The Telegraph: Don't look down - or perhaps do, if you dare...China opens world's highest, longest glass bridge

China has opened the world's highest and longest glass-bottomed bridge – the latest in a series of vertigo-inducing structures which are attracting tourists from all over the world.

The 1,410ft (430 metre) bridge, which opened on Saturday, and spans across the Zhangjiajie Canyon, in Hunan province, allows visitors to peer down into the abyss through 99 triple-layered glass panels. [...]

A maximum of 8,000 visitors a day will be allowed on the bridge, with park officials advising would-be guests to book to avoid disappointment.

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The New Yorker: Has Anything Changed for Female Politicians?

When news reaches Missoula that Rankin has won the general election by a plurality of 7,567 votes, reporters and photographers crowd the front lawn of her house in town, curious to bring back news of the “lady from Montana”— specifically what she looks like, what she’s wearing. (From across the country, her colleague Carrie Chapman Catt, the president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, questions Rankin’s credentials; the first woman in office should be an “intellectual”—certainly not a Westerner without a law degree.) Rankin morphs in the press from small and slight with “locks of fire” to “tall and slender, with frank hazel eyes, sandy hair, and energetic mouth.” She gets several marriage proposals by mail; a toothpaste company offers her five thousand dollars for a photograph of her teeth. It is reported that she can “dance like a boarding school girl” and that she makes her own hats. “I am glad glad glad even to Pollyannaism,” one newspaperwoman writes, “that Jeannette is not ‘freakish’ or ‘mannish’ or ‘standoffish’ or ‘shrewish’ or of any type likely to antagonize the company of gentlemen whose realm has hitherto been uninvaded by petticoats.” [...]

Rankin enters the House on April 2, 1917, in an extraordinary session called by President Wilson to debate war with Germany. The question is not how Rankin will vote but how a woman will vote. (Catt and many of the leaders of the national suffrage movement have urged her to vote for war; anything less, they assure her, will irrevocably set back the cause.) The men stand and applaud as she enters the House, dressed in blue and carrying a bouquet of flowers. She later remembers that, as she walks in, she’s a little worried, unclear where she should sit: at thirty-six and unmarried, she does not want to be accused of flirting. [...]

Twenty-two years later, at the age of sixty, the Candidate tries again for Congress and wins. She has spent the intervening years working for peace and disarmament organizations and travelling the world. She returns to the House in 1941 and achieves instant notoriety and a swift end to her political career when she casts the sole vote against going to war with Japan.

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Politico: How an Outsider President Killed a Party

Many have called Donald Trump’s unexpected takeover of a major political party unprecedented; but it’s not. A similar scenario unfolded in 1848, when General Zachary Taylor, a roughhewn career soldier who had never even voted in a presidential election, conquered the Whig Party.

A look back at what happened that year is eye-opening—and offers warnings for those on both sides of the aisle. Democrats quick to dismiss Trump should beware: Taylor parlayed his outsider appeal to defeat Lewis Cass, an experienced former Cabinet secretary and senator. But Republicans should beware, too: Taylor is often ranked as one of the worst presidents in U.S. history—and, more seriously, the Whig Party never recovered from his victory. In fact, just a few years after Taylor was elected under the Whig banner, the party dissolved—undermined by the divisions that caused Taylor’s nomination in the first place, and also by the loss of faith that followed it. [...]

Despite all this talk of staying away from one party or another, Taylor began inching toward the Whig Party, and the Whigs inched closer to him. At first glance, a general seemed to be a strange choice for the Whigs. Founded in the 1830s as a strained coalition of Southern states’ rights conservatives and Northern industrialists united mostly by disgust at Andrew Jackson’s expansion of presidential power, the Whig Party considered the war a disastrous result of presidential overreach. In fact, the popular backlash they stirred against Democratic President James K. Polk was so great that the Whigs seized control of Congress during the 1846 midterm election. But once America’s victory over Mexico triggered such enthusiasm, some Whigs calculated that running an extremely popular war hero like Taylor would prove to voters that the Whigs were patriotic, despite their anti-war stance.

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Slate: Iraq’s Bisected Onion Dome

Rising out of an artificial Baghdad lake like some kind of surreal relic from a bygone civilization, Iraq's Al-Shaheed Monument is an unforgettable reminder of the lives lost in the Iran-Iraq war.

The Al-Shaheed Monument was built under the regime of Saddam Hussein, during his push to fill Baghdad with lasting monuments during the 1970s and ’80s, so in retrospect it may strike some as a troubling artifact from a despot's rule, but it is hard to deny that it is a stunning work.

The towering memorial was completed in 1983, designed by Iraqi sculptor Ismail Fatah Al Turk. It consists of a 132-foot tall arabesque dome, covered in teal-colored ceramic tiles. The huge bulb is split down the middle, with an eternal flame in between the hollow insides. The whole thing sits on a large, circular square that is itself held in an artificial lake.

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The New Yorker‎: Twenty-five Years After the Failed Soviet Coup

The space in front of the White House where Desnitsky and others stood was promptly named the Square of Free Russia. The “defenders of the White House” and their sympathizers joyfully celebrated their victory, but their euphoric mood, along with the sense of moral clarity and righteousness, proved to be short-lived. Just a few years after the failed coup, less than ten per cent of Russians chose to see those events as a democratic revolution that put an end to Communist Party rule. That perception has not changed. According to a Levada Center poll, taken in August of this year, only eight per cent share this view. Thirty-five per cent say that it was just another episode in the struggle for power among the top leadership, while thirty per cent think that it was a tragedy that had deleterious effects on the state and the people. Today almost half of Russians say that they don’t know or don’t remember what happened in August of 1991. The Square of Free Russia is now a square only in name: the public is barred from the space around the White House, now the seat of the Russian Cabinet, by a tall iron fence.

The failed coup accelerated the secessionist movements in other constituent republics, first and foremost in the Baltics, but also in Georgia, Armenia, and Moldova. In a referendum in December, 1991, the people of Ukraine voted overwhelmingly for independence. By the end of the year, the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. Under the leadership of Yeltsin, who had just smashed the seventy-year-old Communist regime, the new Russia faced the task of building a democratic system, a market economy, and a Russian statehood to replace the Soviet one. The collapse of the Soviet Union may not have been regarded as a tragic event at the time, but, for Russians, seeing the country’s territory shrink and its might diminish was hardly a reason for rejoicing. The fact that the U.S.S.R. fell apart was unexpected and confusing. Those who rose to defend freedom in August, 1991, wanted to get rid of the Communist regime, not to destroy the Soviet Union. To people in Eastern European countries and many in the Baltic states, the Soviet Union may have been a foreign occupier and its collapse a liberation, but to Russians it was still their country, and the sense of liberation was missing. “Free from whom?” was a question that had no answer. [...]

It was only after those protests, and especially after annexing Crimea, that Putin turned to the language of ideas. Today he speaks constantly about state nationalism and Russia’s greatness, and he enjoys the approval of more than eighty per cent of Russians. The fact that, twenty-five years ago, a people’s movement changed the course of history is something that he would rather erase from national memory. He rejects the idea that those events marked a historical divide. In 2012, he said, “In order to revive national consciousness, we need to link historical eras and get back to understanding the simple truth that Russia did not begin in 1917, or even in 1991, but rather that we have a common, continuous history spanning over a thousand years, and we must rely on it to find inner strength and purpose in our national development.”

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