The violent backlash against the American film is taking place in Muslim societies, but it doesn't seem to correlate with Islam's reach.
Red indicates violent protests over the film, yellow indicates non-violent protests. Click to enlarge. (Wikimedia/Atlantic)
Protests against the anti-Islam film Innocence of Muslims have erupted in cities from Morocco to Somalia and Pakistan to Indonesia, an agglomeration of otherwise disparate societies that we sometimes refer to as "the Muslim world." That phrase appears today in headlines at, for example, CBS News, the U.K. Telegraph, Radio Free Europe, and many others. A very handy interactive map of the protests so far, produced by The Atlantic Wire's John Hudson, shows just how widely the protests have spread across the diverse Muslim societies of the world.
But, looking into the severity and frequency of the protests, their occurrence doesn't seem to correlate as directly with the presence of Muslims as the phrase "protests erupt across the Muslim world" might lead you to believe. Even if that's generally true, we might learn a bit more by looking also at who is protesting violently and who isn't.
In a map above, I've charted the violent protests in red and the protests that did not produce violence in yellow. It's an imperfect distinction; I've counted the stone-throwers in Jerusalem as a violent protest but the flag-burners in Lahore as non-violent. But it gives you a somewhat more nuanced view into who is expressing anger and how they're doing it than to just say that the "Muslim world" is protesting. To help show what "Muslim world" means, I've used a map (via Wikimedia) that shows countries by their share of the world Muslim population. The darker blue a country, the more Muslim individuals live there.
The first thing that may catch your eye is that the violent protests appear clustered in the Arab Middle East and North Africa, and specifically in the countries that have endured significant political violence over the last year or so. Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Yemen have been by far the most effected by the uprisings of the Arab Spring. That's excepting Syria, of course, where citizens today presumably have more pressing matters on their minds and are not protesting. Sudan has also endured violent protests and crackdowns recently, and Israel's Palestinian protests have been sporadically ongoing for some time. An outlier here is Lebanon, where protesters today set a KFC on fire, and which has not endured the effects of the Arab Spring, although there has been some violence between partisans of the conflict in neighboring Syria.
The second thing you might notice is how sparse the protests have been in the three countries with the largest Muslim populations in the world: Indonesia, Pakistan, and India. Those three have Muslim populations way above 150 million each, compared to six million in Libya and 10 million in Tunisia, and yet have seen no violence and far fewer protests. India and Indonesia have so far had one protest each, both small; Pakistan has had several, some quite angry, but it's worth noting that such anti-American protests are not uncommon. The world's billion-plus Muslim individuals do not appear uniformly offended, or at least uniformly motivated to act on that offense. That might sound obvious, but the wide difference in protests are a reminder of just how differently people are reacting across the very large and diverse "Muslim world." If 200 of Indonesia's 200 million Muslims stage a protest, and several thousand of Tunisia's 10 million Muslims not only protest but storm embassies and burned an American school, does that say more about the Muslim reaction to the film or the Tunisian?
And, of course, there are the vast areas of the Muslim world that do not appear to be protesting at all. Those include most of sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, Europe, as well as Turkey, Russia, China, and the U.S., all of which have significant Muslim populations. There are probably disparate factors that might explain the lack of protests in those regions and countries: Muslims in China are perhaps a bit too cut off from the rest of the world, for example, and Muslims in America tend to be politically content. But the fact that these enormous populations -- 76 million Muslims in Nigeria, 75 million in Turkey, 29 million in Ethiopia, and so on -- across dozens of countries are not protesting shows the extent to which violent protests are the exceptions rather than the norm.
That's not to discount the importance of the protests, of course, nor the obvious significance of so many angry Muslims marching against the film (and, often, against the United States) simultaneously across so many different parts of the world. But it's worth considering the extent to which the anger behind today's events is a phenomenon specific to certain countries and regions rather than to the "Muslim world" in its broad, complicated entirety.
Its faith-based 12-step program dominates treatment in the United States. But researchers have debunked central tenets of AA doctrine and found dozens of other treatments more effective.
J.G. is a lawyer in his early 30s. He’s a fast talker and has the lean, sinewy build of a distance runner. His choice of profession seems preordained, as he speaks in fully formed paragraphs, his thoughts organized by topic sentences. He’s also a worrier—a big one—who for years used alcohol to soothe his anxiety.
