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Urbanization and the evolution of cities across 10,000 years - Vance Kite

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About 10,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers, aided by rudimentary agriculture, moved to semi-permanent villages and never looked back. With further developments came food surpluses, leading to commerce, specialization and, many years later with the Industrial Revolution, the modern city. Vance Kite plots our urban past and how we can expect future cities to adapt to our growing populations.

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To learn more about global forced displacement, a good place to start is the website of the UN Refugee Agency ( UNHCR). This includes plenty of information and resources; including a basic explanation of the Refugee Convention and an annual report on patterns of forced displacement. The website also looks at individual stories, trying to match the statistical data with more personal accounts of displacement.

To further investigate the challenges faced by those who seek to begin a journey from war to safety, the missing migrants project looks broadly at those-both migrants and refugees-who have died along migratory routes (both at land and at sea). For more detailed information, you can read this report by the International Organization for Migration.

In this TED Talk, Melissa Fleming (UNHCR) tells the story of two refugees and their harrowing journey towards safety. In another important TED Talk (and written article) journalist Anders Fjellberg and photographer Tomm Christiansen remind us of the personal nature of these stories, writing that "everybody has a name, everybody has a story and everybody is someone." In this interview with Antonio Guterres, the former High Commissioner of UNHCR, Guterres calls for a multilateral turn toward acceptance and respect.

It is important to realize that arriving at the destination and obtaining refugee status does not mean the end of problems. Refugees and IDPs in camps often face difficult conditions, including limited infrastructure, overcrowding, temporary shelter with inadequate insulation/protection from the weather, lack of economic opportunities and/or education. Psychologically, life in a camp can be highly alienating and take a heavy toll.

Refugees living outside of camps also face hurdles including gaining access to health, education and other social services, and finding adequate shelter. Refugees are frequently in need of assistance for rent, and financial considerations can prevent them from finding adequate housing, forcing them to live in substandard accommodations such as abandoned or unfinished buildings or in informal dwellings. These run the risk of lacking adequate access to water, sanitation, waste management, or electricity and are unfit for the winter season.

Finding a job is often one of the most complex and difficult tasks, even though refugees may have had access to a good education in their home countries or had jobs that require a high level of education. And even for those refugees that obtain asylum in a country where more socio-economic assistance may be available, the trauma of having to rebuild a life and integrate in a very different context is a major challenge.

At the same time, we should keep in mind that refugees are courageous and strong human beings with their own unique skills and talents and with the ability to make plenty of positive contributions to their host countries. They have a lot to offer to their host societies and their full potential should be embraced. Here you can find a few ways through which you can help and empower refugees in your city or country.

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What does it mean to be a refugee? - Benedetta Berti and Evelien Borgman

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About 60 million people around the globe have been forced to leave their homes to escape war, violence and persecution. The majority have become Internally Displaced Persons, meaning they fled their homes but are still in their own countries. Others, referred to as refugees, sought shelter outside their own country.

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World War II, A War for Resources: Crash Course World History #220

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Robert Waldinger: What makes a good life? Lessons from the longest study on happiness

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What keeps us happy and healthy as we go through life? If you think it's fame and money, you're not alone - but, according to psychiatrist Robert Waldinger, you're mistaken. As the director of a 75-year-old study on adult development, Waldinger has unprecedented access to data on true happiness and satisfaction.

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Aaswath Raman: How we can turn the cold of outer space into a renewable resource

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What if we could use the cold darkness of outer space to cool buildings on earth? In this mind-blowing talk, physicist Aaswath Raman details the technology he's developing to harness "night-sky cooling" -- a natural phenomenon where infrared light escapes earth and heads to space, carrying heat along with it -- which could dramatically reduce the energy used by our cooling systems (and the pollution they cause).

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Why incompetent people think they're amazing - David Dunning

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How good are you with money? What about reading people's emotions? How healthy are you, compared to other people you know? Knowing how our skills stack up against others is useful in many ways. But psychological research suggests that we're not very good at evaluating ourselves accurately.

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Why don't people just adapt sustainable lifestyles when we know it's good for us? 

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Why don't people just adapt sustainable lifestyles when we know it's good for us? 

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Success Story

Creating sustainable-living alternatives in Brazil

It's vital to recognise the value of nature to our society and economy, and support sustainable management and investment in nature. Through the Sky Rainforest Rescue project in Brazil, we worked with farming families to create sustainable alternatives to clearing forest for crops. That meant giving people the agricultural and financial support they needed to make a fair living without cutting down trees. And we helped to make forest-friendly products - like rubber, berries and fish - more profitable by improving processing methods and finding new market opportunities. We also worked with the state government in Acre to develop a payment system which recognised the huge value of services the forest provides - for instance clean water and carbon storage - and paid local people to manage it sustainably. It means people can earn a good living without resorting to damaging the forest.

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Success Story It's vital to recognise the value of nature to our society and economy, and support sustainable management and investment in nature. Through the Sky Rainforest Rescue project in Brazil, we worked with farming families to create sustainable alternatives to clearing forest for crops.

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Why is India technically treating women unfairly? How can this change?

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Why is India technically treating women unfairly? How can this change?

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ndia is at war with its girls and women. The planned rape of eight-year-old Asifa in a temple by several men, including a policeman who later washed the clothes she was wearing to destroy evidence, was particularly horrific. Asifa's rape has outraged and shaken the entire country. Yet sexual abuse in India remains widespread despite tightening of rape laws in 2013. According to the National Crimes Records Bureau, in 2016 the rape of minor girls increased by 82% compared with the previous year. Chillingly, across all rape cases, 95% of rapists were not strangers but family, friends and neighbours.

