Weekly Picks – June 30, 2024

Credit (left): Alphavector/ Shutterstock. Credit (center, clockwise from bottom left): Bruno Barbey/ Magnum Photos; Ahmad Al-Rubaye/ Getty Images; Wired staff/ Getty Images. Credit (right): James O’Brien for Quanta Magazine.

This week’s collection:

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

Linked here but not quoted below, some ‘fact sheets’ shared in the past week:

1. Exit 238

“Each year, the swallow commonly known as the purple martin makes a roughly 5,000-mile journey between North and South America. For his short film Exit 328, the US director Henry Davis documented thousands of these birds roosting in a somewhat unlikely rest area – a strip mall in Austin, Texas – alongside the makeshift human community of locals and dedicated birders that had formed beneath them. Over the course of a week, he filmed the birds making a temporary home in this most human of environments, alongside the eclectic concerns of the people below – from the birds’ safety, to the unpleasant prospect of being defecated on from above. Yet, there’s a peculiar beauty in these dissonances. Observing this convergence of time, place, perspective and species, Davis finds a strange electricity in this moment, which, while documented here, will never quite be replicated.”

2. Agreeing to Our Harm

“Some years ago I spoke at a conservative church in northern Michigan. I talked about military-style guns and the culture of fear and resentment that rationalized the zeal for them. My point was that they and the passions associated with them should have no place among people who claim to be Christians. When I finished there was silence. Then a woman raised her hand and asked why no one had been prosecuted for the Iraq War. It was not a question I expected, to say the least. I had no answer.

The woman was gracious, not at all confrontational. But clearly she had asked her question as a kind of rebuttal to what I had said about guns. When I had time to think about it, I decided she was asking me which was the graver danger—that weapons had seized upon the imagination of an important subset of the population, together with threats and fantasies of using them against people and institutions within their own country, or that a president could throw the American armed forces unprepared into a war, with heavy losses on both sides, and that he could do this on the basis of thin or doubtful information, if not simply from a sense of private grievance and a privileged indifference to other considerations. Now the Supreme Court is mulling the possibility of making real in law the presidential immunity from prosecution, the privileging of power that had, as fact, offended the woman’s sense of justice and safety.

To weigh one grievous threat against another is not a very useful exercise. There is no point in seeming to minimize either one. If I had understood that the woman was questioning the choice I made in deploring where I did, if I’d had my wits about me, I would have said that the problem with guns was accelerating past the possibility of legal control. The choices of individual people would be crucial in determining how widespread the ownership of these weapons would finally be and what ethics on one hand or terrors and delusions on the other would govern their presence and use.

The woman sat quietly while I went on to other things, then left without saying another word to me. But I can imagine that, when she had a moment to think, she might have asked me how I could be sure, in the absence of a deterrent, that the risk of unjustified war was not as great as ever, and as liable to reflect disordered thinking, or grudges, or self-aggrandizement, as the visions of the gun cultists. And she might have added that while it is true that I can speak with people who will indeed, as individuals, influence the presence of weapons in society, I cannot speak—she might say preach—to the people who choose between peace and war.”

3. Why the ‘Costs of Doing Business’ Are Costing Us Our Lives

“We have all been understandably absorbed in infectious diseases for the past few years: the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, long COVID and the resurgence of other ailments like whooping cough, respiratory syncytial virus and measles.

Meanwhile, a host of other diseases have continued to beset us: the non-communicable diseases like Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, hypertension and some cancers. We’ve long known that such diseases are largely due to the social determinants of health — every social class is healthier than the one below it, and sicker than the one above it.

Some social determinants are gaining more interest among public health experts: namely the commercial determinants of health, which the World Health Organization defines as “the private sector activities that affect people’s health, directly or indirectly, positively or negatively.”

Positively, the private sector can produce safe drinking water, effective pharmaceuticals and so on — at least to those who can afford them.

The major negative commercial determinants of health are the industries that produce alcohol, tobacco, ultra-processed foods and drinks, and air pollution from fossil fuels.

According to a 2023 report in The Lancet, these four industries are responsible for one-third of global deaths each year.

According to database.earth, 60 million people died in 2023. Applying The Lancet’s global death numbers to this data, about 20 million of those who died last year died from the product of just four legal, regulated industries (in many countries, tobacco and alcohol are sold by government agencies).

Still more illnesses and deaths result from gambling, dangerous working conditions and even some aspects of health care.”

