Now that I’ve been in Mexico a while, and the travels are coming to a close… I’m going to have to figure out what to do with this blog! Perhaps each month I read stuff by an author from a different continent?
Anyway, until I figure that out, here are some things I’ve liked, with no particular geographic focus:
On things that need to change (and isn’t it crazy they haven’t already?)
“Tax Hero” (Planet Money): As someone who has done taxes in multiple countries, American taxes are indeed insane. This is a story of one professor proposing an easy solution to make American taxes SO MUCH better, and the TurboTax (and other accounting) lobbyists who shut down his campaign. It is everything that is wrong with policy / politics.
“Save Our Food. Free the Seed.” (NYTimes): This opinion piece deftly argues (1) against patents on crop traits (“Utility patents restricted farmers’ freedom to save and exchange seed and breeders’ right to use the germplasm for research.”) and (2) for greater government R&D investment in organic plant breeding (After all, “Organic growing reduces the use of harmful chemicals, improves the soil’s ability to sequester carbon and retain water, and strengthens biodiversity.”) I’m personally both pro-GMO and pro-organic farming methods (yes, that’s a possible stance), and I worry about the ability of our monoculture food systems to handle the environmental changes to come.
On slow-moving environmental disasters
"If Seeing the World Helps Ruin It, Should We Stay Home?" (NYTimes): Of course I knew that my carbon footprint from this year was terrible. And yet, I still didn't quite expect this stat: The extra carbon emissions from one person's share of a one-way NY/LA (2500 mile) flight, shrinks the Arctic summer sea ice cover by 3 square meters, or 32 square feet. And that's a one way flight that isn't actually very long. GAHH.
“Depave Paradise” (99% Invisible): A two-parter about Mexico City, and the fascinating water problem that now plagues it. The city, situated in a natural basin with plenty of water, was constructed to get rid of all its rainfall to prevent flooding. As a result, now the city doesn’t have enough water to sustain its growing population, and tapping groundwater aquifers has resulted in the city shrinking. The piece also discusses some potential solutions for this problem (depaving, rainwater capture, etc.). The podcast was particularly interesting for me, having lived through Cape Town’s water crisis before AND now experiencing rainy season in Mexico City.
“Highway of Riches, Road to Ruin: Inside the Amazon’s Deforestation Crisis” (Globe and Mail): A gorgeous multi-media piece by investigative journalists following the BR-163 highway through the Amazon rainforest. They speak to loggers, farmers, miners, conservationists, and government officials, to try to better understand what’s happening on the ground, and why.
“Ocean Noise Pollution, Whale Ears, and a Humpback Beached on Cape Cod” (BU): There’s growing concern about the noise pollution in oceans, and how human sounds (from sonar, boats, oil drilling) affect marine animals, especially those who use sound to navigate the waters, e.g. whales. This piece follows a team of marine biologists rushing to the site of a beached whale to do an autopsy and gather new science about how exactly whales hear (by extracting whale ears, yes there are photos, and yes they look bizarre). In the process, readers learn all kinds of fun facts, like that pilot whales seem to like the sound of sonar, and actually swim towards it, trying to mimic its sounds. (Doesn’t that give you a great mental image?)
On public policy
“Better Public Schools Won’t Fix Income Inequality” (Atlantic): A pretty convincing article (by someone who built a charter school network) about why American elites are wrong to believe that education is the way to fix income inequality. The piece is full of compelling facts, like that the main growth in jobs (and the main gap in labor) is not actually in skilled labor, even for the next couple decades. The solution to income inequality is therefore redistribution: policies like higher (wealth) taxes and higher minimum wages.
“‘They Were Conned’: How Reckless Loans Devastated a Generation of Taxi Drivers” (NYTimes): This is an infuriating read about how lax regulation and unchecked greed can create a crazy bubble (similar to the housing market bubble that led to the 2008 recession), whose bursting mostly affects poor, non-English-speaking immigrants. The two-parter is also a masterpiece in investigative journalism.
