Weekly Picks

Weekly Picks – April 6, 2025

April 6, 2025 /

Credit (left to right): Cory Doctorow; Cristina Spanò / Grist; Dobrovizcki / Shutterstock

This week’s collection:

  1. About That: The bizarre way Trump’s team calculated reciprocal tariffs | CBC
  2. The Fire This Time | Counterpunch
  3. Zine Archives Preserve Trans Survival and Storytelling | Atlas Obscura
  4. Regime Change in the West? | London Review of Books
  5. Everything you need to know about bird flu | Knowable Magazine

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.

Also, this recently published series (10 articles) is a good primer on the global context surrounding critical minerals and their place in our future:

1. About That: The bizarre way Trump’s team calculated reciprocal tariffs | Andrew Chang

There is nothing that captures the extraordinary stupidity and incompetence of the current U.S. administration quite like a basic fraction cosplaying as high school algebra. But it is worth using this opportunity to plug the consistently reliable fact-checking and effective explanations from CBC’s ‘About That’. Relating analogies of trade deficits and surpluses in personal terms (your purchases at the grocery store and your employment contributions, respectively), they offer a particularly useful tool for showcasing the heightened idiocy plaguing U.S. leadership.

2. The Fire This Time | Henry Giroux

“Americans are not witnessing a slow drift toward authoritarianism. They are living through the violent, coordinated seizure of democratic life by fascist forces emboldened by indifference, cruelty, and the architecture of unaccountable power.

Under such circumstances, it is crucial for people to pay attention to the political crisis that is unfolding. This means being attentive, learning from history, analyzing the mobilizing passions of fascism as a system—one directly related to the forces of gangster capitalism and the force of white supremacy and white Christian nationalism. Language matters, and those willing to fight against the fascist tide must rethink the meaning of education, resistance, bearing witness, and solidarity. And action is imperative: build alliances, flood the streets, defend critical education, amplify resistance, and refuse to be silent.

In the face of this rising tide, resistance must no longer be fragmented, polite, or confined to isolated corners of dissent. As Sherilyn Ifill notes, “it is not enough to fight. You have to meet the moment.” Cultural critics, educators, artists, journalists, social workers, and others must wield their craft like weapons—telling prohibited stories, defying censorship, reigniting the radical imagination. Educators must refuse complicity, defending classrooms as sanctuaries of truth and critical inquiry, even when the risks are great. Students must organize, disrupt, and reclaim their campuses—not as consumers of credentialing, but as insurgents of liberation.

Academics, including faculty and administrators, must form a common front to stop the insidious assault on higher education.  Journalists must break the silence, not by chasing access or neutrality, but by naming injustice with moral clarity. Organizers, activists, and everyday people must converge—across race, class, gender, and nation—into a broad front of democratic refusal. This is a moment not just for outrage, but for audacity—for reclaiming hope as a political act, and courage as a shared ethic.”

3. Zine Archives Preserve Trans Survival and Storytelling | Emma Cieslik

“Zines have existed for over 100 years—from the “little magazines” that Black writers created and distributed during the Harlem Renaissance to the fan-created, self-published comics of the 1930s where modern zines get their name. The second- and third-wave feminist movements, including the ones responsible for the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, used zines to organize protests and community action.

Defined often by a limited run or circulation of 1,000 or fewer copies, zines are created by collaging together written word, printed images, and drawings to create a small book that is then photocopied and distributed. As a result, each one represents a time capsule of community existence and culture. […]

The physical material on which zines are printed is not as important as the content itself. While they can be photocopied, many of these zines are ephemeral because they have not and will never end up in an archive and will never see a larger readership. But to QZAP founder and zinester Miller, this is at the heart of their work—zines are important historical documents that circumvent capitalist information sharing.

“We recognize that there’s so much that, especially in western queer world, does not get talked about in queer media,” Miller says. There are only so many column inches, only so many voices that can be represented because at the end of the day, these publications need to sell advertising to support their work. “Zines don’t do that,” Miller explains, “and one of the things that is so important about our collection is that we’re the rest of the story. We’re all the voices that don’t show up in other media and presses.””

4. Regime Change in the West? | Perry Anderson

“A quarter​ of the way through this century, regime change has become a canonical term. It signifies the overthrow, typically but not exclusively by the United States, of governments around the world disliked by the West, employing for that purpose military force, economic blockade, ideological erosion, or a combination of these. Yet originally the term meant something quite different, a widespread alteration in the West itself – not the sudden transformation of a nation-state by external violence, but the gradual installation of a new international order in peacetime. […]

Such was the original meaning of the formula ‘regime change’, today all but forgotten, erased by the wave of military interventionism that confiscated the term at the turn of the century. A glance at its Ngram tells the story. Flatlining since its arrival in the 1970s, the frequency of the term suddenly soared in the late 1990s, multiplying sixty times over and becoming, as John Gillingham, an economic historian attached to its earlier sense, remarked, ‘the current euphemism for overthrowing foreign governments’.

Yet the relevance of its original meaning remains. […]

Neoliberalism…forms an international regime: that is, not just a system replicated within each nation-state, but one that binds together and exceeds the different nation-states of the advanced, and less advanced, regions of the capitalist world in the process that has come to be called globalisation. Unlike the various national agendas of neoliberalism, this process was not originally driven by the political intention of power-holders, but followed from the explosive deregulation of financial markets set loose by Thatcher’s so-called Big Bang of 1986. In due course, globalisation became an ideological watchword of neoliberal regimes across the world, since it yielded two enormous advantages to capital at large. Politically speaking, globalisation clinched the expropriation of democratic will that the oligarchic closure of neoliberalism was enforcing domestically. For now, TINA [“There is no alternative”] meant not just that policy connivance between centre-right and centre-left at national level largely eliminated any meaningful electoral choice, but also that global financial markets would not permit any deviation from the policies on offer, on pain of economic meltdown. That was the political bonus of globalisation. No less important was the economic bonus: capital could now weaken labour still further, not just by deunionisation, wage repression and precarity, but by relocating production to less developed countries with much lower labour costs, or even simply threatening to do this. […]

The problem, indeed, is a more general one. No populism, right or left, has so far produced a powerful remedy for the ills it denounces. Programmatically, the contemporary opponents of neoliberalism are still for the most part whistling in the dark. How is inequality to be tackled – not just tinkered with – in a serious fashion, without immediately bringing on a capital strike? What measures might be envisaged for meeting the enemy blow for blow on that contested terrain, and emerging victorious? What sort of reconstruction, by now inevitably a radical one, of actually existing liberal democracy would be required to put an end to the oligarchies it has spawned? How is the deep state, organised in every Western country for imperial war – clandestine or overt – to be dismantled? What reconversion of the economy to combat climate change, without impoverishing already poor societies in other continents, is imagined?”

5. Everything you need to know about bird flu | Amber Dance

“In early 2024, the bird influenza that had been spreading across the globe for nearly three decades did something wholly unexpected: It showed up in dairy cows in the Texas Panhandle.

A dangerous bird flu, in other words, was suddenly circulating in mammals — mammals with which people have ongoing, extensive contact. “Holy cow,” says Thomas Friedrich, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “This is how pandemics start.”

This bird flu, which scientists call highly pathogenic avian influenza, or H5N1, is already at panzootic — animal pandemic — status, killing birds in every continent except for Australia. Around the world, it has also affected diverse mammals including cats, goats, mink, tigers, seals and dolphins. Thus far, the United States is the only nation with H5N1 in cows; it’s shown up in dairies in at least 17 states.

In all of known history, “This is the largest animal disease outbreak we’ve ever had,” says Maurice Pitesky, a veterinary researcher at the University of California, Davis.

The virus, which emerged nearly three decades ago, is now creating upheaval in the poultry and dairy industries and making economic and political waves due to the fluctuating price of eggs. But there’s more at risk here than grocery-store sticker shock. As it has journeyed around the world on the wings of migrating birds, the virus has infected more than 960 people since 2003, killing roughly half of them. Since the start of 2024, it’s infected dozens of people in the United States — mainly farm workers — and it killed its first person stateside in January of 2025.

So far, H5N1 flu hasn’t acquired the key trick of passing with ease from person to person, which is what could enable a human pandemic. For now, both the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization rate the public health risk as low. But the situation could change.

“The thing about this virus is, every time we think we know what’s going to happen, it does something totally unexpected,” says Michelle Wille, a virus ecologist at the WHO Collaborating Centre for Reference and Research on Influenza in Melbourne, Australia. “And that’s the only consistent thing I can say about it.””