neo-Nazi. Three, she is the only candidate openly supportive of minorities; such trustworthy sources as the Czech mutation of Sputnik frequently accuse her of such horrible crimes as supporting LGBT equality and pro-immigration propaganda. [...]

See, the President of Slovakia is purely representative (unless they pull a Zeman, may his hemorrhoids explode, and start overstepping their authority), and a lot of their power is the power to draw attention and open public discussion. Slovakia needs this; we’re talking a country that has decided to incorporate the frankly medieval „traditional“ definition of marriage into its Constitution as late as 2014. A President sympathetic to the plights of minorities could finally draw out the issues “we just don’t talk about” like discrimination of minorities to public attention – kicking and screaming, if necessary.

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FiveThirtyEight: What Does Beto O’Rourke Believe?

Those stances from O’Rourke include: 

Supporting the abolition of for-profit and private prisons.

Supporting a ban on so-called assault weapons. Supporting the elimination of bail sentences that require people to pay money to be released from jail ahead of trial.

Criticizing not only Trump’s border wall, but also some of the existing barriers on the U.S.-Mexico border and the increase in border security spending over the last decade. (“Yes, absolutely, I’d take the wall down,” he said in February, referring to the border fencing in the El Paso region.)

Supporting the impeachment of President Trump (O’Rourke took this stance during his Senate campaign. I doubt that he will push this issue during his presidential run, but it was somewhat surprising that he adopted it last year. Other Democrats, like 2020 hopeful Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, didn’t take this stance even as they were running in more liberal states than Texas.).

Supporting a proposal to allow anyone who wants to enroll in a Medicare-like insurance plan the option to do so.

Supporting an increase of the minimum wage to $15 per hour.

Supporting marijuana legalization.

Opposing the death penalty.

Supporting NFL players kneeling during the national anthem in protest of racism.

Describing himself as benefiting from “white privilege.” [...]

O’Rourke has also adopted some bipartisan rhetorical flourishes, emphasizing that he wants politics to be less divisive and more focused on finding common ground. And no one should ignore his fairly centrist political history. He wasn’t known as a liberal firebrand and often eschewed liberal positions during his political rise in Texas. In Congress, his voting record put him to the right of the average House Democrat in 2017-18. He was a member of the New Democrat Coalition, a more centrist wing of the party. [...]

I might classify O’Rourke as fairly liberal on issues around culture and identity and left-leaning but maybe not particularly liberal — compared with, say, Sanders or Elizabeth Warren — on economic issues. (Cory Booker and Kamala Harris probably fall in this camp with O’Rourke.) Part of what’s confusing in assessing O’Rourke’s ideology is that the results are different depending on what benchmark you choose. Is he liberal compared with previous Democratic presidential candidates? Yes. Is he liberal compared with the activists dominating the discourse in the party now? No. [...]

And it’s not just O’Rourke’s pro-immigration and pro-Latino stands that would likely be heavily contested in a general election. Ted Cruz, whom O’Rourke unsuccessfully challenged in the Texas Senate race last year, highlighted O’Rourke’s defense of NFL player protests during the 2018 campaign, suggesting that the Republican thought the issue would help him more than it would help O’Rourke. And we haven’t seen a recent presidential candidate have to defend opposition to the death penalty (neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton ran for president as death penalty opponents). But O’Rourke seems to have left himself little wiggle room by saying that his stance is based on “moral grounds.”

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Politico: EU citizens’ verdict on Brussels: Good for peace but out of touch

According to the survey, a majority of Europeans (a median of 62 percent) hold positive views of the EU. Even in Poland and Hungary, whose governments have recently been at odds with Brussels over rule-of-law concerns, a majority of respondents approve of the EU: 57 percent in Hungary, and in Poland, 72 percent — by far the highest approval ratings among the 10 countries surveyed.[...]

Yet while a majority of respondents said the EU promotes peace, prosperity and democratic values, they also see Brussels as out of touch and inefficient. A median 62 percent said the EU "does not understand the needs of its citizens."

