Citizenship - Carol Vincent, Professor of Sociology of Education, explores the way in which children are being taught about ‘fundamental British values’ such as democracy and tolerance. Does this government imposed requirement too easily result in a celebration of reductionist symbols and stereotypes of Britishness - 'tea and the Queen'? Also, David Bartram, Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Leicester, takes a critical look at a UK ‘citizenship process’ which subjects immigrants to a test designed to enhance their participation in British political and civic life. Does it work?
29 February 2020
Freakonomics: Is There Really a “Loneliness Epidemic”?
That’s what some health officials are saying, but the data aren’t so clear. We look into what’s known (and not known) about the prevalence and effects of loneliness — including the possible upsides.
Aeon: Marcus Aurelius helped me survive grief and rebuild my life
It’s a common misconception that to be a Stoic is to be in possession of a stiff upper lip, to be free from the tumultuous waves of one’s emotions. But what this interpretation of Stoicism gets wrong is that our emotions, even the most painful ones, need not be our enemies if we can learn to think of them as our guides. This might seem obviously false, or like the words of a person who has never encountered real suffering. But it was during one of the worst crises of my life that I found my way to Stoicism and, through Stoicism, to something that’s as close to acceptance as I think it’s possible to find on this plane of existence. [...]
Aurelius reminded me that where I was wasn’t just where I was but when – and that there was no advantage to be found in unsticking myself from time. I’d be lying if I said I learned to stop panicking immediately or instantly. But I learned to repeat to myself the instruction to ‘never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.’ And I learned to take stock of the tools I had and how they could be used to solve the problems of the present rather than catastrophising the unknowns of the future.
But the passage that made the biggest difference – the passage I return to year after year, as deathiversaries or new milestones threaten to drown me in waves of grief – is a reminder that the narrative we construct around what happens to us is, ultimately, up to us. No matter how terrible what happened was, it is still our choice whether to understand our story as one of crippling defeat or a miraculous victory against the odds – even if all we do is get back up and learn to stand again.
SciShow Psych: Why Can’t I Remember My Dreams?
Everyone has dreams, but some people are better at remembering them than others. Scientists aren't sure why we dream, but remembering them has a lot to do with the activity in your brain, and with how well you sleep.
Jacobin Magazine: The Great Reformer
Palme’s background was unusual for a social democrat. A proletarian party through and through, the leadership was comprised almost entirely of men with working-class origins. Palme, in contrast, was born into an elite family and had a traditional upper-class education. [...]
Yet his international student assignment taught Palme the destructiveness and, even from an anticommunist perspective, the counter-productiveness of colonialist wars. After a visit to Malaysia, Palme wrote: “It is a strange paradox that the British government is spending millions of pounds in order to kill off a few communists in the jungle and at the same time is carefully cultivating an increasing number in the University of Malaya.” [...]
These were also the years when Palme made a name for himself as an anti-imperialist international statesman. It started with Vietnam. As early as 1965 he publicly condemned the war, and his criticism deepened under pressure from the solidarity movement. His comparison in 1972 of the US bombing of Hanoi to Guernica and Nazi atrocities outraged Henry Kissinger and prompted Richard Nixon to call him “that Swedish asshole”. [...]
To Palme, the new political and economic landscape did not imply that reformism’s potential had been exhausted. While politicians like Feldt wanted to permanently reorient the party and break with its former economic policies, much of what was done in the 1980s was in Palme’s eyes a necessary evil that would eventually bring order to the national economy. Palme’s position, Feldt explained, was “more about giving the party the opportunity, through undesirable means, to return to its former policies. We had to crawl through a tunnel. At the other end was the light.”
28 February 2020
WorldAffairs: Don't Be Evil: Has Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles -- and All of Us?
"Don’t be evil." It’s an iconic phrase that was written into Google’s code of conduct during the early days of the company. It conveyed a utopian vision for technology that would make the world better, safer and more prosperous. But twenty years later, has big tech lived up to its founding principles or has it lost its soul? Rana Foroohar, Global Business Columnist at The Financial Times and Global Economic Analyst at CNN, documents the bigger implications for how tech companies now operate. In her conversation with World Affairs CEO, Philip Yun, Foroohar looks at the extent to which the FAANGs (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google) threaten democracies, livelihoods and our thinking.
New Statesman: The paradox of an atheist soul
When exploring the idea of the soul Cottingham says nothing of Buddhism, or any non-Western religion. He considers briefly a modern version of the denial of self- hood, which questions the idea that we should aim for narrative unity in our lives. Any such defence of the “episodic” or “happy-go-lucky” life, he tells us, “seems open to a swift and devastating rebuttal: lives of this episodic kind are possible only because others who are not leading happy-go-lucky lives are sustaining the stable relationships that make their easy-come-easy-go attitude possible”. He goes on to observe that advocates of the “episodic” life “tend to be drawn in the end to abandon the very idea of a self persisting over time… Yet the more we think about this, the more it starts to look like a fantasy of evasion.” [...]
The life of Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) was both. He writes in his autobiography that when he looked back he found not a single person but something more like a club whose members changed over time. The solitary, rationalistic and rather puritanical self of Russell’s late Victorian youth was not the self that flirted with mysticism as he fell unhappily out of love with his first wife. Nor was it the self that emerged from a spell in prison for pacifist resistance against the First World War, after which his interests shifted from mathematics and logic to politics, and he travelled to Lenin’s Russia and war-torn China. Still less was it the self that married three more times and had countless affairs. Reflecting on his life, Russell found no enduring selfhood. [...]
Even within the Western tradition, as Tom Holland showed in Dominion: the Making of the Western Mind, there are enormous moral gulfs. The Iliad knows nothing of forgiveness, nor does Aristotle’s Ethics of humility. Self-sacrifice figures nowhere in the Epicurean pursuit of tranquil pleasure, nor does concern for the downtrodden and forgotten in Stoicism. Our revulsion at the gladiatorial games of ancient Rome does not come from any inbuilt repugnance at the spectacle of human suffering and violent death. There is no sign that those who watched the games felt any such revulsion. Nor is there much evidence from that era that slavery was felt to be inherently wrong. The repugnance we feel for these practices is an inheritance from Jewish and Christian ideas of human dignity and equality.
openDemocracy: In Uzbekistan, homosexuality is illegal. Here's what LGBT life is like there
This is where it got difficult. Most of the people I met refused to talk about their lives, even on condition of complete anonymity. The main reasons were distrust and fear of the consequences. Uzbekistan is one of the few remaining countries where sex between men is still criminalised, and can be punished by a three to five year prison sentence. There are no accessible statistics on how many investigations have been opened. But in the course of conversations and interviews it’s become obvious that this criminalisation is widely used to blackmail and threaten people. [...]
LGBT people living in the Uzbek capital Tashkent have it a little easier: life here is more diverse, you can get lost in the crowd. Some people don’t hide their orientation (although they don’t advertise it) – it’s just not talked about. In both the capital and outside, however, there is a total distrust of strangers and need for extreme care in the choice of partners and friends. Despite many attempts, I was only able to talk to Tashkent residents and one activist now living outside the country. [...]
I feel that there are practically no LGBT communities in either Uzbekistan or Russia. I mean the kind of community where people are friends and do things together. There is activism, of course, but that doesn’t particularly unite people – it’s each person for themselves. Gay men don’t live together as communities – no one wants to do that and basically nobody cares. There are several reasons for that, but the main thing is fear – no one wants to end up in court.
