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Issue 10: One word—plastics. [Sam Bowman, Works in Progress]

By William McClain
In [Works in Progress]
February 27, 2023
186 views
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  • The latest issue of Works in Progress—our tenth—is out today. Find it here.
    • Our lead essay explains how France’s fertility shift changed the face of European geopolitics—and explains what caused it.
    • The issue also includes pieces on: reducing reliance on diesel generators in Africa; building roads out of plastic; why we feel empathy for other species; rolling out green energy and other infrasturcture faster; why plutonium gets a bad rap; and using prediction markets to tax bullshit online.
    • Our cover art comes from Rav Rieck, an illustrator and story artist based in Tokyo. You can find more of his work here.
  • At the beginning of the eighteenth century, and for the previous thousand years, France was the China of Europe.
    • For much of that time, it had a quarter of the continent’s population, and even by 1700 had four times the population of England.
    • How differently world history would have panned out, historian *Guillaume Blanc *writes, if France hadn’t also experienced by far Europe’s earliest and most pervasive demographic transition, with first elites and then everyone else reducing their fertility towards just above replacement levels.
    • By the 20th century, France had only about as many people as England, and fewer than Germany.
    • But such a slowdown also meant France could keep pace with a newly-industrialising England, by having fewer mouths to feed.
    • If France’s birth rate had kept pace with England’s, there would be 250 million Frenchmen alive today.
  • Isn’t it weird that we love and care for animals, but also eat them?
    • Many people would struggle to hurt animals that they readily eat.
    • It turns out this isn’t a modern pathology: hunters around the world, whether in Western societies or living as hunter gatherers, express empathy for their prey.
    • This is no random coincidence, argues evolutionary biologist* Cody Moser*. Around the world, hunters use mimicry while hunting—something that sets humans apart from practically every other hunting species.
    • Getting into the heads of our prey made us better hunters. But we caught feelings in the process.
    • The art for this piece comes from Qianhui Yu, an illustrator based in the UK. You can find more of her work here.
  • The power is probably out now in Nigeria — according to one data source, the power is only on for about 7 hours every day.
    • And many sub-Saharan African countries face extremely unreliable power too.
    • The problem is simple, says Open Philanthropy’s *Lauren Gilbert*: African power suppliers are prevented from charging enough for power to break even.
    • Because they lose money when they supply power, they try to cut costs by reducing supply, keeping them bumping along until the next state bailout.
    • To tackle this, Western NGO efforts often focus on building mini-grids off the central network.
    • These efforts do not hurt, but it would be better to fix the underlying problem, and focus on making it possible to charge higher marginal prices and greater supply without hurting the people the caps are intended to help.
  • Proposals for major infrastructure projects in the UK require literally thousands of documents, totalling hundreds of thousands of pages.
    • The same is true across much of the developed world.
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Why you can’t trust the media [Matthew Yglesias, Slow Boring]

By Spencer Chen
In [Slow Boring]
February 15, 2023
268 views
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• The media is often blamed for declining trust, but there is little evidence that it has gotten worse since the pre-Vietnam era.
• In the past, journalists often collaborated with government officials to mislead people, and didn’t report on JFK’s affairs or FDR’s paralysis.
• Today, the media landscape is much more competitive, and mistakes are widely publicized.
• The main problem is that the news-reading audience doesn’t care about accuracy, and is more interested in cheap talk and fandom-style interest.
• Examples of this include the criticism of 538’s election forecasts, and the criticism of CNN’s “mostly peaceful” chyron.

Published February 15, 2023
Visit Slow Boring to read Matthew Yglesias’s original post Why you can’t trust the media

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February 14, 2023 [Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American]

By Spencer Chen
In Heather Cox Richardson [Letters from an American]
February 15, 2023
247 views
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• On Valentine’s Day in 1884, Theodore Roosevelt lost both his wife and his mother.
• Four years before, Roosevelt had married Alice Hathaway Lee and they had a daughter.
• Alice was suffering from Bright’s Disease and his mother from typhoid.
• Roosevelt escaped to Dakota Territory to become a rancher, but his cattle died in a brutal winter.
• He returned to politics with a cowboy image and eventually became President of the United States.
• As President, he worked to clean up the cities and stop the exploitation of workers.

