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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:
- Dreaming of a Great World
- Five Ring Circus
- Queer Maps, Data, Devices, and Resistance
- Blood in the Water, Food on the Table, Protesters on the Shore
- 26 million tons of clothing end up in China’s landfills each year, propelled by fast fashion
- How gamification took over the world
- Inside Ziklag, the Secret Organization of Wealthy Christians Trying to Sway the Election and Change the Country
- I Went to Death Valley to Experience 129 Degrees
- A Deal With the Devil: What the Age-Old Faustian Bargain Reveals About the Modern World
- Canada Is Arming the World’s Bullies
Introductory excerpts quoted below. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
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Weekly Picks – July 7, 2024
Credit (left to right): The Open Syllabus Galaxy; Brian Gratwicke / Flickr; Jose Miguel Picon Chimelis; Isai Ramos / Unsplash.This week’s collection:
- Galaxy Brain
- Learning to love monsters
- One fish, two fish, 3,000 fish…
- Infiltrating the Family
- Dragon-shaped aurora and ‘scream of a dying star’ revealed as 2024 Astronomy Photographer of the Year finalists
Introductory excerpts quoted below. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
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Weekly Picks – June 30, 2024
Credit (left): Alphavector/ Shutterstock. Credit (center, clockwise from bottom left): Bruno Barbey/ Magnum Photos; Ahmad Al-Rubaye/ Getty Images; Wired staff/ Getty Images. Credit (right): James O’Brien for Quanta Magazine.This week’s collection:
- Exit 238
- Agreeing to Our Harm
- Why the ‘Costs of Doing Business’ Are Costing Us Our Lives
- Computation Is All Around Us, and You Can See It if You Try
- The Power of Physician Empathy
- Rule by Militia
- The psychology of oppression and liberation
- Pooping on the Moon Is a Messy Business
Introductory excerpts quoted below. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
Linked here but not quoted below, some ‘fact sheets’ shared in the past week:
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Weekly Picks – June 23, 2024
Credit (left to right): Agnes Jonas; E+ via Getty Images; Film4 / Access / Polish Film Institute / JW Films / Extreme Emotions / The New Inquiry.This week’s collection:
- Climate, State, and Utopia*
- When Police Shootings Don’t Kill: The Data That Gets Left Behind
- The Sentimentality of Evil
- The Beekeeper in Kathmandu
- The Evolution of Empire
- Ghosts on the Water
*The new forum published this week in Boston Review. Responses can also be found at the link.
Introductory excerpts quoted below. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
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Weekly Picks – June 16, 2024
Credit (left to right, top to bottom): Frederic J. Brown/ AFP via Getty Images; Dan Kitwood/ Getty Images; Pete Niesen / Shutterstock; March Avery, Evening Reading, 1972/ ©2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), photo by Josh Schaedel; Carlos Jasso/ReutersThis week’s collection:
- Neymar: Bolivia’s Ladder Boy
- Inside Mexico’s anti-avocado militias
- Should I Have Kids?
- The Internet Supercharged the Exploitation of Black Culture
- The Great Video Game Swindle
- The prison system isn’t ‘broken’ – it’s designed to traumatize black people en masse
- The Oldest Ecosystems on Earth
Introductory excerpts quoted below. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
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Weekly Picks – June 9, 2024
Credit (left to right): Aboodi Vesakaran; Project Syndicate; A section of the mural Alto al Fuego by Juana Alicia / Mauricio E. Ramirez / Public Books; Current Affairs
“‘There are decades where nothing happens,’ Lenin wrote, ‘and there are weeks where decades happen.’ The last eight months have seen an extraordinary acceleration of Israel’s long war against the Palestinians. Could the history of Zionism have turned out otherwise? Benjamin Netanyahu is a callow man of limited imagination, driven in large part by his appetite for power and his desire to avoid conviction for fraud and bribery (his trial has been running intermittently since early 2020). But he is also Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, and his expansionist, racist ideology is the Israeli mainstream. Always an ethnocracy based on Jewish privilege, Israel has, under his watch, become a reactionary nationalist state, a country that now officially belongs exclusively to its Jewish citizens.” (Adam Shatz, “Israel’s Descent”, LRB Vol. 46 No. 12)
This week’s collection:
- Israel’s Descent
- Finding Sanctuary in Art
- Stories Are Weapons
- The Possibilities for Child Liberation
- The New-Old Authoritarianism
- Don’t Major in English: And Other Bad Advice from the World
- Migrating Workers Provide Wealth for the World
Introductory excerpts quoted below. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
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Weekly Picks – June 2, 2024
Credit (on left): Asimov Collective. Credits (center-left, clockwise): Shuyao Xiao; US National Archives; Charlie Riedel/ AP Images; Getty Images/ Anton Petrus. Credit (center-right): Thomas Presquet/ ESA. Credits (on right, top to bottom): Robert Duboise/ Wilhelmina Duboise/ Tampa Bay Times; Patapoutian Lab / Scripps Researcher Institute, La Jolla, CA.
