Weekly Picks

Weekly Picks – April 21, 2024

April 21, 2024 /

Credits (clockwise from bottom left): Fairfax Media via Getty Images; Suraj Pokhrel/ iStock; Nicolás Ortega; Nature; Fredrik Lerneryd; Zachary Pangborn; Wang Naigong; Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images. Center: Jim Uruquhart/ Reuters

This week’s collection:

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

1. The economic commitment of climate change

Abstract: “Global projections of macroeconomic climate-change damages typically consider impacts from average annual and national temperatures over long time horizons. Here we use recent empirical findings from more than 1,600 regions worldwide over the past 40 years to project sub-national damages from temperature and precipitation, including daily variability and extremes. Using an empirical approach that provides a robust lower bound on the persistence of impacts on economic growth, we find that the world economy is committed to an income reduction of 19% within the next 26 years independent of future emission choices (relative to a baseline without climate impacts, likely range of 11–29% accounting for physical climate and empirical uncertainty). These damages already outweigh the mitigation costs required to limit global warming to 2 °C by sixfold over this near-term time frame and thereafter diverge strongly dependent on emission choices. Committed damages arise predominantly through changes in average temperature, but accounting for further climatic components raises estimates by approximately 50% and leads to stronger regional heterogeneity. Committed losses are projected for all regions except those at very high latitudes, at which reductions in temperature variability bring benefits. The largest losses are committed at lower latitudes in regions with lower cumulative historical emissions and lower present-day income.”

2. What is ‘lived experience’?

“Everywhere you turn, there is talk of lived experience. But there is little consensus about what the phrase ‘lived experience’ means, where it came from, and whether it has any value. Although long used by academics, it has become ubiquitous, leaping out of the ivory tower and showing up in activism, government, consulting, as well as popular culture. The Lived Experience Leaders Movement explains that those who have lived experiences have ‘[d]irect, first-hand experience, past or present, of a social issue(s) and/or injustice(s)’. A recent brief from the US Department of Health and Human Services suggests that those who have lived experience have ‘valuable and unique expertise’ that should be consulted in policy work, since engaging those with ‘knowledge based on [their] perspective, personal identities, and history’ can ‘help break down power dynamics’ and advance equity. A search of Twitter reveals a constant stream of use, from assertions like ‘Your research doesn’t override my lived experience,’ to ‘I’m pretty sure you’re not allowed to question someone’s lived experience.’

A recurring theme is a connection between lived experience and identity. A recent nominee for the US Secretary of Labor, Julie Su, is lauded as someone who will ‘bring her lived experience as a daughter of immigrants, a woman of color, and an Asian American to the role’. The Human Rights Campaign asserts that ‘[l]aws and legislation must reflect the lived experiences of LGBTQ people’. An editorial in Nature Mental Health notes that incorporation of ‘people with lived experience’ has ‘taken on the status of a movement’ in the field.

Carried a step further, the notion of lived experience is bound up with what is often called identity politics, as when one claims to be speaking from the standpoint of an identity group – ‘in my lived experience as a…’ or, simply, ‘speaking as a…’ Here, lived experience is often invoked to establish authority and prompt deference from others since, purportedly, only members of a shared identity know what it’s like to have certain kinds of experience or to be a member of that group. Outsiders sense that they shouldn’t criticise what is said because, grounded in lived experience, ‘people’s spoken truths are, in and of themselves, truths.’ Criticism of lived experience might be taken to invalidate or dehumanise others or make them feel unsafe.

So, what is lived experience? Where did it come from? And what does it have to do with identity politics?

. . .

The goal is no longer simply self-realisation – to become who one is – but to demand recognition on behalf of that identity group, thus fostering political change by undermining the structures which have inhibited the authentic way of living of marginalised people.

Lived experience plays a central role in this process in several ways. First, it has become a marker of authenticity. A commonplace among today’s intelligentsia is that historical categories don’t match the lived experience of marginalised people. Miranda Fricker has designated this phenomenon ‘hermeneutical injustice’. Hermeneutical injustice occurs when a marginalised person is unable to understand their own social reality or experiences because the resources for understanding experience are created by those who are dominantly situated in culture. This echoes Fanon’s argument that many philosophical categories present in culture – even the master/slave dialectic in Hegel – were not created with Black experience in mind. Talk of lived experience thus becomes a way of signalling authenticity because one’s experiences aren’t reflected in the dominant culture.

