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.
17 February 2020
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.
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