Weekly Picks – April 28, 2024

Credits (clockwise from bottom left): Arif Qazi; Arhivele Naţionale ale României, f. Romproiect, 7288; TIO/ NOIRLab/ NSF/ AURA/ T. Slovinský; Zachary Scott; Anthony Rathbun; AP Photo /Teresa Crawford, File; Elle Griffin/ The Elysian

This week’s collection:

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

1. The Architectural Gift

“What is the architectural gift, as exemplified in what kinds of sites? Why has the inquiry followed the trajectories it has?

Łukasz Stanek: Architectural gift-giving is embedded in a long tradition of imperial and religious donations of buildings. But my collaborators and I have been interested in its relationship to modern urbanism; in how a focus on architectural gift-giving affords new ways of thinking about the worldwide processes triggered by capitalist industrialization and colonial exploitation since the 18th century. In my book, the temporal frame is more restricted: I studied Cold War collaborations — often unequal — between architects, planners, and construction companies from socialist countries in Eastern Europe, and their counterparts in West Africa and the Middle East. The movement of labor, blueprints, and construction materials and technologies across these geographies shaped cities such as Accra, Lagos, Baghdad, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait City, and many others, from the 1950s to the 1980s. Gifted buildings were among the most visible interventions by means of which the Soviet Union, China, and other socialist countries both supported the newly independent countries, and hoped to achieve political leverage and economic gains.

. . .

My working definition of an architectural gift is a building that was designed and constructed with the intention to be handed over, and to be received without explicitly accepting any obligation to reciprocate — even if such an obligation was implied or anticipated by both giver and receiver. This is a very broad definition, but it leaves out many candidates for architectural gifts, from historical buildings donated to a nation by their owners, to housing in a welfare state. This definition emphasizes the performative character of giving and receiving. Of course, in the case of objects as complex as buildings, there are many candidates for both roles, and not everybody is asked whether they want to give or whether they want to receive a building.

. . .

Gifts, as such, come with an aura of singularity: the gifting of a building is staged as an event in which the donor’s unique generosity meets the receiver’s unreserved gratitude. Yet gifted buildings are not unique; they are common. In Accra, Lagos, Dakar, Addis Ababa, Beirut, cities of the Gulf, Tashkent, Almaty, and Ulaanbaatar, one sees examples from spectacular to mundane, extravagant to genuinely useful. These examples connect to longer traditions of philanthropy, diplomacy, and charity. But their numbers have been growing exponentially since the period of decolonization.

They include schools and universities, clinics and stadiums, office buildings, industrial plants, and whole districts of blocks of flats. They resulted from colonial developmentalism and diplomatic efforts.”

2. No one buys books

“In 2022, Penguin Random House wanted to buy Simon & Schuster. The two publishing houses made up 37 percent and 11 percent of the market share, according to the filing, and combined they would have condensed the Big Five publishing houses into the Big Four. But the government intervened and brought an antitrust case against Penguin to determine whether that would create a monopoly.

The judge ultimately ruled that the merger would create a monopoly and blocked the $2.2 billion purchase. But during the trial, the head of every major publishing house and literary agency got up on the stand to speak about the publishing industry and give numbers, giving us an eye-opening account of the industry from the inside. All of the transcripts from the trial were compiled into a book called The Trial. It took me a year to read, but I’ve finally summarized my findings and pulled out all the compelling highlights.

I think I can sum up what I’ve learned like this: The Big Five publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Britney Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson and this is the bulk of their business. They also sell a lot of Bibles, repeat best sellers like Lord of the Rings, and children’s books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project: publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing (which make no money at all and typically sell less than 1,000 copies).”

3. The great commercial takeover of low Earth orbit

“NASA designed the International Space Station to fly for 20 years. It has lasted six years longer than that, though it is showing its age, and NASA is currently studying how to safely destroy the space laboratory by around 2030. This will involve a “deorbit vehicle” docking with the ISS, which is the size of a football field (including end zones), and firing thrusters so that the station, which circles the Earth at five miles per second, slams down squarely in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, avoiding land, injury, and the loss of human life.

As the scorched remains of the station sink to the bottom of the sea, however, the story of America in low Earth orbit (LEO) will continue. The ISS never really became what some had hoped: a launching point for an expanding human presence in the solar system. But it did enable fundamental research on materials and medicine, and it helped us start to understand how space affects the human body. To build on that work, NASA has partnered with private companies to develop new, commercial space stations for research, manufacturing, and tourism. If they are successful, these companies will bring about a new era of space exploration: private rockets flying to private destinations. They will also demonstrate a new model in which NASA builds infrastructure and the private sector takes it from there, freeing the agency to explore deeper and deeper into space, where the process can be repeated. They’re already planning to do it around the moon. One day, Mars could follow.”

4. Protecting the Darkness in Chile’s Atacama Desert

“Growing up in Chile’s Atacama Desert, Paulina Villalobos thought the Milky Way’s presence in the pristine starry skies was a given. Her father, an amateur astronomer, would wake her when a comet crossed the night sky. But Villalobos later moved to Santiago, the capital, to study architecture. There, the stars disappeared amid a haze of city lights. Just like people who come from the coast miss the ocean, she said, “I missed the sky.”

