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Weekly Picks – June 30, 2024
Credit (left): Alphavector/ Shutterstock. Credit (center, clockwise from bottom left): Bruno Barbey/ Magnum Photos; Ahmad Al-Rubaye/ Getty Images; Wired staff/ Getty Images. Credit (right): James O’Brien for Quanta Magazine.
This week’s collection:
- Exit 238
- Agreeing to Our Harm
- Why the ‘Costs of Doing Business’ Are Costing Us Our Lives
- Computation Is All Around Us, and You Can See It if You Try
- The Power of Physician Empathy
- Rule by Militia
- The psychology of oppression and liberation
- Pooping on the Moon Is a Messy Business
Introductory excerpts quoted below. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
Linked here but not quoted below, some ‘fact sheets’ shared in the past week:
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Weekly Picks – June 23, 2024
Credit (left to right): Agnes Jonas; E+ via Getty Images; Film4 / Access / Polish Film Institute / JW Films / Extreme Emotions / The New Inquiry.
This week’s collection:
- Climate, State, and Utopia*
- When Police Shootings Don’t Kill: The Data That Gets Left Behind
- The Sentimentality of Evil
- The Beekeeper in Kathmandu
- The Evolution of Empire
- Ghosts on the Water
*The new forum published this week in Boston Review. Responses can also be found at the link.
Introductory excerpts quoted below. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
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At the Confluence of Dreams
I wonder what goes through my friends’ minds when I reach out to them and ask if they are free to hop continents. Their pal from afar, politely inquiring if they have vacation days to donate to a spontaneous adventure. No less to a nation they had not given a moment’s thought until the text arrived.
Curiously, they say yes. It has happened three times during my working life. Canadian winters escaped by trotting to New Zealand, embalmed in festive cheer and soaring heat. A summer outing on trains across Hungary, Austria, and Switzerland, from burning pavements to the breezy Alps, from walking through air-conditioned museums to rolling around in a Soviet era jeep. And now we look forward to Fall hikes into the wild nowheres that dominate the Chilean terrain. To time budgeted for its companion islands, arid deserts, and stormy South.
Good friends. Few in number and anywhere from hundreds to several thousand kilometers apart, but easy to restart conversations with, sometimes years after they dropped off.
I have discussed the pull of the foreign before. It is a gravity unequally distributed amongst the group and we are the better for it. We each chase a different spark as we prepare ourselves for the journey.
The flickers of magic in new locations that one dwells on in anticipation of novel experiences. They always seem to appear when least expected, in different spots than predicted, and are sometimes not fully understood until months or years afterwards. I remember thinking that the epic scenery of Canterbury would uniquely elicit that sought feeling of awe – that within the first week on the land of the long white cloud I would capture the magic, if briefly, of travel beyond regular horizons. The region was spectacular, yet it was pleasantly the start of stumbling through a larger fantasy filled with similar highlights. I felt myself reflecting many months later on how there is a spell over that entire corner of the world. Its distinctive wildlife, volcanic landscapes, and tussle with existence in the liminal. Oceans away, a land where caves hold glow worms and hobbits alike.
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Weekly Picks – June 16, 2024
Credit (left to right, top to bottom): Frederic J. Brown/ AFP via Getty Images; Dan Kitwood/ Getty Images; Pete Niesen / Shutterstock; March Avery, Evening Reading, 1972/ ©2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), photo by Josh Schaedel; Carlos Jasso/Reuters
This week’s collection:
- Neymar: Bolivia’s Ladder Boy
- Inside Mexico’s anti-avocado militias
- Should I Have Kids?
- The Internet Supercharged the Exploitation of Black Culture
- The Great Video Game Swindle
- The prison system isn’t ‘broken’ – it’s designed to traumatize black people en masse
- The Oldest Ecosystems on Earth
Introductory excerpts quoted below. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
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Earth-Sized Company Towns
For a program that has created so many original, prescient musical numbers, South Park’s most blunt commentaries on common complacencies are sometimes found in straightforward reflections scored with throwback tracks. The decades-old song usually functioning as two reminders in one – of the cyclical lessons we face and their almost routine repurposing behind different masks.
