Weekly Picks – August 18, 2024

Credit (left to right): Umar Nadeem for The Atlantic; Jose Camões Silva / Wikimedia; IDF/ GPO/ Sipa/ Rex/ Shutterstock; Eric Thayer/ Reuters

As mentioned last week, this is the final ‘Weekly Picks’ post to this blog. I am soon departing for some travels and new updates will be shared in October when I return to Canada.

While this 33-week exercise highlighting 265 pieces across 104 sites (plus some archival material) has been fun, it must come to an end as I refocus my efforts. Expect long form content to continue to appear in this space, though from a personal lens.

This week’s collection:

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

1. The melting brain

“In February 1884, the English art critic and polymath John Ruskin took the lectern at the London Institution for a pair of lectures on the weather. ‘The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century’ was his invective against a particular ‘wind of darkness’ and ‘plague-cloud’ that, in his estimate, had begun to envelope Victorian cities only in recent years. He had been taking careful meteorological measurements, he told a sceptical audience. He railed against the ‘bitterness and malice’ of the new weather in question; and, perhaps more importantly, about how it mirrored a certain societal ‘moral gloom’. You could read in us what you could read in the weather, he suggested.

It was easy that February, and perhaps easy today, to disregard any alleged winds of darkness as the ravings of a madman. Clouds are clouds: even if Ruskin’s existed – which was a question of some contemporaneous debate – it would be untoward to imagine they bore any relationship with the human psyche. As Brian Dillon observed of the cloud lectures in The Paris Review in 2019, it can be hard to tell where Ruskin’s ‘bad weather ends and his own ragged, doleful mood begins.’ In 1886, Ruskin suffered a mental breakdown while giving a talk in Oxford. By the end of his life at the turn of the century, he was widely considered insane. His ramblings on meteorology and the human spirit aren’t exactly treated with the same gravitas as his books on J M W Turner.

And yet, for Ruskin, the clouds weren’t just clouds: they were juiced up by a ‘dense manufacturing mist’, as he’d noted in a diary entry. The plague-clouds embodied the miasma of the Industrial Revolution; the moral gloom was specifically that which arose from the rapid societal and environmental changes that were afoot. Ruskin’s era had seen relentless transformation of pastoral landscapes into industrial hubs. Everything smelled like sulphur and suffering. Soot-filled air, chemical and human waste, the clamour of machinery – these were more than just physical nuisances. They were assaults on the senses, shaping moods and behaviour in ways that were not yet fully understood.

Ruskin believed that the relentless pace of industrialisation, with its cacophony of tools and sprawling factories and environmental destruction, undermined psychological wellbeing: that the mind, much like the body, required a healthy social and physical environment to thrive. This was actually a somewhat new idea. (Isaac Ray, a founder of the American Psychiatric Association, wouldn’t define the idea of ‘mental hygiene’, the precursor to mental health, until 1893.) Instability in the environment, for Ruskin, begot instability in the mind. One reflected the other.

More than a century later, as we grapple with a new suite of breakneck environmental changes, the plague-clouds are again darkly literal. Global average surface temperatures have risen by about 1.1°C (2°F) since the pre-industrial era, with most of this warming occurring in the past 40 years. Ice is melting; seas are steadily rising; storms are – well, you know this story. And yet, most frequently, it is still a story of the world out there: the world outside of us. The narrative of climate change is one of meteorological extremes, economic upheaval and biodiversity losses. But perhaps it is worth taking a maybe-mad Ruskin seriously. What of our internal clouds? As the climate crisis warps weather and acidifies oceans and shatters temperature records with frightening regularity, one is tempted to ask if our minds are changing in kind.”

2. Fatal Chase: Cops and the Illusion of Control

“Despite a decade of renewed focus on police brutality, car chases and vehicular violence have not garnered much attention. In part, this is because there is something visceral about the physical violence of a police choke hold, an officer kneeling on a person’s neck, or law enforcement firing a weapon. Car crashes caused by police, however, do not resonate as police violence, in part because the risks of driving are so normalized, even as car crashes have recently become one of our greatest public health crises. The commonness of car crashes thus masks the source of police car violence: death from a car crash can easily be framed as the product of human error or displaced onto the inanimate though deadly object of the vehicle itself. In any case, we tend not to think about car chases and techniques like PIT maneuvers as police violence.

This is a mistake. At least 3,336 people died during vehicle pursuits from 2017 through 2022. More than one quarter of those who died in police chases were passengers, and 27.1 percent were pedestrians or other drivers.

To put these numbers in context, Campaign Zero’s “Mapping Police Violence” database estimates that the police killed 6,955 people in total in the same five-year period. That database only counts 162 police killings caused by “vehicular force,” but this is a significant undercount because it excludes bystanders and therefore does not capture the full scope of police car violence. Indeed, a recent report found that police pursuits caused between 311 and 455 fatal crashes annually between 2015 and 2020, a number that has remained consistent for decades.

Whether or not to count victims of police pursuits in figures of police killings is more than an esoteric question of data methods. It strikes at the very heart of how the police justify PIT maneuvers used to end high-speed pursuits: to protect the public.”

3. As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel

“The Hamas attack on 7 October came as a tremendous shock to Israeli society, one from which it has not begun to recover. It was the first time Israel has lost control of part of its territory for an extended period of time, with the IDF unable to prevent the massacre of more than 1,200 people – many killed in the cruellest ways imaginable – and the taking of well over 200 hostages, including scores of children. The sense of abandonment by the state and of ongoing insecurity – with tens of thousands of Israeli citizens still displaced from their homes along the Gaza Strip and by the Lebanese border – is profound.

Today, across vast swaths of the Israeli public, including those who oppose the government, two sentiments reign supreme.

