The Hideaway & Headlights

Featured Articles

The Hideaway

Hazlitt • 4 Dec 2024 • ~6500 words

In an abandoned military barracks in rural Germany, Ben Green prepares for the end of the world.

I envied his conviction. Ben was certain, and certainty is hard to come by in conversations about our climate-changed future. The questions I was preoccupied with—How should we live in the face of an existential threat? What do we do with all this uncertainty?—were the same ones that haunted Ben. It’s just that Ben’s search for answers had led him to take a sharp turn off society’s beaten track. For him, there was only one path forward. But, I asked myself: How should we deal with doom? It seemed to me like there were three options: retreat from society to better strive for a negative individual carbon footprint, like Ben; stay and fight for system change, like the climate activists and scientists; or remain in society but retreat from responsibility—like those of us in between.

Asleep at the Wheel in the Headlight Brightness Wars

The Ringer • 3 Dec 2024 • ~5300 words • Archive Link

The crusade against bright headlights has picked up speed in recent years, in large part due to a couple of Reddit nerds. Could they know what’s best for the auto industry better than the auto industry itself?

Headlight brightness might almost seem like too random a subject for anyone to be as invested in as they are. But as it turns out, that’s kind of the point. “There’s a lot of issues that I care about,” Morgan said. “This is one that I think is niche enough that I can have an influence on.” Gatto’s motivation comes from the experience of watching his partner, Liz, struggle to recover from being hit by a cab while walking across the street. He sees headlights as “a realistic and tangible attack surface on the current trend toward antihuman design in our world, primarily guided by the auto industry.” But deep down, what motivates them is the same twitch in the eye that brought me to the subreddit in the first place. “I’m not a very rageful person,” Gatto said, “but for some reason, these lights brought it out of me. And I kind of realized that’s why I had to do something about it. Because no one’s going to come help us.”

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Conjuring the Lost Land Beneath the North Sea

Hakai Magazine • 5 Dec 2024 • ~4550 words

New research reveals that Doggerland—a sunken swath of Europe connecting Britain to the mainland—was more than a simple thoroughfare. It was home.

Doggerland is not well known outside the field of archaeology. And historically, when archaeologists have discussed it, they considered it a land bridge connecting two more interesting places, used by people to travel between Europe and modern-day Britain around 12,000 years ago. But innovative archaeology is reframing Doggerland as a territory in which human communities lived and thrived for millennia—a place that was known, that was home to generations—until a warming climate and rising seas forced people to leave and it was forgotten. As climate change accelerates in the modern era, the story of Doggerland becomes a story of our future.

Chasing the Freedom To Write in a Land of Masks

New Lines Magazine • 5 Dec 2024 • ~4400 words

A Syrian journalist records a journey through repression and fleeting moments of liberty in Latakia, Damascus and Beirut.

The Syrian model of surveillance and punishment closely mirrors the panopticon — the theoretical prison imagined by Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century and made famous by French philosopher Michel Foucault — where authority monitors everyone while remaining unobserved. In this system, guards move freely, unseen by the prisoners, who are acutely aware of being watched. But unlike that ideal, in Syria, the guards weren’t hidden. We saw them, touched them, even shared meals with them. They weren’t faceless; they were our brothers, neighbors and companions in life.

How environmentally responsible investors are unwittingly profiting from German mega coal plants

Voxeurop • 5 Dec 2024 • ~9500 words

While handing out billions in profits to misled responsible investors, asset managers greenwash environmental, health and social damage. A journey into the dark side of sustainable finance made in Europe, from murky meetings with financial brokers in the EU capital to Germany’s coal stronghold.

More than one third ($593 million) of all returns from RWE shares were secured by funds promoted with names evoking the “public good”, deliberately designed to attract investor attention. Among these profits, as much as $543 million was taken in by funds whose names include misleading terms – such as “ESG” “green”, “environment”, “climate”, “sustainable”, “impact”. The EU now wants to ban funds with these names from investing in companies that earn more than 1% of their revenue from the extraction, refining and distribution of coal.

She Was a Russian Socialite and Influencer. Cops Say She’s a Crypto Laundering Kingpin

WIRED • 4 Dec 2024 • ~3400 words • Archive Link

Western authorities say they’ve identified a network that found a new way to clean drug gangs’ dirty cash. WIRED gained exclusive access to the investigation.

As her social clout grew, she posted on social media about buying “huge volumes” of cryptocurrency, asking sellers to contact her. “It all depends on the mood,” Zhdanova told N Style when asked if she was a risk taker. “I'm probably a chameleon.” International authorities believe she was much more than that. At the end of 2023, the United States government hit Zhdanova with economic sanctions for her alleged role in a crypto money-laundering operation used by Russian oligarchs, ransomware gangs, and other criminals. Today, Western law enforcement officials have gone even further, claiming that Zhdanova has acted as the head of a sophisticated money-laundering network that swaps cash for cryptocurrency, the likes of which law enforcement has never seen.

The reluctant politician

New Statesman • 4 Dec 2024 • ~2800 words

A year ago, our writer stood for local election – and won by a landslide. But there was a catch: now he had to be a councillor.

There is no job description for an elected politician, which I seem to have become. You can be bone idle or hyperactive; spend hours sitting on obscure committees or spurn them. There is a code of conduct for councillors but no provision in there for expulsion. All you have to do is turn up for one official meeting every six months – you don’t even have to stay long – and avoid being banned from public office by law. As readers of “Rotten Boroughs” in Private Eye will know, that is a high bar. Otherwise, only death or the voters (come 2027) can boot me out.

Ethiopia’s Agony: ‘I Have Never Seen This Kind of Cruelty in My Life’

New York Times • 5 Dec 2024 • ~4850 words • Archive Link

A rare look inside a region still reckoning with the toll of war crimes, even as new conflicts roil the nation.

Ethiopia is a vast and diverse country, with dozens of distinct ethnic groups, many of which want some degree of autonomy. The current prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, was elected in 2018 on a wave of optimism following nearly three decades of repressive minority dominance by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front in the ruling coalition. (The Tigrayan ethnic group makes up only 6 percent of Ethiopia’s population.) Under its leadership, the country had economic growth, but the T.P.L.F. brutally suppressed political opposition and free speech, leading to festering resentment among Ethiopians from other ethnic groups. Abiy, who is Oromo, the country’s largest ethnic group, which has been historically underrepresented in national leadership, removed Tigrayans from their government posts and later referred to the T.P.L.F. as a “cancer” and as “weeds” that needed to be eradicated.