Whales & Creativity

Featured Articles

How Whales Found Peace in War

bioGraphic • 14 Jan 2025 • ~4250 words

A forgotten museum collection reveals how a pause in industrial whaling during World War II changed whales at the molecular level.

When Case used those isotopic timelines to put all of her hormone analyses together, she saw a signal that confused her. There was a huge spike in stress hormones around 1946 for all 10 whales she had studied, and she didn’t know why. Puzzled, Case brought the data to Hunt. From Ososky’s archival work, Hunt knew all about the pause—and resumption—of whaling in the Antarctic. When she saw the spike, she recognized another potential eureka moment. “I was like, ‘That’s the year the whaling started again,’” she says. “I thought, ‘It couldn’t be that simple.’”

Against the Factory Farming of Creativity

Asomoco • 14 Jan 2025 • ~3400 words

Why you should join the digital organic movement

This points to an emergent injustice. Generative AI is trained on the work of generations of artists and designers (which I’m sure includes the 20 years of AI-free material on DeviantArt), but then goes on to not only create career insecurity for those artists, but also to erode the sense of authenticity that previously surrounded their real work. Imagine being a graphic novel illustrator working for two years on a project, and then overhearing a reader say ‘oh these images are clearly AI-generated’. The tech is taking credit for work it hasn’t even done.

Recommended Articles

Why the West needs prairie dogs

High Country News • 1 Jan 2025 • ~4600 words

They’re among the region’s most despised species, but some tribes, researchers and landowners are racing to save them.

Though black-tailed prairie dogs have a long-standing reputation as pests, their ingenious tunnel systems and industrious prairie pruning make them one of the West’s primary ecosystem engineers. Some researchers call them the “chicken nuggets of the prairie”; if a prairie species eats meat, it almost certainly eats prairie dogs. Without prairie dogs, black-footed ferrets would never survive outside zoos and breeding facilities, and we would have far fewer mountain plovers, burrowing owls, swift foxes, and ferruginous hawks.

The City Was All I Had

Places Journal • 12 Jan 2025 • ~6800 words

Ambitious literature and public policy each seek to shape reality. Few places embody the power of artists and policymakers to arrange space and time more persuasively than Washington D.C.

I had this idea — likely derived from decades of imbibing stories about artists and how they managed to achieve success — that discomfort was a prerequisite to creating great art. I believed that the unease I had and would experience — the involuntary hardship of my childhood; the possibility of self-imposed adversity as an adult — was essential to sharpening my understanding of the world’s problems. Only by contending with these difficulties could I devise policies that would ease burdens for others.

The Pursuit of Death on Psychiatric Grounds

Undark Magazine • 15 Jan 2025 • ~2650 words

The Netherlands allows medically assisted euthanasia for extreme mental suffering. Some doctors question the guardrails.

To Touwen, euthanasia is still a valid option for patients with psychiatric disorders, even though it presents the hardest of ethical choices. It is sensitive, “due to the fact that psychiatric illness does something with your brain and your way of thinking, and possibly with your ability to decide and to weigh your interests,” she said. “There’s always, always this question: Did this person really want to die, or was the wish to die a symptom of his disease?”

The “Terrorists” in My Grandmother’s Neighborhood

Boston Review • 13 Jan 2025 • ~4200 words

Not only a tool to justify U.S. and Israeli intervention, the label is increasingly dividing Iranian society from within.

And while it’s true that the vast majority of Basijis support, at least to some extent, the Iranian government’s ideology, being part of the Basij can also open up contradictions. It’s an awkward position to be carrying out volunteer duties to provide for social needs while the Iranian state increasingly pulls back from provision of social welfare and represses the working-class protesters raising their voices against it. This creates generational rifts and tensions that frequently emerge in the group’s activities. The anthropologist Ahmad Moradi, for example, describes tensions at a factory purchased by the Basij during a government privatization drive. When its Basiji owners tried to cut costs by firing staff, workers went on strike. The local Basiji chapter ended up taking the side of striking workers.

Wayne Rooney and the Rising Tide of Sports ‘Content’

Columbia Journalism Review • 14 Jan 2025 • ~3000 words

What a scrapped documentary says about sports media, access, and gossip.

Argyle parted ways with Rooney, and the documentary was scrapped. Trailing in its wake are broader lessons about the limits of such access-driven projects—and reminders that, despite their ubiquity, they are still only one part of a diverse sports-media ecosystem, one that is increasingly dominated by content, but also rises and falls on the age-old appeal of celebrity, the unpredictable currents of social media, and, at least sometimes, the persistent ability of old-school journalism to set the agenda.

The Cruel Reality of Public Assistance Programs

The MIT Press Reader • 13 Jan 2025 • ~4900 words

I tried to overhaul a system meant to help people in need, but it was designed to fail.

Herein lies the problem not solely with summer meals but instead with all public assistance programs devised in the United States. They create a false division between parent and child; they separate the wealthy from the people who are low income, the “deserving” from the “undeserving.” Summer meals are for kids only, even if their parents are close by and hungry. Separating the wealthy from people with little money means that eligibility criteria is dependent on proving one’s income is below a certain percentage of the federal poverty line. This last part of eligibility is ostensibly to ensure that people who make a certain amount of money over a low threshold, or, in some states, if they had a felony, should not get support that they may desperately need. This ongoing separation of groups and families from each other becomes a way to target destitution.