The Inconsistency of American Feminism in the Muslim World - For women in the Middle East and beyond, the U.S. has been an unconvincing liberator. - link
How Biden Came to Own Trump’s Policy at the Border - Haitian asylum seekers were deported under Title 42, a despised Trump-era practice that the current Administration can’t seem to let go of. - link
The Facebook Whistle-Blower’s Testimony and the Tech Giant’s Very Bad Week - The company has weathered bad P.R. in the past. Will a Senate subcommittee hearing prove a bigger challenge? - link
What Responsibility Do Courts Bear for the Crisis at Rikers Island? - In the wake of a dozen deaths in New York City jails this year, prosecutors and judges are being asked to reckon with the consequences of setting bail. - link
The Nobel Peace Prize Acknowledges a Dangerous Era for Journalists - The co-winner, Dmitry Muratov, is the editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta, which has lost more journalists to murder than any other Russian news outlet. - link
From Vox
The Atlantic wants to hire newsletter writers — and it wants their subscribers, too -
Nicholas Thompson, seen speaking for Wired magazine, is now CEO for the Atlantic. | Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for WIRED
Heads up, Substack. But also Twitter. And Facebook. And the New York Times …
Here’s a media trend: Journalists setting up their own newsletters instead of working for big, established publishers.
Here’s a media trend working in the opposite direction: Big, established publishers with robust business models or big backers — or both — consolidating their power by hoovering up talent.
And here’s a story that can do both: The Atlantic is launching a newsletter offering that wants to bring writers under the Atlantic’s umbrella (and paywall) while letting them stay semi-independent.
The idea, per people familiar, is for the magazine to unveil a roster of newsletter writers — maybe a dozen or so — in the coming weeks. They’ll only be available to Atlantic subscribers. The New York Times has done something similar this year, rolling out subscriber-only letters from writers, including Kara Swisher and Jay Caspian Kang.
One big difference between the Atlantic’s plan and other newsletter distributors is that, in some cases, the Atlantic is recruiting writers who are already in the paid newsletter business. And it wants to convert those writers’ subscribers into Atlantic subscribers.
At least one of those writers, I’ve confirmed, is a writer who currently has set up shop at Substack, the company that kicked off the most recent newsletter boom by making it easy (theoretically) to make money self-publishing.
Here’s the rough outline of what the Atlantic wants to do, via people with knowledge:
The Atlantic isn’t hiring the writers as full-time employees, but will offer them some sort of base payment with the ability to make additional money if they hit certain subscriber goals. So it’s a much more reliable income source than a paid newsletter — even Casey Newton, a contributing writer for Vox Media’s The Verge, who has been running his own, successful, Substack for the last year, says he sees monthly churn of 3 to 4 percent.
If the writers are already selling paid subscriptions to their letters, the Atlantic wants to turn those subscriptions into Atlantic subscriptions. That is: If you’re currently paying Provocative But Thinky Takes Guy $5 a month for his work, now that same money will get you that letter, plus any other newsletters the Atlantic publishes, plus the Atlantic itself, which currently sells a digital-only subscription for $50 a year.
Newsletter writers who join the Atlantic’s program get to keep their existing list of subscribers. So if they decide to bail on the Atlantic, they could start up their business again.
How much oversight or assistance the letter writers will get from Atlantic editors and staff still sounds like a work in progress. But the thrust is that the writers are supposed to remain editorially independent from the publication; they won’t be edited by Atlantic editors. So what happens if the Atlantic ends up hiring someone the Atlantic decides is too racy/racist/problematic for the Atlantic? Good question!
An Atlantic rep declined to comment.
It’s easy to see the appeal of the program to the Atlantic, led by Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg and CEO Nick Thompson. The publication gets a new roster of voices and the possibility of instantly increasing its subscriber numbers. And while more subscribers are always nice, they would be particularly nice for the Atlantic right now, which thrived during the Trump years and the pandemic in particular but, like other publishers, has seen its website traffic slump as Trump and Covid-19 have stopped dominating the news cycle.
And since declining traffic makes it harder to convert new readers into subscribers, anything that brings in new eyeballs — let alone an injection of paying readers — would be welcome. (Here we should note that even though the Atlantic is owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, the billionaire wants the publication, which had a round of layoffs in the early months of the pandemic, to be self-sustaining.)
The pitch to writers is a little more nuanced, with some parts spelled out and other parts more tacit. The obvious one: Come work at an award-winning publication with wide reach, backed by a billionaire. Unstated: Maybe you thought you’d be crushing it once you started up your newsletter business. But maybe you’re not, and maybe you’d like a steady paycheck. Running a solo shop isn’t for everybody.
That said, some newsletter writers who’ve found receptive audiences — primarily via Substack — are making way more money than they ever did at established media companies.
Former New York Times opinion writers and editor Bari Weiss, for instance, tells me she now has 16,500 subscribers to her Substack, Common Sense. Which at $5 per subscriber, per month, means she could be bringing in $890,000 a year, after Substack takes its 10 percent fee. So don’t expect Weiss to show up in the Atlantic’s roster anytime soon.
I asked Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie what it means if competitors like the Atlantic poach some of his authors. He was gracious about it. “We root for writers even when they’re not Substackers, so we’re glad to see a trend toward more ownership for writers,” McKenzie said in a statement. “We’ve always advocated for writers to have full ownership of their content and audiences, and we applaud every step in this direction.”
McKenzie and his team have clearly contemplated some kind of this platform-jumping: Part of Substack’s pitch is that writers can easily walk away, taking all the content they published and an email list of all their subscribers. And Substack’s success has spurred new competitors, including Facebook and Twitter, both of which can easily outspend Substack if they want to — as I reported in June, Facebook dropped $6 million on the URL for Bulletin, its Substack clone.
