The Atlantic: First He Became an American—Then He Joined ISIS

In 2013, six Bosnian immigrants in the United States allegedly sent money, riflescopes, knives, military equipment, and other supplies to jihadists in Syria and Iraq through intermediaries in Bosnia and Turkey. According to the U.S. government’s allegations, individual ISIS fighters would make specific requests—mostly for money and military equipment—and the group would then raise funds and send supplies to Syria. The requests included what was surely an unexpected revelation of nostalgia—packets of Swiss Miss hot cocoa. By sending the cocoa mix and other supplies, federal prosecutors argue, these U.S.-based Bosnians provided what is known as “material support” to terrorists, in violation of the Patriot Act. [...]

Whichever side Pazara was on during the Bosnian War, understanding his experiences during those years is critical to making sense of his radicalization. After the civil war ended in 1995, and after Pazara and his father completed their alleged tour of duty for the VRS, they were still not allowed to return to their hometown of Teslic. Staying in Teslic or refusing the VRS would have surely resulted in imprisonment and torture. Ultimately, Pazara and his father were subject to the same ethnic cleansing inflicted on the rest of the Bosnian-Muslim residents. And so, Pazara carried the baggage of the Bosnian War to his new home in the United States. [...]

It is impossible to know with certainty what led Pazara to radicalize. The distance from his homeland, his professional failures, and his divorce all likely played some role. Certainly, a turn toward conservative religiosity in a period following personal loss is a well-documented phenomenon in the literature on radicalization. What is known is that Pazara found solace on social media, where an online community of Bosnian Salafists created a philosophical echo chamber. Within that echo chamber, the Islamic State’s ideology reverberated, exploiting personal grievances, laying out a narrative of victimhood (“Muslims are under attack”) that seemed to excuse Pazara from responsibility for his failures, and offering a new chance at success and redemption.

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Places Journal: Socialism and Nationalism on the Danube

The Social Democrats may not have been radical but they were embattled. Even today this is evident in the architecture of the apartment blocks — the Gemeindebauten, or “municipally built” housing— that were constructed from the mid 1920s to the mid ’30s. These were not simply tenements: they were monumental tenements, stretching over entire city blocks, following the local model of the Hof-Haus, or perimeter block. In fact the Gemeindebauten were a response not only to the housing crisis but also to a more existential dilemma. What would be the identity of the city, now that it no longer ruled an immense land empire that extended from Trieste on the Adriatic to Lviv beyond the Carpathians? To the Social Democrats the answer was clear: Vienna would be a metropolis dedicated to the welfare and edification of its inhabitants, particularly the long-neglected working classes. And so over more than a decade they proceeded, through various means, especially massive taxation of the wealthy, to transform the imperial capital into a socialist city: Red Vienna.

In this light the Hofs can be understood as not merely practical but ideological. No less than Gothic churches, they are absolutely loaded with rhetoric: massive mid-rise superblocks articulated with towers, archways, loggias, and bays; embellished with bas-reliefs, tiles, metalwork, and sculptures depicting workers and worker families. The labor-intensive construction was itself an integral part of the program: a means of employing as many workers as possible. The most famous of the Gemeindebauten, Karl-Marx-Hof, looks like the architectural equivalent of a mass demonstration, with its series of arched entryways and flagpole-topped towers seeming to step arm in arm into a glorious future. Designed by Karl Ehn (a student of Otto Wagner) and opened in 1930, the building is immense — comprising 1.6 million square feet, with the main facade running for three-quarters of a mile — and accommodates an astonishing 5,000 tenants in 1,400 apartments. Yet Karl-Marx-Hof was only the largest of the 400 apartment blocks constructed by the Social Democrats during their relatively brief period in power. The clarity of purpose is powerfully evident in the focus on the collective: in the provision of generous and open courtyards and a remarkable range of shared facilities. [...]

