The Supreme Court’s legitimacy is already lost

The Supreme Court’s legitimacy is already lost

Dahlia Lithwick writes: If the Supreme Court indeed strikes down Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey this June, as the draft opinion leaked to and published by Politico tonight suggests it will, years of conventional wisdom about the court and its concerns for its own legitimacy will be proved wrong. Every single court watcher who spoke in terms of baby steps, incrementalism, or “chipping away” at one of the most vitally important precedents in modern history will have…

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Europe is in danger, as always

Europe is in danger, as always

Caroline de Gruyter writes: In July 2020, along with European officials and experts, I was asked to take part in a policy game. Convened by a German think tank, we were asked to play out what would happen if either Matteo Salvini or Marine Le Pen, the far-right leaders in Italy and France, came to power. We spent a few hours frenziedly debating how the European Union would respond to each occurrence. Of one thing we were sure: It would…

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The climate movement in its own way

The climate movement in its own way

Charles Komanoff writes: After decades of critically documenting nuclear power’s outsize costs, I finally admitted to myself that the carbon-reduction benefits from continuing to run US nuclear plants are substantial, and in some respects irreplaceable. I made the case for keeping them open in an April article on TheNation.com. Closing New York’s Indian Point reactors last year was a climate blunder, I wrote. Not just because fracked gas is now filling the breach, but because the need to replace the…

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‘We are living in hell’: Pakistan and India suffer extreme spring heatwaves

‘We are living in hell’: Pakistan and India suffer extreme spring heatwaves

The Guardian reports: For the past few weeks, Nazeer Ahmed has been living in one of the hottest places on Earth. As a brutal heatwave has swept across India and Pakistan, his home in Turbat, in Pakistan’s Balochistan region, has been suffering through weeks of temperatures that have repeatedly hit almost 50C (122F), unprecedented for this time of year. Locals have been driven into their homes, unable to work except during the cooler night hours, and are facing critical shortages…

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The bustling neighbourhoods at the heart of cities throughout the ages

The bustling neighbourhoods at the heart of cities throughout the ages

Michael E Smith writes: All cities have neighbourhoods. This may not sound like much of an observation, but it is in fact a powerful claim for archaeologists of early cities. We now know that neighbourhoods are the only true urban universal – a feature found in every city that has ever existed, past and present. Other seemingly ‘urban’ traits, from streets and big buildings to markets and specialists, are absent from many cities and urban traditions. But neighbourhoods are playing…

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The universe could stop expanding ‘remarkably soon’, study suggests

The universe could stop expanding ‘remarkably soon’, study suggests

Live Science reports: After nearly 13.8 billion years of nonstop expansion, the universe could soon grind to a standstill, then slowly start to contract, new research published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests. In the new paper, three scientists attempt to model the nature of dark energy — a mysterious force that seems to be causing the universe to expand ever faster — based on past observations of cosmic expansion. In the team’s model, dark…

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Russia’s longstanding disdain for Ukrainian nationhood

Russia’s longstanding disdain for Ukrainian nationhood

Yaroslav Trofimov writes: As a young poet in the Soviet Union, Joseph Brodsky was persecuted by the authorities before escaping to the U.S. in 1972 and going on to win the Nobel Prize in literature. In Soviet-era Kyiv, Ukrainian intellectuals used to trade coveted samizdat reprints of Brodsky’s poems, reciting them at clandestine gatherings. But the affection wasn’t mutual. At a reading in 1992, less than a year into Ukraine’s existence as an independent nation, Brodsky offered a new poem…

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Russia’s catastrophic geopolitics

Russia’s catastrophic geopolitics

Maxim Trudolyubov writes: Geopolitics cannot but attract those political leaders who cultivate various historical injustices as the basis for their revanchism. This is a political program not only of the Russian president but also of politicians with similar attitudes, including, to various degrees, the leaders of Cuba, China, Hungary, Iran, Serbia, Turkey, and Venezuela. All of them constantly complain about past humiliations, the lack of international recognition, the hostility of certain external forces, and wrongly drawn borders. What is less…

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After a Russian tycoon criticized Putin’s war, retribution was swift

After a Russian tycoon criticized Putin’s war, retribution was swift

The New York Times reports: Oleg Y. Tinkov was worth more than $9 billion in November, renowned as one of Russia’s few self-made business tycoons after building his fortune outside the energy and minerals industries that were the playgrounds of Russian kleptocracy. Then, last month, Mr. Tinkov, the founder of one of Russia’s biggest banks, criticized the war in Ukraine in a post on Instagram. The next day, he said, President Vladimir V. Putin’s administration contacted his executives and threatened…

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Amid carnage in Ukraine, a less bloody shadow war on the Russian side of the border

Amid carnage in Ukraine, a less bloody shadow war on the Russian side of the border

RFE/RL reports: Early in the morning on April 27, a drone crashed in a muddy field southwest of the Russian city of Kursk, around 100 kilometers northeast of the border with Ukraine. Locals tracked down the destroyed device not long after, and posted photographs to Telegram and other social media. The device appeared to be a Bayraktar TB2, a versatile Turkish-designed unmanned aerial vehicle capable of long-distance surveillance as well as dropping guided bombs or firing anti-tank missiles. It wasn’t…

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Ukraine’s digital battle with Russia highlights the advantages of decentralized power

Ukraine’s digital battle with Russia highlights the advantages of decentralized power

Wired reports: When Russian president Vladimir Putin launched his full invasion of Ukraine in February, the world expected Moscow’s cyber and information operations to pummel the country alongside air strikes and shelling. Two months on, however, Kyiv has not only managed to keep the country online amidst a deluge of hacking attempts, but it has brought the fight back to Russia. Even Ukrainian officials are surprised by how ineffective Russia’s digital war has been. “I think that the root cause…

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A climate-driven decline of tiny dryland lichens could have major global impacts

A climate-driven decline of tiny dryland lichens could have major global impacts

Inside Climate News reports: Lichens that help hold together soil crusts in arid lands around the world are dying off as the climate warms, new research shows. That would lead deserts to expand and also would affect areas far from the drylands, as crumbling crusts fill winds with dust that can speed snowmelt and increase the incidence of respiratory diseases. Biologically rich soil crusts, sometimes called cryptobiotic soils or biocrusts, are spread out across dry and semi-dry regions of every…

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How Facebook’s algorithms decide what you see in your news feed

How Facebook’s algorithms decide what you see in your news feed

Gizmodo reports: Several key [internal] documents [published by Gizmodo today] concern what Facebook calls “meaningful social interactions,” a term introduced by the company in Jan. 2018. This metric, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained at the time, was meant to help prioritize “personal connections’’ over an endless online dribble of viral news and videos. This “major change,” as he put it, was framed as an effort to put first the “happiness and health” of the user—Facebook’s way of encouraging users to…

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Ukraine is now America’s war, too

Ukraine is now America’s war, too

Robin Wright writes: America has crossed a threshold in Ukraine, both in its short-term involvement and its long-term intent. The U.S. was initially cautious during the fall and winter as Russia, a nuclear country with veto power at the U.N. Security Council, amassed more than a hundred and fifty thousand troops along the Ukrainian border. It didn’t want to poke the Russian bear—or provoke Vladimir Putin personally. Two days after long convoys of Russian tanks rolled across the border, on…

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