J.G. started drinking at 15, when he and a friend experimented in his parents’ liquor cabinet. He favored gin and whiskey but drank whatever he thought his parents would miss the least. He discovered beer, too, and loved the earthy, bitter taste on his tongue when he took his first cold sip.
His drinking increased through college and into law school. He could, and occasionally did, pull back, going cold turkey for weeks at a time. But nothing quieted his anxious mind like booze, and when he didn’t drink, he didn’t sleep. After four or six weeks dry, he’d be back at the liquor store.
Democrats must do everything they can to prevent Donald Trump’s nomination—like supporting the one man with a chance to beat him.
Marco Rubio would be a terrible president. His tax proposals make George W. Bush look fiscally prudent. He acts as if America can use sanctions, war, or the threat of war to bludgeon its adversaries into submission despite the devastating failure of that approach since 9/11. He has been dishonest and gutless on immigration. He has flirted with climate-change denial even though his hometown now regularly floods.
Still, if I lived in any of the nine Super Tuesday states that allow non-Republicans to vote in their GOP presidential primary, I would cross over—forfeiting my chance to cast a ballot for Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders—and vote for Rubio. Other liberals should do the same. Those who can should write him checks. Whatever it takes to stop the nomination of Donald Trump.
What it's like having a birthday only every four years
The night I turned 21, I swaggered into a college watering hole in Camden, New Jersey. No longer would I flash a doctored Connecticut license and pose as a haggard 42-year-old Stonington man named Kurt. At the stroke of midnight, I could buy a beer legally.
The barkeep slid my license back. “I can’t serve you,” he said. He thought my real ID was fake. Who, after all, has February 29 for their birthday? I protested, but it was no use. “Plus,” he said. “It’s February 28. Come back tomorrow.”
Here’s the thing about birthdays: They happen each year. That’s a birthday’s job: You turn a year older, whether you blow out the candles on the cake or not.
Unless you don’t have a birthday. For 187,000 of us in the U.S., that’s what happens three-quarters of the time. We leaplings, as we’re called, have defied 1-in-1,461 odds to have our birthdays fall on February 29. Some would figure that makes us special. It depends on how you look at it. News reports in secondary markets sometimes feature leap-day births or an octogenarian leaper’s 20th. Back in 2008, Martha Stewart hosted 200 leapers on her show. They wore frog-mouth name tags (frogs leap, get it?). “I think you’re all so lucky!” Stewart said, sort of sincerely. She gave them each state-of-the-art digital picture frames.
The Supreme Court justice asked a question for the first time in 10 years, revealing a different dynamic since the passing of Antonin Scalia earlier this month.
At heart, law professors are simply overpaid nerds, the kind of who take notes in three colors of ink and use two sizes of Post-its to tab out a casebook. We tend to have the ability to find something interesting in proceedings that would bore a normal human being into a state of coma.
Thus it was that at 10:45 a.m. Monday, I was in a sparsely populated Supreme Court press gallery watching Assistant U.S. Solicitor General Ilana Eisenstein provide a rapid wrap-up to a desultory argument over the meaning of “use” as applied a domestic-violence statute forbidding a defendant from “intentionally, knowingly or recklessly” causing “bodily injury or offensive physical contact” with a domestic partner.
It’s here, it’s coherent, and it’s doomed—unless young people change their approach to political reform.
This November will be a watershed moment for the American electorate: It will be the first presidential election in which Generation Y—a.k.a.: Millennials—makes up the same proportion of the U.S. voting-age population as the Baby Boomers.
And if there’s one thing people are learning about this young generation, it’s that they are liberal. Even leftist. Flirting with socialist. In Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, more than 80 percent of voters under 30 years old voted for Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist so outside the mainstream of his party that he’s not even a member.
Whether or not Sanders scores an upset victory in the Democratic race—and to be fair, his odds look long—his support raises a serious question for future elections about the generation wave of voters. Why are young people so liberal; what’s behind their revolutionary spirit; and how close are they to ushering in a true liberal political revolution?
After Chris Christie backed the entertainer on Friday, so did Paul LePage and Jeff Sessions—a diverse set of politicians. Meanwhile, the opposition remains split.
For months, Republicans hoped, prayed, and convinced themselves that this day would never come: the day they had to take an actual, honest-to-God stance on Donald Trump’s candidacy.