Second, invoking lived experience has become a way of achieving epistemic and political authority, usually by claiming that people with marginalised identities have privileged access to knowledge that others are ill-equipped to understand or critique. ‘You don’t know what it’s like’ is a popular refrain. If others don’t and indeed can’t know what it’s like – then the only alternative is to defer to those who have privileged knowledge. When the authority of lived experience is felt, then language like ‘Speaking as a…’ becomes a way of signalling privileged knowledge which others should defer to. The truths of lived experience are now offered, in the words of Raymond Williams, ‘not only as truths, but as the most authentic kind of truths’. By the same token, members of culturally dominant groups can use the same language to express humility and deference towards others – ‘Speaking as a white man…’, ‘I don’t know what it’s like,’ and so on.

Third, lived experience becomes a way of boundary policing. Appeals like ‘Speaking as a…’ can prompt reflexive deference only if we engage in what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak called ‘strategic essentialism’ – that is, only if we behave as if groups are monolithic and homogeneous (which they aren’t). Kwame Anthony Appiah points out that, if Black people seek recognition as Black people (which is entirely reasonable, given how that identity was constructed for the purpose of denigration and oppression), this goes hand in hand with creating boundaries – what it means to be ‘authentically’ Black. In this context, talk of lived experience can be used to police what counts as authentic Blackness, creating a kind of social prison. As he puts it in his essay ‘Identity, Authenticity, Survival’ (1995), ‘[b]etween the politics of recognition and the politics of compulsion, there is no bright line.’ In other words, if the authority of lived experience is to have weight, only the experience of some people can be allowed to count. If one transgresses against certain boundaries, then one’s status as an ‘authentic’ member of the group – and the importance of one’s experiences – can be questioned.”

3. Universities Are Profiting From Blocking Drug-Price Reform

“Research universities, many of them public, have joined forces with pharmaceutical companies and Wall Street firms to fight new government efforts to curtail out-of-control drug prices, saying the regulations could stifle innovation.

But these universities are also likely concerned that drug-price reforms would hamper their profits. Case in point: the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) has quietly reaped more than a billion dollars in payouts from Xtandi, a lifesaving cancer drug that it developed with the help of government funding and now costs US patients $200,000 a year.

The university is among those working to block the government from lowering the cost of prescription drugs like Xtandi that have been developed with taxpayer money.

. . .

UCLA has earned millions of dollars in payouts — mostly royalty fees — from Xtandi sales each year. From 2012, when the drug was approved by the FDA, until the summer of 2023, quarterly royalty payments grew from $564,000 to $48 million, an eighty-five-fold increase, according to data reviewed by the Lever.

In 2016, the university also sold a portion of the royalty rights it co-owned for $1.1 billion to Royalty Pharma, a company that purchases biopharmaceutical royalties to collect future payouts. Of this amount, UCLA received $520 million, which was put into a portfolio anticipated to bring in “approximately $60 million annually until 2027,” according to a university news release.

The remainder of the proceeds was split between the inventors, including Jung and Sawyers, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Maryland, where Sawyers also worked when the drug was invented.

These payouts are on top of the billions of dollars the University of California system receives from federal, state, and local governments. During the 2022–2023 school year, the ten universities in the system were awarded $5.5 billion in public money, with UCLA receiving more than a billion dollars.

Despite such massive benefits from taxpayer money, the University of California system continues to try to block the government’s use of march-in rights, spending $1.2 million lobbying on the Bayh-Dole Act, intellectual property and technology transfer issues, and other matters last year, according to lobbying records.”

4. Europe poops in its own nest

“From the English Channel to the Sea of Marmara, Europe’s seas are soaked in sewage. It might not be the best topic for polite conversation, but managing human waste is the single most important urban necessity.

. . .

The universal experience of excretion has been with us for millennia, yet the topic is considered taboo in many cultures. Though some people are attempting to confront the feelings of shame that come up when talking about it, we still have quite a long way to go, and no time to waste.

Speaking of waste: the release of untreated urban wastewater poses a real threat to the environment and subjects local communities to pollution. As it stands today, Europe’s two opposite shores are both soaked in it.

. . .

Following Brexit, the UK has let loose on environmental standards to protect marine and human health, by dumping sewage straight into the English Channel and North Sea. On average, there are 825 spills into its waterways per day.

Clean water and sanitation are the 6th Sustainable Developmental Goal the EU is addressing, but there are major differences between member states in how they handle their shit.  According to the WHO in the European region, ‘more than 36 million people lack access to basic sanitation services…’ and this access is extremely unequal.