The culturally sanctioned degradation of women is so complete that the prime minister of India, Narendra Modi, launched a national programme called Beti Bachao (Save Our Girls). India can arguably be accused of the largest-scale human rights violation on Earth: the persistent degradation of the vast majority of its 650 million girls and women. And this includes the middle classes, as I found when interviewing 600 women and men in India's cities.

India's women are traumatised in less obvious ways than by tanks in the streets, bombs and warlords. Our oppression starts innocuously: it occurs in private life, within families, with girls being locked up in their own homes. This everyday violence is the product of a culture that bestows all power on men, and that does not even want women to exist. This is evident in the unbalanced sex ratios at birth, even in wealthy families. But India also kills its women slowly. This violence is buried in the training of women in some deadly habits that invite human rights violations, but that are considered the essence of good womanhood.

The first teaches girls to be afraid of their own bodies. When a girl is not supposed to exist, 1.3 billion people collectively pretend that girls don't have bodies and especially no sexual parts. If girls do not have bodies, sexual molestation is not possible, and if it does happen, it has to be denied, and if it cannot be denied, the girl must be blamed.

Denial of sexuality in homes is another habit that is deadly to girls. Almost every woman I interviewed had experienced some form of sexual molestation. Only two had told their mothers, only to be dismissed, "Yes, this happens in families," or "No, this did not happen." Indian government surveys show that 42% of girls in the country have been sexually abused.

Speech is another basic human right. To have a voice, to speak up, is to be recognised, to belong. But girls are trained in silence. They are told to be quiet, to speak softly, dheere bolo, to have no opinions, no arguments, no conflicts. Silent women disappear. They are easy to ignore, overrule, and violate without repercussions. Impunity flourishes.

Over 50% of Indian men and women still believe that sometimes women deserve a beating

It serves a culture of violence to create pleasers, another habit that further erodes a woman's sense of self. Pleasers compromise and sacrifice, all disguised through the ubiquitous phrase beta thora adjust kar lo - "darling, please adjust a little". It means to be punished to force you to fit in, to do what others want you to do and never say no.

Women whose sense of self has been worn down, by definition must depend on others, which only serves to breed fear and violence. Over 50% of Indian men and women still believe that sometimes women deserve a beating. One woman is killed every hour for not bringing enough dowry to a husband. But dependency is still presented as a virtuous habit and independence as a bad characteristic. Dependent women have no separate identity and are legitimate only as mothers, wives and daughters. Such women are trained to put duty over self - the suicide numbers are highest for housewives.

The right to assemble is a right taken away by dictators. In India it is the culture that subverts women's desire to organise. The cultural design of oppression is so clever, that it instils a habit of distrust and trains women to demean, dismiss and discount other women. Almost no woman I interviewed belonged to a women's group. They said, "I don't have time for gossip."

The real genius of this system lies in the fact that oppression has been recast as a virtue. So erasure of self - the most treacherous human rights violation - hides in plain sight, sanctified by loving families, perfumed by our definitions of goodness. And the private sphere, the family, remains impenetrable and untouchable.

We have underestimated the power of culture in creating violence within our families. To reclaim our humanity we need a national conversation about what it means to be a good woman and a good man in India today.

Deepa Narayan is a social scientist and author of Chup: Breaking the Silence About India's Women

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India's abuse of women is the biggest human rights violation on Earth | Deepa Narayan

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ndia is at war with its girls and women. The planned rape of eight-year-old Asifa in a temple by several men, including a policeman who later washed the clothes she was wearing to destroy evidence, was particularly horrific. Asifa's rape has outraged and shaken the entire country.

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Why do we have religion? Will it ever go away? 

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Why do we have religion? Will it ever go away? 

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A growing number of people, millions worldwide, say they believe that life definitively ends at death - that there is no God, no afterlife and no divine plan. And it's an outlook that could be gaining momentum - despite its lack of cheer. In some countries, openly acknowledged atheism has never been more popular.

"There's absolutely more atheists around today than ever before, both in sheer numbers and as a percentage of humanity," says Phil Zuckerman, a professor of sociology and secular studies at Pitzer College in Claremont, California, and author of Living the Secular Life. According to a Gallup International survey of more than 50,000 people in 57 countries, the number of individuals claiming to be religious fell from 77% to 68% between 2005 and 2011, while those who self-identified as atheist rose by 3% - bringing the world's estimated proportion of adamant non-believers to 13%.

While atheists certainly are not the majority, could it be that these figures are a harbinger of things to come? Assuming global trends continue might religion someday disappear entirely?

It's impossible to predict the future, but examining what we know about religion - including why it evolved in the first place, and why some people chose to believe in it and others abandon it - can hint at how our relationship with the divine might play out in decades or centuries to come.

