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Weekly Picks – April 14, 2024
Credits (clockwise from bottom left): Jesse Darling; Toho Company Ltd./ Wikimedia; Adrià Fruitós; Mary Turner/ NY Times/ Panos Pictures; Paolo Gerbaudo/ Phenomenal World; Justin Maxon for The Atlantic; Ben Jennings; Matthieu Bourel/ Illustration for Foreign Policy
This week’s collection:
- Many of us have the wrong idea about poverty and toughness
- There Is Only One Spaceship Earth
- The New Idea of India
- Inventing the Crisis: The anti-trans panic and the crusade against teachers
- The trauma ward
- End of Innocence
- The Truth About Organic Milk
- The Electric Vehicle Developmental State
- The Toxic Culture at Tesla
- Reality, as Seen by Godzilla
Introductory excerpts quoted below. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
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Unwritten Understandings
Just a brief comment to finish the week, on social contracts encountered behind the wheel.
One of those small, highway-side towns, somewhere between Clinton and Prince George. Just a couple weeks ago, but I cannot recall exactly where. The signs change from 90 to 80, then to 60. Slow down, there may be pedestrians ahead. Keep it at 50 in case you see any kids walking on the shoulder. Stay alert.
It is a two-lane road entering the town. Leading a long line of vehicles from the oncoming direction, a giant white eighteen-wheeler. A little bit of cloud cover, but still plenty of daylight around to not require any headlights. Yet this truck driver has their lights on, and blinks them, twice, as they pass me. Alright, cop ahead.
I know flashing lights can mean a lot of things. In rural Canada, at least where I drive, it usually means watch for animals or cops. But in the past seven years of traversing BC’s vast paved network, this caution has only been shared with me when there are police around. It seems like most drivers who are members of the headlight warning brigade almost exclusively use it to warn of speed traps. I am not sure why this level of solidarity is easier stuck to than others, but I guess it is not too difficult to acknowledge the annoyance or hate towards law enforcement. Out on the road, most divisions ebb away and the ‘us vs. them’ line is drawn between those wanting to make quick time of their long journey and those who seek to slow them down. The latter to prop up their usefulness or to manage public safety – or to do one under the guise of the other – that is where the debates lie.
Sure enough, just past the gas station, there they are. Three white RCMP SUVs with those distinctive lights, colors, and reinforced front bumpers.
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They Say
I must listen to what they say, because I cannot see it myself. At least not unfiltered; a distortion of the event, a hazy retelling, is how I bear witness. Jumping into and out of meetings a continent’s breadth away as the occurrence unfolds.
They say this happens all the time. Every eighteen months, or thereabouts. But unless you have the means and the dedication, the chances of experiencing it firsthand are minimal. A gliding shadow, uninterested in our gaze, darts swiftly, sweeping across the rock we call home over peaks and troughs unreachable, or skies opaque.
They say you should watch this one. Take in the Baily Beads, signifiers of a landscape not unlike ours, its jagged irregularities enough to produce a perfect optical symphony. Or watch for the Diamond Rings, flashes of brilliance that will sandwich a long-awaited marvel.
They say that this one is special. It will deliver one of the longest interplanetary hide-and-seek games for centuries. The result of our lunar companion being further away and therefore obscuring a greater area of our solar parent. Usually we get a couple of minutes – this time it will be nearly four.
They say the stellar flares are spiking. This increased activity will be a boon for researchers on the ground, in the sky, and above the atmosphere. An opportunity unlike any other to better understand the mysteries of an unapproachable cosmic shore.
They say the anticipation is palpable. A gold circle slowly loses its luster as a species swarms to a dimming flame. The excitement increases as the shape morphs into waning crescents, hinting at the rhyming clockwork of celestial companions.
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Weekly Picks – April 7, 2024
Credits (clockwise from bottom left): Gaia Moments/ Alamy; Patrick Meinhardt for The Intercept; Paul Sahre; Gary Hershorn/ Getty; The Canadian Press/ Jeff McIntosh; Marc Dozier/ The Image Bank via Getty Images
This week’s collection:
- The new science of death: ‘There’s something happening in the brain that makes no sense’
- Ufologists, Unite!
- Our tools shape our selves
- “It’s Dirty Water”: Rio Tinto’s Madagascar Mine Promised Prosperity. It Tainted a Community.
- The Contested World of Classifying Life on Earth
- Fossil fuel subsidies cost Canadians a lot more money than the carbon tax
The first article also reminded me of a debate on NDEs that took place a decade ago. I fall firmly into the “there is no life after death” camp. Our brain’s complex mechanisms are capable of creating plenty of intricate and maddening illusions, some of which we depend on to cohesively structure a picture of reality around us, while plenty can lead us astray. In case the debate is of interest:
And finally, a note to all that you can watch the upcoming solar eclipse from anywhere in the world, in case you are not within the path of totality.
Introductory excerpts quoted below. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
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Singularly Felt but Universally Relatable
A take-it-all-in hacktivist mystery. No spacetime for blink-and-you-miss-it shenanigans. Mild spoilers for A Murder at the End of the World below.
