Weekly Picks – June 2, 2024

Credit (on left): Asimov Collective. Credits (center-left, clockwise): Shuyao Xiao; US National Archives; Charlie Riedel/ AP Images; Getty Images/ Anton Petrus. Credit (center-right): Thomas Presquet/ ESA. Credits (on right, top to bottom): Robert Duboise/ Wilhelmina Duboise/ Tampa Bay Times; Patapoutian Lab / Scripps Researcher Institute, La Jolla, CA.

This week’s collection:

India’s gargantuan election is about to conclude. I am reminded of how many times people have willingly pedestalled would-be-fascists throughout history. Electing national shepherds under benign assumptions only to be led down malignant paths. Because reactionary politics are easier to adhere to in the face of failing institutions; scapegoating made much more digestible as a means to an end – a quicker path to socioeconomic prosperity. But the path is unsustainable, the suffering is incalculable, and the promised prosperity is a fantasy. It must be if it excludes segments of the populace.

What is happening in India is a microcosm of what is happening in many nations worldwide – a shift to radical populism that seeks victory through oppression, empowering those already in power, and tying the national sentiment to figures rather than democratic principles. The digital age, still in its infancy, has somehow made it easier to construct cults and disseminate charged doctrine rather than reinforce critical inquiry. On this, two writers from the East and West speak about a country where the idea of a republic is yet again on the ballot:

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

Not quoted below, but further reading on a society cannibalizing itself. The first four dispatches are from the past week, while the last is from 2014 but worth sharing alongside them. From the creator of Arab Labor, who tried to make it work before reluctantly departing with his children’s welfare in mind.

The BBC and Jacobin articles are purposefully relayed together here, a dialectical presentation for your interpretation.

1. How the Guinness Brewery Invented the Most Important Statistical Method in Science

“The Guinness brewery has been known for innovative methods ever since founder Arthur Guinness signed a 9,000-year lease in Dublin for £45 a year. For example, a mathematician-turned-brewer invented a chemical technique there after four years of tinkering that gives the brewery’s namesake stout its velvety head. The method, which involves adding nitrogen gas to kegs and to little balls inside cans of Guinness, led to today’s hugely popular “nitro” brews for beer and coffee.

But the most influential innovation to come out of the brewery by far has nothing to do with beer. It was the birthplace of the t-test, one of the most important statistical techniques in all of science. When scientists declare their findings “statistically significant,” they very often use a t-test to make that determination. How does this work, and why did it originate in beer brewing, of all places?”

2. To pee or not to pee? That is a question for the bladder — and the brain

“To most people, pulling into a highway rest stop is a profoundly mundane experience. But not to neuroscientist Rita Valentino, who has studied how the brain senses, interprets and acts on the bladder’s signals. She’s fascinated by the brain’s ability to take in sensations from the bladder, combine them with signals from outside of the body, like the sights and sounds of the road, then use that information to act — in this scenario, to find a safe, socially appropriate place to pee. “To me, it’s really an example of one of the beautiful things that the brain does,” she says.

Scientists used to think that our bladders were ruled by a relatively straightforward reflex — an “on-off” switch between storing urine and letting it go. “Now we realize it’s much more complex than that,” says Valentino, now director of the division of neuroscience and behavior at the National Institute of Drug Abuse. An intricate network of brain regions that contribute to functions like decision-making, social interactions and awareness of our body’s internal state, also called interoception, participates in making the call.

In addition to being mind-bogglingly complex, the system is also delicate. Scientists estimate, for example, that more than 1 in 10 adults have overactive bladder syndrome — a common constellation of symptoms that includes urinary urgency (the sensation of needing to pee even when the bladder isn’t full), nocturia (the need for frequent nightly bathroom visits) and incontinence. Although existing treatments can improve symptoms for some, they don’t work for many people, says Martin Michel, a pharmacologist at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, who researches therapies for bladder disorders. Developing better drugs has proven so challenging that all major pharmaceutical companies have abandoned the effort, he adds.

