25 October 2017
Vintage Everyday: Amazing Photographs of 1980s New York City Subway Through the Lens of a Teenager
Most of these photographs below were shot in 1982 and 83 by native New Yorker Ken Stein when he was 17 and 18 year old, and was the staff photographer for a weekly community newspaper in The Bronx. Through his work he managed to capture the spirit of a New York quite different than the one we currently know, one with an undertone of danger and edge that has transformed over the past few decades. "The city was different back then," he told Gothamist. "I think it was quieter, the street lights were darker, there was more room to walk and more places to wander—often everything seemed new and the different areas of the city were just that; different."
Ken Stein recently shared some of his old photos of New York City from the 1980s on his Flickr page. "I pulled my slides from 20 years ago out of storage and began scanning them. It's like a portal back to my teenage years when i dreamed of going to art school to become a photojournalist."
SciShow Psych: What Causes Near-Death Experiences?
The light at the end of the tunnel, the peacefulness, your life flashing before your eyes—it's all been documented thoroughly in pop culture. What usually gets left out, though, are the potential scientific explanations for what happens to your brain during a brush with death.
Bloomberg: How Ukraine's Elites Are Holding the Line
The Ukrainian government, however, shows signs of lapsing into a "muddling-through" mode. The pension reform required by the International Monetary Fund to stabilize public finances has been watered down with 1,000 legislative amendments. President Petro Poroshenko and his cabinet are not pushing hard on another key element of Western aid conditionality, the introduction of a free market in land, because the immediate benefits are uncertain. The Russian market for Ukrainian agricultural goods is all but closed, the quotas for exports to the EU are tiny, and the owners of Ukrainian agricultural businesses fear that, once land can be bought and sold, foreign competitors with deep pockets will eat them alive. Privatization efforts have largely failed because of a lack of investor interest ("Corruption and war are not incentives to invest," the Chatham House report notes drily.) [...]
Meanwhile, the Ukrainian political elite is strikingly unpopular. Poroshenko is still the most popular choice for president, but according to the latest poll by the Razumkov Center for Political and Economic Research, only 9.3 percent of Ukrainians would vote for him now. Just 9.6 percent would vote for Poroshenko's party, now the biggest in parliament. That's understandable: According to the World Bank's October report on Ukraine, poverty is still higher than it was before the 2014 revolution. Ukraine traditionally runs extremely long election campaigns, and it's time for Poroshenko to prepare for the 2019 election. Both he and the parliamentary parties have strong incentives to use the fruits of macroeconomic stabilization and tax reform to boost social spending. That's already happening: The World Bank expects the public deficit to exceed its 3 percent target this year after hitting 2.2 percent in 2016. [...]
Poroshenko and his team have hit a point where neither the Western donors nor Putin can apply much pain without overreaching themselves. Last week, a group of opposition parties and civil society movements -- including some of the organizers of the original 2013 protests -- tried to stage a major rally in the government quarter in Kiev to demand "a big political reform" including tougher action on corruption. The protest, however, wasn't well-attended. Unlike in 2013, Ukrainians are not ready to rise up for pro-Western or, much less, for pro-Russian causes.
Social Europe: Europe’s Attackers From Within (Joschka Fischer)
On October 1, the Catalan government held an independence referendum in which less than half – some estimates say a third – of the region’s population participated. By the standards of the EU and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the vote could never be accepted as “free and fair.” In addition to being illegal under the Spanish constitution, the referendum did not even have a voting register to determine who was entitled to participate. [...]
The EU is an association of nation-states, not regions. Although regions can play an important role within the EU, they cannot stand in as an alternative to member states. If Catalonia were to set a precedent of secession, encouraging other regions to follow suit, the EU would be thrown into a deep, existential crisis. In fact, one could argue that nothing less than the EU’s future is at stake in Catalonia today. [...]
One can only hope that reason will prevail, particularly in Barcelona, but also in Madrid. A democratic, intact Spain is too important to be jeopardized by disputes over the allocation of tax revenues among the country’s regions. There is no alternative but for both sides to abandon the trenches they have dug for themselves, come out to negotiate, and find a mutually satisfactory solution that accords with the Spanish constitution, democratic principles, and the rule of law.
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