The Atlantic: What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?

 In the past few decades, Americans have broadened their image of what constitutes a legitimate romantic relationship: Courthouses now issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, Americans are getting married later in life than ever before, and more and more young adults are opting to share a home rather than a marriage license with a partner. Despite these transformations, what hasn’t shifted much is the expectation that a monogamous romantic relationship is the planet around which all other relationships should orbit.

By placing a friendship at the center of their lives, people such as West and Tillotson unsettle this norm. Friends of their kind sweep into territory typically reserved for romantic partners: They live in houses they purchased together, raise each other’s children, use joint credit cards, and hold medical and legal powers of attorney for each other. These friendships have many of the trappings of romantic relationships, minus the sex. [...]

Beliefs about sexual behavior also played a role. The historian Richard Godbeer notes that Americans at the time did not assume—as they do now—that “people who are in love with one another must want to have sex.” Many scholars argue that the now-familiar categories of heterosexuality and homosexuality, which consider sexual attraction to be part of a person’s identity, didn’t exist before the turn of the 20th century. While sexual acts between people of the same gender were condemned, passion and affection between people of the same gender were not. The author E. Anthony Rotundo argues that, in some ways, attitudes about love and sex, left men “freer to express their feelings than they would have been in the 20th century.” Men’s liberty to be physically demonstrative surfaces in photos of friends and in their writings. Describing one apparently ordinary night with his dear friend, the young engineer James Blake wrote, “We retired early and in each others arms,” and fell “peacefully to sleep.” [...]

John Carroll, who met his platonic partner, Joe Rivera, at a gay bar, describes this type of romantic relationship as “one-stop shopping.” People expect to pile emotional support, sexual satisfaction, shared hobbies, intellectual stimulation, and harmonious co-parenting all into the same cart. Carroll, 52, thinks this is an impossible ask; experts share his concern. “When we channel all our intimate needs into one person,” the psychotherapist Esther Perel writes, “we actually stand to make the relationship more vulnerable.” Such totalizing expectations for romantic relationships leave us with no shock absorber if a partner falls short in even one area. These expectations also stifle our imagination for how other people might fill essential roles such as cohabitant, caregiver, or confidant.

read the article

Nautilus Magazine: The Joys of Being a Stoic

So it goes for Stoicism: The stiff-upper-lip stereotype finds its root in the fact that Stoics practice endurance. It arose in ancient Greece and Rome, established around 300 B.C. by Zeno of Citium in Athens. People spanning the social gamut practiced it, from slaves such as the early second-century Epictetus to emperors like Marcus Aurelius. They took to heart the idea that if there is nothing you can do about a particular situation, why beat yourself up about it? Work toward as serene a degree of acceptance as you can muster instead. This doesn’t mean suppressing emotions. Rather, it means shifting your emotional spectrum—away from unhealthy emotions like anger and toward the mindful embracing of healthy ones like joy—by working on consciously altering the way you think about yourself and the world. [...]

Well, thank Zeus I’ve never been attracted by a “naive endorsement of stoic ideology.” That’s because I practice upper-case Stoicism, not lower-case stoicism. I’m into the philosophy, in other words, not the macho attitude. Not only are the two unrelated, but in fact research from practitioners of cognitive behavioral therapy shows that the philosophy promotes eudaimonic well-being as well as engagement in life. The goal of Stoicism, after all, is to make us into the best human beings we can be, and it does so through the constant applications of two cardinal principles: the dichotomy of control and the four virtues.[...]

In essence, the idea is to internalize our goals: Instead of focusing, as it comes natural, on outcomes, let’s pay attention to our intentions and efforts. The Stoics think that the only truly good thing for us is our own character, and that therefore the only truly bad things are whatever may undermine our character. Everything else (including health, wealth, reputation, etc.) has value, but does not define who we are. [...]

It turns out that practicing Stoics experience a statistically significant increase in measures of their well-being, with fewer episodes of negative emotions (like anger) and more episodes of positive emotions (like joy). Moreover, such reduction of anger does not take place by way of suppression (which is impossible), but because Stoic practitioners reframe what happens to them in terms that simply do not trigger angry reactions in them. “We stop having ethically misguided and intense or conflicted emotions (sometimes called ‘passions’) and we move toward having ‘good emotions,’” as the handbook for the 2020 edition of Stoic Week states. “The passions are misguided because the passionate person supposes that happiness depends on acquiring or retaining ‘preferred indifferents,’ such as wealth or fame (rather than on exercising the virtues).” This folly leads to anger, fear, or overwhelming lust, emotions often marked “by intensity of feeling, instability and inner conflict.”

read the article 

Wendover Productions: Egypt's Dam Problem: The Geopolitics of the Nile

UnHerd: How Trump held on to black voters

 Nevertheless, Biden’s advantage on race did not lead to higher margins of support from black voters compared to four years ago. Black women voted almost uniformly for Democrats, as they have done for some time; the major surprise in this election concerns black men, especially younger black men who were targeted by both campaigns. Washington Post exit polls indicate that Trump won 18% of black men. Although possibly within the margin of error, this is an apparent increase from the 14% of the black male vote that he won in 2016 according to the Pew Research Center. [...]

Nevertheless, while Biden lost black men at the margins, his campaign appears to have won the turnout game. For a number of reasons, black men have long voted in significantly lower numbers than Black women; the gender gap among black voters is higher than the male-female difference of any other demographic, and getting more black men to vote became a key goal of Democrats this year (Republicans, by contrast, have been accused of suppressing black turnout, knowing that higher numbers of black voters will benefit Democrats overall). [...]

So, yes, the Democratic Party does still have an edge with black voters. But if it doesn’t want to continue losing ground among black men in particular, it would do well to pair its mobilisation efforts and justice agenda with the type of economic appeals that were effective for Donald Trump. Perhaps it really is as simple as a slogan like, “Jobs”.

read the article