The New York Review of Books: Germany’s Election: Choosing the Unspeakable

The apparent calm of the election belied the real concerns of the German public, concerns evident in the election results. Merkel began her campaign late and then barely campaigned; she gave plain speeches that rarely mentioned her opponents. To the eyes of the public, the two major parties seemed nearly identical. This provided the AfD with an opening to be the opposition. If people turned to a party that said the unspeakable, it was partly because very speakable things weren’t being said at all. [...]

“Merkel and Schulz: they agree,” read a headline after the one TV debate of the election season, in which the two candidates seemed to bat canned answers back and forth. The four other parties that will enter the Bundestag, or Parliament—in addition to the AfD, the economically liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP), the Greens, and the far-left Die Linke—were relegated to a follow-up show the next evening. Merkel and Schulz barely discussed the eurozone. Education and NATO spending did not come up. [...]

The central issue of the campaign, migration, barely came up at all in most of the speeches by Merkel and Schulz. Merkel herself hardly mentioned the subject in her campaign, as if hoping the issue would simply go away. The CDU’s “strategy was to not talk about it, hoping in vain that voters wouldn’t realize it,” Dr. Timo Lochocki of the German Marshall Fund told me. 

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The Atlantic: The Misunderstood Roots of Burma's Rohingya Crisis

Tensions between the Bengali-speaking Muslims and Buddhists in Rakhine state have existed for decades—some would say centuries—but the most significant inflection point came in 1982 when Burma’s junta passed a law that identified 135 ethnicities entitled to citizenship. The Rohingya were not among them, though they had enjoyed equal rights since Burma became independent from British rule in 1948. Almost overnight, they were stripped of their citizenship.

In the years since then, the Rohingya were persecuted, steadily lost their rights, and were the victims of violence. The worst of this violence erupted in 2012 following the rape of a Buddhist woman allegedly by Muslim men. That prompted massive religious violence against the Rohingya, forcing 140,000 of them into camps for internally displaced people. International pressure resulted in the military government agreeing to grant the Rohingya a reduced form of citizenship if they registered themselves as Bengali—not Rohingya. Although many Muslims in Rakhine state were previously indifferent to how they were labeled, the years of oppression, combined with the type of citizenship they were being offered, made the offer unpalatable. [...]

For the Burmese government, the word Rohingya is particularly fraught. This is because if the government acknowledges Rakhine’s Muslims as members of the Rohingya ethnic group, then under the 1982 citizenship law—ironically, the same measure that stripped the Rohingya of their citizenship—the Muslims would be allowed an autonomous area within the country. And therein lies the crux of the problem: The Burmese fear a Rohingya autonomous area along the border with Bangladesh would come at the expense of Rakhine territory. The Burmese military, which has cracked down on Rohingya civilians, views this as a possible staging area for terrorism by groups like ARSA.

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The Atlantic: Angela Merkel Reorients Germany

Why was Angela Merkel just elected to a fourth term as German chancellor? Ahead of Sunday’s election, the German journalist Robin Alexander offered one explanation. Since the economy is thriving and the nation’s politics are relatively placid despite the disruptive rise of a far-right populist-nationalist party, many Germans think they’re living on a “ship of stability and around us it’s very stormy.” Consider: Vladimir Putin changed Ukraine’s borders by force; Donald Trump, who “in German eyes behaves like a madman,” was elected president of the United States; Britain voted to exit the European Union; and France, had Marine Le Pen won this year’s presidential race, might have left the bloc as well, destroying the entire EU project. [...]

The United States has served as a model for German democracy and as a guarantor of German security, both through NATO and America’s nuclear-weapons arsenal. The European Union has allowed Germany to become a leading power in Europe while maintaining good relations with its neighbors—as Puglierin put it, “to breathe and to feel well in our own shoes.” In Brexit, the EU will lose its second-largest economy and its strongest link to the United States. In Trump, Germans have confronted a leader across the Atlantic who has wavered on defending NATO members, demanded that Germany pay more for U.S. military protection, challenged certain aspects of liberal democracy, championed the very nationalism that European integration was designed to transcend, and dismissed the EU as a “vehicle” for German power. At first, after the one-two punch of Brexit andTrump, Germans had “the impression that our world crumbled,” Puglierin said. [...]

In a telling debate before the German election, representatives of the country’s six main parties were asked which of four nations—the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, and Turkey—was Germany’s closest partner. Two chose the U.K. in a show of European solidarity. Two picked the U.S. because transatlantic relations were most important, though they explicitly excluded Donald Trump, the “outrageous U.S. president” who “is insulting the whole world and endangering the world with his tweets,” from the partnership. One—the emissary from Merkel’s party—wondered why he couldn’t pick France. Another made no selection whatsoever. When the moderator asked whether any audience members thought Trump was a “reliable partner for Germany,” two lonely hands went up.

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Financial Times: The end of the Chinese miracle

The School of Life: On Still Being a Virgin

Our era of sexual liberation encourages us to have sex; but at the same time, hugely stigmatises those who don’t have it, from choice or circumstances. It’s time to liberate the idea of lingering or ongoing virginity from the shame it’s currently surrounded by.