The Atlantic: Coronavirus Could Break Iranian Society
Zeynep Tufekci has written about the advantages and disadvantages of authoritarianism in dealing with a disaster like this. China can lock down a city, quarantining tens of millions at a time, and it can marshal its top experts, allowing them to wage a campaign against the disease with the absolute authority of a caesar. But it can’t avail itself of the benefits of public trust, including transparent and honest accounts of the disease and its toll. In Iran, it appears that the government has all the disadvantages of an unfree society, and none of the compensating advantages. Watch this incredible video, at once comic and horrifying, of a top Iranian health official, Iraj Harirchi, assuring the public that the situation is being addressed, while sweating and coughing on colleagues and his audience because he has contracted the coronavirus: [...]
At some point, incompetence and evil become indistinguishable. I feel like we have passed this point several times in the past few years, and Iran’s leadership in particular keeps passing it over and over, like a Formula 1 car doing laps. Last month’s accidental downing of a civilian airliner exposed one form of fatal incompetence, followed by an abortive effort to cover it up. Iranians are understandably primed to wonder whether this disaster is similar, a tragedy of malign incompetence that is expanding beyond the government’s ability to contain. [...]
But any amount of waiting can be stressful, even in a place much more competently run than Iran. Earlier this month, I visited Hong Kong. Everyone wore masks. In public, no one crowded into my personal space on buses or in narrow pedestrian alleys. Shopkeepers came outside every quarter hour or so to wipe down the doorknobs and door buzzers of their shops, in case the last customer had left a viral particle. The burden of containing the coronavirus felt collective, and heavy. Hong Kong has a strong sense of identity and group responsibility, which has up until now kept it sane. I could take just a few days of it. Only in the middle of the night, when I knew I would encounter no one up close, did I feel comfortable—and not like some kind of norm-violating monster—walking around with my face exposed to the air.
Wired: Iran’s coronavirus outbreak makes no sense. What’s really going on?
But it is Iran that is concerning public health experts the most. According to the latest reports from the Iranian health ministry, the country has seen 16 confirmed deaths from Covid-19 and 95 confirmed cases. That death rate – of around 17 per cent – is “really quite high based on the China experience, and for early in the course of the epidemic is substantially high,” says Paul Hunter, professor in medicine at the University of East Anglia. So what’s going on? [...]
Some believe the Iranian government is deliberately trying to downplay the severity of the infection in the country. That seems to be supported by reports that broke on February 25 claiming Iranian police arrested 24 people, and temporarily detained another 118, for being “rumour-mongers” about the spread of coronavirus in Iran. The head of Iran’s cyber police force told the state’s official news agency that the police would block online posts that “contain rumours or fake news meant to disturb the public and increase concern in society”. [...]
He doesn’t believe that the main issue is Iran is covering up the spread of the coronavirus. “My view of the world is more cock-up than conspiracy,” he says. But the alternative could be more worrying. “I don’t think Iran has the capacity to identify all the contacts and cases that are likely to have been effective.”
Spiegel: Right-Wing Extremists Could Win Big in Slovak Election
The other parties in the Slovak parliament, to be sure, have made clear that they do not intend to form a coalition with Kotleba under any circumstances. But whether they will remain true to their word is by no means certain. The political landscape is fissured and the liberal camp is divided: If the far-right does as well as polls suggest it could in next week's election, democracy in Slovakia could soon follow the same path as Poland and Hungary. And this despite the fact that Slovakia has long been considered an example of successful integration with the West. Slovakia's roughly 5 million citizens have for years achieved annual economic growth of at least 3 percent and the country enjoys full employment. Carmakers like Mercedes, Kia, VW and Renault are the largest employers. Slovakia adopted the euro in 2005. [...]
Ideological differences have prevented the formation of a united, democratic bloc in the center -- one that could siphon off support from SMER on the left and fend off the demagogue Kotleba on the right. The political center, though, is frayed, and the egos of the party leaders has made any kind of rapprochement difficult. [...]
In 2017, he even handed out checks to poor families worth exactly 1,488 euros ($1,610). The number is a popular code among white supremacists: The number 14 is shorthand for the "14 Words" slogan popularized by the American neo-Nazi David Lane, while 88 stands for "Heil Hitler," as H is the eighth letter in the alphabet. The message that Kotleba sends to voters is that they can feel comfortable identifying with their nationalist history. And that includes the Slovak government, which during World War II was long controlled by Hitler. The clerical-fascist regime of the dictator Jozef Tiso eliminated members of the opposition and helped deport Slovak Jews, most of whom were sent to Auschwitz.
The Conversation: We groom dogs in our own image: the cuter they are, the harder we fall
One argument is pets piggyback on this tendency, with their cuteness inspiring us to care for them. Certainly, we often treat pets like children and consider them to be members of the family. [...]
To increase cuteness, researchers made the dog’s eyes larger, the jowls smaller, or increased the space between the eyes. To make the dog more human-like, they applied colour to the dog’s irises, or gave the dog a visible smile. People typically preferred the dogs with cuter or more human-like traits. [...]
A cautionary note to end on, then, is we must keep animal welfare top of mind. It’s fine to make over a dog who enjoys it, but let’s not cause dogs stress just for the sake of entertainment.
The Guardian: Paraguay still haunted by cataclysmic war that nearly wiped it off the map
The six-year War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870), in which Paraguay confronted the combined forces of Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, had inflicted apocalyptic damage on the landlocked nation.
Roughly two-thirds of Paraguay’s population perished during the conflict, including around 90% of its men. Brazil and Argentina would go on to annex enormous swaths of Paraguayan territory. [...]
The war also left a lasting impact above ground. After the conflict, tracts of public land were sold off to foreign companies to pay off war debt imposed on Paraguay, said Ernesto BenÃtez, a leader in the small-scale farmers’ movement. [...]
Paraguay still has the highest inequality of land ownership in the world – about 85% of agricultural land is held by just 2.5% of owners – and small-scale farmer and indigenous groups face widespread landlessness. At least 14% of Paraguayan land is in the hands of Brazilian farmers, a group that wields enormous economic and political power. [...]
As cases of sexual abuse proliferate, 584 girls between the ages of 10 and 14 were recorded to have given birth in 2018. However, these official figures are criticised for offering an incomplete picture. Elsewhere, recent emblematic cases of sexual harassment towards women in public institutions have been dismissed as “courtship”.
27 February 2020
CityLab: How to Make a Housing Crisis
Contract cities aren’t the first thing that come to mind for most people when they think of the affordable housing crisis that many American cities now face—these suburban communities tend not to have many homeless people or renters at risk of eviction. But in desirable regions like coastal California, contract cities have played a huge role in exacerbating housing problems outside their borders. For over half a century, they’ve been all too successful at implementing their founding mandates: preserving their physical and demographic character, and delivering consistently rising home values to homeowners. [...]
Golden Gates is at its best as a history, whose breadth demonstrates the impossibility of silver-bullet housing solutions. One of many counterintuitive origin points for California’s current crisis was San Francisco’s freeway revolts that began in the 1950s, when grassroots neighborhood activists successfully prevented highways from being constructed throughout most (but not all) of the city. The revolts marked the beginning of the state’s anti-growth movement, which challenged California’s longstanding growth-for-growth’s sake philosophy. That doctrine had brought “urban renewal” projects that transformed minority neighborhoods into bombed-out shells of their former selves and inspired proposals to fill in nearly the entire San Francisco Bay.
Anti-growth activism began as a close cousin of the state’s environmentalism, but as time went on, “the good intention of stopping sprawl soon became cover for stopping everything,” Dougherty writes. The broad language of the California Environmental Quality Act enabled this conceptual fudging, granting ordinary citizens the power to halt coastal subdivisions and green urban infill projects alike. As land use and planning power devolved to neighborhood groups, city governments followed their lead by “downzoning” large swaths of their land to preserve the existing urban landscape, as if it were a pristine old-growth forest.
