Weekly Picks – April 20, 2025

Credit (left to right): Robert Berdan; Bloomberg/ Getty Images; Schmidt Ocean Institute

A couple of videos that I wanted to share this week, from years ago but still relevant:

Gideon Levy on the Two-State Solution
How Israelis Live So Easily With Occupation (full keynote can be found here)

This week’s collection:

Bibles, bullets and beef: Amazon cowboy culture at odds with Brazil’s climate goals | The Guardian
The Animals That Exist Between Life and Death | Nautilus
Across war zones, targeting healthcare has become a strategy, not an accident | Global Voices
Unspoken Oppression – The Twin Hells of School and Work | CounterPunch
How People Are Really Using Gen AI in 2025 | Harvard Business Review
Team captures first confirmed footage of a baby colossal squid | Phys.org
Fashionable Nonsense | The Baffler
The ancient empire that civilization forgot | National Geographic

Find out how these lists are compiled at The Explainer.

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

1. Bibles, bullets and beef: Amazon cowboy culture at odds with Brazil’s climate goals | Jonathan Watts, Naira Hofmeister & Daniel Camargos

This article was published with two companion pieces that provide further context:

“Yellowstone in Montana may have the most romanticised cowboy culture in the world thanks to the TV drama series of the same name starring Kevin Costner. But the true home of the 21st-century cowboy is about 7,500 miles south, in what used to be the Amazon rainforest of Brazil, where the reality of raising cattle and producing beef is better characterised by depression, market pressure and vexed efforts to prevent the destruction of the land and its people. […]

Later this year, Pará will host the Cop30 climate conference, which would be an ideal moment for Brazil to demonstrate progress on a new system to track livestock and reduce emissions from deforestation. That system should be completed by the end of 2026. But few ranchers believe this will happen because of the huge gulf between what locals want and what the world needs.

The first ranchers here were once told they were heroes for opening new economic frontiers. But the climate crisis has dealt a triple blow to their reputation and their livelihoods: not only has it become harder to feed and water their livestock, they now face criticism for wrecking a biodiverse pillar of the global environment while also bearing the brunt of conflicting demands from multinational food corporations to provide food that is both economically cheap and ecologically ethical.

At a time when humanity is breaching more and more environmental limits, this challenge is more than many can bear.

“What is our biggest disease today? Depression. That’s what is killing the most (producers),” says Thaueny Stival, the owner of a mid-sized ranch in the small town of Água Azul do Norte.

A thoughtful man who says he is trying to modernise and do the right thing, Stival says ranchers are struggling to cope with rapidly changing perceptions about food production. When pioneers first arrived in this region in the 1980s, he says, they were encouraged to clear forest by Brazil’s government (then a military dictatorship). Banks would not give them loans unless they cleared most of their land.

That partial and romanticised story of Amazon colonisation from half a century ago has been overtaken by more recent and brutal changes. In this region, the vast majority of ranchers have invaded public lands without permission. Now there is growing evidence that the deforestation that followed is pushing the Amazon to the point of no return, with dire consequences for the world’s climate. The result is that the ranchers who once considered themselves national heroes are now treated as global pariahs.”

2. The Animals That Exist Between Life and Death | Phil Jaekl

“In the late 1600s, self-made scientist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek embarked on a project that would make him question the very nature of life and its limit. And would send ripples of philosophical and scientific quandaries through the generations that persist today. Peering through the hand-ground lenses he crafted, magnifying his subjects 275 times, the Dutch cloth merchant and naturalist was the first human to glimpse an otherworldly microcosmos where astonishing creatures seemed to defy the laws of nature and survival. He called them, adoringly, “animalcules.”

In 1687, he discovered some animalcules so peculiar in form and function that he would spend decades observing them. We now know these tiny animals, which had wheel-like appendages that van Leeuwenhoek correctly surmised were for feeding, as rotifers. They live in watery environments throughout the globe, from the tropics to Antarctica, in oceans, temporary puddles, and even in moisture within moss. But van Leeuwenhoek wasn’t satisfied just watching them. He decided to test these ubiquitous animals’ limits. He wanted to see what would happen to them when their surrounding aqueous environment dried up.

