Politics:
Always hit and miss, but here is Slavoj Žižek on the Paris attacks, refugees and feminism and human rights.
The New Yorker with a historical perspective on the US' answer to refugee crises:
The most notorious example of American hostility to vulnerable outsiders came on the eve of the Second World War, when the U.S. government refused to admit many Jewish refugees from Hitler. The voyage of the ship called the St. Louis, which left Hamburg on May 13, 1939, with nine hundred and thirty-seven mostly Jewish refugees on board, provides the most heartbreaking example of the consequences of American policy. After a stop in Cuba (which didn’t want the refugees, either), the ship was turned away from Florida when it was so close that passengers could see the lights of Miami. Back in Europe, two hundred and fifty-four of those passengers ultimately died in the Holocaust.
The New Yorker: Two American Answers to the Refugee Question, November 24, 2015
In the LRB, on magical thinking about ISIS:
It draws on a growing pool of recruits who discovered not only IS but Islam itself online, in chatrooms and through messaging services where distance vanishes at the tap of a keyboard. Indeed, the genius of IS has been to overcome the distance between two very different crises of citizenship, and weave them into a single narrative of Sunni Muslim disempowerment: the exclusion of young Muslims in Europe, and the exclusion of Sunnis in Syria and Iraq.
London Review of Books: Magical Thinking about Isis, December 3 2015 Issue
Three questions about the Russian jet that was downed by Turkey, which will have significant diplomatic fallout.
Bad news for Australia: Coal is not the future.
The Monthly on why we keep failing to address climate change effectively:
Our conscious destruction of a planet friendly to humans and other species is the most significant development in history. In response, in 1988 the international community, under the umbrella of the United Nations, created perhaps the most remarkable co-operative scientific enterprise: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). On five occasions – 1990, 1995, 2001, 2007 and 2014 – it has provided policymakers and the world’s publics with comprehensive and conservative summaries of the conclusions of the thousands of climate scientists. Each new report has grown more certain than the last about the gravity of the dangers we are facing. Interestingly, however, social scientists other than economists – sociologists, psychologists, political scientists, students of international relations – have not been invited to contribute to the IPCC reports nor have they participated in the global conversation on climate change. This is seriously strange. For no less important than the impact of climate change on the Earth and its creatures is the question of why human beings – international society, governments of nation-states, communities, individuals – have so far failed so comprehensively to rise to its challenge.
The Monthly: Diabolical. Why have we failed to address climate change?. December 2015 Issue
Pop Culture:
A video interview with Cate Blanchett, about Carol. (and a quiet admission that I am getting tired of "it's not just a lesbian love story, it's a love story foremost").
The Guardian, on Jessica Jones, which is an outstanding show in which the ultimate villain is the patriarchy, the emotional core is women supporting each other to regain agency and power, and a lot of non-straight characters.
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