Meanwhile, as the default date for Britain's exit from the EU draws closer, the poll found that nearly two-thirds (a median of 62 percent) do not think the EU handled Brexit well. Less than half approve of the EU's approach to economic issues.

On the economy and Brexit, attitudes vary from country to country: About half of Germans approve of the EU's approach to these issues, for instance, while only a third of Spaniards do. [...]

A median of 77 percent of respondents said they support taking in refugees, with more than 80 percent of people in Spain, the Netherlands, Germany and Sweden are ready to welcome refugees. But only 49 percent in Poland and 32 percent in Hungary agree. Similarly, just 5 percent of Hungarians said they believe immigrants are making their country stronger, compared to 62 percent in the U.K. and Sweden.

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Vox: New Zealand prime minister on mosque shooter: “You will never hear me mention his name”

“He sought many things from his act of terror, but one was notoriety,” Ardern said. “And that is why you will never hear me mention his name.” She added, “He is a terrorist, he is a criminal, he is an extremist. But he will, when I speak, be nameless.”

In the past few years, there’s been a growing push for not just leaders like Ardern but the media and the general public as well to do what she’s doing here. The concern: Mass shooters are carrying out these horrific tragedies in part for fame and notoriety. Naming them widely in public discussions and media coverage gives them what they want — and signals to future would-be perpetrators what they can expect in the wake of an attack. [...]

But to do this, more people will need to get on board. Media around the world has widely reported the New Zealand shooter’s name and details from his manifesto, including, in some cases, linking directly to the manifesto itself. Until that changes, there will still be a strong incentive for potential copycats.

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BBC4 Thinking Allowed: Spectacular Cities

Spectacular urbanisation: The world’s tallest building is in Dubai and the 2022 World Cup in soccer will be played in fabulous Qatar facilities. But what role do the sensational cities of the Arabian Peninsula play in urban development across the Earth? Laurie Taylor talks to Harvey Molotch, Professor of Sociology at New York University and to Davide Ponzini , Associate Professor of Urban Planning at Politecnico di Milano, Italy. Also, Natalie Koch, Associate Professor of Geography at Syracuse University, asks why autocrats in resource rich nations build spectacular new capital cities.

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The Guardian Longreads: Concrete: the most destructive material on Earth

He said the amount of concrete laid per square metre in Japan is 30 times the amount in America, and that the volume is almost exactly the same. “So we’re talking about a country the size of California laying the same amount of concrete [as the entire US]. Multiply America’s strip malls and urban sprawl by 30 to get a sense of what’s going on in Japan.” [...]

That is true of all countries at some stage. During their early stages of development, heavyweight construction projects are beneficial like a boxer putting on muscle. But for already mature economies, it is harmful like an aged athlete pumping ever stronger steroids to ever less effect. During the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, Keynesian economic advisers told the Japanese government the best way to stimulate GDP growth was to dig a hole in the ground and fill it. Preferably with cement. The bigger the hole, the better. This meant profits and jobs. Of course, it is much easier to mobilise a nation to do something that improves people’s lives, but either way concrete is likely to be part of the arrangement. This was the thinking behind Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, which is celebrated in the US as a recession-busting national project but might also be described as the biggest ever concrete-pouring exercise up until that point. The Hoover Dam alone required 3.3m cubic metres, then a world record. Construction firms claimed it would outlast human civilisation. [...]

Empty, crumbling structures are not just an eyesore, but a drain on the economy and a waste of productive land. Ever greater construction requires ever more cement and steel factories, discharging ever more pollution and carbon dioxide. As the Chinese landscape architect Yu Kongjian has pointed out, it also suffocates the ecosystems – fertile soil, self-cleansing streams, storm-resisting mangrove swamps, flood-preventing forests – on which human beings ultimately depend. It is a threat to what he calls “eco-security”. [...]