The extraordinary darkness that sheaths the Atacama, which stretches for hundreds of miles in Chile’s north, has made it a haven for astronomers searching for planets and stars shimmering in the night sky. With its high altitude and clear skies, the region is repeatedly chosen as a site for observatories. According to some estimates, by 2030, Chile will be home to around 70 percent of the world’s astronomical infrastructure.

Yet even here, skyglow from hundreds of miles away can overwhelm the faint light emanating from astronomical objects.

Now, a new regulation aims to darken the night skies.

In October, the Chilean government announced a new National Lighting Standard that will become effective later this year. The updated standards expand restrictions on light luminosity, color, and the hours they can be turned on to protect three major concerns: astronomy, biodiversity, and human health.

For astronomers, the stakes can feel high. While the Atacama offers a window to answer fundamental questions about the origin of life, that window is at risk of closing in the next 50 years due to increasing light pollution, said Chilean astronomer Guillermo Blanc. Worldwide, the sky is estimated to get brighter by 10 percent on average each year.

The new rule on light pollution in Chile was informed, in part, by a technical advisory committee, which included astronomers and other scientists — Villalobos, who is now an architect and lighting designer, among them. The new regulation, she said, offers “the possibility of recovering the sky.””

5. How Do We Know What Animals Are Really Feeling?

“This past November, in a large, carpeted banquet room on the University of Wisconsin’s River Falls campus, hundreds of undergraduate, graduate and veterinary students silently considered the lived experience of a Sonoran desert tortoise. Perhaps nine in 10 of the participants were women, reflecting the current demographics of students drawn to veterinary medicine and other animal-related fields. From 23 universities in the United States and Canada, and one in the Netherlands, they had traveled here to compete in an unusual test of empathy with a wide range of creatures: the Animal Welfare Assessment Contest.

That morning in the banquet room, the academics and experts who organize the contest (under the sponsorship of the American Veterinary Medical Association, the nation’s primary professional society for vets) laid out three different fictional scenarios, each one involving a binary choice: Which animals are better off? One scenario involved groups of laying hens in two different facilities, a family farm versus a more corporate affair. Another involved bison being raised for meat, some in a smaller, more managed operation and others ranging more widely with less hands-on human contact.

Then there were the tortoises. On screens along the room’s outer edge, a series of projected slides laid out two different settings: one, a desert museum exhibiting seven Sonoran specimens together in a large, naturalistically barren outdoor enclosure; the other, a suburban zoo housing a group of four tortoises, segregated by sex, in small indoor and outdoor pens furnished with a variety of tortoise toys and enticements. Into the slides had been packed an exhausting array of detail about the care provided for the tortoises in each facility. Only contestants who had prepared thoroughly for the competition — by researching the nutritional, environmental, social and medical needs of the species in question — would be able to determine which was doing a better job.

“Animal welfare” is sometimes misused as a synonym for “animal rights,” but in practice the two worldviews can sometimes be at cross purposes. From an animal rights perspective, nearly every human use of animals is morally suspect, but animal-welfare thinkers take it as a given that animals of all kinds do exist in human care, for better or worse, and focus on how to treat them as well as possible. In the past half century, an interdisciplinary group of academics, working across veterinary medicine and other animal-focused fields, have been trying to codify what we know about animal care in a body of research referred to as “animal-welfare science.”

The research has unlocked riddles about animal behavior, spurred changes in how livestock are treated and even brought about some advances in how we care for our pets: Studies of domestic cats, for example, have found that “puzzle feeders,” which slow consumption and increase mental and physical effort while eating, can improve their health and even make them friendlier. The discipline has begun to inform policy too, including requirements for scientists receiving federal grants for their animal-based research, regulations governing transport and slaughter of livestock, accreditation standards for zoos and aquariums and guidelines for veterinarians performing euthanasia.

Contest organizers hope to help their students, who might someday go into a range of animal-related jobs — not just as vets but in agribusiness, conservation, government and more — employ data and research to improve every aspect of animal well-being. Americans own an estimated 150 million dogs and cats, and our policies and consumption patterns determine how hundreds of millions of creatures from countless other species will live and die.”

6. How to Eat a Rattlesnake

“Few events combined John’s interests in the natural world, craftsmanship, and danger like the annual Rattlesnake Festival, held in the nearby town of Apache. The spring I was nine, he took my sister and me. There were some perfunctory carnival rides—runtish roller coasters and a swinging Viking ship—as well as a competition for the best-dressed cowboy and cowgirl. But these were hardly the main draw. For fans of the Western diamondback rattlesnake, this was Woodstock. Craft booths sold snakeskin boots, saddles, wallets, and belts. Uncle John bought me a keychain fashioned out of a rattlesnake head, which seemed to both of us the height of fashion. The star attraction was the so-called snake pit, inside an old saloon, where the creatures were exhibited before being skinned.