Recently, however, a surge of new research is opening the field to fresh hypotheses and treatment approaches. Although therapies for bladder disorders have historically focused on the bladder itself, the new studies point to the brain as another potential target, says Valentino. Combined with studies aimed at explaining why certain groups, such as post-menopausal women, are more prone to bladder problems, the research suggests that we shouldn’t simply accept symptoms like incontinence as inevitable, says Indira Mysorekar, a microbiologist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. We’re often told such problems are just part of getting old, particularly for women — “and that’s true to some extent,” she says. But many common issues are avoidable and can be treated successfully, she says: “We don’t have to live with pain or discomfort.””

3. The 165-year reign of oil is coming to an end. But will we ever be able to live without it?

“Between the 17th and 20th centuries, humans killed millions of whales for oil. They stripped their blubber, spinning the iconic creatures in the water and pulling off the fat in a huge spiral like the peel of an apple. The blubber was boiled into oil, then strained into barrels to be used in everything from oil lamps to industrial lubricants.

This was the bloody process that brought light to society.

“It is horrible,” Charles Nordhoff wrote of his experience on a whaling vessel in 1895. “Yet old whalemen delight in it. The fetid smoke is incense to their nostrils. The filthy oil seems to them a glorious representative of prospective dollars and delights.”

For over 100 years, the voracious hunger for whale blubber drove blue, humpback and North Atlantic right whales to the brink of extinction.

Now, commercial whaling is all but banned, whale blubber is used in just a handful of products, and whale populations have rebounded somewhat.

A similar sea change is coming for petroleum, though when and how it will play out is still incredibly hazy.

The best superforecasters, combined with machine learning, are only accurate at predicting geopolitical events up to a year in advance, Luke Kemp, research affiliate with the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk and at the University of Cambridge, told Live Science. At best, “we have general pictures we can paint.”

But the general trends are clear. We’ve already transitioned much of our home energy use away from oil. And as climate change pushes us to accelerate that transition, we’re developing new technologies that will help the world outgrow its oil dependence ever faster, experts say. In a few industries, like shipping and plastic, the decayed bones of long-dead animals will be the primary energy source for a long time to come.

But a post-oil world is coming.”

4. The City Makes the Civilization

“The crowning position of cities remaining unchallenged does not mean all is well with our cities—or, for that matter, our civilization. That we grasp at straws such as the advent of the internet, doubling down on car-sustained suburbs through self-driving vehicles or even personal flying transport, or state-mandated pandemic resilience and social distancing to try and bypass the problems of our cities, shows as much desperation as innovation. The contrast offered by modern China is instructive. Shenzhen, today the center of global electronics manufacturing, was as recently as 1979 a backwater fishing town of 20,000 inhabitants. Far from the only Chinese city to see such a meteoric rise, these cities are not the supposed “ghost towns” of media stories but the physical infrastructure of the next stage of Chinese civilization.

There is no way to aspire to a better future without aspiring to functional cities because all functional institutions rely on them. There is, further, no way to reimagine or reorganize society without reimagining and reorganizing cities. No exit from this problem to a different social order is possible, because any such exit will, without innovation in social technology, after a perhaps rapid growth in urban population simply recreate our cities and their parasitic city politics and social decay. Since our industrial civilization clearly needs a refounding, many of our cities will need such a refounding as well.”

5. You Can’t Turn Back the Clock on Genocide

“From early on, Israeli leaders have been remarkably clear about their intentions in the Palestinian enclave. Israeli Colonel Yogez BarSheshet, speaking from Gaza in late 2023, put it bluntly: “Whoever returns here… will find scorched earth. No houses, no agriculture, no nothing. They have no future.”

It’s as if Israel’s leaders knew that, while it was impossible to actually destroy Hamas, they could at least obliterate Gaza’s infrastructure and slaughter civilians under the guise of hunting down terrorists. After seven long months of Israel’s onslaught of revenge, it’s clear that this has never been about freeing the hostages taken on October 7th. Along the way, Israel could easily have accepted multiple proposals to do so, including a ceasefire resolution brokered by Egypt, Qatar, and the U.S. in early May. Instead, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and crew shot down that plan, in which Hamas had agreed to release all living hostages taken in its October 7th assault on Israel in exchange for Palestinians held in Israeli prisons. The sticking point, however, had nothing to do with the release of those captives rotting in Gaza under who knows what kind of stressful conditions, but Israel’s refusal to accept any resolution that includes a permanent ceasefire.

