Towns across the American south are reckoning with whether or not to tear down Confederate statues in public spaces. For New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, taking down the monuments felt like a necessity, despite the tension it brought forth in his city. “I didn’t start the problems with race in this country, but I did force the people of New Orleans to confront them,” Landrieu reflected in in this short interview at the 2017 Aspen Ideas Festival.
14 August 2017
Quartz: Kenya is denying setting “death squads” loose on election protesters
Kenya’s government has denied the use of live bullets and killing of protesters as demonstrations rocked opposition strongholds in the capital Nairobi and in Kisumu county in western Kenya. Opposition candidate Raila Odinga said that government-mandated “death squads” had fired on protesters and called on his supporters to mourn them dead on Monday and not go to work. [...]
Supporters of opposition candidate Raila Odinga poured into the streets from Friday night (Aug. 11) after president Uhuru Kenyatta was re-elected for a second term in office. Throughout the country, conflicting figures were being reported on how many people were dead or injured in the protests. A 10-year-old girl was killed in Mathare on Saturday while she was on the balcony of her parents’ home. In Kisumu city, police killed 11 people in the crackdown, according to Reuters, while 26 others were treated for gunshot wounds and police beatings. AFP reported that eight bodies were taken to the Nairobi city morgue after protests hit the slum areas of Kibera and Kawangware.
The non-governmental organization Doctors Without Borders said they had treated 54 patients in their clinics, including seven with gunshots. The Kenya Red Cross said it had treated or evacuated a total of 93 casualties in both Nairobi and Kisumu.
CityLab: How to Love the Place You Live
To some extent it’s true that where we live fundamentally alters our life. Look at Raj Chetty’s data that shows that children are more upwardly mobile in some counties than in others. Where we live matters. But so does simply loving where you live, which has been linked to higher longevity, well-being, and local GDP growth. So you can panic that you’re missing out on some undiscovered utopia in Vermont, or you can just drill down and invest emotionally where you happen to be right now. [...]
There’s a frequently cited study that says almost two-thirds of Millennials want to pick their city first, then find a job there, rather than go wherever a job takes them. That tells me that we’re paying attention to the holistic community and its potential to make us happy beyond job satisfaction. We’re asking questions like, Can I walk here? Can I kayak? Are there good restaurants? Can I find my tribe here? Places aren’t just a random backdrop. They define and facilitate the kind of lives we want to live. [...]
I love Jason Rentfrow’s research about how people with certain personality traits congregate geographically. In America for instance, you have concentrations of neurotic people in the Northeast and more open people in coastal regions. Cities end up manifesting the personalities of the people who live there, and that attracts similar people who, naturally enough, feel like they’ll fit in there. Eventually those reputations become self-perpetuating. Quirky people flock to Austin because they’ve heard it’s quirky, and so it stays quirky.
The Atlantic: Convert Nation
Your book significantly undermines that myth. You describe a period in the early 19th century when many Americans weren’t very religious, followed by a period of religious revival, largely driven by aggressive proselytism. What have you learned about the myth of the so-called “nones”—people who aren’t any religion in particular—through your study of conversion? [...]
Mullen: This missionary effort I’ve been talking about creates an obligation to choose your religion. It works like this: Somebody has a religious affiliation, and then an encounter with a missionary or person of a different background makes them realize that there are other options out there. Those other options might not be appealing, but the presence of all those different options creates a sense that if you stay in the religion to which you’re born, you’re staying in it because you’ve made a choice to remain affiliated and reject other options.
All of this is unequally distributed. If you’re a Christian growing up in a place with a lot of Christians, you’re much less likely to be affected by the knowledge that there are other options available to you. For instance: If you’re a Catholic in a Catholic enclave, then your religion is closely related to your ethnicity and neighborhood. But if, for instance, you’re an American Jew, you’re probably in a very small minority. You’re almost certain to be approached by Christian missionaries. So there’s a kind of asymmetric experience here. [...]
Religion is a kind of perpetual-motion machine. For many people, it brings stability, but it brings destabilization as well. While there is freedom in that system of American religion, I think it also comes at a tremendous cost.
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