Yu has been consulted by government officials, who are increasingly aware of the brittleness of the current Chinese model of growth. But their scope for movement is limited. The initial momentum of a concrete economy is always followed by inertia in concrete politics. The president has promised a shift of economic focus away from belching heavy industries and towards high-tech production in order to create a “beautiful country” and an “ecological civilisation”, and the government is now trying to wind down from the biggest construction boom in human history, but Xi cannot let the construction sector simply fade away, because it employs more than 55 million workers – almost the entire population of the UK. Instead, China is doing what countless other nations have done, exporting its environmental stress and excess capacity overseas. [...]

Although the dangers are increasingly apparent, this pattern continues to repeat itself. India and Indonesia are just entering their high-concrete phase of development. Over the next 40 years, the newly built floor area in the world is expected to double. Some of that will bring health benefits. The environmental scientist Vaclav Smil estimates the replacement of mud floors with concrete in the world’s poorest homes could cut parasitic diseases by nearly 80%. But each wheelbarrow of concrete also tips the world closer to ecological collapse.

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The New Yorker: The Magical Thinking Around Brexit

Instead, the next two weeks will test how deeply a nation can immerse itself in self-delusion. As a matter of European and U.K. law, Brexit is set to happen on March 29th. Members of the E.U. are frustrated because, even though they have spent two years negotiating a withdrawal agreement with Prime Minister Theresa May, Parliament has rejected it twice, most recently last Tuesday, which means that there is a risk of a chaotic, off-the-cliff No Deal Brexit, without determining new rules for trade, travel, or such basic matters as drivers’ licenses. On Wednesday, Parliament passed a motion saying that it didn’t want a No Deal Brexit, but—in an absurdity within an absurdity—didn’t legally change the deadline. On Thursday, May got Parliament’s approval to ask the E.U. for an extension. (Seven of her own Cabinet members voted against her.) But all of the other twenty-seven member states must approve it, and several have said that they will not do so unless the U.K. comes up with an actual plan for what it will do with the added time. And should the extension be short, or long enough to allow a real reconsideration of whether Brexit is even worth doing? The mood of many European leaders was captured by Mark Rutte, the Prime Minister of the Netherlands, who said that he didn’t see the point of just allowing the U.K. to keep “whining on for months.” [...]

There has been a failure, among Brexiteers, to see how Ireland has thrived as part of the E.U.; with the principle of free movement of people and goods fortifying the peace agreement and Dublin’s emergence as a business center, the E.U.’s ideals of shared peace and prosperity have been realized there in a distinct way. At this point, Varadkar, who is forty, gay, and the son of a doctor from Mumbai and a nurse from County Waterford, has more clout in Brussels than May does. [...]

Those words should resonate for Americans. The Brexit debate has been marked by particular British eccentricities, but the tendencies it appeals to—xenophobia, the belief in a lost, past greatness—cross many borders. The adherents of such movements may see the floundering of Brexit as a reason to rethink their assumptions—or, more dangerously, as proof that élites are conspiring against them. The populist dream subsists in an increasingly troubled sleep.

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Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell: The Origin of Consciousness – How Unaware Things Became Aware

Consciousness is perhaps the biggest riddle in nature. In the first part of this three part video series, we explore the origins of consciousness and take a closer look on how unaware things became aware.

New York Magazine: Beyond 'The One': Exploring Modern Polyamory

In 2019, who gets to define love?

According to a growing number of Americans, love today means not limiting yourself--or your partner--to just one. Polyamory, or the practice of intimate relationships with more than one partner is on the rise.

A 2016 national poll found that 31 percent of women and 38 percent of men thought their ideal relationship would include some form of consensual non-monogamy. But despite this interest, polyamory is still very much stigmatized.

"Beyond the One: Exploring Modern Polyamory" is a short documentary that uncovers American ideals of love and partnership by following individuals who dare to live outside our romantic norms.

This Valentine's Day, follow two women, author Sophie Lucido Johnson and YouTuber Sharon Rosenburg, as they practice polyamory and in so doing, challenge what it means to find "The One."

