Weekend Reading
Long reads for a Springish weekend
“According to a Live Science report, Elise Kerdoncuff of the University of California, Berkeley, and her colleagues analyzed more than 2,700 genomes of modern Indians who live in 17 Indian states and represent speakers of the country’s major languages and tribal and caste groups. The study suggests that the population has three main ancestral groups, including Neolithic farmers from the area of Sarazm in what is now northwestern Tajikistan; pastoralists from the Eurasian steppe; and hunter-gatherers from South Asia. The study also determined that an influx of people to India from Africa some 50,000 years ago brought genetic variation to these three ancestral groups. A separate analysis of the genomes determined that like most non-Africans, Indians inherited between one and two percent of their DNA from Neanderthals and Denisovans. The researchers noted that almost 90 percent of all known Neanderthal genes found in modern humans today were detected in the genomes studied. It is not known if Neanderthals and Denisovans lived in the area, or if their genes were carried to India by modern humans after encounters with Neanderthals and Denisovans in Eurasia.” (Jessica E. Saraceni/Archaeology)
“Two years after the Federal Reserve began hiking interest rates to tame prices, delinquency rates on credit cards and auto loans are the highest in more than a decade. For the first time on record, interest payments on those and other non-mortgage debts are as big a financial burden for US households as mortgage interest payments. The figures suggest a difficult reality for the millions of consumers who are the engine of the US economy: The era of high borrowing costs — however necessary to slow price increases — has a sting of its own that many families may feel for years to come, especially the ones that haven’t locked in cheap home loans. And the Fed, which meets next week for a policy decision, doesn’t appear poised to cut rates until later in 2024. As monthly debt payments take up more of workers’ paychecks, those consumers are more exposed to potential economic contractions. And the cost of money affects people’s perception of their own prosperity: A February paper from IMF and Harvard University researchers posits that the recent high cost of borrowing — which isn’t captured in inflation figures — is key to understanding why consumer sentiment remains lackluster even as inflation has moderated and businesses are hiring at a healthy pace. That theory suggests the debt burden could be a drag on President Joe Biden’s reelection bid, with the economy consistently registering as a top concern at the ballot box.” (Yahoo! Finance via Bloomberg)
“On Wednesday the House passed a bill to require ByteDance, the Chinese social-media giant that owns TikTok, to either sell the app or stop operating it in the US. (The Washington Post’s Aaron Gregg and Cristiano Lima-Strong explain succinctly what the bill would do and what might come next. The legislation would ban distribution within the US of any application ‘controlled’ by a ‘foreign adversary’—in this case, China.) The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board calls the bill a tough message to China, noting that ‘TikTok hoovers up personal data that Beijing could use for political-influence campaigns.’ The Post’s editorial board disagrees, arguing that ‘threatening a one-off ban against a tech firm, arbitrarily overriding the government’s existing process for assessing foreign corporate threats, is the wrong way’ to address privacy concerns and force TikTok to separate from ByteDance, if that’s the end goal. Last spring, Fareed argued against banning TikTok because of its Chinese ownership but for regulating the app because of ‘just how scarily addictive it is,’ particularly for young people, plus the ominous privacy-related issue of collecting data on teens. As for where this is heading, The Economist notes a murky future for the just-passed House bill. Former US President Donald Trump, who attempted to enact a similar policy through an executive order as president, now opposes it, and Republican senators could follow his lead, the magazine notes.” (Fareed’s Global Briefing)
“Saudi Arabia sees vast riches beyond oil within its reach. The kingdom’s broad-ranging ambition, a top mining official told Semafor, is to extract the more than $2.5 trillion in metals in its soil, invest in minerals extraction around the world, and capture as much of the minerals value chain as possible. ‘Saudi Arabia is being transformed. Through this transformation we want to be an economic powerhouse,’ Khalid al-Mudaifer, the vice minister for mining, said. “To be an industrial [power], we need minerals. To build projects, we need minerals. Therefore, mining of Saudi Arabia [is] the first step, bringing minerals from outside is the second step, third step is to build Saudi Arabia as a hub.’ As part of its ‘Vision 2030’ effort to refashion and diversify its economy, the kingdom is adding mining as a ‘pillar’ of its industrial foundation — joining the mainstays of oil, gas, and petrochemicals — and creating a new economic backstop against the eventual decline of fossil fuels.” (Prachant Rao/semafor)
