Weekly Picks – August 11, 2024

Credit (left to right): Piotr Kowalczyk; Makrem Larnaout; Moises Saman/ Magnum, for The New York Times; Mark Harris for Vox/ Getty Images; Stephen Lam/ Reuters

Dear reader, next week’s collection of articles will be the final ‘Weekly Picks’ post.

As newsletter subscribers were informed recently, In Difference will be on a brief hiatus from August 19 to the end of September, while I am travelling without regular access to the internet.

I have decided to use this interlude as an opportunity to refresh some of my initial aims in creating this reflective space.

Wishing you a pleasant week ‘neath the Perseids ahead.

This week’s collection:

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

1. The Parable of the Vulture

“At one time more than 50 million vultures surfed the skies in kettles over India, Pakistan and Nepal. The most abundant bird of prey in the world appeared so numerous that people didn’t bother counting them in bird surveys. Now the accountants can do that: there are barely 20,000 left. “Functionally extinct,” they call it.

Vultures used to take care of the decomposing dead. The white-backed vulture (Gyps bengalensis), the long-billed vulture (Gyps indicus) and the slender-billed vulture (Gyps tenuirostris) would descend from the sky and alight upon a dead cow, an expired buffalo or even a departed Parsi resting in a Tower of Silence.

Within 40 minutes the sharp beaks of 100 vultures could reduce putrefying flesh to glistening bone. Like us they rejoiced in communal dining. With their long featherless heads, India’s vultures excelled at pulling meat from the bowels of a hoofed animal.

Eating dead things, of course, requires an iron gut. A vulture’s highly adaptive stomach can handle any pile of rotting flesh along with pathogens as deadly as anthrax. A vulture’s digestive system is 100 times more acidic than a human’s. Vultures, along with beetles and bacteria, make up one of nature’s finest sanitation crews.

For thousands of years the people and farmers of India prized and characterized this relationship as purifying. Religion and necessity shaped this lengthy entanglement. Hindus don’t slaughter or eat beef. On a continent with more than 500 million livestock (mostly cows), villagers simply counted on vultures to take care of the dead.

Whenever a cow faltered, farmers stripped off the leather. Then they disposed of the carcass near nesting colonies on the outskirts of town or in dumps. In this fashion vultures disposed of nearly 27 million dead cows, camels and water buffalo a year. Bone collectors picked up the remains to use as plant fertilizer.

This avian disposal service kept the dead from stinking up the place and fouling waterways. It kept in check the spread of rabies, brucellosis and tuberculosis.

But in 1994 vultures began dying in heaps. The eaters of the dead became themselves carrion. Their long wings no longer soared through thermals. Their silhouettes vanished from treetops and old ruins.”

2. A Worldmaking Plant

“West of Cancún and Tulum’s popular beach resorts and the iconic pyramids of Chichen Itzá, a renovated plantation bills itself as a “living museum” transporting visitors to Yucatán’s nineteenth-century gilded age, when Mérida, the capital of Yucatán state, purportedly housed the most millionaires per capita in the world. The plantation-museum runs tours showcasing the opulence of Mérida’s “casta divina,” or “divine caste,” comprised of European-descended planters made rich by the boom in agave fibers called henequén produced on their plantations. These tours include walkthroughs of the renovated master’s house, filled with ornate furniture and porcelain imported from Europe, and an excursion aboard mule-drawn wooden platforms on the plantation’s original railroad tracks.

From the platforms, guests can admire the agaves dotting the fields. What the tour does not mention is that these agaves were planted upon dispossessed Maya land and harvested by Maya debt peons under conditions including whipping, starvation, and incarceration—practices that journalist John Kenneth Turner, in his 1909 exposé, Barbarous Mexico, equated with slavery. The tour also neglects to note that, as international demand for henequén soared near the turn of the twentieth century, other groups were trafficked onto the plantations to work alongside the Maya: Yaquis starting around 1902, forcibly removed from their northern homelands divided by the U.S.-Mexico border, and over a thousand Koreans who were lured to Mexico by the promise of a better life in 1905—the same year the Japanese Empire declared Korea a protectorate, dependent territory, five years before officially annexing Korea as a colony.