In urban areas, access to public toilets is often severely restricted, and the right to basic hygiene weighs down on poor and unhoused people. Tessza Udvarhelyi writes about how governments want to create the ‘ideal of the clean city’ for tourists, resulting in poor and racialized minorities being pushed to the margins of it. This form of urban segregation is mainly informed by the dogma of ‘cleanliness’, rooted in the 18th century.

Moreover, ever since France’s decision to dismantle the so-called ‘Calais Jungle’ camps in 2016, human rights experts have been urging the country to provide asylum seekers living there with safe water and sanitation.

However, draining sewage is only one half of the problem. Treating wastewater is wholly another, and a gigantic task at that. Of course, the waste that goes down the drains contains a lot of contaminants and toxins – but it could also be a resource. New technologies are attempting to address this problem, sometimes by rethinking very old methodologies, such as plant filtering and composting regimes.

Though composting and using urban waste as fertilizer is proposed as a sustainable solution, there is a reluctance to use it due to the toxic materials and chemicals found in it. But as Kate Brown puts it in her article for Estonian journal Vikerkaar on Resurrecting the soil: ‘If people realize that what they flushed down the toilet comes back to them on their dinner plates, then they might be more thoughtful both about what they consume and toss down the drain.’

So poop contains multitudes: pathogens and nutrients, human rights issues, industrial challenges, and more.”

5. Inside the Kenyan cult that starved itself to death

“It started with one family. Then another arrived, then another. Soon there were enough of them to begin clearing a section of the forest, cutting down the moringa and acacia trees, and uprooting thick shrubs. The forest, known as Shakahola, bordered a village of the same name in south-eastern Kenya, not far from the coast. The villagers were puzzled. Not only had these strangers occupied their ancestral land without permission, they were venturing into parts of the forest that were deemed uninhabitable. Shakahola forest, on the edge of the vast Tsavo National Park, teems with dangerous animals: lions and leopards, hyenas and elephants. Locals sometimes dipped into it to gather wood, to make charcoal or to graze their livestock. But no one from Shakahola dared live there.

Yet these mysterious visitors continued to arrive throughout late 2019. By early 2020, as the pandemic ravaged Kenya, shutting down schools and leading to severe restrictions on travel and socialising, their numbers grew to around 2,000. Every week, Changawa Mangi, one of Shakahola’s elders, saw groups of women and children come to town to buy maize for milling into flour. But he found it difficult to learn much about the newcomers. “We didn’t know who they were. We asked them, but they refused to say more than that they were farmers,” Mangi told me. There were signs, though, that they had begun to regard the forest as their permanent home: locals saw them raising chickens and building mud houses.

In January 2023 – three and a half years after the forest-dwellers first appeared – the shopkeepers in Shakahola noticed something strange: the children who usually accompanied their mothers into town were no longer tagging along. Within weeks, the women themselves stopped appearing.

Then, in February, some herders who had been grazing their cattle returned to town with an alarming story. They had seen a few women lying on the forest floor. This in itself was unusual: every Kenyan knows that such a posture can attract the attention of scavenging animals. The women were skeletal and the group could hear them moaning for help. When the herders drew closer, they were stopped by a band of men armed with machetes. “If you are here to herd, do that. Don’t bother with things that don’t involve you,” the men reportedly warned them.

A few days later, another group of herders found five emaciated boys, aged between 10 and 13, stumbling through the forest. This time, the herders managed to bring them into town. What the boys had to say shocked Shakahola’s residents.”

6. Death and Taxes

“Since Israel began its military campaign in Gaza following Hamas’ attack on October 7th, Americans have protested their government’s involvement in the war in increasingly radical—and illegal—ways. Activists have blocked traffic and occupied spaces, often getting arrested and grabbing headlines in the process.

But one tool in this repertoire of contention that has received much less media attention is “war tax resistance”: the practice of refusing to pay some or all federal taxes that contribute to military spending. This old pacifist tactic is finding new adherents, as a generation of activists who cut their teeth in during the George Floyd uprising loses its patience. “Marching and protesting is fantastic,” said Nick Lancelotti, who co-founded a group called “We the People” with June Johnson. “Sharing space with people, being in a crowd, and showing solidarity is incredible. But at the same time, that needs to then translate into tangible action.” The group is eyeing April 15th to stage a national “Tax Blackout,” as they hope to persuade 50 million Americans (a whopping 30 percent of taxpayers) to refuse to pay at least 5 percent of their income taxes and instead redirect it to Gaza-related relief funds and organizations.

The goal may sound lofty, but war tax resistance is having a moment.

. . .