. . .

The specter of death in Gaza is difficult, if not impossible, to grasp. At a distance, our understanding of the situation often relies on somber statistics, especially in the establishment media. The official count, consistently cited by mainstream outlets, comes in at around 35,000 deaths.

In May, the New York Times and other outlets jumped on a report from the United Nations, which had apparently revised Gaza’s death count. But the U.N. did not, in fact, halve its total of women and children who had died, as the Jerusalem Post claimed. It simply altered its classification system in terms of those estimated to have died and those it could definitively confirm to be deceased. The totals, however, remained the same. Nonetheless, even those numbers, based on information provided by Gaza’s Ministry of Health, end up blurring the cruel reality on the ground.”

6. The Marked Man

“The maintenance man climbed to the country club roof at dawn. As he reattached a loose panel to a leaking air duct last fall, the placid fairways glowed, and his mind went back years — to another rooftop, another brief moment of peace, when he’d gazed out at a vista of razor wire. Back then, while laboring in prison blues, he’d called out to his boss for a tool. A guard threw him in solitary confinement for raising his voice.

Most of Robert DuBoise’s memories go something like that.

These days, DuBoise walks carpeted hallways in orthopedic work boots, carrying his ladder. Members of Ardea Country Club in Oldsmar see a sweet 59-year-old with puffy eyes and a grin. “How are you today?” he asks in his froggy voice. “Is there anything I can do?” They may have heard about his 37 years in prison for a crime he did not commit, but few know how his unlikely freedom intertwines with a bigger Tampa saga

DuBoise’s 2020 exoneration in a single murder and rape case revealed what authorities call a vicious spree of serial killings, the links between them buried in case files and a morgue cabinet for decades.

When he walked free, much lay ahead: his bid for compensation, a search for the true killers, a political power struggle — and the question of how to salvage what was left of his life.

Yet DuBoise doesn’t complain. Stuck in traffic, he smiles: “I’m grateful to even be sitting at a red light.” He possesses what a judge called “an uncommon capacity for grace and forgiveness.” Pressed on the matter, however, he eventually relents.

“Just because I have a good attitude,” he said, “does not mean I’m not mad about what was done to me.””

7. The Tower and the Sewer

“It has always been more difficult to make sense of the radical right than the radical left. Back when there were serious left-wing bookstores catering to active socialists rather than leisured graduate students, those, too, were a little helter-skelter. Utopian authors rubbed shoulders with Stalinists, anarchists with Trotskyists, interpreters of the wisdom of Chairman Mao with interpreters of the wisdom of the Albanian leader Enver Hoxha (a Seventies thing). Shelves were devoted to each and every postcolonial liberation movement then active, with many manifestos written by obscure revolutionaries destined to become infamous tyrants. Yet despite the intellectual and geographical variety, one always had the sense that the authors imagined they were aiming at the same abstract goal: a future of human emancipation into a state of freedom and equality.

But what ultimate goal do those on the radical right share? That’s harder to discern, since when addressing the present they almost always speak in the past tense. Contemporary life is compared to a half-imagined lost world that inspires and limits reflection about possible futures. Since there are many pasts that could conceivably provoke a militant nostalgia, one might think that the political right would therefore be hopelessly fractious. This turns out not to be true. It is possible to attend right-wing conferences whose speakers include national conservatives enamored of the Peace of Westphalia, secular populists enamored of Andrew Jackson, Protestant evangelicals enamored of the Wailing Wall, paleo-Catholics enamored of the fifth-century Church, gun lovers enamored of the nineteenth-century Wild West, hawks enamored of the twentieth-century cold war, isolationists enamored of the 1940s America First Committee, and acned young men waving around thick manifestos by a preposterous figure known as the Bronze Age Pervert. And they all get along.