I learned about henequén while researching the history of Korean indentureship in the Yucatán Peninsula, yet the racial and colonial dimensions of the plantation economy are rarely acknowledged in public narratives of the historic henequén zone’s past, upon which the region’s tourist economy is quite literally built. Many of the Yucatán Peninsula’s crumbling plantations, abandoned when the henequén bubble burst as rival commodities crowded the world hard fibers market, have been refashioned by real estate developers and foreign investors into upscale museum-resorts. What was once the company store that pushed workers further into debt is now a luxury spa, the majordomo’s quarters honeymoon suites.

. . .

Naming and defining the relations of domination and exclusion on specific plantation sites among racialized groups—indentured Koreans, displaced Yaqui, and dispossessed Maya workers alongside wealthy European-descended planters, for example—would be better than pretending those relations did not exist at all. But I wonder if stopping there might limit our horizons for critique, especially in neocolonial touristic spaces like Mérida. After all, colonialism as a logic, force, and structure is unconfined by such spatial boundaries; it both conditions and is sustained by the partial narratives that reflect the present politics and economic capture of any given place, which sever our connections to contexts beyond our immediate fields of vision.”

3. The Future Before Us

“Hundreds of well-armed police cloaked in military garb staring down crowds of Black civilians in T-shirts and jeans. A QuikTrip gas station engulfed in flames set against the night sky. The body of Michael Brown Jr. left for hours in the St. Louis summer heat. These are among the enduring images of the Ferguson uprising that are not easily forgotten.

What makes a single event far outlive the brief moment of its occurrence—that causes it to imprint itself, not just into the minds of nearby observers but even the most remote of witnesses? None could have predicted the repercussions of August 9, 2014. This was hardly the first and would not be the last in an endless series of street executions by the cops patrolling St. Louis and its surrounds. That the cop was white and the slain boy Black was, itself, unremarkable.

And yet, something broke that day. Or rather, something was broken, by force and with great intention. The façade of peaceful coexistence was broken, and the young Black dissidents in the street did the breaking. They weren’t yet “protesters,” or even “activists,” as many would come to be characterized. They were the vanguard of resistance against an oppressive force. And they called into question the very nature and origin of that oppression.

But if it was a breaking, it was also a process of creation. In those moments of grief and rage, new solidarities were formed. New visions began to emerge, fueled by the organizers, visual artists, musicians, photographers, and storytellers of St. Louis. Ferguson—this suburban municipality of just over twenty thousand people—was transformed into a universal symbol of struggle for human rights and dignity that traveled from Hollywood to the White House and across an ocean to the United Nations. This homegrown rebellion changed the terms of debate in public life across the globe, but nowhere more than in Ferguson’s own backyard. By the fall of 2015, the region’s leadership class had been cowed by the spectacle of those thousands of young Black people (and no shortage of allies) in the streets, city halls, county councils, and shopping malls. They offered an explicit trade: your peace for our justice.”

4. Medicine is plagued by untrustworthy clinical trials. How many studies are faked or flawed?

“How many clinical-trial studies in medical journals are fake or fatally flawed? In October 2020, John Carlisle reported a startling estimate.

Carlisle, an anaesthetist who works for England’s National Health Service, is renowned for his ability to spot dodgy data in medical trials. He is also an editor at the journal Anaesthesia, and in 2017, he decided to scour all the manuscripts he handled that reported a randomized controlled trial (RCT) — the gold standard of medical research. Over three years, he scrutinized more than 500 studies.

For more than 150 trials, Carlisle got access to anonymized individual participant data (IPD). By studying the IPD spreadsheets, he judged that 44% of these trials contained at least some flawed data: impossible statistics, incorrect calculations or duplicated numbers or figures, for instance. And 26% of the papers had problems that were so widespread that the trial was impossible to trust, he judged — either because the authors were incompetent, or because they had faked the data.

