Deluge & Deli Meat

Featured Articles

After the Deluge

Harper's Magazine • 19 Nov 2024 • ~7100 words • Archive Link

A small town faces down climate disaster.

For a moment, we had what they had: a communal purpose that draws us together—in their case, an angry God, in ours, angry weather—and leads us to put aside differences, or at least to surrender them to exigency. And in that same moment, I had something I hadn’t for the four years I’d led Scotland: a reservoir of goodwill on which to draw as I expressed views I’d mostly kept in check all along. I wrote it in my head, rehearsed it in my car: a sermon on the meaning of recent events, on floods and tornadoes as evidence of our sins.

The Case Against Deli Meat

Grub Street • 19 Nov 2024 • ~5200 words • Archive Link

They’re consistent, convenient, tasty — and at a time of recalls and outbreaks, one of the riskiest things you could eat.

But cold cuts represented a conceptual leap beyond their progenitors — more a simulation of meat than meat itself. Unlike classic deli meats, those plastic-wrapped blocks behind the deli counter do not all come from the same muscle or even a single animal. To make a typical loaf of cold cuts, many animals are slaughtered, exsanguinated, chilled, balded, cleaned, disassembled, deboned, tossed into a large industrial bowl, run through a set of high-speed rotating knives, ground into a pastelike goo the consistency of pancake batter, mixed with a cocktail of preservatives and binding agents, poured into molds that mimic the animal’s anatomy, cooked back into a solid, vacuum-sealed, and labeled for shipping.

Recommended Articles (8 Articles Today)

‘A little dirty’: inside the secret world of McKinsey, the firm hooked on fossil fuels

the Guardian • 20 Nov 2024 • ~3750 words

Interviews and analysis of court documents show how the world’s most prestigious consulting firm quietly helps fuel the climate crisis.

McKinsey goes where the money is, former consultants told the CCR. “It’s capitalism incarnate,” one said. Another, who says they petitioned senior figures at the firm to curb some of its more damaging fossil fuel work, said he was told: “If we don’t do it, a competitor will.”

The Delicate Path of Treating Addiction Among Doctors

Undark Magazine • 20 Nov 2024 • ~3200 words

Physician Health Programs aim to help struggling doctors. But some critics say they do more harm than good.

Doctors afflicted by mental illness or addiction often struggle to prioritize their own treatment and care. And they may be a particularly vulnerable population due to their high risk for burnout and mental health struggles, which can facilitate the misuse of substances: While the number of doctors experiencing addiction broadly mirrors the general population, a 2022 review found that self-reported problem alcohol use among doctors increased in recent years. And a recent BMJ meta-analysis found that female surgeons are 76 percent more likely than the general population to consider suicide.

The Gendered Battle Over Digital Sexual Abuse in South Korea

New Lines Magazine • 20 Nov 2024 • ~6100 words

Despite the country’s trailblazing laws, campaigners say more is needed to tackle the causes of a recent spate of pornographic deepfakes aiming to humiliate women and girls.

Despite the government’s quick response, some in South Korea believe that the root causes of these gendered crimes are not being adequately addressed. Women’s rights groups lament that the nation’s rage has focused mainly on perpetrators who target school-age girls, largely overlooking the ubiquity of digital sex crimes against adult women in the country, not to mention South Korea’s poor record on gender equity. South Korea has consistently had the highest gender wage gap among nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development since 1996. As of this year, only one-fifth of South Korea’s National Assembly members were women, lagging behind the global average.

Are We Accidentally Building a Planetary Brain?

NOEMA • 20 Nov 2024 • ~5050 words

From superorganisms to superintelligences, how studying crabs could reveal that we are unintentionally building an artificial world brain.

The evolution of crabs, from their shrimp-like ancestors, can be characterized as a headward surge: a ballooning that erupts forth from the face in exaggerated arrays of mandibles and pincers. In 1852, Dana called this “cephalization.” Dana thought he had found an ironclad “law” of evolution, explaining universal trends across life’s tree. This was motivated by an uninspected assumption, then widespread, that organic evolution — rather than branching aimlessly — must tend in some direction toward “one far-off divine event,” as Alfred Tennyson poetically put it. That event, for Dana, was the bulbing of ever-bigger brains.

The Business School Scandal That Just Keeps Getting Bigger

The Atlantic • 19 Nov 2024 • ~6400 words • Archive Link

The rot runs deeper than almost anyone has guessed.

It's easy to imagine how cheating might lead to more cheating. If business-school psychology is beset with suspect research, then the bar for getting published in its flagship journals ratchets up: A study must be even flashier than all the other flashy findings if its authors want to stand out. Such incentives move in only one direction: Eventu­ally, the standard tools for torturing your data will no longer be enough. Now you have to go a little further; now you have to cut your data up, and carve them into sham results. Having one or two prolific frauds around would push the bar for publishing still higher, inviting yet more corruption. (And because the work is not exactly brain surgery, no one dies as a result.) In this way, a single discipline might come to look like Major League Baseball did 20 years ago: defined by juiced-up stats.

The Painted Protest

Harper's Magazine • 18 Nov 2024 • ~6600 words • Archive Link

How politics destroyed contemporary art.

. . . as faith in the liberal order began to fall apart around 2016, this conception of art no longer seemed relevant. As concerns over identity, social issues, and inequalities intensified, there was a sense that the art world had grown frivolous and decadent, that the proliferation of forms and approaches over the decades had reached its limit. Art, which had previously been a way to produce discursive polyphony, aligned itself with the dominant social-justice discourses of the day, with works dressed up as protest and contextualized according to decolonial or queer theory, driven by a singular focus on identity.

Death in Nogales

The New York Review of Books • 16 Nov 2024 • ~4200 words • Archive Link

An unarmed Mexican migrant was shot dead on an Arizona ranch. The response revealed widespread support for violence at the border.

The broader reaction to his arrest, however, shows that the spirit of the Texas Rangers lives on—that many Americans continue to be astonished and offended that they might be punished for killing a migrant on the border. In the months after Kelly’s arrest, 12,000 people signed a petition asking for his release. Online fundraisers collected almost half a million dollars, which he used to pay bail. Early fans left comments making clear that they supported Kelly not because they thought he was innocent—framed for the killing—but because, as in any perceived wartime, killing had become the patriotic thing to do. One YouTube comment on a video of the preliminary hearing reads, “Only stopping these invaders in this way—no matter sex or age—will send the signal to stop this invasion.”

The Stone Soup Theory of Billionaires

Asomo • 14 Nov 2024 • ~4600 words

An antidote to Great Man theories of history.

This basic principle - that we come together to survive - was true in the age of hunter-gatherers, and it’s true now. That said, while we are part of a transnational mesh of people coming together, it doesn’t mean you directly depend on every single one of them. Rather, you only draw on a small subset of them, but they in turn draw on other subsets who draw on other subsets, and so on. If you zoom out, and look at every chain of interdependence, you’ll see an enormous web of extraordinarily complex connections, with no beginning or end. All these ‘supply chains’ will entangle and double-back on each other.