Weekly Picks

Weekly Picks – May 4, 2025

May 4, 2025 /

Credit (left to right): HJ/ AP; Current Affairs; Myriam Wares

Please note: I will be unable to share ‘Weekly Picks’ on May 18 and 25 due to a packed schedule. ‘Weekly Photo’ posts will continue uninterrupted.

This week’s collection:

  1. Renters v. Rentiers | London Review of Books
  2. The First Forever War | The Intercept
  3. How Animals Understand Death | Nautilus
  4. Truth and Lies About the Gaza Protests | Current Affairs

Nautilus also published a piece on synchronous fireflies last week. It brought back visions of a memory from a dozen years ago, of a starlit bucolic scene into which fireflies flooded. Linked here for those who would like an escape to rural darkness, half a world away.

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.

1. Renters v. Rentiers | Jack Shenker

“In​ the postwar period, landlords…were seen in the popular cultural imagination as mean, unscrupulous and cowardly. By the time Thatcher came to power in 1979, they seemed to be dying out: a cross-party effort to make housing a social right had reduced private lettings to only 7 per cent of homes in the UK, and the press was full of talk about the demise of landlordism. In 1974, the Conservative Political Centre (CPC), an in-house Tory think tank, published a pamphlet called ‘The Eclipse of the Private Landlord’. ‘The accelerating decline of the privately rented sector is quite irreversible,’ it concluded. ‘The private landlord, as he exists now and has existed, will, within a generation, be almost as extinct as the dinosaur. There is nothing that can be done about this.’

Nick Bano, a barrister who specialises in housing, sees this prediction as a salutary reminder that the goal of landlord abolition seemed quite plausible in fairly recent memory. ‘But as close as we came to the death of the private landlord,’ Bano writes, ‘we never held up a mirror to that hungry maw’ to check that the beast ‘had breathed its last’. British landlordism has not only survived, but prospered. Today, HMRC estimates that there are 2.8 million landlords in the UK: more than 5 per cent of the adult population. As Bano observes, that’s twice as many landlords as NHS employees, four times the number of teachers, and double the number of coal miners at the industry’s peak. Landlordism is the closest thing we have to a national industry. King Charles is a private landlord. John Lewis is a private landlord. The homelessness charity St Mungo’s is a private landlord. So are many MPs and, as Ruby found out, doctors. […]

The UK’s homelessness crisis is now the worst in the developed world.

There are three different explanations [for] this. The first is that Britain’s seemingly never-ending housing boom – the market value of the country’s housing stock increased by £750 million a day in the decade after the 2008 financial crisis, an upward curve that accelerated sharply during the Covid pandemic before falling back slightly in 2023 after Liz Truss’s short-lived premiership spooked the housing market – is a speculative bubble that must soon burst. The second focuses on the financialisation of housing: its transformation into a commodity that is bought, sold and gambled on in the global marketplace. The promoters of the financialisation theory argue that drawing in an international elite to buy penthouses in Battersea and Mayfair means that rising prices cascade down the housing ladder, all the way to suburban semis in Birmingham and terraces in Middlesbrough. The third thesis, which has become an axiom of contemporary political discourse, is that rising house prices are a product of scarcity: not enough homes are being built, with the result that supply is failing to keep up with demand.

Bano dismisses all three explanations. Property values are not wildly inflated, he insists; rising house prices represent market confidence that these assets will remain profitable in the long term. The financialisation thesis, he claims, approaches the housing crisis the wrong way round. There’s no doubt that UK housing has become a financial safe haven for Gulf sheikhs and middle-class Koreans alike, but the pertinent question is why it is such an appealing investment. The answer, he argues, is to be found at the bottom of the market not the top. He reserves his strongest contempt for the ‘supply guys’ who believe that the solution to our housing troubles is to build more housing. Among the evidence he marshals to refute the idea that more homes mean lower prices is a 2022 report which found that the ballooning of housing costs over the past twenty years has coincided with a growth in surplus housing, as well as census data showing that most British property is underoccupied rather than overcrowded. ‘In reality,’ Bano says, ‘there are plenty of homes to go around.’

Instead, Bano locates the origin of the housing crisis in the relationship between tenant and landlord: an interdependence governed by legal and economic structures designed by the state to maximise rent extraction, and protected by successive governments. His contention is that even though private renters constitute only 20 per cent of households, potential rental yields – whether realised or not – play the biggest role in determining the cost of all residential property.”

2. The First Forever War | Nick Turse

“When a tank crashed through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon 50 years ago today, the Potemkin state of South Vietnam collapsed, and the Vietnamese war of independence, fought in its final phase against the overwhelming military might of the United States, came to a close.

