Weekly Picks – June 16, 2024

Credit (left to right, top to bottom): Frederic J. Brown/ AFP via Getty Images; Dan Kitwood/ Getty Images; Pete Niesen / Shutterstock; March Avery, Evening Reading, 1972/ ©2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), photo by Josh Schaedel; Carlos Jasso/Reuters

This week’s collection:

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

1. Neymar: Bolivia’s Ladder Boy

“An 11-year-old cemetery worker in Bolivia dreams of a better education as he struggles to support his family.

Neymar works as a “ladder boy” at a cemetery in Sucre, Bolivia. In the labyrinth of mausoleums, he cleans tombs for visitors in return for a few bolivianos. The meagre amount of money he earns helps him support his mother following the death of his father.

Between his continued grief and the toil of his work, Neymar dreams of a better education at a school that he can’t afford. As the annual Day Of The Dead celebrations approach, hundreds of additional people are expected to visit the cemetery. The promise of increased earnings offers hope to Neymar, but will he achieve his dream?”

2. Inside Mexico’s anti-avocado militias

“The avocado has been grown and eaten in Mexico for centuries. The glyph representing the Maya calendar’s 14th month features the fruit, and Aztec nobles often received it as tribute. “Looks like an orange, and when it is ready for eating turns yellowish,” observed the Spanish coloniser Martín Fernández de Enciso in 1519. “So good and pleasing to the palate.”

For the better part of the 20th century, however, the fruit failed to catch on. Among the challenges faced by marketers were the fruit’s many names: alligator pear, aguacate, avocado, Calavo – the last a portmanteau of California and avocado. (The name in Nahuatl, an Indigenous language, ahuacatl, is slang for testicle, and was never really an option.) Money was poured into advertising to fix the problem, and California funded research on farming techniques, though these still didn’t solve for the novel taste. Growing ranks of producers, and the small consumer base, led to ruinous drops in price while costs kept increasing. Water and land got more expensive as new housing developments demanded more and more.

. . .

After achieving notoriety as one of the most spectacular commercial food failures of the 20th century, the avocado finally entered the mainstream. Guacamole and avocado toast became two of the most successful gustatory trends of the 21st century, pushed with prime-time Super Bowl ads. Michoacán’s avocado production went from about 800,000 tonnes in 2003 to more than 1.8m tonnes in 2022. Over the same period, the US’s avocado consumption quadrupled.

Today, groundwater in Michoacán is disappearing and its bodies of water are drying up. Lake Zirahuén is polluted by agricultural runoff. Nearly 85% of the country was experiencing a drought in 2021, and experts project that the state’s Lake Cuitzeo, the second largest in all of Mexico, could disappear within a decade. In part because of the conversion from pine to avocado trees, the rainy season has shrunk from around six months to three. So profound is the drain on the region’s aquifers that small earthquakes have newly become commonplace. The 100-mile avocado corridor has, in effect, become the only live theatre of what is often referred to as “California’s water wars”.

It’s unclear whether the avocado can survive this changing climate. But in Michoacán, the more pressing question is whether its residents can survive the avocado.”

3. Should I Have Kids?

“To have a child, it is often said, is to transform one’s identity. What this might have meant in the past is more or less obvious: With few exceptions, for the better part of history, to have a child meant it was time for a woman to say her final farewells to whatever public existence she managed to forge up to that point. But now there is another, more mysterious change that becoming a mother is understood to imply, more basic than the historical conditions of oppression. This change is supposed to reconfigure the deepest core of one’s being. When the contemporary analytic philosopher L. A. Paul wanted to introduce the idea of a fundamentally transformative experience, one of her central examples was having a child. For women, especially, becoming a parent is frequently described as a total revolution of the self. “Giving birth to a baby is, literally, splitting in two, and it is not always clear which one your ‘I’ goes with,” philosopher Agnes Callard wrote in a reflection on the relief she felt after losing an unplanned pregnancy.

. . .

Parents, mothers especially, like to claim they have become better people subsequent to the birth of their children. I am not here to call anyone’s bluff or forswear the possibility of my own personal growth in the future. No doubt, I learned new tricks. How to keep milk cold on the go, how to never ask a small child whether they wanted to do something but which of two options they preferred. But I did not unearth new ethical or emotional resources. I am, it is true, far more patient with my daughter than I would be with anyone else exhibiting comparably high levels of incompetence, need, or obstinance. But this tolerance does not extend to anyone else. There is less of it to go around. Nor am I more compassionate. If my heart has genuinely, permanently expanded, it is by the measure of my love for my daughter, not much more.

But what of this love? Is it not unlike anything I’ve ever known? The rumor of this love drives much of the fear of missing out among those debating whether or not to have children. One hears: I am afraid that if I don’t have a child, I will never know what that love is like. But while the relationship between a parent and child is doubtless unique, what if I told you that, phenomenologically speaking, it is not really grand and tremendous? That it’s not even particularly extraordinary?”

4. The Internet Supercharged the Exploitation of Black Culture

“Recently, I went to a screening for a documentary following four young Black girls attending a dance with their fathers in a local prison. I was struck in particular by a 5-year-old counting the days until her father is freed. I laughed and cried along with the audience as she quipped about her family and bragged about her schooling, playing the well-worn part of an innocent kid caught in a tragedy.

Then the film ended and there she was, sitting for a panel to discuss what we’d just seen. This version was reticent tween with butterfly twists, visibly working through the implications of her childhood broadcast at Sundance. She didn’t really know what was happening around her, she admitted, until she saw the film herself.