Aeon: How Europe became so rich
It should be emphasised that Europe’s success was not the result of any inherent superiority of European (much less Christian) culture. It was rather what is known as a classical emergent property, a complex and unintended outcome of simpler interactions on the whole. The modern European economic miracle was the result of contingent institutional outcomes. It was neither designed nor planned. But it happened, and once it began, it generated a self-reinforcing dynamic of economic progress that made knowledge-driven growth both possible and sustainable.
How did this work? In brief, Europe’s political fragmentation spurred productive competition. It meant that European rulers found themselves competing for the best and most productive intellectuals and artisans. The economic historian Eric L Jones called this ‘the States system’. The costs of European political division into multiple competing states were substantial: they included almost incessant warfare, protectionism, and other coordination failures. Many scholars now believe, however, that in the long run the benefits of competing states might have been larger than the costs. In particular, the existence of multiple competing states encouraged scientific and technological innovation. [...]
In early modern Europe, however, political and religious fragmentation did not mean small audiences for intellectual innovators. Political fragmentation existed alongside a remarkable intellectual and cultural unity. Europe offered a more or less integrated market for ideas, a continent-wide network of learned men and women, in which new ideas were distributed and circulated. European cultural unity was rooted in its classical heritage and, among intellectuals, the widespread use of Latin as their lingua franca. The structure of the medieval Christian Church also provided an element shared throughout the continent. Indeed, long before the term ‘Europe’ was commonly used, it was called ‘Christendom’.
Social Europe: Can the left really stop Salvini?
The turnout in Emilia-Romagna was up more than 20 percentage points from five years ago. This made a huge difference. The strong personal victory of Bonaccini—whose electoral list with his name on it added almost 6 per cent to the progressive tally—could at first sight be explained by the local tradition of good governance. This is represented by the modello Emiliano,characterised by a tempered capitalism embedded in a social-democratic governance with a strong left-wing subculture.[...]
Their full name, ‘Sardines against Salvini,’ tells a lot about their nature and genesis as well as their will to counter a far-right victory in a left-wing bastion. In some ways, they recall the mobilisation of grassroots progressive groups in the United States since the election of Donald Trump as president. This complex and variegated activism, a ‘middle America’ rebooting democracy—made up of Women’s Marches, Black Lives Matter, local canvassing, and a spontaneous citizens’ engagement in cities and suburbs of many states—has largely been missing on European soil. [...]
As the resistance of the last bastions against the European populist trend becomes increasingly fragile, it is time for progressive forces to find new forms of mobilisation—without mirroring demagogic nationalism and its policies—and to learn a few lessons transnationally and from Italy. The left needs to regain its capacity to create a shared political culture, to focus on integrative responses and to challenge rising populism with its traditional political weapons: rights, solidarity, equality, democracy.
openDemocracy: How the Greens won Budapest
On the back of an anti-Semitic re-election campaign that spring, Fidesz had secured 2/3 of the seats in Hungary’s gold-plated parliament building, giving it the right to change the country’s constitution at will – a power they’ve not been slow to use. None of the various progressive parties had managed to even reach second place: they’d also been beaten by another far right party, Jobbik. [...]
It’s not only Roma people. Orbà n has chased much of the Central European University out of Budapest, and attacked gender studies departments as part of his war on feminism. His allied oligarchs have bought out the majority of the press. Last year, openDemocracy uncovered a long list of examples of electoral malpractice in the 2018 election. And in 2018 more than one person said to me that public criticism of the ruling party – including in social media posts – can mean losing your job if you’re one of the many people on the government’s public works scheme. The country is sometimes described by those following the rise of the global far right as a model for social control with the veneer of democracy. [...]
Just as important, though, was a new innovation the party brought to Hungary: door-knocking. In a media environment where people don’t know what to believe, nothing beats meeting them face to face. While Fidesz rely on mobilising a huge database of their own supporters, the Greens knocked on thousands of doors, speaking to people about their concerns. Barabás tells me he personally knocked on 1,500 doors – 40% of the district he now represents, and that this is something other parties haven’t done in the past in Hungary.
Politico: Iran’s leadership rigs an election — and still loses
The orchestrated vote now looks like a flop in terms of bolstering the regime’s legitimacy, however, thanks to the lowest turnout in the Islamic Republic’s history and growing concern that the government played down the scale of a coronavirus outbreak rather than risk empty polling stations. Coronavirus has now killed eight people in Iran, the biggest death toll outside China. [...]
Since Friday night, Tehran has dithered over releasing even the “official” turnout figure in the vote for the 290-seat assembly, but Interior Minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli on Sunday put it at a record low of just under 43 percent. This is way beneath 62 percent in 2016 and the 69 percent who turned out in the vote of 2000, which proved a big win for the reformist camp of President Mohammad Khatami. (Turnout in the last presidential election in 2017, when Hassan Rouhani beat the hard-liner Ebrahim Raisi, was 73 percent.) [...]
In the aftermath of the vote, Iran suddenly announced a sweeping crackdown to try to stop the spread of the disease. It announced the closure of schools, universities, cultural centers and cinemas. Several sports fixtures will be canceled while several big sports matches will be played without spectators. Even a Tehran district mayor tested positive for the disease. Turkey, Pakistan, Armenia and Afghanistan have closed their borders with Iran, or limited transport.
EURACTIV: Crisis-ridden SPD wins state parliamentary elections in Hamburg
With voter turnout at 62%, a large increase from the historic low in 2015, the city of Hamburg delivered a clear win for left-wing parties. While the SPD lost 6% of its vote share from the previous election in 2015, it remains the top party in the city by a wide margin. The election results indicate the likely continuation of the coalition between the SPD and Greens, and lead candidate for the Greens Katharina Fegebank would then continue on as the city’s second mayor.
The two parties further consolidated their majority, receiving a combined 63.2% of the vote compared to 57.9% five years ago. But the Greens will have a more prominent position now, having jumped from 12.3% to 24.2%. [...]
CDU General Secretary Paul Ziemiak called it a “bitter day for the CDU…there’s no way to sugarcoat it” and admitted that “what happened in Thuringia didn’t help.” Saarland’s state premier, Tobias Hans, called the Hamburg election “a result that must scare us, even as a federal party.” He went further calling the party “an up-to-date picture of lack of leadership,” particularly after the Thuringian crisis.
FiveThirtyEight: What Defines The Sanders Coalition?
Younger Democrats (those under 45) are more likely to be very liberal than older Democrats,3 and Sanders is very popular where these two groups overlap. But very liberal Democrats under 45 make up a small bloc of the electorate (10 percent of the exit poll sample in New Hampshire and 16 percent in both Iowa and Nevada).
But he’s also popular, though not quite so overwhelmingly, with the nonoverlapping parts of these two groups. The entrance and exit polls in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada showed the Vermont senator either leading or tied at the top among voters under 45 who identify as somewhat liberal or moderate, and in New Hampshire and Nevada, he led with very liberal voters who are over age 45. (In Iowa, he was second only to Warren with older, very liberal voters.4 So Sanders’s coalition is not solely age-based or solely ideological; being either young or very liberal makes you likelier to support Sanders, even if you’re not both. [...]
Still, if we had to say what most defines Sanders’s supporters, we would say age. The left-leaning polling firm Data for Progress, in a survey released shortly before the Nevada caucuses that was fairly close to the final results, found that Sanders was winning 66 percent of somewhat liberal respondents under 45, compared to 38 percent of those who are very liberal and over 45. That suggests that younger voters are Sanders’s strongest demographic, even more so than those who are very liberal.[...]
In Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, Sanders was more popular with voters without college degrees than voters with degrees. He was the clear leader among voters without degrees in all three states, but Nevada was the only state where he was well ahead among college graduates. And those two dynamics — Sanders being more popular with non-college-educated voters than college graduates and leading the field among those without degrees — generally also show up in national surveys and polls of upcoming states. In terms of raw numbers, there are probably more Sanders supporters without degrees than Sanders supporters who identify as very liberal, since the former is simply a much larger group. (About half of the voters in the three states that have voted so far didn’t have college degrees, for example, but only 20 to 30 percent of voters in those states identified as very liberal.)
26 February 2020
Stephen Fry's 7 Deadly Sins: Wrath
Mister ANGRY has been unleashed from his rage cage. Let’s drink together some of the wine from his grapes of wrath. Furious to know more?
The Guardian Today in Focus: India, Modi and the rise of Hindu nationalism
Narendra Modi has been grappling with continuing domestic unrest since his Hindu nationalist BJP government passed the CAA in December, which grants citizenship for refugees of every major south Asian religion except Muslims. In conjunction with a planned national register of citizens, it is feared the law will make India’s Muslim community aliens in their own country and undermine the secular foundations of the country by making religion the basis of citizenship.
BBC: American parenting styles sweep Europe
It’s generally acknowledged that raising a child has geographic variations. In 2009, for example, a study by an international group of academics looked at the way parents in different countries talked about the traits they wanted their children to have. The differences were fascinating. Dutch parents, for example, focused on the Three Rs: rust, reinheid and regelmaat (rest, cleanliness and routine). Italian parents preferred their children to be even-tempered, well-balanced and “simpatico”. American parents, meanwhile, were more likely to want their child to be “intelligent” or “cognitively advanced”. [...]
“[Intensive parenting] is a type of parenting that requires a significant amount of time and money,” says Patrick Ishizuka, a sociology professor at Cornell University who studies intensive parenting. It includes scheduling children for multiple extracurricular activities, as well as advocating for their needs and talents in communications with schools and other institutions. And it’s not limited to a small subset of parents. “I would describe it as the dominant cultural model of parenting in the US right now,” says Ishizuka. [...]
He believes that the rise in inequality, including in Europe, makes parents feel they need to help drive their children’s education, a view shared by Matthias Doepke, a researcher living in the US and co-author of the book Love, Money and Parenting: How Economics Explains the Way We Raise Our Kids. “If inequality is very high, that means from the parents’ perspective, it’s becoming very important for the kids not to be left behind. And so parents will assume a parenting style that is more intense and that is more success-oriented,” Doepke explains.
TLDR News: Bernie Wins Nevada: What That Means for the 2020 Race
At the weekend Senator Bernie Sanders won his third Primary of the 2020 process in Nevada. In this video, we discuss the winners and losers in Nevada as well as the impact this will have on the rest of the contest.
24 February 2020
BBC4 Thinking Allowed: Loss
Loss: How should we understand the 'road not taken'? Laurie Taylor talks to Susie Scott, Professor of Sociology at the University of Sussex, about her study of lost experience - that vast terrain of things we have not done, that did not happen or that we have not become. Also, Tim Strangleman, Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, reveals a lost world of paternalistic employment in which people enjoyed a well-paid job for life, free meals in silver service canteens, after work sports & theatre clubs & a generous pension on the horizon – the story of the Guinness Brewery in West London.
The Log Books: “You might well be very angry!”
The 70s was a hotbed of activism, from lesbians fighting for child custody to gay men demanding equal laws for the age of sexual consent. Tracking the movement through the log books, Tash and Adam hear from activists on the frontline, including Lisa Power and Ted Brown. Meanwhile, young activists in a resurgent Gay Liberation Front discuss the actions they plan for 2020...
99 Percent Invisible: Their Dark Materials
Vantablack is a pigment that reaches a level of darkness that’s so intense, it’s kind of upsetting. It’s so black it’s like looking at a hole cut out of the universe. “Vantablack is striking when you look at it… because it [doesn’t look] like something is colored black. It looks like an absence. It disappears,” explains Adam Rogers, a journalist who writes for Wired. Vantablack swallows nearly all visible light and gives back no reflection, so every contour or crease of whatever it’s applied to disappears. It has this odd effect of making something look two dimensional, while at the same time as if you can fall right through it. [...]
What really caught his attention Jensen was the amount of interest that came from another field in desperate need of a super-black pigment: the art world. In that first couple of weeks alone, Surrey Nanosystems received over 400 inquiries from artists wanting to use it in their work. Working with artists was just not something Surrey Nanosystems was equipped to do because Vantablack was incredibly hard to work with. Carbon nanotubes had to be grown at about 430 degrees centigrade, which is still hot enough to damage most materials. CNTs were also very delicate and could scrape off easily but most importantly, any collaboration with artists would take up time and tech resources since anything coated with Vantablack would have to be grown in Surrey Nanosystem’s reactors. Working with artists just didn’t seem like a practical move for the company… until they met Anish Kapoor. [...]
Ben Jensen is quick to point out that artists being protective of technology isn’t actually a new thing in the art world. Artists have been creating their own oil paints since the Renaissance and they were under no obligation to share their material with competitors. Jensen explains, “People feel if something exists, they have an automatic right to it… The reality is the world has never been like that. You go back to when Turner was creating his blacks and you go up to him, say, ‘Hey, you created an amazing black. I want it.’ You would have been laughed out of the art scene.” Stuart Semple sees it in a different way. He believes that sharing knowledge and technology can only move the arts community forward. It was a clear cut disagreement on how the world operated vs. how one thought the world should operate.
Vox: America's presidential primaries, explained
Before Americans vote on the next president in November, both major political parties have to settle on a nominee. That process is called the primary, and in 2020 it consists of 64 different contests, held on 22 different days, over several months. And for some reason, it all starts in the midwestern state of Iowa. So how did America's political parties come up with this system? And is there a better way to do it?
UnHerd: How Kazakhstan’s multicultural dream turned sour
Kazakhstan has never witnessed ethnic violence on this scale before, but the turmoil evoked traumatic memories of intercommunal clashes in Kyrgyzstan in 2010 between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz which left hundreds dead. [...]
Nursultan Nazarbayev, the president who ruled Kazakhstan for three decades until his resignation last year, made ethnic harmony a pillar of the nation, partly to avoid antagonising his powerful neighbour Russia, always on the look-out for discrimination against Russians abroad (they are Kazakhstan’s largest ethnic minority, making up 40% of the population at independence and now just under 20%). [...]
Under Nazarbayev, ethnic tensions were a taboo topic. The government steadfastly denied any intercommunal element to such incidents, even flying in the face of evidence on the ground. This time, Tokayev, the president, initially dismissed the violence as a “group brawl”, before obliquely acknowledging an ethnic slant by condemning “criminals” acting under the guise of shouting “pseudo-patriotic slogans”.
euobserver: German ex-commissioner Oettinger lands Orban job
According to the commission's rules, former commissioners have to notify the EU executive with "a minimum of two months' notice of their intention to engage in a professional activity during a period of two years after they have ceased to hold office". [...]
Oettinger has informed the commission that the Hungarian government had discussed with him a possible function in the Hungarian National Science Policy Council, a commission official said when asked by EUobserver on the matter. [...]
In 2016, Oettinger used a private plane for a travel to Budapest offered by a German businessman with strong Kremlin ties, Klaus Mangold, which possibly broke EU ethics rules - even though the commission at the time considered it to fall outside of its transparency and ethics rules.