The first is a combination of rage and fear, a desire to re-establish security at any cost and a complete distrust of political solutions, negotiations and reconciliation. The military theorist Carl von Clausewitz noted that war was the extension of politics by other means, and warned that without a defined political objective it would lead to limitless destruction. The sentiment that now prevails in Israel similarly threatens to make war into its own end. In this view, politics is an obstacle to achieving goals rather than a means to limit destruction. This is a view that can only ultimately lead to self-annihilation.

The second reigning sentiment – or rather lack of sentiment – is the flipside of the first. It is the utter inability of Israeli society today to feel any empathy for the population of Gaza. The majority, it seems, do not even want to know what is happening in Gaza, and this desire is reflected in TV coverage. Israeli television news these days usually begins with reports on the funerals of soldiers, invariably described as heroes, fallen in the fighting in Gaza, followed by estimates of how many Hamas fighters were “liquidated”. References to Palestinian civilian deaths are rare and normally presented as part of enemy propaganda or as a cause for unwelcome international pressure. In the face of so much death, this deafening silence now seems like its own form of vengefulness.

Of course, the Israeli public long ago became inured to the brutal occupation that has characterised the country for 57 out of the 76 years of its existence. But the scale of what is being perpetrated in Gaza right now by the IDF is as unprecedented as the complete indifference of most Israelis to what is being done in their name. In 1982, hundreds of thousands of Israelis protested against the massacre of the Palestinian population in the refugee camps Sabra and Shatila in western Beirut by Maronite Christian militias, facilitated by the IDF. Today, this kind of response is inconceivable. The way people’s eyes glaze over whenever one mentions the suffering of Palestinian civilians, and the deaths of thousands of children and women and elderly people, is deeply unsettling.”

4. A Trip to One of the Hottest Cities on the Planet

“One broiling Friday last month, I visited the emergency room of Mayo Hospital, the largest hospital in Pakistan. For more than 150 years, it has stood just outside the Old City of Lahore, not far from the marble domes of the Badshahi Mosque. Every day, more than 1,000 people fill its wards. No one is turned away. Patients come from all corners of Lahore, from the sugarcane fields outside the city and from far-off villages. In the lobby, some of them rolled past me in wheelchairs or arrived on makeshift stretchers. There was terrible wailing and occasional screaming. The 49-year-old head of the emergency department, Dr. Yar Muhammad, walked me over to where patients were categorized according to urgency. Earlier this summer, he had added a new intake counter. It is devoted exclusively to patients afflicted by Lahore’s extreme heat.

The Lahori poet Kishwar Naheed once wrote that “the sun spends itself” in Pakistan. In recent years, its expenditures have increased. In May, temperatures rose into the 120s. Schools were closed so that kids would not get heatstroke during their commute or on the playground. In Lahore, the heat is not only cruel; it is two-faced. Moist air from the monsoon creeps north from the Indian Ocean in July. The towering ranges of the Himalaya, the Hindu Kush, and the Karakoram corral it into storms that mellow the city’s temperatures without easing the discomfort felt by its residents. I learned this the hard way that very morning. A three-hour downpour had struck overnight, but by 9 a.m., the ground was mostly dry. The rain had evaporated into a thick layer of street-level humidity. It was not the genteel dab-your-forehead variety that you might experience in August in Washington, D.C. It singed your face like steam.

Muhammad showed me into the hospital’s intensive-care unit. Along its back wall, four cubicles were separated by white partitions, about shoulder-high. In the leftmost one, a 35-year-old woman named Saira Shehzad was lying flat on a bed, drifting in and out of consciousness. She wore a pink-and-red shalwar kameez and gold earrings. Her face would go blank for a few seconds and then flash alive with intense confusion, followed by terror. Her eyes had difficulty focusing. Her mother sat next to her bed, cradling her daughter’s head in one hand and pressing a cool sponge to her cheek with the other.

Shehzad lives in Faisalabad, a few hours away. She had arrived in the city the previous week for her brother’s wedding. She was staying at her mother’s house with her husband and three children, all in close quarters. The house is in the old city, a single square mile where roughly 200,000 people live surrounded by crumbling walls built by the Mughals centuries ago. Shehzad’s mother cannot afford to cool her house with air-conditioning. Few Lahoris can. In summer, a monthly electricity bill can easily exceed the average person’s take-home pay. In a city of 14 million, nine out of 10 people lack air-conditioning. The novelist Mohsin Hamid has described them as “the great uncooled.” Their annual suffering is one reason—but only one—that Pakistan consistently ranks among the countries most menaced by climate change. In its megacities, the human cost of this, one of Earth’s hottest recorded summers, is not an abstraction.”

5. What if we learned contemplation like we do arts or sports?

“Contemplative practices harness this capacity to transform and enhance individuals, communities and lived worlds (including social, cultural and ecological worlds). Across times and cultures, humans have devised a capacious repertoire of practices used to free the self from its felt confines, improve wellbeing, and access new knowledge about being human.

Contemplation is popularly associated with mindfulness and yoga, but it’s a big umbrella that covers many other practices, including techniques to cultivate prosocial emotions (such as compassion), to use the imagination to shape perceptions, to appraise and analyse critical topics, to contextualise the self within broader contexts, and to push the body and mind to total exaltation. By refining skills such as attentional balance, emotional regulation, empathic response, perspective-taking and bodily awareness, practices of contemplation help us navigate and modulate the human experience.

Historically, practices of contemplation were inextricable from the rest of life, including its cultural, philosophical, cosmological and religious dimensions. But since at least the 16th century in the West, due to the systematic rupture with traditions of contemplation, cultural attitudes towards contemplation have gotten skewed. It has consequently been marginalised in many societies, and people have grown estranged from it. To be estranged from contemplation means to no longer recognise your ability to apply specific practices designed to transform and enhance your life.”