Al Jazeera: New Zealand cabinet agrees on tougher gun laws in principle: PM

The New Zealand prime minister also announced an inquiry into the mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch on Friday that left 50 people dead.

Ardern said the details are still to be worked out but the changes to the country's firearms laws will be announced in full within 10 days.

She also said that while the man charged with carrying out the shootings was not a New Zealand citizen, it could not ignore the problem of white supremacy supporters within the country. [...]

Facebook said it removed 1.5 million videos of the shootings during the first 24 hours after the massacre. [...]

Frustration was building among the families of victims as under Islam it is custom to conduct burials within 24 hours, but bodies will not be released until post-mortems are carried out.

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The Guardian Longreads: How the US has hidden its empire – podcast

The problem with the logo map, however, is that it isn’t right. Its shape does not match the country’s legal borders. Most obviously, the logo map excludes Hawaii and Alaska, which became states in 1959 and now appear on virtually all published maps of the country. But it is also missing Puerto Rico, which, although not a state, has been part of the country since 1899. When have you ever seen a map of the US that had Puerto Rico on it? Or American Samoa, Guam, the US Virgin Islands, the Northern Marianas or any of the other smaller islands that the US has annexed over the years? [...]

The maps and census reports that mainlanders saw presented them with a selectively cropped portrait of their country. The result was profound confusion. “Most people in this country, including educated people, know little or nothing about our overseas possessions,” concluded a governmental report written during the second world war. “As a matter of fact, a lot of people do not know that we have overseas possessions. They are convinced that only ‘foreigners’, such as the British, have an ‘empire’. Americans are sometimes amazed to hear that we, too, have an ‘empire’.” [...]

Then there are the military interventions. The years since the second world war have brought the US military to country after country. The big wars are well-known: Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. But there has also been a constant stream of smaller engagements. Since 1945, US armed forces have been deployed abroad for conflicts or potential conflicts 211 times in 67 countries. Call it peacekeeping if you want, or call it imperialism. But clearly this is not a country that has kept its hands to itself. [...]

It wasn’t until I travelled to Manila, researching something else entirely, that it clicked. To get to the archives, I would travel by “jeepney”, a transit system originally based on repurposed US army jeeps. I boarded in a section of Metro Manila where the streets are named after US colleges (Yale, Columbia, Stanford, Notre Dame), states and cities (Chicago, Detroit, New York, Brooklyn, Denver), and presidents (Jefferson, Van Buren, Roosevelt, Eisenhower). When I would arrive at my destination, the Ateneo de Manila University, one of the country’s most prestigious schools, I would hear students speaking what sounded to my Pennsylvanian ears to be virtually unaccented English. Empire might be hard to make out from the mainland, but from the sites of colonial rule themselves, it is impossible to miss.

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The Guardian Longreads: Spain’s Watergate: inside the corruption scandal that changed a nation

Besides, most people had other things on their minds, not least the prospect of making money. In the housing boom that lasted from the mid-1990s to 2007, Spain built more homes than France, Germany and the UK combined. And it wasn’t just housing. Towns with populations of tens of thousands built airports, while new roads and high-speed rail lines spread like spiderwebs across the country. And with each development came the opportunity for unscrupulous politicians and businessmen like Correa to rig contracts. Today, many of these dodgy housing developments and infrastructure projects stand abandoned, ruins of an age of excess. Trying to wean Spain off building, quipped one economist following the crash, was like quitting hard drugs. [...]

The revelations came as the economic crisis began to take hold, galvanising anger about corruption. In 2011, unemployment reached 22%. Almost one in two young people were out of work. In May 2011, protesters, most of them young, began occupying plazas in Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia to protest bank bailouts, austerity and corruption. They were known as the indignados, the outraged ones. More than 6 million people took part over weeks of protests. National surveys showed overwhelming support for the movement, which transcended traditional party lines. A generation of young people with few job prospects began questioning the assumptions that had underpinned Spain’s young democracy. “Gürtel was the ‘emperor has no clothes’ moment for Spain,” said Carlos Delclós, a former indignados activist and author of a book on the movement and its political inheritor, Podemos. “Gürtel made it clear that it was not specific cases of corruption but that it was systemic. That corruption was the system.” [...]

