America’s gun crisis

THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS

In the shadow of another massacre of children, is there anything left to say about America and guns? Here’s a look at the structural political problem — and how churches have failed children in the United States. On that theme, Southern Baptists are engulfed in one of the biggest church sexual abuse scandals of recent decades, which was diligently covered up by churches (for more information). Also, here’s why the United States has an infant formula crisis (you’ll never guess, but it has something to do with the concentration of capital).

ARTS AND LETTERS AND REVIEWS

The person behind the NYT Pitch Bot (kinda) unmasked, and how they so effectively nail a media stereotype. James M. Cain plays detective on Watergate (parenthetical note: did Spiro T. Agnew ever feel aggrieved that he was overshadowed by Nixon’s resignation? In any other administration until Trump’s, he’d have been one of America’s greatest White House scandals (Rachel Maddow had a red-hot go though). The debate over the Orthodox theology of killing tyrants. Disaster films and filming disaster — exploring the appeal.

AROUND THE GLOBE

How Viktor Orbán is using the invasion of Ukraine to cement his autocratic powers (as well as blocking European Union sanctions on Russia). A Catalonian perspective on how Spain took its independence quest seriously but Catalans didn’t. In Russia, even memorialising the murdered is outlawed. Germany, in its slow separation from the world’s worst regimes, is putting distance between itself and China. And why Boris Johnson, despite repeated major failings, including lying to Parliament and breaking the law, is still in power.

NEIGHBOURS

Dissecting the Biden administration’s new Pivot to Asia, and how it stacks up to the Obama-era one. Cambridge and UK universities’ reliance on tainted Chinese money. State politics and female participation in Indian democracy. Is China looking for a second military base in Africa? A new paper from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) urges us to stop seeing right-wing terrorism in a national context and understand it as a transnational problem.

BEST OF THE REST

Demand for electric vehicles is way more responsive in California to changes in the price of petrol than to the price of electricity (wonder if that’s because we only pay electricity bills quarterly?) Jews and prohibitionists — anti-Semitism or just plain zealotry? Why are so many US retirees returning to work? What happens when everyone who wants an air conditioner or fridge gets one? A major problem for the climate crisis.