Imagine yourself an adolescent with no knowledge of British idioms, culture, reference points – British life, in general. Now imagine picking up a random Agatha Christie novel and reading the first couple of chapters. Would you latch onto it? Would its unapologetically English characters, class tropes, and personification of European vignettes resonate? Christie was my introduction to murder mysteries. As a high schooler, I must have read most of her catalogue. At times, the prose and characters were difficult to get a grip on, but worth grappling with regardless. The twists and turns so worth it.
Christie knew how to construct a setting, place characters in context, prescribe them motivations, interests, and suspicions, and lead the reader down several rabbit holes of possibilities. It did not matter if the cultural touchpoints were not always obvious or easily understood, at least to this reader unfamiliar with the world of twentieth century Britain at that time. The author was doing enough to keep you engaged and develop the people you were following. The strangeness of the stage provided plenty of intrigue.
Sometimes, she cheated. A clue left unshared or a spurious revelation plucked from speculation that could not possibly be confirmed until the author was ready for us to hear it. And Then There Were None was guilty of this; The Murder of Roger Ackroyd the exact opposite.
Not every mystery writer sprinkles their literature with puzzle pieces to the full picture. Nor do they need to. It may be fun to go through a Sherlock Holmes story with the aplomb and brilliance of the eponymous detective, but alas, that is not easy given the number of red herrings overlaid within the narrative. When entering the world of a murder mystery, we are also conditioned to be suspicious of everyone and ascribe intention or ulterior motives to every little action. We cannot let anything go. It is as much a game to play as it is a story to absorb. Pleasantly surprising, then, when we happen upon a thriller or murder mystery having gone in blind – now we have to re-read or re-watch it at some point; what clues did we miss along the way?
This brings us to FX’s A Murder at the End of the World, created by Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij. With “a murder” in the name, the only surprises ahead are the ones you are expecting. It is a whodunit that primes the viewer to be doubtful of everyone and everything. Except this one actually plays nicely on the trope of revealing a grand master plan, instead dwelling on the evolving mess at hand.
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Weekly Picks – March 31, 2024
Credits (clockwise from top left): Maggie Chiang; Biodiversity Heritage Library; Amit Katwala/ New Humanist; Amira Khalil; UN Women/ Bashar Al-Jabari/ Flickr
This week’s collection:
- Aid Wars
- Zombie forensics
- The Women Who Found Liberation in Seaweed
- Antimarket
- Of Life and Lithium
- Light at the End of the Tunnel
- The Gaza Strip has been destroyed. So has hope for a fair future for the two peoples.
Introductory excerpts quoted below. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
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Weekly Picks – March 24, 2024
“The unique life philosophy of Abdi, born in Somalia, living in the Netherlands.” More at Aeon here.
Credits (clockwise from bottom left): Andrew Testa/ Panos; Kelly Cheng Travel Photography/ Getty Images; Wan Azizi Ws/ Getty Images/ 500px; Evelyn Hofer; AP Photo/ Mahesh Kumar A.; Francisco Negroni; Stefanie Loos; Priscilla Du Preez/ Unsplash.com; Undark via DALL-E; Brandi Morin. Middle: Stefan Gutermuth/ Slate.
This week’s collection:
- Are Evidence-Based Medicine and Public Health Incompatible?
- Botswana’s inspirational women safari guides who are navigating change
- The Fading Memories of Youth
- Empire of the ants: what insect supercolonies can teach us
- Rejecting the Binary
- AP finds grueling conditions in Indian shrimp industry that report calls ‘dangerous and abusive’
- In oil country, First Nation with high cancer rates accuses AER of ‘regulated murder’
- The Basis of Everything: The Fragility of Character in a Truth-Challenged World
- Abolish the clubs: The chumocracy is poison for democracy
- It’s dirty work
And a lovely picture to cap things off:
Introductory excerpts quoted below. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
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“It’ll have to go”
This post contains spoilers for Douglas Adams’ A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. It also contains rants on a bat-and-ball game.
There is an Indian word called ‘Tamasha’, which means fun, excitement, glamor, uncertainty – all rolled into one.
– Mihir Bose
In Life, the Universe, and Everything, Douglas Adams introduces us to Krikkit, a planet surrounded by a dust cloud. Krikkiters, the planet’s inhabitants, are unaware of the cosmos. They see a perpetually black sky – no starlight piercing through, no clue of what lies behind the curtain. Krikkiters are initially portrayed as unassuming, kind humanoids going about their daily lives within a pastoral bliss. That is, until a spaceship sears a luminous path through the void, crashing onto their planet from nowhere. They look up, astonished – where did it come from?
We quickly find out that the Krikkiters are more than they seem. In unbelievably quick time, they reverse engineer the spaceship and embark on a mission. Launching into the darkness, a small crew leave the planet to discover the truth. For a while, all they see is nothingness; the remarkable fact that they are moving through what they thought was a static celestial tapestry hardly appears to be invigorating. Finally, they happen upon it. A spectacular revelation – the darkness suddenly punctuated with pinpricks of light, their number slowly growing and growing, until the entire universe lies in front of them. All the stars, galaxies, globular clusters – the ignitions of existence – laid bare within infinity itself.