Between 2012 and 2014, at the height of austerity, it seemed as if everywhere you looked some previously respectable representative was on trial for stealing public money. Even the royal family, it seemed, were at it: a corruption scandal centred on the then king’s son-in-law, Iñaki Urdangarin, threw the monarchy into disrepute. In 2014, the once popular King Juan Carlos abdicated, citing health reasons, amid a sharp decline in popularity. (Last year, Urdangarin was sentenced to six years in jail for tax fraud and embezzlement.) [...]

For the PP, the verdict was devastating: the party itself was convicted as a direct beneficiary of the Gürtel scheme. The court found that ever since the party was founded, it had maintained a parallel accounting system to collect money from kickbacks that could be used to fund the party. The court said the testimony of Rajoy and other PP figures who denied knowing about the existence of the slush fund were “not credible”. The reputational damage was far worse than the actual punishment, which amounted to a fine of just €240,000. (The sentence would have been considerably harsher if the case was tried today, after a 2015 change in the law made illegal party financing a crime.)

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The Guardian Today in Focus: Trump, Brexit and the rise of populism

A team of researchers around the world has been working with the Guardian to measure exactly how global politics is changing – and becoming more populist. From Donald Trump in the US to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, from Narendra Modi in India to Theresa May in the UK, the researchers analysed hundreds of speeches, and what they found surprised them.

The Guardian’s Paul Lewis tells Anushka Asthana about the two-decade surge in populist rhetoric that has upended the global political landscape.

Also: writer and broadcaster Sam Delaney on the problem with men and mental health.

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99 Percent Invisible: The Known Unknown

After the war, Railton advocated for a grave bearing the body of a single soldier to bring the impossibly large tragedy down to a human scale. The soldier’s anonymity would allow each person who came to the grave to project whatever was most important to them onto the mystery. It didn’t matter if you wanted to honor all those who served or merely those who died, those who volunteered or those who were drafted, or even whether you were for the war or against it. Everyone was free to mourn in their own way. [...]

The remains in the tomb are not even technically referred to as an “unknown soldier.” No one knows which service they’re from, so instead of “soldier” or “sailor” or “marine,” they’re simply referred to as the “Unknown.” In fact, anything that narrows the scope of who this person could be — including where exactly they were found is purposely withheld from the public in order to make sure that they represent every possible service member. It’s one of the reasons the tomb has become one of the Washington D.C. area’s biggest tourist attractions. [...]

At first, there were a lot of Unknowns to work with. In World War I there were around 1,648 Unknowns, in World War II there were 8,526, the Korean war there were 848. But thanks to improved battlefield evacuation tactics, the Vietnam War produced only four sets of unidentified remains that could potentially go into the tomb. Then, as more information about those remains was discovered, only one set of remains remained unknown. That single set of remains was known only as X-26, but his actual name was Michael Blassie.

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Wisecrack: Is BANKSY Deep or Dumb? – Wisecrack Edition

Banksy may be one of the most well-known artists in the world - but is he deep or dumb? We'll explore Banksy's influences and goals to see if he lives up to all the hype.

Quartz: What the study of animal emotions shows us about being human

Primatologist Frans de Waal has coined a term for the rejection of anthropomorphism, dubbing it “anthropodenial.” In his new book, Mama’s Last Hug, he argues that anthropodenial—discounting the complexity of other animals— persists because we’ve been able to justify a lot of cruel behavior by claiming that animals don’t really feel like we do.[...]

Our brains are similarly structured, with the same neurotransmitters. The differences between a fish and a person’s physicality and environment account for the fact that our inner lives aren’t identical—but just because a fish lives in water and doesn’t seem to grieve like you and me doesn’t mean the fish has no mental life or self-awareness, or sense of finality.[...]