Scholars are still trying to tease out the complex factors that drive an individual or a nation toward atheism, but there are a few commonalities. Part of religion's appeal is that it offers security in an uncertain world. So not surprisingly, nations that report the highest rates of atheism tend to be those that provide their citizens with relatively high economic, political and existential stability. "Security in society seems to diminish religious belief," Zuckerman says. Capitalism, access to technology and education also seems to correlate with a corrosion of religiosity in some populations, he adds.
Crisis of faith
Japan, the UK, Canada, South Korea, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, France and Uruguay (where the majority of citizens have European roots) are all places where religion was important just a century or so ago, but that now report some of the lowest belief rates in the world. These countries feature strong educational and social security systems, low inequality and are all relatively wealthy. "Basically, people are less scared about what might befall them," says Quentin Atkinson, a psychologist at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

Yet decline in belief seems to be occurring across the board, including in places that are still strongly religious, such as Brazil, Jamaica and Ireland. "Very few societies are more religious today than they were 40 or 50 years ago," Zuckerman says. "The only exception might be Iran, but that's tricky because secular people might be hiding their beliefs."

The US, too, is an outlier in that it is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, but also has high rates of religiosity. (Still, a recent Pew survey revealed that, between 2007 and 2012, the proportion of Americans who said they are atheist rose from 1.6% to 2.4%.)

Decline, however, does not mean disappearance, says Ara Norenzayan, a social psychologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and author of Big Gods. Existential security is more fallible than it seems. In a moment, everything can change: a drunk driver can kill a loved one; a tornado can destroy a town; a doctor can issue a terminal diagnosis. As climate change wreaks havoc on the world in coming years and natural resources potentially grow scarce, then suffering and hardship could fuel religiosity. "People want to escape suffering, but if they can't get out of it, they want to find meaning," Norenzayan says. "For some reason, religion seems to give meaning to suffering - much more so than any secular ideal or belief that we know of."

This phenomenon constantly plays out in hospital rooms and disaster zones around the world. In 2011, for example, a massive earthquake struck Christchurch, New Zealand - a highly secular society. There was a sudden spike of religiosity in the people who experienced that event, but the rest of the country remained as secular as ever. While exceptions to this rule do exist - religion in Japan plummeted following World War II, for instance - for the most part, Zuckerman says, we adhere by the Christchurch model. "If experiencing something terrible caused all people to become atheists, then we'd all be atheists," he says.
The mind of god
But even if the world's troubles were miraculously solved and we all led peaceful lives in equity, religion would probably still be around. This is because a god-shaped hole seems to exist in our species' neuropsychology, thanks to a quirk of our evolution.

Understanding this requires a delve into "dual process theory". This psychological staple states that we have two very basic forms of thought: System 1 and System 2. System 2 evolved relatively recently. It's the voice in our head - the narrator who never seems to shut up - that enables us to plan and think logically.

System 1, on the other hand, is intuitive, instinctual and automatic. These capabilities regularly develop in humans, regardless of where they are born. They are survival mechanisms. System 1 bestows us with an innate revulsion of rotting meat, allows us to speak our native language without thinking about it and gives babies the ability to recognise parents and distinguish between living and nonliving objects. It makes us prone to looking for patterns to better understand our world, and to seek meaning for seemingly random events like natural disasters or the death of loved ones.

In addition to helping us navigate the dangers of the world and find a mate, some scholars think that System 1 also enabled religions to evolve and perpetuate. System 1, for example, makes us instinctually primed to see life forces - a phenomenon called hypersensitive agency detection - everywhere we go, regardless of whether they're there or not. Millennia ago, that tendency probably helped us avoid concealed danger, such as lions crouched in the grass or venomous snakes concealed in the bush. But it also made us vulnerable to inferring the existence of invisible agents - whether they took the form of a benevolent god watching over us, an unappeased ancestor punishing us with a drought or a monster lurking in the shadows.

Similarly, System 1 encourages us to see things dualistically, meaning we have trouble thinking of the mind and body as a single unit. This tendency emerges quite early: young children, regardless of their cultural background, are inclined to believe that they have an immortal soul - that their essence or personhood existed somewhere prior to their birth, and will always continue to exist. This disposition easily assimilates into many existing religions, or - with a bit of creativity - lends itself to devising original constructs.

"A Scandinavian psychologist colleague of mine who is an atheist told me that his three-year-old daughter recently walked up to him and said, 'God is everywhere all of the time.' He and his wife couldn't figure out where she'd gotten that idea from," says Justin Barrett, director of the Thrive Center for Human Development at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, and author of Born Believers. "For his daughter, god was an elderly woman, so you know she didn't get it from the Lutheran church."

For all of these reasons, many scholars believe that religion arose as "a byproduct of our cognitive disposition", says Robert McCauley, director of the Center for Mind, Brain and Culture at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and author of Why Religion Is Natural and Science Is Not. "Religions are cultural arrangements that evolved to engage and exploit these natural capacities in humans."
Hard habits to break
Atheists must fight against all of that cultural and evolutionary baggage. Human beings naturally want to believe that they are a part of something bigger, that life isn't completely futile. Our minds crave purpose and explanation. "With education, exposure to science and critical thinking, people might stop trusting their intuitions," Norenzayan says. "But the intuitions are there."

On the other hand, science - the system of choice that many atheists and non-believers look to for understanding the natural world - is not an easy cognitive pill to swallow. Science is about correcting System 1 biases, McCauley says. We must accept that the Earth spins, even though we never experience that sensation for ourselves. We must embrace the idea that evolution is utterly indifferent and that there is no ultimate design or purpose to the Universe, even though our intuition tells us differently. We also find it difficult to admit that we are wrong, to resist our own biases and to accept that truth as we understand it is ever changing as new empirical data are gathered and tested - all staples of science. "Science is cognitively unnatural - it's difficult," McCauley says. "Religion, on the other hand, is mostly something we don't even have to learn because we already know it."