This was surely the case in the last decades the 20th century. Although many observers argued that the fall of communism would lead to increasing convergences among the nations once divided by the Iron Curtain, in Hungary the major architectural trend of the 1990s stressed not global solidarity but national difference. That decade saw the growing prominence of the self-described school of “Organic Architects,” led by the guru-like Imre Makovecz. Starting to practice in the 1960s, but receiving few commissions until the 1980s, Makovecz, a devout Catholic, was equally anti-Soviet and anti-globalist. (He died in 2011.) He is best known for designing tent-like structures inspired by speculation about what the yurts of the Magyars, who traveled from Central Asia to Hungary sometime in the medieval era, might possibly have looked like. Over the years he created a fascinating and deeply odd style characterized by swelling, maternal domes, phallic protrusions, and anthropomorphic face-like elements. Obsessed by trees, Makovecz disdained industrial fabrication and preferred to build in wood; his celebrated design for the Hungarian pavilion at the 1992 Seville Expo, constructed in timber and containing an actual tree whose roots were visible through a glass floor, was described at the time as a “dizzy fantasy.” But above all Makovecz and his followers were driven by nationalist visions of Hungarian uniqueness; they favored an “authentic” and rural Hungary and expressed distrust for urbane and cosmopolitan Budapest. It was all clearly a reversion back to the imaginary worlds of Hungarian form that so excited Lechner and his protégés at the start of the century.

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Quartz: A night at India’s first capsule hotel

Urbanpod, founded by entrepreneur duo Shalabh Mittal and Hiren Gandhi, draws inspiration from a similar chain in Singapore, which in turn is based on Japan’s famous capsule hotels from the 1970s. Originally created as accommodation for businessmen looking for a few hours to spend the night after they missed the last train home, capsule hotels have steadily become a global trend. [...]

Despite its compact appearance, the pod is sufficiently spacious, and not claustrophobic as one would presume. It is similar to the sleeper compartment of a double-decker overnight inter-city bus, minus the worn-out, unhygienic appearance and odour. The corridors of the hotel are quiet; the shared bathrooms are clean and smell fresh. Every inch of the space is highly designed, there are buttons for everything, a smoke detector blinks in the background next to a miniature fire extinguisher. Despite the attention to detail, or maybe because of it, the experience feels highly cinematic. I realise that things could easily go wrong, just like they do in the countless science fiction films this set seems inspired by. A capsule doesn’t exactly allow for easy escape. [...]

But capsule hotels or capsule-sized homes might be the future of urban housing some day—tiny houses and micro-apartments are already being considered in increasingly overcrowded cities. After the 2008 recession, a major chunk of laid-off workers, left homeless, sought refuge in the coffin-like pods in Japan. This type of living is not restricted to Asia but is gaining acceptance across the world—the American Tiny Living Movement, for instance, has seen people forced by never-ending debt to move to compact, Ikea-like homes. Buzzfeed News recently uncovered plans by London developers for homes of 6.7 metres, 30 metres below the minimum requirement for one-bed flats, with no bathrooms. These movements ensconce the reality of a housing shortage under the terms “innovation,” “sustainable,” and “minimal,” and put the onus on tenants, instead of addressing the problems that led to the housing crisis.

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TED-Ed: The world’s most mysterious book - Stephen Bax

Deep inside Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library lies a 240 page tome. Recently carbon dated to around 1420, its pages feature looping handwriting and hand drawn images seemingly stolen from a dream. It is called the Voynich manuscript, and it’s one of history’s biggest unsolved mysteries. The reason why? No one can figure out what it says. Stephen Bax investigates this cryptic work. 

Vox: Meet the designer cats with wild blood (Mar 13, 2017)

By breeding house cats with wild animals, humans developed hybrid cats that look like little leopards. Bengal cats are a breed that was developed by breeding domestic cats with asian leopard cats. The first American bengal breeder is a woman named Jean Mill, but her work has continued through other breeders. We met one of those breeders, Anthony Hutcherson, when we went to film the cats at the Westminster Dog Show. Besides bengals, we also saw another hybrid breed: savannahs. Instead of asian leopard cats, savannahs were developed by breeding house cats with servals. Unlike the other two breeds, the last breed we met, toygers, are not hybrid cats. Breeder Judy Sugden created the breed by carefully breeding domestic cats with qualities that resemble wild tigers. To learn more about the cats and the breeders that made possible, watch the video above.