The Guardian Longreads: Are your tinned tomatoes picked by slave labour?

Discrimination and violence against African workers gets worse in Italy with every passing day. In 2018, there were 126 racially motivated attacks recorded in the country, some fatal: in May last year a neo-fascist shot and wounded six black people in Macerata, near the central city of Ancona. A Cameroonian was shot in the city of Aprilia, an hour’s drive from Rome. A few weeks before, in July, a Moroccan man was beaten to death there. The problem is so severe that the Italian intelligence agency warned earlier this year about the rise in far-right groups and “a real risk of an increase in episodes of intolerance towards foreigners”. [...]

Rather than denying the situation, the country’s interior minister, Matteo Salvini, has repeatedly said immigrants are the “new slaves”. The observation isn’t sympathetic but strategic: publicising their destitution is a calculated attempt to dissuade more from coming to Italy. It serves his political purpose to perpetuate their ghettoisation, and also shores up the far-right narrative that immigrants can never integrate. [...]

Something similar was happening all over the country. The Roman mafioso, Salvatore Buzzi, whose consortium repeatedly won contracts to arrange housing for migrants, was heard in a 2014 police wiretap boasting: “Have you got any idea how much I earn through immigrants? I make more from immigrants than I do from drugs.” His consortium enjoyed annual revenues of €55m. [...]

Many activists believe this modern form of slavery is not a perversion of 21st-century capitalism, but the logical result of putting profit before every other consideration. “Unless you counter the huge power of the multinationals,” Yvan Sagnet told us, “it will be difficult to resolve the problem of working conditions. Because caporalato and modern slavery are the effect of a system, not the cause of it: the effect of ultraliberalism applied to agriculture.”

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Curbed: Inside the strange—and misunderstood—saga of Biosphere 2

Escape fantasies have long fueled the search for utopia—that irresistible notion of putting everything wrong in the rear view and casting out to a new world of your own making. In the late 1980s, a motley crew of ecologists, engineers, artists, and an eccentric billionaire embarked on an experiment to see if humans were able to colonize space, presuming that the earth would, at some point, become uninhabitable due to environmental collapse, nuclear war, or some other catastrophic event. And thus, Biosphere 2—one of the strangest research experiments of the 20th century—was willed into existence. [...]

Biosphere 2 was influenced by Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic architecture, “Synergetics” systems thinking, and “Spaceship Earth” theories. Meanwhile, the writings of historian and urbanist Lewis Mumford informed Biosphere 2’s explorations of the natural world and technology working harmoniously together to support human life.

When the experiment began, it was met with curiosity and fanfare. But after a series of controversies and mishaps—including a near-lethal loss of oxygen and conflict between researchers and their new manager, Steve Bannon—it was dismissed as a failure in mainstream media. “Biosphere or Biostunt?” read the title of a 1993 Time story on the project. It was lampooned in the 1996 Pauly Shore movie Bio-Dome. But did the experiment actually “fail,” or was it just misunderstood and misinterpreted? It depends on who you ask.

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UnHerd: Scotland’s drug shame

Data recently published has revealed that in Scotland, drug-related deaths rose by a shameful 27% last year to 1,187. That means the death-toll in Scotland was equivalent to five Lockerbie bombings or fifty 7/7s. It is nearly three times that of the UK as a whole, and, per capita, the drug death rate in Scotland is higher than that of the U.S. Yet no national emergency has been declared. [...]

And the cause has baffled many. Myself included. It may be attributable to a number of factors, including the sharp managed-decline of the industries around which many working-class communities formerly cohered. The mechanisms by which they once lifted themselves out of poverty were sacrificed on the altar of the free-market and replaced with Frankie and Benny’s, American-style shopping malls, casinos and, in Dundee (the drug-death capital) a world-leading design museum — partly funded by the billionaires implicated in the U.S. opioid crisis. [...]

My theory is that the drug problem is worse in Scotland for the same reason the drink, cigarette and life-expectancy problems are worse: the severity of deindustrialisation was that much more acute north of the border because we lacked the political autonomy to mitigate its impact in context-specific ways. Then again, I’m not an academic. Maybe it’s just the weather that’s killing everyone. [...]

Where the U.S. led, Scotland followed. Research published by Scottish Universities in 2018 found that 18% of the Scottish population was prescribed at least one opioid painkiller in 2012 and that “there were four times more prescriptions for strong opioids dispensed to people in the most deprived areas, than to those in the most affluent areas”. Every bit of data available points to a large increase in the prescription of addictive painkillers like co-codamol and tramadol over the last 10-years in the very communities where people are dying.

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TLDR News: What Johnson's Cabinet Reshuffle Mean For Brexit

On Thursday night, Boris Johnson selected his new cabinet in the biggest reshuffle in recent memory. Cabinet selections really indicate what kind of people the Prime Minister wants to surround themselves with, what kind of strategies they will be using. So in this video, we will be discussing who Johnson chose, and what this might indicate about his Brexit plans.

City Beautiful: What is New Urbanism?