Now, with Trump looking more and more like the GOP nominee, high-profile Republicans are starting to take stands, and some of them have decided to swallow their pride and endorse Trump. The first, of course, was Chris Christie, whose backing of Trump reverberated widely on Friday. Friday afternoon, Maine Governor Paul LePage, a former Christie endorser, followed the New Jersey governor’s lead.
On Sunday, Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions backed Trump, too, ahead of the Yellowhammer State’s Super Tuesday primary. A Sessions-Trump alliance makes sense in many ways. Sessions is one of the hardest line members of the Senate on immigration, which is Trump’s signature issue, and an endorsement had been the subject of speculation since top Sessions aide Stephen Miller joined the Trump campaign a month ago. It’s also a blow to Ted Cruz, who has allied himself with Sessions in the Senate—one of the few colleagues he has a decent relationship with.
Scientists are struggling to figure out the timeline for how climate change will affect vulnerable waterfront communities.
Between 1901 and 2010, global sea levels rose an average of 0.19 meters, or roughly seven inches. Over the next century, they’ll continue to rise—but at this point, that’s one of the few things scientists know for certain. Less understood is how fast they’ll rise, or where in the world these changes will be the most pronounced—information that will be crucial in helping coastal communities adapt to climate change.
“This is the burning question,” said Andrea Dutton, an assistant professor of geology at University of Florida. “How quickly will the sea levels rise, and by how much?”
To figure it out, Dutton and other scientists across the United States are studying sea-level changes dating back 125,000 to 400,000 years ago, when global mean temperatures were 1.5 or two degrees Celsius higher than they are today. In some cases, the global mean sea levels during these eras peaked at 20-30 feet above present rates.
The emphasis on knowing Java and JavaScript could put students of color on the bottom rung of the tech workforce.
For its most ardent champions, enthusiasm for coding comes close to evangelism. From Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt—“Let’s get the whole world coding!”—and the actor Ashton Kutcher, to the NBA player Chris Bosh and the rap royalty Snoop Dogg—“support tha american dream n make coding available to EVERYONE!!”—teaching kids to code has gained high-profile support and widespread acclaim.
Perhaps for good reason. Jobs in the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering, and math are among the fastest-growing and highest-paying careers for college graduates, and with the pervasiveness of technology in our daily lives, learning to code is increasingly seen as foundational and essential for learning—not unlike reading, writing, and arithmetic. President Obama in a January weekly radio address latched onto the comparison: “In the new economy … it’s a basic skill, right along with the three ‘Rs.’” And the White House has put a lot of stock in that idea, reserving $4 billion in its 2017 federal budget proposal for states to bolster computer-science education, and $100 million of those funds targeted for school districts to establish and expand computer science in classrooms across the country.
On February 29, the NASA astronaut Scott Kelly will turn over command of the International Space Station to astronaut Tim Kopra, then prepare to return to Earth after spending nearly a year in space. Last March, Kelly launched into low Earth orbit aboard the ISS, taking hundreds of photographs during his year abroad.
On February 29, the NASA astronaut Scott Kelly will turn over command of the International Space Station to astronaut Tim Kopra, then prepare to return to Earth after spending nearly a year in space. Last March, Kelly and and cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko launched into low Earth orbit aboard the ISS, and have since participated in hundreds of experiments while the effects of long-term microgravity on the human body were studied. Kelly also took hundreds of photographs during his year abroad, posting many to his Twitter account. As we await the return of Kelly and Kornienko tomorrow, here are some of his photographs from the past year.
There are elected officials who could endorse Donald Trump without disgracing themselves. But given his past positions and rhetoric, the New Jersey governor isn’t one of them.
“Showtime is over. We are not electing an entertainer-in-chief. Showmanship is fun, but it is not the kind of leadership that will truly change America.”––Chris Christie in a speech earlier this year
Seven months ago, Chris Christie launched his presidential campaign promising straight talk. His announcement featured the proud slogan, “Telling it like it is.” During his candidacy, he repeatedly criticized Donald Trump, declaring on at least one occasion that his temperament and experience are unsuited for the White House.
“Showtime is over,” he said in January. “We are not electing an entertainer-in-chief. Showmanship is fun, but it is not the kind of leadership that will truly change America.”