“The black-and-red bulk carrier AT 27 arrived in Guinea on Africa’s west coast last month. On it was a typical cargo: 25,000 tons of wheat destined for Mali, a neighboring country that’s facing severe food insecurity. The goods, though, were not part of any ordinary trade. The 170-meter-long ship docking in Conakry was one of several dispatching free grain promised by Russian President Vladimir Putin to six African countries. And the largesse comes with a different price. Along with security assistance, arms supplies and Russian-sponsored beauty pageants, the donations are part of the Kremlin’s efforts at closer ties with Africa while it wages war in Ukraine. What Russia gets in return is support for its ambitions and access to markets that can potentially soften some more of the impact of US and European sanctions. The Kremlin is steadily making inroads, taking advantage of instability in countries that used to rely on former colonial ties with Europe. During the Russia-Africa summit last year, Putin promised up to 50,000 tons of free grain each for Burkina Faso, Zimbabwe, Mali, Somalia, Central African Republic and Eritrea, some of which have since reinforced their ties with Moscow. The Russian Agriculture Ministry said this week that 200,000 tons of ‘humanitarian aid for Africa’ had been delivered. In the past months, Burkina Faso has seen the arrival of Russian troops and Moscow opening an embassy. Mali, which has avoided criticizing the war in Ukraine, is getting a Russian-sponsored gold refinery. Central African Republic is planning to host a Russian military base and has received weapons, security expertise and training. Eritrea voted against a UN General Assembly resolution demanding that Russia withdraw its troops from Ukraine. Russian aid doesn’t necessarily go to the countries that need it the most, but to those who are Russia’s ‘best allies,’ said Seidik Abba, who heads the CIRES think tank focusing on Africa’s Sahel region. ‘Take Eritrea, poor, isolated and determined to oppose Western imperialism,’ Abba said from Mauritania’s capital, Nouakchott. ‘Russia goes to these countries with strained relations with the West and it reinforces the political divides.’” (Aine Quinn and Katarina Hoije/Bloomberg via Yahoo)
“The right’s criticisms of IVF are not new. When George W. Bush vetoed a bill to expand stem-cell research in 2006, so-called ‘snowflake children,’ born from donated frozen embryos, attended the event. Recently, as Melissa Gira Grant observed at The New Republic, a piece in Christianity Today speculated that embryo adoption may be ‘the next pro-life frontier.’ On its own, embryo adoption may not seem like much of a threat: If someone donates their frozen embryos, why shouldn’t they be adopted by someone else? But when the practice is framed as a ‘pro-life frontier,’ amid rising threats to IVF and reproductive choice, it can seem sinister. Some proponents favor restrictions on IVF that would make the practice more costly and less successful in order to minimize the creation of excess embryos. Choice would vanish along with privacy. It’s already happening in Republican-led states, where lawmakers have forced their way into the doctor’s office.” (Sarah Jones/Intelligencer)
“The war in Ukraine has led to more than its share of arguments. In the run-up, the U.S. spent months warning skeptical allies that an invasion was imminent. This argument was mirrored inside Ukraine: Zaluzhny became convinced that the Russians were coming, and spent the weeks before the war urging a mobilization; Zelensky remained uncertain, and resisted the advice, worried that it would panic the population and give Russia an excuse to invade. There was widespread consensus that, in the event of an invasion, Russia would quickly win. General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told congressional leaders in early February of 2022 that the Russian military might take Kyiv in as little as seventy-two hours. When this did not happen, in part because Zaluzhny repositioned some of his forces without authorization and moved or camouflaged the country’s military hardware, a new round of arguments broke out. Was Russia a paper tiger, or did it simply fight in the stupidest possible way? Was China also overrated? Was the tank dead (again)? … ‘The Russian military adapted,’ Lee said. ‘They often require some painful lessons, but then they do adapt.” Lee agrees with some of the criticisms lobbed by both sides in the aftermath of the offensive. Strategically, he thinks the defense of Bakhmut was carried out for too long by Ukrainian forces, for political reasons; materially, he agrees that the West should have got its act together a little sooner to provide more advanced weaponry to the front. But, for him, these are secondary matters: “Most of it came down to the Russian side.’ A failure to appreciate this was a major problem in U.S. discussions of the war. Dara Massicot, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me that the emphasis on Russian incompetence in the first months of the war created unrealistic expectations and complacency.” (Keith Gessen/TNY)