The Huffington Post: Here’s What Happens When Public Transit Is Free
The communities testing or considering free transit are diverse, ranging from major metropolises to small towns and from blue-collar to affluent. Just an hour’s drive from Worcester is Lawrence, Massachusetts, a post-industrial city with a large immigrant population. It used a municipal budget surplus to make some bus service free on a trial basis last fall, and the city has seen ridership go up 20%. [...]
The equity impact of a free ride is obvious: Beyond a few big cities, it’s the most marginalized people who are least likely to own cars and thus rely most on transit. And for those who count on it, transit is at least as vital as other services that cities are expected to fund entirely through tax revenue, from parks and libraries to schools and police forces. [...]
Climate change, however, may finally tip that political calculation. In the United States, according to federal government data, transportation is responsible for 29% of greenhouse gas emissions, with passenger cars and light trucks emitting 59% of that. Putting a dent in those figures will require public transit to become more attractive than driving, and given the cost of fueling, parking and maintaining an automobile, the word “free” could have a certain appeal. [...]
Fares sometimes amount to only a small fraction of a system’s funding — 14%, or about $3 million, in Worcester — which means lost revenues can often be made up for with federal and state grants, budget reallocations or special taxes. France uses a payroll tax on businesses to support urban and regional transit systems, allowing some of them to offer free rides. In the U.S., free transit in some college towns is made possible by a subsidy from the local university.
Social Europe: Just Transition Fund can boost European coal phase-out
The European Commission’s proposal for a Just Transition Fund has the potential to add to this momentum, by making the EU’s remaining coal countries an offer too attractive to refuse. The fund is one of three pillars of a new Just Transition Mechanism, a central part of the European Green Deal. Next to it, a dedicated scheme under the InvestEU fund and a public-sector loan facility with the European Investment Bank will support regions and sectors most affected by the union’s transition to climate neutrality. [...]
To receive funding, countries will need to draw up territorial transition plans. Such plans are an essential element of a just-transition process, as they give prospective security to workers, industries, investors and communities. Importantly, these strategies need to be driven by all stakeholders from affected regions: people from a given region best know its strengths and weaknesses and what they want it to look like in the future. [...]
Under the proposed allocation criteria for the Just Transition Fund, Poland and Germany will stand to benefit the most. Allocation of funding is based on greenhouse-gas emissions, employment or production levels in a certain industry, economic development and the number of inhabitants—climate ambition is entirely missing from this equation. [...]
The European Parliament has already made clear that Just Transition funding must be conditional on coal phase-out plans. Among member states, the EU countries which are members of the Powering Past Coal Alliance control a comfortable majority and share a common interest in insisting on strict climate conditionality.
21 February 2020
The Log Books: “Pretty policemen” | Episode 4
The log books are full of stories about raids on parties and arrests made in public toilets, as the police sought to stop men having sex with men in the 70s and 80s. Tash and Adam hear from the people who suffered through unfair laws and police persecution, a lawyer who defended them, and a retired police officer with regrets. Contributors include Terry Stewart, who is still seeking a pardon for his conviction today.
Social Europe: Industrialised countries gamble with younger generations’ future
Indeed, more than half of the 41 members of the European Union (EU) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) have even recorded slight declines in intergenerational justice in recent years. There are however major differences between the countries in their efforts to balance fairly the interests of younger and older generations (see table at bottom).[...]
The sad truth is that in 19 of the 41 countries assessed greenhouse-gas emissions actually increased from 2017 to 2018. Australia, the United States and Canada, which continue to emit nearly 20 metric tons of greenhouse gases per capita, are among the biggest polluters. [...]
Sustainable fiscal policies are key to ensuring justice between generations. High debt levels, for example, will spell enormous financial burdens for younger generations. A large number of countries have once again been able significantly to reduce their debt levels since the crisis, thereby creating the financial breathing room needed for present and future generations. Nonetheless, we observe continued high levels of debt, particularly in Japan, the US and the crisis-stricken countries of southern Europe. Greece, for example, has the second highest debt ratio, 183.3 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP), following a rise of four percentage points from 2017.
UnHerd: Will Britain join the European baby push?
For anyone who’s stood on a packed train lately, the idea that Britain faces a population crisis might seem absurd. But the platform crush belies a demographic crash, little noticed when England and Wales recently posted its lowest birth rate figures – of 1.7 babies per woman – since records began. [...]
Indeed many demographers view Britain as oddly unsupportive of natalism, and of 41 OECD countries, the UK comes in 34th in paid parental leave. While in France mothers receive extra-long maternity leave and a cash bonus after their third child, and there are travel perks and reduced income tax for large families, in Britain child benefit is means tested and capped at two children. Oh Mon Dieu! [...]
From the Baltic to the Black Sea, governments are thinking long-term demographic thoughts. Hungary, which now spends four times more on pro-natalist measures than it does on defence, aims to get the birth rate up to replacement level — 2.1 babies per mother — by 2030. [...]
If he has at least two terms in office, Boris will serve to see other countries grapple with demographic challenges, and might be surprised by what he sees. When Vladimir Putin gave his annual state of the union address last month he spent 20 minutes on constitutional reforms and twice as long on the need to remedy Russia’s birth-dearth. Here, as elsewhere, religion is increasingly invoked; in neighbouring Georgia, the birth rate jumped after the Orthodox Patriarch took to personally baptising babies.
TLDR News: Inside Cummings' Mind: Exploring Johnson's Chief Strategist's Blog
Dominic Cummings, Johnson's Chief Advisor, is an interesting character. He's been called a genius by Johnson, a dark political manipulator by the media and a career psychopath by Cameron. In this video, we take a look at his blog to find out what Cummings really believes and what his plans are to shape the British political landscape.
SciShow Psych: Why More Choices Don't Make You Happy
We're surrounded by choices in life, but psychologists have found that having those choices doesn't necessarily make us happy.
Ciceroni: Slovak elections & democracy explained
In the first video of our series about elections and democracy, we talk about the parliamentary elections and history of democracy in Slovakia.
Vox: How the British royal family makes money
The British royal family is very rich, but not as rich as you might think. And that’s because of a centuries-old model for how they make their income — and taboos about earning a private income outside of their official duties.
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are breaking free from the rules of how royals make money, which just might be a savvy financial decision.
Note: The properties illustrated on our map are only the properties we were able to geo-locate precisely from the following sources.
20 February 2020
BBC4 Thinking Allowed: Hidden gay lives
Hidden gay lives: Laurie Taylor uncovers the ‘fabuloso’ history of Polari, Britain’s secret gay language with Paul Barker, Professor of English Language at Lancaster University. He also talks to the cultural historian, James Polchin, about the ways in which 20th c American crime pages recover a little discussed history of violence against gay men, one in which they were often held responsible for their own victimisation.
Today in Focus: The end of the affair: how Britain walked away from the EU
John Palmer was the Guardian’s correspondent in Brussels in 1973 when the UK entered the European Economic Community. Now, 46 years later, Jennifer Rankin is in Brussels for the Guardian as British MEPs are packing up and leaving. They tell Anushka Asthana how membership has changed Britain. Plus: Dan Sabbagh on Huawei’s role in British infrastructure.
Caravan Magazine: Intimations of an Ending
Right now, seven million people in the valley of Kashmir, overwhelming numbers of whom do not wish to be citizens of India and have fought for decades for their right to self-determination, are locked down under a digital siege and the densest military occupation in the world. Simultaneously, in the eastern state of Assam, almost two million people who long to belong to India have found their names missing from the National Register of Citizens, and risk being declared stateless. The Indian government has announced its intention of extending the NRC to the rest of India. Legislation is on its way. This could the lead to the manufacture of statelessness on a scale previously unknown.