Other animalcules, he noted, would readily break apart or collapse in on themselves upon desiccation. But when he dried out rotifers, they each instead contracted into a shrunken, wrinkled oval, now called a “tun” or “xerosome.”

What van Leeuwenhoek discovered next went beyond anything he could have imagined: After adding water to a glass tube that contained dried sediment and rotifer tuns he’d collected from a rain gutter, van Leeuwenhoek watched in wonder through his homemade microscope as rotifers came back to life. “I examined it, and perceived some of the Animalcules lying closely heaped together,” he wrote in a letter to the British Royal Society. “In a short time afterwards they began to extend their bodies, and in half an hour at least a hundred of them were swimming about the glass …” As a good experimentalist, he repeated the process by drying out other rotifers and witnessing the same phenomenon numerous times—even after samples were desiccated for a month.

“These little animals, which had appeared to be completely dried and lifeless, were restored to motion upon the addition of water, as if they had never suffered any harm,” van Leeuwenhoek wrote. Microbiologists would later find that some species of rotifers are able to reanimate after up to nine years of desiccation. […]

In fact, many of van Leeuwenhoek’s early observations were often met with skepticism. Forget about tiny, resurrecting bugs. A microcosmos of bizarre lifeforms, unseeable with the naked eye, sounded to most of his contemporaries more like fiction than reality.

Even as microbiologists have been working for centuries now to piece together how rotifers and several other animal species survive desiccation and other extreme conditions, philosophers are still grappling with the idea that life and death may not be the only states of being in which organisms can exist.”

3. Across war zones, targeting healthcare has become a strategy, not an accident | Walid El Houri

“In recent years, the targeting of healthcare workers, hospitals, and health infrastructure in conflict zones has escalated alarmingly, particularly in the West Asia and North Africa (WANA) region. Nowhere has this been more devastating than in Gaza, where the systematic destruction of the healthcare system by Israel has reached unprecedented levels. By early 2024, over 761 incidents of violence against Palestinian healthcare had been recorded — equivalent to the total number of attacks in Sudan, Ukraine, and the Democratic Republic of Congo combined.

The 2023 report by the Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition documented a 25 percent rise in assaults on healthcare facilities and personnel globally, making it the worst year on record. These included bombings, looting, and killings that paralyzed healthcare systems and left civilians without essential care. The report found that nearly half of these incidents were attributed to state forces. It identified clear patterns of violence against healthcare in places like Myanmar, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, and, critically, in Gaza.

“Conflicts where violence against healthcare becomes a consistent pattern frequently start with extreme levels of violence against the health system,” the report noted. In 2023, this trend was particularly stark in Manipur (India), Sudan, and Gaza. […]

This increasing normalization of attacks on healthcare facilities and personnel reflects a crisis in the post-WWII world order, with international law, institutions, and protections under an unprecedented attack.

Protections enshrined in international law — particularly the Geneva Conventions — are routinely flouted, especially by powerful states and their allies. While legal mechanisms like the ICJ and ICC offer glimmers of hope, they remain toothless without enforcement mechanisms and political will.”

4. Unspoken Oppression – The Twin Hells of School and Work | Malik Diamond

“I find it instructive that the kind of adults who would call a child cynical are the same ones who are most devoted to the idea that the proper way to rear children is to force them to sit at a desk, doing pointless, repetitive tasks, for the best hours of the day, five days a week, nine months a year—conditioning them to obedience, fractured thinking, emotional dependency on authority, and boredom.

Anyone who has plodded through this country’s demented compulsory schooling system knows perfectly well that it’s a nightmarish violation of the human spirit. Yet most of us grow up and regard it as unavoidable, like it was gravity. We fail to imagine or pursue any alternatives. Even worse, we have kids of our own and ship them off to these chambers of low-grade torture, despite our own hellish experiences there. What’s more cynical than that?