Its resurgence has a compelling logic: because the income tax is so closely tied to the defense budget, withholding the former to protest the latter takes aim at both the state’s ability to wage war and every citizen’s role in it. Though not nearly as extreme as self-immolation, war tax resistance shares a common thread with Bushnell’s act: a reckoning with personal complicity and an attempt at personal absolution.”

7. Yellowknife to Fort McMurray: lessons from the frontlines of Canada’s worst wildfires

“There are only a few short weeks left until the snow melts and the next fire season begins, and with an extreme drought blotting out much of the West, 2024 is likely to be yet another bad fire year. Two-thirds of the entire Northwest Territories was evacuated during the 2023 fire season as an area the size of Switzerland burned. Another 86,000 people were under evacuation orders in B.C. and Alberta. As officials reflect on lessons learned from past disasters, one thing is clear: evacuations are increasingly a new normal in the West, in part because fires — and floods — are getting worse due to climate change.

With few tools to immediately curb these disasters, we need to reimagine what people, and governments, do when they’re in the path of a wildfire.

“We are seeing a very clear trend and events like these are happening more frequently,” Duerr says. “They’re bigger in nature, and they’re lasting longer than they ever have before. This is something that we need to look at holistically across the country, and say, ‘How are we going to support these into the future?’”

. . .

Jody Butz knows the feeling of watching a besieging disaster launch its assault: Butz was the operations section chief of the Fort McMurray fire department when an infamous wildfire, known locally as The Beast, roared into the community in 2016.

That fire was Canada’s costliest disaster ever, causing the evacuation of 88,000 people in a matter of hours and destroying 2,600 buildings. But Butz, now the city’s fire chief, credits it with instilling a new seriousness in Fort McMurray when it comes to wildfire, something that even the partial destruction of the nearby community of Slave Lake, Alta., five years prior, hadn’t been able to do.

“Never let a disaster go to waste,” Butz says.”

8. The Cloud Under the Sea

“Cable industry professionals tend to be pragmatic people, preoccupied with the material realities of working planet-scale construction. But in conversations about landing high-bandwidth cables in digitally neglected regions or putting millions of people back in contact with every fiber strand melted together, they often hint at a sense of larger purpose, an awareness that they are performing a function vital to a world that, if they do their jobs well, will continue to be unaware of their service.

. . .

The world’s emails, TikToks, classified memos, bank transfers, satellite surveillance, and FaceTime calls travel on cables that are about as thin as a garden hose. There are about 800,000 miles of these skinny tubes crisscrossing the Earth’s oceans, representing nearly 600 different systems, according to the industry tracking organization TeleGeography. The cables are buried near shore, but for the vast majority of their length, they just sit amid the gray ooze and alien creatures of the ocean floor, the hair-thin strands of glass at their center glowing with lasers encoding the world’s data.

If, hypothetically, all these cables were to simultaneously break, modern civilization would cease to function. The financial system would immediately freeze. Currency trading would stop; stock exchanges would close. Banks and governments would be unable to move funds between countries because the Swift and US interbank systems both rely on submarine cables to settle over $10 trillion in transactions each day. In large swaths of the world, people would discover their credit cards no longer worked and ATMs would dispense no cash. As US Federal Reserve staff director Steve Malphrus said at a 2009 cable security conference, “When communications networks go down, the financial services sector does not grind to a halt. It snaps to a halt.”

Corporations would lose the ability to coordinate overseas manufacturing and logistics. Seemingly local institutions would be paralyzed as outsourced accounting, personnel, and customer service departments went dark. Governments, which rely on the same cables as everyone else for the vast majority of their communications, would be largely cut off from their overseas outposts and each other. Satellites would not be able to pick up even half a percent of the traffic. Contemplating the prospect of a mass cable cut to the UK, then-MP Rishi Sunak concluded, “Short of nuclear or biological warfare, it is difficult to think of a threat that could be more justifiably described as existential.”

Fortunately, there is enough redundancy in the world’s cables to make it nearly impossible for a well-connected country to be cut off, but cable breaks do happen. On average, they happen every other day, about 200 times a year. The reason websites continue to load, bank transfers go through, and civilization persists is because of the thousand or so people living aboard 20-some ships stationed around the world, who race to fix each cable as soon as it breaks.

The industry responsible for this crucial work traces its origins back far beyond the internet, past even the telephone, to the early days of telegraphy. It’s invisible, underappreciated, analog. Few people set out to join the profession, mostly because few people know it exists.”