The reason, I think, is that these usable pasts serve more as symbolic hieroglyphs for the right than as actual models for orienting action. That is why they go in and out of fashion unpredictably, depending on changes in the political and intellectual climate. The most that can be said is that the further to the right one goes, the greater the conviction that a decisive historical break is to blame for the loathsome present, and that accelerating decline must be met with…well, something. That’s when things get vague.

Rhetorical vagueness is a powerful political weapon, as past revolutionaries have understood.

. . .

The most psychologically interesting stream of American right-wing thought today is Catholic postliberalism, sometimes called “common-good conservatism.” The “post” in “postliberalism” means a rejection of the intellectual foundations of modern liberal individualism. The focus is not on a narrow set of political principles, such as rights. It is on an all-encompassing modern outlook that postliberals say prizes autonomy above all else and that is seemingly indifferent to the psychological and social effects of radical individualism. Such an outlook is not only hostile to the notion of natural or socially imposed moral limits to individual action, which are also necessary for human happiness. It has also gradually undermined the preliberal intellectual foundations of Western societies that once made it easier to protect the common good against the claims of selfish individuals.”

8. Haiti’s Sin of Resistance

“As Frederick Douglass said of Haiti in 1893, “Haiti is Black, and we have not yet forgiven Haiti for being Black or forgiven the Almighty for making her Black.” And today, the West still has not forgiven the descendants of the Haitian revolutionaries for showing the world the first truly free nation in the hemisphere.

Numerous reports and pictures of what’s happening in Haiti would have one believe that the Haitian people are incapable of running their own country and that an intervention from the “international community” is necessary. However, clarity comes by way of understanding history; history explains why, as Douglass said, Haiti has not yet been forgiven.

. . .

After achieving independence from France, there was no “happily ever after” for the Africans of the former colony of Saint Domingue. The French responded with a choice for the Africans: pay reparations to the French enslavers or fight another war. In July of 1825, Haitian President Jean-Pierre Boyer chose the former. The Haitians owed more than 150 million francs. Haiti didn’t have the money to pay the debt, so they were coerced by the French to borrow from French banks to pay it.

This is known as the double debt. According to The New York Times, Haitians paid about $560 million in today’s dollars, which could have added $21 billion to the Haitian economy over time.

These are funds that could have built the nation. Instead, they went to further build up France. As Haiti finished its repayment, the French hijacked Haiti’s treasury, establishing the Haitian National Bank in Paris under the control of French financiers. The Haitians believed that the move would bring investment in the country. But it only continued to weaken Haiti’s economy.

Next came the United States, beginning with an operation in 1914 where the Marines walked out of Haiti’s national bank with $500,000 in gold destined for Wall Street. Citing the Monroe Doctrine, which framed any foreign intervention in the Americas as a threat, the United States launched a full-scale invasion and occupation of Haiti in response to German inroads into the Haitian economy. Racist ideas stoked by the media—like the notion that “some of the highest officials of Haiti took part in the cannibalistic rites of voodoo”—provided cover for the campaign.”

9. On the Crisis of Men

“I grew up in the age of the crisis of men. Already a frequent subject of national headlines when I became a teenager in the early Nineties (extensively catalogued by Susan Faludi in her 1999 book Stiffed), by the early 2000s, when I was in college, the burdens of contemporary manhood had become the dominant theme of prestige television and film. There were the belated men, the ones who had come “too late,” as Tony Soprano memorably put it to his psychiatrist, and thus instead of getting to build the country with their biceps were stuck in therapy and a rapidly feminizing suburbia, watching helplessly as the old codes were violated and then forgotten completely. There were the nostalgic men, like Don Draper, who aspired to live in the sepia-toned world that he famously pitched as an advertising template to Kodak executives on Mad Men. There were the men who found in violence and criminality a temporary respite from the confines of contemporary manhood—Tony again, but also Walter White on Breaking Bad and Frank Lucas in American Gangster. And there were the ones who impersonated a clearly disintegrated authority to unconsciously comedic effect, like Michael Scott in The Office. If you had to choose, the best among bad options at the time was to become one of Judd Apatow’s hapless husbands; sure, these were pudgy man-children destined to be remembered as footnotes even by their own families, but at least they seemed to be in on the joke.

