Weekly Picks – July 14, 2024

Credit, left: Jack Jen Gieseking. Credit, center (clockwise from top-left): Eyðfinnur Olsen/ Alamy Stock Photo; Pratyush Dhawan; Nesma Moharam; AP Photo/ Ng Han Guan; Creative Touch Imaging Ltd. / NurPhoto via Getty Images; Etienne Laurent / AFP / Getty. Credit, right: Selman Design.

This week’s collection:

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

1. Dreaming of a Great World

“Lincoln did save the United States from much unhappy history, from a fractured continent of contending European-scale states that would almost certainly have warred against each other again. Perhaps a more frankly colonial U.S. would have competed with the Confederacy for colonies in Latin America, Africa, Asia. Perhaps a vengeful U.S. would have seized Canada. A breakaway Texas republic might have sought to expand to the Pacific and throughout the west. One can imagine being drawn into the emerging competition between Britain and Germany, with World War I battles taking place on both sides of the Atlantic. It is likely that the continent would not have developed so quickly, or that the continental superpower would have emerged.

That is the other side of the coin. Lincoln’s legacy. The unified, rapidly industrializing republic spanning a greater territory than Western Europe would by sheer bulk almost inevitably rise to overwhelming global power. Energies not absorbed in a competition among American states would be devoted instead to internal consolidation and expansion. While European states were assembling overseas empires the United States was developing an integrated continental empire, turning its warfares almost immediately to subduing and colonizing the remaining Indian lands of the interior west that had been leapfrogged in the thrust to the Pacific coast. The job was barely proclaimed complete by Frederick Jackson Turner in the 1890s before the U.S. was thrusting out into the world, seizing the Spanish empire’s island colonies so strategically placed to secure trade routes from Latin America to Asia. The colonies went away, but the strategic network, the “empire of bases” noted by Chalmers Johnson, is larger than ever.

So Lincoln’s success bears its consequences, as would have his failure. These are the legacies with which we live. America continues to be the greatest global power, even though on a more equal basis with other powers. It is really too important a country in global history to behave like an empire, consumed in its own interests to the exclusion of others. The fundamental facts of a world so tightly knit as ours is that the only way to serve ones own interests ultimately is to seek and preserve the common good. America’s greatest leadership in the world will only come when we acknowledge our national shortfallings.”

2. Five Ring Circus

“Olympism, the strange syncretic invention of Pierre de Coubertin, drew on the baron’s misreading of the ancient games and a wilfully romantic appropriation of the English public school cult of the amateur athlete. Coubertin first called for a revival of the Olympics at a symposium at the Sorbonne in 1892, and in 1894 established the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which chose Athens as the games’ first host city. This month, after a gap of a hundred years, the Olympic Games will return to Paris for a third time.

The first Olympics held in Paris, in 1900, were a farce. Coubertin had intended them to serve as the sporting component of the Exposition Universelle. Its chief organiser, Alfred Picard, was less keen, dismissing Coubertin’s games for a few hundred amateur male athletes as ‘cheap and unfit to represent the nation’, while the neo-Hellenism of the Olympic movement was seen as an ‘absurd anachronism’. The official programme of the exhibition included a range of sports that were popular in late 19th-century France: motor races and ballooning, fishing and pigeon racing, as well as mass displays featuring thousands of gymnasts and archers, golf and polo parties, school sports, events for women and children, and – least Olympic of all – professionals competing in tennis, pelota and cycling.

Undeterred, Coubertin in effect decreed that the events in the exhibition’s sporting programme that didn’t involve motor vehicles, professionals, children or animals were Olympic events. The press was confused, describing these contests as festival games, Olympian games and international games. The public didn’t pay much attention. Just one paying spectator seems to have attended the croquet. No laurels or certificates were awarded. Many of the winners were surprised to discover, years later, that they had participated in the Olympics. ‘It’s a miracle that the Olympic movement survived,’ Coubertin admitted.

