In a feel-good Korea summit, Kim lays the groundwork for meeting with Trump

In a feel-good Korea summit, Kim lays the groundwork for meeting with Trump

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The Washington Post reports: North Korea’s Kim Jong Un has laid the foundations for a meeting with President Trump as soon as next month, signaling a willingness to discuss denuclearization and trying to dispel the idea that he’s an unreliable “Little Rocket Man.” In an astonishing turn of events, a beaming Kim on Friday stepped across the border into South Korea for a day of talks that began and ended with him holding hands with the president of the South,…

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Say goodbye to the information age — it’s all about reputation now

Say goodbye to the information age — it’s all about reputation now

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By Gloria Origgi, Aeon There is an underappreciated paradox of knowledge that plays a pivotal role in our advanced hyper-connected liberal democracies: the greater the amount of information that circulates, the more we rely on so-called reputational devices to evaluate it. What makes this paradoxical is that the vastly increased access to information and knowledge we have today does not empower us or make us more cognitively autonomous. Rather, it renders us more dependent on other people’s judgments and evaluations…

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American Jews have abandoned Gaza — and the truth

American Jews have abandoned Gaza — and the truth

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Peter Beinart writes: “In our time,” wrote George Orwell in 1946, “political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.” British colonialism, the Soviet gulag and America’s dropping of an atomic bomb, he argued, “can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face.” So how do people defend the indefensible? Through “euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.” By obscuring the truth. So it is, more than 70 years later, with…

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The deep roots of Trump’s war on the press

The deep roots of Trump’s war on the press

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Tim Alberta writes: You couldn’t miss it. Arriving in Cleveland for the 2016 Republican National Convention, visitors found themselves staring at an enormous white billboard, slapped across the top of a tall concrete building in the city’s bustling downtown, screaming a simple directive: “DON’T BELIEVE THE LIBERAL MEDIA!” The signage—black letters against a white backdrop, save for “LIBERAL MEDIA” in bloody red—was ample around town the week of Donald Trump’s coronation in Cleveland. It was carried on top of taxicabs;…

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Two mass murders reveal how difficult—and important—it is to correctly identify terrorism

Two mass murders reveal how difficult—and important—it is to correctly identify terrorism

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J.M. Berger writes: Two mass murders took place within 48 hours this week. Both attackers were adherents of extremist ideologies. Both terrorized people. But one of these two attacks was clearly terrorism, and one was apparently not. What’s the difference? Early Sunday morning, Travis Reinking walked into a Tennessee Waffle House wearing nothing but a jacket and started shooting, killing four and wounding several more. Early reporting indicates that Reinking had a history of apparent mental illness. But Reinking also…

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Sea-level rise caused by climate change will make most atolls uninhabitable by the mid-21st century

Sea-level rise caused by climate change will make most atolls uninhabitable by the mid-21st century

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The Washington Post reports: More than a thousand low-lying tropical islands risk becoming “uninhabitable” by the middle of the century — or possibly sooner — because of rising sea levels, upending the populations of some island nations and endangering key U.S. military assets, according to new research published Wednesday. The threats to the islands are twofold. In the long term, the rising seas threaten to inundate the islands entirely. More immediately, as seas rise, the islands will more frequently deal…

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Natalie Portman and the crisis of liberal Zionism

Natalie Portman and the crisis of liberal Zionism

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Eric Levitz writes: There have always been tensions between liberal universalism and Jewish nationalism. But the rise of the Trumpist right has heightened such contradictions. To remain true to both AIPAC and progressivism, a liberal Zionist must now lament border walls in Texas but defend them in the West Bank; condemn Republicans who suggest that nonwhite babies pose a threat to American civilization as proto-Nazis and endorse Israel’s right to defend itself against the “demographic threat” that is Palestinian children;…

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Reflective and unreflective atheists

