openDemocracy: Lexit: The biggest unicorn of them all

But it would be a mistake to say that Godfather Hayek’s red-blooded neoliberalism has ever been implemented by the EU, as there are simply too many variables, or governments, to contend with. Think of the dirigiste tendencies of the French or the social-welfare commitments of the Scandinavians. A neoliberal utopia has simply never arrived.[...]

Monnet saw the proto-EU as a way for governments to pool sovereignty in limited ways, in specific sectors. This would then, it was believed, generate 'spillover' effects such as increased loyalty by elites. The Monnet-inspired Schuman Declaration of 1950, which first proposed the pooling of coal and steel production, was clear: “Europe will not be made all at once, or according to a single plan. It will be built through concrete achievements which first create a de facto solidarity.” Integration would lead national governments to lay down their arms in return for economic security. The national Barzinis and Corleones would finally be at peace.[...]

In contrast, ‘unreformable’ is the critique thrown at the EU by the left. But this doesn’t explain how Nigel Farage and other Brexiteers leveraged EU institutions to gain power and hoover up EU cash; it doesn’t explain why the far-right sees the European Parliament as a beach-head for reconstituting nationalist mafias – while getting paid for doing it. And it doesn’t explain why staunch EU critic Yanis Varoufakis is running for the EU parliament this year on a platform of radical change.[...]

Without a proper account of the EU’s complexity and origins, the Lexiter position tends to fall into a self-made abyss of misunderstanding. And without having the class power to back up its position, a Lexit – just like Brexit – may condemn the UK to perpetual autarky and possible disintegration.

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CityLab: What Cities Are Getting Wrong About Public Transportation

If you peruse this data-dump every year, you’ll probably notice something: Despite the tireless efforts of transit planners, bike-lane boosters, and other actors in the mobility arena, the mode-share percentages don’t seem to budge much in the any given growing city as they add more people, despite massive investments in transit infrastructure. Take Dallas, Texas, for example: In 1996, that city opened the first stage of its light-rail network, which has since grown into the largest system in the U.S., at a total cost of something around $5 billion. But the share of commuters in the city who ride transit has remained below 6 percent since 1990. [...]

A weighted-index does not quite get at why only 30 percent of Seattleites took sustainable transportation in 2015 when 91 percent of its jobs are within 10 minutes of what the report considers “frequent service,” where any stop is serviced an average of 5 times an hour between 7 a.m. and 9 p.m. But there’s a mismatch in accessibility: Only 10 percent of Seattle residents were reachable within 60 minutes by walking, biking, or public transit. Even the city’s successful rapid-transit options only reach 7 percent of its population. [...]

But making progress on these indicators does not necessarily mean having to overhaul your public transit options or build new systems from scratch. Consider Minneapolis and its progress on biking. If you factor in improvements in bike infrastructure, the population living near frequent transit jumps 9 percent, rising from 64 to 73 percent. “We only included protected bike lanes as a way to travel by bike in the transportation network,” says Chestnut. “It goes to show that number of people who have access to frequent transit can be improved without having to put in vast sums of money.”[...]

Another avenue where each city has room for improvement is with providing better transit service to people living in low-income households that earn less than $20,000 a year. Los Angeles may not reach as much large of a share of its total population with frequent transit in its car-centric sprawl, but where it does reach matters to a larger share of low-income households that rely on it compared to say, Atlanta. The indicators make that task appear not as difficult as you might think: Transit networks do reach where low-income people live; it is just that service needs to be more reliable.

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The New York Review of Books: Paris Pastoral: A City Recultivated

Located just north of Paris, the administrative department of Seine-Saint-Denis is France’s poorest and most ethnically diverse. Its Brutalist public housing complexes, once triumphant monuments to socialist modernism, are now sites of social marginalization. It’s the last place one would imagine seeing wandering shepherds tending their flocks. Yet here, and elsewhere in metropolitan Paris, an urban agricultural revolution is taking root.

That revolution has the blessing of the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo. On her watch, the city pledged in 2016 to cover 250 acres of urban space with greenery by 2020. In 2017, the city launched Parisculteurs, a program that solicits bids for urban agriculture projects to ensure that roughly one third of that area is dedicated to agriculture. One winning project is BienÉlevées, a play on the French expression meaning “well raised” (as in well brought-up children), founded by four sisters who grow saffron on the roof of a Monoprix supermarket.[...]

Over the past century, exhibition curator Augustin Rosenstiehl told me, “the space reserved for nature in the Île-de-France doubled”—“yet, during the same period, the diversity of our biomass has collapsed.” The key to preserving biodiversity, essential to human survival and to making metropolitan Paris a resilient city, Rosenstiehl believes, is a new urban planning that restores the essential place that small-scale, ecologically sustainable agriculture formerly held in a habitat where people, plants, and animals thrive together.[...]