Carlisle called these ‘zombie’ trials because they had the semblance of real research, but closer scrutiny showed they were actually hollow shells, masquerading as reliable information. Even he was surprised by their prevalence. “I anticipated maybe one in ten,” he says.

. . .

The issue is, in part, a subset of the notorious paper-mill problem: over the past decade, journals in many fields have published tens of thousands of suspected fake papers, some of which are thought to have been produced by third-party firms, termed paper mills.

But faked or unreliable RCTs are a particularly dangerous threat. They not only are about medical interventions, but also can be laundered into respectability by being included in meta-analyses and systematic reviews, which thoroughly comb the literature to assess evidence for clinical treatments. Medical guidelines often cite such assessments, and physicians look to them when deciding how to treat patients.”

5. The Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples

“On August 9, 2001, in Colombia, riot police and private security forces from the Cerrejón coal mine — one of the largest open-pit coal mines in the world — surrounded the remote community of Tabaco. They then dragged residents out of their homes and bulldozed what remained of that town’s structures. There was, after all, coal under the town and the mine’s owner, Exxon Mobil Corporation, wanted to access it. Since that date, the displaced residents of Tabaco have been fighting for compensation and (as guaranteed by both Colombian and international law) the reconstruction of their community. So far, no such luck.

Note that August 9th was then and is now the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, as the United Nations first declared in 1994. That was, in fact, the day when the newly formed U.N. Working Group on Indigenous Populations had its initial meeting in 1982.

Indigenous peoples have, of course, been under siege by colonizers for hundreds of years, even if their struggles for land and sovereignty only gained true international recognition in the late twentieth century, a time when, ironically enough, they were experiencing new assaults on their lands globally. Since World War II, the unprecedented growth of both the world’s population and global consumption levels have pushed resource use far beyond any limits once imagined. And that scramble for resources only accelerated starting in the 1990s, which meant further encroachment on Indigenous territories — and, of course, an onrushing climate catastrophe.

Since then, however, the growing visibility and power of Indigenous movements have created enormous potential for fundamentally changing our world in a positive fashion. While the struggle of the inhabitants of Tabaco has in many ways been emblematic of Indigenous struggles against extractivism, the story is more complicated. First, Tabaco itself is not, in fact, an Indigenous community but one largely descended from Africans brought to the New World as slaves. A narrow emphasis on Indigeneity can make it hard to take in non-Indigenous land and environmental struggles. Moreover, not all Indigenous people are rural and the stereotype flattens the realities of such movements. Finally, popular but misguided ideas about indigeneity underlie the claim to a Jewish “Indigenous” presence in Palestine, one that divorces Indigeneity from its historical context.

A deeper dive into colonialism and Indigenous peoples can help clarify the nature of such movements today and, curiously enough, some of the debates around the Israeli-Palestinian question as well.”

6. How the most powerful environmental groups help greenwash Big Meat’s climate impact

“The story of McDonald’s and the beef industry’s sprawling network of roundtables is just one part of an extensive campaign by the meat and dairy sector to downplay its environmental impact, delay regulations, deflect responsibility, and assure the public and policymakers that its voluntary initiatives are sufficient to avert environmental ruin. And it’s working: From 2010 to 2022, US meat production increased by over 13 percent while the industry successfully staved off calls for regulation at home and on the international stage.

None of this is terribly surprising — it’s largely the same denial and deflection playbook run by Big Oil to avoid responsibility for climate change, with the usual suspects helping: industry-aligned academics, front groups, loyal politicians, and social media influencers.

But among those allies are groups that are surprising: some of the world’s largest environmental organizations.