“In (R. Bruce Hitchner’s) own work in the countryside around Kasserine, a center of Roman olive oil production south of Althiburos, not too far from the current Tunisian border with Algeria, he and others showed that the Romans often situated olive oil presses on the sites of longstanding local farms that had elaborate systems of terraces and irrigation. ‘The Roman period was built largely upon indigenous agricultural technology,’ Hitchner said. Another dramatic example of the interactions between Roman and the native peoples is a tomb inscription found in eastern Algeria. The Latin inscription of a local aristocrat Caius Julius Gaetulus describes him as a veteran of the Roman army, given citizenship under Julius Caesar or Augustus, who served as a priest of the imperial cult. On the other side of the tomb, however, an early Berber text tells a different story, calling him Keti, son of Maswalet, and emphasizing his long affiliation with a local people. ‘If you just read the Latin inscription, you would think this person had become thoroughly ‘Romanized’ and brought into the system. But the Romans always emphasized the idea of having dual identities,’ Hitchner said. ‘It wasn’t a problem.’” (Michael Blanding/Tufts Now)
“The U.S. is beginning to roll out striking instances of place-based industrial policy—a good amount of it focused on federal investment in heartland geographies still making a spotty transition from their ‘old’ industrial economy to a new tech-driven model. Most notable are the investments from the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Regional Innovation Engines program and the Commerce Department’s Regional Technology and Innovation Hubs (Tech Hubs) program—each funded as part of last year’s bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act and financed by the FY 2023 omnibus appropriations bill. Last August, the NSF named 16 regions as finalists for its Regional Innovation Engines competition. Eight of these regions were in the industrial Midwest, and 10 within a broader ‘heartland’ geography, with proposals ranging from breakthroughs in quantum computing and energy storage to smart water systems and sustainable manufacturing materials. And last week, the agency announced lead organizations in Fargo, N.D. and Chicago as two of the program’s winners. Likewise, the Commerce Department’s recent announcement of Tech Hub designations was similarly heartland-centric, with multiple proposals that aim to translate innovations into new businesses and jobs in emerging sectors of critical national interest.” ( John C. Austin and Mark Muro/Brookings)
“We move at last from Brookings to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Late last year it released a report from a multi-year effort by its ‘Commission on Reimagining Our Economy,’ or CORE. (I was on that commission.) Today in the New York Times one of the commission’s co-chairs, Kathy Cramer of the University of Wisconsin, and an Academy senior program officer, Jonathan Cohen, have an op-ed based on the report, about a particular aspect of ‘left-behind’ America. Cramer and Cohen write about one aspect of the CORE project4: a set of ‘listening sessions’ with, especially, working-class people around the country. I can’t stress enough how different these sessions were from standard ‘guy in a diner’ interviews. They never started with national politics, and only rarely ended up there. Instead they were about people’s personal stories: Their successes, their challenges, their ideals, their realities. They were in the spirit of Studs Terkel’s Working interviews, 50 years ago. The op-ed today stresses one aspect of economic reality left out of the currently buoyant statistics: how precarious many people feel their situation to be. Families are one flat tire, one workplace injury, one bad fall, one sick child away from ruin. This is the reality that novelists seize on to capture the economy of any era. Think of Dickens, think of Victor Hugo, think of Theodore Dreiser or Upton Sinclair. The report makes the consequences vivid, and suggests practical solutions.” (James Fallows)
“The digital media revolution is over. Its two leaders, Vice Media and BuzzFeed , are in a frenetic retreat, surrendering much of their online empires as they try to protect what remains of their core assets. Having once threatened to upend the entire industry and usher in a new era of news distribution and monetization, the former digital media darlings are now merely attempting to survive in any form they can. As they retreat, their large newsrooms once filled with rows of journalists are now shutting off the lights and closing their doors. BuzzFeed, already slimmed down after several waves of layoffs, announced this week that it will slash another 16% of its staff as it undergoes ‘planned strategic restructuring’ to reduce costs. And Vice Media said Thursday that it will lay off hundreds of staffers as it ceases publishing on its own website and pivots into a business that resembles a studio. ‘It's devastating to have a group of reporters who have made such a significant impact in the world have their jobs end in this way,’ one senior Vice Media staffer told me about the ugly state of affairs. All digital publishers have struggled in recent years as they navigate brutal industry headwinds, brought on by a softened advertising market now dominated by Big Tech titans and plummeting referral traffic. Not to mention, the looming threat of artificial intelligence, also brought on by Big Tech titans.” (Oliver Darcy/Reliable Sources)
