99 Percent Invisible: The Infantorium

Dawn Raffel, the author of a book about the unexpected history of incubation in America, says Lion built a better incubator and displayed it at the Berlin Industrial Exposition in 1896. The air in Lion’s incubator was heated underneath by a pipe flowing with hot water. The temperature was pretty consistent, and the box was ventilated. But Lion’s real innovation had nothing to do with hot water or warm air. He put a big glass window on the box, and then in Berlin, he filled the boxes with premature babies. “It took on the environment of a sideshow,” says Raffel. “There were drinking hall songs about it. He called it Die Kinder-Brutanstalt, which was literally child hatchery.” [...]

Couney perfected his sideshow at the 1901 World’s Fair in Buffalo, New York. That Fair has gone down in infamy as the place where President William McKinley was shot and died of gangrene 8 days later. But aside from that… people had a really good time at the fair! Dr. Couney set up on the midway, which is the section filled with carnival rides and sideshows, and in Buffalo, it was popping off with attractions like “House Upside Down,” and “Jerusalem on the Morning of the Crucifixion.” Thousands of people paid ten cents each to see Dr. Couney’s incubator show. And parents from across the city brought their premature babies to Couney, hoping for a miracle. A local medical journal reported that 48 of the 52 babies delivered to Couney that summer had survived. [...]

Beyond the safety concerns, there’s something deeply unsettling to modern eyes about the whole concept of incubator sideshows. Today, it’s clear that putting babies on display and profiting off of them is exploitative. In many ways, Couney’s exhibits were in line with some of the worst parts of amusement parks and World’s Fairs. In addition to the rides, many fairs and parks had “ethnological villages”, where Native Americans or people from faraway nations would live on-site in stereotyped caricatures of their homes. Some were literally caged and incarcerated on the grounds, with no record of payment. On a lot of midways, there was a despicable willingness to exploit human life for the entertainment of others. Charging money to see tiny infants was a small part of that.

read the article or listen to the podcast

BBC4 Analysis: The New Censorship

Democracy flourishes where information is free flowing and abundant, so the logic goes.

In the West the choice of information is limitless in a marketplace of ideas. While authoritarian regimes censor by constricting the flow of information.

But even in the West a new pattern of control is emerging. And this free flow of information, rather than liberate us, is used to crowd out dissent and subvert the marketplace of ideas.

Peter Pomerantsev examines how the assumptions that underpinned many of the struggles for rights and freedoms in the last century - between citizens armed with truth and information and regimes with their censors and secret police - have been turned upside down.

listen to the podcast

The Guardian: How the right’s radical thinktanks reshaped the Conservative party

Libertarian thinktanks in the US, such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) have had this sort of close relationship with incoming Republican administrations for years, furnishing them with staff and readymade policies. Thinktanks – non-governmental organisations that research policies with the aim of shaping government – have long been influential in British politics, too, on both left and right, but the sheer number of connections between Johnson’s cabinet and ultra free market thinktanks was something new. In the period immediately before the Brexit referendum and in the years since, a stream of prominent British politicians and campaigners, including Johnson, Michael Gove, Nigel Farage and Arron Banks, have flown to the US to meet with thinktanks such as the AEI and the Heritage Foundation, often at the expense of those thinktanks, seeking out ideas, support and networking opportunities. Meanwhile, US thinktanks and their affiliates, which are largely funded by rightwing American billionaires and corporate donations, have teamed up with British politicians and London-based counterparts such as the IEA, the Legatum Institute and the Initiative for Free Trade, to help write detailed proposals for what the UK’s departure from the EU, and its future relationships with both the EU and the US, should look like, raising questions about foreign influence on British politics. [...]

One key Atlas strategy involves using the media to shape the political debate. By encouraging the creation of more and more thinktanks – a never-ending production line of new “institutes”, “centres” and “foundations”, whose acronyms blur into each other – the network can generate a “constant river of commentary” from its experts, says Andrew Simms, a veteran of environmental thinktanks who has often debated against members of Atlas-affiliated organisations. A predominantly rightwing British media have been happy to give them space. This gives the impression of widespread support for what may be minority or fringe points of view. The thinktanks’ contribution to the post-referendum Brexit debate was a turbo-charged version of what they have long done on issues such as tax and climate, where they have disputed the scientific consensus, argues Simms. “It’s a belief system. They go very ‘big picture’ to shift the tide of opinion.” [...]

We asked Oliver Letwin, the former Conservative minister who helped lead the Tory backbench rebellion against a no-deal Brexit, how influential he thought the free market thinktanks were. He said that occasionally they had shifted the political terrain, but mostly the dynamic worked the other way round. Earlier in his career, he recalled, he had commissioned some of the UK ones to write pamphlets – but only to justify what he had already decided to do: “One alights magpie-like on these, if they tend to your argument. But 95% of the reports they produce are just junk.” He doubted they had played much role in Brexit policy. Why, then, did he think so many Conservative politicians had made trips to the US thinktanks? He seemed baffled by this. “Do they? I have no idea.” [...]

“The clique that think about Europe and nothing else now dominate every aspect of the party,” said Margot James, the former Conservative digital and culture minister. “It’s just different to the one I joined.” When James entered parliament in 2010, she became a member of the Free Enterprise Group and went to IEA events, but eventually found the thinktank’s views too rigidly ideological. James now feels that a number of MPs have adopted the IEA’s ideas “lock, stock and barrel” and that Johnson had surrounded himself with “dogmatic small-state” conservatives. “Oh, there are people at No 10 who would honestly make your hair stand on end,” she said.

read the article or listen to the podcast

Vox: Who pays the lowest taxes in the US?

You might have heard that the poor in America barely pay any taxes. And if you look at a chart of how much every American pays in income taxes, that seems basically true. But income taxes are just one type of the many taxes we pay. So what happens if we add them all up? A new analysis by the economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman did exactly that. And it shows that the American tax system might not be as "progressive" as many people believe.