Take the World Wildlife Fund, or WWF, a green giant with over $600 million in assets. WWF and McDonald’s are both founding members of the beef roundtable, and later, the two worked together on other beef-related projects. In fact, that inaugural conference in 2010 was officially titled the World Wildlife Fund Global Conference on Sustainable Beef. (WWF has helped to found similar industry roundtables for poultry and soy — most of which is fed to farmed animals — and a certification program for seafood.)

For its collaboration, McDonald’s makes sure WWF is well compensated; from 2015 to 2022, the company donated $4.5 to $9 million to WWF-US.

From 2017 to 2022, WWF-US brought in approximately $12 million to $28.6 million from various meat, dairy, seafood, fast food, restaurant, and grocery companies, including Tyson Foods, Cargill, Burger King, Costco, Walmart, Red Lobster, Chobani, and Dairy Management Inc., a dairy trade group.

. . .

WWF is hardly alone. Two of the other largest US environmental organizations — the Nature Conservancy (TNC) and Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) — also closely collaborate with large meat and dairy companies, ranchers, and trade groups on a range of initiatives. But outside observers, along with some former and current employees at EDF and WWF, argue that those initiatives often do more to improve the companies’ image than the environment.”

7. Building a Public Energy Commons

“The crisis in the renewable energy buildout comes at a pivotal moment. For the first time, according to the European Union’s climate service, global warming has exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius across an entire year. The earth is currently sweltering through the hottest days ever recorded. As I write these lines, the Park Fire—already one of California’s biggest wildfires ever—burns uncontained, incinerating hundreds of thousands of acres and generating unprecedentedly strange phenomena like fire tornadoes and smoke thunderclouds.

The primary driver of this increasingly deadly warming is the combustion of fossil fuels to generate electricity. Hence, there is broad agreement among climate and energy experts that the world must electrify everything, from transportation to the heating and cooling of buildings to most industrial production. But most members of the public do not yet understand the urgency of this issue. Even among climate activists, more energy tends to be focused on decrying the stampede toward fossil fuel expansion than on building out renewable alternatives.

Why has there been so little progress towards decarbonization in a progressive state like New York? For many years, renewable energy was more expensive than energy derived from fossil fuels, making energy transition appear to be an economic nonstarter. But about a decade ago, the cost of power from renewables and fossil fuels reached parity, and clean power now tends to be cheaper than forms of dirty energy like coal. This ought to be a game-changer—after all, pundits have told us for years that the falling cost of renewable energy will mean less fossil fuels since renewables will be more profitable to develop than dirty-energy sources.

But it turns out that cheap power is not all that attractive to investors. As New York state senator Julia Salazar and assembly member Sarahana Shrestha argue in a recent opinion essay, the “fundamental problem is that the state is currently relying entirely on private developers to build renewables—but they will build only if they can make a hefty profit.” In recent years, a mix of inflation, supply chain issues, and an outdated grid system designed for fossil fuels has meant that building renewables isn’t profitable enough for investors. As a result, not only have new capacity additions dwindled, but many private developers have also walked away from contracts they signed with the state to build wind and solar power, bringing New York’s progress toward climate goals grinding to a halt.”

8. The War the World Forgot

“As rebel movements go, the S.P.L.M. is an unusual one. Armed insurgencies have long been fueled by radical ideology, be it Marxism, in the case of the Central American guerrillas of the 1980s, or Islamism for Hamas and the Islamic State more recently. The S.P.L.M. is among the few rebel groups to claim it is fighting for a Western-style democracy: It has a Constitution and calls for a secular state in Sudan, though it does so while pointing a rifle. The S.P.L.M.’s stronghold is in the Nuba Mountains, a region in southern Sudan roughly the size of Ireland that remains one of the world’s most isolated places. Across the Nuba landscape, piles of pink granite boulders rise up, many for hundreds of feet, making ideal lookout points for assaults against government-held lands. The S.P.L.M. has been capturing territory at a steady pace during the current civil war — “liberating” it, in the rebels’ parlance. Kadugli is their next major target.