By the time of the next Paris games, in 1924, Coubertin’s resilience, monomania and focus on what would now be called branding had succeeded in turning the Olympics into a global institution, which would soon supersede the world’s fairs and imperial exhibitions on which it had initially depended.”

3. Queer Maps, Data, Devices, and Resistance

“This exchange began in 2021, when cultural geographer and environmental psychologist Jack Jen Gieseking spoke with artist and designer Ulf Treger about the work both were doing in queer mapping. Gieseking’s book A Queer New York, published in 2020, is an historical geography of lesbian-queer society and political economy in New York City, with a focus on lesbian-queer roles in contemporary processes of gentrification; the volume is accompanied by an online pair of interactive maps, jointly titled An Everyday Queer New York. Treger works with the group Queer narratives, mapped to collaboratively document geographies of LGBTIQ+ people, especially in his home city of Hamburg, Germany; he helped to design the art/map/story collection Queeraspora Collective Mappings, produced as a brochure in 2022, and subsequently published online as a multilayered digital map. Gieseking consulted with Queer narratives, mapped in the early pandemic as they built out their work.

For a variety of reasons, including the pandemic, the initial conversation paused. Gieseking and Treger reconnected in 2023, and the two spoke further about mapping, memory, and resistance. Finally, in 2024 they returned to their discussion via email.

By way of a greeting to you, the reader, the conversants write:

We hope this extended back-and-forth can promote additional forms of queer thinking. In these times of ever-increasing crises, it is all the more necessary to imagine new worlds and relationalities across the borders, boundaries, and barriers that are levied against LGTBIQ+ people and so many othered “others.””

4. Blood in the Water, Food on the Table, Protesters on the Shore

“In a cafe close to the misty harbor in Tórshavn, in the Faroe Islands, Andrew Marshfield and Espen Østrem stick out as obvious foreigners. It’s not their English, which is spoken widely across this self-governing archipelago within Denmark, located halfway between Iceland and Norway in the North Atlantic. It’s the two men’s opinions that turn heads our way. They’re talking about whales—specifically, how to stop local residents from killing them.

“This year, they slaughtered whales in front of a cruise ship,” Østrem says, incredulously. The cruise line issued an apology to its passengers, noting that the event was “distressing for the majority of guests on board” and objecting to the “outdated practice.” Newspapers and networks all over the world covered the story, including the Washington Post and NPR in the United States. Østrem and Marshfield, both animal rights activists, think tourists should boycott the islands to help turn the tides against the practice. Three women sitting by the window glance toward us, then politely turn back to their hot drinks.

In a centuries-old tradition known as a grindadráp, the Faroese people hunt long-finned pilot whales for their meat and blubber. The whales are technically large dolphins, ranging from four to over six meters long, with bulbous heads and black tails. When a pod is sighted, someone calls a “grind,” pronounced “grinned,” and people are free to leave work to participate. School children leave class to watch. Once the hunters have killed the whales using lances, they share the meat and blubber, carrying it home in buckets, wheelbarrows, and truck beds for boiling and preserving.

For many in this place so deeply connected to the sea, the practice is meaningful and central to cultural identity and memory. But it’s proven controversial to outsiders. Compared with industrialized commercial meat production today, which tends to remain contained within factories and industrial slaughterhouses, the grind does not hide the violent reality of harvesting meat for food. That—and the fact that the grind’s quarry is an intelligent marine mammal—have made the hunt a high-profile target for Østrem and Marshfield, and other activists. The pair is part of a land crew with the Captain Paul Watson Foundation UK. Paul Watson is the infamous founder of Sea Shepherd Conservation Society—best known for its militant tactics on behalf of marine life, including against Indigenous whalers. When Watson split with Sea Shepherd in 2022 over directional differences, a few chapters around the world changed their names to stay aligned with him, including Sea Shepherd UK.

Østrem and Marshfield, a Norwegian software engineer and a British underwriter, are here to capture photos of blood-filled harbors and butchered whale carcasses so Watson’s foundation can muster outrage online. Ultimately, they want to rouse global political pressure, maybe even a trade embargo, to end what they call unnecessary violence.”

