Wild Times, 34
February 4, 2018
Text
1 – My Father’s Body, at Rest and in Motion – Siddhartha Mukherjee @ The New Yorker
"Look, I wanted to shout each day that I tended to my father in the hospital, it’s really something. These conserving, self-correcting, decay-resisting forces that contend invisibly within us—in our bodies, our cities, our planetary ecosystem, even—are the opposite of nothing. The hospitals that work, the ambulances that lift patients smoothly off the ground: we neglect the small revolutions that maintain these functions, but when things fall apart we are suddenly alert to the chasms left behind. If we could measure homeostatic stamina—if we could somehow capture and quantify resilience—we might find a way to conserve things worth keeping before they failed, or, for that matter, learn to break things that we wanted broken. It is easy to notice the kind of activity that drives change; stasis, on the other hand, requires a more vigilant reckoning."
2 – Losing Faith in the State, Some Mexican Towns Quietly Break Away – The New York Times
“Fed up with both the cartels and the government, the people of Tancítaro pushed out both.”
3 – Making China Great Again – Evan Osnos @ The New Yorker
"Late one afternoon in November, I went to see a professor in Beijing who has studied the U.S. for a long time. America’s recent political turmoil has disoriented him. 'I’m struggling with this a lot,' he said, and poured me a cup of tea. 'I love the United States. I used to think that the multiculturalism of the U.S. might work here. But, if it doesn’t work there, then it won’t work here.'"
4 – Inside Silicon Valley’s Dark Side – Emily Chang @ Vanity Fair
"With famous actors and athletes wanting to get into the tech game, it’s no surprise that some in the Valley have a high opinion of their attractiveness and what they should expect or deserve in terms of their sex lives. In the Valley, this expectation is often passed off as enlightened—a contribution to the evolution of human behavior. For many women who describe it, however, it’s a new immaturity—sexist behavior dressed up with a lot of highfalutin talk—that reinforces traditional power structures, demeans women, and boosts some of the biggest male egos in history: just another manifestation of Brotopia."
5 – Fashion’s Culture of Lechery – Chris Wallace @ Business of Fashion
"Sex sells, we’ve been told, like it was the end of the story. Sex sells like gravity keeps us down. Well, yeah, let’s find out how to climb, fly, leave the orbit of predation, victimisation; let us transcend the leer and the culture that profits from it."
6 – Inside India’s race to cool 1.3 billion people in a warming world – Josh Dzieza @ The Verge
"It’s a tug-of-war, Mishra said, between rising temperatures and our ability to adapt. 'Who, will win? Probably, I would go for humans,' he said, optimistic but hedging."
Backlog
1 – The Great Nutrient Collapse
2 – How Instagram Makes You Basic, Boring, and Completely Deranged