"There's evidence that religious thought is the path of least resistance," Barrett adds. "You'd have to fundamentally change something about our humanity to get rid of religion." This biological sticking point probably explains the fact that, although 20% of Americans are not affiliated with a church, 68% of them say that they still believe in God and 37% describe themselves as spiritual. Even without organised religion, they believe that some greater being or life force guides the world.

Similarly, many around the world who explicitly say they don't believe in a god still harbour superstitious tendencies, like belief in ghosts, astrology, karma, telepathy or reincarnation. "In Scandinavia, most people say they don't believe in God, but paranormal and superstitious beliefs tend to be higher than you'd think," Norenzayan says. Additionally, non-believers often lean on what could be interpreted as religious proxies - sports teams, yoga, professional institutions, Mother Nature and more - to guide their values in life. As a testament to this, witchcraft is gaining popularity in the US, and paganism seems to be the fastest growing religion in the UK.

Religious experiences for non-believers can also manifest in other, more bizarre ways. Anthropologist Ryan Hornbeck, also at the Thrive Center for Human Development, found evidence that the World of Warcraft is assuming spiritual importance for some players in China, for example. "WoW seems to be offering opportunities to develop certain moral traits that regular life in contemporary society doesn't afford," Barrett says. "People seem to have this conceptual space for religious thought, which - if it's not filled by religion - bubbles up in surprising ways."
The in-group
What's more, religion promotes group cohesion and cooperation. The threat of an all-powerful God (or gods) watching for anyone who steps out of line likely helped to keep order in ancient societies. "This is the supernatural punishment hypothesis," Atkinson says. "If everyone believes that the punishment is real, then that can be functional to groups."

And again, insecurity and suffering in a population may play a role here, by helping to encourage religions with stricter moral codes. In a recent analysis of religious belief systems of nearly 600 traditional societies from around the world, Joseph Bulbulia at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand and his colleagues found that those places with harsher weather or that are more prone to natural disasters were more likely to develop moralising gods. Why? Helpful neighbours could mean the difference between life and death. In this context, religion evolved as a valuable public utility.

"When we see something so pervasive, something that emerges so quickly developmentally and remains persistent across cultures, then it makes sense that the leading explanation is that it served a cooperative function," says Bulbulia.

Finally, there's also some simple mathematics behind religion's knack for prevailing. Across cultures, people who are more religious also tend to have more children than people who are not. "There's very strong evidence for this," Norenzayan says. "Even among religious people, the more fundamentalist ones usually have higher fertility rates than the more liberal ones." Add to that the fact that children typically follow their parents' lead when it comes to whether or not they become religious adults themselves, and a completely secularised world seems ever more unlikely.
Enduring belief
For all of these reasons - psychological, neurological, historical, cultural and logistical - experts guess that religion will probably never go away. Religion, whether it's maintained through fear or love, is highly successful at perpetuating itself. If not, it would no longer be with us.

And even if we lose sight of the Christian, Muslim and Hindu gods and all the rest, superstitions and spiritualism will almost certainly still prevail. More formal religious systems, meanwhile, would likely only be a natural disaster or two away. "Even the best secular government can't protect you from everything," says McCauley. As soon as we found ourselves facing an ecological crisis, a global nuclear war or an impending comet collision, the gods would emerge.

"Humans need comfort in the face of pain and suffering, and many need to think that there's something more after this life, that they're loved by an invisible being," Zuckerman says. "There will always be people who believe, and I wouldn't be surprised if they remain the majority."
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A growing number of people, millions worldwide, say they believe that life definitively ends at death - that there is no God, no afterlife and no divine plan. And it's an outlook that could be gaining momentum - despite its lack of cheer. In some countries, openly acknowledged atheism has never been more popular.

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If one thing's for sure, it's that the second-wave feminists are at war with the third-wave feminists.

No, wait, the second-wavers are at war with the fourth-wave feminists.

No, it's not the second-wavers, it's the Gen X-ers.

Are we still cool with the first-wavers? Are they all racists now?

Is there actually intergenerational fighting about feminist waves? Is that a real thing?

Do we even use the wave metaphor anymore?

As the #MeToo movement barrels forward, as record numbers of women seek office, and as the Women's March drives the resistance against the Trump administration, feminism is reaching a level of cultural relevance it hasn't enjoyed in years. It's now a major object of cultural discourse - which has led to some very confusing conversations because not everyone is familiar with or agrees on the basic terminology of feminism. And one of the most basic and most confusing terms has to do with waves of feminism.

People began talking about feminism as a series of waves in 1968 when a New York Times article by Martha Weinman Lear ran under the headline " The Second Feminist Wave." "Feminism, which one might have supposed as dead as a Polish question, is again an issue," Lear wrote. "Proponents call it the Second Feminist Wave, the first having ebbed after the glorious victory of suffrage and disappeared, finally, into the sandbar of Togetherness."

The wave metaphor caught on: It became a useful way of linking the women's movement of the '60s and '70s to the women's movement of the suffragettes, and to suggest that the women's libbers weren't a bizarre historical aberration, as their detractors sneered, but a new chapter in a grand history of women fighting together for their rights. Over time, the wave metaphor became a way to describe and distinguish between different eras and generations of feminism.

