Weekly Picks – March 3, 2024
“His lips do not speak, and in the face of this muteness, I’m haunted. I fall static to my knees before the corpse of poetry.”
– Leopoldo María Panero
Credits (clockwise from bottom left): Daniel Acker / Bloomberg / Getty Images; Mira Sucharov / The Walrus; Avo Walker / Truthout; Dagny Bock: Dust by the Reflecting Pool, 2022; Dan Marker-Moore; Hossein Fatemi/Panos
A bookstore in its final days, memory incarnate. The voices of a gender, assured but unheard. The stark reality within all our horizons of a roofless existence. Propagandists who peddle moral fantasies. A diary of recycled narratives, waste, and sorting schemes. The beauty of dust’s movements on a global pallet. Preparations for science done in shadow as our lunar companion moves to conceal us from the Sun. And a poignant poem in the form of an editorial.
This week’s collection:
- Adeus aos Livros (Goodbye to Books)
- Silencing of the Girls
- I’ve Been Unhoused. It Could Happen to You. Let’s Stop Criminalizing It.
- The Academics Helping the Meat Industry Avoid Climate Scrutiny
- At the Recycling Centre
- The Cost of Our Debris
- How the Eclipse Will Change Solar Science Forever
Amira Hass tries to find the words:
- Gaza and Israel, a New Word Association Game
Further reading on the conflict from the past week:
Note that only excerpts (often introductory) are quoted. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
1. Adeus aos Livros (Goodbye to Books)
“I recall being struck by people’s investment in silencing girls. As if it were impossible to listen to girls and go on living in the way that we have been. As if somehow girls would blow the cover. I was taken aback by the incentives held out to girls not to say what otherwise they would say, and by the force brought to bear in making sure that, once a girl has come of age, her voice – a voice readily heard among young girls, a voice artists have heard and recorded across time and cultures – will be covered or, if outspoken, will be heard as ‘too loud’ or too much or somehow not right, and will not be listened to or taken seriously.
. . .
Judy, 13, speaks of losing her mind. Pointing to her gut, she explains that the mind ‘is associated with your heart and your soul and your inner feelings and your real feelings.’ She contrasts her mind with her brain, which she locates in her head and associates with her smartness, her intelligence and her education. Judy observes that, in the course of growing up, children are in danger of forgetting their minds, because of all the things that are ‘shoved at you into your brain.’ Thus she implicates schools in children’s losing touch with what she describes as ‘a deeper sort of knowing’.
. . .
These little girls illuminate the consciousness that the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio describes in his book The Feeling of What Happens (1999). In their bodies and in their emotions, they register their experience from moment to moment, picking up the music or the feeling of what happens, which then plays in their minds and thoughts. Thus they name what one can think of as relational crimes and misdemeanours – stealing someone’s attention, acting like one is the owner of others – and they are confident in their ability or power to do something about it. In Meeting at the Crossroads (1992), Lyn Mikel Brown and I report the findings of our five-year study involving close to 100 girls between the ages of seven and 18; we call these young girls ‘whistleblowers’ in the relational world. And you know what happens to whistleblowers!
‘I don’t know… I don’t know… I don’t know.’ As girls crossed the threshold from childhood into adolescence, this phrase peppered our interview transcripts. Listened to closely and questioned, it turned out that girls often knew what they claimed not to know. About themselves and others and the world they were living in. It was more as if they had lost their trust in their knowledge.”
3. I’ve Been Unhoused. It Could Happen to You. Let’s Stop Criminalizing It.
“I was transformed like cut-rate Disney magic into an invisible person and a visible threat, or prey. As a young woman, I was more perceived as the latter (though to a lesser degree than my nonwhite and noncis counterparts), and I learned to keep my head down, both to avoid sexual harassment but also to avoid the inevitable chastisement and life advice from people who weren’t unhoused, and who saw themselves as superior citizens because of it.
In our society, the burden and blame of being unhoused sit squarely on one’s own shoulders – one is told that one’s situation is a result of some moral deficiency. In truth, the reasons why people become unhoused are myriad, shaped by our existence in the waning capitalist empire known as the United States. There isn’t one reason that can be considered “outside” a system which upholds the ills of capitalism, racism, ableism, misogyny, colonialism, ageism and the downright lottery of what situation you were born into.
. . .
If we accept that unhoused folks are not the sole architects of their situation and are also people as diverse as the housed population — because all of us were at one point housed — this creates two problems within the false framework of individual failure. First, it humanizes us. Second, it means that the problem is systemic, so anyone could be in that situation, even you.
Even if you have housing right now, you are still likely only one or two emergencies away from being unhoused. In the richest country in the world, where 16 million homes sit vacant while on any given day currently some 650,000 Americans are unhoused (record numbers), and housing is unaffordable to half of all renters in the country, we are all on very shaky ground. This is a horrifying prospect, but one that should move us to establish a solidarity of the shaken, rather than cocoon in fear. It requires a connection not just of personal stories and struggles, but of systemic ones.”