“TALKING TO JENSEN Huang should come with a warning label. The Nvidia CEO is so invested in where AI is headed that, after nearly 90 minutes of spirited conversation, I came away convinced the future will be a neural net nirvana. I could see it all: a robot renaissance, medical godsends, self-driving cars, chatbots that remember. The buildings on the company’s Santa Clara campus weren’t helping. Wherever my eyes landed I saw triangles within triangles, the shape that helped make Nvidia its first fortunes … This is not the Nvidia of old, the supplier of Gen X video game graphics cards that made images come to life by efficiently rendering zillions of triangles. This is the Nvidia whose hardware has ushered in a world where we talk to computers, they talk back to us, and eventually, depending on which technologist you talk to, they overtake us … ‘This is not my normal crowd. Biologists and scientists, it’s such an angry crowd,’ Huang said into a microphone, eliciting laughter. ‘We use words like creation and improve and accelerate, and you use words like target and inhibit.’ He worked his way up to his pitch: ‘If you want to do your drug design, your drug discovery, in silicon, it is very likely that you’ll have to process an enormous amount of data. If you’re having a hard time with computation of artificial intelligence, you know, just send us an email.’ Huang has made a pattern of positioning Nvidia in front of every big tech trend.” (Lauren Goode/WIRED)
“‘I left America because I doubted my ability to survive the fury of the color problem here. (Sometimes I still do.),’ wrote Baldwin in his essay The Discovery of What It Means to be an American, in 1959. ‘I wanted to prevent myself from becoming merely a Negro; or, even, merely a Negro writer…Still, the breakthrough is important, and the point is that an American writer, in order to achieve it, very often has to leave this country.’ Abroad, Baldwin would continue churning out beloved work, including his 1962 novel Another Country, his essay collection The Fire Next Time in 1963, and the novel If Beale Street Could Talk in 1974. (Nearly half a century later, in 2018, Barry Jenkins would adapt If Beale Street Could Talk into a film by the same name, starring KiKi Layne, Stephan James, and an Oscar-winning Regina King.) By the time Capote’s imagined rendezvous with Baldwin occurred in the mid-1970s, Baldwin was already primarily living in Saint-Paul de Vence. Capote vs. The Swans writer Jon Robin Baitz knew as much, framing episode five as ‘a play, really—an imagined encounter,’ Baitz told Vanity Fair. ‘They knew each other, but there was no real love lost between them in actuality.’” (Chris Murphy/VF)
“Six months into the Russian occupation of the Ukrainian city of Kherson, in September 2022, the director of Liza Batsura’s college arrived at the dormitory where Batsura lived and told the students to pack up their things: They were going to Crimea. If the students refused, they would be put in the basement, Batsura said, speaking through a translator. The director gave no further explanation. The next evening, they were taken to a camp called ‘Friendship’ in Crimea, which was occupied by Russia in 2014. Although she couldn’t have known it at the time, Batsura—now 16 years old—was one of almost 20,000 children the Ukrainian government estimates have been deported or forcibly displaced to Russia. Only 388 have been returned. Initially, the prospect of a couple of weeks by the sea didn’t sound so bad. But Batsura quickly began to realize that that wouldn’t be the case. The food was terrible, the days were long, and the children were pressured to sing Russian songs, including the national anthem, which made her very uncomfortable. Foreign Policy is unable to independently verify Batsura’s account, but her experience closely tracks with the findings of investigations by the United Nations as well as researchers at Yale School of Public Health and other human rights groups who have documented a ‘systematic’ effort to relocate and reeducate thousands of Ukrainian children over the course of the war. She also recounted her story to Reuters as part of an extensive investigation into the deportations. Batsura was one of five Ukrainian teenagers who visited Washington last month with representatives of Save Ukraine, a Ukraine-based nonprofit that helps to rescue Ukrainian children from Russia and the territories it occupies. They stoically recounted the stories of their abductions again and again for journalists, members of Congress, and attendees at public events.” (Amy McKinnon/FP)