It's not a perfect metaphor. "The wave metaphor tends to have built into it an important metaphorical implication that is historically misleading and not helpful politically," argued feminist historian Linda Nicholson in 2010. "That implication is that underlying certain historical differences, there is one phenomenon, feminism, that unites gender activism in the history of the United States, and that like a wave, peaks at certain times and recedes at others. In sum, the wave metaphor suggests the idea that gender activism in the history of the United States has been for the most part unified around one set of ideas, and that set of ideas can be called feminism."

The wave metaphor can be reductive. It can suggest that each wave of feminism is a monolith with a single unified agenda, when in fact the history of feminism is a history of different ideas in wild conflict.

It can reduce each wave to a stereotype and suggest that there's a sharp division between generations of feminism, when in fact there's a fairly strong continuity between each wave - and since no wave is a monolith, the theories that are fashionable in one wave are often grounded in the work that someone was doing on the sidelines of a previous wave. And the wave metaphor can suggest that mainstream feminism is the only kind of feminism there is, when feminism is full of splinter movements.

And as waves pile upon waves in feminist discourse, it's become unclear that the wave metaphor is useful for understanding where we are right now. "I don't think we are in a wave right now," gender studies scholar April Sizemore-Barber told Vox in January. "I think that now feminism is inherently intersectional feminism - we are in a place of multiple feminisms."

But the wave metaphor is also probably the best tool we have for understanding the history of feminism in the US, where it came from and how it developed. And it's become a fundamental part of how we talk about feminism - so even if we end up deciding to discard it, it's worth understanding exactly what we're discarding.

Here is an overview of the waves of feminism in the US, from the suffragettes to #MeToo. This is a broad overview, and it won't capture every nuance of the movement in each era. Think of it as a Feminism 101 explainer, here to give you a framework tounderstand the feminist conversation that's happening right now, how we got here, and where we go next.

The first wave: 1848 to 1920

People have been suggesting things along the line of "Hmmm, are women maybe human beings?" for all of history, so first-wave feminism doesn't refer to the first feminist thinkers in history. It refers to the West's first sustained political movement dedicated to achieving political equality for women: the suffragettes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

For 70 years, the first-wavers would march, lecture, and protest, and face arrest, ridicule, and violence as they fought tooth and nail for the right to vote. As Susan B. Anthony's biographer Ida Husted Harper would put it, suffrage was the right that, once a woman had won it, "would secure to her all others."

The first wave basically begins with the Seneca Falls convention of 1848. There, almost 200 women met in a church in upstate New York to discuss "the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of women." Attendees discussed their grievances and passed a list of 12 resolutions calling for specific equal rights - including, after much debate, the right to vote.

The whole thing was organized by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who were both active abolitionists. (They met when they were both barred from the floor of the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London; no women were allowed.)

At the time, the nascent women's movement was firmly integrated with the abolitionist movement: The leaders were all abolitionists, and Frederick Douglass spoke at the Seneca Falls Convention, arguing for women's suffrage. Women of color like Sojourner Truth, Maria Stewart, and Frances E.W. Harper were major forces in the movement, working not just for women's suffrage but for universal suffrage.

But despite the immense work of women of color for the women's movement, the movement of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony eventually established itself as a movement specifically for white women, one that used racial animus as fuel for its work.

The 15th Amendment's passage in 1870, granting black men the right to vote, became a spur that politicized white women and turned them into suffragettes. Were they truly not going to be granted the vote before former slaves were?

"If educated women are not as fit to decide who shall be the rulers of this country, as 'field hands,' then where's the use of culture, or any brain at all?" demanded one white woman who wrote in to Stanton and Anthony's newspaper, the Revolution. "One might as well have been 'born on the plantation.'" Black women were barred from some demonstrations or forced to walk behind white women in others.

Despite its racism, the women's movement developed radical goals for its members. First-wavers fought not only for white women's suffrage but also for equal opportunities to education and employment, and for the right to own property.

And as the movement developed, it began to turn to the question of reproductive rights. In 1916, Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the US, in defiance of a New York state law that forbade the distribution of contraception. She would later go on to establish the clinic that became Planned Parenthood.

In 1920, Congress passed the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote. (In theory, it granted the right to women of all races, but in practice, it remained difficult for black women to vote, especially in the South.)

The 19th Amendment was the grand legislative achievement of the first wave. Although individual groups continued to work - for reproductive freedom, for equality in education and employment, for voting rights for black women - the movement as a whole began to splinter. It no longer had a unified goal with strong cultural momentum behind it, and it would not find another until the second wave began to take off in the 1960s.

The second wave: 1963 to the 1980s

The second wave of feminism begins with Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, which came out in 1963. There were prominent feminist thinkers before Friedan who would come to be associated with the second wave - most importantly Simone de Beauvoir, whose Second Sex came out in France in 1949 and in the US in 1953 - but The Feminine Mystique was a phenomenon. It sold 3 million copies in three years.

The Feminine Mystique rails against "the problem that has no name": the systemic sexism that taught women that their place was in the home and that if they were unhappy as housewives, it was only because they were broken and perverse. "I thought there was something wrong with me because I didn't have an orgasm waxing the kitchen floor," Friedan later quipped.

But, she argued, the fault didn't truly lie with women, but rather with the world that refused to allow them to exercise their creative and intellectual faculties. Women were right to be unhappy; they were being ripped off.

The Feminine Mystique was not revolutionary in its thinking, as many of Friedan's ideas were already being discussed by academics and feminist intellectuals. Instead, it was revolutionary in its reach. It made its way into the hands of housewives, who gave it to their friends, who passed it along through a whole chain of well-educated middle-class white women with beautiful homes and families. And it gave them permission to be angry.