Knausgaard’s My Struggle, whose six books were published between 2009 and 2011 (they appeared in English between 2012 and 2018), can be understood as belonging to the crisis-of-men genre. Indeed, we might say that in Knausgaard’s novel the crisis of men reaches its full dialectical self-consciousness.

. . .

In Book Six, some three thousand pages after Knausgaard has wheeled his daughter out of her music class, he investigates the difference between the social roles of “son” and “father,” which for him describe the two essential paths for the modern man. Knausgaard’s own father, he alleges, was a restless and often volatile man who managed to discipline himself for barely long enough to remain in the house as his children were growing up but who never truly became a father. In the “absence of any inner peace or gravity,” his father’s behavior was thus guided “by the outside, and for someone born in 1944, this was the authoritarian, rule-setting father.” (Never one for understatement, Knausgaard claims to be reminded of his father while watching videos of Hitler, though to be fair he also says he is reminded of himself.) Knausgaard is desperate to avoid being like his father, whose arbitrary temper and alcoholism had terrified him for most of his childhood, but, having seen only this defective model up close, he is unsure what it would take to improve upon it. “Being a father is a commitment,” he hazards. “But what are you committing yourself to?”

Knausgaard’s conclusion is that a true father is committed to being present for his family, which means above all that he abides by the “limit” that having a family places on him. “You have to be at your post; you have to be at home,” he writes. “Yearnings and aspirations are irreconcilable with this because what you hunger for is limitless and what home does is set limits. A father without limits is no father, but a man with children. A man without limits is a child, that is, the eternal son.””

10. The Insulin Empire

“For many diabetics today, insulin replacement therapy—the measured intake of lab-extracted insulin, now produced by microbes—provides immediate relief to their painful suite of symptoms, and a relatively easy fix to a gruesome and debilitating physiological and psychological experience. But if a patient is so lucky as to be diagnosed with diabetes in time to prevent or ameliorate DKA, they are immediately faced with another disconcerting problem: accessing the treatment, which happens to be one of the most lucrative pharmaceutical products in human history. Just past the centennial of insulin’s discovery, the lack of insulin access and affordability continues to run rampant globally. Of the 537 million people living with diabetes worldwide, around 70 million require insulin. At the same time, more than three in four adults with diabetes reside in low- and middle-income countries where a combination of poverty and predatory pharmaceutical regimes make acquiring sufficient insulin difficult or impossible. Even in higher-income countries, pharmaceutical consortiums control who gets access to insulin, and for how much.

Take the United States: about 38.4 million Americans—including children—have diabetes, and among them, 8.4 million rely on insulin. A 2019 Yale study found that one in four insulin-dependent diabetics have resorted to rationing their insulin supplies: using less insulin than prescribed, stopping insulin therapy, delaying the start of insulin therapy, not filling prescriptions, and engaging in other underuse behaviors related to cost. Many who need insulin not only require adequate dosages but different types of insulins, alongside a suite of devices to monitor and stabilize blood sugar levels as health complications can emerge if they drift too far in either direction. Forgoing adequate insulin dosing can have devastating consequences for type 1 and many type 2 diabetics, and the practice is a substantial driver of the hundreds of thousands of deaths attributable to diabetes complications in the United States each year. With global diabetes rates expected to double by 2050, insulin accessibility and affordability will continue to be a matter of life and death for people with the disease.”

11. Dominion

“For aeons, life has fundamentally reorganised Earth. This process began roughly 2 billion years ago, when a tiny form of microbial algae, cyanobacteria, chanced on a way to live off sunlight and became so numerous that its toxic waste products caused a mass extinction. The survivors were forced to adapt to a gas that we now call ‘oxygen’. Today, one species that descended from those survivors, Homo sapiens, may be causing another mass extinction by expropriating massive amounts of Earth’s biological resources. In our short time on this planet, we have transformed plants, animals and vast tracts of habitable land. Our waste products have taken on a geological scale. Like tiny oxygen-producing microbes more than 2 billion years ago, life is once again fundamentally reorganising Earth.

