euronews: LGBT rights in Europe: Some countries 'moving backwards on equality for first time in a decade'

An example provided was in Bulgaria, where the means for trans-people to change their names or gender markers in official documents has been removed.

In Serbia and Kosovo, the governments have failed to renew action plans on gender equality, the report said.

Hungary and Turkey had also regressed, with the latter doing so since 2015, due to each governments' "failure to uphold fundamental civil and political rights". [...]

Azerbaijan ranked the worst country in Europe for LGBT equality policies and laws, with Turkey and Armenia scoring second and third last respectively.

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The Guardian: Latin, Hebrew … proto-Romance? New theory on Voynich manuscript

In a peer-reviewed paper published in the journal Romance Studies, Gerard Cheshire, a research associate at the University of Bristol, argues the manuscript is “a compendium of information on herbal remedies, therapeutic bathing and astrological readings” focusing on female physical and mental health, reproduction and parenting. [...]

“Sorry folks, ‘proto-Romance language’ is not a thing,” tweeted Dr Lisa Fagin Davis, executive director of the Medieval Academy of America, of Cheshire’s paper. “This is just more aspirational, circular, self-fulfilling nonsense.” [...]

She was not convinced by Cheshire’s theory. “It takes liberties with how we understand languages to work,” she said. “He is arguing for a language built of words drawn from lots of places and periods, but together they don’t create something that is convincing as a workable language.”

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The Atlantic: Photos of Huawei’s European-Themed Campus in China

China’s Huawei Technologies is the largest telecommunications-equipment manufacturer in the world, with production and development centers in more than a dozen countries. One of its newest facilities, located in Dongguan, China, is being built as a collection of replicas of European landmarks. The 3.5-square-mile Ox Horn research and development campus is being developed as 12 separate “towns,” with names such as Paris, Verona, and Bruges. Research buildings are being modeled after famous castles, palaces, and more. The Ox Horn campus is designed to accommodate 25,000 employees, and is connected by private trams and trains to other nearby Huawei campuses and to company housing in Shenzhen. Kevin Frayer, a photographer for Getty, was able to visit the still-growing campus, and returned with these images.

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CityLab: ‘Build More Housing’ Is No Match for Inequality

A new paper by two leading economic geographers suggests this argument is simply too good to be true. Titled “Housing, Urban Growth and Inequalities” and forthcoming in the journal Urban Studies, it’s written by Andrés Rodríguez-Pose of the London School of Economics (LSE) and Michael Storper, who divides his time among the LSE, UCLA, and Sciences Po in Paris. According to Storper and Rodríguez-Pose, the notion that an insufficient supply of housing is a main cause of urban economic problems is based on a number of faulty premises. They say the effect of supply has been blown far out of proportion.

They agree that housing is part of the problem: “Housing market failures can imperil local economic growth and generate problems such as segregation, long commute times, deteriorating quality of life, homelessness, and barriers to social mobility for certain populations,” they write. But housing policy, and zoning restrictions in particular, are certainly not the be-all and end-all of urban problems. Upzoning expensive cities is no match for the deep divides within—and especially between—cities, and is wholly insufficient to remedy them. [...]

A key factor here is the growing divide between highly-paid techies and knowledge workers and much lower-paid people who work in routine service jobs. These service workers end up getting the short end of the stick, spending much more of their income on housing in expensive cities. “Under these circumstances moving to big cities provides no immediate benefits for workers without college education,” Rodríguez-Pose and Storper write. [...]

Solving the economic and geographic divisions of America and other advanced countries is a task that goes far beyond local housing policy. “Planning deregulation and housing costs are neither going to solve the problem of areas lagging behind, nor are they likely to have an impact on the economic development of dynamic cities,” Rodríguez-Pose and Storper write. Worse, they caution, “an excessive focus on these issues at the expense of serious and sustainable development strategies, can fuel economic, social and political distress and anger in declining and lagging areas that can threaten the very foundations on which economic activity, both in less developed and more prosperous areas, has been erected in recent decades.”

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CityLab: The Frankfurt Kitchen Changed How We Cook—and Live

Viewed through a 21st-century lens, kitchen politics usually fall along the fault line of gender and domestic labor: We debate who does their share of the housework and cooking in a family, and what that means for women’s professional development and personal well-being. The fault line prior to the mid-20th century wasn’t gender, but class. We’re used to thinking of kitchens as a universal kind of room that almost everyone has—as essential as a place to sleep, or a bathroom. Our great-great-grandparents were not. [...]

This approach makes sense when you consider that the only fully-outfitted kitchens were, prior to the 20th century, true workspaces where household staff labored in the service of a well-to-do (or even middle-class) family. For the poor and working class, dwellings generally had no discrete kitchen. In a one- or two-room home, be it an apartment or a farmhouse, a large cast-iron stove was likely to be the only major appliance, and might also be a family’s primary heat source. A table or set of shelves might serve to house utensils and tools, but there were no standardized cabinets or kitchen “furniture” as we know them today. [...]

A major critique of the Frankfurt Kitchen in feminist literature of the 1970s onward was that its smallness isolated women there, and though it was theoretically emancipating due to its efficiency, it essentially guaranteed that wives and mothers would continue to bear the brunt of domestic work alone. Nearly a century later, though considerably improved upon since the 1920s, the gender imbalance in domestic labor remains stubbornly in place.

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