The exhibition labels this period one of “promiscuity,” in the sense of an indeterminate mingling. This promiscuity was wiped away during the second half of the twentieth century by zoning laws that formally separated urban, natural, and agricultural spaces, strictly defining which activities were allowed in each and forbidding, for example, the construction of housing on agricultural land or the grazing of livestock in forests. Small farming plots were consolidated in the service of large-scale, machine-based agriculture. Labor-intensive production of fruits and vegetables disappeared from the riverine valleys around Paris, which became natural corridors for new highways and rail lines, and the development of new urban hubs. In the Île-de-France region around Paris, nearly all the farming that is left is industrial grain production—acre after acre of mono-cropped wheat with nary a person, let alone a bee or bird or animal, in sight.[...]

The exhibition also imagines Paris’s tramway lines with dedicated trams for livestock, so that flocks like the one shepherded by Dubreuilh could be transported for grazing on public parks and meridians where gas-guzzling mowers and hedge trimmers would no longer be required. Abandoned factories and commercial warehouses could be converted into multi-use structures for performances, housing, food production, and restaurants, as could old barns and hangars for farm machinery, effectively bringing community and the arts to now isolated rural areas.

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The School of Life: Why You'll Never Find the Right Person

It could sound rather brutal to hear that we'll never find the right person, but it's in fact the most generous and optimistic sentiment, because only once we give up on the absurd dream of finding the Right Person (who doesn't exist for anyone), can we start to make it work with that far more realistic and likely partner: the good enough person.

SciShow: How Aspirin Changed Medicine Forever

Aspirin isn't just an old medicine cabinet stand-by, it's one of the oldest medicines we humans learned how to make ourselves. And our research into aspirin did more than just make it better at relieving pain, it opened the door to whole new disciplines of scientific research!

Foreign Policy: The Beginning of the End of Britain’s Brexit Fantasy

Moreover, Britain suddenly finds itself very much alone on the world stage. As of April 1, as things currently stand (and there’s no plan B in the wings), the U.K. will no longer be in the European Union, with everything that entails. Not least is the loss of frictionless and duty-free trade with nearly half a billion souls. And no one is rushing to save Britain by offering better trade terms, least of all its old “special” ally, the United States.[...]

Trump, who has been a Brexit cheerleader from the start—he was elected only a few months after the Brexit referendum and incongruously cheered the result during a visit to one of his Scottish golf courses—has made a brutally hard process even harder every step of the way for May. Last fall, Trump blindsided May by calling her proposed pullout agreement “a great deal for the EU,” then cast doubt on whether he could negotiate with her at all, in part because May’s pact would have required a 21-month transition period.[...]

More to the point, while standing alone, the U.K. is not a priority for anyone. For example, Leigh noted, Australia and New Zealand are currently in talks on trade deals with the European Union and making it a priority over any hypothetical talks with Britain. A market of 450 million outweighs one of 65 million.

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Politico: Portugal’s opposition woes

Unlike almost everywhere else in Europe, Portugal’s mainstream conservatives face no credible threat from populists on the right. Instead, they are split into three rival parties defined by personal rather than ideological differences. [...]

Rio’s Social Democratic Party (PSD) remains the largest on the right, but polls show it heading for its worst-ever European Parliament result. Its support languishes below 25 percent, 15 points behind Costa’s Socialist Party (PS). [...]

Rio eventually won a confidence motion by 75 to 50 votes in the party’s National Council just before 4 a.m. but only after a 10-hour debate marked by mudslinging that's unlikely to win over disgruntled voters. [...]

The right still suffers from association with austerity policies introduced under PSD Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho in response to the eurozone debt crisis. Since gaining power in November 2015, Costa has overseen steady economic growth that’s cut unemployment by half.

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Politico: Spanish left’s top-level split

Errejón, who took on — and lost to — Iglesias for Podemos’ leadership in 2017, had been tapped to represent the party in May's election, when a new regional parliament will be chosen. But on Thursday, Errejón said he had joined a new, cross-party movement called Más Madrid (More Madrid) and would run on its ticket in the election instead.[...]

Podemos' branch in Andalusia, Adelante Andalucía, finished fourth in an election in December that saw its share of the vote plummet by more than 30 percent from a 2015 ballot. Podemos is currently the third-biggest party in the national parliament, but most recent polls place it fourth.

Analysts often blame Podemos’ loss of support on decisions such as refusing to endorse Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s bid for power back in 2016 — which effectively allowed the conservatives to stay longer in office; striking an alliance with the communist United Left; and its stance on Catalan independence — Podemos often sides with the separatists, backed the vote on secession and opposed Madrid assuming control over the region after the declaration of independence. 

Errejón — a 35-year-old politics professor — has been portrayed as a moderate in contrast with the hard-liner Iglesias, although public differences between the two have often been more about marketing than policies. Errejón has been a firm defender of using language that goes beyond old leftist stereotypes in a bid to attract wider support.

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