Published February 15, 2023
Visit Letters from an American to read Heather Cox Richardson’s original post February 14, 2023

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February 12, 2023 [Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American]

By Spencer Chen
In Heather Cox Richardson [Letters from an American]
February 13, 2023
238 views
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• On February 12, 1809, Abraham Lincoln was born in Kentucky, and 100 years later, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded on the anniversary of his birth.
• The spark for the organization of the NAACP was a race riot in Springfield, Illinois, on August 14 and 15, 1908.
• William English Walling, Mary White Ovington, and Henry Moskowitz met in New York City in January 1909 to create a new civil rights organization.
• The group noted that Black Americans had lost their right to vote and were segregated from white Americans in schools, railroad cars, and public gatherings.
• W. E. B. Du Bois, a founding member of the Niagara Movement, became the NAACP’s director of publicity and research and edited the organization’s flagship journal *The Crisis*.
• The NAACP challenged racial inequality by calling popular attention to racial atrocities and demanding that officials treat people equally before the law.
• In 1946, NAACP leader Walter Francis White brought the story of World War II veteran Isaac Woodard, blinded by a police officers after talking back to a bus driver, to President Harry S. Truman.

Published February 13, 2023
Visit Letters from an American to read Heather Cox Richardson’s original post February 12, 2023

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Don’t Read His Lips [James Surowiecki, The Atlantic]

By Spencer Chen
In [The Atlantic]
February 8, 2023
264 views
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• Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, spoke last week after the Fed’s monthly meeting, conveying the message that the fight against inflation was not yet won and that the Fed anticipated continuing to raise interest rates over the next few months.
• Investors ignored Powell’s message and leaped to the conclusion that the Fed was no longer as hawkish as it had been, sending stocks soaring.
• When Powell spoke yesterday at the Economic Club in Washington, D.C., he wanted to make sure that no one missed the point and reiterated that the process of getting inflation down would be “bumpy” and was likely to take “quite a bit of time”.
• Until 1994, the Fed didn’t even announce at its monthly meeting whether it had raised or lowered interest rates.
• Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, Janet Yellen, and Jerome Powell have all been open about their thinking and have moved steadily toward more transparency and public communication about their policies.
• The job of central bankers has changed and they now have to be good at communicating without any real rule book.
• Powell did a fine job of explaining that the Fed was sticking with its target of 2 percent inflation, and that, as a result, it planned to keep hiking interest rates.
• However, the market rallied strongly, and by day’s end it was up by more than a percentage point.

Published February 8, 2023
Visit The Atlantic to read James Surowiecki’s original post Don’t Read His Lips

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Why There Was No Racial Reckoning [Wesley Lowery, The Atlantic]

By Spencer Chen
In [The Atlantic]
February 8, 2023
261 views
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• In the wake of the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, the nation’s leadership class was presented with a crossroads: to radically rethink American policing, or to retreat to the safety of piecemeal reform.
• Tyre Nichols’ death in Memphis, TN in January 2021 is a reminder of the limitations of reform.
• Five officers were fired and charged with second-degree murder after the release of four video clips depicting the officers’ excessive use of violence.
• The race of the officers (all five were Black) sparked debate about the role of race in police violence.
• The timely release of information and forthright steps to hold the officers accountable likely prevented civil unrest.
• The Memphis Police Department had a Black woman police chief, a majority-Black workforce, body cameras, de-escalation training, and a duty-to-intervene policy, yet Tyre Nichols was still killed.
• The city had responded to a record-high 342 murders in 2021 by deploying the SCORPION unit, a task force of 40 officers instructed to “be tough on tough people.”
• Vice President Kamala Harris attended Tyre Nichols’ funeral, where his mother said she believed her son was sent on an assignment from God.
• The article discusses the legacy of James Baldwin and Derrick Bell, two influential Black American writers and activists.
• Baldwin wrote about the Atlanta child murders in 1979, and Bell wrote the foreword to the 1996 paperback edition of Baldwin’s book, Evidence.
• Bell developed a theory called “interest convergence,” which posits that America’s white majority takes strides toward racial equality only when white people see doing so as in their own best interest.
• The article also discusses the death of Tyre Nichols, a Black man killed by police in Atlanta in 2021.
• At the funeral, activist Amber Sherman outlined the family’s demands for accountability and reform.
• Sharpton discussed the need for legislation to end qualified immunity and make it a crime for a cop to stand by and watch another officer brutalize a civilian.
• He concluded that movements take time, but that he and other activists will continue to fight for justice.

Published February 8, 2023
Visit The Atlantic to read Wesley Lowery’s original post Why There Was No Racial Reckoning

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A History of Confusing Stuff in the Sky [Garrett M. Graff, The Atlantic]

By Spencer Chen
In [The Atlantic]
February 8, 2023
279 views
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• Balloons have been used for spying and bombing since World War I, and German zeppelins regularly crossed the English Channel to drop hand grenades or small bombs on London.
• During World War II, Japan lofted about 9,000 balloon bombs toward the West Coast in 1944 and 1945, hoping to spread fear, ignite forest fires, and bring the war to America’s homeland.
• At the end of World War II, the arrival of the nuclear bomb meant that an entire city could be vaporized by a lone attacker arriving out of the blue sky.
• In 1947, reports of a mysterious flight of objects over the Cascades in the Pacific Northwest touched off a summer of excited, panicked UFO sightings.
• In 1952, the Air Force’s UFO-investigation program, Project Blue Book, figured out that Captain Thomas F. Mantell had most likely been chasing a Navy weather balloon when he crashed his plane.
• In the postwar era, balloons represented cutting-edge military technology, and the U.S. had multiple secret balloon projects under way.
• On Saturday, the U.S. military deployed an F-22 to shoot down a Chinese spy balloon, and the pilot who flew the plane is known as FRANK01, honoring Frank Luke, the balloon-busting ace of 1918.

