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Have we forgotten how to die?

Have we forgotten how to die?

In a review of seven books on death and dying, Julie-Marie Strange writes: James Turner was twenty-five when his four-year-old daughter Annice died from a lung condition. She died at home with her parents and grandmother; her sleeping siblings were told of her death the next morning. James did everything to soothe Annice’s last days but, never having encountered death before, he didn’t immediately recognize it. He didn’t know what to do or expect and found it hard to discuss…

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Orwell saw that lying is the lifeblood of totalitarianism, making literature impossible

Orwell saw that lying is the lifeblood of totalitarianism, making literature impossible

Masha Gessen writes: Some essays are letters into the future. “The Prevention of Literature” is one such essay, and today I’d like to respond to it from 2018. Orwell argues that totalitarianism makes literature impossible. By literature, he means all kinds of writing in prose, from imaginative fiction to political journalism; he suggests that verse might slip through the cracks. He writes, too, that there is such a thing as “groups of people who have adopted a totalitarian outlook”—single-truth communities…

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NATO is once again practicing for the worst

NATO is once again practicing for the worst

Anne Applebaum writes from northern Poland: Scruffy, yellowish-brown buildings are bunched around a long courtyard; portable toilets and generators have been set up on the dusty ground beside. Inside, military-grade laptops, the kind that don’t break if you drop them, are arrayed along a series of tables, their cables spooling off onto the floor. Men from different countries, some dressed in camouflage, talk in low voices. A large map of Europe’s Baltic coast has been projected onto one of the…

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How sanctions feed authoritarianism

How sanctions feed authoritarianism

Peter Beinart writes: The United States has a long history of intervening overseas to solve one problem and inadvertently creating others. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration armed rebels fighting Afghanistan’s Soviet-backed government only to find that some of them later targeted the United States. During that same decade, America armed the government of El Salvador in a gruesome civil war against leftist rebels that spawned the migration that produced the now notorious gang, MS-13. It’s worth remembering these precedents…

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France pours scorn on Trump’s ‘little words’

France pours scorn on Trump’s ‘little words’

Politico reports: France pledged on Sunday to stand by the G7 summit statement disowned by Donald Trump and took a swipe at the U.S. president by declaring that international cooperation could not depend on “fits of anger” or “little words.” Apparently incensed by remarks about U.S. tariffs at the closing press conference on Saturday by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Trump — who had already left the gathering in Quebec — tweeted that he had instructed U.S. officials not to…

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How Lebanon transformed Anthony Bourdain

How Lebanon transformed Anthony Bourdain

Kim Ghattas writes: Growing up in Beirut during Lebanon’s 15–year civil war, I wished for someone like Anthony Bourdain to tell the story of my country: a place ripped apart by violence, yes, but also a country where people still drove through militia checkpoints just to gather for big Sunday family lunches, or dodged sniper fire to get to their favorite butcher across town to sample some fresh, raw liver for breakfast. Bourdain, the legendary roving chef and master storyteller…

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Bees may understand zero, a concept that took humans millennia to grasp

Bees may understand zero, a concept that took humans millennia to grasp

Kate Keller writes: As a mathematical concept, the idea of zero is relatively new in human society—and indisputably revolutionary. It’s allowed humans to develop algebra, calculus and Cartesian coordinates; questions about its properties continue to incite mathematical debate today. So it may sound unlikely that bees—complex and community-based insects to be sure, but insects nonetheless—seem to have mastered their own numerical concept of nothingness. Despite their sesame-seed-sized brains, honey bees have proven themselves the prodigies of the insect world. Researcher…

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Music: Jon Hassell — ‘Dream Theory’

Music: Jon Hassell — ‘Dream Theory’

  Jon Hassell: “Dream Theory in Malaya is titled after a paper by a visionary anthropologist, Kilton Stewart, who in 1935 visited a remarkable highland tribe of Malayan aborigines, the Senoi, whose happiness and well-being were linked to their morning custom of family dream-telling—where a child’s fearful dream of falling was praised as a gift to learn to fly the next night and where a dream-song or dance was taught to a neighboring tribe to create a common bond beyond…

