Subjunctive & Gershkovich

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Death in Grammar

The Dial • 12 Nov 2024 • ~3650 words

How a Spanish grammatical mood, the subjunctive, can express uncertainty, for instance about whether one wants to live.

I was (and still am) fascinated by the clear right-or-wrongness of Spanish grammar, and yet how that grammar can also express doubt, uncertainty, contradiction and even irony. And as in grammar, so in poetry. A poem is similarly made of constituent parts: It adds up to itself, to a feeling, to a state, to a being. At the same time, poetry reflects the very uncertainty, the enigma, the unbearable all-ness or unbearable nothing-ness of existence.

The Wall Street Journal’s Campaign to Free Evan Gershkovich

Columbia Journalism Review • 13 Nov 2024 • ~6650 words

What newsrooms need to know, from an insider who helped lead the effort.

What we knew from our corporate security team suggested that he might match the description, just emerging in some Russian reports, of a man hauled out of a steakhouse by government agents in Yekaterinburg, an industrial hub more than a thousand miles from Moscow where Gershkovich was reporting on the state of Russia’s wartime economy. My next ninety minutes was a flurry of calls: State Department, National Security Council, Pentagon. The message: we believe our colleague has been seized by Russia’s security services, and we would like to speak to officials at the highest level tonight to convey the seriousness of the situation and ask for their assistance in seeking his return. Or, more simply put: this looks really bad and we want your help.

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The Making Of A New American Epidemic

NOEMA • 12 Nov 2024 • ~4500 words

Unchecked development is encroaching into parched desert landscapes and kicking up more than just a little dust — it’s raising the risk of a mysterious new infection.

. . . a rapidly warming climate has increased the intensity of Utah’s droughts and the dust storms that accompany them. Dust from construction sites blows into homes, covering counters and floors; some residents develop mysterious coughs and pneumonia. Here, like in much of the arid American West, Valley fever is on the rise. The fungal infection, which is caused by inhaling spores found in soil and dust, is little discussed and often misdiagnosed, but it is a frequent cause of pneumonia and occasionally results in infection that spreads beyond the lungs, and sometimes, into the brain. In some cases, Valley fever can be deadly. Construction workers and farm workers whose work brings them close to dust, are on the front lines of this epidemic, with little means to protect themselves. Yet we have only a vague understanding of where the fungus is now, much less how the rapid transformation of southwestern landscapes by both development and climate change will change who is at risk of infection. Unfamiliar diseases are appearing in new places, forcing patients to chase diagnoses and proper medical care.