Published February 8, 2023
Visit The Atlantic to read Garrett M. Graff’s original post A History of Confusing Stuff in the Sky

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The Moon Smells Like Gunpowder [Jillian Scudder, Nautilus]

By Spencer Chen
In [Nautilus]
February 8, 2023
173 views
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• Apollo 16 and 17 astronauts noticed a strong smell of gunpowder in the lunar module after returning from moonwalks.
• The lunar dust is sharp and can cling to the space suits, making it difficult to remove.
• Inhaling the dust can cause severe damage to the lungs, similar to silicosis.
• If humans are ever to live on the moon or Mars, they will need to find a way to protect themselves from the dust.

Published February 8, 2023
Visit Nautilus to read Jillian Scudder’s original post The Moon Smells Like Gunpowder

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The History Behind the Chinese Spy Balloon [Garrett M. Graff, The Atlantic]

By Spencer Chen
In [The Atlantic]
February 8, 2023
264 views
T

• Balloons have been used for spying and bombing since World War I, and German zeppelins regularly crossed the English Channel to drop hand grenades or small bombs on London.
• During World War II, Japan lofted about 9,000 balloon bombs toward the West Coast in 1944 and 1945, hoping to spread fear, ignite forest fires, and bring the war to America’s homeland.
• At the end of World War II, the arrival of the nuclear bomb meant that an entire city could be vaporized by a lone attacker arriving out of the blue sky.
• In 1947, reports of a mysterious flight of objects over the Cascades in the Pacific Northwest touched off a summer of excited, panicked UFO sightings.
• In 1952, the Air Force’s UFO-investigation program, Project Blue Book, figured out that Captain Thomas F. Mantell, a World War II pilot, had most likely been chasing a Navy weather balloon when he crashed.
• In the postwar era, balloons represented cutting-edge military technology, and the U.S. had multiple secret balloon projects under way.
• Today, sophisticated surveillance systems have failed to spot the forays of other Chinese balloons, and the U.S. military deployed an F-22 to shoot down the modern version of the first aerial weapon the country ever faced.

Published February 8, 2023
Visit The Atlantic to read Garrett M. Graff’s original post The History Behind the Chinese Spy Balloon

Read on

The Persistent Racism of Policing [Eve Fairbanks, The Atlantic]

By Spencer Chen
In [The Atlantic]
February 7, 2023
174 views
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• Tyre Nichols’s killing has sparked a conversation about racism and police brutality in America.
• Kgadi, a South African soldier, grew up under apartheid and was inspired to join the military partly because he wanted to be like the white-led police force that had killed his brother.
• South Africa has gone from strict segregation to a place where people of color fill the president’s cabinet, dominate Parliament, set school curricula, run universities, and write the news.
• Post-apartheid South African police officers kill more civilians per capita than the American police do.
• Under South Africa’s first Black president, Nelson Mandela, Black-liberation leaders had expected great change, but Mandela asserted his commitment to the status quo.
• Black South Africans felt a pressure to perform and do the job in a way that their predecessors would approve of or recognize.
• Malaika, a “born free”, observed that some Black people in her formerly white neighborhood went overboard building ostentatious security walls and refused to answer when Black handymen rang their doorbell.
• A life coach wrote a blog post advising Black women to act like white madams for their maids to respect them.
• South African Black people often felt they were treated worse by Black authorities than by white people.
• Black service providers were sometimes accused of having a double standard when it came to treating wealthier Black customers.
• The Black-liberation movement’s goal was to dismantle the world white South Africans created, or just to move more freely within it.
• Kuseni Dlamini, the second Black CEO of Anglo American South Africa, chose to join the top ranks of an institution from which he had long been barred.
• Some Black leaders developed the same kind of loathing for poorer Black people that apartheid-era white leaders had evinced.
• Police brutality and racism are intimately linked in South Africa, as in America.
• Black South African police officers often look back at apartheid with nostalgia, as a time when police had more absolute power to use force.
• Complex, inherited ideas about power and internalized racism can lead Black cops to kill a Black man.
• Traditions we have attempted to discard after discerning their injustice will likely be heritable and persistent.

Published February 7, 2023
Visit The Atlantic to read Eve Fairbanks’s original post The Persistent Racism of Policing

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