“Republicans already had a woman problem with their nominee, the proudest p*ssy grabber in the land. They have been losing elections bigly ever since the Supreme Court’s decision in 2022. It’s quite likely that - despite the months of horse-race polling and pearl-clutching ahead - pro-choice voters will stamp out Trumpism and MAGA in November. Dobbs was payback to the tiny but motivated Republican zygote wing, but it is a disaster electorally. The GOP appears to believe they can defy the numbers by trotting out peppy, younger female MAGA shills - so far to ridiculous effect. In the last week alone, cheerleader-ish Alabama Sen. Katie Britt was caught in a brazen lie about a border trafficking victim, South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace, dolled up by the ABC ‘This Week’ team with an extra glop of lip gloss, played the rape victim card to dodge questions about her support for serial, adjudicated sex abuser Trump. To round out the cast, in tinpot dictator/Godfather style, The Don’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, just swanned in to take charge of the RNC, and is expected to turn it into a piggy bank for Trump family legal fees. These women are mad, bad … dangerous to know. But the true avatar of the GOP female is Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.” (Nina Burleigh/American Freakshow)
“Since its founding in 2015, the hardline House Freedom Caucus has been a polarizing presence, using confrontational and obstructionist tactics to push Congress, and the Republican Party, to the right on a variety of issues. In the process, the group ousted a Republican House speaker and became a far-right conservative power center of its own. But it’s come at considerable cost to the House as a legislative body, and created an even more factionalized and dysfunctional chamber. Now, those same issues are surfacing in statehouses across the nation where in recent years the Freedom Caucus has exported its model. Many of the 11 legislatures with state-based Freedom Caucuses have seen their Republican majorities splinter and descend into bitter conflict with the application of the Congress-honed tactics. ‘It’s the same kind of battles that are going on with the Freedom Caucus in Washington, D.C.,’ said South Carolina state Rep. Jay Kilmartin, who has been a member of the South Carolina Freedom Caucus since 2022. ‘We ran because we got frustrated with what we were getting out of our state Republican Party for so long.’” (Peder Schaefer/Politico)
“Widespread outages were reported on Thursday in countries including South Africa, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Benin, Ghana and Burkina Faso. Since then, services have largely been restored in Liberia and South Africa. The cause of the cable failures was not immediately clear, to the frustration of millions of customers around the continent. ‘There seems to be a pattern in the timing of the disruptions, impacting from the north to the south of Africa,’ said Cloudflare Radar, which provides information on internet connections. Sometimes undersea cables can get cut, even by debris, a retired expert told the BBC. He added: ‘You can also have undersea earth slides - sections of seabed can become unstable, sending huge amounts of mud down a canyon or gulley.’ ‘Where cables come ashore and are buried underground, they could be prone to accidental or intentional damage.’ Whatever the cause, it has resulted in major difficulties for people who rely on the internet for a living.” (Natasha Booty & Moses Kollie Garzeawu/BBC)
“AU.K. cryptocurrency firm transferred digital assets worth more than $4.2 million to a crypto wallet belonging to a member of an alleged Russian arms-dealing network who was later sanctioned by the United States, ICIJ and the Guardian can reveal. Details of the transactions involving the prominent cryptocurrency firm Copper Technologies raise questions about whether United Kingdom laws governing the cryptocurrency industry have adapted quickly enough to keep pace with a rapidly-evolving sector that has come under increasing scrutiny over the level of anonymity it can provide. Last year, the Guardian reported that Copper Technologies was involved in a share sale worth more than $19 million that benefited a U.S.-sanctioned Russian banker. Now, an analysis of cryptocurrency transactions by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and the Guardian highlights a connection between Copper and Jonatan Zimenkov, an Israeli-born Russian national. Zimenkov, 29, was sanctioned by the U.S. in February 2023 for allegedly assisting the Russian military with the invasion of Ukraine, as part of the ‘Zimenkov network,’ an arms-dealing and sanctions evasion network headed by his father, Igor Zimenkov. Records show that Copper transferred millions of dollars worth of digital currency in May 2021 to a wallet that has since been identified as belonging to Zimenkov.” (Matei Rosca and Rob Davies/ICIJ)