Some people say a man is made outta mud
A poor man’s made outta muscle and blood
Muscle and blood and skin and bones
A mind that’s a-weak and a back that’s strongThis version of 1946’s “Sixteen Tons” (itself referring to a coal mining practice in the 1920s) was sung in 1955 by Tennessee Ernie Ford. It relays, as effectively in 2024 as back then, the forceful allying to an exploitative entity. Except today, the company towns are earth-sized; the swelling digital monopolies that tie themselves to our collective political economies at immeasurably large scales. The Titanics that carry with them the fate of markets, elections, freethought, and our environment.
You load 16 tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
St. Peter, don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the company storeIt is a strangely vanilla, yet efficient, montage in an episode with quite a few absurd zeniths. (Not every day does a man in a box end up the leader of a union drive.) No mystery why it came to mind as I went out to grab some takeout today. The two individuals ahead of me were on their phones, each awaiting a number of orders to be placed within a large, thermally insulated bag, each with a different food delivery app’s logo stamped across it.
I was born one mornin’ when the sun didn’t shine
I picked up my shovel and I walked to the min
I loaded 16 tons of number nine coal
And the straw boss said, “Well, a-bless my soul”The laboriousness of labor may change, but its structure remains consistent. And we have done not-too-well to find ourselves in similar places in relation to the power brokers of society, nearly a century apart.
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Running the Gauntlet
This post does not go much deeper than ‘I tried several spicy sauces for the novelty’.
After watching multiple episodes of the Youtube show, and knowing I would quickly consume any hot sauce in the kitchen, I decided to order the latest collection and test them out for myself. Results shared below.
The Context
I regularly consume very spicy food.
- Jalapenos, red chilis, and various store-bought hot peppers and sauces (including the stronger ones sourced from Asian markets) are a staple of my diet.
- I like spicy Asian cuisine – I have consumed the hottest achars, numbing spices, and hotpot mixes without too much issue. The phlegm may get going but I enjoy eating the dishes.
- For those who are familiar with Noodlebox – I like ordering a 4 or 5 on their spice menu. The 6 is usually too much for me to really enjoy the flavors. A bit of googling tells me their 6 is around 1,000,000 on the Scoville scale, which itself is a flawed metric.
I do not know how accurate all the spiciness measures are; no better way to confirm the heat than by trying it for myself!
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Weekly Picks – June 9, 2024
Credit (left to right): Aboodi Vesakaran; Project Syndicate; A section of the mural Alto al Fuego by Juana Alicia / Mauricio E. Ramirez / Public Books; Current Affairs
“‘There are decades where nothing happens,’ Lenin wrote, ‘and there are weeks where decades happen.’ The last eight months have seen an extraordinary acceleration of Israel’s long war against the Palestinians. Could the history of Zionism have turned out otherwise? Benjamin Netanyahu is a callow man of limited imagination, driven in large part by his appetite for power and his desire to avoid conviction for fraud and bribery (his trial has been running intermittently since early 2020). But he is also Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, and his expansionist, racist ideology is the Israeli mainstream. Always an ethnocracy based on Jewish privilege, Israel has, under his watch, become a reactionary nationalist state, a country that now officially belongs exclusively to its Jewish citizens.” (Adam Shatz, “Israel’s Descent”, LRB Vol. 46 No. 12)
This week’s collection:
- Israel’s Descent
- Finding Sanctuary in Art
- Stories Are Weapons
- The Possibilities for Child Liberation
- The New-Old Authoritarianism
- Don’t Major in English: And Other Bad Advice from the World
- Migrating Workers Provide Wealth for the World
Introductory excerpts quoted below. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
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Framing Life
We tend to think of our lives as narratives. Stories with beginnings, middles, and ends. Structured by significant nodes – moments marking personal evolution – and neatly annotated by epiphanies.
