Onward and Upward - By Charles Kenny. On Feb. 29, the World Bank came out with its latest estimates on global poverty.
They suggest incredible worldwide progress against the scourge of absolute deprivation. In 1981, 52 percent of the planet lived on $1.25 a day or less according to the World Bank's estimates; today it is around 20 percent. In 1990, around 65 percent of the population lived on less than $2 a day; by 2008 that number had fallen to 43 percent. This is not just a story about China -- though 663 million people in that country alone have climbed out of poverty since the early 1980s.
Poverty has been declining in every region, and for the first time since the World Bank began making estimates, less than half of the population of sub-Saharan Africa lives in absolute deprivation. That may seem like news too good to be true, but in fact it's probably too pessimistic. Meanwhile, China this week probably surpassed the 1 billion mobile-phone subscriber mark, with India on about 900 million.
Cities. Current Affairs. Education. Global development. Of all the secrets of war, there is one that is so well kept that it exists mostly as a rumour.
It is usually denied by the perpetrator and his victim. Governments, aid agencies and human rights defenders at the UN barely acknowledge its possibility. Yet every now and then someone gathers the courage to tell of it. Expose of Brutal Prison Jolts France's Self-Image. When Dr.
Veronique Vasseur began working at La Sante prison in Paris, the experience was so shocking that she started keeping a diary. Within days she had met inmates so deranged or depressed that they had swallowed rat poison, forks or drain cleaner. Skin diseases were rampant because showers were only available twice a week, though temperatures sometimes soared to more than 100 degrees in cramped cells holding four prisoners each. Inmates stuffed their clothes in the cracks in their cells to keep the rats out, and most of the mattresses were full of lice and other insects. Some of the weaker prisoners, Dr. Dr. While the French pride themselves on being standard-bearers for human rights, Dr. And 124 inmates committed suicide in 1999, one of the highest rates among European penitentiaries. We Felt No Mercy.
An Afghan National Army soldier keeps a casual watch from inside a guard tower at a Base in the Panjwai District west of Kandahar City.
Photograph by Philip Cheung. My grandmother often said that as the elders died, so would history. Rape Reporting During War. Forced Marriage and 'Honor Killings' Happen in Britain, U.S Too. The Bravest Woman in Seattle by Eli Sanders. An invitation for kids to be cruel. By now, millions of people across the world have viewed ‘Making the Bus Monitor Cry’ .
For those of you who haven’t, it is a video of a slew of vile, verbal abuse against 68-year-old Karen Klein, a bus monitor from Greece, New York, from four 13-year-old boys. It is hard to know what is more shocking: the methodical cruelty with which the children ply their insults; or the grandmother’s inability to respond effectively to the humiliating onslaught. The Decline and Fall of Parental Authority. February 22, 2012 | Like this article?
Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. American parents today face a perfect storm of cultural and social circumstances that undermine the very foundations of parental authority. In response, mothers and fathers are beginning to see therapists as irrelevant and to challenge the entire social, educational, and economic context of childrearing. Well, until later. The Body Counter - By Tina Rosenberg. The choreography of a typical human rights investigation goes like this: Researchers interview victims and witnesses and write their report.
The local media cover it -- if they can. Then those accused dismiss it; you have nothing more than stories, it's one word against another, the sources are biased, the evidence faked. And it goes away. Love, honour and obey. Conflicting views: is marriage a medium for self-expression?
The Mystery of 18 Twitching Teenagers in Le Roy. Out of Contact by John Terborgh. The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon’s Last Uncontacted Tribes by Scott Wallace Crown, 494 pp., $26.00.
Pre-teen runway models: Tracking the trend. In recent years, the debate over underage fashion models has reached a fever pitch.
Ondria Hardin starred in a sultry Prada ad at 13. An Australian modeling agency recently announced that it wanted 13-year-olds because 16-year-olds were “too old.” The greatest meeting of strangers in history. I am in the midst of a long-term project to document instances when empathy has flowered on a mass scale and shifted the course of human history. While empathy has periodically collapsed on a collective scale – just think of colonialism in Latin America or the Holocaust – there have also been moments when it has emerged as a force for positive and radical social change.