This week’s collection:
- How the Guinness Brewery Invented the Most Important Statistical Method in Science
- To pee or not to pee? That is a question for the bladder — and the brain
- The 165-year reign of oil is coming to an end. But will we ever be able to live without it?
- The City Makes the Civilization
- You Can’t Turn Back the Clock on Genocide
- The Marked Man
- The Tower and the Sewer
- Haiti’s Sin of Resistance
- On the Crisis of Men
- The Insulin Empire
- Dominion
India’s gargantuan election is about to conclude. I am reminded of how many times people have willingly pedestalled would-be-fascists throughout history. Electing national shepherds under benign assumptions only to be led down malignant paths. Because reactionary politics are easier to adhere to in the face of failing institutions; scapegoating made much more digestible as a means to an end – a quicker path to socioeconomic prosperity. But the path is unsustainable, the suffering is incalculable, and the promised prosperity is a fantasy. It must be if it excludes segments of the populace.
What is happening in India is a microcosm of what is happening in many nations worldwide – a shift to radical populism that seeks victory through oppression, empowering those already in power, and tying the national sentiment to figures rather than democratic principles. The digital age, still in its infancy, has somehow made it easier to construct cults and disseminate charged doctrine rather than reinforce critical inquiry. On this, two writers from the East and West speak about a country where the idea of a republic is yet again on the ballot:
Introductory excerpts quoted below. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
Not quoted below, but further reading on a society cannibalizing itself. The first four dispatches are from the past week, while the last is from 2014 but worth sharing alongside them. From the creator of Arab Labor, who tried to make it work before reluctantly departing with his children’s welfare in mind.
- Israel’s Problem Is Its Rotting Society, Not Benny Gantz
- Superlatives
- ‘Exterminate the beasts’: How Israeli settlers took revenge for a murder in the West Bank
- The BBC Is Afraid to Report the Facts About Israel’s War
- Sayed Kashua: why I have to leave Israel
The BBC and Jacobin articles are purposefully relayed together here, a dialectical presentation for your interpretation.
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Weekly Picks – May 26, 2024
Credits (clockwise from top left): David Guttenfelder; Jesse Winter / The Narwhal; Current Affairs; Rizek Abdeljawad/ Xinhua via Getty Images; Cristina Gottardi; Hokyoung Kim; Shannon Stapleton / Reuters; monticelllo/ Getty.
This week’s collection:
- Not Your Childhood Library
- “Deny, denounce, delay”: The battle over the risk of ultra-processed foods
- It hurts, but it’s holy
- The Voyager Probes Were a Triumph of Collective Endeavor
- Beyond Athens and Jerusalem
- The Criminalization of Poverty Is Creating a More Violent World
- A portrait of pollution around Canada’s busiest port
- Gaza’s Stolen Healers
- Nova Scotia’s Billion-Dollar Lobster Wars
- Can Sports Survive Climate Change?
Introductory excerpts quoted below. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
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Weekly Picks – May 19, 2024
Credits (on the left, clockwise from top left): reptiles4all/ Getty Images; Anouk Delafortrie for the EU ECHO via Flickr; Stuart Isett; Micha Bar-Am/ Magnum Photos; Nigel Van Wieck; Chase Lindberg. Credit (right): Kavan Chay.
This week’s collection:
- Aurora Banks Peninsula
- Not Too Wet To Burn
- The Modern Beggar
- Humans Are Driving a New Kind of Evolution in Animals
- The Unpunished: How Extremists Took Over Israel
Also recommended: The Law In These Parts. - The world isn’t watching
- Can You Lose Your Native Tongue?
- The age of uncertainty. Liminal time
Introductory excerpts quoted below. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
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Weekly Picks – May 12, 2024
Credits (left to right): Julia Nimke; Estelle Caswell / Grist; Mark Harvey / 3 Quarks Daily; Herron Stock LLC
A lighter set of reads this week. I had little time to dwell on too many longer pieces as I transported myself around the Lower Mainland for work and leisure. I hope you enjoy learning about parasites or taking strolls through idyllic Italy without any mention of the mafia or political frays.
This week’s collection:
- The Creatures that Control the Natural World
- Sicily Sold Homes for One Euro. This Is What Happened Next.
- Snake Oils, Vitamins, And Self-Help
- If You Build It, Will They Come?
Introductory excerpts quoted below. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
A supplementary collection from the past week, not quoted below but linked here for those interested, on the ongoing student protests seeking an end to an apartheid state and a genocide perpetrated via collective punishment. These pieces focus on American campuses but are relevant to movements happening worldwide.