The violence of inclusion and the violence of exclusion are precursors of a convulsion that could alter the foundations of India, and rearrange its meaning and its place in the world. The Constitution calls India a secular, socialist republic. We use the word “secular” in a slightly different sense from the rest of the world—for us, it’s code for a society in which all religions have equal standing in the eyes of the law. In practice, India has been neither secular nor socialist. In effect, it has always functioned as an upper-caste Hindu state. But the conceit of secularism, hypocritical though it may be, is the only shard of coherence that makes India possible. That hypocrisy was the best thing we had. Without it, India will end. [...]
But what was bad for the country turned out to be excellent for the BJP. Between 2016 and 2017, even as the economy tanked, it became one of the richest political parties in the world. Its income increased by 81 percent, making it nearly five times richer than its main rival, the Congress Party, whose income declined by 14 percent. Smaller political parties were virtually bankrupted. This war chest won the BJP the crucial state elections in Uttar Pradesh, and turned the 2019 general election into a race between a Ferrari and a few old bicycles. And since elections are increasingly about money—and the accumulation of power and the accumulation of capital seem to be convergent—the chances of a free and fair election in the near future seem remote. So maybe demonetisation was not a blunder after all. [...]
In its latest report, released in October, the National Crime Records Bureau has carefully left out data on mob lynchings. According to the Indian news site The Quint, there have been 113 deaths by mob violence since 2015. Lynchers, and others accused in hate crimes including mass murder, have been rewarded with public office and honoured by ministers in Modi’s cabinet. Modi himself, usually garrulous on Twitter, generous with condolences and birthday greetings, goes very quiet each time a person is lynched. Perhaps it’s unreasonable to expect a prime minister to comment every time a dog comes under the wheels of someone’s car. Particularly since it happens so often. Mohan Bhagwat, the supreme leader of the RSS, has said that lynching is a western concept imported from the Bible, and that Hindus have no such tradition. He has declared that all the talk of a “lynching epidemic” is a conspiracy to defame India.
In its latest report, released in October, the National Crime Records Bureau has carefully left out data on mob lynchings. According to the Indian news site The Quint, there have been 113 deaths by mob violence since 2015. Lynchers, and others accused in hate crimes including mass murder, have been rewarded with public office and honoured by ministers in Modi’s cabinet. Modi himself, usually garrulous on Twitter, generous with condolences and birthday greetings, goes very quiet each time a person is lynched. Perhaps it’s unreasonable to expect a prime minister to comment every time a dog comes under the wheels of someone’s car. Particularly since it happens so often. Mohan Bhagwat, the supreme leader of the RSS, has said that lynching is a western concept imported from the Bible, and that Hindus have no such tradition. He has declared that all the talk of a “lynching epidemic” is a conspiracy to defame India.
Spiegel: A Search for the Source of Italy's Malaise
Is it really possible that the residents of a country envied worldwide for its "italianità ," for its vigor, elegance and culture, are actually, deep inside, unhappy? Almost every second Italian makes precisely that claim, the highest such value in Europe. Between the Brenner Pass in the far north and the island of Lampedusa in the south, a share of the populace more than twice the EU average feels lonesome and neglected. Two-thirds are afraid of losing their job. Life expectancy keeps rising in the country, but the birth rate continues to break records as it plummets. [...]
But their deep disgust with everything having to do with the state, widely seen as voraciously greedy and uncaring, has grown since the onset of the 2011 economic crisis. Migration across the Mediterranean as well as the European Commission's alleged paternalism have reinforced a comprehensive feeling of an external threat. The average Italian, Sicilian Andrea Camilleri has written, isn't particularly concerned with the outside world. "It is enough for him to know the location of his home, his church, his pub and his city hall. His curiosity does not extend beyond that." [...]
According to official EU statistics, Rome is less livable than either Bucharest or Sofia if you ask the city's own residents. The Facebook page belonging to the group "romafaschifo" – Rome sucks – is full of posts about the aesthetic downfall of this "savaged" city, as the journalist Corrado Augias would have it. [...]
The most recent report from the researchers at Censis, which was released just before Christmas, noted that Italy was in danger of degenerating into a "fearful, mistrust-ridden society." Almost half of all respondents now support "a strong man in power" who no longer must submit to elections or parliamentary approval.
Social Europe: Why EU action on minimum wages is so controversial—yet so necessary
In an op-ed published by EUObserver just before the consultation, Therese Svanström, president of the Swedish Confederation of Professional Employees (TCO), wrote: ‘Most importantly [sic] … is the fact that the EU lacks legal competence in the area of wages.’ Thus, rather than convincing arguments about why precisely EU action would be bad, the piece primarily reflects a fear of losing control and a defensive stance, asserting that ‘well-functioning systems for collective agreements simply cannot be ordered from Brussels’. [...]
The commission has made clear that it would not oblige countries which do not have a statutory wage to introduce one, thus making most of the contenders’ arguments null and void. The framework should focus on the objectives, in terms of coverage (the percentage of the labour force receiving at least the minimum wage) and level (most probably expressed as a percentage of the median wage), not on a specific type of instrument.
Svanström hypothesises that ‘what goes up, might come down’, implying that the EU could use the framework to lower wages in times of crises. The history of EU social policy rather teaches us that its regulations are always minimum standards. So these cannot be used to lower national standards and what is already a minimum cannot be lowered. [...]
Twenty-two EU countries currently have a minimum wage under 60 per cent of the median (the benchmark recommended by the International Labour Organization). An EU framework could matter a great deal for those countries, creating political pressure and institutional incentives to improve wages and even, in the medium term, engender upward convergence.
19 February 2020
99 Percent Invisible: Shade
Shade can literally be a matter of life and death. Los Angeles, like most cities around the world, is heating up. And in dry, arid environments like LA, shade is perhaps the most important factor influencing human comfort, “even more than our temperature, more than humidity, more than wind speed,” says Bloch. Without shade, the chance of mortality, illness, and heatstroke can go way up. People become dizzy, disoriented, confused, lethargic, and dehydrated — and for the elderly or people with health issues, that can tip into more dangerous territory, like heart attacks or organ failure. Shade can literally save lives. [...]
But things changed drastically in LA after the advent of cheap electricity and the completion of the Hoover Dam. The city rebuilt itself around controlled air conditioning and car culture. Palm trees became an LA calling card. “As Mary Pickford said, [palm trees are] very good for window shopping from the seat of your car because the tree trunks aren’t that robust,” notes Bloch, but they’re also “as one essayist said, about as useful for shade as a telephone pole.” [...]
But the sidewalk isn’t the only place where LA has a shade problem. The public parks also provide very little refuge from the hot sun. Pershing Square, for example, used to be full of shade trees. But after a new underground parking structure destroyed the root system, the thick, dense tree canopy was replaced. Other parks lack trees because of a strategy Bloch has reported on called crime prevention through environmental design. In LA, there is an idea that increased visibility in public spaces will lead to higher levels of public safety. In several instances, it’s believed the LAPD has installed pole cameras in parks or in public housing projects and cut down mature trees to give the camera a clear sightline.
VICE: Photos of the Most Egregious 'Anti-Homeless' Architecture
At its core, hostile or "defensive" architecture amounts to a forever campaign waged, consciously or otherwise, by designers, landlords, and developers to force people to use property in exactly one way. Sometimes, the end result isn't exactly a tragedy; skaters might have to go somewhere else, for instance. But in its most malignant form, hostile architecture can deter homeless folks from resting. In those cases, public or quasi-public spaces of cities—often defined by unequal access to transit, groceries, and other essentials—become a visceral extension of society's collective disregard for their fate. [...]