But their response is unexpected: “It’ll have to go.” The Krikkiters cannot share the universe. The potential life forms residing across uncountable worlds all newly discovered enemies; a rude interruption to a way of life that must be preserved through destruction. The Krikkiters head back to their planet, resolved to a new, brutal mission, one that will result in trillions upon trillions of deaths.
It is one of the more incredible moments in a series of novels that envelopes witty hyperbole and poignant interludes with comedy, providing plenty of unsettling narratives.
The Indian Premier League, or IPL, begins today. I wish I felt inspired to write about something more important, but there is a certain gravity to this game that is inescapable.
Let me rattle off a few things about cricket, its stewards, its fans, and a tournament at the node of two eras in the sport’s history.
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Weekly Picks – March 17, 2024
Credits (clockwise from top left): Stefano Summo for ProPublica; Edges of Earth / Adam Moore; Mutual Aid (2009). Photograph by Timothy Vollmer / Flickr; Apu Gomes / AFP / Getty; Brian Snyder / Reuters / Redux; Cole Burston / AFP / Getty; Jon S. / Deed; Alice MartinsCollective struggle – a possible foundation for radical care; solidarity and its discontents the hallmark of destabilizing systems of oppression. Stories from those on the street facing their own unconquerable peaks. Hell on Earth in the heat of the desert, a growing fallout of sustained war, where neglected souls and zealots alike seek peace but remain trapped in turmoil. The surrender of a province and its environment to fossil fuel fanaticism. A historical review of a central African conflict, itself an allegory of how colonialism seeps through social strata. The compounding research behind the ill-effects of rising wealth disparities worldwide. Triads, illicit drug trades, exploited immigrants, and a cavalcade of avoidable problems linking nations who choose to criminalize substances to support their home-grown industries of terror. Freedivers off the coast of Japan preserving community as much as an ancient way of life. Finally, a comment on change in the media landscape, and on trust’s declining value as a commodity used to buy political engagement.
This week’s collection:
- The Revolution Will Be Caring
- Sisyphus on the Street
- The Open-Air Prison for ISIS Supporters—and Victims
- ‘Fire Weather’: Big Oil’s Climate Conflagration
- Intractable Crisis
- Why the world cannot afford the rich
- Gangsters, money and murder: How Chinese organized crime is dominating Oklahoma’s illegal medical marijuana market
- The Plight of Japan’s Ama Divers
- Journalism’s Slow Death Threatens Democracy
Quite a lot of doom and gloom shared above and below. A final comment for this week – you may remember one of the more recent reimaginings of Tears For Fears’ “Mad World”, as interpreted by Michael Andrews and Gary Jules, and popularized by 2001’s Donnie Darko, tv shows, trailers, and video games:
People often remark on Gary Jules’ vocals, but the video’s exhibition, simple yet remarkable, should also be noted, carrying Michel Gondry’s signature in its frames. Worth revisiting as our perpetual cruelty towards one another seems unceasing, gaslighting the collective or impressing upon us, whether falsely or not, a powerlessness to act. But there is hope in preservation – in words, no less. An ongoing reassurance that alongside our deepest laments there exists a choice to latch onto a wider reality, one that persists through inferno.
Note that only excerpts (often introductory) are quoted. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
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Memories, Randomly Accessed
(Note for those scrolling past: this post contains a gallery of snapshots from Tokyo in 2014. Click “read more” to view.)
A decade ago, nearly half a kilometer above the most populous metropolis in the world, a conversation began between a professor and student of English from two different worlds. The professor was Japanese, born and raised in Tokyo. He was treating his grandkids to a day atop the capital city, their faces eagerly leaning as far as they could towards the slanted glass that overlooked the concrete jungle. The student was Canadian, by citizenship it should be said; attachment to national identity already too nefarious a notion to adequately stomach. He was on a vacation and had come to the tower to spend a few hours photographing the vast steel lanes and their skyscraping endpoints, in light from above during the day and when lit from below at night.
“I do not teach grammar, I want to be clear about that,” the older man explained in a soft tone, “I teach literature.” How to read human beings and their complexity through discussions of their textual output.
The two chatted while the kids ran through people’s legs, mostly young couples, as the evening view transformed from ‘diurnal smog’ to ‘twilight neon’. They spoke about how students approached their studies and of their seriousness in attending to life’s challenges. The professor was empathetic and non-judgmental. He had been born after the big war and lived through the Japanese adoption of global (mostly American) culture. The influx of democracy and capitalism – of modernity and its customs – alien from the pre-war empire but only separated from it by “a few years”. He had watched his neighborhood’s wooden roofs subsumed by a growing encasement of metal, glass, and machinery. He did not own a vehicle, simply stepping outside and catching a train two minutes from his doorstep that took him straight to campus.
The student, a visitor, did little talking, choosing instead to ask questions. A lecture voluntarily attended and with great enthusiasm, in a classroom within the clouds.