The Atlantic: The Merkel Effect

2017 was expected to be Merkel’s toughest campaign yet: to start, it’s the year when Europe’s far-right populist parties, including the anti-immigration Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), have sought to showcase their electoral strength amid a growing backlash against globalization and Europe’s refugee crisis. When Merkel announced her reelection bid last December, she did so battered by more than a year of tough criticism over her open-door policy toward refugees, and facing a certain degree of voter fatigue after hitting her 12th year in office.

And then came Merkel’s main challenger, Martin Schulz, a political “newcomer” from the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) initially lauded as a charismatic and effective contrast to Merkel. After Schulz entered the race in January, support for her party dropped into the low 30s, putting her dead even with the SPD for the first time in more than five years. The German political world was abuzz over the “Schulz effect”: the new candidate’s widespread appeal and ability to take on Merkel to give the country new blood in the chancellery. “We were getting a little bit afraid and uneasy at the beginning of the year when Martin Schulz was introduced as a candidate,” Peter Beyer, a member of the Bundestag from Merkel’s CDU, told me. “The polls were completely different … he was a star.” [...]

What’s more, since the SPD is currently serving in a “grand coalition” with the CDU in Germany’s parliament, Schulz has struggled to explain just how his party differs from Merkel’s and why voters should change the status quo for something that appears on its face relatively similar. “Because the Social Democrats are part of that coalition government, that is always a very difficult situation,” Alexander Mauss, a Berlin-based political pollster, told me. “You can’t really oppose the politics or the policy of the governing coalition because you are part of it.”

That challenge for Schulz was apparent in three state elections across Germany in the spring, all of which were seen as potential bellwethers for September, and all of which delivered victories for the CDU (and by extension for Merkel). In Saarland, a tiny western state along the French border that voted in March, Merkel’s party expected to face a tough challenge, but instead gained 5 points over its previous performance there. And in May, the CDU ousted SPD governments in both Schleswig-Holstein and North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state and an SPD stronghold. “For us it was extremely good to learn that we are able to actually win again, elections on the Länder [state] level,” Beyer, who hails from North Rhine-Westphalia, said.

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The Atlantic: When Will Voyager Stop Calling Home?

Far from it. After the Voyagers completed their tours of the outer planets in the 1980s, giving humanity its first real look at Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, they continued on to the outer reaches of the solar system. In August 2012, Voyager 1 left the system entirely, emerging from inside the protective bubble formed by the sun’s wind and exiting into interstellar space. Voyager 2 is on its way out; the spacecraft is currently coasting through the heliosheath, the outermost layer of the sun’s bubble. Voyagers 1 and 2 are currently about 13 billion and 10 billion miles from Earth, unfathomable distances that mean little more to us terrestrials than giant numbers on a page. [...]

The Voyagers transmit data to Earth every day. The spacecraft collect information about their surrounding environment in real time and then send it back through radio signals. Voyager 1 data takes about 19 hours to reach Earth, and signals from Voyager 2 about 16 hours. (For comparison, it takes the rovers on Mars 20 minutes on average to call home.) The signals get picked up by NASA’s Deep Space Network, a collection of powerful antennae around the world that communicate with dozens of missions. [....]

The DSN spends between four and seven hours per day listening for the faint pings of the spacecraft. The power of the transmitter aboard the spacecraft is similar in wattage to that of a refrigerator light bulb. But the DSN is sensitive enough to hear its messages, and, if necessary, can become even more sensitive. If Earth needs a bigger ear for Voyager in the future, the DSN can make its facilities work as a single array, with more collecting power.  

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Slate: Kate Middleton and Japan’s Princess Mako Showcase Two Different Gendered Models of Royal Succession

But of the 19 people in the Japanese royal family, just five are men, including 83-year-old Emperor Akihito, who plans to abdicate his position next year. He’ll pass the throne to his eldest son, Crown Prince Naruhito. Naruhito has no sons, so he’ll pass it to his younger brother Akishino. Akishino’s only son and Akihito’s only male grandchild, 10-year-old Hisahito, is next in line. If he doesn’t have any sons, there will be no one left to take his place.

The fast-approaching end of Akihito’s reign isn’t the only cause for concern among those invested in the future of Japanese monarchy. On Sunday morning, Princess Mako, Akihito’s oldest grandchild and Akishino’s oldest child, announced her engagement to a commoner. Japanese law dictates that male royals can marry outside the imperial family and retain their status, but women cannot. When 25-year-old Mako marries legal assistant Kei Komuro, her college boyfriend, she’ll finally get the right to vote but forfeit her allowance from the government, her title, and her last name.