We have no problem acknowledging that humans are emotional creatures, and that our feelings often stem from knowledge. For example, when a loved one dies, we grieve because we know we won’t see them again—the knowledge informs the sense of sadness. But when it comes to animals, scientists have long been reluctant to attribute depth to emotional expression, relegating everything to primal drives instead. [...]

Amongst some professionals, there’s still resistance to embracing our animal brethren and acknowledging we’re family. De Waal believes it’s because seeing the full range and depth of animal feelings will expose our own animality to us. He notes that we refer to the human drive for power as “leadership” and don’t discuss the fact that we are a hierarchical species and some of us want to dominate, just like some apes want to climb to the top of ape culture. When de Waal once discussed the human power drive at a psychology conference he was taken aback by the negative response. He writes, “You’d think I had shown them pornography!”

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The Guardian: The Islamophobia that led to the Christchurch shooting must be confronted

The temptation is going to be to declare the suspect, who livestreamed himself on Facebook shooting dozens of Muslims while they gathered for Friday prayer, a madman. It would be comforting to think so. Because then we could put aside any recognition that the discourse he appears to have bought into, evident from the manifesto he posted a link to on his now-deleted Twitter account, goes far beyond simply him. [...]

After the 7 July bombings happened in London in 2005, I was appointed as deputy convenor of a UK government working group on radicalisation to look at precisely which factors led to people becoming swept up in extremism. We examined the role of ideas and ideology, and concluded that they played a significant part – that we could not simply cast aside the importance of extremist discourse and dogma. There were, and are, other factors: political dissent, exclusion, and so on – but it would be wrong to minimise the extent to which ideas energised people, and provided their rationalisation for violent acts.

By the same token, it would be outrageous to fail to recognise that the unbridled, nativistic, anti-Muslim bigotry that has become so widespread in our societies has nothing to do with this attack in New Zealand. New Zealand is a part of the west. And, as far as the manifesto is concerned, the west writ large is subject to a Muslim invasion. That sentiment is not limited to a far-right extremist with a gun in a mosque, killing Muslim worshippers. It is popularised by scores of people in far more mainstream arenas.

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Quartz: Out-of-work US men are unhappier than men almost anywhere else

Working-age men who have dropped out of the US workforce were found to be more stressed and sadder than their peers in both poor and rich countries, according to a new study released by the Brookings Institution. The unhappiness gap between out-of-work men and those with jobs is also much wider in the US. [...]

Rather than measuring the economy or employment, well-being measures focus on emotional and physical health and whether people find their lives meaningful. Some countries, including the UK and Bhutan, have started collecting well-being statistics. [...]

She and her colleagues mapped white men’s dissatisfaction. They found it concentrates in places with struggling industries, including coal and traditional manufacturing, and in areas that voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. It also overlaps with places with a high rate of drug overdoses and suicide deaths, which have driven down US life expectancy overall. [...]

Minorities, meanwhile, are used to the challenges of discrimination and other adversity not faced by many whites, which can make them more resilient. Any progress—which blacks and Hispanics have seen over the past few decades, in terms of education, life expectancy and other indicators—seems like winning, even if it still leaves them on an unequal footing with whites.

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CNN: Only six countries have equal rights for men and women, World Bank finds

Only six countries currently give women and men equal rights, a major report from the World Bank has found.

That's an increase -- from zero -- compared to a decade ago, when the organization started measuring countries by how effectively they guarantee legal and economic equality between the genders.[...]

Of those nations, France saw the biggest improvement over the past decade for implementing a domestic violence law, providing criminal penalties for workplace sexual harassment and introducing paid parental leave.

But countries in the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa averaged a score of 47.37, meaning the typical nation in those regions gives women under half the legal rights of men in the areas measured by the group.[...]

"Gender equality is a critical component of economic growth," Georgieva wrote in the report. "Women are half of the world's population and we have our role to play in creating a more prosperous world. But we won't succeed in playing it if the laws are holding us back."

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