99 Percent Invisible: Great Bitter Lake Association

The convoy of 14 ships came from 8 different nations: the UK, West Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Sweden, France, Bulgaria, and the United States. In the beginning, the crews weren’t told anything because there was a complete lockdown on information reaching the ships. Despite the lack of communication, the shipping companies were working in the background to get their crews home, while the United Nations tried to work out a deal to reopen the canal. Months dragged on, and the boats still hadn’t been released. They were stranded for so long, the convoy earned the nickname the Yellow Fleet because the sandstorms in the region stained the hulls of the ships. [...]

Soon, they started hanging out a lot, and because they were a bunch of young sailors, they started partying a lot. Some of the captains became worried that with the amount of idle time on the ships, people would start to get bored and acting badly. “There was of a lot of drinking, and […] hanging out, and sleeping and they were thinking it would be good to get together and organize some social activities,” explains Senker. The captains figured a little structure would curb the worst behavior of their sailors, so in October of 1967, five months after the start of the Six-Day War, they founded the Great Bitter Lake Association.

The Great Bitter Lake Association was a way to regulate the unofficial marketplace that had sprung up between the ships, and bring some order to their makeshift community. It was also a social committee. Membership in the GBLA included events hosted each week by a different vessel. Ships modified their lifeboats into sailboats and took turns hosting regattas. One ship built a functional soccer pitch on its deck and held tournaments. The Polish ship had a doctor and became the de facto medical center. The Swedish ship had a gym.

listen to the podcast or read the article

Nautilus Magazine: Can You Overdose on Happiness?

Yet there it was in a publication from 2012. The article was written by two Germans and an American, and they were grappling with the issue of how we should deal with the possibility of manipulating people’s moods and feeling of happiness through brain stimulation. If you have direct access to the reward system and can turn the feeling of euphoria up or down, who decides what the level should be? The doctors or the person whose brain is on the line? [...] 

The neurologist refused. He gave the patient a little lecture on why it might not be healthy to walk around in a state of permanent rapture. There were indications that a person should leave room for natural mood swings both ways. The positive events you encounter should be able to be experienced as such. The patient finally gave in and went home in his median state with an agreement to return for regular checkups. [...]

Young Schläpfer thought about his superior’s remark and actually began to ask his patients questions. He still does. Today, he believes that anhedonia is the central symptom while everything else, including psychological pain, is something that comes in addition to that. It is only when their anhedonia abates that people suffering from depression feel better. And this is not strange, because desire and enjoyment are driving engines and a key to many of our cognitive processes. Desire pushes, so to speak, all the other systems and even makes it possible to have motivated behavior and to work toward a goal.

read the article

FiveThirtyEight: The Constitution Doesn’t Give Presidents Any Protections During Impeachment

The basic sentiment is that the president is being railroaded. But the reality is that when it comes to impeachment, there aren’t any protections for the president laid out in the Constitution. In fact, experts told me that pretty much any rights Democrats give Trump are above and beyond what they’re required to do. Trump hasn’t been charged with a crime and impeachment isn’t a legal proceeding, so he doesn’t have any of the rights you hear about on “Law and Order,” including due process. In the world of impeachment, “fairness” means whatever the majority party in the House of Representatives thinks it should mean. [...]

It’s easy to see a presidential impeachment as something akin to a criminal prosecution — evidence is marshaled, a trial is held, and the president’s fate hangs in the balance. But impeachment is a political process, not a legal one. As a result, it has entirely different rules that make certain protections that are reserved for criminal defendants — like due process — irrelevant. “As a matter of law, a president has essentially no claim to any kind of participation in the impeachment process,” said Frank Bowman, a law professor at the University of Missouri and the author of “High Crimes and Misdemeanors: A History of Impeachment for the Age of Trump.” [...]

All of these protections only kick in when impeachment moves into the Judiciary Committee, though — and unlike past impeachments, a significant portion of the action this time around will happen outside that committee. Importantly, Trump’s lawyers won’t be allowed to participate in the next phase of the inquiry, which will involve public hearings run by the House Intelligence Committee. But Binder said that made sense, because unlike the House majority in the Nixon and Clinton impeachments, Democrats don’t have a voluminous special counsel probe to draw from, so the next round of hearings are arguably the public distillation of the House’s investigation, not its case for impeachment. On a practical level, though, it means that Trump’s legal team likely won’t be able to get involved for several weeks — which leaves plenty of time for his defenders to complain about how he’s been boxed out of the process.

read the article

The Guardian: 'Did I ever really know him?': the women who married gay men

Megan is one of a potentially dying breed of women: those who married closeted gay men. As countries such as Australia and Britain progress towards LGBTQI equality, it’s a social phenomenon that could vaporise within a generation. 

When a married man comes out later in life, positive reactions can be heartening. Rainbow garlands are unfurled. People applaud his bravery. They empathise with his struggle. They marvel at how he came through it and celebrate that he can finally be himself. They express gratitude we live in more enlightened times.

Often entirely missing from this narrative is the woman’s voice. [...]

She says women present with depression, anxiety, sleeplessness, high blood pressure, eating issues and fears their children will be bullied. “Some women contact the service before their husband is even aware they know he’s gay,” she says. “Some women found out because they were diagnosed with HIV or another STI. And yes, some women say the group saved their lives; they were suicidal when they contacted us.” [...]