The most naive among us are convinced that we’re doing our kids some kind of favor by sending them to school, and perhaps such ignorance can be forgiven. Other folks know through hard experience that lack of schooling credentials can doom children to a lifetime of menial labor or worse. […]

As a writer and a poet, I love and respect language, words, and depth of meaning. I hate platitudes; I hate mindlessly parroted political jargon even more. So whenever someone bops me with some lexicon like they just won the conversation, it’s time for me to play Naughty Student, hand up in the back of the room—excuse me, sir; define oppression; define liberation. Define responsible.

In my view, the most common and unacknowledged forms of immediate, everyday oppression are the twin hells of School & Work. The first was always intended by its progenitors as training for the second; some asshole authority figure tells you what to do all day, and the most important lesson you learn is: do it or else. Coerced by law, and by the need for parents to have somewhere to park their kids during the workday, we go to school. Coerced by the necessity of money for survival, we work… if we’re lucky. Otherwise, we end up in society’s trash can, living on the street or in prison.”

5. How People Are Really Using Gen AI in 2025 | Marc Zao-Sanders

“Much has happened over the past 12 months. We now have custom GPTs: AI tailored for narrower sets of requirements. New kids are on the block, such as DeepSeek and Grok, providing more competition and choice. Millions of ears pricked up as Google debuted their podcast generator, NotebookLM. OpenAI launched many new models (now along with the promise to consolidate them all into one unified interface). Chain-of-thought reasoning, whereby AI sacrifices speed for depth and better answers by sharing the intermediate reasoning steps with the user before arriving at a final answer, came into play. Voice commands now enable more and different interactions, such as allowing us to use gen AI while driving. And costs have substantially reduced with access broadened over the past 12 hectic months. […]

There were several indications that gen AI users in 2025 have now developed a deeper understanding along with a skepticism about gen AI, its creators, and the ecosystem it’s in. […]

As one might expect, users seemed to have a better understanding of how LLMs work this year. More seem to understand the fundamental point that for AI to be useful to humans, we need to be clear about our intentions.”

6. Team captures first confirmed footage of a baby colossal squid | Schmidt Ocean Institute

“An international team of scientists and crew on board Schmidt Ocean Institute’s research vessel Falkor (too) was the first to film the colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni) in its natural environment. The 30-centimeter juvenile squid (nearly one foot long) was captured on video at a depth of 600 meters (1968 feet) by the Institute’s remotely operated vehicle (ROV) SuBastian. The sighting occurred on March 9 on an expedition near the South Sandwich Islands in the South Atlantic Ocean.

This year is the 100-year anniversary of the identification and formal naming of the colossal squid, a member of the glass squid family (Cranchiidae). […]

“It’s exciting to see the first in situ footage of a juvenile colossal and humbling to think that they have no idea that humans exist,” said Dr. Kat Bolstad of the Auckland University of Technology, one of the independent scientific experts the team consulted to verify the footage. “For 100 years, we have mainly encountered them as prey remains in whale and seabird stomachs and as predators of harvested toothfish.”

Colossal squid are estimated to grow up to seven meters (23 feet) in length and can weigh as much as 500 kilograms (1,100 lbs), making them the heaviest invertebrate on the planet. Little is known about the colossal squid’s life cycle, but eventually, they lose the see-through appearance of the juveniles. Dying adults have previously been filmed by fishermen, but have never been seen alive at depth.”

Those interested in the history of this extraordinary creature may appreciate this BBC deep dive.

7. Fashionable Nonsense | Leif Weatherby

“You’ve heard the rumors. People named Dennis are more likely to become dentists. If you do a little ritual before you go on stage, you’ll perform better. If you give your employees chocolate chip cookies, they will become, as if by magic, more motivated. What you think, and the judgments you make, are conditioned by “bias” that you need to overcome with data. With statistics. With science.