And once those 3 million readers realized that they were angry, feminism once again had cultural momentum behind it. It had a unifying goal, too: not just political equality, which the first-wavers had fought for, but social equality.

"The personal is political," said the second-wavers. (The phrase cannot be traced back to any individual woman but was popularized by Carol Hanisch.) They would go on to argue that problems that seemed to be individual and petty - about sex, and relationships, and access to abortions, and domestic labor - were in fact systemic and political, and fundamental to the fight for women's equality.

So the movement won some major legislative and legal victories: The Equal Pay Act of 1963 theoretically outlawed the gender pay gap; a series of landmark Supreme Court cases through the '60s and '70s gave married and unmarried women the right to use birth control; Title IX gave women the right to educational equality; and in 1973, Roe v. Wade guaranteed women reproductive freedom.

The second wave worked on getting women the right to hold credit cards under their own names and to apply for mortgages. It worked to outlaw marital rape, to raise awareness about domestic violence and build shelters for women fleeing rape and domestic violence. It worked to name and legislate against sexual harassment in the workplace.

But perhaps just as central was the second wave's focus on changing the way society thought about women. The second wave cared deeply about the casual, systemic sexism ingrained into society - the belief that women's highest purposes were domestic and decorative, and the social standards that reinforced that belief - and in naming that sexism and ripping it apart.

The second wave cared about racism too, but it could be clumsy in working with people of color. As the women's movement developed, it was rooted in the anti-capitalist and anti-racist civil rights movements, but black women increasingly found themselves alienated from the central platforms of the mainstream women's movement.

The Feminine Mystique and its "problem that has no name" was specifically for white middle-class women: Women who had to work to support themselves experienced their oppression very differently from women who were socially discouraged from working.

Earning the right to work outside the home was not a major concern for black women, many of whom had to work outside the home anyway. And while black women and white women both advocated for reproductive freedom, black women wanted to fight not just for the right to contraception and abortions but also to stop the forced sterilization of people of color and people with disabilities, which was not a priority for the mainstream women's movement. In response, some black feminists decamped from feminism to create womanism. ("Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender," Alice Walker wrote in 1983.)

Even with its limited scope, second-wave feminism at its height was plenty radical enough to scare people - hence the myth of the bra burners. Despite the popular story, there was no mass burning of bras among second-wave feminists.

But women did gather together in 1968 to protest the Miss America pageant and its demeaning, patriarchal treatment of women. And as part of the protest, participants ceremoniously threw away objects that they considered to be symbols of women's objectification, including bras and copies of Playboy.

That the Miss America protest has long lingered in the popular imagination as a bra-burning, and that bra-burning has become a metonym for postwar American feminism, says a lot about the backlash to the second wave that would soon ensue.

In the 1980s, the comfortable conservatism of the Reagan era managed to successfully position second-wave feminists as humorless, hairy-legged shrews who cared only about petty bullshit like bras instead of real problems, probably to distract themselves from the loneliness of their lives, since no man would ever want a ( shudder) feminist.

"I don't think of myself as a feminist," a young woman told Susan Bolotin in 1982 for the New York Times Magazine. "Not for me, but for the guy next door that would mean that I'm a lesbian and I hate men."

Another young woman chimed in, agreeing. "Look around and you'll see some happy women, and then you'll see all these bitter, bitter women," she said. "The unhappy women are all feminists. You'll find very few happy, enthusiastic, relaxed people who are ardent supporters of feminism."

That image of feminists as angry and man-hating and lonely would become canonical as the second wave began to lose its momentum, and it continues to haunt the way we talk about feminism today. It would alsobecome foundational to the way the third wave would position itself as it emerged.

The third wave: 1991(?) to ????

It is almost impossible to talk with any clarity about the third wave because few people agree on exactly what the third wave is, when it started, or if it's still going on. "The confusion surrounding what constitutes third wave feminism," writes feminist scholar Elizabeth Evans, "is in some respects its defining feature."

But generally, the beginning of the third wave is pegged to two things: the Anita Hill case in 1991, and the emergence of the riot grrrl groups in the music scene of the early 1990s.

In 1991, Anita Hill testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her at work. Thomas made his way to the Supreme Court anyway, but Hill's testimony sparked an avalanche of sexual harassment complaints, in much the same way that last fall's Harvey Weinstein accusations were followed by a litany of sexual misconduct accusations against other powerful men.

And Congress's decision to send Thomas to the Supreme Court despite Hill's testimony led to a national conversation about the overrepresentation of men in national leadership roles. The following year, 1992, would be dubbed " the Year of the Woman " after 24 women won seats in the House of Representatives and three more won seats in the Senate.

And for the young women watching the Anita Hill case in real time, it would become an awakening. "I am not a postfeminism feminist," declared Rebecca Walker (Alice Walker's daughter) for Ms. after watching Thomas get sworn into the Supreme Court. "I am the Third Wave."

Early third-wave activism tended to involve fighting against workplace sexual harassment and working to increase the number of women in positions of power. Intellectually, it was rooted in the work of theorists of the '80s: Kimberlé Crenshaw, a scholar of gender and critical race theory who coined the term intersectionality to describe the ways in which different forms of oppression intersect; and Judith Butler, who argued that gender and sex are separate and that gender is performative. Crenshaw and Butler's combined influence would become foundational to the third wave's embrace of the fight for trans rights as a fundamental part of intersectional feminism.