Previously, when asked about their strategy for managing public spaces, a spokesperson for the California Department of Transportation (DOT)—which had placed boulders where folks once camped in the Bay Area—said they "use fencing and landscaping elements to prevent and discourage.... illegal encampments." It’s worth noting that many people sleeping outdoors within U.S. city limits are doing so illegally, although due to the 2018 Martin v. Boise court decision, they might not be punished for doing so on public property unless the city in question provides adequate indoor space. It's still unclear what this decision will mean to the estimated 550,000 homeless people in the country, nor the growing population in the Bay Area, which has massively increased over the past two years. [...]
As "hostile architecture" posts have in the past, the story blew up for a few days on social media—until the Coalition deleted their original, having determined the restaurant was "a valued member" of the community and "supportive of its homeless neighbors." That may be true, as the business explicitly denied anti-homeless intent, pointing to the rock as part of a Japanese garden. And this isn't the place for a debate about whether or not businesses are in the right or wrong even if they do choose to shoo homeless people away. Because when it comes to hostile architecture, it's more important to realize the effects than the intent, whether aesthetic or otherwise. And you can't do that without knowing what it looks like.
Politico: Bernie breaks out of the pack
While few expect that Sanders can carry more than a third of the vote in Nevada, nearly everyone believes that will be enough to win in a field where the moderate vote remains splintered. It is becoming a source of celebration for Sanders' supporters and an urgent problem for those who want to prevent him from claiming the nomination. [...]
Pete Buttigieg, who topped the field with Sanders in Iowa and finished less than 2 percentage points behind him in New Hampshire, is not polling well in Nevada or in the next voting state, South Carolina. Amy Klobuchar surged in New Hampshire but is starting from behind in Nevada. Biden is the opposite — humiliated in Iowa and New Hampshire but with better prospects here. [...]
The dim prospects of anyone beating Sanders in Nevada were laid bare last week, when the state’s powerful Culinary Workers Union elected not to endorse in the presidential primary. Despite its criticism of Sanders’ signature policy proposal, Medicare for All, the union was not convinced that any other Democrat could defeat Sanders, even with the union’s endorsement, according to a source familiar with the union’s deliberations.
The Federal Trust: Brexit: The British government starts to recognise reality
Michael Gove’s acknowledgement that trade between the UK and the EU after 1st January 2021 will be far from frictionless is a watershed in the Brexit process. The claim that Brexit would not significantly impinge upon British trade with the European Union was central to the 2016 Leave campaign. So central indeed that government ministers spent the three years thereafter repeating this dishonest assurance in the face of ever-mounting evidence to the contrary. [...]
The enduring denial that Brexit would involve customs and other checks at the border(s) of the EU was not merely a political and rhetorical convenience. The equivocation about the objective implications of Brexit for cross-border trade reflected a continuing disagreement among Leave voters and later within government itself about different models for quitting the EU. Campaigners for a Leave vote knew that there is not and never has been a majority within the British electorate for any specific form of Brexit. Any serious discussion during the referendum campaign of realistic alternatives to current British EU membership would have risked splintering the Leave coalition. Post-2016 government ministers have been forced to realise that any concrete form of Brexit, be it “hard” or “soft,” brought with it highly unpalatable consequences which they have been reluctant to discuss honestly with the electorate. Until now. [...]
The governmental volte-face on frontier formalities will probably need to be followed in short order by similar reversals of tack on Ireland, fisheries, financial services, digital exchanges and trading arrangements with third countries. These reversals will be intensely embarrassing to Boris Johnson’s administration, and it may well be that he concludes his short-term political interest is better served by abandoning negotiation with the EU and simply proclaiming that after the transition period ends the UK will trade with the EU on “WTO terms.” No informed commentator is in any doubt that this will cause considerable damage and disruption to the British economy. It will also exacerbate political tensions within the United Kingdom, heightening discontent in Northern Ireland and Scotland. Such political and economic dislocation would be unlikely, however, to deter this hubristic government. Boris Johnson would reasonably hope to be able to count on support from important sections of the traditional mass media to justify his recklessness in pursuing a new “no deal Brexit” as an unavoidable response to the “intransigence” of the EU. Over the past three and a half years, these Eurosceptic media have had much practice in depicting as unreasonable the EU’s wholly understandable reluctance to accommodate the ever-varying demands from London that are, in truth, inimical to the EU’s interests.
The Atlantic: ‘Pure Poison’ for a Scholarly Career
All we know for certain, through forensic testing, is that the manuscript likely dates to the 15th century, when books were still mostly handmade and rare. But its provenance and meaning are uncertain, making it virtually impossible to corroborate any claims about its contents against other historical materials. So why are so many scholars and scientists driven to solve the puzzle?
For many, it’s the ultimate opportunity to prove their analytical skills in their given field. For others, it’s a chance to test promising new digital technologies and artificial-intelligence advances. And for some, it’s simply the thrill of the hunt. [...]
“Everyone wants to be the one to prove it, to crack it, to prove your own abilities, to prove you’re smarter,” says Davis, the medieval scholar. One problem, she adds, especially with a complex medieval manuscript, is that researchers are specialists. “Hardly anyone out there understands all the different components” of the manuscript, she points out, referring not just to the illustrations but to things like the binding, the inks, and the handwriting. “It’s going to take a whole interdisciplinary team.” [...]
In the end, the manuscript may simply be an unsolvable mystery. Robert Richards, a historian of science at the University of Chicago, uses the codex to teach the concept of scientific paradigms, where a scientific theory comes to shape a field of research so strongly that scientists can’t always explain or identify anomalies outside of the theory.
17 February 2020
WorldAffairs:The Crisis in Syria: A Geopolitical Reshuffling of Power (Nov 5, 2019)
The withdrawal of US troops from northern Syria has had grave repercussions for the security and stability of the entire region. The Turkish military has invaded northern Syria, killing dozens of Kurdish civilians and forcing over 200,000 Kurds to flee. In the absence of US troops, Russian and Syrian troops have rushed in to fill the power vacuum. Meanwhile, hundreds of ISIS fighters have escaped detention. Brett McGurk, distinguished lecturer at Stanford University and former special presidential envoy for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, and David Phillips, director of peace-building and rights at Columbia University and former senior advisor to the US Department of State, make sense of the cascading impacts with WorldAffairs co-host Ray Suarez.
WorldAffairs: The Promise of Africa: How Foreign Investment Affects Self-Sufficiency
Africa is home to some of the fastest growing economies in the world. By 2050, it will have a population greater than China and up to a quarter of the world’s workforce. More than half of its population will be under 25 – presenting tremendous growth potential with the right opportunities in place and posing significant risks without them. Governments and businesses from all over the world are scrambling to have a strong footing in Africa by strengthening ties and making investments. In this week’s episode, we’ll consider what countries – from within and outside Africa – stand to gain the most and more critically, how Africans might actually benefit from this investment. Amaka Anku, head of the Africa practice at Eurasia Group, Alex Vines, head of the Africa Program and research director for Risk, Ethics, and Resilience at Chatham House, and Jonathan Ledgard, founder of Droneport and Linnaeus, make the case for the promise of Africa's future with WorldAffairs co-host Ray Suarez.
