Instead of relying on scattered deposits of fossil
fuel—the control of which has largely defined geopolitics
for more than a century—we are moving rapidly toward a
reliance on diffuse but ubiquitous sources of supply.
…
In fact, the sheer scope of that potential change seems to
be motivating much of the current backlash against clean
energy in the U.S.
Plus, I always love a bit on e-bikes; not only fun, but an excellent way to get around without burning things:
E-biking—best thought of as biking without hills—may prove
to be an even more important innovation. The e-bike is
almost unbelievably efficient: to fully charge a
five-hundred-watt e-bike costs, on average, about eight
cents. That charge provides some thirty miles of range, so
it costs about a penny to ride five miles.
Tons of facts here that indisputably illustrate how the transformation of global energy that is not only under way, but accelerating:
The United Kingdom—where, after all, fossil fuel really
began—now has so much wind power that in 2024 its carbon
emissions fell below what they were in 1879
Worth a read. Let’s see if the optimism I felt while reading it is still there in five years.
Sarah Fortune, a professor and the chair of the
department of immunology and infectious diseases at
Harvard’s school of public health, is among the world’s
leading experts on tuberculosis, the No. 1 infectious
cause of death globally. She had a sixty-million-dollar
N.I.H. award for a seven-year moon-shot effort to unravel
exactly how tuberculosis makes people sick, in order to
find ways to better control the disease. It is now the
beginning of the fifth year of the contract, which has
supported work involving some sixty people across
fourteen institutions—including Case Western Reserve
University, in Ohio, the University of Pittsburgh, the
University of Colorado, and clinical sites in South
Africa and Uganda. That work—in humans, animals, and
machine-learning models—had already revealed a pathway to
a truly protective vaccine against T.B., which was
previously believed impossible. The team had been
conducting testing in macaques of an injectable vaccine
developed by researchers at Boston Children’s
Hospital.
But, on Tuesday morning, Fortune had received
an e-mail with a letter from the N.I.H. ordering her to
stop her research, “effective immediately.” Virtually all
spending was halted. This was reminiscent of the
stop-work orders and terminations at U.S.A.I.D., which
ended more than eighty per cent of the agency’s programs
and led to layoffs for some two hundred thousand people
in the U.S. and around the world. These programs and
people had saved lives by the millions. The indifference
to, and even celebration of, the destruction is what is
most horrifying.
In the pediatrics ward, a cramped space that had cartoon
characters painted on the walls, a nine-year-old named
Mariam cried softly as another of my colleagues examined
her. Her hair was neatly braided and tied with a yellow
scrunchie. Mariam had lost an arm to amputation after an
air strike, and shrapnel had slashed a hole between her
bladder and her rectum. She had already undergone five
surgeries. On a bed next to her lay a three-year-old boy,
who had needed surgery after he was injured in an air
strike; his five-year-old brother was killed in the
attack. The boy was suffering from an infected surgical
wound. “It just doesn’t feel real,” Saleem told me later.
“How can something so horrible be real?”
…
Israeli forces have now dropped more explosives in Gaza
than fell on London, Dresden, and Hamburg combined during
the Second World War. More than fifty thousand
Palestinians have been killed.
…
I asked the paramedics what was hardest about this work.
Responding to an air strike and discovering that it’s your
own family, one said. Recovering the bodies of children,
another said. He paused, then added, “It is strange that
the world has allowed this to happen to us.”
The indifference to, and even celebration of, the destruction is what is most horrifying.
According to investigator Walter F. White of the NAACP,
Mary Turner was tied and hung upside down by the ankles,
her clothes soaked with gasoline, and burned from her
body. Her belly was slit open with a knife like those used
“in splitting hogs.” Her “unborn babe” fell to the ground
and gave “two feeble cries.” Its head was crushed by a
member of the mob with his heel to hide any evidence of
what had happened, the crowd then shot hundreds of bullets
into Turner’s body. Mary Turner was cut down and buried
with her child near the tree, with a whiskey bottle
marking the grave. The Atlanta Constitution published an
article with the subheadline: “Fury of the People Is
Unrestrained.”
The indifference to, and even celebration of, the destruction is what is most horrifying.
A large group of people feels one way, while a small
group with a disproportionate amount of structural power
tells them they are wrong to feel it. This is
particularly true for college students around the
country. Their Instagram feeds are full of eviscerated
children, but their passionate protest—the real-world
application of everything their liberal, humanistic
education was supposed to impart—has made them criminal,
first in the eyes of their school administrators, and now
to their government. The tactics of the protest movements
they read about in their textbooks comprise illegal acts.
…so there’s no guarantee that a majority of the justices
will follow existing law in White Lion, no matter how
clear that law may be.
It is important to take a moment to let that soak in. Just bask in how bananas the implications are. I find going through the synonyms for “unhinged” in your local thesaurus is a great way to summarize our Supreme Court’s behavior.
These are adults, so let us treat them like adults. Let
us acknowledge that they want to believe nonsense and
conjecture. They want to believe anything that affirms
their worldview. They want to celebrate a leader who
allows them to nurture their basest beliefs about others.
The biggest challenge of our lifetime will be figuring
out how to combat the American willingness to embrace
flagrant misinformation and bigotry.
Naomi Beinart, writing about attending high school the day after the election, also at the Times:
… most of the guys I saw that Wednesday appeared
nonchalant. A smiling student shook his friend’s hand and
said sarcastically, “Good election” in the same hallway
where I saw a female teacher clutching a damp tissue.
Why did it seem these boys were so unperturbed? I worried
that my guy friends might care about women only until it
conflicts with other, more pressing, priorities.