5. 26 million tons of clothing end up in China’s landfills each year, propelled by fast fashion

“At a factory in Zhejiang province on China’s eastern coast, two mounds of discarded cotton clothing and bed linens, loosely separated into dark and light colors, pile up on a workroom floor. Jacket sleeves, collars and brand labels protrude from the stacks as workers feed the garments into shredding machines.

It’s the first stage of a new life for the textiles, part of a recycling effort at the Wenzhou Tiancheng Textile Company, one of the largest cotton recycling plants in China.

Textile waste is an urgent global problem, with only 12% recycled worldwide, according to fashion sustainability nonprofit Ellen MacArthur Foundation. Even less — only 1% — are castoff clothes recycled into new garments; the majority is used for low-value items like insulation or mattress stuffing.

Nowhere is the problem more pressing than in China, the world’s largest textile producer and consumer, where more than 26 million tons of clothes are thrown away each year, according to government statistics. Most of it ends up in landfills.

And factories like this one are barely making a dent in a country whose clothing industry is dominated by “fast fashion” — cheap clothes made from unrecyclable synthetics, not cotton. Produced from petrochemicals that contribute to climate change, air and water pollution, synthetics account for 70% of domestic clothing sales in China.

China’s footprint is worldwide: E-commerce juggernaut brands Shein and Temu make the country one of the world’s largest producers of cheap fashion, selling in more than 150 countries.

To achieve a game-changing impact, what fashion expert Shaway Yeh calls “circular sustainability” is needed among major Chinese clothing brands so waste is avoided entirely. “You need to start it from recyclable fibers and then all these waste textiles will be put into use again,” she said. But that is an elusive goal: Only about 20% of China’s textiles are recycled, according to the Chinese government — and almost all of that is cotton.

Chinese cotton is not without a taint of its own, said Claudia Bennett of the nonprofit Human Rights Foundation. Much of it comes from forced labor in Xinjiang province by the country’s ethnic Uyghur minority.”

6. How gamification took over the world

“It’s a thought that occurs to every video-game player at some point: What if the weird, hyper-focused state I enter when playing in virtual worlds could somehow be applied to the real one?

Often pondered during especially challenging or tedious tasks in meatspace (writing essays, say, or doing your taxes), it’s an eminently reasonable question to ask. Life, after all, is hard. And while video games are too, there’s something almost magical about the way they can promote sustained bouts of superhuman concentration and resolve.

For some, this phenomenon leads to an interest in flow states and immersion. For others, it’s simply a reason to play more games. For a handful of consultants, startup gurus, and game designers in the late 2000s, it became the key to unlocking our true human potential.

In her 2010 TED Talk, “Gaming Can Make a Better World,” the game designer Jane McGonigal called this engaged state “blissful productivity.” “There’s a reason why the average World of Warcraft gamer plays for 22 hours a week,” she said. “It’s because we know when we’re playing a game that we’re actually happier working hard than we are relaxing or hanging out. We know that we are optimized as human beings to do hard and meaningful work. And gamers are willing to work hard all the time.”

McGonigal’s basic pitch was this: By making the real world more like a video game, we could harness the blissful productivity of millions of people and direct it at some of humanity’s thorniest problems—things like poverty, obesity, and climate change. The exact details of how to accomplish this were a bit vague (play more games?), but her objective was clear: “My goal for the next decade is to try to make it as easy to save the world in real life as it is to save the world in online games.”

While the word “gamification” never came up during her talk, by that time anyone following the big-ideas circuit (TED, South by Southwest, DICE, etc.) or using the new Foursquare app would have been familiar with the basic idea. Broadly defined as the application of game design elements and principles to non-game activities—think points, levels, missions, badges, leaderboards, reinforcement loops, and so on—gamification was already being hawked as a revolutionary new tool for transforming education, work, health and fitness, and countless other parts of life.

. . .

