The Guardian: The invention of Essex: how a county became a caricature

More than just brashly consumerist, Essex was also painted as a hotbed of bigotry, the place where white people moved to escape parts of London that were no longer white enough for them. In 1994, Lord Inglewood, a pro-European Conservative MEP, told a newspaper that the “Essex view of conservatism” was threatening the “more generous, less xenophobic historic tradition”. (Inglewood also blamed the influence of Essex for increasing “public bad manners, aggressiveness and yobbishness” in the party.) Essex came to represent “white flight” in the UK, and there is much evidence of xenophobia and racism in Essex: the county was a hotbed of BNP membership during the first decade of the 21st century. [...]

Today, Basildon is a poster child of inequality. It contains a quarter of the most deprived areas of Essex, despite housing an eighth of its total population, and is the sixth most unequal town in the country. Pitched against such evidence, the myth of Essex as the great Thatcherite success story says more about the will of the Conservative commentariat than anything else. In the mid-1980s, my parents bought the Southend council house my sister and I grew up in, but we didn’t feel like triumphant beneficiaries of some economic miracle. A microclimate of inequality existed on our street, separating homeowners from council tenants. I remember my mum and dad refusing to sign one London-born homeowner’s petition to have his sister, a renter, evicted for being the mother of a “problem family”. No one seemed any richer, just further apart. [...]

The persistent rhetorical power of this invented Essex – as a land of a million Marks Francois, ready to die for No Deal – requires that we continue to overlook the reality of the actual place. “There is still a conversation, even today, black folk in London saying to me, seriously: ‘What are you doing in Essex?’” says Southend-based artist Elsa James, whose work addresses stereotypes of people of African-Caribbean heritage and those of Essex women. Parts of Essex, James says, are more diverse than is widely acknowledged: there were 50 mother tongues among the students at the Southend primary school her youngest daughter attended. [...]

This, finally, is the magic power of “Essex”. For it allows Jenkin – the Cambridge-educated son of a lord – to confidently proclaim that he knows the desires of the “common man”, merely by the mention of this most misunderstood of counties. If Essex did not exist, they would need to invent it.

read the article or listen to the podcast

Curbed: Herland: Reimagine Utopia

What have all of the utopias we've covered so far had in common? They were all largely driven by the will and power of a charismatic leader - usually a man, usually white. How do you build a utopia, then, for people in society who really need it? In our season finale, we visit worlds where there are no men. In fiction, and real life.

listen to the podcast

The Conversation: Erdoğan’s control over Turkey is ending – what comes next?

When Turkey’s currency, the lira, dropped by 20% last year, the slide risked a global crisis. Turkey is also an important NATO ally, allowing its land and air bases to be used for the alliance’s military operations into places such as neighboring Syria and Iraq. [...]

Istanbul, a city of 16 million people, accounts for one-third of Turkey’s gross domestic product and is larger than many national economies. Whoever controls Istanbul’s massive municipal budget also controls its patronage. [...]

Earlier this year, more than 1,000 Turkish academics and their colleagues overseas signed an open letter condemning Erdogan’s bombing of more than 100 targets in Kurdish areas in Syria near its borders. [...]

Whether or how quickly the end for Erdoğan may come will be determined by how united the opposition remains. It is also possible a new political party will emerge, created by former allies of Erdoğan who said their current party under his leadership “caused a serious slide in rhetoric, actions, morals and politics.”

read the article

Vox: The Ice Bucket Challenge and the promise — and the pitfalls — of viral charity

To be clear, the ALS Association did a pretty good job at putting the money to use. Local chapters, she writes, were able to purchase equipment for ALS patients, like “power wheelchairs, walkers, and shower benches. ... The waitlist that had existed throughout the loan program’s 20-year history has evaporated since the Ice Bucket Challenge.”

While local chapters got a significant share of the money, and spent it largely on support for the patients they serve, most of the money — $80 million — went to research. (It should be noted that in drug development, even $80 million is a drop in the bucket — taking a drug from the idea stage to approval in FDA clinical trials can easily cost $2 billion). [...]

The Red Cross raised $500 million for Haiti in 2010 and accomplished very little, and it remains nearly impossible to tell where the money went or what happened. In 2012, the group Invisible Children made an incredibly successful viral video about central African warlord Joseph Kony, raised more than $30 million, and immediately ran into a host of problems: Ugandans protested the video, critics called it racist and imperialist, the producer had a breakdown, the charity nearly went bankrupt, and Kony was never found.[...]