If we want to tackle today’s global crises – from wealth inequality and armed conflict to climate change and food insecurity – we need to learn from the past and understand how empathy can be harnessed as a powerful tool to shift human behaviour and ignite social action. ‘CONFLICTING CREDOS BUT THE SAME VISION OF THE WORLD’ This is a transcript of the first part of the talk I gave last week as part of the Criticise This!
Seminar in Ulcinj, Montenegro on ‘Rethinking the Question of Difference’. (The second part of the talk overlaps with the Milton K Wong lecture that I am giving in Vancouver next week; I will publish that in full.) The audience comprised mainly of artists, writers and critics, and the aim was to explore more deeply the philosophical and political underpinnings and consequences of contemporary ideas of social difference. Gimme Shelter - by Uri Friedman and Joshua Keating. The originality of the species. In June 1858 a slender package from Ternate, an island off the Dutch East Indies, arrived for Charles Darwin at his country home in Down, Kent.
He may well have recognised the handwriting as that of Alfred Wallace, with whom he had been in correspondence and from whom he was hoping to receive some specimens. But what Darwin found in the package along with a covering letter was a short essay. And this essay was to transform Darwin's life. Wallace's 20 pages, so it seemed to their reader on that momentous morning, covered all the principle ideas of evolution by natural selection that Darwin had been working on for more than two decades and which he thought were his exclusive possession – and which he had yet to publish.
WHAT IS WRONG WITH MULTICULTURALISM? [PART 1] I gave the Milton K Wong lecture in Vancouver on Sunday. I very much enjoyed the event- it was a stunning venue, a superb audience and a good discussion of the issues. My thanks to the Laurier Institution, University of British Columbia and CBC for inviting me. It Can Happen Here: Europe’s Screwed Generation and America’s.
Word on the suite. IASC: The Hedgehog Review - Volume 14, No. 1 (Spring 2012) - Why Google Isn’t Making Us Stupid…or Smart - Chad Wellmon. The Hedgehog Review: Vol. 14, No. 1 (Spring 2012) Reprinted from The Hedgehog Review 14.1 (Spring 2012). This essay may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission. Please contact The Hedgehog Review for further details. Are we becoming immune to war. At the Big Think website, John Horgan argues that war is just a cultural practice that humankind could eventually abandon, unless we keep infecting ourselves with the "war virus" (h/t Andrew Sullivan). Caspar Melville - Never ending story. There is a story that Helen Bamber tells that she has told before. In fact, she never stops telling it. A History of Self-Immolation. Council for Secular Humanism. The last time we redefined what it means to be human.
A case for wellbeing. We need to stop asking questions like "Are Bank Holidays good for the economy? " Atul Gawande: Failure and Rescue. The following was delivered as the commencement address at Williams College on Sunday, June 3rd. We had a patient at my hospital this winter whose story has stuck with me. Harms of Post-9/11 Airline Security. As I posted previously, I have been debating former TSA Administrator Kip Hawley on the Economist website.
I didn't bother reposting my opening statement and rebuttal, because -- even though I thought I did a really good job with them -- they were largely things I've said before. In my closing statement, I talked about specific harms post-9/11 airport security has caused. Bill Hicks on Freedom of Speech. A Small World After All? by Ethan Zuckerman. All Hail the Generalist - Vikram Mansharamani. Beware of Franklin’s Gambit in making decisions. The 'Busy' Trap. Spoon fed: how cutlery affects your food. The history of the paper clip: It was invented in 1899. It hasn’t been improved upon since. The Population Control Holocaust. The world our grandchildren will inherit: the rights revolution and beyond. The Population Boon - Philip E. Auerswald. The social cell. How to defuse sub-Saharan Africa's population bomb - health - 26 April 2012.
Media & Tech. Essays.