Don’t Deny Girls the Evolutionary Wisdom of Fairy-Tales. Amy Alkon. Quillete

The view from moral high ground is best enjoyed after the check (for whatever you’re moralizing against) clears. (...) Rather like animal-rights activists who own a string of steakhouses, Disney film stars Kristin Bell and Keira Knightley spoke out recently against the bad examples they feel Disney princesses convey to girls. (...)

The Age of Instragram Face. Jia Tolentino. The New Yorker.

This past summer, I booked a plane ticket to Los Angeles with the hope of investigating what seems likely to be one of the oddest legacies of our rapidly expiring decade: the gradual emergence, among professionally beautiful women, of a single, cyborgian face. It’s a young face, of course, with poreless skin and plump, high cheekbones. It has catlike eyes and long, cartoonish lashes; it has a small, neat nose and full, lush lips. It looks at you coyly but blankly, as if its owner has taken half a Klonopin and is considering asking you for a private-jet ride to Coachella. The face is distinctly white but ambiguously ethnic—it suggests a National Geographic composite illustrating what Americans will look like in 2050, if every American of the future were to be a direct descendant of Kim Kardashian West, Bella Hadid, Emily Ratajkowski, and Kendall Jenner (who looks exactly like Emily Ratajkowski). “It’s like a sexy . . . baby . . . tiger,” Cara Craig, a high-end New York colorist, observed to me recently. The celebrity makeup artist Colby Smith told me, “It’s Instagram Face, duh. It’s like an unrealistic sculpture. Volume on volume. A face that looks like it’s made out of clay.” (...)

If Someone Speaks the Truth, He Will Be Killed’. Neil Hauer. The Atlantic

One morning last April, immigration officers approached Minkail Malizaev’s residence in the German town of Lüdenscheid with troubling news. After four years in Germany, he and his family were being sent back to where they had come from: back to Russia. Back to Chechnya. (...)

Hitler, a global biography. Brendan Simms. Basic Books.

This biography makes three big and interrelated new claims. First, that Hitler’s principal preoccupation throughout his career was Anglo-America and global capitalism, rather than the Soviet Union and Bolshevism. Secondly, that Hitler’s view of the German Volk–even when purged of Jews and other ‘undesirables’–was highly ambivalent, reflecting a sense of inferiority by comparison with the ‘Anglo-Saxons’. Thirdly, that we have–for very understandable reasons–focused too much on Hitler’s murderous ‘negative eugenics’ against the Jews and other ‘undesirables’ and not enough on what he regarded as his ‘positive eugenics’, which were designed to ‘elevate’ the German people (...)

The biggest story in the UK is not Brexit. It’s life expectancy. Danny Dorling. The Correspondent

In the four weeks of September 2019, while Boris Johnson tried to force through a general election, 1,248 more people died in England and Wales than was usual at that time of year. During the four weeks of the election campaign, eventually called at the end of October, 2,124 more people died in England and Wales than again was usual for that time of year. (...)