Russia’s Axis of the Sanctioned | Why We Need to Talk About Marriage | Giant 'Gravity Hole' in the Ocean May Be the Ghost of an Ancient Sea | Neanderthals caught and cooked crabs 90,000 years ago

View online | Unsubscribe (one-click).
For inquiries/unsubscribe issues, Contact Us

?

?

?

?

?

?

Want to accelerate software development at your company? See how we can help.

Want to accelerate software development at your company? See how we can help.

Russia’s Axis of the Sanctioned - Foreign Affairs

At first glance, the war against Ukraine appears to be a disaster for Russia. With most of its soldiers tied up fighting Kyiv’s forces, Moscow is struggling to station troops abroad. Russia has also had to redeploy to Europe some weapons and military systems it had positioned in Asia and the Middle East. And Moscow’s military sales, already in decline, are now in greater peril. Sanctions have deterred traditional Russian clients from continuing with their purchases, and Russia’s poor military performance has dampened enthusiasm among prospective ones.

These constraints and problems are real. But if Western officials believe, as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in June, that the war in Ukraine is “greatly diminishing Russia’s power, its interests, and its influence,” they should think again: Russia still has significant international sway. Moscow maintains steady defense contracts with most of its legacy customers, such as India and Vietnam, which rely on Russia to maintain their systems. Russia has had to move most of its soldiers and material to Ukraine, but it still has permanent air and naval bases in Syria, giving the country direct access to the Mediterranean and allowing it to harass U.S. forces in the Middle East. The Moscow-led Wagner paramilitary company controls several bases in Libya, which serve as a logistics hub for its activities in the Sahel. Wagner is set to continue operating in one form or another, even after its former boss, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was killed in a plane crash (likely orchestrated by Russian President Vladimir Putin). Moscow is also considering whether to use or establish additional bases in Africa.

In fact, for Russia, there’s an upside to newfound isolation: stronger, deeper defense cooperation with the many countries that are also hostile to the United States and Europe. This collection of countries—which stretches from Venezuela to North Korea—may not have much in common beyond shared enemies, and individually, none of them is especially powerful. But together, they can help the Kremlin sustain its war against Ukraine. They can also help other members further their own regional ambitions, increasing the odds of military conflict across the world.

Continued here

?

?

?

?

?

?

Don't like ads? Go ad-free with TradeBriefs Premium

Want to accelerate software development at your company? See how we can help.

Want to accelerate software development at your company? See how we can help.

Why We Need to Talk About Marriage - The New Yorker

How is marriage unlike everything else? And why is it sometimes so very awful? These are questions raised by the British critic and filmmaker Devorah Baum in her nimble new work, “On Marriage” (Yale). There is, she writes, “something enigmatic about the marital bond lying in excess of Enlightenment reason or easy description.” Marriage is a vast subject, being an institution that informs our most important social structures—including the tax code and the disposition of intergenerational wealth—while also circumscribing the idiosyncratic goings on within Baum’s household, or mine, or, quite possibly, yours. Yet Baum finds that marriage is a surprisingly unexamined subject, at least by professional philosophers, who have left the field to novelists, filmmakers, and other artists and theorists. When marriage does make an appearance in the philosophical canon, Baum suggests, it is typically only a subsidiary topic. Philosophers lose their minds a bit when trying to address the subject of the marital condition, she says, citing the unmarried Kant’s insistence that marriage is founded upon “the reciprocal use that one human being makes of the sexual organs and capacities of another.” (She notes that “long-term married people, at least, would surely have been able to reassure the moral philosopher that marriage isn’t chiefly about constant reciprocal sex.”) Baum asks whether the relative lack of philosophic interest in marriage could, in fact, be the key to understanding what marriage means philosophically. Is marriage, she asks, “what you only do when you do not ponder it too much?”