TLDR News: Johnson's 'Power Grab': The Cabinet Reshuffle Explained
Yesterday Number 10 announced some pretty major changes to the makeup of Johnson's Cabinet with the most significant change coming in the form of Javid's resignation. The former Chancellor of the Exchequer was replaced by Rishi Sunak, a chancellor some speculate will be more loyal to Johnson and Cumming's plans. Is this a standard reshuffle or an attempt by Johnson the gain greater control over Number 11.
Nautilus Magazine: This Psychological Concept Could Be Shaping the Presidential Election
Pluralistic ignorance is a discrepancy between one’s privately held beliefs and public behavior. It occurs when people assume that the identical actions of themselves and others reflect different underlying states. The term has been in circulation for nearly 80 years, though more recent experiments have made it a focal point of social psychology. [...]
Over a decade later, psychologists Nicole Shelton and Jennifer Richeson examined whether pluralistic ignorance stymied friendship among black and white college students. They designed an experiment that asked students to imagine approaching a group of people from a different race in a dining hall. Results showed both groups of students wanted to have more contact with each other, but erroneously thought the other group didn’t want to have contact with them. In subsequent studies, Shelton and Richeson documented the real consequences of this miscalculation among Princeton students. They found that people who endorsed divergent explanations for their own actions and the identical actions of racial outgroup members had less contact with people of different races in their daily lives. Pluralistic ignorance deterred Princeton students of different races from interacting with each other.4 [...]
Nate Silver, editor of FiveThirtyEight, reflected on these data in a blog post. “Being a woman was the biggest barrier to electability, based on Avalanche’s analysis of the results, and women were more likely to cite gender as a factor than men,” Silver wrote. “So there are a lot of women who might not vote for a woman because they’re worried that other voters won’t vote for her. But if everyone just voted for who they actually wanted to be president, the woman would win!”9
Nautilus Magazine: The Future of Food Looks Small, Dense, and Very Bushy
The way we live is out of balance with the way we eat. About eleven percent of the Earth’s land area is used for agriculture; meanwhile, two-thirds of the human population is now jammed in cities, which cover a mere three percent. Continued urbanization and population growth will require more farmland, more transportation, and an even bigger ecological footprint—unless we can find more efficient ways to feed the world.
One intriguing solution is to give traditional agriculture a 90 degree twist into vertical farming, where crops are grown indoors in tightly stacked rows, sustained hydroponically so that they don’t need dirt. A lot of food production could then be relocated to urban regions, so that less wilderness would need to be converted to cropland, notes Choon-Tak Kwon, a postdoctoral fellow in plant biology at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. The financial and ecological cost of transporting food should decrease substantially, too. “You can grow perishable crops near your home all the year around,” Kwon says, ideally leading to “fresher foods with stable prices.” [...]
Other researchers are finding ways to apply targeted genetic shrinking to completely unrelated crops, as well. In 2018, Erika Varkonyi-Gasic and her colleagues with the New Zealand Institute for Plant & Food Research Limited in Auckland created a dwarf kiwi vine through gene editing. Instead of long, climbing vines that take a few years to mature, the engineered kiwis were just a meter long at maturity and produced fruit within a year. The global appetite for kiwi fruit may be modest, but the shrinking technique could soon be ubiquitous.
UnHerd: Why arranged marriages make sense
For most of recorded history, marriage was seen as a contract, largely for the creation of children. If love — agape — developed as a result, all the better, but romance was not a reason for marriage. The Greeks and Romans essentially saw romantic love as a mental illness — “a sickness, a fever, a source of pain” in the words of historian Nigel Saul — while the medieval aristocracy thought of marriages as more like business contracts. Kings used their children as assets with which to make deals, one of the most ruthless being the 12th century Henry II, who had his heir Henry wed when he was five and his bride, daughter of the king of France, just two. [...]
Along with rules about consent and age, the Church also became increasingly strict about the marrying of relatives, which had a profound effect on wider society. Once people were forced to marry out, their loyalty to their family declined in relation to wider society and this fostered more radical ideas. Maybe Romeo wasn’t just a member of the Montague clan but an individual with his own desires? Maybe his individual happiness was more important than the extended family’s status? The effects have been long lasting, with various studies showing a link between the Catholic Church’s ban on cousin marriage with corruption and democracy. [...]
There are now around a quarter of a million marriages a year in Britain, just over half the rate in 1969 when the Divorce Reform Act was passed. Marriage has also become a luxury good, with the gap between professional and working classes rising just this century from 22% to almost 50%. The results are huge numbers living alone, a figure that will surpass 10 million by 2040.
16 February 2020
Nautilus Magazine: Mapping Gay-Friendly Cities Through History
What separates Ptolemy’s survey from simple jingoism, however, is his attempt to ascribe the ethnic differences he perceived to a set of rational principles. On this account, the Tetrabiblos is one of the earliest examples of what’s sometimes called anthropological ethnology. And unlike the blood-based racial theories which became especially pernicious in America and Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries, Ptolemy’s ethnology is entirely geographical. This makes the Tetrabiblos rightfully the great-grandfather of what’s surely the most famous modern work of geographic anthropology, Jared Diamond’s best-selling Guns, Germs, and Steel. But let’s not be coy here. What really makes Ptolemy’s whirlwind world tour so entertaining is all the sex—or, rather, how candidly Ptolemy discusses the sexual habits of the peoples he describes. [...]
Ptolemy’s assertion that acceptance of homosexuality decreases along a line running from London to Riyadh agrees pretty well with what I imagine is the current conventional wisdom on the matter. Could he be on to something? To add a quantitative veneer to this question, we can use that favorite tool of data analysts everywhere: a linear regression. [...]
It’s no secret, for instance, that northwestern Europe historically, and even quite recently, was not especially welcoming toward homosexuals. Indeed, when the great Victorian explorer Richard Burton developed his own theory of geographically-influenced sexuality, the Middle East was explicitly included, and England excluded, from his map of what he termed the “Sotadic Zone”—a region where homosexuality was supposedly natural, accepted, and common. Were Figure 2 to be redrawn with data from 150 years ago, it’s altogether likely that the best-fit regression line would have entirely the opposite slope. Yet a correlation that shifts from one moment to the next undermines any argument that there’s a fixed principle at work. Instead, perhaps the only constant uniting Ptolemy’s and Burton’s theories is that each imagined the sexual mores of faraway lands to be radically different from what he knew back home, and each projected his disgust or desire accordingly. That’s hardly the story you would get if the only information you had was the cold and context-free data of Figure 2. Trying to figure out which story, if any, is hiding in your data is challenging expressly because there are usually multiple stories which can be crafted, and deciding which one to emphasize rarely has anything to do with the data itself.
Social Europe: What’s at stake in the Democratic primaries
For example, with regard to health care, all the candidates support moving beyond the reforms introduced under Barack Obama’s presidency towards universal coverage. Where they differ is on how to get there: Sanders and Warren favour a rapid transition to a ‘single-payer’, public (‘Medicare for all’) system, while the moderates favour gradual change, beginning with the expansion of a public option (Medicare) to those lacking private insurance.
Similarly, all the candidates advocate higher taxes on the wealthy, fighting inequality, more business regulation, increased spending on social programmes and infrastructure, making college more affordable, and devoting greater attention to environmental issues and climate change. As with health care, on these issues the candidates differ more on how they favour achieving these goals than on the goals themselves. [...]
On the other side of the electability debate are those who believe the path to victory lies not in trying to attract independent and wavering voters but in mobilising the party’s base. Supporters of this strategy point to research arguing that voters generally don’t know much about policy and the intense polarisation of the American electorate, which makes them care even less. In this view, Democrats and Republicans are so committed to their own ‘team’—technically, ‘negative partisanship’ has become so strong—that they will vote for any candidate their party puts up.
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