Reflective and unreflective atheists

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Patrick Freyne writes: John Gray is a self-described atheist who thinks that prominent advocates of atheism have made non-belief seem intolerant, uninspiring and dull. At the end of the first chapter of his new book, Seven Types of Atheism, he concludes that “the organised atheism of the present century is mostly a media phenomenon and best appreciated as a type of entertainment”. He laughs when I remind him of this sick burn. “I wrote the book partly as a riposte…

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To communicate with apes, we must do it on their terms

To communicate with apes, we must do it on their terms

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Rachel Nuwer writes: On August 24, 1661, Samuel Pepys, an administrator in England’s navy and famous diarist, took a break from work to go see a “strange creature” that had just arrived on a ship from West Africa. Most likely, it was a chimpanzee—the first Pepys had ever seen. As he wrote in his diary, the “great baboon” was so human-like that he wondered if it were not the offspring of a man and a “she-baboon.” “I do believe that…

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Colossal cosmic collision alters understanding of early universe

Colossal cosmic collision alters understanding of early universe

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Reuters reports: Astronomers have detected the early stages of a colossal cosmic collision, observing a pile-up of 14 galaxies 90 percent of the way across the observable universe in a discovery that upends assumptions about the early history of the cosmos. Researchers said on Wednesday the galactic mega-merger observed 12.4 billion light-years away from Earth occurred 1.4 billion years after the Big Bang that gave rise to the universe. Astronomers call the object a galactic protocluster, a precursor to the…

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Gaia mission releases map of more than a billion stars – here’s what it can teach us

Gaia mission releases map of more than a billion stars – here’s what it can teach us

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Gaia’s view of our Milky Way and neighbouring galaxies. ESA/Gaia/DPAC, CC BY-SA By George Seabroke, UCL Most of us have looked up at the night sky and wondered how far away the stars are or in what direction they are moving. The truth is, scientists don’t know the exact positions or velocities of the vast majority of the stars in the Milky Way. But now a new tranche of data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite, aiming to map…

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Did Macron just charm Trump into compromising on Iran?

Did Macron just charm Trump into compromising on Iran?

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Robin Wright writes: French President Emmanuel Macron masterfully works Donald Trump, perhaps better than any U.S. ally. By the end of the day Tuesday, it looked like he might—just might—prevent an angry showdown between the United States and Iran. Trump began the day by virtually declaring war on the Islamic Republic if the nuclear deal unravels and Tehran resumes uranium enrichment, a fuel process for both peaceful nuclear energy and bombs. “They’re not going to be restarting anything,” the President…

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Swift victory in Colombian Supreme Court could pave way for further legal action on climate around the world

Swift victory in Colombian Supreme Court could pave way for further legal action on climate around the world

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Pacific Standard reports: In Colombia, a group of 25 children and young people have just made legal history: They successfully put their government on trial for causing climate change and thereby endangering the fundamental rights of its citizens. Colombia’s Supreme Court agreed with the young plaintiffs that the government had done too little to halt deforestation in the Amazon, despite its commitment to achieve net-zero deforestation by 2020. This, the justices decided, amounted to a threat to the plaintiffs’ rights…

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U.S. falls to 45th on press freedom index, Trump labeled ‘media-bashing enthusiast’

U.S. falls to 45th on press freedom index, Trump labeled ‘media-bashing enthusiast’

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The Hill reports: Reporters Without Borders has dropped the United States to No. 45 in its annual ranking of press freedom for 180 countries around the world. In the report released Wednesday, the United States received a “fairly good” rating, which falls below the category of “good,” in which only 9 percent of countries rated were placed. The ranking continues a downward trend for the U.S. in recent years. The country finished No. 43 in 2017 and No. 41 in…

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The spirit molecule

The spirit molecule

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Graham St John writes: Identified in 300 BCE by the Greek physician Herophilos as the brain’s only unpaired organ, the pineal gland has long been a source of mystery and speculation. Galen, another Greek physician and philosopher, discussed its role as a valve regulating the flow of ‘psychic pneuma’. This view informed René Descartes, who in the 17th century situated the soul (for him, the mind) precisely in this tiny mid-brain structure, which he imagined to be something of a…

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