4. The Academics Helping the Meat Industry Avoid Climate Scrutiny
“Initially, the industry attempted to solve its P.R. problem by pushing out press releases and fact sheets from suspiciously named front groups like the Center for Consumer Freedom and industry trade associations like the American Meat Institute. But as a new paper published this week makes clear, Big Meat swiftly turned instead to institutions the public was more likely to trust: universities.
. . .
This is a page straight out of tobacco and fossil fuel companies’ playbooks: funding so-called “merchants of doubt” to distort public conversations away from solutions in line with scientific consensus. These efforts, Jacquet and Morris write, have “helped downplay livestock’s contributions to climate change, increase public trust that the industry is proactively reducing emissions on its own accord, and shape climate policymaking in the industry’s favor.”
. . .
This approach was by design: Jacquet and Morris quote from IFeeder documents praising Mitloehner as a “a neutral, credible, third-party voice to news reporters and stakeholder groups at conferences and other important governmental meetings,” whose voice would help consumers “feel good about the choice they are making to include protein in their families’ diets.” The CLEAR Center was created, the documents say, to work “with decision makers, thought leaders and consumer influencers.”
This is one distinction between Big Ag’s approach and that of Big Tobacco or Big Oil, Jacquet told me. Whereas fossil fuel and tobacco companies prioritized funding academics whose studies came to industry-friendly solutions, Jacquet said, Big Ag companies are much more focused on promoting university-affiliated voices who will directly intervene in “public discourse, advocacy, and lobbying efforts.” The actual research, in this approach, isn’t the main point.”
A companion piece for those interested
“One of the shiniest new initiatives at COP28 in Dubai last December was the world’s first ‘Voluntary Recycling Credit’ scheme, which will allow companies to ‘offset’ their waste products by purchasing credits from recyclers. The marketplace for these credits will be blockchain-based, so that transactions can be tracked. Building on the dubious success of ‘carbon credit’ programmes, the scheme won’t force companies to produce less waste but will enable them to meet their net-zero targets by investing in recycling, thus propelling the growth of the global recycling industry. It’s tempting to laugh at this near-parodic display of green libertarianism: commercial actors, unhindered by state legislation, corralling one another to redirect capital flows by way of cryptocurrency, a technology so energy-intensive that its use in the scheme threatens to overwrite any projected ecological pay-off (the emissions generated by cryptocurrency each year are currently equivalent to those of Portugal). The launch of the VRC initiative, barely registered in the Anglophone press, indicates two things: first, that we are deeply in need of novel solutions to the global waste crisis; and second, that big business is still hoping we can recycle our way out of the mess we’re in.
. . .
Waste is something most of us would rather not think about, and recyclable waste lacks even the queasy glamour of the truly untouchable. It’s not ‘matter out of place’, as Mary Douglas said of dirt, but matter temporarily out of place, or sort-of-in-place, or might-one-day-be-back-in-place. Public trust in the recycling industry is low, dented by years of scandals over illegal dumping and mass exportation, and our understanding of what happens to the things we recycle is based on patchy and sometimes contradictory information.
. . .
A recycling centre is a good place to go for a glimpse into the 21st-century industrial sublime. The one I visited had a suspended complex of steel steps and walkways jutting out over a multi-tiered superhighway of conveyor belts, each carrying its own stream of detritus. The waste was jostled across fleets of platforms, which filtered out large scraps of cardboard, before being fed past huge magnets to remove clumps of metal, then churned through a series of automated sorting devices, which use near-infrared scanners to eject materials based on their size and grain. A complex air-filtration system prevents the smell inside the plant – starchy and sour, with a soiled undertone from all those dregs and residues – from escaping into the surrounding area. Standing above the maze of conveyor belts, you can watch as the relics from a thousand domestic scenes – broken toys, bank statements, vodka bottles, handwritten notes – float serenely into the jaws of the machines.
. . .
The problem is that manufacturers are keener to imply that their products are sustainable than to admit that they aren’t. In 2020, the head of the American Plastics Industry Society remarked that ‘if the public thinks that recycling is working, they are not going to be as concerned about the environment.’ A good show of ‘greenwashing’ can divert attention from the ecological cost of mass-producing single-use items.”
“Dust can be both the essence of deadness and the substance of life. To Darwin, pollen is a “fecundating dust.” To Tennyson—and to T.H. Huxley, who quotes Tennyson’s lines in his review of On the Origin of Species (1859)—life is “but dust that rises up/And is lightly laid again.” In Blake’s Europe: A Prophecy (1794), the narrator asks a fairy, “What is the material world, and is it dead?” To which the fairy responds, “Every particle of dust breathes forth its joy.” Death and life meet in dust, entwined in materiality. There’s something nearly cellular—almost transcendent—about it, as Shakespeare suggests in Measure for Measure. “Thou art not thyself,” Duke Vincentio tells Claudio, “For thou exists on many a thousand grains/That issue out of dust.” The duke is describing, I think, what a much later writer calls “a temporary agreement among atoms” or “microscopic life particles,” which cohere in the “fantastical structure” of the body, where the “I” believes it has sovereignty—thus raising the question of how and where and under what conditions dust becomes not only galaxies and planets but self and spirit.