A large majority of Japanese residents—86 percent, according to a May 2017 poll—believe that women should be eligible for the throne, and 59 percent think the children of female family members should also count in the line of succession. Sixty-one percent want princesses to be able to stay in the imperial family after their marriages to commoners, helping to expand the family tree as those couples grew their own branches of descendants. Now, Japanese legislators must decide which is more important: the continued existence of a dwindling imperial bloodline or its strict patrilineal heritage. [...]

By some accounts, even Emperor Akihito supports such a change. Empresses are not unheard of in Japan: Though emperors used to have concubines to increase the likelihood of producing male heirs, eight women in the family have sat on the throne in the 125 recorded generations of the imperial family. They were largely considered stand-ins until patrilineal successors could take over. There are few good arguments beside tradition for the endurance of government-supported monarchs, and even fewer for the restriction of the throne to men. Mako could just as easily perform the duties of an empress, minimal as they are, as her grandfather, and imperial genes will persist in her future children as much as they will in her brother’s. There’s another word for a tradition that would rather reintegrate families who have been commoners for generations into the imperial line than treat women as equally valued members: sexism.

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Quartz: Playing board games can make you a nicer person with better relationships

It’s easy to see why this would have widespread appeal in the toxic, deeply divided political climate of the US—under a president obsessed with the concept of winning, who champions the view that inequalities are the result of individual moral failing. Indeed, board games have a history of engaging directly with the question of how social structures influence outcomes. The original version of Monopoly was designed as a liberal critique of capitalism.

Another significant feature of board games is that they require several people to sit down in the same room together and concentrate on a shared experience in real time. That is becoming increasingly rare in a world in which we often see our friends and loved ones more on social media than in real life. A recent Atlantic story outlined the sharp rise in teen isolation as an entire generation sits in their rooms, glued to their smartphones, interacting via app. They report higher levels of depression and anxiety than earlier generations, too. [...]

Beyond Gen Con, adults around the world seem to be increasingly interested in making board games a standard leisure activity for grownups. Sales of board games are booming in the US and around the world, and board games were the single most-funded item on Kickstarter as of 2016. So-called German or “euro games”—like Settlers of Catan or Carcassonne—are leading the board game renaissance. Such games involve a high degree of analytical strategy and operate on a learning curve, which makes them more satisfying each time you play. The games move along quickly because each turn requires interaction with multiple players; you don’t just sit around and wait for your turn to roll the dice.

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openDemocracy: Normalising torture

Ten years ago Murat Kurnaz, a Turk from Bremen, wrote these words, in his book Five Years of My Life, an innocent man in Guantanamo. “We have to describe how the doctors came only to check whether we were dead or could stand to be tortured for a little longer.” The words shocked at the time, but since then the appalling details of US torture practices as part of the ”war on terror” and the involvement of the medical profession are well known – published by the US Senate as well as by several of the men who were subjected to them. [...]

There are British precedents for such payoffs to prevent a trial. Six years ago the UK government came to a confidential agreement with former Guantanamo prisoners to keep MI5 and MI6 documents and personnel out of a court case concerning complicity in torture and rendition. Similarly they later paid a Libyan couple who had been victims of rendition rather than face them in court. [...]

Yemen today is an example of where we are. For more than two years a Saudi-led coalition, supported by the US, has been bombing and blockading this devastated impoverished country. The uncounted civilian casualties are also suffering from starvation and a rampant cholera epidemic. Thanks to the work of Human Rights Watch, Amnesty and Associated Press we know too that in the name of counterterrorism Yemen today has a network of secret prisons run by United Arab Emirates and Yemeni forces. Torture is routine and US advisers participate in interrogations of suspected Al Qaeda/ISIS prisoners. Some of these men and boys are reportedly interrogated on US ships while others are held in the UAE military base at Assab in Eritrea. [...]

The CIA lawyer mentioned above, John Rizzo, is one of 12 Bush administration lawyers and other officials including former president Bush and vice president Cheney named in 2015 by HRW as among those who should be investigated for “conspiracy to torture and other crimes.” Mitchell and Jessen are named as part of the conspiracy.

The powerful lawyers and politicians who should be accountable to the world for normalising torture and deliberately dismantling human rights safeguards for us all have been embraced by the power of the establishment into top jobs in legal firms or academia or government and probably feel themselves protected in their impunity. The precedent of the Mitchell/Jessen case should prove them wrong.

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