4. Computation Is All Around Us, and You Can See It if You Try

“Even today, I don’t visualize or hear the machine, but it sings to me; I feel it humming along, updating variables, looping, branching, searching, until it arrives at its destination and provides an answer. To me, a program isn’t static code, it’s the embodiment of a living creature that follows my instructions to a (hopefully) successful conclusion. I know computers don’t physically work this way, but that doesn’t stop my metaphorical machine.

Once you start thinking about computation, you start to see it everywhere. Take mailing a letter through the postal service. Put the letter in an envelope with an address and a stamp on it, and stick it in a mailbox, and somehow it will end up in the recipient’s mailbox. That is a computational process — a series of operations that move the letter from one place to another until it reaches its final destination. This routing process is not unlike what happens with electronic mail or any other piece of data sent through the internet. Seeing the world in this way may seem odd, but as Friedrich Nietzsche is reputed to have said, “Those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”

This innate sense of a machine at work can lend a computational perspective to almost any phenomenon, even one as seemingly inscrutable as the concept of randomness. Something seemingly random, like a coin flip, can be fully described by some complex computational process that yields an unpredictable outcome of heads or tails. The outcome depends on myriad variables: the force and angle and height of the flip; the weight, diameter, thickness and distribution of mass of the coin; air resistance; gravity; the hardness of the landing surface; and so on. It’s similar for shuffling a deck of cards, rolling dice or spinning a roulette wheel — or generating “random” numbers on a computer, which just involves running some purposely complicated function. None of these is a truly random process.”

5. The Power of Physician Empathy

“We all prefer a doctor who listens to our concerns and expresses compassion for our suffering. But does physician empathy actually have a lasting impact on a patient’s health?

Empathy appears to decline among some medical students over the duration of their medical school training, and doctors often miss opportunities to offer it due to time constraints. Physicians also seem to show less empathy toward patients in lower socioeconomic groups and from non-white races. But they might be missing an important therapeutic tool.

A new study in JAMA finds that “very empathetic” doctors are associated with greater pain relief, better daily functioning, and higher quality life among people with chronic back pain compared with “slightly” empathetic doctors. Physician empathy was even more strongly associated with good outcomes on these measures than opioids, surgical interventions, and other non-drug treatments, such as exercise. The effect sizes were small, but clinically relevant, according to the researchers, and extended across a full year of follow-up.

. . .

The average differences in pain levels found in the study were likely too small to make a difference in a patient’s day-to-day experience, says Vitaly Napadow, a pain researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital who was not involved in the study. That’s true even though empathy had a greater impact than other treatments, including opioids and spinal surgeries, he says. “It speaks to how little difference those other things make, unfortunately,” he says.

Over the past decade, evidence has begun to accumulate that a physician who is empathetic may not only help to relieve a patients’ pain, but also improve clinical outcomes, in terms of both physical and mental health.”

6. Rule by Militia

“In April last year the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) clashed with the army in Khartoum, beginning a civil war that has plunged Sudan into humanitarian crisis. Over ten million people have been displaced, and almost half the country faces acute hunger. For the warring parties, catastrophe has proved profitable: both have seized humanitarian assets, taxed aid convoys, and looted the civilian population. Once an ethnically organized militia beholden to Omar al-Bashir, the dictator who ruled the country between 1989 and 2019, the RSF has begun to grow into a transnational economic empire; it already has a gold mining business offshored in the United Arab Emirates and forces that have deployed in Libya and Yemen. Eager to complete this transformation, the group is now intent on capturing the state that created it.

Militias are often taken as a sign of weak or absent government, the result of renegade actors operating in the wake of state collapse. Such a narrative could be told through a roll call of fallen dictators—from Mohamed Siad Barre in Somalia through to Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya—whose removal seemed to result in the death of the state and the emergence of militias that pick over its carcass. But these lapsarian lessons about the evils that befall a society after state collapse occlude more than they reveal. The reality is that many militias active around the globe today were created by states. In the aftermath of the economic crises of the 1980s, governments wracked by debt found militias an efficient way of managing restive populations.

. . .

These arrangements are at odds with the normative assumptions of liberal peacemaking, which undergird cookie-cutter, UN-backed Security Sector Reform (SSR) processes in every postwar settlement in the Global South. The central tenet of SSR is that a state should have a single unified army and a monopoly of violence within its territory. Its motto might as well be: where the militias are, the state is not. That assumption has been proven false, time and again. In South Sudan, for example—now five years into an SSR process that began in the aftermath of civil war—the state has ruled by multiplying militias. Far from preventing the state from functioning effectively, militias have proved essential to its continued existence.