. . .
Dust is “matter at the very limit-point of formlessness, the closest ‘stuff’ gets to nothing.” So it’s not surprising that we generally recognize it not by what it’s made of but by the form it takes—the minuteness of its particles, how evenly it lies on a polished surface, the way it plumes in the wind and motes in the sunlight.3 Do you know where your dust originates and what it contains? Dust is local—there it is on your dashboard and under your sofa—yet it’s global, too, traveling immense distances on the wind. It is ubiquitous.
. . .
And yet dust isn’t merely negation, disintegration, the ultimate, nihilistic end of “stuff.” A world without dust would be a world without movement, without friction, without change of any sort—a world that doesn’t spin or orbit or even belong to this dusty universe. “Culturally,” Owens writes, “dust may be a metaphor for time, decay and forgottenness.” But in the flow of our planet’s systems, it’s “an element as important as oxygen, or water or ice.””
7. How the Eclipse Will Change Solar Science Forever
“On April 8, 2024, a 115-mile-wide strip of North America will be plunged into darkness. The disk of the moon will slip in front of the sun, obscuring its face and creating a rosy, fluffy crown of flame visible from Mazatlán, Mexico, to Newfoundland, Canada. It will be the last spectacle of its kind for a generation—the next total solar eclipse viewable from across North America will be on August 23, 2044.
Spectators aren’t the only ones excited. A solar eclipse is one of the best ways for scientists to study the solar corona, that ring of fire that stands out when the moon blocks our bright star. This feature remains one of the most mysterious parts of the sun. Astronomers originally thought the corona was a feature of the moon—perhaps sunlight reflecting off the lunar atmosphere. But the moon has no atmosphere. It was not until 1806 that Spanish astronomer José Joaquín de Ferrer recognized it was a feature of the sun instead, giving it the name corona, the Spanish word for “crown.”
We now know that the corona is the sun’s shockingly hot outer atmosphere. This atmosphere releases a mysterious “wind” of particles and occasionally unleashes clumps of itself in roiling packages of energy called coronal mass ejections. What we don’t know, however, is how or why those things happen.
. . .
Solar physics was born during a total solar eclipse in August 1868. Astronomers had just begun using prisms to investigate spectroscopy, splitting the sun’s light into its component colors to study the star’s chemical makeup. The sun’s spectrum contains barcodelike dark lines indicating the presence of elements such as hydrogen, sodium and iron, among others. Two astronomers independently captured the sun’s spectrum during the August 1868 eclipse and found that it contained a new line corresponding to a new element—the first element discovered off Earth. They named it helium, after the Greek god Helios, who represented the sun.
The following year, during another total solar eclipse, astronomers in Iowa saw something else odd in the sun’s spectrum: a bright green line in the corona that they suspected belonged to a new chemical element. They announced the discovery of coronium, found only in the sun’s halo of glorious purple-pink flames. It would be 70 years before another physicist correctly identified coronium as a strange form of iron that had been ionized 13 times, meaning it had half the electrons of a typical iron atom. This state was possible only if the iron atoms had been cooked in a terrific crucible of around two million degrees Fahrenheit. The surface of the sun, however, is 10,000 degrees F. That meant the corona was 200 times hotter than the surface, where the heat and light are emitted. It would be like sitting in front of a campfire in a seat 200 times hotter than the burning wood. Scientists have struggled to explain this immense temperature difference ever since. “That’s where modern solar physics really starts,” says Dan Seaton, a solar physicist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. “Nobody had ever thought that the sun would have had million-degree or hotter plasma in it. What does it mean? What are the consequences of it?””
8. Gaza and Israel, a New Word Association Game
“The atrocities of October 7. The wounded. The bombed. The thirsty. That’s them. Our hostages. Shelled. We’re doing the shelling. They drink contaminated water. What do the hostages drink? Four hundred people lined up for a toilet. Diarrhea. There is no water or toilet paper. The prices are sky-high. How are the hostages managing? There are no sanitary pads either. What are the hostages managing with?
A father cries as he carries his dead baby. You won’t see it on Israeli television. The Hamas leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, walks in flip-flops through a tunnel. Yes, seen on Israeli television. With his children. Some 10,000 Palestinian children have been killed. Maybe 11,000 already. How many babies? Who can count them all? We’ve bombed them. We’ve killed them. A girl in a pink dress. A boy who loved ice cream. Blue plastic shrouds. A mass grave. White cloth shrouds.
Here lie their dead in the square. Impressive tactical achievements, the army spokesperson says. We make every effort not to harm innocent civilians. Today we killed dozens of terrorists. The army killed police officers securing aid trucks from looters. A soldier is killed in an encounter with terrorists in Gaza. Protecting their home. Was there a home?
. . .
After the bombings, a few hairs on Gaza children’s heads turn white. White shrouds. Blue shrouds. A mass grave. The IDF excavates cemeteries. Brings back bodies in vans. The finish line. The red line.”
Further reading on the conflict from the past week: