UnHerd: 2017: when the US woke up to its drugs shame

This was the year the US finally woke up to what was happening in its midst. There were 70,200 overdose deaths, a sharp rise on the previous year and more than the toll from guns, car crashes or AIDS at the peak of its epidemic. At least 10 million people were misusing opioids, wasting an estimated $80 billion from the economy.

The awful scale of abuse and addiction raises issues over prohibition, exposing the futility of trying to curb the flow of illicit drugs in a globalised world where chemists in Asia can cook up new drugs for immediate sale across the 50 states of America. The Dayton coroner told me his team would monitor the dark web to determine the products that would soon be found inside bodies in their morgue.

But it sparks other issues too: over the US health system, which leaves so many poorer people without healthcare to tackle problems. Over the rapacious nature of unchecked capitalism, since the epidemic was fostered by a pharmaceutical firm pushing highly-addictive new painkillers and callous doctors signing dozens of daily prescriptions in ‘pill factories’. It has even provoked debate over rich philanthropists who profit from misery then launder their images with donations to major museums.[...]

The British Nobel laureate Sir Angus Deaton and his equally-brilliant wife Anne Case, economists at Princeton University who have tracked this plague of pointless fatalities among middle-aged white people, called them ‘deaths of despair’. They published a paper in 2017 called ‘Mortality and morbidity in the 21st century’. It revealed death rates of white people with no more than a high school diploma had grown to be 30% higher than those of black people — having been 30% lower at the turn of the century.

read the article

UnHerd: How liars become leaders

This is the magic of some lies, and some of the liars who tell them. We willingly conspire in our own deception because of the way it makes us feel, and the comfort it brings. It’s even used as the inspirational finale of the Christmas classic Miracle on 34th Street. “Which is worse: a lie that draws a smile or a truth that draws a tear?”. In the last decade, we’ve decided, quite firmly, to choose the lie. After all, who wants what Al Gore described as “inconvenient truth” when you can willingly suspend your disbelief and go along with promises of the moon and the stars, delivered yesterday and paid for by someone else? [...]

This trend for unreliable narrators feels like part of the same phenomenon that enables people who play this game to make it to the top. We are now caught in a permanent twilight where every fact can be questioned, every truth undermined. Photos and videos can be faked. Every anecdote is questioned with the accusation that it “didn’t happen”. Social media has been a powerful force for the democratising of information but it’s also made it harder to tell what’s true and what’s false.[...]

We love being sucked into the dramatic aura of an Amy or a Boris: into a vortex where we are released from the gravitational pull of the truth. We never really believe them. But we suspend our disbelief because it is convenient and comfortable. It offers us a chance to play out the fantasy of being able to shape our own reality: to say that this is so simply because I say it is. We get to be Gods for a moment. How can uncomfortable truths ever compete?

read the article

CNN: Why movie villains love modern architecture

Oppenheim explores his darker road not traveled in "Lair," a recent book from Tra Publishing, that renders 15 highly secretive dwellings in black-and-white architectural drawings. They include the Nordic alpine hideaway in "Ex Machina," the spidery underwater sea home in "The Spy Who Loved Me," the sleek Mount Rushmore abode in "North By Northwest," and the eerie Brutalist Wallace Corporation HQ in "Blade Runner 2049."

The lairs generally share commonalities: They are pristine, awe-inspiring, high-tech, otherworldly, often impractical, and draw heavily on the tenets of modernism. The book poses the question: Why do bad guys live in good houses? [...]

Oppenheim and his team came up with a rubric for which hideouts made the final cut -- and what counted as true villainry. "First, primarily, the lairs had to be aspirational. They also had to be incredibly beautiful from an architectural standpoint," he explained. They omitted the lavish John Lautner-designed mansion of porn director Jackie Treehorn in "The Big Lebowski," not deeming him a real antagonist. Darth Vader's hellfire stronghold in "Star Wars" also lost out in favor of the Death Star because Oppenheim decided nobody would actually want to live on an untenable volcanic planet.

read the article

The New York Times: A New Secularism Is Appearing in Islam

The rise of Islamism, a highly politicized interpretation of Islam, since the 1970s only seemed to confirm the same view: that “Islam is resistant to secularization,” as Shadi Hamid, a prominent thinker on religion and politics, observed in his 2016 book, Islamic Exceptionalism. [...]

Some of those signs are captured by Arab Barometer, a research network based at Princeton and the University of Michigan whose opinion surveys map a drift away from Islamism — and even Islam itself. The network’s pollsters recently found that in the last five years, in six pivotal Arab countries, “trust in Islamist parties” and “trust in religious leaders” have declined, as well as attendance in mosques.

Granted, the trend isn’t huge. Arabs who describe themselves as “not religious” were 8 percent of those polled in 2013, and have risen to only 13 percent in 2018. So some experts on the region, like Hisham A. Hellyer, an Egyptian-British scholar, advises caution.[...]

The disillusionment is often only with Islamism as a political instrument, but it can turn against Islam, the religion, itself. In Turkey, the latter is manifested in a social trend among its youth that has become the talk of the day: the rise of “deism,” or belief in a God, but not religion. Pro-Erdogan Islamists are worried about this “big threat to Islam,” but perceive it, tragicomically, as yet another Western conspiracy, rather than their own accomplishment.

read the article

Associated Press: Pope denounces 'rigidity' as he warns of Christian decline

Francis’ message appeared aimed at conservative and traditionalist Catholics, including within the Vatican Curia, who have voiced increasing opposition to his progressive-minded papacy. Their criticisms have accelerated over the past year, amid Vatican financial and sex abuse scandals that may have predated Francis’ papacy but are nevertheless coming to light now.[...]

He cited the late Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, a leader of the progressive wing of the Catholic Church, who in his final interview before dying in 2012 lamented that the church found itself “200 years behind” because of its inbred fear of change. [...]

In a tangible sign of change, Francis issued a new decree Saturday limiting the term of the dean of the College of Cardinals, an influential job that had previously been held for life. Francis accepted the resignation of the current dean, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, and decreed that going forward, the future top cardinal would only have a five-year renewable term.

read the article