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Month: July 2018

According to the Aztecs, improvement doesn’t come from the self

According to the Aztecs, improvement doesn’t come from the self

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Sebastian Purcell writes: When Halloween rolled around last year, my wife and I were prepared to be greeted by scores of eager trick-or-treaters. Guided by the thought that too much candy was better than too little, we bought entirely too much, and simply poured the excess on to a platter in our living room. The problem is: I have a sweet-tooth. ‘I can’t stop eating these!’ I said to my wife, peevishly, a few days later. Nearly every time I…

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Trump’s nativism is transforming the American landscape

Trump’s nativism is transforming the American landscape

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Jedediah Purdy writes: In his late may commencement address at the Naval Academy, President Trump chose to remind the graduating cadets and their families of a particular aspect of American history. “Our ancestors conquered a continent,” he said. This point is part of a larger attack on “cynics and critics” who “denigrate America’s incredible heritage.” Like many of Trump’s actions as president, the speech was a reminder that his particular brand of nationalism takes a keen interest in the meaning…

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How democracy fades away

How democracy fades away

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Murtaza Hussain writes: Despite being one of the United States’s founding statesmen and its second president after independence from Britain, John Adams was quite skeptical of democracy. “Democracy never lasts long,” Adams reflected in an 1814 letter. “It soon wastes exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet, that did not commit suicide.” The United States that existed when Adams wrote the letter was not very worthy of being described as a democracy in any case. Millions of…

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Trump’s talking points on Crimea are the same as Putin’s

Trump’s talking points on Crimea are the same as Putin’s

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Christian Caryl writes: A few days ago, reporters on Air Force One asked President Trump if he would accept Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. They had good reason to do so. As Trump prepares for his July 16 summit meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, there have been signs that the U.S. president might be considering some sort of grand bargain that might entail recognition of Moscow’s claims. You’d think that the journalists’ question would be an easy one…

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Is Trump handing Putin a victory in Syria?

Is Trump handing Putin a victory in Syria?

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David Ignatius writes: The catastrophic war in Syria is nearing what could be a diplomatic endgame, as the United States , Russia and Israel shape a deal that would preserve power for Syrian President Bashar al -Assad in exchange for Russian pledges to restrain Iranian influence. Checking Iranian power has become the only major Trump administration goal in Syria, now that the Islamic State is nearly vanquished. President Trump appears ready to embrace a policy that will validate Assad, an…

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The Capital Gazette shooting and the true value of local newspapers

The Capital Gazette shooting and the true value of local newspapers

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Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes: On Thursday afternoon, a thirty-eight-year-old man named Jarrod Ramos killed five people at the Capital Gazette newspaper, in Annapolis, Maryland. He fired a gun into the newsroom, then stopped, reloaded—members of the staff now cowering under their desks—and then started firing again. After a mass shooting, there is usually both sadness and a sense of dread, as the country waits to discover the shooter’s identity and the nature of his grievance. But in this case the staff…

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How emoji are changing the way we communicate

How emoji are changing the way we communicate

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Wired reports: Two years ago, Sanjaya Wijeratne—a computer science PhD student at Wright State University—noticed something odd in his research. He was studying the communication of gang members on Twitter. Among the grandstanding about drugs and money, he found gang members repeatedly dropping the ⛽ emoji in their tweets. Wijeratne had been working on separate research relating to word-sense disambiguation, a field of computational linguistics that looks at how words take on multiple meanings. The use of ⛽ jumped out…

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Owls see the world much like we do

Owls see the world much like we do

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The New York Times reports: Owl eyes are round, but not spherical. These immobile, tubular structures sit on the front of an owl’s face like a pair of built-in binoculars. They allow the birds to focus in on prey and see in three dimensions, kind of like humans — except we don’t have to turn our whole heads to spot a slice of pizza beside us. Although owls and humans both have binocular vision, it has been unclear whether these…

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Reports of the demise of liberalism are greatly exaggerated

Reports of the demise of liberalism are greatly exaggerated

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Daniel H Cole and Aurelian Craiutu write: Modern democratic governments are founded on liberal principles meant to create the basis of a fair and just society. Liberalism emerged as a reaction against absolute power, in favour of individual autonomy protected by freedom of conscience and the rule of law. As the political theorist Judith Shklar put it in Political Thought and Political Thinkers (1998): ‘Liberalism’s deepest grounding is … in the conviction of the earliest defenders of toleration, born in…

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Oye Trump! Mexico’s next president thinks you’re erratic and arrogant, and a lot else, too

Oye Trump! Mexico’s next president thinks you’re erratic and arrogant, and a lot else, too

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Siobhán O’Grady writes: Last year, Andrés Manuel López Obrador published a book that criticized the United States’ influence in Mexico and featured parts of speeches he made on a tour of the United States, where he called for migrant rights. He named it “Oye, Trump,” Spanish for “Listen Up, Trump.” Now he’s going to be Mexico’s next president. The leftist former mayor of Mexico City, who is also known by his initials, AMLO, has repeatedly made clear how he differs…

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Mussolini promised peace ‘with love if possible and with force if necessary’

Mussolini promised peace ‘with love if possible and with force if necessary’

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Clive Irving writes: Is there a moment when a fanatical leader can be stopped before he takes a nation into the abyss? A moment when those with the moral determination to stop him can act before it is too late? These questions are not academic. Every day Trump stress tests this republic’s defenses against a demagogue. History has such moments. They need to be heeded. In Italy the moment came on Aug. 16, 1924. For more than two months, one…

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The Supreme Court looks away

The Supreme Court looks away

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David Cole writes: At the close of his opinion upholding President Donald Trump’s ban on immigrants from five predominantly Muslim countries, Chief Justice John Roberts proclaimed on Tuesday that “Korematsu has nothing to do with this case.” He went on to write that Korematsu v. United States, the 1944 decision that backed the internment of Japanese citizens and immigrants based on their race, “was gravely wrong the day it was decided, has been overruled in the court of history and—to…

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The sad delusion of Anthony Kennedy conspiracy theories

The sad delusion of Anthony Kennedy conspiracy theories

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Mark Joseph Stern writes: Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement from the Supreme Court shocked liberals so deeply that some haven’t quite accepted that his decision to step down was on the up and up. A New York Times report on the Trump administration’s quest to nudge Kennedy off the bench has spawned a series of conspiracy theories that revolve around one detail in the piece: The justice’s son, Justin Kennedy, worked at Deutsche Bank when it loaned Trump more than $1…

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The inventor of the World Wide Web and his mission to save it

The inventor of the World Wide Web and his mission to save it

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Katrina Brooker writes: “For people who want to make sure the Web serves humanity, we have to concern ourselves with what people are building on top of it,” Tim Berners-Lee told me one morning in downtown Washington, D.C., about a half-mile from the White House. Berners-Lee was speaking about the future of the Internet, as he does often and fervently and with great animation at a remarkable cadence. With an Oxonian wisp of hair framing his chiseled face, Berners-Lee appears…

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First sighting of a newborn planet

First sighting of a newborn planet

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The Guardian reports: It is a moment of birth that has previously proved elusive, but astronomers say they now have the first confirmed image of the formation of a planet. The startling snapshot shows a bright blob – the nascent planet – travelling through the dust and gas surrounding a young star, known as PDS70, thought to be about 370 light years from Earth. The black circle in the centre of the image, to the left of the planet, is…

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