“Denmark’s Paternity Leave Problem” (The Impact) and “After men in Spain got paternity leave, they wanted fewer kids” (Quartz): An interesting set of pieces on paternity leave. In Denmark, where moms/dads can split their leave, fathers rarely take much. In Finland, where each has an allotted amount of leave, they both take it. In Spain: “Spending more time with their children—or the prospect of having to do so—may have made men more acutely aware of the effort and costs associated with childrearing [and shifted their preference to having smaller families...] At the same time, women started showing preferences for slightly larger families—perhaps a sign that having more children seemed more desirable with a slightly more equitable balance of labor at home." And all the female readers go 🙄.
On complicated men
“How did WeWork’s Adam Neumann Build a $47 Billion Company?” (NY Mag): “In 2017, Neumann declared that WeWork’s ‘valuation and size today are much more based on our energy and spirituality than it is on a multiple of revenue’ […] In this mode — which is his usual one — he can sound like a satirical version of a start-up founder. The years between Steve Jobs’s ascension to business deity and the fateful afternoon when Elon Musk tweeted that his company might go private at $420 a share have cemented the legend of the iconoclastic founder as a modern American folktale. Spreadsheets are out; megalomaniacal ambition is in.” For some reason, I (and I suppose many readers) can’t get enough of these take-down profiles, and yet, I know they do nothing.
“The Curious Cons of the Man Who Wouldn’t Die” (GQ): I began reading, thinking this was going to be a fun bank-heist romp of a story, but instead, it’s actually a sad, moving story of how an AIDS survivor committed fraud to live his last year(s) in style, but then… just kept living, with the legal issues and emotional trauma that involved.
On things that brought me wonder
“Why I (Still) Love Tech: In Defense of a Difficult Industry” (Wired): I loved this piece so much I read it twice, one day after the next. It’s a soaring and frantic, excellently written “it’s complicated” ode to the tech industry, from someone who joined it in the 1990s. The beginning is particularly amazing. A quick excerpt: “When I was a boy, if you’d come up behind me (in a nonthreatening way) and whispered that I could have a few thousand Cray supercomputers in my pocket, that everyone would have them, that we would carry the sum of human ingenuity next to our skin, jangling in concert with our coins, wallets, and keys? And that this Lilliputian mainframe would have eyes to see, a sense of touch, a voice to speak, a keen sense of direction, and an urgent desire to count my actual footsteps and everything I read and said as I traipsed through the noosphere? Well, I would have just burst, burst. I would have stood up and given the technobarbaric yawp of a child whose voice has yet to change.”
Circe by Madeline Miller: I’m not normally a Greek mythology kind of girl, but this was a fun and well-written read— an empathetic take on the life of the goddess Circe, AKA Witch of Aiaia, AKA daughter of the Sun God, Helios.
“Making Coffee” (Ice Coffee: The History of Human Activity in Antarctica): This podcast is hosted by a researcher living in Antarctica, telling you about humans in Antarctica, while he makes coffee. The episodes are long, and I’m not a history wonk enough to stick with it, but this first episode on how one logistically makes coffee in a frigid place, was fascinating. All the problems you never even considered! Just to make a cuppa! I literally said “wow” out loud at some point.
“Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog”: Werner mentioned this off-hand recently, I hadn’t seen it, and boy it is a goody, STILL, more than 10 years later. It’s a short comedic musical starring Neil Patrick Harris, written by Joss Whedon (of Buffy fame).
Isle of Dogs: I’m not a die-hard Wes Anderson fan, but I LOVED this one. It was bursting with heart, (odd) humor, and of course, dogs. Highly recommended.
Other random recommendations
The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell: This sprawling book jumps around times and places, but centers on several generations of families in Zambia. There’s some magic realist and scifi elements, but mostly the story is just driven by characters trying to make their way in a difficult place. I found it quite lovely to see the country through someone else’s fictional lens, and it brought me back to the many weeks I spent working there; my former employer Zoona was even mentioned :) I liked it, didn’t love it— but would probably still recommend it to anyone who’s spent time in Zambia (or even neighboring Malawi / Zimbabwe).