Politico: May’s divorce deal doesn’t add up

It could also convince some banks and companies to put on hold plans to relocate jobs and production to Continental Europe in the next few months, while the two sides discuss a transition period and the outlines of a future trade relationship. London was desperate to start that second phase of talks before businesses voted with their feet and left the U.K. [...]

How do you keep regulations aligned between the United Kingdom and the EU to avoid a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, as Theresa May has promised, while simultaneously insisting that Britain will leave the single market and the customs union and preserving the constitutional and economic integrity of the U.K? [...]

And there’s nothing in the agreement that indicates it has been answered. EU chief negotiator Michel Barnier appeared to acknowledge that five days of redrafting had merely glossed over the problem rather than truly resolving it. “No one should underestimate the difficulties we will face on this issue,” he said. “Nobody.”

The only way to square the circle would be for the U.K. to continue indefinitely observing EU rules, norms and standards like Norway — not just during a transition period but as part of a future trade agreement, without becoming a formal member of the European Economic Area.

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Politico: SPD’s Martin Schulz wants United States of Europe by 2025

“I want there to be a constitutional treaty to create a federal Europe,” Schulz said Thursday during a speech at a party convention in Berlin, as he urged his party to clear the way for talks with Angela Merkel’s conservatives which could lead to a new German government and put an end to an unprecedented coalition deadlock.

The drafting process of such a constitutional treaty, Schulz said, should involve citizens across the Continent. Once drafted, it would “be presented to the member states, and those who are against it will simply leave the EU,” he said, adding that Poland was already systematically undermining European values and Hungary was increasingly isolating itself. [...]

Asked about Schulz’s speech at a press conference in Berlin, Merkel declined to respond to the specifics of his proposal but said the EU should focus on fixing its “weaknesses” and improving its “ability to act.”

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Slate: Smoothing an Elephant

Yascha Mounk and Branko Milanovic discuss what his famous elephant curve says about the ills—and the gains—of globalization, how the left’s concern with inequality is being turned against its concern with internationalism, why economic causes of populism are often expressed in cultural ways, and how a determination to increase the financial and educational endowments of ordinary citizens can combat inequality and boost their living standards.

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Social Europe: Inequality More Than Matters

In fact, the OECD highlights that reducing inequality by one Gini point would translate into an accumulated increase in growth of 0.8% during the following five years. In this respect, Europe has moved in the opposite direction. Between 2005 and 2015, the Gini coefficient rose from 30.6 to 31 and income disparities between the top and bottom 20% have increased from 4.7 to 5.2. As the proportion of people at risk of social exclusion is closely related to income inequality, poverty has grown constantly since 2005, and between 2008 and 2014 several member states experienced an increase in inequality in terms of household disposable income.

While one of the five goals of the Europe 2020 strategy aspired to reducing by at least 20 million the number of people in or at risk of poverty and social exclusion (from 115.9 million in 2008 to 95.9 million in 2020), in 2015 these citizens already accounted for 117.6 million in the EU-28. Moreover, 32.2 million disabled people were at risk of poverty and social exclusion in 2010, as well as 26.5 million children, taking the overall percentage to unacceptably high levels (23.7%). The rise in inequality since the economic crisis has especially impacted women, exacerbating poverty among them and excluding them even more from the labour market.

Several factors have contributed to getting us into this situation. The extensive changes in the labour market should be at the centre of our worries: the proliferation of “atypical” jobs, the weakening of collective bargaining, the deterioration in working conditions, increased temporary working, and policies of internal wage devaluation. In short, the labour market has stopped being a stable source of prosperity for many people.

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The Atlantic: Frank Lloyd Wright's Striking Pop-Cultural Legacy

These TV and film settings span decades and genres, from science fiction to horror to fantasy. But they have one crucial connection: They all either filmed in, or were directly inspired by, one private residence in Los Angeles: the Ennis House, built in 1924 by Frank Lloyd Wright. Stone-colored and covered with intricately patterned tiles, it looms imperiously from atop the Los Feliz hills—and, as the Historic American Buildings Survey described it in 1969, “appears from the distance as a tremendously large monument rather than a two-bedroom dwelling.” [...]

The architect thought that an experimental construction technique with concrete—already a relatively common building material, and available in do-it-yourself form for use at home—might be the key. He didn’t particularly like concrete, writing in his autobiography that it was “the cheapest (and ugliest) thing in the building world.” But he did understand the material’s potential and challenged himself to make it beautiful, posing the hypothetical, “Why not see what could be done with that gutter-rat?” [...]

Regardless of the countless times the Ennis House has been immortalized on film, Wright’s textile-block structures were not the big break the architect was looking for. Hollywood contacts were not enough. Wright headed back east and would not build in California again for years. He would briefly go into bankruptcy the year after Ennis, taking him into the difficult years of the Great Depression. [...]

The house is somber in other ways, as well. While the architect’s knowledge of the Mayans was superficial and arguably appropriative, perhaps he knew—he was always careful with the small details—that they typically used their temples as tombs. That built-in mood, more than anything, may explain the success of the Ennis House: It could fit any bill as a location, as long as it was home to monsters, villains, or anti-heroes. Though many kinds of movies and shows used it as a setting, pulpy, genre projects in particular gravitated to its unusual cinematic possibilities.

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