“This past week CARICOM, the Caribbean trade group, announced a new ‘consensus’ plan to deliver Haiti from the hands of roving gangs and paramilitary groups and into the tender care of democracy and free and fair elections. In part because of escalating gang violence in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, the meeting to put this plan into action was held in Kingston, Jamaica, after talks that included the leaders of the CARICOM states; numerous Haitian stakeholders; US Secretary of State Antony Blinken; the State Department’s head of Western Hemisphere affairs, Brian Nichols; the Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and other foreign diplomats. As part of the plan, a seven-member transitional presidential council, representing seven Haitian stakeholder groups, will be charged with naming a new interim prime minister. Shortly after the CARICOM announcement, Haiti’s much reviled de facto Prime Minister Ariel Henry, subject of mass demonstrations in Haiti this past year calling for his ouster, promised to step aside as soon as the plan was instituted and an interim prime minister had been named. Henry spoke in solemn presidential tones from an undisclosed location in Puerto Rico, where he had made a surprise landing on March 5 after his plane, a private jet, failed find a welcoming gate anywhere on the island Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic. (Henry was returning home from Kenya, where he’d worked on a long-standing but troubled UN/US plan for a 1000-officer Kenyan police force to help Haiti reestablish order.) As one Haitian friend said to me, ‘How do you step aside when you’re already in Puerto Rico?’” (Amy Willentz/The Nation)
“New York, New York: the city that never quite got over its ’80s era, its Club 57 or Studio 54, its graffitied subway system, Warhol or his films, St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, Grace Jones clad only in Keith Haring’s squiggles; a cast of characters sometimes mononymous, always prolific, and too often short-lived. In Radiant (Harper)—one of several books this spring that take on the glam and tumult of the decade—Brad Gooch traces Haring’s defiant, definitive lines. There’s his entering a 15-foot-by-3-inch fantasia into his Kutztown, Pennsylvania, junior high school student art exhibit (parsing Haring’s youth feels relevant; the image of the radiant baby would become his signature) through his 1978 move to NYC to attend the School of Visual Arts and his finding community amid a band of Lost Boys. In Jennifer Clement’s forthcoming The Promised Party (Canongate), the author of the acclaimed Widow Basquiat describes that downtown Manhattan cohort: ‘All of us were some sort of runaway.’ Of Haring, she writes, ‘Keith had tenderness in him, the tenderness that one finds in jails and hospitals.’ Meanwhile, Cynthia Carr’s Candy Darling (FSG), the first biography of the glamorous queer icon, serves as a temporal prequel to the scene—Darling starred in the Andy Warhol–produced Women in Revolt (1971) and Tennessee Williams’s play Small Craft Warnings (1972) long before Haring enrolled at SVA.” (Arimeta Diop/VF)
“When Mehdi Hasan had his show canceled by MSNBC, the network tried to keep the pugnacious British-American broadcaster on as an analyst and guest host. Hasan declined, exiting the network he worked at for four years and launching his own digital media company — a risky move at a time when the digital media industry is in a tailspin. Yet Hasan’s company, Zeteo, is off to an auspicious start. After raising $4 million from family and friends, Hasan launched the outlet on Substack. Zeteo now boasts more than 100,000 subscribers … By the end of his time at MSNBC, relations between the network and Hasan, an outspoken critic of Israel, were strained. Soon after Oct. 7, Semafor reported that Hasan and two other Muslim hosts at MSNBC, Ali Velshi and Ayman Mohyeldin, had been taken out of their hosting chairs. By December, Hasan’s show was canceled. He chose to leave the network because he wanted to play a bigger role in the media landscape, particularly in light of the upcoming election. He promises that Zeteo will speak more bluntly about issues like war and politics than the traditional media environment where he’s worked throughout his whole career.” (Mediaite)
