Sri Lankan ethnic Tamil war survivors listen to the UN, 2013. Photo: Eranga Jayawardena/ Press Association. All rights reserved The Sri Lankan government is currently designing transitional justice mechanisms to address human rights abuses connected to the three decade long war which ended in May 2009. But a key question is whether victims of sexual…
LA’s Mayor Has A Brilliant Idea To Land The Olympics And Fund Youth Sports At The Same Time
Los Angeles is one of the few places left that actually wants to host the Olympic Games. Huge cost overruns to build up for an Olympiad, followed by the expense of maintaining a bunch of white elephant sports facilities after the athletes leave (How much use is there for a velodrome anyway?) is causing potential host cities to…
Post-humanitarianism in situ: Moria in flames
Riot police stand guard as a large fire burns inside the Moria refugee camp on the northeastern Greek island of Lesbos, September 19, 2016.Michael Schwarz/Press Association. All rights reserved.Nothing but burnt rubble remains in a large part of Moria on the island of Lesbos. The infamous EU hotspot – aka detention centre – that so…
Vintage Maps From A Swashbuckling Era Are Leading Scientists To Forgotten Treasure: ‘Ghost’ Reefs
Professor Loren McClenachan of Colby College was visiting the British Admiralty Library in Portsmouth, England, when she unearthed a series of magnificent antique nautical charts. Depicting the waters around the Florida Keys, the charts were made by British cartographers and dated from just before the American Revolution. They were the works of the world’s best…
Team Syntegrity, a comprehensive method of hope
Team Syntegrity participants in Barcelona in June, 2017.The Team Syntegrity (TS) sessions held in Barcelona on 19-22 June provided a space and a method of hope in which a variety of social powers unfolded through association and combination. The objective was to think collectively about how civil society may be able to confront the main…
Psychology Teachers Turned Their Classroom Into A Study About The Best Way To Fight Fake News
In a time when fake news has become “a game of Whack-a-Mole,” popping up on a variety of media platforms while duping audiences of all political affiliations, teaching young people to discern the difference between what is or isn’t reliable information has become an unusually difficult, and urgent, challenge. Fortunately, a new study published in the journal Science and Education has brought…
Vladimir Putin and the rural roots of authoritarian populism in Russia
An open-air photography exhibition in the centre of Moscow, November 2017 (4 months before the 2018 Russian presidential election). The exhibition depicts idealised scenes of traditional peasant life in (northern) Russian villages. Photo by Natalia Mamonova, all rights reserved. The recent presidential elections returned Vladimir Putin to power for the fourth time. In the elections,…
There’s A Crowdfunding Campaign To Help The Google Manifesto Guy
By now, you’ve likely heard about James Damore, the Google engineer who wrote a ridiculously long memo (3,300 words, to be exact) about why, in his opinion, women are biologically ill-suited to work in the tech industry. Despite claiming to “value diversity and inclusion,” Damore wrote that women weren’t succeeding as much as their high-ranking…
The tragedy of the Venezuelan opposition
Photo courtesy of Nueva Sociedad. This article is being published as part of the partnership between Nueva Sociedad and democraciaAbierta. You can read the original article here. The regional elections of October 15 were a true catastrophe for the opposition in Venezuela. Few times in history has an electoral event had such overwhelming consequences: practically, the…
Principal To Students: Here’s $100 If You Can Ditch Your Phone
Before I became a journalist, I worked as a teacher, and one year I had a third grader who was sometimes reluctant to participate in class. One afternoon, instead of writing down three math problems that were on the board, he was busy rolling a clump of boogers (as children sometimes do) across the top…