Cuatro proyectos de país destinados a fracasar (y uno que triunfará). Jairo Fernández. Medium.

El sistema político español está en crisis. (...): cuatro elecciones generales, dos mociones de censura, un referéndum de independencia en la comunidad autónoma que supone el 20% del PIB español y la subsecuente aplicación, por primera vez en la historia, del artículo 155 de la Constitución; la irrupción de cuatro nuevas fuerzas de ámbito español en el Congreso de los Diputados -una de ellas de ultraderecha, rompiendo la frágil “excepción española”- y el reforzamiento inédito de los partidos soberanistas en la misma cámara, que alcanzan en el momento de escribir estas líneas los 29 escaños sin contar al siempre ambiguo PNV. (...)

Millennials weren’t the only ones gutted by the recession. Austin Chaning. VOX

“It’s really time for y’all to settle down” is unsolicited advice I hear from older family members every three months or so. Generally kind, loving people — many of them boomers — feel a need to voice an opinion born of their own frustrations about my lifestyle, which seems so different from their own. (...) I am in my mid-30s. I am an Xennial, or so it has been dubbed. To the older generation, my husband and I seem flakey, uninterested in the lives they created in order to succeed. The often too-easy label of “slacker” gets applied to Gen X cuspers like myself. But the truth is, by the time we reached the path the older generation had prepared for us, it was nothing but a sinkhole. We didn’t have much choice in the matter of stability. Especially as Black folks. (...)

Who Are Turkey’s Proxy Fighters in Syria? Elisabeth Tsurkov. The New York Review of Books

A small Turkish flag was standing on the desk of the offices of the Turkish-backed faction in a residential area of Şanlıurfa, in southern Turkey. The men in the room, most of them veteran fighters from eastern Syria, were expecting me and did their best to locate a Syrian revolutionary flag in time for our meeting in the summer of 2019. They could not find one. (...)

The New China Scare. Foreign Affairs

(...) Something similar is happening today in the American debate about China. A new consensus, encompassing both parties, the military establishment, and key elements of the media, holds that China is now a vital threat to the United States both economically and strategically, that U.S. policy toward China has failed, and that Washington needs a new, much tougher strategy to contain it. This consensus has shifted the public’s stance toward an almost instinctive hostility: according to polling, 60 percent of Americans now have an unfavorable view of the People’s Republic, a record high since the Pew Research Center began asking the question in 2005. But Washington elites have made their case “clearer than truth.” The nature of the challenge from China is different from and far more complex than what the new alarmism portrays. On the single most important foreign policy issue of the next several decades, the United States is setting itself up for an expensive failure. (...)

The Equivalent of Cultural Genocide. Bernard Zand. Der Spiegel

China's diplomats refrain from uttering his name in public, even though many of them are confronted with his work on an almost daily basis. An anthropologist from Germany, Adrian Zenz, 45, has almost singlehandedly triggered a debate that is proving to be a challenge for the Chinese leadership. He has done extensive research into Beijing's repression of the country's Muslim minority Uighur population and has shed light on the system of internment and reeducation camps that China has set up in the western part of the country. According to Zenz, over a million Muslims have been locked away in these camps -- without trial. (...)

Subscriptors