Aesthetically, the third wave is deeply influenced by the rise of the riot grrrls, the girl groups who stomped their Doc Martens onto the music scene in the 1990s.

"BECAUSE doing/reading/seeing/hearing cool things that validate and challenge us can help us gain the strength and sense of community that we need in order to figure out how bullshit like racism, able-bodieism, ageism, speciesism, classism, thinism, sexism, anti-semitism and heterosexism figures in our own lives," wrote Bikini Kill lead singer Kathleen Hanna in the Riot Grrrl Manifesto in 1991. "BECAUSE we are angry at a society that tells us Girl = Dumb, Girl = Bad, Girl = Weak."

The word girl here points to one of the major differences between second- and third-wave feminism. Second-wavers fought to be called women rather than girls: They weren't children, they were fully grown adults, and they demanded to be treated with according dignity. There should be no more college girls or coeds: only college women, learning alongside college men.

But third-wavers liked being girls. They embraced the word; they wanted to make it empowering, even threatening - hence grrrl. And as it developed, that trend would continue: The third wave would go on to embrace all kinds of ideas and language and aesthetics that the second wave had worked to reject: makeup and high heels and high-femme girliness.

In part, the third-wave embrace of girliness was a response to the anti-feminist backlash of the 1980s, the one that said the second-wavers were shrill, hairy, and unfeminine and that no man would ever want them. And in part, it was born out of a belief that the rejection of girliness was in itself misogynistic: girliness, third-wavers argued, was not inherently less valuable than masculinity or androgyny.

And it was rooted in a growing belief that effective feminism had to recognize both the dangers and the pleasures of the patriarchal structures that create the beauty standard and that it was pointless to punish and censure individual women for doing things that brought them pleasure.

Third-wave feminism had an entirely different way of talking and thinking than the second wave did - but it also lacked the strong cultural momentum that was behind the grand achievements of the second wave. (Even the Year of Women turned out to be a blip, as the number of women entering national politics plateaued rapidly after 1992.)

The third wave was a diffuse movement without a central goal, and as such, there's no single piece of legislation or major social change that belongs to the third wave the way the 19th Amendment belongs to the first wave or Roe v. Wade belongs to the second.

Depending on how you count the waves, that might be changing now, as the #MeToo moment develops with no signs of stopping - or we might be kicking off an entirely new wave.

The present day: a fourth wave?

Feminists have been anticipating the arrival of a fourth wave since at least 1986, when a letter writer to the Wilson Quarterly opined that the fourth wave was already building. Internet trolls actually tried to launch their own fourth wave in 2014, planning to create a "pro-sexualization, pro-skinny, anti-fat" feminist movement that the third wave would revile, ultimately miring the entire feminist community in bloody civil war. (It didn't work out.)

But over the past few years, as #MeToo and Time's Up pick up momentum, the Women's March floods Washington with pussy hats every year, and a record number of women prepare to run for office, it's beginning to seem that the long-heralded fourth wave might actually be here.

While a lot of media coverage of #MeToo describes it as a movement dominated by third-wave feminism, it actually seems to be centered in a movement that lacks the characteristic diffusion of the third wave. It feels different.

"Maybe the fourth wave is online," said feminist Jessica Valenti in 2009, and that's come to be one of the major ideas of fourth-wave feminism. Online is where activists meet and plan their activism, and it's where feminist discourse and debate takes place. Sometimes fourth-wave activism can even take place on the internet (the "#MeToo" tweets), and sometimes it takes place on the streets (the Women's March), but it's conceived and propagated online.

As such, the fourth wave's beginnings are often loosely pegged to around 2008, when Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were firmly entrenched in the cultural fabric and feminist blogs like Jezebel and Feministing were spreading across the web. By 2013, the idea that we had entered a fourth wave was widespread enough that it was getting written up in the Guardian. "What's happening now feels like something new again," wrote Kira Cochrane.

Currently, the fourth-wavers are driving the movement behind #MeToo and Time's Up, but in previous years they were responsible for the cultural impact of projects like Emma Sulkowicz's Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight), in which a rape victim at Columbia University committed to carrying their mattress around campus until the university expelled their rapist.

The trending hashtag #YesAllWomen after the UC Santa Barbara shooting was a fourth-wave campaign, and so was the trending hashtag #StandWithWendy when Wendy Davis filibustered a Texas abortion law. Arguably, the SlutWalks that began in 2011 - in protest of the idea that the way to prevent rape is for women to "stop dressing like sluts" - are fourth-wave campaigns.

Like all of feminism, the fourth wave is not a monolith. It means different things to different people. But these tentpole positions that Bustle identified as belonging to fourth-wave feminism in 2015 do tend to hold true for a lot of fourth-wavers; namely, that fourth-wave feminism is queer, sex-positive, trans-inclusive, body-positive, and digitally driven. (Bustle also claims that fourth-wave feminism is anti-misandry, but given the glee with which fourth-wavers across the internet riff on ironic misandry, that may be more prescriptivist than descriptivist on their part.)

And now the fourth wave has begun to hold our culture's most powerful men accountable for their behavior. It has begun a radical critique of the systems of power that allow predators to target women with impunity.

So is there a generational war between feminists?

As the fourth wave begins to establish itself, and as #MeToo goes on, we've begun to develop a narrative that says the fourth wave's biggest obstacles are its predecessors - the feminists of the second wave.

