Mixup & Time
Two couples in California discovered they were raising each other’s genetic children. Also, 20 atomic clocks are barely keeping up.
Featured Articles
An I.V.F. Mixup, a Shocking Discovery and an Unbearable Choice
New York Times • 25 Nov 2024 • ~7350 words • Archive Link
Two couples in California discovered they were raising each other’s genetic children. Should they switch their girls?
The other couple did not have the prolonged process of waiting and discovery that Daphna and Alexander had. Instead, there was an urgent phone call from the clinic, their fertility doctor weeping as he explained that there had been a terrible mistake: They had been raising the genetic child of another couple, who had been raising theirs. The conversation was a shock that plunged them into grief, even if Zoë’s mother, Annie, wasn’t entirely surprised. On some level, she had been waiting for a phone call like that one.
The mind-bending new science of measuring time
Financial Times • 25 Nov 2024 • ~5600 words • Archive Link
In windowless labs in Colorado sit the 20 atomic clocks the world sets its watch by. They’re barely keeping up.
One of Nist’s main concerns is time. It measures and distributes it for the United States, second after second, always and endlessly. Underlying this seemingly mundane task is a complex administrative bureaucracy and a sophisticated scientific apparatus. The institute claims five Nobel Prizes, one in chemistry and four in physics. In recent years, the measurement science has outpaced the bureaucracy that constrains it, and both are now working to redefine the second itself.
Recommended Articles (6 Articles Today)
What Ever Happened to the Lady Jaguars?
New York Times • 24 Nov 2024 • ~5850 words • Archive Link
They were the Lady Jaguars, a winless basketball team of troubled teenage girls. The New York Times spent months with them in 2012 and 2013. Recently, we wondered: What happened to the girls? Had they risen from their circumstances and fulfilled their visions of a better life? We set out to find them.
As teens, they were fragile, awkward, wounded, resilient, optimistic. They were young enough to have dreams, modest ones, mostly of attaining something marginally better than what they were living. The last lines of my final article in the 2012 series had left their future open, untold. “A cold, late-winter wind blew, and the girls rushed to get into the warmth of awaiting cars, back into a life without a basketball team,” I wrote. “In a moment, it seemed, they were scattered like leaves, and it was impossible to know just where they would be blown.”
Inside Big Oil’s war against transparency
ICIJ • 22 Nov 2024 • ~4150 words
For a decade, the industry fought bitterly against a basic anti-corruption rule to report their payments to foreign governments.
But the current rule also allows companies to leave out key details. For example, Exxon, Chevron and other firms including Transneft, a Russian state-owned company, are partners in the Caspian Pipeline Consortium. CPC pays hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes and fines to Russian governmental authorities. These taxes help sustain the Russian economy, boost arms production and pay state officials’ salaries and pensions — thereby aiding the Russian war effort in Ukraine. Yet in their first disclosures, filed with the SEC, neither company reported any payments to Russia. Under the rule passed in 2020, the companies don’t have to report payments made by a joint venture that they don’t directly operate.
This article is part of a series called "Caspian Cabals." I recommend taking a look at the other articles in the series as well:
Oil giants ignored red flags, enriched elite for Kazakhstan pipe dream
Uncovering Timur Kulibayev’s European property empire
‘It’s not drought - it’s looting’: the Spanish villages where people are forced to buy back their own drinking water
the Guardian • 23 Nov 2024 • ~4350 words
Spain is increasingly either parched or flooded – and one group is profiting from these extremes: the water-grabbing multinational companies forcing angry citizens to pay for it in bottles.
But while Garriga and other Catalans have been suffering water shortages in recent years, there’s one group of people that appears to be immune, and even profits from them: the multinational companies extracting millions of litres of water from the very same land. This isn’t just a Spanish issue – across the world, from Uruguay to Mexico, Canada to the UK, many have begun to question whether private corporations should be allowed to siphon off a vital public resource, then sell it back to citizens as bottled water.
The Kintsugi Strategy: Mending Political Fragmentation
More Wretch Than Sage • 23 Nov 2024 • ~4550 words
You can't unsmash a pot, but with Kintsugi you can repair it in a way that honours its history, golden welds transforming it into something beautiful while acknowledging the trauma of its fractures.
Kintsugi, (Lit. Golden Joinery) is a Japanese method of mending smashed ceramics and allows us to explore the metaphor further. In a world where striving for unattainable perfection stresses us, Kintsugi offers a different perspective of embracing imperfections. We can use it to consider not just how to avoid being derailed when the cup is smashed but how we can pick up the pieces and influence what happens next. An object cannot be separated from its history - including its breaks and repairs. By highlighting the cracks with gold, we can transform them into something beautiful and unique. The beauty in the breakdown lies in the acceptance and celebration of imperfections.
The Island Where Environmentalism Implodes
The New Yorker • 23 Nov 2024 • ~3250 words • Archive Link
New Caledonia is home to thousands of species found nowhere else—and to nickel that companies like Tesla desperately need.
In 2000, a team of scientists argued, in Nature, that defending New Caledonia and other biodiversity hot spots could be a “silver bullet” for environmental conservation. For years, the Earth has been in the midst of a mass extinction inflicted largely by humans; the paper’s authors, among others, argued that safeguarding the world’s most biodiverse places can slow the crisis down. But as nickel gains a reputation as a remedy for another crisis—climate change—two strands of environmentalism are coming into conflict. In New Caledonia, the quest to save species is at odds with the mission of protecting the climate. Mining companies extract the nickel from New Caledonia’s soil by razing the forests that evolved on it; the engines of the so-called green transition could leave Earth’s most verdant corner in tatters.
In every Nelson he visits, Jeff Truesdell finds the man he loved
Nelson Star • 21 Nov 2024 • ~2550 words
How do you live with the loss of a loved one? For Truesdell, it means visiting every Nelson in North America.
In November 2022, carrying about 10 life-sized photos of Nelson glued to cardboard, Jeff returned to the rural town with an idea. “I thought to myself, if Nelson can't be my literal muse in life, he can still be my muse in death.” Over the last two years, Jeff has visited seven Nelsons including Nelson, B.C., this September. At each destination he dutifully poses his Nelson at local landmarks, but Jeff has also begun speaking with local residents about their town as well as their own experiences with grief.
