Good morning, Quartz readers, and apologies for the late delivery of your brief!
Ignore the vows and hair-pulling.
There will be no campaign to remove the killer Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, who again has gassed his people, murdering some 85 in his most recent attack. The usual international coalition possesses no will. The facts on the ground don’t allow for easy extraction. A palatable quasi-democrat isn’t waiting to step in. And even if those conditions were met, Russian president Vladimir Putin would make the price too high. If Putin went along with Assad’s ouster, he would further expose to the world his own excesses of militarism and murder.
It was a good show that just two days after Assad’s sarin gas attack, US president Donald Trump responded with a strike of 59 missiles at Shayrat air base in Homs province. He allowed the world to vent horror and anger at Assad. But hours later Syrian jets were taking off from Shayrat: Trump had made an elegant announcement of moral purpose, and a stated new policy of defending innocent women and children. But the words were rendered empty and self-serving by the bombing’s light damage—the runways, the taxiways, the parking areas are intact. Assad can go on with his war.
What did Trump achieve? He has, for now, deflected attention from his long list of self-inflicted woes. On April 7, for the first time in weeks, not a word was heard about investigations of his campaign’s links to Russian hacking of last year’s presidential election; cable television forgot about the diet of lies Trump feeds to the nation, and his unsubstantiated allegations against perceived enemies. Talk of an unraveling of his young presidency tapered off.
Trump will ride his newfound bipartisan support for a time. But he will have to do more to keep it. For starters, he can find out what Putin knew about Assad’s sarin gas stockpile, and of the recent attack. He will have to find a way to defuse the tension with North Korea, which fired yet another ballistic missile into the Sea of Japan on April 4. And he must stop making ad hominem, false attacks against his enemies. Trump, in short, will have to keep making a stab at statesmanship. One short show of presidential leadership will not be sufficient.—Steve LeVine
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Brands see the future of fashion in 3D knitting. 3D printing has not yet delivered on the futuristic vision that would allow you to walk into a store, give the staff your measurements, and walk out with a garment made on the spot. But, Marc Bain writes, that scenario is becoming a reality for 3D knitting, a cousin of 3D printing. Adidas and Ministry of Supply are experimenting with in-store machines that offer customized garments in mere hours—and that’s just the start.
Politeness isn’t enough; we now demand friendliness. In the service industry, “emotional labor”—manipulating your own emotions to meet others’ expectations—is a daily burden. And the pressure to respond to that forced friendliness in kind is burdensome too, writes Olivia Goldhill: “Those in service jobs have to be happy, so do customers, and every public interaction is crammed with false optimism and forced smiles and cries of ‘awesome!’”
Even Supreme Court women get shushed. Female justices get interrupted three times as often as their male counterparts, according to a dissection of years of speech pattern data in the US Supreme Court. Women have made up an average 24% of the bench over the past 12 years, and while 32% of all interruptions were of women, only 4% were by them. Surprising no women anywhere.
The economic promise of post-apartheid South Africa is fading. Ratings firms downgraded the country’s sovereign credit ratings to “junk status” after the president fired his finance minister in a midnight maneuver. The political chaos of the present has made the economic future uncertain. Insight may lie in the recent past as, Lynsey Chutel found while reporting a brief history of South Africa’s junk ratings.
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High school journalists investigated their new principal—and forced her resignation. Students at tiny Pittsburg High School in southeast Kansas had questions about new principal Amy Robertson’s academic credentials. They began investigating, and discovered the source of her PhD was an unaccredited university that has been called a diploma mill. As faculty, administrators, and parents looked on, a state law preventing censorship of school journalism shielded the students’ efforts, allowing them to uncover what the hiring committee hadn’t about her past.
Men have a complicated relationship with testosterone. Although the male sex hormone is vital for vigor and reproduction, it comes with a price. Richard G. Bribiescas argues in Nautilus that the side effects of testosterone—like needing more energy to fuel larger muscles and being less able to fight infections—may be a reason why men die earlier than women.
Two celebrated chefs want to bring high-quality fast food to low-income communities. Daniel Duane tells the story of chef Daniel Patterson, who ditched the Bay Area’s fine-dining scene to team up with Ray Choi—“the tattooed king of LA food trucks”—on an ambitious, socially-conscious fast-food chain called Locol. The goal? Give people in poor, predominantly African-American US neighborhoods access to cheap, nutritious, and tasty food, and pay fair wages to local workers. The chefs discovered, however, that disrupting fast-food is a lot harder than they’d thought.
Brazil wants to know if you’re really black or not. For decades, Brazilian intellectuals and political leaders claimed the country was a “racial democracy,” contrasting favorably with US Jim Crow-era segregation. Black activists have succeeded in bursting that myth by showing extreme inequality, such as the absence of black Brazilians in education. But in a country with as much mixed-race heritage as Brazil, Foreign Policy’s Cleuci de Oliveira finds affirmative action policies are being exploited by some white citizens who have African heritage.
The F-35 jet program is everything wrong with US military procurement. The program to give America and its allies a unified fighter jet platform with specialized versions for the service branches has been going since the 1980s. Businessweek’s Paul Barrett doesn’t uncover massive fraud or corruption. Instead he finds a far more insidious problem: creep. Creep of mission, of requirements, of timelines, and of cost. It turns out designing one jet airframe to serve vastly different mission requirements might not have been such a great idea after all.
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