Vox: A law professor's warning: we are closer to oligopoly than at any point in 100 years

In the early 1900s, the biggest monopolists of the day had virtually complete control of their markets. Standard Oil. US Steel. The American Sugar Refining Company.

Today we don’t so much have single companies dominating an entire industry as much as a handful of extremely powerful ones. Over the past few decades, the number of markets consolidated by a few mega-companies has skyrocketed, according to Columbia law professor Tim Wu. [...]

Wu points to the beer industry as a perfect example. “People may not realize this, but domestically, there are two companies that sell 75 percent of the beer in the United States — Molson Coors and Anheuser Busch, both owned by foreign companies,” he says. “That is an industry that used to have five or six actors and now has two.” [...]

It is essentially a battle between the economists and the lawyers. The economists do believe we should have no sense of right and wrong, but that it’s about economic performance. The champion of this view was [conservative legal scholar] Robert Bork, and his basic argument was that a lot of what looks like evil or malicious conduct — the so-called “bad guys” — may be very economically efficient and therefore good for the economy. So [to Bork] antitrust lawyers should get out of the business of calling good or evil.

The opposite tradition I’d associate with [Supreme Court Justice] Louis Brandeis, who took the antitrust law not as merely an economic tool — though it was that — but a promotion of certain values he thought were central to the American public, like decentralization and a certain kind of virtue in business. Brandeis believed business could be a profession and pursued in a virtuous way. He also thought that the whole goal of the American Republic was to inculcate virtue and good character in people.

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Quartz: Data shows that using science in an argument just makes people more partisan

If only we would all just use our rational, scientific minds. Then we could get past our disagreements.

It’s a nice thought. Unfortunately, it’s wrong.

Yale behavioral economist Dan Kahan has spent the last decade studying whether the use of reason aggravates or reduces partisan beliefs. His research shows that aggravation easily wins. The more we use our faculties for scientific thought, the more likely we are to take a strong position that aligns with our political group. That goes for liberals as well as conservatives. [...]

Kahan’s research began as a challenge to the contention of some behavioral economists that public policy disagreements are the result of an over reliance on emotion-driven decision making—what the Nobel prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls “System 1” thinking. These researchers argued that public policy formed by experts using deliberate, analytical decision making processes (“System 2” thinking in Kahneman’s lingo) would be better and less partisan. [...]

Perhaps Kahan’s most disconcerting finding is that people with more scientific intelligence are the quickest to align themselves politically on subjects they don’t know anything about. In one experiment, Kahan analyzed how people’s opinion on a unfamiliar subject are affected when given some basic scientific information, along with details about what people in their self-identified political group tend to believe about that subject. It turned out that those with the strongest scientific reasoning skills were the ones most likely to use the information to develop partisan opinions.

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Quartz: Why do Greek statues have such small penises?

In ancient Greece, it seems, a small penis was the sought-after look for the alpha male.

“Greeks associated small and non-erect penises with moderation, which was one of the key virtues that formed their view of ideal masculinity,” explains classics professor Andrew Lear, who has taught at Harvard, Columbia and NYU and runs tours focused on gay history. “There is the contrast between the small, non-erect penises of ideal men (heroes, gods, nude athletes etc) and the over-size, erect penises of Satyrs (mythic half-goat-men, who are drunkards and wildly lustful) and various non-ideal men. Decrepit, elderly men, for instance, often have large penises.” [...]

Only grotesque, foolish men who were ruled by lust and sexual urges had large penises in ancient Greece. Art history blogger Ellen Oredsson notes on her site that statues of the era emphasized balance and idealism.

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The Guardian: World's first solar panel road opens in Normandy village

France has opened what it claims to be the world’s first solar panel road, in a Normandy village.

A 1km (0.6-mile) route in the small village of Tourouvre-au-Perche covered with 2,800 sq m of electricity-generating panels, was inaugurated on Thursday by the ecology minister, Ségolène Royal.

It cost €5m (£4.2m) to construct and will be used by about 2,000 motorists a day during a two-year test period to establish if it can generate enough energy to power street lighting in the village of 3,400 residents. [...]

Normandy is not known for its surfeit of sunshine: Caen, the region’s political capital, enjoys just 44 days of strong sunshine a year compared with 170 in Marseilles.

Royal has said she would like to see solar panels installed on one in every 1,000km of French highway – France has a total of 1m km of roads – but panels laid on flat surfaces have been found to be less efficient than those installed on sloping areas such as roofs.

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Mic: She didn't consent. Now he says he didn’t, either.

The night of March 22, 2016, is hazy for Irene Fagan Merrow, a 24-year-old comedian who lives in New York City. After performing at the Experiment Comedy Gallery in Brooklyn — an eclectic venue known for welcoming performers from underrepresented groups — she began imbibing with a few friends and fellow comics. Having recently gone through a difficult breakup, she drank heavily. By about 11 p.m., Merrow had blacked out.

When Merrow came to a few hours later, she found herself downstairs at the Experiment with the owner of the venue, Mo Fathelbab. Fathelbab was, as Merrow later put it, "on top of and inside of" her, engaging in penetrative sex. [...]

But when news broke in October that prominent New York City comedian Aaron Glaser had been banned from Upright Citizen's Brigade for sexually assaulting multiple women, Merrow decided she could no longer perform at Fathelbab's venue and wanted him to know why. She sent him an email, explaining she had blacked out when they had sex and felt she "was taken advantage of in a time of emotional and physical vulnerability." [...]

Fathelbab has been vocal about the need to combat sexism in the comedy scene; he has become known for promoting and supporting female and nonwhite comics. His reputation, combined with his insistence he did not consent to sex with Merrow, raise questions about gender dynamics and consent when both parties are intoxicated. Under New York state law, if both were incapacitated, neither was able to legally consent to sex. However, that hasn't stopped the community from believing Merrow's side of the story, which she attributes to a switch to a "believe women" mindset. [...]

The quick response could signal a shift within the community toward believing accusers instead of deriding them — a notable departure from the response to the Glaser allegations, which were followed by victim-blaming defenses of the accused that shook the comedy world.

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