BBC: Why it pays to be grumpy and bad-tempered

Next the two teams were pitched against each other in a game designed to test their creativity. They had 16 minutes to think of as many ways as possible to improve education at the psychology department. As Baas expected, the angry team produced more ideas – at least to begin with. Their contributions were also more original, repeated by less than 1% of the study’s participants. [...]

In essence, creativity is down to how easily your mind is diverted from one thought path and onto another. In a situation requiring fight or flight, it’s easy to see how turning into a literal “mad genius” could be life-saving.

“Anger really prepares the body to mobilise resources – it tells you that the situation you’re in is bad and gives you an energetic boost to get you out of it,” says Baas. [...]

Then in 2010 a team of scientists decided to take a look. They surveyed a group of 644 patients with coronary artery disease to determine their levels of anger, suppressed anger and tendency to experience distress, and followed them for between five and ten years to see what happened next.

Over the course of the study, 20% experienced a major cardiac event and 9% percent died. Initially it looked like both anger and suppressed anger increased the likelihood of having a heart attack. But after controlling for other factors, the researchers realised anger had no impact – while suppressing it increased the chances of having a heart attack by nearly three-fold. [...]

In some situations, happiness carries far more serious risks. It’s associated with the cuddle hormone, oxytocin, which a handful of studies have shown reduces our ability to identify threats. In prehistoric times, happiness would have left our ancestors vulnerable to predators. In modern life, it prevents us paying due attention to dangers such as binge drinking, overeating and unsafe sex.

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Jacobin Magazine: How the War on Terror Fuels Trump

The recent denunciations underscore a growing consensus among foreign policy elites in both parties: that Trump’s disrespect for constitutional norms and antipathy toward limits on executive power pose, as the Washington Post put it, “a unique threat to American democracy.”

Some voters, however, aren’t convinced.

Eighty-eight percent of Republicans and 40 percent of the general public support Trump. Judging by the last few months of polling, a significantly larger portion backs his national security agenda. Half the country supports a temporary ban on Muslim immigration; 44 percent favor a registry for Muslims already here; 53 percent want to intensify surveillance of US mosques; and 63 percent endorse the torture of terror suspects. In the latest Pew survey on the subject, voters say Trump would do a better job than Clinton defending the country from future terrorist attacks. [...]

If a constituency exists for Trump’s extreme anti-terror agenda it’s because Republicans and Democrats alike have spent the last fifteen years cultivating paranoia, secrecy, and deference to executive authority — while vastly overstating the threat of attacks on American soil. [...]

Obama’s DOJ largely continued these polices (with the exception of torture), abandoning a campaign commitment to bring transparency to the war on terror. Instead, he has ramped up investigations and prosecutions of national security leakers and resisted efforts to make public the worst crimes of the Bush administration.

On the battlefield too, there’s been much continuity between Bush and Obama. Bush administration lawyers reimagined the meaning of warfare, increasing the executive’s unilateral authority to wage it and creating a legal framework for a borderless, multifaceted war with no necessary end.

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Quartz: The history of the tango is actually kind of gay

From this perspective, the past few years of queer tango in Argentina are an innovation, an adaptation from the traditional gender roles. But, despite a mythology that links the tango with brothels, historical research shows that the tango was danced by male couples from the beginning. And so, rather than pushing boundaries, queer tango is a return to the origins of the dance. [...]

Men would practice together, perfecting their polka and waltz so that they could impress a woman when the time came. It seems the tango began in the tenements as the men’s fantasy dance. [...]

Though men began dancing tango with an eye to wooing women, Trenner says there was certainly a “semi-secret” gay culture. There were certain dancers who were famously good followers and who didn’t go to social dances with women. These men were “fought over,” says Trenner, as the preferred partners. “There was an unstated queer element of the male practice.” [...]

But though gay milongas still face some opposition, two men dancing together is the most traditional form of the tango. And in other ways, too, queer tango embodies the spirit of the dance. “The dance represents a culture that is not dominant. It’s not the mainstream culture,” says Taylor. “For a long time, this was an art not of entertainment but resistance.”

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Al Jazeera: Fighting spatial apartheid in South Africa

The Woodstock Hub claims that Beukes and the other Bromwell Street tenants are being evicted for failure to pay rent. But while tenants concede that they have not been paying rent for the past two years, they say that they have been unable to establish any contact with the new owners since they took over the property. Residents believe that this has been part of a deliberate move to facilitate their eviction and avoid dealing with long-standing lease agreements. [...]

He points out that much of this former industrial area escaped the large-scale segregation of the apartheid state's Group Areas Act, which ripped apart other similarly diverse Cape Town communities, most famously District 6.

The Act saw most Capetonians of colour cast out into the collection of marginalised townships now known as the Cape Flats and sometimes still referred to as the "apartheid's dumping ground". [...]

Twenty-two years since the end of apartheid, this situation is being mirrored across Cape Town, with free market forces, favourable tax breaks and rocketing property prices entrenching Cape Town's undesirable status as one of the most segregated cities in South Africa.

But a new campaign dubbed Reclaim the City aims to finally wrest Cape Town's soul from apartheid's enduring legacies and what activists see as its contemporary manifestation. Marching under the banner of "Land for people, not for profit", the campaign is fighting to reimagine the city as a more racially and economically integrated and equal space.

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Al Jazeera: Zulu king: I won't let my people forget our history

KwaZulu-Natal, a region in eastern South Africa with the Drakensberg Mountains to the west and the Indian Ocean to the east, is home to one of the most powerful kingdoms in the African continent - the Zulu. [...]

The then newly born nation existed in relative peace until the late 1800s, when British troops invaded Zulu territory and divided the land.

The Zulu never regained their independence.

Today, as estimated 11 million Zulus live in South Africa.

They account for about 22 percent of the population, but other smaller communities live in nearby countries, such as Lesotho, where there are around 320,000 Zulus, Zimbabwe (152,000), Swaziland (106,000), Malawi (64,000), Botswana (5,300), and Mozambique (3,900). And they recognise one man - Goodwill Zwelithini - as their king. [...]

On Talk to Al Jazeera he discusses the threats his culture has faced, reviving traditions some see as controversial, and the lack of emphasis on Zulu and other people's histories in the curriculums of South African schools. 

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