Quartz: If nutrition labels looked like this, your attempts to quit sugar might actually work

This image, which resurfaced on Reddit earlier this month, is part of an ad campaign from the German consumer interest group Verbraucherzentrale Hamburg.

The images (seen here, with ingredients in German) make the easily misread or overlooked information on nutrition labels hard to ignore. Slim-Fast is full of sugar. A brand of cereal called “Fitness” is full of sugar.

Yes, nutrition information is right there on the label. But those grams are hard to conceptualize, and food marketers can easily take advantage of that confusion. For example, the kid-friendly drink Capri-Sonne (or Capri Sun, as it’s known in North America) looks a lot healthier in this ad…

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BBC4 A Point of View: Teaching to the test

Will Self says it's time for schools to stop "teaching to the test".

He argues that in the contemporary wired world, "it seems obvious that young people need more than ever to know how to think outside the boxes, rather than simply tick them".

There's no reason, he says, to shackle children "to the go-round of memorization and regugitation".

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The Conversation: Exploring the complexities of forgiveness

I grew up in a community of these remarkable people, but not once did I hear the topic of forgiveness for the Nazis discussed. The Nazis hardly warranted their consideration. Instead, what prevailed was the distinctive Jewish response to the tragedy of the Holocaust of not asking why, but what do we do now. Invariably the answer was a single-minded determination and commitment to rebuilding a new generation of proud and committed Jews. [...]

In the Jewish belief there is a distinction between forgiveness and consequences. Lack of consequences is not synonymous with forgiveness and negative consequences does not equate with lack of forgiveness, as in forgiving one’s child for demonstrating carelessness or inconsideration while still holding her accountable.[...]

But far from being just a necessary but regrettable allowance, Judaism teaches that the practice of forgiveness was divinely designed from the very outset of creation. Thus, the reason why God deliberately created us imperfect is because through the process of sin and reconciliation, both the forgiver and the forgiven can experience tremendous personal and religious growth. [...]

So, since we are human beings who still have a conscience to discern good from evil, the only conclusion we must come to is that we cannot in any way forgive the Nazis. To think otherwise would be to dishonor the victims of the Holocaust and to degrade our own moral compass.

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FiveThirtyEight: Will Trump’s Refugee Ban Have Public Support?

Donald Trump signed a wide-ranging executive order on Friday that resets the United States’ immigration and refugee programs. The policy bars immigrants from seven heavily Muslim countries from entering the U.S. for 90 days, including people with green cards. It bans all refugees from entering the U.S. for 120 days, and indefinitely bans Syrian refugees. And it cuts the number of refugees the U.S. will accept overall in 2017. (For a more detailed rundown, read here.) [...]

Slight differences in framing and question wording can also have big effects on how well immigration, refugee and terrorism policies poll. Whether Trump’s executive order is viewed in humanitarian terms or (as the Trump administration has tried to frame it) in the context of counterterrorism could go a long way towards determining how much the public supports it. [...]

Again, there are so many ways to look at these numbers. Will Americans react more to the fact that the U.S. is temporarily banning all refugees or to the halts on immigration from predominantly Muslim countries? It’s just not clear how it will play out politically. American opinions on immigration, counterterrorism and refugees are complicated and interact with one another, and different opinions can be activated at different times. Furthermore, some aspects of the policy — such as banning U.S. green card holders from re-entering the United States (or only allowing them to re-enter on a case-by-case basis) — have not been polled at all. For the time being, it’s probably safe to say that the policy is neither as unpopular as its detractors might hope for, nor as popular as its supporters might assume. But that could change as the public learns more about it in the days and weeks ahead.

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The Spectator: Atheist and gay, Frederick the Great was more radical than most leaders today (3 October 2015)

After Frederick’s accession in 1740, he became, in his turn, the tormentor of the family. Although he did not imprison his wife like George I, he repeatedly humiliated ‘this incorrigibly sour subspecies of the female sex’, as he called her. They barely met. His nephew and heir, the future Frederick William II, wrote of him in 1780: ‘That animal is a right scourge of God, spat out of Hell on to earth by God’s wrath.

After his accession, in Blanning’s words Frederick ‘came out’. He spent most of his time far from prying eyes in Potsdam, south- west of Berlin, and enjoyed ‘intimate relations’ with young officers, as well as his first valet Fredersdorf. The king called him ‘du’ and he acted as an unofficial prime minister. Frederick commissioned a fresco of Ganymede and filled his parks with statues of Antinous or pairs of male lovers. His poems ‘The Orgasm’ and ‘Palladion’, the first written for his handsome Italian favourite Count Algarotti, praise ‘glorious heroes, responding both actively and passively to their lithe and obliging friends’.

Blanning emphasises the luxury and grandeur of the court of Prussia. Berlin had one of the largest city palaces in Europe and was surrounded by at least 20 country palaces for the monarch and the ruling family — many more than Vienna. Frederick II extended Charlottenburg, built Sans Souci, and the 638-room Neues Palais in Potsdam and bought a new palace in Breslau, capital of Silesia, in which he installed a throne room. On campaign he shared his troops’ hardships: they loved him. In peacetime, he amassed magnificent collections of pictures, sculptures, jewelled rings and snuff boxes. Frederick’s greenhouses were as luxurious as his gilded rococo bedrooms and music rooms. He built the Berlin opera and founded the Berlin porcelain factory. [...]

Like the recent books of John Röhl on Wilhelm II and Jonathan Steinberg on Bismarck, Blanning shows that Prussia had a court society and culture — a ‘deep state’ not always visible on the surface. If more diaries and memoirs, such as those of Count Lehndorff and Hildegard von Spitzemberg, or the journalism of Alfred Kerr (father of the children’s author Judith Kerr) were translated, they would help us understand the driving force of the country which, before the self-inflicted cataclysm of 1914, was the powerhouse of Europe.

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