The Atlantic: The Incredible Staying Power of Theresa May

But perhaps the greatest challenge to May’s Brexit plan didn’t come from her party at all. Arlene Foster, the leader of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party, which is currently propping up May’s government in Westminster, offered a stern warning that her party would not support a Brexit deal that puts any divergence between Northern Ireland and the rest of the U.K., including a customs border in the Irish sea or a special customs union for Belfast alone. This, Foster said, would be the DUP’s “blood red” line.

For all the divisions over Brexit that remain within the party, May’s hold to the leadership appears to be safe—at least for now. When all was said and done, even some of the prime minister’s staunchest critics conceded that her speech had bought her time to hammer out a deal, even if didn’t necessarily evoke full-fledged support for it. And while critics of Chequers are unlikely to change their mind anytime soon, they at least seem to agree that now wouldn’t be the right time to try and trigger a leadership election to push May out. [...]

A recent poll found that the Conservatives were more likely to win the next general election under May than other potential leadership rivals right now—a belief that also seems to have buoyed tacit support for May to remain in her role. But even those who have thrown their support behind the prime minister for now have conceded that this support may be time-limited. “I just think politics is a short-term game,” the House of Commons Leader and Conservative lawmaker Andrea Leadsom said Wednesday when asked whether the party would support the prime minister in the next election. “A week changes a lot. I think she’s had a fantastic day today.”

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The Atlantic: The Remarkable Rise of the Feminist Dystopia

This feels like a particularly strange moment in history, but it’s one that writers seem to have anticipated: The past two years have seen a spate of works delving into the discombobulation of the present. During the early days of the Trump administration, readers sought out dystopian stories that connected the turbulence and the racism and the alternative facts of the 45th presidency with anxieties the world has had before. Over the last couple of years, though, fiction’s dystopias have changed. They’re largely written by, and concerned with, women. They imagine worlds ravaged by climate change, worlds in which humanity’s progress unravels. Most significantly, they consider reproduction, and what happens when societies try to legislate it. [...]

The novel that’s received the most attention over the past two years from women readers troubled by the news was actually published 33 years ago, smack in the middle of the Reagan administration. In 1985, as America lurched socially to the right in what was seen as a rebuke of the sexual revolution, Margaret Atwood published The Handmaid’s Tale, a speculative vision of a repressive theocratic state in America enabled by mass infertility and nuclear fallout. [...]

There were moments when life seemed to be doing its utmost to imitate Atwood. When Oklahoma lawmakers tried to pass a bill requiring women to get written permission from their sexual partner before having abortions. When the Trump administration sanctioned children and babies being literally ripped from their parents’ arms, and when the White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders claimed that the policy of family separation was actually “very biblical” because it was enforcing existing laws. [...]

There’s no mass epidemic of infertility in Red Clocks, no impending threat to the existence of humankind. Male politicians simply take away women’s rights because they don’t think women should have them. They’re incapable of summoning the empathy to imagine what an unwanted pregnancy might feel like, incapable of imagining that women’s desires regarding their own bodies should take precedence over men’s opinions. Red Clocks is plausible because men’s opinions on abortion and assault and female bodily autonomy have always counted more than women’s. You don’t need to see elderly white senators on television, lining up to apologize to a man who’s been accused of sexual assault, to grasp how much.

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Social Europe: How The Handling Of The Financial After-Crisis Fuels Populism

During the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, central banks’ rescue of finance continued on an unprecedented scale for ten years with what is called Quantitative easing (QE). The striking effect of this was to send prices of financial assets sky-high and thereby substantially enrich the bankers, speculators and the already rich holders of these assets at levels that are much higher than before the crisis.

At the same time, ordinary people found themselves lastingly out of work on a huge scale. Governments whose own finances deteriorated steeply – not least because of their aid to the financial sector – rushed to cut back on their spending, especially on welfare. Everywhere, classic right-wing governments but also social-liberal left ones as in France adopted deflationary policies to cut the cost of labor and loosen up the labor market rules, thus making ordinary people’s working and living conditions far worse. While cutting again the taxes on the super-rich and corporate earnings to preserve the country’s « attractiveness. » [...]

In these conditions it is scarcely surprising that both classic right-wing and left-wing parties are utterly discredited in working class eyes all over the world. The remedy to the crisis should have been to fight these deflationary tendencies by creating public sector jobs and providing support for infrastructure and human capital (education/skills training/R&D et al)investment projects, strengthening regulation of the labor market and wage-earners’ social security, returning to progressive taxes and redistribution of wealth…

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Quartz: All the places plastic bags are banned around the world

In America, only two states have conclusively banned single-use plastic bags: Hawaii and California.

Though Hawaii’s ban came first, it wasn’t technically a state-wide ban: all five Hawaiian islands (Big Island, Honolulu, Kauai, Maui, and Pala) individually banned plastic bags at various points—the last of which took effect in 2015. The bans, which aim to fully phase in by 2020, range in definition and severity, but generally still allow for the use of 100% recyclable plastic bags.

California passed a unilateral, state-wide ban in September of 2014, and it went into effect in November of 2016. The law bans single-use plastic bags at all large retailers, and imposed a 10-cent charge for paper bags. Before the law was passed, more than 100 California local laws banning bags were already in place. [...]

At least 32 countries around the world have plastic bag bans in place—and nearly half are in Africa, where plastic bags frequently clog drains, leading to increased mosquito swarms (and, as a result, bouts of malaria). [...]

In Ireland, a 22c plastic bag tax has reduced usage by as much as 90%. Portugal has seen a drop in excess of 85%. And since imposing a tax in 2003, Denmark has seen the lowest plastic usage in Europe, averaging just 4 bags per person per year.

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Quartz: The future of food is farming cells, not cattle

But we’re reaching the upper limit of how much longer we can do this for. According to a report published by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, livestock grazing takes up 26% of Earth’s ice-free land, and an additional 33% of arable land is used to grow the food that feeds them. This set-up is also susceptible to unpredictable events, such as epidemic viruses, antibiotic resistance, and weather incidents like rogue snow storms and heat waves. [...]

One of the most important ways to do that is through cellular agriculture. This is the process of producing animal products from cells rather than from whole animals. Instead of raising a cow from calf to slaughter—and requiring all of the feed, water, and land that goes with it—we can create animal proteins without the farm. [...]

It’s also potentially better for our health: If we weren’t so reliant on concentrated animal farming operations, we could rein in problems with epidemic viruses and antibiotic resistance. Right now, the vast majority of antibiotics are manufactured and used for farm animals, not for human beings. The development of antibiotic resistance could be one of the biggest threats to global public health. Moving toward more controlled, clean systems for animal product manufacturing may help us reduce our dependence on antibiotics in farming.

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