The rebel army eyed the city below as one fighter fiddled with the wooden handle of a rocket launcher. They believed the government had stockpiled tanks, armored personnel carriers and potentially large stores of ammunition that, if captured, could fuel their movement for many years. In short, taking Kadugli could be the first step in realizing their vision for the nation that they hope will emerge from these many years of war. “We are patient, and Kadugli is surrounded on three sides,” a commander told me that afternoon. “It is only a matter of time till you and I will meet for lunch there.”

Sudan’s war has left nearly 11 million people displaced from their homes — more than the entire population of New York City, and currently the single largest population of internal refugees anywhere in the world. One U.S. State Department official estimated in May that as many as 150,000 people might be dead in the fighting, though the chaos has made an accurate body count impossible. Hospitals have ceased operating. Khartoum’s international airport is a ghost town, overrun by militiamen. Western Darfur, on the country’s frontier with Chad, stands besieged by paramilitary groups who have rekindled the ethnic cleansing that made Darfur a household name in the 2000s.

And then there is the threat of starvation, the specter that haunts nearly all conflicts in Africa and makes no distinction between civilian and combatant. More than 15 million Sudanese faced crisis-level food insecurity even before the war began. Since then, the fighting has destroyed not just schools and roads but also farms and agricultural infrastructure, as the warring parties pillage the countryside to sustain themselves. The possibility of a great famine, like the one that ravaged Ethiopia in the 1980s, has become real again. Yet in a world already ravaged by entrenched wars and the threat of more, the tragedy of Sudan has hardly registered in many corners. Protesters do not march on capitals demanding a cease-fire. The United States has kept its distance. “For a Full Year, the Bodies Have Piled Up in Sudan — and Still the World Looks Away” was the headline of a piece this April by Nesrine Malik, a columnist at the British newspaper The Guardian who writes about the country and was born there.

Perhaps the war’s greatest tragedy is that it started with a moment of hope.”

9. Who Do They Think They Are?

“Writers are those naïfs among us who believe that language can be used to take the measure of experience. Readers demonstrate faith in them when they commit to a book or short story. The reader-writer relationship is a contract of sorts. But because the terms are not written down, there is much room in that contract for misinterpretation. What is at stake is not small: it is a shared picture of reality. Nor is it static. With each new publication or rereading, the reader-writer contract is up for review. What could go wrong?

In every closely examined work of creativity, no matter how successful, there is a frightening degree of illusion. Once, in an art gallery, I was taken with a work of Flemish realism depicting a man who wore the most dazzling lace collar. I moved closer and closer, until I could see that the fine textile was simply a series of crude white dots joined together by off-white and grey dashes. I walked backwards, away from the painting, while keeping my eyes fixed on it. Suddenly the lace collar miraculously and convincingly reappeared. For art lovers, such a thing is a marvel. For those looking for a simplified truth, it can be deeply distressing. Artifice is problematic for those who insist that all sleights of hand are meant to deceive, most likely for nefarious purposes. Is it any wonder that artists and writers in this age of mass media have looked to pull back the curtain on their practice?

What can one say in defence of writing? Because words can have multiple meanings, they are inherently ambiguous. The problem is compounded by sentences, paragraphs, chapters, whole works. Finding clarity of meaning often seems to require superhuman effort. So why bother, when all human endeavours fall short in one way or another, usually sooner rather than later? As someone famous once famously said, “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Let me return to my initial statement: Writers are those naïfs among us who believe that language can be used to take the measure of experience. As an opening gambit, it is some shade of a red herring. No writer has ever taken the full measure of experience, nor will they. Also, writers write for all kinds of reasons. Frequently it is for escape or pleasure. Even writing that sets its heart on a truth — no matter how profound and serious — will still bear traces of these unstated motivations.”

10. Milky Way Over Tunisia

A beautiful capture to end the collection for this week. And a reminder of the ongoing annual visit from the Perseids, a most stellar occasion.