Roxanne remembers, as Australia’s marriage equality postal vote was happening, clients contacting the service asking: have you done it yet, have you voted? I ask her if any were no voters, given their experiences. “Absolutely not,” she says. “They were enthusiastic about creating a new world – so no other woman would go through what they did.”

read the article

Vox: A federal appeals court just demolished Trump’s claim that he is immune from criminal investigatio

Yet, as Chief Judge Robert Katzmann, a Clinton appointee, explains for his court, Trump’s immunity claim is especially weak because Vance seeks personal documents that are unrelated to Trump’s conduct in office. Though prior Supreme Court decisions establish that the president enjoys “absolute immunity from damages liability predicated on his official acts,” this case does not involve Trump’s conduct in office. Nor does it even involve an “order that compels the President himself to do anything.” [...]

This decision is undoubtedly correct, at least under existing precedents. “The most relevant precedent for present purposes is United States v. Nixon,” Katzmann notes, a 1974 Supreme Court decision requiring President Nixon to “‘produce certain tape recordings and documents relating to his conversations with aides and advisers’ for use in a criminal trial against high‐level advisers to the President.” [...]

It’s important to note just how narrow this decision is. “This appeal does not require us to consider whether the President is immune from indictment and prosecution while in office,” Katzmann writes. It also does not require the court “to consider whether the President may lawfully be ordered to produce documents for use in a state criminal proceeding.” Rather, the Vance opinion dealt only with Trump’s sweeping claim that he is immune from criminal investigation altogether.

read the article

The Guardian: 'Amused us for years': Rob the unappealing albatross finally finds a mate

Rob, 35 and named after the red, orange and blue bands around his leg, is part of the world’s only mainland breeding colony of royal albatross – majestic birds with wingspans of about three metres – at Taiaroa Heads on the Otago peninsula, near the bottom of the South Island. [...]

Four of Rob’s previous partners have died, while others have not stuck – and no one knows why. Langsbury noted that the dating pool was small, with about 200 adults in the colony. [...]

Langsbury hoped Rob, who has raised three chicks so far, would breed with his new partner, who also had a chequered relationship history. “She’s a successful breeder,” he said. “She’ll know what to do.”

read the article

The Economist: Central and eastern Europeans are mostly happy with progress since 1989

Standards of living for most of the region’s peoples have vastly improved, and most of them know it. New polling by the Pew Research Centre shows that 81% of Poles, 78% of Czechs and 55% of Hungarians agree that this is the case. Only Bulgarians on balance take a gloomy view, with just 32% of them thinking that their standard of living has improved since 1989. Development has been patchy, but for every depopulating and ageing rustbelt in eastern Europe there is a booming industrial region, a tech cluster or a services centre desperate for more workers. [...]

After three decades of democracy, cynicism about politicians is as widespread as it is in western Europe. In Slovakia 63% of people think most elected officials do not care what they think, a Pew poll finds; in Hungary, 71% and in Bulgaria, 78%. By way of comparison, the figures in France and Britain are 76% and 70%, respectively.

In western Europe and America such anger at the ruling class has translated into votes for nationalists, populists, Brexit and Donald Trump. In Hungary and Poland those who feel left behind tend to blame liberalism and the West. Zsuzsanna Szelenyi, who was an anti-communist activist in Hungary in 1989, says that many of her compatriots were disappointed after the fall of communism because they expected their country “to become like Austria overnight”. It did not, of course, but gdp per person, not to mention life expectancy, has risen sharply across the region.

read the article

The Economist: Germans still don’t agree on what reunification meant

Many observers say the debate grew louder three or four years ago. The most obvious explanation is therefore the migrant crisis of 2015-16. Petra Köpping, the integration minister in Saxony, one of the five eastern states established at reunification, says that when she tried to explain to her constituents why the state was helping refugees, some replied: “Integrate us first!” Many easterners resented the resources being devoted to help newcomers when they felt left behind. They also disliked the labelling of their complaints as racist.

But the refugee crisis merely triggered a deeper shift, says Christian Hirte, the government’s special commissioner for east Germany. One idea, floated by Angela Merkel, who as chancellor is east Germany’s best-known export, is that the east is undergoing something comparable to the experience of West Germany in 1968, when children forced their parents to account for their activities in the Nazi period. Now, the argument runs, young east Germans seek explanations for what happened to their parents in the early years of reunification. “The long-term wounds were concealed because people were absorbed finding a place in the new society,” says Steffen Mau of Humboldt University in Berlin. “Perhaps you need 25 years to realise this.” [...]

Such views tap into a feeling among many easterners that they have struggled to take back control of their own destiny. Ms Köpping says east Germans hold barely 4% of elite jobs in the east. Many rent flats from westerners, who own much of the eastern housing stock. “Sometimes east Germans feel that they’re ruled by others, not themselves,” says Klara Geywitz, a Brandenburger running to lead Germany’s Social Democrats. Nor have east Germans stormed the national citadels of power. Almost 14 years after she took office Mrs Merkel—and Joachim Gauck, president from 2012-17—remain exceptions rather than a vanguard. Rarely one to dwell on her origins, Mrs Merkel has lately begun to reflect publicly on the mixed legacy of reunification. “We must all…learn to understand why for many people in east German states, German unity is not solely a positive experience,” she said on October 3rd.

read the article

The Local: Could Merkel’s Christian Democrats really work with the far-right AfD?

But on Monday an open letter signed by 17 local CDU officials and reported on by the Ostthüringer Zeitung, urges the party to start "open-ended talks" with the AfD. They consider it unthinkable that "almost a quarter of the voters" in Thuringia "should remain outside the talks". [...]

The AfD surged into second place with 23.4 percent, more than doubling its share of the vote since the last state election in 2014, while the CDU tumbled down to 21.8 percent, from 33.5 percent in 2014. [...]

The CDU previously ruled out working with the Left, but Thuringia CDU leader Mohring said he was open to talks with the party's local leader Ramelow.

read the article