A contemporary and ridiculous (I mean the latter not in the vernacular, but the actual dictionary definition — “worthy of ridicule”) response to teaching accurate accounts of the slavery, imperialist land theft, and genocide inherent in America’s history is that it could make some people feel bad. Well, yeah. I, an American, SHOULD feel AWFUL about living on stolen land, about the genocide concurrent with said theft, and of the past chattel slavery whose repercussions still warp everything here from economic opportunity to equal justice.
Similarly, I SHOULD feel badly about patriarchy. I SHOULD feel the pain of the violent, corrupted, un-just order it has forced upon us all ANDBYFARTHEWORSTOFIT upon women. (Atwood: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”)
So, feeling bad. Feeling bad? How can anyone even begin to learn from history, to fix themselves, to send society in the right direction unless they feel pain and regret and remorse? And that’s the takeaway: they don’t want you to feel bad because they don’t want you to learn, and they don’t want you to learn because they don’t want you to think.
Is someone afraid of change? Well, what can ever come to be without change? Or what is dearer or closer to the nature of the Whole than change? Can you yourself take your bath, if the wood that heats it is not changed? Can you be fed, unless what you eat changes? Can any other of the benefits of life be achieved without change? Do you not see then that for you to be changed is equal, and equally necessary to the nature of the Whole?
This is a potent combination: a voice describing patriarchy, while characters from well-known films show how it harms. For me, though, I feel the high quality writing is not getting all the way to my brain as I am also trying to simultaneously pay attention to the moving pictures. So I found it helpful to transcribe part of the video:
All you have to do is turn on the news or go to the movies
and you’ll be inundated with endless stories centering
men. Obviously, this doesn’t mean that women are never
centered under patriarchy, but when they are, it’s often
framed as a woman’s story, rather than a human story.
“The Barbie Movie”, for example, is very specifically a
story about the gendered experience of being a woman in
society. We can contrast that with a movie like
Oppenheimer, which is a story about becoming “death, the
destroyer of worlds.” Yes, this “destroyer of worlds”
happens to be a man, but notice, the story isn’t focused
on the gendered experience of being a man in society. In
fact, all of Christopher Nolan’s films center very
important men, but none are about their gender. They’re
billed as stories representative of the human experience
writ large. Greta Gerwig’s movies, on the other hand, all
center women, and are very explicitly about being a woman
trying to navigate a man’s world.
That’s not a criticism of either director, by the way.
It’s just a stark illustration of what “male-centered”
means. In patriarchy, men are viewed as the default for
“human” and therefore, male experiences are framed as an
exploration of the human condition, while women’s
experiences are, first and foremost, framed as being about
women. Incidentally, this deep-seated cultural expectation
of male centrality helps explain the waves of backlash
against any entertainment that’s made for a general
audience, but doesn’t center men, or masculinity.
Male identification is a little more complicated, but it
is a critical piece of the patriarchal puzzle. It means
that:
Core cultural ideas about what is considered
good, desirable, preferable, or normal are
culturally associated with how we think
about men, manhood, and masculinity.
— Johnson, The Gender Knot
This is why professions that elevate qualities like
toughness, competitiveness, strength, control,
rationality, and invulnerability, are so highly valued and
highly paid in our society. While occupations that revolve
around qualities thought of as feminine, like compassion,
sharing, and care-giving, tend to be systematically
devalued and underfunded.
Those problems with patriarchy above are just some of the reasons I am a feminist. I believe feminism is extremely correct. If you read bell hooks’ Feminism is for Everybody and you disagree, I don’t want to talk to you. I just don’t.
As I looked out of the [SS United States] over the strip malls and
parking lots that sprawled out before the ship’s bow, it
struck me that maybe as a culture we are losing the
capability to incorporate things of such remarkable
grandeur into the fabric of our lives. We see something
magnificent and instead of feeling that transcendent awe
and humility, maybe we view it as a threat to the worth
of the generally shabby architectural constructs we
pepper our cities with today. Rather than a cause for
celebration, things of beauty are merely to be gleefully
demolished or to be hacked apart for the base elements
they are made of. The real failure is in our own
inability to save something like the SS United States,
not in its inability to integrate itself into our world.
We may now have massive cruise ships serving as seaborne
vacation metropolises, but it would be hard to argue that
they approach the class or elegance of the passenger
liners that preceded them. Maybe as a symbol of who we
are, we just don’t deserve the SS United States any more.
Maybe we never did. I leave that judgment to you.
I plan to go back through the wreckage for my books and
rescue whatever I can. I will not put them on bookshelves
this time. I just want to make sure that the pages are
intact. My brother Hamza will do the same thing with his
Arabic grammar and literature books, which he has spent
ten years collecting. Both of us pray that in the coming
days, it will not rain and soak their pages.
I am afraid, each day, that I will hear news that Mosab and his family have been killed.
The late social critic Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a sendup
of what she saw as an “epidemic of wellness” in her book,
Natural Causes. Our obligation to the self had become, in
her opinion, an endless gauntlet of obligations. Our
commitment to augmenting and bettering ourselves
threatens to overtake, rather than improve, our minds and
bodies. “You can think of death bitterly or with
resignation … and take every possible measure to postpone
it,” she wrote. “Or, more realistically, you can think of
life as an interruption of an eternity of personal
nonexistence, and seize it as a brief opportunity to
observe and interact with the living, ever-surprising
world around us.”
If we were to take the obligation to
wellness seriously, wouldn’t it, ultimately, center on
that possibility?