Indeed today’s militias, simultaneously state-supported armies and private economic actors, are the substantive political force organizing much of our world, even if the international system still insists that the nation-state is its operative political unit. These militias are not aberrations, nor are they atavistic forms of social organization. They flourish because of the way that nation-states are inserted into the contemporary global economy.”

7. The psychology of oppression and liberation

“It is neither a surprise nor a coincidence that we are witnessing a renewed interest in Fanon and his ideas since the October 7 Hamas attacks on the Zionist entity and occupying settler colony of Israel and the ensuing genocide against the Palestinians. Without any doubt, his analysis and thinking remain highly relevant and enlightening, due to the endurance of coloniality (which he analyzed) in its myriad forms, from settler colonialism in Palestine to neocolonialism in various parts of the global South. However, some of this renewed interest—particularly in relation to the situation in Palestine—succumbs to simplistic critiques and erroneous and insidious readings of his work that tend to distort it and to disconnect it from his anti-colonial and revolutionary praxis, as well as from his unwavering commitment to the liberation of the “wretched of the earth.” These supposedly “critical” endeavors cannot be dissociated from the broader attacks on Palestinians’ right to resist colonialism using any means necessary and the disdainful attitude toward people who show uncompromising solidarity with their resistance and liberation struggle. In some cases, the whole enterprise amounts to racism masquerading as intellectual discourse.

. . .

In his work, Fanon describes thoroughly the mechanisms of violence put in place by colonialism to subjugate oppressed people. He writes: “Colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state.” According to him, the colonial world is a Manichean world, which proceeds toward its logical conclusion: it “dehumanizes the native, or to speak plainly it turns him into an animal.” For Fanon, colonization is a systematic negation of the other and a frantic refusal to attribute any aspect of humanity to that other. In contrast to other forms of domination, colonial violence is total, diffuse, permanent, and global.”

8. Pooping on the Moon Is a Messy Business

“Everybody poops, including astronauts. In fact, the first picture Neil Armstrong ever snapped from the surface of the moon shows a jettisoned waste bag that may well contain poop. The Apollo crews left a total of 96 bags of waste, including urine and feces, across their six landing sites, which are still sitting there to this day: a celestial reminder that wherever humans go, we bring our shit with us.

These Apollo jettison bags, sometimes shorthanded as the “poo bags,” have been the subject of much interest and speculation since they were deposited on the moon more than 50 years ago. Human feces is packed with microbial life, which means that the moon hosted life on its surface for an unknown period of time after each Apollo landing. Learning how long those microbes survived in the extraterrestrial excrement would reveal tantalizing insights into the mystery of life’s origins on Earth and its potential existence elsewhere. The bags also raise questions about our cultural heritage and environmental impact on the lunar environment, while underscoring the intractable problem of managing and disposing of off-Earth biological waste.

These topics are more salient than ever now that there’s a renewed push, both from governments and commercial actors, to return humans to the surface of the moon, potentially for stays of weeks, months, or—in the most optimistic visions—indefinitely.

“If there’s going to be humans living permanently on the moon, you don’t want bags of poo lying around,” says Melissa de Zwart, a professor at the University of Adelaide who specializes in the legal and regulatory aspects of outer space or environments, including the moon. “It’s a hazard. It’s unsightly. It’s not what we want to do. So the question is, what are the environmental standards that we will apply? We don’t currently have any hard and fast rules.”

The messy business of waste management and disposal in space has plagued astronauts and mission planners since we first started blasting our meatbag bodies into space. “When the biological functions of man are discussed, they are more likely to evoke laughter than to stimulate interest,” lamented the authors of a 1971 paper on the subject. But despite the taboo nature of the topic, the team emphasized its centrality to human spaceflight, noting that “the astronauts have learned quickly the importance of gravity in the mechanics of defecation.”

Indeed, we take for granted that when we go to the bathroom on Earth, our urine and feces helpfully separate from our bodies thanks to the forces that govern objects with mass: gravity affects poop just as it does planets and people. But in micro- or lunar gravity, waste does not disconnect from the body so easily, and it can behave unpredictably in storage, inspiring memorable phrases such as “fecal popcorning,” referring to the movements of astro-poop as it bounces off the sides of space toilet containment tanks.”