“Last summer, Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs was celebrated at the Apollo Theater for his work in education. The rapper was presented with an award by students from Capital Preparatory Harlem, the charter school he co-founded in 2016, the same year Forbes named him the richest man in hip-hop. The school is advertised as a posh college-prep academy with high-end facilities and a board that has included a number of Black public figures, including a host of The View, one of Dapper Dan’s daughters, and a popular self-help author and TV personality. It’s part of a network of charter schools that has attracted high-profile donors like Andreessen Horowitz and the Koch Foundation, in addition to Combs, who pledged $1 million in 2018. At the Apollo, three graduates took to the stage, eager to meet the Harlem-born rapper, their school’s unofficial mascot … Five months later, Capital Prep would sever ties with Combs after his former girlfriend filed a lawsuit accusing him of abuse, rape, and sex trafficking. (Combs settled with her a day later, though three additional women and one man subsequently filed suits against him with similar claims; he denies all the allegations.) But the school’s relationship with Combs may be the least of its problems. Capital Prep is located in East Harlem, one of New York City’s poorest neighborhoods. It serves nearly 500 students in grades six through 12, the majority of whom are Black and low income. In addition to ‘a rigorous college preparatory curriculum’ designed to produce ‘engaged citizens for social justice,’ Capital Prep advertises a variety of extracurriculars, ample faculty support, and a 100 percent college acceptance rate for graduates. For parents, the promise of an institution backed by Combs and Steve Perry — a charter-school founder whose reputation was built on uplifting poor kids of color — is elite education. But parents enticed by Capital Prep are calling it a disaster.” (Sangeeta Singh-Kurtz/NYMag)
“(Speaker of the House) Mike Johnson pulled off this upset with the same paradoxical style he’d displayed in those furtive early discussions. Outwardly deferential but privately ambitious, he is a professed Trump true believer whose courteous, churchy persona is virtually the opposite of the insult-spewing, porn-star-paying former President’s. While Johnson was quietly lining up backers like (Representative Jodey Arrington, of Texas) and (Representative Mike Garcia), he publicly supported two more senior mentors, Jim Jordan and Steve Scalise—each competing against the other, and each predictably unable to overcome pockets of enmity within the conference. By waiting to reveal his own bid, Johnson retained the support of both mentors until he was ready to advance himself. Years of obliging service to Trump at his weakest moments—voicing steadfast support for him during his two impeachments, offering legal arguments that bolstered his stubborn denial of his 2020 defeat—also paid off for Johnson. On October 24th, after he first added his name to the Republican secret ballot for Speaker nominee, he came in second out of nine, behind Tom Emmer, of Minnesota, the Republican Whip. Emmer had voted to certify Trump’s 2020 electoral loss. Trump savaged him on social media as a ‘globalist’ whose selection would be ‘a tragic mistake.’ Emmer withdrew within hours, and the next day Trump came out, in capital letters, for Johnson. ‘My strong SUGGESTION is to go with the leading candidate, Mike Johnson, & GET IT DONE, FAST!,’ Trump posted, wrapping up the race. In January, Johnson, seated on a couch in the Speaker’s office—his back to his new private balcony, which overlooks the Washington Monument—told me he never doubted that he could win the job if he wanted it. ‘I always knew in the back of my mind I could do it,’ he said. Concealing any ambition for the Speakership until the final hour may have served him well, he acknowledged.” (David D. Kirkpatrick/TNY)
“The failure of Hollywood studios to strike a timely deal with writers and actors last summer meant the traditional fall TV season was canceled in 2023. But while all of the Big Four broadcasters experienced some Nielsen pain as a result, none took a bigger hit than CBS. Its strength as TV’s most-watched network for the past 15 years was built on the back of comedies and dramas, and starved of those scripted staples, its ratings quickly fell off a cliff. It was predictable, but also painful: Fall viewership plunged a massive 31 percent vs. the previous year. George Cheeks, the president and CEO of CBS and chief content officer for news and sports at Paramount+, does not attempt to sugarcoat his network’s fourth-quarter struggle … In theory, CBS could have started sprinkling its primetime lineup with a smattering of originals as early as January, stopping the bleeding immediately. It’s the approach ABC has taken, with its Thursday dramas only just now returning this week, well after comedies such as Abbott Elementary relaunched. But Cheeks and his heads of programming and scheduling instead opted to hold off and use some big tentpole specials — the Golden Globes, post-season football, the Grammys, and most importantly, the Super Bowl — to market the premieres of almost all the network’s scripted series as one big event rolling out week of Feb. 12.” (Josef Adalian/Vulture)