Weekly Picks – February 25, 2024
Credits (clockwise from bottom left): Sarah O’Gorman / UPY2024; Mustafa Saeed / Noema Magazine; Lalo de Almeida / Folhapress / Panos / Redux; Realy Easy Star / Giuseppe Masci / Alamy; John Moore / Getty Images; María Jesús Contreras
Some standout articles sandwiched between visions from different timelines that share the same world. Plus a deep dive into the lobbyists and billionaires who have undermined one of the most exemplary public vaccination campaigns in humanity’s history.
The main montage, then. Stories from the streets from individuals who find themselves homeless, in a fight not to be pigeonholed as scapegoats. Radical new histories enabled by advancements in science. An argument against the child-laden life from the proselytizer’s of antinatalism. Dispatches from the poet politicians reshaping the Horn of Africa. And the invisible emissions seeping through legal loopholes to grey our future sky, one dying oil well at a time.
This week’s collection:
- A Life Without a Home: Voices from the tents, shelters, cars, motels and couches of America.
- Solar storms, ice cores and nuns’ teeth: the new science of history
- The Case Against Children: Among the antinatalists
- A Country Shaped By Poetry
- The Rising Cost of the Oil Industry’s Slow Death
- Winners of the 2024 Underwater Photographer of the Year Contest
On the fight against a sane approach to cooperation on public health:
- The West Is Sabotaging a Global Pandemic Treaty
- Further reading:
- A podcast discussion on the topic:
Note that only excerpts (often introductory) are quoted. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
1. A Life Without a Home: Voices from the tents, shelters, cars, motels and couches of America.
“A record number of people across the country are experiencing homelessness: the federal government’s annual tally last year revealed the highest numbers of unsheltered people since the count began in 2007. Politicians and policymakers are grappling with what can be done. But the people who are actually experiencing homelessness are rarely part of the conversation.
Lori Teresa Yearwood, a journalist who lived through years of homelessness, spoke of the ways we discount those without shelter. “Society created a new species of people, and we carefully crafted an image of them: one of broken passivity and victimhood, people in need of constant scrutiny and monitoring,” she said in a 2022 speech. “When we shift and widen the perspective of the unhoused, that’s when things radically change.” Ms. Yearwood collaborated with Times Opinion on this project before her untimely death in September. She understood what many who have not experienced homelessness ignore: that people without shelter have something to say — and often something of great worth — about what it’s like to live inside this country’s cobbled-together solutions.
That’s why we sent reporters and photographers to different parts of the country to meet with people experiencing homelessness in very different ways. We asked them to fill out surveys, take videos, use disposable cameras and have their children share drawings.
Whatever led them to homelessness, the people who spoke to The Times want a way out. As the nation debates how to help them, they shared the solutions they want to see.”
2. Solar storms, ice cores and nuns’ teeth: the new science of history
“In its core techniques, history writing hasn’t changed that much since classical times. As a historian, you can do what Herodotus did – travel around talking to interesting people and gathering their recollections of events (though we now sometimes call this journalism). Or you can do what most of the historians that followed him did, which is to compile documents written in the past and about the past, and then try to make their different accounts and interpretations square up. That’s certainly the way I was trained in graduate school in the 2000s. We read primary texts written in the periods we studied, and works by later historians, and then tried to fit an argument based on those documents into a conversation conducted by those historians.
But what if there was another way? What if instead of digging in the archives and criticising arguments, you could write history directly from the physical remains of the past, reconstructing events with the forensic detail of a crime scene investigator? This would be a history written not from words, but from things. Archaeology, art history and other disciplines rooted in the close study of material culture have long held out this promise. But traditionally there has been a dividing line between what they could offer and what was seen by many historians as their true task. These fields tended to move on different scales, and paid attention to different subjects. Historians, examining archival documents, written annals and inscriptions, focused more on named individuals in specific moments. Archaeologists and their brethren, examining changing styles of architecture, burials, fragments of ceramics and so on, gathered plenty of information, but on a broader scale. In a few places, such as the study of coins and seals, the two methods overlap. But generally speaking, these two approaches to the past – text-based and thing-based – have been assigned in different domains. Recently though, this division has become blurrier.
In the past decade or so, scientists’ ability to extract information from material remains has grown exponentially. In some cases, such as the study of ancient climates, old techniques have been employed with new scope and precision. In others, procedures such as whole-genome DNA sequencing – once expensive and error-prone when applied to ancient samples – have become reliable and ubiquitous. We also have brand new methods of dating, imaging and chemical analysis, which have allowed the detritus of antiquity – everything from teeth to shoes to ancient rubbish itself – to speak about the past as eloquently as any archive.”
3. The Case Against Children: Among the antinatalists
“Why put someone through that, Alex and Dietz agreed, when a child could just as well never have known existence at all? The unborn do not appear to be moaning at us from the void, petitioning to be let into life. This idea—that having children is unethical—has come to be known as antinatalism, and in 2021 Dietz set up an Instagram account for a new organization he called Stop Having Kids. By then, the two were dating, although most of the time still living apart. Every so often, they met to hold demonstrations for Stop Having Kids, which Dietz has over time built into a real operation with donors who fund billboards that say things like procreation is not a responsibility and make love not babies.
. . .
Most of the time, the people who approached wanted to know if the demonstration had to do with overpopulation and climate change. Probably because they have encountered the term “antinatalism,” or similar-sounding ones like “child-free,” in the New York Times or the Washington Post, on NPR or the BBC or CNN, all of which have asked in the past few years whether people should still have children with the planet heating up so severely. Generally, these articles and news segments conclude that it’s fine to have kids, as individual self-denial isn’t what big social changes are made of—a conclusion that frustrates many antinatalists, who argue that making the world better is just one of the numerous benefits of abstaining from procreation, but not the primary one. The point is that if people stopped having babies, there would no longer be anyone new whom we might need to protect from climate change, or who would be obliged to try to solve it. The point is that the planet would be better off without people, and that people would be better off not being people.
. . .
Benatar introduced the word “antinatalism” into circulation in his 2006 book Better Never to Have Been. Using what has since been described in antinatalist circles as the “asymmetry argument,” Benatar argues that existence contains both benefits and harm, whereas non-existence contains neither. The most ethical choice, given this asymmetry, is to avoid harm. In fact, he argues, each of us has a duty to keep from increasing the world’s net suffering, a responsibility that procreation necessarily violates. “Only existers suffer harm,” Benatar writes. “None of this befalls the non-existent.””
“In Somaliland, poems were often recited to pass the time by men leading camel trains and by women weaving mats to cover their domed huts. Like the lives of the nomadic people who spoke them, the poems were cyclical. When their speakers moved, they brought their animals and their poetry. At each stop along this annual migration, the women would reuse the verses as they built their thatched homes and the men would recite them as they moved their herds to water.
But poems also served a utilitarian, public purpose: they could be deployed to argue a court case or to make peace between warring families. And their lines were powerful in ways few other nations could understand. In Somaliland, an autonomous region perched at the northern tip of Somalia, poetry had sparked wars, toppled governments, and offered paths to peace.
. . .
The poetic guidelines that have lived in the heads of Somali poets could fill an encyclopedia. There are styles for love poems and styles used for nationalist verse during the independence struggle; there are styles to be accompanied by the oud, a stringed instrument from the Middle East; and a shorter, faster meter reserved for women.
. . .
For more than a century, Somaliland had suffered under colonialism, dictatorship, civil war and economic collapse. Sometimes tensions became so taut that they seemed to explode into verse. Although journalists were often stifled, poets could more freely air their grievances publicly and watch them spread. One poem might spark another, then another and another.
When a debate — known as a silsilad or “chain” — was in full swing, poets near and far could weigh in with verse of their own. They’d recite their contributions publicly, relying on the listeners to memorize and spread the poems. Later, technology allowed them to record their contributions on cassette tapes and send their voices into the diaspora, where they’d be copied and shared.”
5. The Rising Cost of the Oil Industry’s Slow Death
“In the 165 years since the first American oil well struck black gold, the industry has punched millions of holes in the earth, seeking profits gushing from the ground. Now, those wells are running dry, and a generational bill is coming due.
Until wells are properly plugged, many leak oil and brine onto farmland and into waterways and emit toxic and explosive gasses, rendering redevelopment impossible. A noxious lake inundates West Texas ranchland, oil bubbles into a downtown Los Angeles apartment building and gas seeps into the yards of suburban Ohio homes.
But the impact is felt everywhere, as many belch methane, the second-largest contributor to climate change, into the atmosphere.
There are more than 2 million unplugged oil and gas wells that will need to be cleaned up, and the current production boom and windfall profits for industry giants have obscured the bill’s imminent arrival.
. . .
The industry’s household names — Chevron, ExxonMobil and others — often reap the biggest profits from any given oil field. As the booms fade and production falls, wells are sold to a string of ever-smaller companies, many of which let the infrastructure fall into disrepair while violations and leaks skyrocket. The number of idled wells soars too, as companies warehouse them to avoid costly cleanup. By this point, regulators’ hands are tied because the bonds states demand to use as leverage are so small. Seeing little incentive to plug wells and get their tiny bonds back, companies slip into bankruptcy court, where executives are protected from their environmental liabilities. When the dust settles, the government is on the hook for the now-orphaned wells.”
6. Winners of the 2024 Underwater Photographer of the Year Contest
7. The West Is Sabotaging a Global Pandemic Treaty
“It is a certainty that there will be other pandemics. The emergence of novel infectious diseases is a condition of living on the planet. Their rapid spread across borders is a condition of modernity — of the extent of trade, travel, high-speed transport, and migration that it affords us. In the fourteenth century, it took over a decade for the bubonic plague to spread along the Silk Road from southwestern China to Italy. Today, pathogens can catch a lift on a holidaymaker flying home and cross the world in a single afternoon. Deforestation significantly exacerbates the threat, but even a world with much more extensive forest protection would not be able to avoid outbreaks.
. . .
At some point, a much more serious pathogen — one, say, with the infectiousness of measles combined with the lethality of Ebola, where some two-thirds of those infected die — could emerge through spillover, accident, or design.
It is this ever-present threat, with fresh experience of the world’s catastrophic response to COVID-19 to learn from, that has driven the nations of the world to craft a new, global pandemic treaty. As Charles Michel, the outgoing president of the European Council and an early supporter of a treaty, wrote in 2021, outlining the rationale for building a new global system: “No single government or institution can address the threat of future pandemics alone.”
. . .
With little light being shone on the talks, the negotiators from Western powers have quietly backed away from any notion of equity between developed and developing nations, in service of the protection of the intellectual property (IP) rights of pharmaceutical firms. Efforts toward even beginning a conversation about the substantial financing necessary for pandemic preparedness, including funding monitoring and sharing of information on pathogens, have also come to naught.
. . .
And even if some sort of agreement is reached at the eleventh hour, public health officials at the few international bodies cobbled together during COVID-19 to shave off the sharp edges of lack of access to vaccines in the Global South warn that there is no enforcement mechanism. Without enforcement, they say, the whole endeavor is merely an exercise in symbolism.”
Further reading for those interested in the movements for and against a global and equitable approach to vaccine distribution:
And a podcast discussion on the topic: