UnHerd: Was it The Sun wot won Brexit?

The trouble is that it’s very hard to study. If you see that readers of Right-wing papers are more likely to vote for Right-wing parties, you can’t conclude that the one causes the other; it could just be that people who vote for Right-wing parties enjoy reading that they’re right to do so.

That’s why there’s been some excitement about a new report, not yet published or peer-reviewed but available in preprint form. Its authors saw the opportunity for a natural experiment: the impact of Merseyside’s post-Hillsborough boycott of The Sun on Eurosceptic attitudes in the region. [...]

I am pretty sceptical. For one thing, when you look in the paper at the graph of attitudes towards Europe on Merseyside, Euroscepticism was declining pre-1989, and it continued to decline post-1989. There doesn’t seem to be a noticeable change at or shortly after 1989 itself; it levels off in the 1990s. The “control” group – a “synthetic Merseyside”, or conglomeration of other English areas weighted for similarity to the Liverpool area – also declines in Euroscepticism, just rather more slowly, and then increases for a bit in the early 1990s. Eyeballing it, at least, it doesn’t scream “Hillsborough did this” to me; it looks like some longer-term trend. [...]

In general, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Labour was the more Eurosceptic of the two main parties. And, in Liverpool in particular, the Labour council was heavily influenced by Derek Hatton of the Militant Tendency, who voted No in 1975. It was only in 1983 that Neil Kinnock made Labour explicitly pro-Europe, but Militant and Bennite Labourites still fought back (Denis Healey and others formed the Labour Against The Euro group as late as 2002, although that was specifically against joining the single currency). Meanwhile, Tory Eurosceptics became ever more vocal over the same period.

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Rare Earth: The Statue of George W. Bush

Someone in the comments mentioned I started every episode this season with "In Albania" and now it's all I can hear.

TED-Ed: How stress affects your body - Sharon Horesh Bergquist

Our hard-wired stress response is designed to gives us the quick burst of heightened alertness and energy needed to perform our best. But stress isn’t all good. When activated too long or too often, stress can damage virtually every part of our body. Sharon Horesh Bergquist gives us a look at what goes on inside our body when we are chronically stressed.

FRANCE 24 English: French city of Dunkirk tests out free transport -- and it works

Now the city (population 88,000) seeks to become a beacon of a greener economy, by building infrastructure such as a large-scale wind farm off the coast and transforming its city center to be more pedestrian-friendly. Key to this effort is its free bus system, inaugurated on 1 September, 2018. The network connects Dunkirk to a cluster of neighbouring towns, with five express lines running every ten minutes throughout the day, and a dozen other lines serving less dense areas. [...]

Accessibility has been “one of the keys of Dunkirk’s success” with free transport, says Maxime Huré, a political scientist at the University of Perpignan and president of the think tank VIGS, which specialises in urban development and transport issues. Over the past year, Huré has led an in-depth study of Dunkirk’s free bus experiment, commissioned by the city and carried out by an independent team of social science researchers. The study will officially be released on 11 September, but some of its initial findings have already been published. They show that ridership has spiked over the last year, more than doubling on weekends and increasing by around 60 percent during the week. [...]

Styling itself as a “laboratory” of free transport, Dunkirk has attracted an “incessant” stream of visitors intrigued at whether it could work in their cities, says Delevoye. Among them was Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, who took a ride on Dunkirk’s buses last October. A few months later, she announced that Paris would extend free transit passes to children under 11 and young people under the age of 20 with a handicap, taking effect this Sunday, 1 September [see the tweet below]. That’s in addition to senior citizens earning less than €2,000 a month, who already benefited from free ‘Navigo’ passes.

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Curve Magazine: The Qur’an, The Bible And Homosexuality In Islam

Neither the Bible nor the Qur’an (Koran) has a lot to say about homosexuality, and what they do say relates only indirectly to contemporary discussions about gay rights and same-sex marriage. Like pre-modern scholars of law and ethics, these books assume heteronormativity. [...]

Actually, he had already determined to punish all these towns and their inhabitants, male and female, young and old, before the angels’ visit and the attempted homosexual rape (Genesis 18:16–33). When the wickedness of Sodom is recalled in other parts of the Bible, homosexuality is not mentioned. Yet, despite this broader context, the story was often interpreted primarily as a condemnation of homosexual activity in any form. [...]

In the Hadith (thousands of stories reporting the words and deeds of Muhammad and his companions that are comparable in authority to the Qurʾan itself), there is some support for the notion that the principal offences of Sodom were idolatry and avarice. These led in turn to inhospitality and the rape of male visitors.

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The Guardian: Scientists quash idea of single 'gay gene'

“[This study] highlights both the importance of the genetics as well as the complexity of the genetics, but genetics is not [the] whole story,” said Dr Benjamin Neale, co-author of the study from the Broad Institute in the US.

Writing in the journal Science, an international team of researchers report how they drew on existing genetic databases to conduct the largest study yet into genetics and same-sex sexual behaviour.

In the first part of the study, they looked at data from about 500,000 individuals collected as part of the UK Biobank project: about 4% of men and nearly 3% of women said they had ever had a same-sex sexual experience. The team stress that they did not focus on identity or orientation, and did not include transgender individuals. [...]

The study provides a number of insights, including that there is overlap between genetic predisposition to same-sex sexual behaviour and traits such as openness to experience, as well as predisposition to mental health problems.

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