Today, we live in an undeniably gamified world. We stand up and move around to close colorful rings and earn achievement badges on our smartwatches; we meditate and sleep to recharge our body batteries; we plant virtual trees to be more productive; we chase “likes” and “karma” on social media sites and try to swipe our way toward social connection. And yet for all the crude gamelike elements that have been grafted onto our lives, the more hopeful and collaborative world that gamification promised more than a decade ago seems as far away as ever. Instead of liberating us from drudgery and maximizing our potential, gamification turned out to be just another tool for coercion, distraction, and control.”

7. Inside Ziklag, the Secret Organization of Wealthy Christians Trying to Sway the Election and Change the Country

“A network of ultrawealthy Christian donors is spending nearly $12 million to mobilize Republican-leaning voters and purge more than a million people from the rolls in key swing states, aiming to tilt the 2024 election in favor of former President Donald Trump.

These previously unreported plans are the work of a group named Ziklag, a little-known charity whose donors have included some of the wealthiest conservative Christian families in the nation, including the billionaire Uihlein family, who made a fortune in office supplies, the Greens, who run Hobby Lobby, and the Wallers, who own the Jockey apparel corporation. Recipients of Ziklag’s largesse include Alliance Defending Freedom, which is the Christian legal group that led the overturning of Roe v. Wade, plus the national pro-Trump group Turning Point USA and a constellation of right-of-center advocacy groups.

. . .

“We are in a spiritual battle and locked in a terrible conflict with the powers of darkness,” says a strategy document that lays out Ziklag’s 30-year vision to “redirect the trajectory of American culture toward Christ by bringing back Biblical structure, order and truth to our Nation.”

Ziklag’s 2024 agenda reads like the work of a political organization. It plans to pour money into mobilizing voters in Arizona who are “sympathetic to Republicans” in order to secure “10,640 additional unique votes” — almost the exact margin of President Joe Biden’s win there in 2020. The group also intends to use controversial AI software to enable mass challenges to the eligibility of hundreds of thousands of voters in competitive states.

In a recording of a 2023 internal strategy discussion, a Ziklag official stressed that the objective was the same in other swing states. “The goal is to win,” the official said. “If 75,000 people wins the White House, then how do we get 150,000 people so we make sure we win?”

According to the Ziklag files, the group has divided its 2024 activities into three different operations targeting voters in battleground states: Checkmate, focused on funding so-called election integrity groups; Steeplechase, concentrated on using churches and pastors to get out the vote; and Watchtower, aimed at galvanizing voters around the issues of “parental rights” and opposition to transgender rights and policies supporting health care for trans people.

. . .

One theology promoted by Christian nationalist leaders is the Seven Mountain Mandate. Each mountain represents a major industry or a sphere of public life: arts and media, business, church, education, family, government, and science and technology. Ziklag’s goal, the documents say, is to “take dominion over the Seven Mountains,” funding Christian projects or installing devout Christians in leadership positions to reshape each mountain in a godly way.”

8. I Went to Death Valley to Experience 129 Degrees

“A large digital thermometer sits at the entrance to the gleaming mid-century-modern visitor center in Furnace Creek, California. When I arrived on Sunday afternoon, it was thronged with people with their phones out, taking pictures. A mood of anticipation hummed through the crowd. A few hours east of us, in Las Vegas, temperatures would rise to 120 degrees Fahrenheit, smashing that city’s record by three degrees. But news reports suggested that here in the heart of Death Valley National Park, the high could reach 130, matching the hottest-ever day reliably measured on Earth. At 1 p.m., the big thermometer was already flipping back and forth between 126 and 127.

A ranger told us not to get excited, as the thermometer runs a degree or two hot. Our hopes were undimmed: There were still several hours to go before the day reached peak heat. In the meantime, a circus atmosphere was taking hold. I saw a man kneeling close to the ground, surrounded by a camera crew. I edged closer, thinking that he might have caught a scorpion or tarantula, and saw he had a frying pan instead. He was trying to cook a raw egg in the sun. When the clear and runny part turned white, he brayed at his doubters in triumph.

