Weekly Picks – March 24, 2024

“The unique life philosophy of Abdi, born in Somalia, living in the Netherlands.” More at Aeon here.

Credits (clockwise from bottom left): Andrew Testa/ Panos; Kelly Cheng Travel Photography/ Getty Images; Wan Azizi Ws/ Getty Images/ 500px; Evelyn Hofer; AP Photo/ Mahesh Kumar A.; Francisco Negroni; Stefanie Loos; Priscilla Du Preez/ Unsplash.com; Undark via DALL-E; Brandi Morin. Middle: Stefan Gutermuth/ Slate.

This week’s collection:

And a lovely picture to cap things off:

Lava-Lit Lenticular Cloud Crowns Volcano in Spectacular Photo

Introductory excerpts quoted below. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.

1. Are Evidence-Based Medicine and Public Health Incompatible?

“McLean and Edmunds are experts in infectious disease modeling; they build elaborate simulations of pandemics, which they use to predict how infections will spread and how best to slow them down. Often, during the Covid-19 pandemic, such models were used alongside other forms of evidence to urge more restrictions to slow the spread of the disease. Heneghan, meanwhile, is a prominent figure in the world of evidence-based medicine, or EBM. The movement aims to help doctors draw on the best available evidence when making decisions and advising patients. Over the past 30 years, EBM has transformed the practice of medicine worldwide.

Whether it can transform the practice of public health — which focuses not on individuals, but on keeping the broader community healthy — is a thornier question. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Heneghan and several other prominent EBM thinkers became influential critics of pandemic policies. The specifics of their critiques vary, but certain themes emerge: Again and again, they have argued that public health leaders like McLean relied too heavily on error-prone models, biased evidence, and simple intuition when making consequential decisions. At the same time, they say, those public health experts did little to gather rigorous data to back up their claims about the usefulness of interventions like mask mandates and school closures.

In response, some public health experts and physicians — including other prominent people in the EBM movement — have argued that researchers like Heneghan and his allies have overstepped their bounds, making unreasonable demands on public health that can be used to further political agendas.

Versions of this debate pop up regularly — over masks, school closures, and even in areas outside of pandemic policy, such as treatment for children experiencing gender dysphoria.

Taken alone, each can be understood as its own little flashpoint. But there’s a bigger debate underway — one that has profound implications for the future of public health practice. At stake are deep divisions over how scientific evidence should be used to make decisions.”

2. Botswana’s inspirational women safari guides who are navigating change

“In the early morning light, before the blistering Botswana sun reaches full heat, the only sounds are the brushing of traditional mokoro canoes as they slide over the grass and slip gently into the glassy waters of the Okavango Delta. Eager tourists sit poised with cameras and smartphones as their mokoro guides, or “polers” as they are known, expertly cast them off from shore with their lengthy poles pushing deep into the delta’s muddy bed. It’s a trade that requires a challenging combination of balance and physical strength, as well as in-depth knowledge of wildlife and wilderness survival skills.

Traditionally, this has been considered a man’s job, but now a handful of courageous women are challenging stereotypes and steering change in the world of guiding.

. . .

Compared to other high-profile safari destinations, like Kruger National Park in nearby South Africa, humans have had very little impact on the Okavango. The Delta spans a colossal area of substantially undisturbed wetlands and seasonally flooded grasslands, and because of its vast size, access and development is difficult. Tourism to the inner Delta is limited to small, tented camps reached mainly by air.

Mothogaathobogwe is part of the indigenous Bayei tribe from Maun, who live on the outskirts of the Delta and follow a sustainable lifestyle that has long preserved the integrity of the Delta’s many different habitats and inhabitants. The Bayei play a vital role in helping to stem poaching and farming threats…As she steers, Mothogaathobogwe scans the water’s surface, wary of encountering hippos and crocodiles, all the while explaining the ecosystems we are gliding through. Her trained eye can spot the tiniest of green frogs latched onto a reed. This type of safari is in stark contrast to the typical, bumpy, four-wheeled game drives in search of the big five.

As Mothogaathobogwe picks a water lily and fashions it into a necklace, she reflects on what her life would be like if it weren’t for this tourism opportunity.”

3. The Fading Memories of Youth

“You might think you remember taking a trip to Disneyland when you were 18 months old, or that time you had chickenpox when you were 2—but you almost certainly don’t. However real they may seem, your earliest treasured memories were probably implanted by seeing photos or hearing your parents’ stories about waiting in line for the spinning teacups. Recalling those manufactured memories again and again consolidated them in your brain, making them as vivid as your last summer vacation.