As she muttered her way through the discussion, I was surprised by just how surprised I was: I knew she would be there since the screening was organized around the girls’ attendance. But for nearly two hours I had been fed a character; the film had cast her as an avatar for a social issue. To quote Toni Morrison in The Origin of Others, “I immediately sentimentalized and appropriated her.” In reality, she’s just a girl dealing with trauma whose circumstances were caught, packaged, and distributed to the many eyes of strangers before she fully realized what had happened to her family.

American life today is largely digested through screens. If we’re not working through screens, we’re learning with them, socializing through them, entertaining ourselves with them, each new digital platform flattening our faces into images and compressing our interior lives into text. Each of these interactions carries a risk of making the other person on the screen—captured, digitized, packaged and sold—a little less human. Legacy Russell’s new book, Black Meme: A History of the Images That Make Us, interrogates America’s relationship with Black imagery, iconography, and symbolism—quite literally, at points, the Black face. Tracing a pattern from the 1915 propaganda film The Birth of a Nation to the media fallout from Breonna Taylor’s murder in 2020, Russell illustrates how American visual culture relies on Black culture while stripping the people at its center of their humanity.”

5. The Great Video Game Swindle

“The video game industry is a mess — a massive, lucrative mess. Two years ago, a PwC report projected that video games would be worth $321 billion by 2026, up from $214 billion in 2021. This year, the market is set to hit $282 billion, so it’s more or less on pace, with an average revenue per user of over $200 accounting for console, computer, and mobile gaming.

To get a sense of the scale here, video games are worth more than the film industry. And the music industry. In fact, the video game industry is bigger than both of those industries combined. That’s staggeringly big. The immense size and economic power of the industry, which is largely nonunionized, creates regulatory gaps, leading to inevitable dysfunction and exploitation. This makes life miserable for employees and consumers alike, both in the workplace and beyond.

. . .

One of the biggest problems in gaming is that workers are treated as eminently disposable fodder for production, here today and gone tomorrow once the project ships. Writing/podcasting in the Verge last week, Nilay Patel noted that tens of thousands of workers had been laid off in the last two years, including ten thousand this year alone.

Patel’s summary, couched in the context of solid sales numbers, matches Schreier’s in its incisive simplicity: “It feels like a grim time to be in the business of making games, even though the art of video game design is flourishing.”

As far as layoffs are concerned, Kody Cava, writing in Jacobin, places the blame squarely on the shoulder of industry executives. Cava argues the problem isn’t “instability” inherent to building video games, but good, old fashioned exploitation driven by a power imbalance between the suits and game designers, and further exacerbated by a growing labor pool and limited — though growing — unionization.

It’s a familiar capitalist dynamic: big profits squeezed from workers and consumers alike, with most of the cash concentrated at the top for executives, leaving crumbs for everyone else.”

6. The prison system isn’t ‘broken’ – it’s designed to traumatize black people en masse

“The lived reality of the racist prison system can get lost in the swirl of facts and figures surrounding mass incarceration. Frigid cells in winters and sweltering conditions in summers; the volatility and capriciousness of hostile guards and correctional staff; food barely fit for human consumption; isolation from one’s community and deprivation from the routines and small freedoms that made up one’s identity prior to incarceration. The trauma of such an experience is undeniable, and extends far beyond prison walls—from overpoliced communities subjected to the constant presence of police surveillance and terror, to the families and relationships put under the strain of separation. Dr. Da’Mond Holt returns to Rattling the Bars for the final installment of a two-part interview, this time speaking with host Mansa Musa and his friend Lonnell Sligh, about their respective experiences behind bars, and the implications of the prison system as a deliberate system of mass trauma affecting Black and other working class communities of color.”

7. The Oldest Ecosystems on Earth

“When it comes to biological superlatives, we typically focus on individuals: The largest tree in a forest, the oldest organism on the planet. After visiting the Hoh Rainforest, however, I began to wonder about superlative communities. What are the oldest existing ecosystems on Earth, and what can we learn from them?

Like the Hoh, some old-growth forests have survived for centuries. But it turns out that certain ecosystems and biomes on the planet today have persisted for hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of years, preserving, somehow, their defining characteristics despite undergoing major changes.

To make an analogy to a famous thought experiment: If every component of a ship is gradually replaced with a sufficiently similar replica, the vessel retains its essential form, even though it is no longer identical to its previous iteration. Similarly, most of the cells in our bodies have died and been replaced many times over since we were born, yet we still recognize the continuity of our overall anatomy. And some cities have maintained a distinct topography, infrastructure, and culture for millennia, even with a continual turnover of buildings and inhabitants. The changes that ecosystems endure through geologic time are even more dramatic, but the principles are similar.

Precisely what it means for an entire living system to be so old, and what makes such astonishing longevity possible, remain open questions, in part because they challenge our very notions of what it is to be alive. When we adopt a deep time, holistic perspective, some ecosystems take on an almost organismic quality, shifting across the planet’s surface like giant amoebae, expanding and retreating in response to environmental fluctuations, yet persisting as coherent entities.

Scientists have not yet agreed on a precise definition of life, but many experts have phrased it more or less like this: Life is a system that actively sustains itself. The laws of thermodynamics dictate that everything in the universe will inevitably fall apart, dissolving into a homogenous mush. Living systems use available energy to temporarily evade this outcome and maintain their improbably organized structures. More than genetics or reproduction, it is this capacity for self-preservation that unites life at every scale, from protist to prairie.

In this sense, ecosystems are very much alive.”