People stood together in clusters, wearing floppy hats and neckerchiefs. I heard lots of French and German, and a bit of Dutch. Over the years, I’ve run into many Europeans in the big western parks. Europe has no great desert, and as a consequence, its people have become great pilgrims of arid expanses: seekers of heat, space, and light. A trio of Germans took pictures of themselves pointing to the temperature. I, too, was a tourist, and I, too, had retained a childish enthusiasm for superlatives. I wanted to experience world-record heat, not as a number in a headline, but with my body. I’d heard that Death Valley’s summers were becoming hotter, as they have been in many other places. I imagined my physical person as a kind of tuning fork for planetary change.

At 3:18 p.m., the slightly overactive thermometer ticked up to 130; I later saw that, according to the National Weather Service, the temperature was only 129. I was no stranger to the scorching feel of a desert in high summer. My dad lived amid the red rock of Southern Utah for more than a decade, and I visited him in all seasons. I was just there a few weeks ago when temperatures reached 113. But 129 hits different. When you emerge into that kind of heat from an air-conditioned space, you feel its intensity before the door even closes behind you. It sets upon you from above. It is as though a clingy gargoyle made of flame has landed atop your head and neck. This gargoyle is a creature of pure desire. It wants only one thing, to bring you into thermal equilibrium with the desert. It goes for your soft spots first, reaching into the corners of your eyes, singeing your nostrils. After a few minutes pass, it tries to pull moisture straight through your skin. You feel its pinches and prickles on your forearms and calves. The breeze only makes things worse, by blasting apart the thin and fragile atmosphere of cooled air that millions of your pores produce by sweating. Your heart hammers faster and faster. Your cognition starts to blur. Only eight minutes in, I looked down at my phone. It had shut down entirely. I chose to view that as an act of solidarity.”

9. A Deal With the Devil: What the Age-Old Faustian Bargain Reveals About the Modern World

“The legend of the Devil’s contract is the most alluring, the most provocative, the most insightful, the most important story ever told. It concerns a humanity strung between Heaven and Hell, the saintly and the satanic; how a man could trade his soul for powers omnipotent, signing a covenant with the Devil so that he could briefly live as a god before being pulled down to Hell. Frequently associated with Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, that Elizabethan play wasn’t the origin of that myth, but his is certainly a sterling example of that eternal script. Yet long before that Renaissance play and long afterwards, we can find the inky traces of Faust’s damned signature in a multitude of works both high and low, canonical and popular. More disturbing than that is the way that the Devil’s hoof-prints can be found across the wide swatch of history, in our willingness to embrace power and engage in exploitation, to summon self-interestedness and to conjure cruelty.”

10. Canada Is Arming the World’s Bullies

“Canada is aiding some of the world’s most repressive governments with military goods. According to Global Affairs Canada’s (GAC) recently released 2023 Exports of Military Goods and Technology report, Canada continues to transfer massive quantities of weapons to antidemocratic governments and states accused of war crimes.

This data contradicts Canada’s self-promotion as a defender of peace and democratic values on the world’s stage and is further evidence of an ongoing trend of Canadian arms flowing into the stockpiles of human rights abusers. The GAC report shows that last year Canada exported military goods valued at CAD $2.143 billion to non-US destinations. Although the United States is typically the largest consumer of Canadian-made weapons, Canada neither regulates nor reports most of its arms exports to its southern neighbor. Including these figures would dramatically increase the total reported value associated with the Canadian arms trade.

According to Freedom House, nearly half of Canada’s reported weapons transfers in 2023 — valued at $1.04 billion, or 49 percent of the total — were destined for authoritarian states, such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar.

. . .

The Canadian government closely echoes the defense industry’s claims about the benefits of arms exports while decrying human rights abuses abroad. But when it comes to Canada arming the abusers, Ottawa’s actions speak louder than its words.

By arming dictatorships, Canada undermines global stability and tarnishes its own reputation in an increasingly fractured and unstable international arena. Canadian officials should challenge the world’s autocrats, not provide them with the means to repress. These concerns are amplified when considering the general shrinking of democratic space worldwide. For the first time in two decades, the global community is comprised of more autocracies (seventy-four) than democracies (sixty-three).”