Haaretz: Israel's Minister of Truth

If in 1975, Chaim Herzog dramatically tore up a copy of UN General Assembly Resolution 3379, equating Zionism with racism, the justice minister has now admitted the truthfulness of the resolution (which was later revoked). Shaked said, loud and clear: Zionism contradicts human rights, and thus is indeed an ultranationalist, colonialist and perhaps even racist movement, as proponents of justice worldwide maintain.

Shaked prefers Zionism to human rights, the ultimate universal justice. She believes that we have a different kind of justice, superior to universal justice. Zionism above all. It’s been said before, in other languages and other nationalist movements. [...]

Thus Shaked believes, as do so many around the world, that Israel is built on foundations of injustice and therefore must be defended from the hostile talk of justice. How else can the repulsion to discussing rights be explained? Individual rights are important, she said, but not when they are disconnected from “the Zionist challenges.” Right again: The Zionist challenges indeed stand in contradiction to human rights. [...]

Zionism is Israel’s fundamentalist religion, and as in any religion, its denial is prohibited. In Israel, “non-Zionist” or “anti-Zionist” aren’t insults, they are social expulsion orders. There’s nothing like it in any free society. But now that Shaked has exposed Zionism, put her hand to the flame and admitted the truth, we can finally think about Zionism more freely. We can admit that the Jews’ right to a state contradicted the Palestinians’ right to their land, and that righteous Zionism gave birth to a terrible national wrong that has never been righted; that there are ways to resolve and atone for this contradiction, but the Zionist Israelis won’t agree to them.

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Scientific American: Visualizing Sex as a Spectrum

Much of the public discourse in this arena centers on gender rather than sex, presumably because gender is understood to be somewhat subjective; it is a social construct that can be complex, fluid, multifaceted. Biological sex, on the other hand, appears to leave less room for debate. You either have two X chromosomes or an X and a Y; ovaries or testes; a vagina or a penis. Regardless of how an individual ends up identifying, they are assigned to one sex or the other at birth based on these binary sets of characteristics. [...]

The project abruptly transformed into an exercise in visualizing complexity. First, it seemed imperative to define a few terms. Sex, gender, and sexuality are all distinct from one another (although they are often related), and each exists on its own spectrum. Moreover, sex cannot be depicted as a simple, one-dimensional scale. In the world of DSDs, an individual may shift along the spectrum as development brings new biological factors into play. The density of science underlying this phenomenon compelled a shift towards intersex as the primary focus of the visualization. [...]

DSDs—which, broadly defined, may affect about one percent of the population—represent a robust, evidence-based argument to reject rigid assignations of sex and gender. Certain recent developments, such as the Swedish adoption of a gender-neutral singular pronoun, and the growing call to stop medically unnecessary surgeries on intersex babies, indicate a shift in the right direction. I am hopeful that raising public awareness of intersex, along with transgender and non-binary identities, will help align policies more closely with scientific reality, and by extension, social justice.

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openDemocracy: Gentrifier heal thyself?

Curiously, many of the people who make these comments about gentrification are gentrifiers themselves, railing against the displacement of the working class at their house-warming parties on up-and-coming blocks where working class people used to live. [...]

Maybe the left-wing case against gentrification is the same—a worthy concern, but one for which we would personally sacrifice very little. That may sound harsh, but we can’t ignore such critiques. Not only do many of us participate in gentrification—we actually enjoy it: earnestly deploring the Trump Presidency in Che Guevara-themed cafés; celebrating the diversity of city life in a live music bar with a $10 cover charge; or buying produce at farmers’ markets instead of greasy delis. [...]

The idea of gentrifiers as a pioneering “creative class” of tech start-ups and quirky businesses has been largely discredited, but in my experience the residents of poorer neighbourhoods don’t always see the arrival of people with additional energy and resources as inherently bad. They might bemoan the destruction of public housing in favour of ‘shared workspaces’ and roof-top bars, without opposing the basic idea of outside investment. [...]

Nonetheless, in the fight for more just and inclusive cities, gentrifiers can lend valuable support. Though not to the same extent, they can see and feel the damage done by profit-centred housing markets. They can sense the unwillingness of politicians to respond, and they can help imagine and develop solutions to the crisis. When people have some shared experience—even if it’s scraping together enough money for a broker’s fee, or dealing with a negligent landlord, or complaining about inexplicable power cuts in their building, they begin to see more common interests with their neighbours—and to recognize the need to fight alongside them for improvements.

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Vox: Why fact-checking can’t stop Trump’s lies

The School of Life: Why We Need Ancient Greek Words for Love

Many of our relationship problems stem from the emptiness of our vocabulary around our affectionate emotion. We have only the minimal word 'love'. Luckily, the Ancient Greeks had a more nuanced and complicated vocabulary that we can usefully borrow from.