“On Marriage” shares the cerebral sensibility established in those movies; the book is characterized by an affinity for wordplay and by an awareness, informed by psychoanalytic theory, that wordplay is seldom wholly frivolous. Baum’s opening pages are groaningly laden with marriage-centric puns. “Writing about marriage wasn’t my idea—someone eligible proposed it to me and I said yes,” she reports. Her point is that marriage lends itself irresistibly to metaphor, being an inescapable framework for conceiving of ourselves in relation to others. Working on her own, and on the page, rather than collaborating with her husband on film, Baum makes the exposure of her own marital arrangements secondary to her preferred activity of analyzing books, movies, and television shows. Her selections are mostly of the sort produced and consumed by members of the transatlantic cultural cognoscenti who appear in “The New Man” and “Husband”—including work by the novelist Taffy Brodesser-Akner, the theorist Slavoj Žižek, and the screenwriter Phoebe Waller-Bridge. (For Baum, the figure of the “hot priest” in Season 2 of “Fleabag” is a representation of “marriage’s singular ability to conjugate those things within us that otherwise cannot abide in a world with no patience for contradictions, such as love and hate, morality and obscenity, the orthodox and the liberal, the secular and the religious.”) Ingmar Bergman is a touchstone, as is Stanley Cavell, that rare philosopher who has taken marriage as a topic for serious consideration, especially in “Pursuits of Happiness,” an account of Hollywood’s screwball comedies as remarriage stories. Like Cavell—and like George Eliot, who also gets a look-in—Baum is convinced that marriage, over all, might provide a moral and social good. Of “Middlemarch,” the greatest novel by the most philosophically inclined of novelists, Baum offers the ingenious interpretation that marriage itself is the key to all mythologies, and that “Middlemarch” was meant to be the all-encompassing work that Edward Casaubon was unable to write.

Among the scenes from her own marriage that Baum describes is a moment in which she’s sitting with her husband on the couch while watching the unnervingly intimate sex represented in the television adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel “Normal People.” She begins by underlining how, for parents of small children, the co-watching of television represents a precious opportunity for adults-only time. “We look forward to looking forward together and there are few things we look forward to quite as much,” she writes. She goes on, though, to consider just why the encounters between Marianne and Connell, the two young people at the story’s center, should be so especially squirm-inducing, given the quantity of explicit content readily available to the contemporary viewer. Recalling the acute embarrassment she would feel as a child when, while watching TV with her parents, a bout of onscreen sex would occur, Baum draws upon the Freudian concept of scopophilia, or the pleasure of watching: those unsought glimpses were, she says, a kind of displacement of the primal scene, and a reminder that the people inside the family home have “their own bodies, their own histories, their own feelings, their own desires, their own dreams and fantasies and lives to live.” She enlists an observation by the psychoanalyst Darian Leader that “one starts looking for things only once they are lost,” and proposes that the depiction of intercourse between beautiful twentysomethings in “Normal People” may evoke in each of the co-watchers a nostalgic desire for a lost past that, crucially, may not be a shared one. In a final critical turn, Baum considers the way in which the show illustrates the evolution of Marianne and Connell’s own intimacy: at first, they look into each other’s eyes while making love, only later to lie in bed companionably with an open laptop. For the characters onscreen, no less than for viewers at home, watching together is one way that a relationship matures as its participants come of age—or, in Baum’s phrase, as love enters history.

Continued here

?

?

?

?

?

?

Giant ‘Gravity Hole’ in the Ocean May Be the Ghost of an Ancient Sea - Scientific American

A vast expanse of the Indian Ocean is a staggering 100 meters lower than the global average sea level because of a major dip in Earth’s gravity. Scientists now think they know the cause

There’s a massive “hole” in the Indian Ocean, researchers say—but it’s not the kind that could drain away all that water. Instead it’s a term geologists use to describe a spot where Earth’s gravity is lower than average. And a new study may have finally revealed its origins: it appears to be caused by plumes of molten rock rising from deep beneath Africa at the edges of the sinking remnants of an ancient ocean bed.

In an ideal universe, Earth would be a perfect sphere, and its gravity would be exactly the same at every point on its surface. But in reality, Earth is flatter than a true sphere around both the North and South Poles, and it bulges out near the equator. Additionally, different regions exert a different gravitational pull depending on the mass of Earth’s crust, mantle and core beneath them.

Continued here

?

?

?

?

?

?

Neanderthals caught and cooked crabs 90,000 years ago - Popular Science

By Laura Baisas | Published Feb 7, 2023 10:00 AM EST

What types of food would be served at a Paleolithic Period buffet for Neanderthals? Fruits, plants, and nuts for sure, but the former inhabitants of Gruta de Figueira Brava in Portugal would have also expected lots of seafood, especially brown crab (Cancer pagurus).

“Neanderthals in Gruta da Figueira Brava were eating a lot of other marine resources, like limpets, mussels, clams, fish, as well as other terrestrial animals, such as deer, goats, aurochs and tortoises,” archaeologist Mariana Nabais from the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution tells PopSci.

Continued here

?

?

?

?

?

?

You are receiving this mailer as a TradeBriefs subscriber.
We fight fake/biased news through human curation & independent editorials.
Your support of ads like these makes it possible. Alternatively, get TradeBriefs Premium (ad-free) for only $2/month
If you still wish to unsubscribe, you can unsubscribe from all our emails here
Our address is 309 Town Center 1, Andheri Kurla Road, Andheri East, Mumbai 400059 - 93544947