"The backlash to #MeToo is indeed here," wrote Jezebel's Stassa Edwards in January, "and it's liberal second-wave feminism."

Writing with a lot less nuance, Katie Way, the reporter who broke the Aziz Ansari story, smeared one of her critics as a "burgundy-lipstick, bad-highlights, second-wave-feminist has-been."

And there certainly are second-wave feminists pushing a #MeToo backlash. "If you spread your legs because he said 'be nice to me and I'll give you a job in a movie' then I'm afraid that's tantamount to consent," second-wave feminist icon Germaine Greer remarked as the accusations about Weinstein mounted, "and it's too late now to start whingeing about that." (Greer, who has also said on the record that she doesn't believe trans women are "real women," has become something of a poster child for the worst impulses of the second wave. Die a hero or live long enough to become a villain, etc.)

But some of the most prominent voices speaking out against #MeToo, like Katie Roiphe and Bari Weiss, are too young to have been part of the second wave. Roiphe is a Gen X-er who was pushing back against both the second and the third waves in the 1990s and has managed to stick around long enough to push back against the fourth wave today. Weiss, 33, is a millennial. Other prominent #MeToo critics, like Caitlin Flanagan and Daphne Merkin, are old enough to have been around for the second wave but have always been on the conservative end of the spectrum.

"In the 1990s and 2000s, second-wavers were cast as the shrill, militant, man-hating mothers and grandmothers who got in the way of their daughters' sexual liberation. Now they're the dull, hidebound relics who are too timid to push for the real revolution," writes Sady Doyle at Elle. "And of course, while young women have been telling their forebears to shut up and fade into the sunset, older women have been stereotyping and slamming younger activists as feather-headed, boy-crazy pseudo-feminists who squander their mothers' feminist gains by taking them for granted."

It is not particularly useful to think of the #MeToo debates as a war between generations of feminists - or, more creepily, as some sort of Freudian Electra complex in action. And the data from our polling shows that these supposed generational gaps largely don't exist. It is perhaps more useful to think of it as part of what has always been the history of feminism: passionate disagreement between different schools of thought, which history will later smooth out into a single overarching "wave" of discourse (if the wave metaphor holds on that long).

The history of feminism is filled with radicals and progressives and liberals and centrists. It's filled with splinter movements and reactionary counter-movements. That's part of what it means to be both an intellectual tradition and a social movement, and right now feminism is functioning as both with a gorgeous and monumental vitality. Rather than devouring their own, feminists should recognize the enormous work that each wave has done for the movement, and get ready to keep doing more work.

After all, the past is past. We're in the middle of the third wave now.

Or is it the fourth?

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The waves of feminism, and why people keep fighting over them, explained

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If you have no idea which wave of feminism we're in right now, read this.

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Where does the concept of inequality come from? How did it happen?

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Where does the concept of inequality come from? How did it happen?

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Income and Wealth Inequality: Crash Course Economics #17

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Rethinking Civilization - Crash Course World History 201

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Monkeys and Morality: Crash Course Psychology #19

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Did 'bad people' have any 'positive' impact on history?

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Did 'bad people' have any 'positive' impact on history?

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Watch the TED Talk too (warning: Violent images).

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Violence and evil are no strangers to our world, and they are never going away. However, if we learn to recognize the sources of derelict behavior, we may be able to interv…

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Why humans are so bad at thinking about climate change

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What Progress has been made for the goals? 

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What Progress has been made for the goals? 

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NEW YORK (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Progress is not moving fast enough to meet an ambitious set of global goals to conquer poverty, inequality and other international woes by a 2030 deadline, slowed largely by growing war and violence, the United Nations said on Monday.

Advances have been few and uneven in reducing conflict and promoting gender equality, sustainable energy, infrastructure and other key areas, the U.N. said in a report assessing the pace of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Approved in September 2015, the sweeping 15-year agenda approved by the 193 U.N. member states is a global "to-do" list to tackle such issues as climate change, education, hunger, joblessness and land degradation.

The cost of implementation has been estimated at $3 trillion a year.

"The rate of progress in many areas is far slower than needed to meet the targets by 2030," wrote U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in a foreword to the 60-page report.

Intensified war and violence are critical obstacles to implementation, said Wu Hongbo, Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs.

"Conflict has become the most insurmountable barrier to poverty eradication and sustainable development," he wrote in the report.

War and violence led to some 65.6 million people being forced from their homes at the end of 2016, an increase of about 300,000 people over the previous year, Wu wrote.

Children are disproportionately affected, he added, deprived of health care, education, safe water and shelter and often separated from their families.

Other particularly thorny problems include reducing maternal deaths, making education universally accessible to children and the representation of women in political decision-making, Guterres said in the foreword.

He also cited persistently high rates of violence against women and girls and "alarmingly" high unemployment rates among young people.

"Advancements have been uneven across regions, between the sexes, and among people of different ages, wealth and locales, including urban and rural dwellers," the report said.

Wu, at a U.N. event to release the report, said, however, he was "not that pessimistic."

He said in 2016, 22 nations volunteered for the U.N.'s review of their SDGs' progress, and that number doubled to 44 for the 2017 review.

"More and more national governments would like to get involved," he said.

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Progress too slow on global goals for sustainable development, U.N....

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NEW YORK (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Progress is not moving fast enough to meet an ambitious set of global goals to conquer poverty, inequality and other international woes by a 2030 deadline, slowed largely by growing war and violence, the United Nations said on Monday.