Hello there. Or as my favorite internet cat says, HELO. Not much to say today, so I’ll leave you with the articles. Small announcement: I’ve added a marker that tells you which articles are paywalled, so you can think before you use up whatever free articles you have on that outlet.
If you got this from a friend and want to subscribe, here’s the link. Also, if any of the links are paywalled and if you don’t want to pay for a subscription, try opening the link in incognito mode in your browser; it works sometimes. If that doesn’t work, you can access the website using a different browser on the same device, or use a different device altogether.
1. Waste of 1,000 Research Papers
(paywalled, The Atlantic)
This is an interesting article from Ed Yong at The Atlantic about the futile search for and investigation into the “depression gene”. A team found that a particular gene correlated highly with depression, but only on a very small sample size. Eventually, later studies using more data were able to rule this out conclusively.
2. Adrift in the Arctic
(paywalled, Washington Post)
A team of scientists is going to study the Arctic for a year, while being on a ship totally at the mercy of the seas and ice. This one-in-a-generation project is a 17-month effort that costs $134 million.
Perovich says he thinks the summer ice “will stick around as long as I do.” He nods to his younger colleague. “I don’t know about you.”
Webster pulls her knees toward her chest. Her expression is sober as she ponders the Arctic’s future — and her own.
“I can’t actually imagine what that would be like,” she says.
“It’s easy to imagine; you just erase all the ice,” Perovich says. “What’s hard to imagine is what all the ramifications would be.”
3. Reading Lessons
A poignant and expressive essay about reading throughout one’s life, this is quite the read. I’ll leave you with a few excerpts.
There were certainly distractions in that pre-internet paradise, but I also experienced flashes of grace, spaces of half an hour here and there when I could connect so directly to the language of a poem that it felt as though an electric charge were surging back and forth between my heart and the page. I was not so much reading the text as being read by it, imprinted by it, explained and forgivingly understood by those elegant patterns of ink.
I began to pace slowly on the flat sand, and as I did, it occurred to me to pull The Prelude out of my purse and open the book. The slow tempo of my walking started to align itself with the languid pace of Wordsworth’s meter. Once my feet and his were synchronized, I was able to follow his meaning too. […] description of Wordsworth’s method of composition. “Coleridge has told me,” writes Hazlitt, “that he himself liked to compose in walking over uneven ground, or breaking through the straggling branches of a copse-wood; whereas Wordsworth always wrote (if he could) walking up and down a straight gravel walk, or in some spot where the continuity of his verse met with no collateral interruption.”
4. Why I don’t love Light Rail Transit
I stan public transport, and was made aware of a number of nuances in this essay(actually an edition of another newsletter). Light Rail is the type of public transport, it turns out, that is antithetical to every good thing about public transport: the cost per passenger mile is high, it isn’t very accessible, it actually promotes racial/financial inequity and gentrification, and so on. Buses aren’t as glamorous as light rail, but they may be cheaper and more effective.
5. How a Tiny Plant Made a Big Comeback in West Virginia
This is a super story about a plant called the Buffalo clover. Why is it called that? It thrived in the past when it was crushed beneath the hooves of rambling buffaloes. It’s made a comeback now, and funnily enough, it’s because a particular patch of ground has been trampled by a “skidder” used to haul trees out of woods. Since the natural environment of the plant has been disturbed, an active restoration project was required.
6. Norway’s Bold Plan to Tackle Overtourism
A stunning fact: Norway has a population of ~5.5 million, and receives ~6 million tourists per year. Something that they can’t (or don’t want to) control is the number of tourists, but they want to improve and mitigate the impact that those tourists have on Norway’s environment.
As for Borge Ousland, he’s working as fast as he can toward sustainability. “I strongly believe there is not much time,” he says. “Norway could and should do so much more. I want to be able to look into my grandchildren’s eyes and say that at least I took a stand and did something. As one Norwegian environmentalist told me: ‘It’s too late to be a pessimist.’”
7. Tove Jansson’s illustrations for The Hobbit
This is amazing. I love The Hobbit , and I love Moomin.
8. The Heirloom
We treasure family heirlooms highly. In this essay, Bina Venkataraman argues that we should treasure and steward the environment just as we would a family heirloom. We are descendants of our ancestors; can we be good ancestors to our descendants? It seems like we are at a tipping point for this to happen.
We may not know what people in the future will wear, how they will travel, or what devices will be implanted in their brains. But we do know that people, however long we persist into the future, will retain something of what it is to be essentially human: the drive for survival, and the need for natural and cultural resources to support that survival. The pursuit of pleasure, knowledge, love, beauty, and community. We know they will seek a sense of belonging to time, as the ancients did and as we do today — one that connects them with the past and with the future. And that tells us something about what is most important to protect.
9. Parenting’s New Frontier: What Happens When Your 11-Year-Old Says No to a Smartphone?
As I read this article, I tried to take stock of the amount of attention that goes into my phone. I also tried to think about how much more present I would be if I used it less. The author of this essay is in a conundrum because her son refuses to have a phone: he says it would make him less self-reliant and less present in the world. I don’t think anybody can argue with that.
10. The Tyranny of Economists
It seems like we are obsessed with putting numbers to things in order to quantify them, and one such number that we’ve come up with recently, I’ve learnt, is the dollar value of a human life. I don’t want to get into the debate of how correct/relevant economics is, but letting ourselves make all our decisions based on the input of economists hasn’t served us all that well, according to this piece.
That’s all. See ya later.