Can Britain Turn Bosnia Away from Secessionism?–Instead of first dealing with those who are the source of the crisis, and then looking for sustainable long-term Constitutional reform solutions, the currently proposed changes would permanently cement the ethnonational principle of ethnic clans, and would de facto legitimize apartheid. They are also in conflict with European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) judgments, and more importantly, are not the standard of any democratic society anywhere else in the world—not in Europe or the United States. The National Interest
What Happens to Brands When Celebrity Endorsers Are ‘Canceled?’–“Nike’s stock price, of course, reflects expectations about its profits from all business lines,” Knittel and Stango explained. “So, the percentage change in profits will be weighted by the shares of economic profits flowing from ‘Tiger-related’ products and ‘non-Tiger-related’ products.’” JStor Daily
How to Prepare for a Solar Flare Hitting Earth–The sun sloughs off material regularly, but it usually doesn’t hit Earth, just by chance. Our luck has to run out eventually, though. Scientists estimate there’s around a 12 percent chance of a massively disruptive coronal mass ejection hitting Earth every 10 years. That’s about the same likelihood as a massive earthquake hitting California. Lifehacker
It’s Time to Rein in America’s Drone War Program–While the US drone program isn’t an effective way of killing terrorists, it successfully terrorizes civilians who live with the constant threat of death from above. Zubair Rehman, a 13-year-old Pakistani child whose grandmother was killed by a drone, explained in his congressional testimony that he now fears blue skies, because drones are more likely to fly in clear weather than on cloudy days. It’s unsurprising then that drone strikes often destroy popular support for the US’s anti-terrorism programs in countries around the world. Inkstick
The 1619 Project and the Demands of Public History–Seldom these days does a paper edition have such blockbuster draw. New Yorkers not in the habit of seeking out their Sunday Times ventured to bodegas to nab a hard copy. (Today you can find a copy on eBay for around a hundred dollars.) Commentators, such as the Vox correspondent Jamil Smith, lauded the Project—which consisted of eleven essays, nine poems, eight works of short fiction, and dozens of photographs, all documenting the long-fingered reach of American slavery—as an unprecedented journalistic feat. Impassioned critics emerged at both ends of the political spectrum. On the right, a boorish resistance developed that would eventually include everything from the Trump Administration’s error-riddled 1776 Commission report to states’ panicked attempts to purge their school curricula of so-called critical race theory. New Yorker
Frederick Douglass and American Empire in Haiti–At the age of seventy-one, Frederick Douglass was appointed ambassador to the Republic of Haiti by the administration of U.S. president Benjamin Harrison. Douglass had helped stump for Harrison during the 1888 presidential elections and the position was something of a reward for the elderly abolitionist. However, Douglass’s short time in the post—from the end of 1889 to the summer of 1891—was an absolute debacle. It served to tarnish the latter days of Douglass’s venerable career and is widely seen—by both his contemporaries and by later biographers and critics—as having been calamitous. Boston Review
How to Fix Social Media–Today, mired as we are in partisan, bitter, and seemingly fruitless debates over the roles and responsibilities of social media companies, the controversy surrounding George Carlin’s naughty comedy routine can seem distant and even quaint. Thanks to the Internet’s dismantling of traditional barriers to broadcasting, companies such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter transmit a volume and variety of content that would have been unimaginable fifty years ago. What’s at issue now is far greater than the propriety of a few dirty words. Arguments over whether and how to control the information distributed through social media go to the heart of America’s democratic ideals.
We Know a Lot More About Omicron Now–The flood of Omicron news can be overwhelming. The endless data, anecdotes, and studies are hard enough to synthesize. But what makes the information even harder to parse is that so much evidence (i.e., what people are seeing) is intertwined with opinion (i.e., what people are hoping and fearing). To round up the week’s Omicron news, I wanted to write something that disentangled evidence and opinion, to help people make decisions right now—about travel, and school, and weddings, and funerals, and holidays—even though we’re dealing with lots of imperfect information. The Atlantic
This Is the Story of How Lincoln Broke the U.S. Constitution–What has become clear to me is that even before the passage of those Reconstruction amendments — indeed, as a kind of precondition for them — Lincoln fatally injured the Constitution of 1787. He consciously and repeatedly violated core elements of that Constitution as they had been understood by nearly all Americans of the time, himself included. Through those acts of destruction, Lincoln effectively broke the Constitution of 1787, paving the way for something very different to replace it. www.nytimes.com
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