People generally remember nothing from before age 3, and children’s memory abilities don’t fully mature until about age 7. “It’s a paradox in a sense,” says neuroscientist Flavio Donato of the University of Basel. “In the moment that the brain is learning at a rate it will never show again during the whole lifetime, those memories seem not to stick in the brain.”

For many years, researchers assumed babies’ brains are simply not mature enough to form lasting memories. Theories have abounded as to whether this is a biological immaturity or something more psychological, such as a lack of a sense of oneself as an individual or the ability to use language. Sigmund Freud, however, believed infants do form memories, but the brain suppresses them so we forget the psychosexual experience of birth. He called the process “infantile amnesia.”

New research is beginning to suggest Freud was right about the forgetting, if not about its purpose. It appears the brain actually can create memories before age 3—although perhaps in a different way from adult memories—and those memories may persist into adulthood. But we can’t consciously access them.”

4. Empire of the ants: what insect supercolonies can teach us

“It is a familiar story: a small group of animals living in a wooded grassland begin, against all odds, to populate Earth. At first, they occupy a specific ecological place in the landscape, kept in check by other species. Then something changes. The animals find a way to travel to new places. They learn to cope with unpredictability. They adapt to new kinds of food and shelter. They are clever. And they are aggressive.

In the new places, the old limits are missing. As their population grows and their reach expands, the animals lay claim to more territories, reshaping the relationships in each new landscape by eliminating some species and nurturing others. Over time, they create the largest animal societies, in terms of numbers of individuals, that the planet has ever known. And at the borders of those societies, they fight the most destructive within-species conflicts, in terms of individual fatalities, that the planet has ever known.

This might sound like our story: the story of a hominin species, living in tropical Africa a few million years ago, becoming global. Instead, it is the story of a group of ant species, living in Central and South America a few hundred years ago, who spread across the planet by weaving themselves into European networks of exploration, trade, colonisation and war. Some even stowed away on the 16th-century Spanish galleons that carried silver across the Pacific from Acapulco to Manila. During the past four centuries, these animals have globalised their societies alongside our own.

. . .

Unicolonial ants are superb and unfussy scavengers that can hunt animal prey, eat fruit or nectar, and tend insects such as aphids for the sugary honeydew they excrete. They are also adapted to living in regularly disrupted environments, such as river deltas prone to flooding (the ants either get above the waterline, by climbing a tree, for example, or gather into living rafts and float until it subsides). For these ants, disturbance is a kind of environmental reset during which territories have to be reclaimed. Nests – simple, shallow burrows – are abandoned and remade at short notice. If you were looking to design a species to invade cities, suburbs, farmland and any wild environment affected by humans, it would probably look like a unicolonial ant: a social generalist from an unpredictable, intensely competitive environment.”

5. Rejecting the Binary

“Thirty-four years and at least a dozen books after Gender Trouble (on their own and co-written with other scholars, covering subjects from hate speech to post-9/11 global politics to Zionist nationalism to the COVID-19 pandemic), Butler is publishing their first book with a nonacademic press. Who’s Afraid of Gender?, out this month from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is not the simplified, popularized reworking of their early writings on the topic you might expect. Nor is it a polemic in the tradition of Gender Trouble. Instead, it’s an analysis of contemporary political and cultural battles over the very topics that Butler’s early work brought into wider public discussion: the mutability and potential for radical social change that are contained in the category of gender, along with the right of women and all queer, gender-nonconforming, and trans people to live freely and safely in the world.

So who is afraid of gender? Many, many institutional and governmental entities, not to mention activist groups both online and off, are now staging a mass moral panic about a “phantasmatic cluster” of anxieties related to gender and sexuality: queer and trans rights, feminism, abortion, contraception, reproductive technology, book banning. These issues, Butler demonstrates, can all be seen as parts of one very large and urgent problem: the global rise of authoritarianism. Donald Trump, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro—right-wing leaders and religious organizations from around the world are all busy stoking the same fearful rhetoric around the same handful of reliably incendiary issues. Any consumer of right-wing media is dosed many times per hour with “news” about their children being groomed by secret networks of left-wing pedophiles, or the imminent threat posed by imaginary gender pirates whose demand for basic bodily autonomy somehow imperils the sexual self-definition and even the continued existence of heteronormative cis people.