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As Trump threatens U.S. allies, Russia and China solidify their ties

As Trump threatens U.S. allies, Russia and China solidify their ties

South China Morning Post reports: China and Russia pledged to support each other on key global issues during a summit in Beijing on Friday, as the two sides hailed an “all-time high” in bilateral ties amid strained relations with the US. The two countries also signed a raft of deals, including for nuclear cooperation projects totalling 20 billion yuan (US$3.13 billion) and a US$1 billion industrial investment fund. Chinese President Xi Jinping met his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin ahead of…

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For Kim Jong Un, meeting Trump is about cementing power at home

For Kim Jong Un, meeting Trump is about cementing power at home

Anna Fifield reports: “This unprecedented meeting with the U.S. president will make Kim Jong Un feel very proud, having achieved something his father and grandfather didn’t,” said Joo Seong-ha, who escaped from North Korea and now writes about the country for South Korea’s Dong-A Ilbo newspaper. And although “maximum pressure” may have helped bring Kim to the negotiating table, the other reality is that he is coming to the summit from a position of relative strength, said Kenneth Dekleva, a…

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Arron Banks ‘met with Russian officials multiple times before Brexit vote’

Arron Banks ‘met with Russian officials multiple times before Brexit vote’

The Observer reports: Arron Banks, the millionaire businessman who bankrolled Nigel Farage’s campaign to quit the EU, had multiple meetings with Russian embassy officials in the run-up to the Brexit referendum, documents seen by the Observer suggest. Banks, who gave £12m of services to the campaign, becoming the biggest donor in UK history, has repeatedly denied any involvement with Russian officials, or that Russian money played any part in the Brexit campaign. The Observer has seen documents which a senior…

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Climate change can be stopped by turning carbon dioxide pollution into gasoline

Climate change can be stopped by turning carbon dioxide pollution into gasoline

The Atlantic reports: A team of scientists from Harvard University and the company Carbon Engineering announced on Thursday that they have found a method to cheaply and directly pull carbon-dioxide pollution out of the atmosphere. If their technique is successfully implemented at scale, it could transform how humanity thinks about the problem of climate change. It could give people a decisive new tool in the race against a warming planet, but could also unsettle the issue’s delicate politics, making it…

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Under Trump, ‘America First’ really is turning out to be America alone

Under Trump, ‘America First’ really is turning out to be America alone

Susan B. Glasser writes: The Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, was less than forty-eight hours away from hosting the biggest diplomatic gathering of his career when I spoke with one of his top advisers on Wednesday afternoon. Trudeau’s team was searching for strategies to salvage the annual G-7 summit with the American President, Donald Trump, and leaders of five of the world’s other large democratic economies—all of them close allies of the United States, and all of them furious with…

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Evangelical minister warns about dangerous alliance between American evangelicals and the Republican Party

Evangelical minister warns about dangerous alliance between American evangelicals and the Republican Party

Mother Jones reports: The past four decades have seen an ever-tightening alliance between American evangelicals and the Republican Party, and few have played as pivotal a role in fostering that coupling as Reverend Rob Schenck. The evangelical minister from Buffalo, New York, gained national notoriety in the 1990s as a fervent anti-abortion activist who orchestrated shocking stunts to promote his cause, including one in which an aborted fetus was thrust in the face of then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton. His keen…

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IKEA unveils ambitious climate goals

IKEA unveils ambitious climate goals

GreenBiz reports: Swedish furniture giant IKEA has promised to outlaw single-use plastic products across its entire product range and in-store eateries by 2020 and ensure zero emission home deliveries as standard by 2025, as part of a sweeping set of new sustainability goals. The firm also promised to design all its products in line with circular principles and using renewable and recycled materials, and reduce the climate footprint of its wares by an average of 70 percent per product by…

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