In the Labyrinth of #MeToo


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Taking stock of what the movement has been about.

Yet even lacking the imperial powers of the Bull-Boss, they have become targets of a feminism that has gotten derailed from its most serious goals—namely, addressing the severe injustices inherent in our sex-gender system. Abortion clinics close, countless women suffer from domestic abuse, women workers endure a significant gender pay gap (earning, on average, 80 percent of what men make), female CEOs fail to break through that glittery glass ceiling (making up just five percent of the Fortune 500 list). And let’s not forget that when Hillary Clinton ran for president, hordes of red-capped Trump supporters enthusiastically chanted Lock Her Up! at all those raucous rallies.

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Sandra M. Gilbert — The American Scholar

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Pakistan’s Sham Election


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How will this outcome affect India Pakistan relations?

Those of us who have watched Pakistan for decades, however, viewed the election with a more jaundiced eye. It was marked by appalling levels of electoral violence, including an election day suicide bombing in Quetta that killed at least 31. Second, the result was predetermined by Pakistan’s powerful army, which engaged in electoral malfeasance for months leading up to the election and on election day itself. The army was hell-bent upon securing Khan’s victory and even encouraged political parties with overt ties to terrorist groups to field several hundred candidates, alongside some 1,500 candidates tied to Pakistan’s right-wing Islamist parties. These right-wing groups will help forge Khan’s electoral coalition, underwritten by Pakistan’s army and the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the intelligence agency that does the army’s dirty work at home and abroad.

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C. Christine Fair — Foreign Affairs

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Rem Koolhaas sees the future in the countryside


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Is it time to leave the cities to live in the countryside?

I first realised this in a Swiss village in the Engadin, which I visited often over the past 25 years. I began to notice drastic changes there. The village was simultaneously growing and hollowing out. A man I assumed was a farmer turned out to be a dissatisfied nuclear scientist from Frankfurt. Cows disappeared, along with their smell, and in came minimalist renovations, abundant cushions absorbing their new owners’ urban angst. Farming itself was now left to Sri Lankan workers. And nannies, nurses and assistants recruited in Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines were now looking after the homes, kids and pets of the virtual, one-week-a-year population who had caused the village to expand.

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The World in 2018

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No, you probably don’t have a book in you


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From the horse’s mouth – reality check for wannabe writers.

Remember writing papers in school? Remember trying to eke out 1,000 words or three pages or whatever seemingly arbitrary number a teacher set? Remember making the font bigger and the margins wider? You can’t do that to a book. I ‘m often sent stories that are way too long or too short for the publishing industry, and that makes them bad candidates for books. The average novel, for adults or children, is at least 50,000 words. That’s 50 three-page papers. Shorter books are not cheaper for the publisher to make, for many reasons too boring to get into here, and no, it’s not just cheaper to do ebooks, either. (No, really, it’s not.) If you’re an epic writer and think breaking up your 500,000-word fantasy series into five books is the key, you’re wrong there, too. A publisher doesn’t really want book two until they see how book number one is selling. And if your story doesn’t wrap up until book five, then you’re going to have nothing but disappointed readers. Writing — just getting the words on the page — is hard, period. Writing artfully so that someone enjoys what you’re writing is even harder.

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Kate McKean — The Outline

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The World Is Hot, on Fire, and Flooding. Climate Change is Here.


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It’s the hottest month of one of the hottest years in the history of human civilization, and unusual wildfires are sprouting up all over the map. Sweden has called for emergency assistance from the rest of the European Union to help battle massive wildfires burning north of the Arctic Circle. Across the western United States, 50 major wildfires are burning in parts of 14 states, fueled by severe drought. The wildfires burning in Siberia earlier this month sent smoke plumes from across the Arctic all the way to New England, four thousand miles away. Last year, big wildfires burned in Greenland for the first time in recorded history.

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Yves Smith — Naked Capitalism

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The Handmaid’s Tale


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I just finished the book. Sharing a 1986 review of the book.

The author has carefully drawn her projections from current trends. As she has said elsewhere, there is nothing here that has not been anticipated in the United States of America that we already know. Perhaps that is the trouble: the projections are too neatly penciled in. The details, including a Wall (as in Berlin, but also, as in the Middle Ages, a place where executed malefactors are displayed), all raise their hands announcing themselves present. At the same time, the Republic of Gilead itself, whatever in it that is not a projection, is insufficiently imagined. The Aunts are a good invention, though I cannot picture them as belonging to any future; unlike Big Brother, they are more part of the past – our schoolteachers.

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Mary McCarthy — The New York Times

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Prisoners of a Vision: Dissidents in Sisi’s Egypt


All of them are unlikely rebels. They are quiet, mostly unassuming, and doggedly hopeful. “The strong hand over society will never protect any dictator forever,” Mohamed Zaree said, shortly after a hearing at which the assembly-law case was adjourned yet again. “At some point, however hard a fist is clenched, it comes apart.” The price to be paid in the meantime is the endurance of thousands of disillusioning setbacks. Dissidents do not have the luxury, as guerillas do, of living outside society and periodically striking at it. They remain in the midst of things, witnessing crimes and abuses too numerous and commonplace to note. Having lived so long with the contradictions of their lives, Egypt’s dissidents have forgotten that they are courageous, if they ever knew it. They just persevere, sustained by the belief that there is something in man that must be defended, and that the current state of affairs is beneath their dignity.

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Tom Stevenson — LARB

How Cars Divide America


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We see the same basic pattern where we look at metros that are knowledge and tech hubs. Driving to work alone is negatively associated with the innovativeness of metros (measured as patents per capita), whereas the share of commuters who use transit or bike or walk to work is positively associated with innovation.

America is an increasingly polarized and politically divided nation, and the car both reflects and reinforces those divisions. Car-dependent places are much more likely to have voted for Trump in 2016. Although the associations are stronger for Trump votes, the same basic pattern holds for Romney votes in 2012. On the flip side, metros that voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Barack Obama in 2012 have much higher shares of commuters who use transit or walk or bike to work.

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Richard Florida — CityLab

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India’s demographic time bomb


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A strong warning.

For his part, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made no secret of his desire to drive a manufacturing sector. Under the “Make In India” banner, this has been a flagship policy of his first term in government, with hopes that India could eventually rival China as a mass manufacturer. While Make In India is regularly decried as a failure in newspaper headlines, it is still relatively early days, and the government has been working to remove some of the bureaucratic obstacles, such as approving changes to rules around wages.

At the same time, the government is in defence mode, working to hose down concerns about the growing unemployment problem. Earlier this month, Modi told a magazine that the issue was not about a lack of jobs, but rather a lack of relevant data.

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Aarti Betigeri — The Interpreter

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Science Fiction Is Not Social Reality


“The trouble with a kitten is that eventually it becomes a cat.” — Ogden Nash

Tech creators and tech billionaires are influenced by Science Fiction for different reasons. Some of these have to do with the narrative of the ‘hero outsider’ who uses their knowledge and skill to fix a problem through engineering a solution or through adapting tools and technology in new ways to solve some type of problem. Other reasons have to do with creating a Utopian society that is “bettered” through time-saving devices that are automated. The doors in Star Trek, the just-in-time data knowledge and data access in any number of films: Bladerunner, Star Wars, Minority Report, etc. and books all are delivered seamlessly in Science Fiction. When things do break, there is often an engineering solution. Even when Science Fiction turns against mankind, as it did in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the gadgets and gear are shown as sufficiently technologically inspiring, so much so that even though it was a warning film of sorts, that element becomes minimized in favor of recreating “cool technology.”

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S.A. Applin — Motherboard