As statistics persistently show, the reverse is true: It’s women and LGBTQ+ people, especially those of color, who are far more likely to be the targets of workplace discrimination, online and street harassment, sexual violence, and murder. The projection of one’s own desire to oppress onto the target of that persecution is the kind of psychosocial phenomenon Butler excels at spotting in the wild, and at dismantling with the swiftness of a hunter field-dressing their prey.”

6. AP finds grueling conditions in Indian shrimp industry that report calls ‘dangerous and abusive’

“From the ponds, trucks hauled the shrimp to peeling sheds. In one shed, dozens of women, some barefoot, stood on narrow wooden benches enduring 10-hour shifts peeling shrimp covered in crushed ice. Barehanded or wearing filthy, torn gloves, the women twisted off the heads, pulled off the legs and pried off the shells, making it possible for American cooks to simply tear open a bag and toss the shrimp in a skillet.

From India, the shrimp travels by the ton, frozen in shipping containers, to the U.S., more than 8,000 miles away. It is nearly impossible to tell where a specific shrimp ends up, and whether a U.S.-bound shipment has a connection to abusive labor practices. And Indian shrimp is regularly sold in major U.S. stores such as Walmart, Target and Sam’s Club and supermarkets like Kroger and Safeway.

. . .

Erugula Baby, 51, widowed and destitute, sold her gold jewelry — her only savings — and then took out loan after loan in her rural Indian village as her son lay dying of liver disease. Her debt topped $8,500 and her son didn’t survive. Today she’s raising her granddaughters and trying to repay the loans, help her daughter-in-law get an education and, on a good day, eat a small amount of rice. She said she works in brutal conditions, peeling, cutting and grading shrimp in a factory for less than $4 a day, which is $2 less than minimum wage.

“The working conditions are tough,” she said, wiping away tears with the corner of her red sari. “Standing for long hours in the cold while peeling and cutting shrimp takes a toll on my body.”

Baby and other workers said they pay recruiters about 25 cents a day out of their salaries just to set foot inside the processing shed. Transportation in company buses is also deducted from some workers’ salaries, along with the cost of lunch from company canteens. Many workers have no contracts, and no recourse if they are hurt on the job.

. . .

Many people in India struggle to survive amid endemic poverty, debt and unemployment. The women AP spoke with said this work, despite the oppressive conditions, is their only chance to avoid starvation. The economic drivers go beyond shrimp, and beyond India, to issues of globalization and Western power.”

7. In oil country, First Nation with high cancer rates accuses AER of ‘regulated murder’

“Last year, Fort Chipewyan officials, alongside those from several other affected Indigenous communities, learned of a 5.3 million litre spill from Imperial Oil’s Kearl Mine (located about 75 kilometres upstream of the community). Soon after, they found out about another spill at the same mine site that had been leaking for at least nine months before they learned about it.

Despite mine employees discovering the leak in 2022, and then notifying Imperial, which in turn alerted the AER, neither told affected Indigenous communities, the public, or provincial, territorial and federal governments. They were only informed when an Environmental Protection Order was released by the AER.

In October, the Canadian Press reported that Imperial Oil and the AER already knew that the tailings had been leaking for years.

. . .

In Fort Chipewyan, there continues to be documented elevated rates of cancer and other diseases with no official explanation as to the source. For the community, the tailings spills have heightened existing local concerns over contamination.

“The people know that something is up, that something is going on,” Rigney, a member of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, said earlier that day while sipping coffee at her kitchen table. “We knew from day one.”

. . .

These days, the conditions of the river and aquatic life are declining, she says. It’s common to find deformed fish in their catches, and many suspect the oddities are directly linked to industrial pollution upstream.

Nevertheless, Rigney practices her traditions like harvesting, drying and canning fish, and spending as much time as she can out on the territory.

“Even though I know my land is poisoned, I’ll still go out to Jackfish as soon as I can (if we can have enough water to get into the river this year). There is nothing more beautiful than spring on the land.”

Her eyes gaze longingly out her kitchen window and her voice momentarily trails away. “The ducks, the robins. And, oh my God, you know… it’s beautiful.”

Rigney says she’s lost count of how many people in Fort Chipewyan have died too soon.”

8. The Basis of Everything: The Fragility of Character in a Truth-Challenged World

“The great Catholic theologian and philosopher Romano Guardini began his 1963 book The Virtues with reflections on truthfulness, arguing that, among the virtues, it has absolute value. Truthfulness is an obligation, he insisted, never an option. We must always speak the truth and act so as not to mislead. Neither resistance nor possible harm relieves us of that responsibility.

