Weekly Grounding #10
News, links, writing
Weekly Groundings are published every Friday to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I found during the past week. I hope they help ground your thinking in the midst of media overload. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.
Without further ado, here’s this week’s Weekly Grounding:
“The Strange Disappearance of the Anti-War Movement”
Ashok Swain, an international relations scholar in Sweden, provides some important commentary on the rapidly developing global geopolitical situation in this video interview for Unherd. Swain’s analysis of the Biden administration’s decision to send cluster bombs to Ukraine is particularly chilling: “Look at how the cluster bombs kill. Cluster kill mostly the civilians after the war is over…40 to 50 percent of them are children. Do you think anyone who wants real good [for] the Ukraine will want to put those kind of weapons in the Ukrainian land, which will kill the generations of Ukrainians for the time to come?” He also makes the important point that the groups one would expect to lead the anti-war movement have abandoned this effort for other causes.
“Workers Exposed to Toxic Lead Cables Wrestle With the Aftermath”
This investigative reporting at The Wall Street Journal documents the epidemic of chronic illness among telecom workers who were exposed to lead on the job: “Some of the workers have neurological disorders, kidney ailments, gastrointestinal issues and cardiovascular problems, illnesses that can be linked to lead exposure. There’s no way to determine what triggered specific ailments. Doctors say no amount of lead is safe.” AT&T dismisses these claims, calling them “anecdotal, non-evidence-based linkages to individuals’ health symptoms.” This kind of “evidence-based” rationale for dismissing “anecdotes” is precisely why I criticized the secular religion of “Evidence-Based Medicine” in my essay, “The Truth of the Anecdote,” here on Handful of Earth.
“Stanford President Will Resign After Report Found Flaws in His Research”
On a related topic, this New York Times reporting illustrates just how deep fraud and corruption goes in the upper echelons of biomedical research: “The Stanford panel’s 89-page report, based on more than 50 interviews and a review of more than 50,000 documents, concluded that members of Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s labs engaged in inappropriate manipulation of research data or deficient scientific practices, resulting in significant flaws in five papers that listed Dr. Tessier-Lavigne as the principal author.” Significantly, it took “PubPeer, an online crowdsourcing site for publishing and discussing scientific work,” to raise the alarm about Tessier-Lavigne’s data manipulation, manipulation which seems to have been entirely missed in the peer review process at top journals like Nature, Science, and Cell.
“How Jawaharlal Nehru Helped Build a New Crop of Leaders in Africa”
- discusses the fascinating history of African students in India for Scroll.in. He explains that one of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s “pet projects was the scheme to provide scholarships and fellowships to African students…Similar scholarships were available in the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union, but some young Africans – inspired by India’s non-violent freedom struggle and post-independence political stability – chose to study in the South Asian country.”
This short post by
at reflects on the impact of technological change on music production, recording, and distribution. George writes that “In black popular music, bands were centers of creativity, institutions of employment, and…reflected various branches of the African-American and Afro-Cuban innovation.” After “the synthesizer,” “the drum machine,” and “the sampler, “streaming” has been the final blow to the social institution of the band.
“The Dawn of the Bohemian Peasants”
Louis Elton offers a rich (if somewhat self-indulgent) sociological profile of what he calls the “Bohemian Peasants,” or “Bopeas,” over at Unherd. The explanation for the rise of this new counterculture within the global petite bourgeois is incisive: “The Bopeas are a new paradigm in culture and consumption. They are the descendants of other post-war consumer groups: the Hippies, the Yuppies, and the Bobos of Soho House. However, unlike their predecessors, who grew from the boom of generational upward mobility and urbanisation in the 80 years after the Second World War, the Bopeas are responding to something else: a crisis of what Peter Turchin calls ‘elite overproduction’ — and a diminishing need for everyone to be an urban creative.”
“Simone Weil’s Great Awakening”
At The New Statesman, Wolfram Eilenberger draws on the biography and thought of French philosopher and activist, Simone Weil, to critique the “self-blinding careerism and over-specialisation of academic philosophy.” Eilenberger singles out “the highly calculated promises of salvation presented with hideous self-certainty by the proponents of effective altruism, with their utilitarian moral offsets on a global scale.” He continues: “The true achievement of emancipation, Weil thought, lay in liberation not of the self but from the self. Reflective self-empowerment should make way for a pre-reflective alertness to the beauty and vulnerability of life. This leads to an active care for the world we share with other beings – it made no difference to her whether it was named ‘nature’ or ‘God.’”
What grounded your thinking this week? Feel free to share in the comments.