The Atlantic: Pope Benedict Says Blame the ’60s for Priests’ Abuse

Benedict didn’t stay in the background. Instead, he published a letter that is incoherent, inaccurate, and at times truly bizarre. In his letter, he wrote that the news of the February conference had compelled him to action. “I compiled some notes by which I might contribute one or two remarks to assist in this difficult hour,” he wrote.[...]

In his letter, Benedict said the crisis started in the second half of the 1980s. This is not true. He himself, as prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican’s doctrinal office, handled abuse cases sent to the Vatican dated before then. He also managed an investigation into the Legionaries of Christ and its charismatic Mexican founder, the Reverend Marcial Maciel Dellogado, who was later found to have molested seminarians and fathered several children well before the ’80s. (He left the Legionaries out of the letter.) [...]

Why did Benedict even publish this thing? Benedict’s longtime personal secretary, Monsignor Georg Gänswein, told The New York Times that the pope had published his reflections of his own accord. The letter appeared in several archconservative outlets that have been critical of Francis and that also published a bombshell letter last summer in which an archbishop said the Vatican was full of “gay lobbies.”

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The Atlantic: The Implosion of Jeremy Corbyn

According to polling by The Jewish Chronicle, 85 percent of British Jews now think that Corbyn is anti-Semitic. And that was before this week’s bombshell: documents obtained by The Sunday Times showing that Labour failed to investigate hundreds of anti-Semitism complaints, and let hundreds more slide. The documents show not only that Labour’s procedures for investigating anti-Semitic incidents were—despite public assurances to the contrary—dismally subpar, but also that members of Corbyn’s office directly intervened in more than one in 10 investigations, despite having claimed that they were impartial. [...]

A year earlier, in March 2018, the story broke that Corbyn had been a member of three secret Facebook groups in which virulent anti-Semitic memes were sometimes shared. Understandable, perhaps, in radical campaign circles. My enemy’s enemy is my friend, right? We’re protesting an occupation, not forming a government. There’s nothing anti-Semitic about deploring Israel Defense Forces violence in Gaza, but if Palestine is your cause, sometimes you’re going to meet people who really just hate Jews—just like if Israel is your cause, sometimes you’re going to meet people who really just hate Muslims. [...]

Until the general-election upset in June 2017, when Labour stunned pollsters by increasing its vote share, Corbyn seemed unlikely to stick around for long. But that victory—of sorts—trapped him. After the election, MPs who thought they could wait him out grew restless. Luciana Berger, a Jewish Labour MP, had been perennially targeted for abuse, both anti-Semitic and misogynistic, mainly from the far right. But when she started talking about anti-Semitism in Labour, when she expressed concern about Corbyn and the mural, something changed. Some of the abuse seemed to be coming from Labour supporters, even members. “One person told me: ‘Momentum will be watching you,’” she wrote.

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openDemocracy: A pan-European radical right – contradiction in terms?

Although Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has confirmed it is sending a representative, Marine Le Pen of France’s National Front has said she will not be attending. Le Pen herself hosted a similar meeting in Nice in 2018, at which Geert Wilders from the Dutch Party for Freedom and several other influential radical right speakers were present, an event which indicated how hard it has been to create a pan-European radical right bloc. [...]

As David Barnes recently wrote here, narratives of European civilization have been both common and hard to sustain; Oswald Mosley’s post-World War II argument in favour of ‘Europe – A Nation’, which shares many similarities with today’s anti-immigrant discourses promoted by the likes of Salvini, found few takers, despite the fact that a notion of Europe having a homogeneous racial and cultural background was widely held across the continent’s radical right movements. [...]

Even if Europe’s radical right leaders share certain fundamental ideas, however, such as a belief in the need to defend the ‘white race’, a hatred of Islam, a desire to stop immigration, and a basic ultra-nationalist position, it is hard to see how the clash of nationalisms that conferences such as Salvini’s will expose can survive the experience. [...]

There may have been a sharing of ideas – a transnational fascism – but there was really no ‘fascist international’. Attempts to appeal to a basic ‘Europeanism’, centred on racial belonging and conspiratorial antisemitism, have historically proved insufficient to mobilise and maintain coherence across the continent, with nationalism proving far more powerful as an identity-building cohesive force. Perhaps the National Socialists came closest with their transnational membership of the SS (although this was not huge) and a racial ideology which found supporters in all European countries. Yet ultimately, as Bauerkämper and Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe write, ‘the vision of a fascist Europe proved to be a chimera. Fascists clearly espoused different versions of European unity.’

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Vox: How Leonardo da Vinci made a "satellite" map in 1502

Leonardo da Vinci’s known for his art and inventions — but also his groundbreaking maps, like this one of Imola, Italy.

In this episode of Vox Almanac, Vox’s Phil Edwards explores how it was made. Further reading:
1) John Pinto’s History of the Ichnographic City Plan is useful to understand the history of these maps.
2) Check out Portraying the City in Early Modern Europe: Measurement, Representation, and Planning by Hilary Ballon and David Friedman for more info.
3) If you want to dig deeper into early maps, Jessica Maier’s Mapping Past and Present: Leonardo Bufalini’s Plan of Rome is fascinating.

Please email Phil if you have trouble finding any of these papers.

Drafting 1502’s equivalent to a “satellite” map was a massive undertaking, and Leonardo managed to pull it off. His early map helped Italian politcian Cesare Borgia construct an idea of the town of Imola that was far more accurate than most contemporary maps. Through the use of careful measurements of angles and pacing out distances using a primitive odometer, Leonardo managed to create a map that was very close to accurate.

This map — an “ichnographic” map — was a step forward in portraying how maps could work to represent geography. Though it’s marked with some inaccuracies, it’s stunningly precise for the time and pushed forward the art of mapmaking. Leonardo’s Imola remains, even today, a remarkably useful guide to the city.

CityLab: When Weird Things Get You a Free Ride

Not just any book, mind you. In keeping with an annual tradition, ticket inspectors on national carrier NS were instructed to give free travel to anyone carrying a copy of the novel Jas van Velofte (“Jacket of Promise”) by author Jan Siebelink. The deal came at the culmination of the country’s book week, an annual national literature festival. During each book week, festival organizers release a free book written especially for the occasion, available in generous but still limited numbers to anyone who buys a book (this year, worth €12.50 or more) or signs up to a library in the preceding weeks. This book then serves as a token for travel anywhere in the country. [...]

Indonesia’s second city, Surabaya, came up with a novel way of clearing its streets of plastic waste last autumn: It has been encouraging passengers to trade in trash for bus tickets. While the idea of offering people an incentive to collect recyclable trash is not unusual, giving people a benefit in terms of travel is—especially as the most striking aspect of the scheme is perhaps that the city is not asking for very much. If you want a bus ticket that’s valid for two hours, Surabaya’s transit authorities are asking you to supply just 10 plastic cups or five bottles. [...]

Under normal circumstances, if you demanded that a subway ticket inspector got on their knees to check out your shoes, you’d likely get the police called on you. Not, however, in Berlin over the past year. In January 2018 Berlin’s BVG transit authority launched a limited edition line of sneakers in collaboration with Adidas. The sneakers’ decoration featured a splash of the close-to-iconic psychedelic camouflage print that covers the city’s subway train seats, but that wasn’t the feature that made their $215 cost a bargain. That could be found in the sneakers’ tongues, which were printed with an annual pass for travel across the network.

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Quartz: In rich countries, the middle class is getting smaller and smaller, generation by generation

When the Baby Boomers, who were born between 1943 and 1964, were in their twenties, some 68% were in middle-income households. Only 60% of Millennials, who were born between 1983 and 2002, could say the same at a similar time in their lives.

The OECD defines the middle class as people earning between 75% and 200% of the national median annual income. Its data is an average of results from Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and the United States. [...]

Housing costs are squeezing the middle class the hardest; this now consumes a third of disposable income for middle-class households, up from a quarter in the 1990s. Housing and higher education expenses have been rising faster than middle incomes, the OECD said. [...]

Still, there are differences between countries. The OECD data show that the US middle class has shrunk as a result of both the lower and upper classes expanding, although the latter has grown by almost twice as much. In Spain, the decline of the middle class is entirely due to people falling into the lower class. In the UK, the lower class has gotten smaller, while the upper class has grown, but within the middle class, the lower-middle has grown while the mid-middle and upper-middle are in decline.

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FiveThirtyEight: What Happens If Biden Doesn’t Run — Or Flops?

A Change Research poll released this week offers some clues. It showed Biden well ahead of his potential Democratic rivals in South Carolina, which is expected to vote fourth in the Democratic primary process. (The survey was conducted March 31-April 4.) Thirty-two percent of Democrats said they favored Biden, with Bernie Sanders (14 percent) and Kamala Harris (10 percent) the only other candidates in double digits. Of course, that Biden is leading in South Carolina is not surprising — he leads in basically all polls of the 2020 field, nationally and in the early primary states.

But Change Research also conducted a version of the poll with only declared candidates — leaving out Biden and other potential late entrants1 And that showed a much different, more wide-open race. Sanders was in first with 24 percent, and five other candidates were in double digits: Beto O’Rourke (16 percent), Harris (15), Cory Booker (12), Pete Buttigieg (12) and Elizabeth Warren (11 percent). [...]

That said, the difference in results without Biden is interesting a couple of ways. First, even though Sanders is positioning himself as one of the most liberal candidates in the race and Biden is likely to be cast as one of the more conservative ones, it’s not clear that Democratic voters are seeing those two as representative of different ideological poles within the party. According to polling from Morning Consult, Sanders is the second choice for many Biden voters, and vice versa. That Sanders gained 10 percentage points in the Change Research poll when Biden was not included also suggests that some voters are choosing between those two. Again, that finding could simply reflect that Sanders is the only candidate besides Biden who most Democrats are really familiar with. But it’s also worth considering that voters, at least at this stage, either might not know or might not care about the various candidates’ policy differences, which may already be well-known to party activists and journalists.

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Vox: How America’s relationship with Turkey fell apart

The US, Sloat added, worries about Turkey’s growing friendship with Russia and acceleration away from democracy. That’s been exacerbated by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, an authoritarian who has dismantled secular liberal politics in favor of Islamist political values, harbors anti-Western views, and has widened the US-Turkey gap. [...]

“This is no longer anything that can accurately be called a strategic partnership,” Lisel Hintz, a Turkey expert at Johns Hopkins University, told me. “I wouldn’t even call Turkey an ally. An ally doesn’t behave the way in which Turkey has been behaving.” [...]

A faction of the Turkish military, claiming to speak for the entire Turkish Armed Forces, aimed to oust Erdoğan in the name of democracy — despite the fact that Erdoğan and his party were democratically elected. But the attempt failed, mainly because large portions of the military sided with their president. [...]

And Erdoğan’s rhetoric during local elections last week stoked anti-American sentiment among his base throughout the campaign. There has long been anti-US feeling within the Turkish government and public — partly because of rampant conspiracy theories about America secretly plotting to crush Turkey, and Washington’s much-disliked Middle East policies — but the autocrat ratcheted up the language to a whole new level.

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