Truthfulness was foundational for Guardini (and Western tradition back to the ancient Greeks), not only because faithfulness to truth is the basis of good relations and the life of the community, but because it is the bedrock of human character. Truthfulness in speech and action gives us “something clear and firm,” he observed, as is confirmed by such statements as “What is right, must be done.” Through truth, honesty, and reliability we become stable and attain character, that solid inner core and fixed vantage point from which we navigate our way in the world.

In his own day, Guardini contended, the virtue of truthfulness—and by extension, character—had “suffered great damage.” He was not alone in that conviction then; he is even less so now.

. . .

If we look at virtually any area of contemporary life, from business to politics to journalism or higher education, the evidence of growing dishonesty is overwhelming. “Our problem today,” writes the psychologist William Damon, surveying the wreckage, “is that we seem to be entering a dysfunctional period of social change in which an essential commitment to truthfulness no longer seems to be assumed.”

What is happening?”

9. Abolish the clubs: The chumocracy is poison for democracy

“There is a more serious problem with clubs, and the fact that the Garrick excludes women is only a part of it. Indeed, private clubs exclude far more than “just” 51 percent of the population –– a sense of exceptionality, rarity, refinement, is their very essence. It’s what creates and reaffirms entitlement to be in power, since the social capital that produces that power is supposed to be based on merit and “greatness.”

. . .

The Garrick is not the only one. Clubs are everywhere: from the Bullingdon Club to Boodle’s to the ill-fated Soho House. And we don’t call all of them “clubs”: think of traditional fraternities in The Netherlands and Belgium — they too forge elite influence through socialisation behind closed doors. All of these are a defining feature of unapologetic elitism, in societies where access to power is already disproportionately distributed by way of nepotism. Whether we’re talking about the overrepresentation by those who attended public schools, or the revolving door between Westminster and multinationals, or about medical equipment deals being handed out to “friends” — it’s the super-rich who stand to gain the most. To defend clubs is to defend white male privilege. But it’s also to defend a deeply anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian institution whose main function is the maintenance of inequalities of wealth and what we call “distinction”.”

10. It’s dirty work

“In The Managed Heart (1979), the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild identified and defined this kind of workplace interaction as ‘emotional labour’. Or: ‘the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display.’ Inspired by Erving Goffman’s work on the different roles we play, Hochschild built her case by looking at jobs in the service industry or in care work that require people to control their feelings and exhibit emotional responses that meet the demands of their role. In a restaurant, a waitress must smile at an angry customer; staff in elder care homes should remain considerate with each resident when faced with two hours to change 20 beds. For Hochschild, emotional labour describes a monetary exchange for correctly shaped emotions. It involves the development of (often unrecognised) communication and stress management skills. Over 25 years of hospital work as a therapist, then supervising and training clinical teams, I’ve learnt to present a calm demeanour. Alongside doctors, nurses and teams dealing with suicides, domestic violence, road accidents, insults, manipulation, distress, blood, abandonment, vomit, illness, child abuse, rape, pain and death, I’ve developed skills to comfort and conciliate.

When they work well, hospitals should provide respite and relief. Yet, backstage, this emotional work is messy and grim. It can be classified as ‘dirty work’, a concept developed by sociologists and political scientists, such as Joan Tronto, for work that remains hidden, the underbelly of society. Emotional hospital work is upsetting in the etymological sense – for it overturns, capsizes, the emotions. How do staff bridge this emotional gap?

. . .

Although emotional labour and emotional regulation are never explicitly detailed in a hospital job, implicitly they are required. A young doctor ought to be able to calmly announce the imminent death of a loved one to family without betraying that they’re feeling overwhelmed. An accident and emergency medical receptionist must settle an aggressively drunk woman, even if they feel terrified. Following a road accident, ambulance staff have to retrieve a family’s bodies from a car, manage their own emotional shock, and console the surviving member.

. . .

But if emotional labour is role playing a ‘caring’ role, what is happening to hospital employees offstage? How do staff discover how to help and yet not try to save the world; to create boundaries, but not build impenetrable walls; to assume a role, yet be authentic? How can doctors, nurses and paramedical personnel learn the script of care? Or should these emotional and communicative qualities simply emerge intuitively, from professional devotion? Or from having a character and gender suited to the job? Do we expect more empathy from a nurse than a doctor, and why? What happens when staff don’t feel anything, or feel too much?

In a capitalist hospital, crammed with overworked and underpaid staff, is it even legitimate to ask people to be kind professionally, and always available to console?”