These narratives are always written after they have been lived. Meaning made by looking back; a historical decipherment of triumphs and defeats, challenges met or succumbed to, opportunities seized or lost. The narratives simplify the chaos and ascribe some measure of identity to our ‘self’. Without them, we seem to be lost. We cannot make sense of ourselves, of others, of everything around us that we interact with.
Everyone is a living book, being written and spoken ceaselessly. Together, we epitomize a colossal library. Humanity’s scripture, the collapsed state of a much more inscrutable existence. The lucid interpretation abided by but not quite believed. Authorships are shared – we take the pen when we are ready or able, but we are not necessarily the ones writing our own tale.
With those tendencies in mind, let us take a look at two brief stories. The lives of P and D. From the moment they graduated high school to now, with a particular focus on their labor.
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Weekly Picks – June 2, 2024
Credit (on left): Asimov Collective. Credits (center-left, clockwise): Shuyao Xiao; US National Archives; Charlie Riedel/ AP Images; Getty Images/ Anton Petrus. Credit (center-right): Thomas Presquet/ ESA. Credits (on right, top to bottom): Robert Duboise/ Wilhelmina Duboise/ Tampa Bay Times; Patapoutian Lab / Scripps Researcher Institute, La Jolla, CA.
This week’s collection:
- How the Guinness Brewery Invented the Most Important Statistical Method in Science
- To pee or not to pee? That is a question for the bladder — and the brain
- The 165-year reign of oil is coming to an end. But will we ever be able to live without it?
- The City Makes the Civilization
- You Can’t Turn Back the Clock on Genocide
- The Marked Man
- The Tower and the Sewer
- Haiti’s Sin of Resistance
- On the Crisis of Men
- The Insulin Empire
- Dominion
India’s gargantuan election is about to conclude. I am reminded of how many times people have willingly pedestalled would-be-fascists throughout history. Electing national shepherds under benign assumptions only to be led down malignant paths. Because reactionary politics are easier to adhere to in the face of failing institutions; scapegoating made much more digestible as a means to an end – a quicker path to socioeconomic prosperity. But the path is unsustainable, the suffering is incalculable, and the promised prosperity is a fantasy. It must be if it excludes segments of the populace.
What is happening in India is a microcosm of what is happening in many nations worldwide – a shift to radical populism that seeks victory through oppression, empowering those already in power, and tying the national sentiment to figures rather than democratic principles. The digital age, still in its infancy, has somehow made it easier to construct cults and disseminate charged doctrine rather than reinforce critical inquiry. On this, two writers from the East and West speak about a country where the idea of a republic is yet again on the ballot:
Introductory excerpts quoted below. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
Not quoted below, but further reading on a society cannibalizing itself. The first four dispatches are from the past week, while the last is from 2014 but worth sharing alongside them. From the creator of Arab Labor, who tried to make it work before reluctantly departing with his children’s welfare in mind.
- Israel’s Problem Is Its Rotting Society, Not Benny Gantz
- Superlatives
- ‘Exterminate the beasts’: How Israeli settlers took revenge for a murder in the West Bank
- The BBC Is Afraid to Report the Facts About Israel’s War
- Sayed Kashua: why I have to leave Israel
The BBC and Jacobin articles are purposefully relayed together here, a dialectical presentation for your interpretation.
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McFerrin
It is a curious refrain embedded into key moments throughout 2017’s The Square. Calm moments surrounded by uncomfortable situations; intonations amplifying unwelcome serenity.
When I first heard this portion of the soundtrack, I thought it was a unique instrumental. By the time it resurfaced during the last scene – the calmest of emotional climaxes to the story, where a young girl looks up at her father from the back seat, her previous respect undermined by his unstable actions and not-so-well-hidden mistreatment of others – I knew I needed to look it up. The track is such a perfect auxiliary to the ridiculous, and occasionally important, musings of Ruben Östlund. And of his many flawed characters.
I was pleasantly surprised to learn that it was Bobby McFerrin’s improvisations that scored this maelstrom of a film. In many ways, appropriate accompaniment.
An indie ditty for the middle of this, a most testing, week.