However, unlike our unicellular ancestors, we are ethically conflicted about our looming fate. How much more should we grow as a species? Do we have an obligation to leave future generations with a biosphere that is as rich and diverse as the one we inherited? How should we distribute the associated costs between poor and rich nations, between producers and consumers, and between institutions and individuals? These are important, pressing issues. Beneath many of these questions lies a more fundamental ethical quandary: what should we do about our ability to so easily dominate other species and the environment? It is a problem that has become urgent. Should we disavow our dominance and attempt to minimise it? Or should we embrace our powers to alter Earth and its inhabitants?

Perhaps we shouldn’t do either.”

12. The BJP’s Drive for Hegemony

“In 2014, the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party captured national power in the world’s largest democracy. Under its controversial new leader, Narendra Modi, the BJP established India’s first single-party majority government since 1984 and became the only party besides the Indian National Congress to accomplish this feat since the country won independence, in 1947. In the 2019 general election, despite a disappointing economic record, growing communal strife, and disruptive policy decisions, the BJP increased its vote share and seats in Parliament. The victory emboldened the party to further its longstanding agenda to transform India’s secular constitutional democracy into a de facto Hindu nation. Modi remained popular throughout India’s terrible pandemic. Now, with a return of high economic growth and the unity of opposition parties in question, most observers expect him to win the 2024 general election, which concludes in June.

What explains the political dominance of the BJP? Where does the party fit among other right-wing forces in the world? And why does the BJP, despite its apparent ideological hegemony, seek to suppress any sign of opposition or dissent?”

13. Elections in India: Caste, Islamophobia and Social Revolution

“Modi’s distortion of Rahul Gandhi’s socialist and social democratic commitments exposes a key element in Indian politics. The so-called upper caste left and the Indian liberals, in this context, should be understood much the same way as the “left” is understood in other countries of the world, such as the Democratic Party in America and the “Zionist left.” That is, India’s mainstream Left is only the left flank of the upper-caste extremist and supremacist right.

The elections are nearing their close, and in the first week of June we will know the winners. If you read the reports in the Indian mainstream media (controlled by the ruling party), and in the international media (always mediated by India’s upper caste elites), the elections are a mere formality, a cursory ritual that will soon be behind the country. The upper caste media claims that Modi’s far-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP, People’s Nationalist Party) will win with a historic majority. The BJP itself has spoken of changing the nature of the Indian Constitution, which ostensibly ensures that India is a secular, socialist and democratic republic committed to equality. A BJP victory, however, may not be so fully assured. Even if the right continues to win the votes of the upper-caste minorities, who constitute less than ten percent of the population, that contingent will not necessarily secure victory.

For international readers: Indian politics is often portrayed as a simple picture of “Hindu majority thinking” against “religious minorities”, especially Muslims. The BJP portrays itself as representing the “Hindu majority” while accusing the opposition of representing only Muslims. This image is deceptive for several reasons. The simple opposition between “Hindu” and “Muslim” has served Western media and academics well in the face of their own political investment in Islamophobia. Islamophobia is not only a domestic strategy—it has also allowed Modi to forge closer ties with Israel and successive U.S. administrations.

While the majority of the Indian population belongs to the lower castes and comes from all religions, the upper caste minority controls the judiciary, the police, the army, the bureaucracy, the media, and the academic institutions. The existence of the upper-caste minority is often treated as a harmless cultural idiosyncrasy by international academics and media. One gets a sense that elite Western voices assume for themselves a default upper-caste identity when they try their hand at interpreting Indian society and politics. There are upper-class solidarities that resonate across international borders—Western journalists and academics mentally transpose themselves from their own elite positions to the upper castes (whether Hindu, Muslim or Sikh) of India. Therefore, as is the case with those domestic Indian elites whose positionality they assume, the international set rarely interacts with or troubles themselves with the concerns of the lower castes of India. As is so often the case across world discourse and media, it is the lives and concerns of the ruling classes that dominate. Consequently, international commentators fail to understand the underlying dynamics of Indian elections.”