“Live rattlers,” a sign on the door promised. Behind a fenced-off area, a stubbled cowboy in rubber boots and denim stood in the center of a slithering heap, like a redneck Saint George and the Dragon. In his craggy hands he held a snake out for the crowd to admire. It flicked its tongue, curving its body into a muscular “S.”

“After this, we’ll eat one,” Uncle John told us.

“A rattlesnake?” It was as though he’d proposed feasting on flamingo meat, or roasted kindergartner.

Like many proud Americans, Oklahomans excel at deep-frying everything from chicken to Oreos. The state fair, in Oklahoma City, even claims to have discovered a way to fry coffee. We left the snake pit and passed food trucks crowded with less adventurous patrons buying funnel cakes and corn dogs, until we came to a booth called the Fried Snake Shack. An aproned attendant proffered little paper boats filled with what at first looked like fried catfish tenders, battered and golden brown. But a closer inspection revealed evidence of an unfamiliar, sinuous anatomy, which I tried to push from my mind as I took my first bite.

“How does it taste?” Uncle John asked. The meat was stringy and full of small bones. The taste was hard to detect given the ratio of paltry meat to crispy coating.

“Like chicken,” I remember I said, trying to impress him with my nonchalance.

The Western diamondback rattlesnake is among the most dangerous snakes in the United States. Named for the signature zigzag pattern of its skin, it is aggressive and known to stand its ground against predators and intruders. It can detect body heat and has excellent aim. Its venom is hemotoxic, attacking the blood. In some sense, though, the creature could be considered unusually gracious. Its rattle serves as an audible warning system. Anyone seeking to handle a rattlesnake must brazenly disregard this evolutionary “fuck off” feature, and for what? As Anthony Felder, Jr., an Oklahoma rattlesnake wrangler who was hospitalized with bites on three separate occasions before being fatally bitten, in 2016, aptly summed it up, “I jumped out of a perfectly good airplane once, so why wouldn’t I play with rattlesnakes?””

7. Dozens of deaths reveal risks of injecting sedatives into people restrained by police

“Demetrio Jackson was desperate for medical help when the paramedics arrived.

The 43-year-old was surrounded by police who arrested him after responding to a trespassing call in a Wisconsin parking lot. Officers had shocked him with a Taser and pinned him as he pleaded that he couldn’t breathe. Now he sat on the ground with hands cuffed behind his back and took in oxygen through a mask.

Then, officers moved Jackson to his side so a medic could inject him with a potent knockout drug.

“It’s just going to calm you down,” an officer assured Jackson. Within minutes, Jackson’s heart stopped. He never regained consciousness and died two weeks later.

Jackson’s 2021 death illustrates an often-hidden way fatal U.S. police encounters end: not with the firing of an officer’s gun but with the silent use of a medical syringe.

The practice of giving sedatives to people detained by police has spread quietly across the nation over the last 15 years, built on questionable science and backed by police-aligned experts, an investigation led by The Associated Press has found. Based on thousands of pages of law enforcement and medical records and videos of dozens of incidents, the investigation shows how a strategy intended to reduce violence and save lives has resulted in some avoidable deaths.

At least 94 people died after they were given sedatives and restrained by police from 2012 through 2021, according to findings by the AP in collaboration with FRONTLINE (PBS) and the Howard Centers for Investigative Journalism. That’s nearly 10% of the more than 1,000 deaths identified during the investigation of people subdued by police in ways that are not supposed to be fatal. About half of the 94 who died were Black, including Jackson.

Behind the racial disparity is a disputed medical condition called excited delirium, which fueled the rise of sedation outside hospitals. Critics say its purported symptoms, including “superhuman strength” and high pain tolerance, play into racist stereotypes about Black people and lead to biased decisions about who needs sedation.

The use of sedatives in half these incidents has never been reported, as scrutiny typically focuses on the actions of police, not medics. Elijah McClain’s 2019 death in Aurora, Colorado, was a rare exception: Two paramedics were convicted of giving McClain an overdose of ketamine, the same drug given to Jackson. One was sentenced last month to five years in prison and the other was sentenced Friday to 14 months in jail and probation.

It was impossible to determine the role sedatives may have played in each of the 94 deaths, which often involved the use of other potentially dangerous force on people who had taken drugs or consumed alcohol. Medical experts told the AP their impact could be negligible in people who were already dying; the final straw that triggered heart or breathing failure in the medically distressed; or the main cause of death when given in the wrong circumstances or mishandled.

While sedatives were mentioned as a cause or contributing factor in a dozen official death rulings, authorities often didn’t even investigate whether injections were appropriate. Medical officials have traditionally viewed them as mostly benign treatments. Now some say they may be playing a bigger role than previously understood and deserve more scrutiny.

Time and time again, the AP found, agitated people who were held by police facedown, often handcuffed and with officers pushing on their backs, struggled to breathe and tried to get free. Citing combativeness, paramedics administered sedatives, further slowing their breathing. Cardiac and respiratory arrest often occurred within minutes.”