Politics:
All the single ladies:
"This is why the expansion of the population of unmarried women across classes signals a social and political rupture as profound as the invention of birth control, as the sexual revolution, as the abolition of slavery, as women’s suffrage, and as the women’s-rights, civil-rights, gay-rights, and labor movements that made this reordering of society possible. By their very growing presence, single women are asking for a new deal from their government. The Democratic platform, suddenly more liberal than it has been in a generation, is more liberal largely in response to this new segment of the American population."
NY Mag: The Single American Woman, February 22, 2016
The Atlantic on how Russia's geography determines its foreign policy:
Two of Russia’s chief preoccupations—its vulnerability on land and its lack of access to warm-water ports—came together in Ukraine in 2014. As long as a pro-Russian government held sway in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, Russia could be confident that its buffer zone would remain intact and guard the European Plain. Even a neutral Ukraine, which would promise not to join the European Union or NATO and would uphold the lease Russia had on the warm-water port at Sevastopol in Crimea, would be acceptable. But when protests in Ukraine brought down the pro-Russia government of Viktor Yanukovych and a new, more pro-Western government came to power, Putin had a choice. He could have respected the territorial integrity of Ukraine, or he could have done what Russian leaders have done for centuries with the bad geographic cards they were dealt. He chose his own kind of attack as defense, annexing Crimea to ensure Russia’s access to its only proper warm-water port, and moving to prevent NATO from creeping even closer to Russia’s border.
The Atlantic: Russia and the Curse of Geography, October 31, 2015
The Washington Post tries to visualise the history of refugee crises since 1945, and meanwhile in the UK, kids straight out of school are judging asylum claims.
Carnegie Europe on the state and future of global governance amidst the many current global crises.
A long, heartbreaking portrait of Aaron Swartz and the idea of free access.
In Primary News, what does Hillary Clinton's win in South Carolina mean (Bernie Sanders struggles to win black and non-secular voters)? And Marco Rubio may have found Donald Trump's Achilles heel, but likely too late. And how did the Republican Party end up here? By going post-policy.
What is like to live on Mars?
Google's quest to build the perfect team:
As the researchers studied the groups, however, they noticed two behaviors that all the good teams generally shared. First, on the good teams, members spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as ‘‘equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.’’ On some teams, everyone spoke during each task; on others, leadership shifted among teammates from assignment to assignment. But in each case, by the end of the day, everyone had spoken roughly the same amount. ‘‘As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well,’’ Woolley said. ‘‘But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined.’’
The New York Times Magazine: What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team, February 25, 2016
Pop Culture:
Beyoncé made a documentary about racial injustice, and The Root on how structural racism has caused the horrifying water crisis in Flint, Michigan.
On the day of the Oscars: What is it like to work in Hollywood if you aren't a straight white man? And a history of six feminist crusaders in Hollywood:
Cox’s vision, when she moved to Los Angeles from New York in the mid-'70s, was to make an entire series of genre films, all from a woman's point of view: a gender-bending sci-fi, a war story with a female hero at the center. She only got as far as making the Western. "I thought, they're making all the genre movies where the men are the heroes and I want to flip this concept on its ear," she says. "Looking back, this seems naïve. What was I thinking? But the fact that this seems naïve perhaps says something important about our industry. At any rate, this vision was rejected."
Pacific Standard: The Original Six: The Story of Hollywood's Forgotten Feminist Crusaders, February 27, 2016
And a look back at the 1992 protests against the Academy Awards -
Hollywood’s antigay tendencies were still thriving in the early 1990s, and 1991 was a prime example. “That was the year of ‘The gays killed JFK’ and ‘Trans people are serial killers who will make you into a coat,’” jokes Gaudino, referring to the villains in JFK (with its highly fictionalized gay cabal of assassination conspirators) and Silence of the Lambs (with its serial killer who murders women to wear their skin), respectively. It was also the year of Fried Green Tomatoes, a film based on a bestselling novel about a female friendship turned romance, in which the protagonists’ lesbian relationship was eliminated; Prince of Tides, featuring one character traumatized by a gay rape and another who was a wise-cracking, flamboyant gay stereotype; and L.A. Story, in which all references to a lesbian character’s love life were cut before release. A few independent movies offered more balanced portrayals, including Gus Van Sant’s lauded indie drama My Own Private Idaho and the drag-ball documentary Paris is Burning — neither of which, despite making multiple critics’ best-of-the-year lists, were nominated for Oscars. (“So when our stories were getting out there, they were being completely ignored [by the Academy],” notes Gaudino.)
Yahoo Movies: Before #OscarsSoWhite: The Forgotten Story of Queer Nation's 1992 Academy Awards Protest, February 26, 2016.
Laura van den Berg (Find Me) and Emily St. John Mandel (Station 11) talk about the end of the world, and how female writers potentially approach it differently.
The Guardian with a detailled look into Twenty20 cricket:
T20 is still frowned on in many quarters as the bastard child of cricket, but it cannot be ignored, its rise influencing the way cricket is played, viewed, marketed, developed. At its outset, I certainly saw it as fun, but an adjunct: candyfloss cricket I called it, one bite, some sweetness and then … nothing. But then came the Indian Premier League, with its moneyed privately owned city franchises, and the riches they offered. A conflict of interest grew, with the top players understandably hankering after the financial rewards, for what is a few weeks’ work, so that IPL became a genuine threat to the integrity of the heavy schedule of international cricket. Other leagues have started – Big Bash, Caribbean Premier League, the RamSlam in South Africa – and where players were once tied by international commitments, a new category of itinerant cricketer emerged.
The Guardian: Inside Twenty20: on the front line of a cricket revolution, February 25, 2016
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