America lost its war, but Vietnam was devastated. “Sideshow” wars in Cambodia and Laos left those countries equally ravaged. The United States unleashed an estimated 30 billion pounds of munitions in Southeast Asia. At least 3.8 million Vietnamese died violent war deaths, an estimated 11.7 million South Vietnamese were forced from their homes, and up to 4.8 million were sprayed with toxic herbicides like Agent Orange. […]

The U.S. did whatever it could to cripple the reunited Vietnam. Instead of delivering billions in promised reconstruction aid, it pressured international lenders like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to reject Vietnamese requests for assistance. The newly unified nation of farmers had no choice but to till rice fields filled with unexploded American bombs, artillery shells, rockets, cluster munitions, landmines, grenades, and more.

The war’s toll continued to rise, with 100,000 more casualties in Vietnam in the 50 years since the conflict technically came to a close and many more in the neighboring nations of Southeast Asia.

After all that, America could have learned something.”

3. How Animals Understand Death | Brandon Keim

“How do animals understand death? That is the question animating this story, which convention dictates I start with an anecdote. But which one? While working on the story a friend told me how his dog saw his closest canine friend run over; the dog becomes disconsolate and agitated whenever they pass the street where it happened. My algorithms surfaced a story about a grief-stricken widower goose who found new love. Someone I follow on social media argued that it’s ethically acceptable to kill animals because they don’t know what death is. I read about a primatologist who runs an animal sanctuary in Costa Rica; every year, a monkey she rescued brings her latest baby to the sanctuary for introductions, but one year the monkey brought a dead baby. Perhaps she hoped a human who once helped her could help again. There was nothing the primatologist could do, though, and after several hours the mother monkey, seeming to admit defeat, screamed.

I read dozens of scientific papers—about a mother dingo who carried her dead pup for days, elephants who appear to bury their dead, dolphins who would not let a deceased podmate sink—and debates about how those behaviors should be interpreted. I often did so while cradling my cat Maya, then dying from kidney disease, and thought sometimes of Ingmar, my cat who died last winter from cancer. On the final night of her life, her body hollowed, she summoned the energy to visit her favorite spots, as if paying them a last visit. I thought often about the inevitable death of those I love, which troubles me constantly. I thought sometimes about my own death, which for now is less of a concern. I attended the passing of a goat named Caramel at the sanctuary where I volunteer. Goats have very large pupils, and near the end, as he lay on his side, they were like galaxies.

The conventional wisdom, among scientists and much of the public as well, holds that animals know little about death. They perceive it, obviously, and may distinguish between dead and alive, but do not grasp it. When a rabbit runs from a fox, then, they flee pain rather than the end of experience. The successful fox, for his part, knows that his prey is immobile, not that they have ceased living. They have no concept of death; it is not part of their mental models, much less a source of anguish or concern or motivation. Or so the thinking goes.

“Mortals are they who can experience death as death. Animals cannot do this,” wrote the philosopher Martin Heidegger. “The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it,” pronounced anthropologist Ernest Becker in The Denial of Death. Becker was notably contemptuous of animals—“Inside they are anonymous,” he wrote. “They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness”—but even Charles Darwin, who embraced the mental commonalities between humans and other animals, thought them incapable of understanding that they could die.

For all that people now appreciate the minds of other animals, understanding death has remained a clear divide. In the last few years, though, more scientists have turned their attention to the subject. They argue that some exceptionally intelligent creatures can indeed comprehend death. The comprehension might be rudimentary compared to that of a typical 21st-century adult, but it’s close enough to blur the divide. And some researchers and scholars want to go even further: Understanding death, they argue, is not so complicated, is meaningful even in simpler forms, and may be shared by many creatures rather than just a few.”

4. Truth and Lies About the Gaza Protests | Alex Skopic

An article for those familiar with the discourse around the two documentaries being discussed.

“Last month, two very different documentaries about the ongoing protest movement for Gaza and its people debuted in U.S. theaters. First, audiences got October 8 (sometimes stylized as October H8TE), an exploration of what its makers claim is an “explosion of antisemitism on college campuses, social media and in the streets” since the October 7 attacks. A little later, we got The Encampments, an inside look at the protest movement at Columbia University featuring interviews with Mahmoud Khalil—the student organizer who was abducted and imprisoned by the Trump administration shortly before the film’s release. In the press, these documentaries have often been treated as both opposite and equal, with reviewers writing that they “talk right past each other” or joking about a “two doc solution.” But there is no need to take a polite, equivocal “both sides” approach here. The Encampments is a compelling account of one of the most important human rights and liberation struggles of our time. October 8, by contrast, is a mendacious pack of smears and lies.”