9. The Life and Death of Hollywood

“Thanks to decades of deregulation and a gush of speculative cash that first hit the industry in the late Aughts, while prestige TV was climbing the rungs of the culture, massive entertainment and media corporations had been swallowing what few smaller companies remained, and financial firms had been infiltrating the business, moving to reduce risk and maximize efficiency at all costs, exhausting writers in evermore unstable conditions.

“The industry is in a deep and existential crisis,” the head of a midsize studio told me in early August. We were in the lounge of the Soho House in West Hollywood. “It is probably the deepest and most existential crisis it’s ever been in. The writers are losing out. The middle layer of craftsmen are losing out. The top end of the talent are making more money than they ever have, but the nuts-and-bolts people who make the industry go round are losing out dramatically.”

Hollywood had become a winner-takes-all economy. As of 2021, CEOs at the majority of the largest companies and conglomerates in the industry drew salaries between two hundred and three thousand times greater than those of median employees. And while writer-producer royalty such as Shonda Rhimes and Ryan Murphy had in recent years signed deals reportedly worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and a slightly larger group of A-list writers, such as Smith, had carved out comfortable or middle-class lives, many more were working in bare-bones, short-term writers’ rooms, often between stints in the service industry, without much hope for more steady work. As of early 2023, among those lucky enough to be employed, the median TV writer-producer was making 23 percent less a week, in real dollars, than their peers a decade before. Total earnings for feature-film writers had dropped nearly 20 percent between 2019 and 2021.

Writers had been squeezed by the studios many times in the past, but never this far.

. . .

But the business of Hollywood had undergone a foundational change. The new effective bosses of the industry—colossal conglomerates, asset-management companies, and private-equity firms—had not been simply pushing workers too hard and grabbing more than their fair share of the profits. They had been stripping value from the production system like copper pipes from a house—threatening the sustainability of the studios themselves. Today’s business side does not have a necessary vested interest in “the business”—in the health of what we think of as Hollywood, a place and system in which creativity is exchanged for capital.

. . .

Profit will of course find a way; there will always be shit to watch. But without radical intervention, whether by the government or the workers, the industry will become unrecognizable.”

10. Welcome to Mass Market Mountaineering

“The years of suppressed resentment can’t be ignored. Nepali climbers living in impoverished or humble circumstances had watched Westerners travelling, climbing, spending money, making money, getting sponsors, becoming famous. Steck, a consummately professional alpinist during his brief yet spectacular career, summed it up nicely, although he needn’t have limited his observations to Everest: “Climbing Everest is so big now, with so much money involved, and the Sherpas are not stupid. They see this, and they want to take over the business and kick out the Westerners.”

Local climbers haven’t “kicked them out,” but the squeeze is on. Twenty to thirty years ago, foreign companies had a much greater say in expedition operational matters, with less influence from the Nepali side. Today the tables have not only turned, they have flipped over completely. At first, the surge of 100 percent Nepali owned and operated companies was driven by the benefits of local Nepali knowledge and access to the many bureaucratic doors that foreigners didn’t know existed, never mind had access to. Many of those early Nepali companies undercut the foreign operators, and clients responded in kind. Why spend $60,000 (US) to climb Everest when you could do it for $40,000?

There are tangible differences between a $40,000 climb and a $60,000 one, regardless of who owns the company: the amount of bottled oxygen, the quality of the tents, even the training and experience of the guides. Guided clients on an 8,000-metre peak should want the best, most experienced guides and the highest guide-to-client ratio they can possibly find, because their lives depend on it. And it’s important to have the equipment required in worst-case scenarios: specialized rescue gear, medicines, reliable communication devices—and people who know how to use them.

With more than 2,000 expedition agencies operating in Nepal, however, the choices today can be mind boggling. Some Nepali guides with an astute business sense have evolved from porters to icefall doctors (who install the fixed ropes and ladders) to high-altitude guides to expedition company owners. The availability of first-class infrastructure, equipment, helicopters, and qualified guides has given the Nepali agencies the edge over Western operators. Rodolphe Popier, a member of the Himalayan Database team, has watched the transition. “Nowadays, Sherpas perfectly know that they are the key craftsmen on the high peaks,” he says. They are turning the business of guiding in Nepal on its ears. Few are still offering the $40,000 (US) budget alternative, and many are exceptionally qualified to cater to today’s clients.

It’s likely that, at this point, neither foreign nor Nepali companies could fully function without the other; the foreign agencies generally assemble the clients while the Nepali operators provide all other services. However, even this scenario is changing. Nepali operators are increasingly able to do it all, including finding clients without the intervention of a third party. It’s likely that all aspects of the expedition industry in Nepal will soon be delivered by Nepalis.”