Politics & Current Affairs — November 28, 2011

Why we Stopped Accepting Mass Atrocities

How did we go from seeing genocide and other large-scale crimes against humanity as a consensus-free zone to today’s overwhelming acceptance of the “responsibility to protect”?

bigthinkeditor

What’s the Latest Development?

Gareth Evans examines what saw the world go from complete ideological division on the response to mass-atrocity crimes to the current overwhelming consensus on the basic principles of the “responsibility to protect” (R2P) doctrine. One reason it caught on is that R2P is about a lot more than coercive military intervention. Its options are nuanced and multidimensional.

What’s the Big Idea?

“Our debates are now about how, not whether, to implement the responsibility to protect,” U. N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in September, reflecting the now overwhelming consensus on the fundamental principles of R2P. Evans says that for every two steps forward on R2P there is usually one back, but “by any measurement, the achievement of the past decade–universal agreement that state sovereignty is not a license to kill–has been tremendous.”

a computer generated image of a human brain.

Thinking

The great free will debate featuring Michio Kaku and Steven Pinker

Who — or what — really controls your mind?

Building destroyed by the Halifax Explosion. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

The Past

The largest accidental explosion of all time

More than a century ago, Halifax suffered an accidental blast one-fifth the size of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

a collage of photos of a man with a hat and a book.

High Culture

6 great books with wildly unreliable narrators

Dive into the twisted truths and concealed realities told by literature’s most unreliable narrators.

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The Well

Signs you’re burned out — and how to bounce back

If you don’t feel better after the weekend, the “burnout paradox” could explain why.

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7 min

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with

Laurie Santos

Starts With A Bang

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If you can identify a foreground star, the spike patterns are a dead giveaway as to whether it’s a JWST image or any other observatory.

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