Falcons & Milei

Featured Articles

The Fleet-Winged Ghosts of Greenland

Hakai Magazine • 3 Dec 2024 • ~4250 words

A mysterious population of peregrine falcons in the Far North has inspired environmental action and scientific research around the world.

Peregrine falcons hold near-mythical appeal in our collective imagination, and for good reason. Topping out at speeds of more than 320 kilometers an hour, they’re the fastest species on Earth, plummeting from the sky like amber-eyed missiles. They hit their prey at such staggeringly high velocities that they’ve prompted studies on the physics of momentum and the aerodynamics of flight. Their nest sites, or aeries—selected for their inaccessibility to predators and view of the world below—often require biologists to include technical climbing gear as part of their standard kit. As falconry subjects, they’ve inspired a vernacular of terms that roll off the tongue like a chant—tiercel, eyas, bewit, creance, stoop, keen, haggard, passager, bate. And with sharply masked faces, delicately barred undersides, and wings shaped like boomerangs, they’re also a visual delight.

Javier Milei Wages War on Argentina’s Government

The New Yorker • 30 Nov 2024 • ~8450 words • Archive Link

The President, a libertarian economist given to outrageous provocations, wants to remake the nation. Can it survive his shock-therapy approach?

For Milei, one of the keys to attracting support has been making the language of theoretical economics satisfying to people who want to overturn society. At his inauguration, last December, he broke with tradition by holding the ceremony outside Argentina’s Congress building, where he spoke in front of a banner that read “The President Who Passes Into History Is He Who Makes History.” Milei’s followers are enthusiastic about displaying symbols, and the crowd that packed the square flaunted Argentinean flags and baseball caps emblazoned, in English, with “Make Argentina Great Again.”

Recommended Articles (7 Articles Today)

“You Don’t Have an Age”

The Dial • 3 Dec 2024 • ~2850 words

Medical exams to determine the age of asylum seekers are putting minors at risk.

One fall day in 2022, Ishaaq, a 16-year-old asylum seeker from a conflict zone in the Middle East, was shepherded into a Belgian hospital ward along with 20 others . . . Until Ishaaq could secure a replacement passport, the question of whether he should be treated as an adult or as a child would be decided by a series of medical examinations. “Stop here! Don’t move! If you don’t stay still and listen, you will be an adult!” Ishaaq says on a video call, recalling the brusque directions from a doctor. He gestures as he describes the three-point test — a scan of his teeth, clavicle and wrist. He squeezes his jaw between his thumb and forefinger, slaps the top of his chest, and raises his hand, as if the experience were imprinted in muscle memory. One week later he received the results. Ishaaq pats the side of his head with an open palm, eyebrows shifting into an expression of helplessness: He was now, officially, 21.

The Secret Pentagon War Game That ​Offers a Stark​ Warning for Our Times

New York Times • 30 Nov 2024 • ~6850 words • Archive Link

The devastating outcome of the 1983 game reveals that nuclear escalation inevitably spirals out of control.

The best available model of such an event is an ultrasecret 1983 Pentagon war game called Proud Prophet. That game was a nuclear test of sorts, and it provided critical lessons that remain crucial today. It was unique in that by design it was largely unscripted, involved the highest levels of the U.S. military and its global warfighting commands and used actual communication channels, doctrines and secret war plans. One of its great strengths was that unlike any other war game involving the possibility of small-yield nuclear weapons, it ran freely and was allowed to play out to its natural conclusion: global devastation.

America’s Hidden Racial Divide: A Mysterious Gap in Psychosis Rates

New York Times • 3 Dec 2024 • ~5550 words • Archive Link

Black Americans experience schizophrenia and related disorders at twice the rate of white Americans. It’s a disparity that has parallels in other cultures.

Jonathan Metzl, a psychiatrist and professor of sociology and psychiatry at Vanderbilt University, explored and extended this idea in his 2009 book, “The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease.” He argues that in the 1960s and ’70s, the clinical application of the schizophrenia diagnosis — and even aspects of the official diagnostic criteria — changed in response to white fears about the civil rights and Black Power movements. Mining records from a Detroit-area psychiatric institution, Metzl traces a transformation: from schizophrenia’s being seen as a largely female — and unthreatening — disease to its becoming a disorder of aggression and a means, whether or not consciously intended, to lock up Black men.

How to lose your home

Aeon • 3 Dec 2024 • ~4250 words

In a changing climate, the instinct is to save everything you can. But maybe letting go is braver – and better for the future?

Parsons’s warning that some coastal settlements may be ‘beyond saving’ chimes with Caitlin DeSilvey’s Curated Decay (2017), a book that navigates this same uneven terrain of loss, heritage and historical memory. ‘Even when a decision has been made to accept eventual ruination,’ writes DeSilvey, a geographer at the University of Exeter, ‘in moments of threat, it is extremely difficult to step back and allow destruction to continue unchecked.’ But perhaps our relationships with the built and natural world around us would be more healthy if we were honest about their precarity, and our own. DeSilvey cites Greg Kennedy, of An Ontology of Trash (2007): ‘Authentic care senses the truth of death and discloses it accordingly.’

Searching for a miracle: inside the Vatican’s secret saint-making process

The Guardian • 3 Dec 2024 • ~4850 words

Canonisation has long been a way for the Catholic church to shape its image. The Vatican is preparing to anoint its first millennial saint, but how does it decide who is worthy?

Describing what would-be saints needed to do in life, Acutis omitted mention of the significant tasks they would need to undertake in death. To be recognised as a saint, an individual must go through what is essentially a prolonged posthumous trial during which their physical and spiritual remains are assessed. The Vatican office responsible for this process is known as the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, and it has been in operation since 1588. The dicastery investigates whether the candidate was spiritually exemplary in life, and whether they have proven useful to the faithful in death. Crucially, and most controversially, every candidate must also have two scientifically inexplicable miracles posthumously attributed to them before they can be canonised.

The Nonstop Gay Sex Party on the Mexico City Subway

The Nation • 2 Dec 2024 • ~3800 words

The city’s metro hosts—and authorities unofficially sanction—a queer institution unlike any other.

Queer people the world over have found ways to create spaces where they can survive, and sometimes even thrive, in the unlikeliest contexts. But very few have managed to fashion a queer hub out of something that is mobile and woven into the municipal infrastructure. Mexico City’s gay underground has the distinction of being literally underground.

‘I cried, I cried. I had no one’: the brutal child kidnappings that shamed Belgian Congo

The Guardian • 1 Dec 2024 • ~2500 words

Over 70 years ago, thousands of mixed-race boys and girls were torn from their mothers by order of the state. This week five survivors hope a court will censure Belgium for crimes against humanity

Monique Bitu Bingi was one of many mixed-race children forcibly separated from their parents and sequestered in religious institutions by the Belgian state that ruled Congo, Burundi and Rwanda. Her Congolese mother was 15 when she was born; her father was 32, a colonial official from a well-to-do family in Liège. Monique’s existence – and thousands of other mixed-race children known as métis (mixed race) – deeply alarmed the Belgian state, which viewed these babies as a threat to the white supremacist colonial order.