Most existing programs can’t absorb that much money, so there’s pressure to launch new programs. But trying to launch new programs just because you can afford them isn’t necessarily the best reason for starting them. Even if a charity’s existing work is highly effective, if new donations will be shuffled off to new, less promising projects, then the effect of the additional donations is likely to be small.

read the article

Intelligencer: Trump’s Racism Is Pushing Away the Voters He Needs in 2020

The latest such evidence comes in a new study released today by Navigator Research, a consortium of Democratic research and advocacy groups. The report, provided exclusively to The Atlantic, examines a group that many analysts in both parties believe could prove to be the key bloc of 2020 swing voters: Americans who say they approve of Trump’s management of the economy, but still disapprove of his overall performance as president. And it shows Trump facing significant headwinds among that potentially critical group, partly because of the divisive language and behavior he’s taken to new heights, or lows, since last weekend—tweeting about the congresswomen and encouraging his supporters to attack them as well. [...]

[T]he key measure for Trump next year will be the share of voters who approve of his overall performance, not the (for now) wider group who give him good marks on the economy. “They have to become approvers,” [Republican pollster Gene] Ulm says. For incumbents, he adds, “job approval is your vote—it’s almost like religion.” The latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll dramatically underlines that point. It found that in 2020 matchups against any of the four major Democratic contenders—former Vice President Joe Biden and Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Kamala Harris of California, and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts—Trump drew support from a minuscule 5 percent or less of voters who disapproved of his overall job performance as president. (Trump led each Democrat by at least 83 percentage points among voters who approve of his performance.) [...]

The other strong possibility, of course, is that it’s a mistake to attribute any real calculation to Trump’s course of conduct. According to this perspective, Trump behaves like a white-nationalist thug because he is one. He’s not playing some sort of multidimensional chess that shows how devilishly clever he is; he’s using the world’s biggest megaphone to act on the insecurity, megalomania, desire to demean other people that defines his character. As the comedian Flip Wilson used to say: “What you see is what you get.” If that’s the case, all the numbers and rational analysis in the world won’t keep Trump from cutting racist capers and threatening his many enemies all the way to November of next year. It will be a wild ride.

read the article

Inverse: Does Age Difference Matter in Relationships? Why It Might and Might Not

While there is variation across cultures in the size of the difference in age-gap couples, all cultures demonstrate the age-gap couple phenomenon. In some non-Western countries, the average age gap is much larger than in Western countries. For example, in some African countries about 30% of unions reflect a large age gap. [...]

Across Western countries, about 8% of all married heterosexual couples can be classified as having a large age gap (10 years or more). These generally involve older men partnered with younger women. About 1% of age-gap couples involve an older woman partnered with a younger man.

The limited evidence on same-sex couples, however, suggests the prevalence rates are higher. About 25% of male-male unions and 15% of female-female unions demonstrate a large age gap. [...]

Although men and women place importance on a partner who is warm and trustworthy, women place more importance on the status and resources of their male partner. This is largely because, with women being the child bearers, the investment is very high on their behalf (time and effort in childbearing and rearing). So they are attuned to looking for a partner who will also invest resources into a relationship and family. [...]

Many people assume that age-gap couples fare poorly when it comes to relationship outcomes. But some studies find the relationship satisfaction reported by age-gap couples is higher. These couples also seem to report greater trust and commitment and lower jealousy than similar-age couples. Over three-quarters of couples where younger women are partnered with older men report satisfying romantic relationships.

read the article

The Independent: Polish cities and provinces declare ‘LGBT-free zones’ as government ramps up ‘hate speech’

Ahead of parliamentary elections this autumn, the Law and Justice party has thrown the full weight of its party apparatus behind a campaign that is marginalising Poland’s LGBT+ community, its critics say.

The party’s new focus on countering what its officials call Western “LGBT ideology” has largely replaced its prior rallying cries against migrants, said Michal Bilewicz, a researcher at the University of Warsaw who tracks the prevalence of prejudices against minorities in public discourse.

In 2015, anti-migrant rhetoric helped the right-wing populist party come to power, according to data gathered by Mr Bilewicz.

But even at the height of Europe’s surge, Poland never saw many non-European migrants, and public attention became more difficult to sustain once the flow to the continent diminished. [...]

Paweł Jabłoński, an adviser to Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, noted that the “LGBT-free” declarations had “no actual meaning in terms of regulations”.[...]

With their remarks “on the margins of hate speech,” said Adam Bodnar, Poland’s independent commissioner for human rights, “the government is increasing homophobic sentiments.”

read the article