Debate around skinniness in fashion is not new. But despite the chorus of protest, alarm and disgust, nothing ever really seems to change. The catwalks continue to feature ultra skinny girls, while designers continue to cite the now worn-out justification that they make their clothes small to save money; if you’re spending hundreds of thousands on a fashion show, why would you make your clothes a size 16 when size 6 requires far less material?

Skinny white models could be bad for business | Fashion | guardian.co.uk.

Europe has had several years of experience with harsh austerity programs, and the results are exactly what students of history told you would happen: such programs push depressed economies even deeper into depression. And because investors look at the state of a nation’s economy when assessing its ability to repay debt, austerity programs haven’t even worked as a way to reduce borrowing costs.

via Europe’s Economic Suicide – NYTimes.com.

The economic downturn that has shaken Europe for the last three years has also swept away the foundations of once-sturdy lives, leading to an alarming spike in suicide rates. Especially in the most fragile nations like Greece, Ireland and Italy, small-business owners and entrepreneurs are increasingly taking their own lives in a phenomenon some European newspapers have started calling “suicide by economic crisis.”

Increasingly in Europe, Suicides ‘by Economic Crisis’ – NYTimes.com.

“Nobody should believe that another half-century of peace and prosperity in Europe is guaranteed. It is not. So I say: If the euro fails, Europe fails. That must not happen. We have a historical obligation to protect by all prudent means at our disposal Europe’s unification process begun by our forefathers more than fifty years ago after centuries of hatred and spilling of blood. None of us can foresee what the consequences would be if we were to fail.
“The Euro’s Imagined Community” by Robert J Shiller | Project Syndicate.

While the movie vividly chronicles the wages of bigotry and neglect, it even more vividly chronicles how much society can budge when the people exhorting it to are united and determined and smart and right. The fight in us eclipses the sloth and surrender, and the good really does outweigh the bad. That’s a takeaway of “How to Survive a Plague,” and that’s a takeaway of the AIDS crisis as well. The AIDS Warriors’ Legacy – NYTimes.com.

There is a lot of optimism now in the community of public-health officials and advocates who work on AIDS. People are being treated with more effective medicine in more places and in greater numbers around the world than many ever thought possible. The world is getting smarter about outsmarting the AIDS virus. But, even as we know more, there are still disputes about how best to move forward on both prevention and treatment. Such is the nature of AIDS, especially as it involves an attempt to understand the complexity of human behavior as it relates to sex.

Read more New Yorker: The Changing AIDS Epidemic—and What to Do Next : The New Yorker.

Oftentimes an artist makes a story unfold, but sometimes an artist captures a story evolving all on its own. For his installation “Stelen (Columns)”, Marc Adelman collected 50 profile pictures from an internet dating site catering to gay men in Berlin. The catch: all of the photos were curiously taken in front of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, aka the Holocaust Memorial.

Marc Adelmans “Identity, Politics, Sex” At Jewish Museum PHOTOS.

Greek democracy is being destroyed. Not by soldiers marching with insane slogans on their lips about the inevitable triumph of the German master race, international proletariat or global jihad, but by moderate men and women who think themselves immune to ideological frenzy. Greece’s enemies are novel, but no less frightening for that: extremists from the centre ground; the respectable running riot.
Greece is being destroyed by ‘respectable’ fanatics | Nick Cohen | Comment is free | The Observer.

Poverty is not a sign of collective failure but individual immorality. The psychic coup of neo-liberal thinking is just this: instead of being disgusted by poverty, we are disgusted by poor people themselves. This disgust is a growth industry. We lay this moral bankruptcy at the feet of the poor as we tell ourselves we are better than that.

via Instead of being disgusted by poverty, we are disgusted by poor people themselves | Suzanne Moore | Comment is free | The Guardian.

The new Eurogroup meeting on February 9 is not enough to banish the spectre of a Greek bankruptcy. While Athens may largely be responsible for the crisis, the EU and its partners are not blameless themselves. La Stampa argues that their confused messages and the absence of any strategy have transformed a resolvable problem into an explosive chaos.Europe is just as guilty as Greece | Presseurop English.