This heady cocktail of assertions and recommendations comes from the world of “behavioral science,” a strain of psychology with a storied academic history that has spilled into the worlds of publishing, public policy, and management theory.

The problem is that it’s all bullshit. […]

This particular brand of twaddle is relentlessly fixated on improving economic outcomes above all else. In this, it hardly deviates from the canon of behavioral science books written for a mainstream audience. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (2008) by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein is by far the most influential dispatch from the realm of behavioral psychology—more properly, behavioral economics, a true creature of the business school. In it, Thaler and Sunstein advance the idea of “libertarian paternalism”: the notion that modest adjustments to our environment produce better outcomes for everyone. Putting carrots before cake in a cafeteria line, for instance, will make people choose the healthy option more often; making organ-donation opt-out instead of opt-in will raise participation rates—these are the titular “nudges” Sunstein and Thaler envision.

The concept of nudging spread like wildfire, with dozens of governments, including our own here in the US of A, opening “nudge units.” It provided a cheap set of ostensible solutions to real political problems. Instead of paying for school lunches to be actually healthy, why not just nudge parents or students to choose the healthier option already there? For the Obama administration, and many other late-stage technocratic neoliberal governments around the world, this approach offered a way to claim they were addressing deep-seated problems without doing the hard work of structural reform. The nudge was peak Democrat neoliberal policy, relying on markets, individual choice, and the manipulation of that choice in lieu of progressive, redistributive policy. The problem, again, was that it was all bullshit. Large swaths of the foundational experiments Sunstein and Thaler cited either failed to replicate when the experiments were done again, or were the effect of “publication bias,” in which publishing only surprising and positive results provides a misleading picture of the evidence. When this bias was corrected for, no evidence for the effectiveness of nudges remained, according to a 2022 study.

Over the years, fraud and just plain fatuousness have blended to produce a psychology that leans into the idea that a mixture of self-help, government policy, and app-style gamification could optimize individuals and society. It’s not just the bestselling trade books that suffer from these flaws. The enterprise is rotten all the way down.”

8. The ancient empire that civilization forgot | Andrew Curry

“At its height, the ancient city of Hattuşa, capital of the Hittite civilization, must have been awe-inspiring. Built into a steep hillside in what is today central Türkiye, the city was ringed by tall brick walls. It was home to as many as 7,000 people, vast temple complexes, and an imposing stone rampart visible from miles away. Today the hillside is home to a mystery.

No pillars or high walls mark the ruins of the palace and temples that once stood—just stone foundations half-covered by dry grass. Some of the city’s gates still stand, guarded by statues of lions, sphinxes, and an axe-wielding god. But much is gone. The mud-brick walls have crumbled over the centuries; floods and snowmelt have eroded the original hillside, sending buildings full of clay tablets cascading down the slopes. Fainter still are the clues that might explain what happened to the powerful Hittite people—a lost empire that researchers are now beginning to understand with greater clarity.

The disappearance of the Hittites, around 1180 B.C., was a vanishing act with few parallels in history. For at least 450 years, the Hittites controlled much of modern-day Türkiye and beyond—from close to the shores of the Black Sea to the rivers of Mesopotamia and the waters of the Mediterranean. They built sophisticated cities, impressive temples, and an elaborate palace in the rugged countryside of Anatolia. They authored massive archives of cuneiform tablets containing numerous ancient languages and sacred rituals. Their kings benefited from trade routes that reached far beyond the Hittite homeland.Their armies once even penetrated deep into Mesopotamia. Their tangle with Egypt’s Ramses the Great at the Battle of Kadesh resulted in the world’s first peace treaty.

“They were able to fight the Egyptians, and the Babylonians and Assyrians had to treat them as equals,” said Andreas Schachner of the German Archaeological Institute, which has been carrying out digs at the Hattuşa site for nearly a century. Yet “the Egyptians, the Assyrians—they were all part of historical memory. The Hittites were extinguished completely.””