Author: Will Truman

The mainstream French media carried the Macron campaign statement, but virtually nothing else. In addition to the normal proscription of campaign “propaganda” on election eve, the government issued a statement saying specifically that anyone...

Berlin (AFP) – German police on Sunday evacuated some 50,000 people from the northern city of Hanover in one of the largest post-war operations to defuse World War II era bombs. Residents in a...

We have arrived at a strange moment for the left. In the most basic sense, the world we want—a social order built on racial and gender equality, in which the needs of human beings are privileged over profit (or something like that)—is further off than ever. The Trump administration and the Republican majority will seek to defang the labor movement, destroy the welfare state, accelerate deportation and mass incarceration, empower police and prosecutors, undermine environmental protections, rollback civil rights, start wars, and criminalize our means of fighting back. Much of this is already underway.

At the same time, there have perhaps never been more people banging on the walls of our clubhouses, demanding to be let in. It is the left’s first responsibility to fling open the doors. And when we do, we’ll need to avoid the traps of insularity, purism, and fragmentation that have undermined our efforts in the past. We’ll have to meet these new allies, as Smucker says, “where they are, with the language they use, in the spaces they frequent.”

From: A Tough-Love Letter to the Left | New Republic

The difficulty in studying localities and comparing them with the national picture is largely because of the lack of comparable data. At the Labor Department, productivity is measured by comparing labor input (hours worked) to a sector’s output (in dollars). At the regional scale, Parilla and Muro use metro-level output from Moody’s Analytics and employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to estimate local productivity. In doing so, they observe massive variations across the U.S. economy, from an average of $299,000 per worker a year in Midland, Texas to $38,000 per worker in Jacksonville, North Carolina.

According to their research, the largest U.S. cities tend to be the most productive areas, along with areas in the energy belt that specialize in oil, gas, and mining. The low end of the productivity spectrum consisted of smaller cities in the southern and southwestern U.S. These findings aren’t that surprising given that cities and boom towns tend to be more productive.

From: The Geography of U.S. Productivity – The Atlantic

Walking around urban Japan, I feel like I am seeing a society that is several steps closer to that ideal than the United States. You may have heard that Japan is a government-directed society, and in many ways it is. But in terms of the constituents of daily life being privately owned and marginally priced, it is a libertarian’s dream world.

For example, there are relatively few free city parks. Many green spaces are private and gated off (admission is usually around $5). On the streets, there are very few trashcans; people respond to this in the way libertarians would want, by exercising personal responsibility and carrying their trash home with them in little baggies. There are also very few public benches. In cafes, each customer must order something promptly or be kicked out; outside your house or office, there is basically nowhere to sit down that will not cost you a little bit of money. Public buildings generally have no drinking fountains; you must buy or bring your own water. Free wireless? Good luck finding that!

Does all this private property make me feel free? Absolutely not! Quite the opposite – the lack of a “commons” makes me feel constrained. It forces me to expend a constant stream of mental effort, calculating whether it’s worth it to spend $4 to sit and rest for 10 minutes, whether it’s worth $2 to get a drink.

From: Noahpinion: Do property rights increase freedom? (Japan edition)

I made a special playlist on iTunes before going to see my dad for the first time as a free man. I sat up in my hotel room in Indianapolis, having arrived from Brooklyn at nearly 1 a.m. The room was dirty and badly designed, but I’d booked it last minute using an app. Now, I was back in my favorite Midwestern city, preoccupied with the phone in my hands, trying to answer the question, “What songs will I want to listen to on the way to see my father for the first time outside of prison?” I didn’t want to hear anything too loud or too fast. I wanted familiar and soothing; 60 tracks later, the list was lousy with Anita Baker, Lauryn Hill, and ‘90s-era Kenny Loggins.

Sleep did not show up that night. As scared as I was of the bedbugs I assumed surrounded me in that atrocious hotel, I was more afraid what would happen when I saw my father. Would the man who showed up be anything like the one I’d been imagining, and would I be anything like the daughter he thought he had? Would he be proud of me? How were we going to make this relationship — the real one — work? I lived in Brooklyn, and he would be staying with his sister in Indiana. More importantly, he had been in prison for 30 years and had no contact with modern technology.

From: Father Daughter Relationship – Parent Prison Experience

Bazian is a street orator whose disgust with America is such that he called for an American Intifada. He is a major supporter of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, and a one-time fundraiser for KindHearts, which the US government shut down for its alleged ties to the terrorist organization Hamas.

Bazian denies he is an antisemite, but he blocked the appointment of a Jewish student to San Francisco State University’s Student Judicial Council on the grounds that the individual supported the State of Israel and was thus a racist by definition. Of course, in contrast, Bazian’s support of the terrorist organization Hamas would be considered an embrace of social justice.

In public lectures, Bazian refers to the modern-day Palestinians as the descendants of the Philistines. The historical basis of this is nonexistent. The Philistines were an Aegean people related to the Ancient Greeks and bore the phenotypic characteristics of a tall, fair-skinned people. Bazian himself resembles the Philistines with the same proximity as Hitler, Goering, and Goebbels represented the Aryan superman, who was as blond as Hitler, as slim as Goering, and as tall as Goebbels.

From: UC Berkeley Offers Class in Erasing Jews From Israel, Destroying Jewish State | Jewish & Israel News Algemeiner.com

I was fascinated by my colleague Julia Silge’s recent blog post on what verbs tend to occur after “he” or “she” in several novels, and what they might imply about gender roles within fictional work. This made me wonder what trends could be found across a larger dataset of stories.

Mark Riedl’s Wikipedia plots dataset that I examined in yesterday’s post offers a great opportunity to analyze this question. The dataset contains over 100,000 descriptions of plots from films, novels, TV shows, and video games. The stories span centuries and come from tens of thousands of authors, but the descriptions are written by a modern audience, which means we can quantify gender roles across a wide variety of genres. Since the dataset contains plot descriptions rather than primary sources, it’s also more about what happens at than how an author describes the work: we’re less likely to see “thinks” or “says”, but more likely to see “shoots” or “escapes”.

From: Gender and verbs across 100,000 stories: a tidy analysis – Variance Explained

On Tuesday night, three-fourths of the Oneders-turned-Wonders — heartthrob singer Jimmy Mattingly (Johnathon Schaech), unnamed bass player The Bass Player (Ethan Embry), and drummer Guy “Shades” Patterson (Tom Everett Scott) — reunited at the...

Is closing the gender gap sexist? Also, Freddie on Girls and a defense of the alpha female.