But if you’re not a Substack superstar, maybe it doesn’t take a ton of money to woo you from the company: just a steady paycheck and the ability to write for a big group of people. Like people at some regular media companies do.
How the 3-point line is breaking basketball -
The game is at a turning point. Should the rules be changed?
The NBA introduced the 3-point line in 1979, and not much changed right away. Players weren’t used to shooting from far out, so for the first few years, they mostly didn’t. It wasn’t until the 1986–’87 season that the league as a whole scored more than 100 3-pointers in one season.
The arc of the line was shortened for a few years in the ’90s, but besides that, it hasn’t changed much — and that’s given players and coaches an opportunity to strategize around it. In 2014, statistic-obsessed sports executive Daryl Morey led what many people call the 3-point revolution. He used the D-League Rio Grande Valley Vipers as a testing ground to see whether volume shooting from the 3-point line netted better results than shooting 2s — and it worked.
The math states that scoring one-third of your shots from behind the 3-point line is as good as scoring half your shots from inside the line. In other words: Shooting as many 3s as possible will likely lead to a higher score.
The league took notice, and teams and players followed suit. Now, 3-point plays are so prevalent, fans have begun criticizing the league for being oversaturated with them. Critics worry the game is on the verge of becoming boring because everyone is trying to do the same thing. And that’s led some to wonder whether the NBA should move the 3-point line back.
James Dator is a senior staff writer at SB Nation, where he covers the 3-point line as well as lots of other sports, including baseball, soccer, and the NFL. Here’s an article he wrote on the 3-point line. (For more of Dator’s reporting, check out his author page.)
The Amazing Pace by Jason Schwartz (about how Daryl Morey transformed the Rio Grande Valley Vipers).
Climate scientists should pay more attention to fish poop. Really. -
A redlip parrotfish in the Maldives releasing some carbon-rich feces. | Getty Images
Fish poop transforms ocean chemistry and can store carbon for centuries.
Daniele Bianchi, a researcher at the University of California Los Angeles, has a message for climate scientists everywhere: Pay more attention to fish poop.
Fish and their feces play a hugely important and vastly underrated role in ocean chemistry and the carbon cycle that shapes Earth’s climate, according to a new study led by Bianchi and published in the journal Science Advances.
The story goes something like this: Tiny marine organisms called phytoplankton absorb carbon from the water and air around them. As the plankton are eaten by increasingly larger creatures, the carbon then travels up the food chain and into fish. Those fish then release a lot of it back into the ocean through their poop, much of which sinks to the seafloor and can store away carbon for centuries. The scientific term for carbon storage is sequestration.
“We think this is one of the most effective carbon-sequestration mechanisms in the ocean,” Bianchi told Vox. “It reaches the deep layers, where carbon is sequestered for hundreds or thousands of years.”
Carbon that’s stored in the deep sea is carbon that’s not making the oceans more acidic or trapping heat in the atmosphere. In other words, fish poop could be a bulwark against climate change.
The problem is that commercial fishing has sliced the global fish population to a fraction of its former level. As scientists figure out the importance of fish poop, they’re also recognizing a new danger of large- scale fishing. Beyond putting ecosystems at risk, the industry is messing with big nutrient cycles — and perhaps eating into an important carbon sink.
How much carbon do fish flush away?
About a quarter of the carbon dioxide spewing from cars, factories, and farms ends up in the ocean each year, making it one of the world’s largest carbon sinks. Much of that carbon is sucked up by phytoplankton, which is then eaten by other marine organisms, which are then eaten by fish. It’s Food Chain 101.
What Bianchi and his co-authors wanted to know was how much of that phytoplankton (and the carbon it contains) ends up in fish, and where it goes from there. The researchers focused their analysis on the ocean beforeindustrial fishing began in the 19th century, and during a period of “peak catch,” around the turn of the 20th century. Peak catch, Bianchi notes, led to over-fished oceans of the sort we recognize today.
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A phytoplankton bloom in Sagami Bay, Pacific Ocean.
The team had reliable data for commercial fish, like tuna and cod, which have been widely studied by the fishing industry. According to their analysis, these fish alone took up about 940 million metric tons of carbon per year, or 2 percent of all biomass produced by plankton, before preindustrial fishing. “Two percent might look like a small number, but it is, in fact, massive,” Bianchi said. For comparison, the UK emitted 326 million metric tons of carbon dioxide last year.
That 940 million number increases to 1.9 billion metric tons of carbon per year, or 4 percent of the total phytoplankton biomass, when the authors estimated the impact of all fish, not just ones harvested by the fishing industry.
Meanwhile, during the period of peak catch — when there were about half as many fish in the ocean as before the Industrial Revolution — fish populations digested a much smaller portion of the world’s carbon. The species that are fished commerciallytook up about 1 percent of the total phytoplankton biomass, Bianchi said.
That’s similar to what happens in the oceans today, he explained: Fish are taking in about half as much biomass and carbon as they once did, simply because there are far fewer of them.
Why fish poop is so important for the planet
When fish deposit carbon on the bottom of the ocean, there’s less left over to warm the planet.
That’s where poop comes in. Roughly a fifth of the biomass that fish consume “returns to the environment as fecal pellets,” the authors write. Because these pellets are relatively large and compact, compared to the excrement of smaller organisms, they sink quickly into the deep ocean. That’s key to long-term storage.
“When thinking about carbon sequestration, a really important metric is how deep the carbon gets in the ocean,” Sasha Kramer, a researcher at the University of California Santa Barbara who was not involved in the study, told Vox. “Deeper particles are sequestered on longer time scales.”
According to Bianchi, commercial fish sequester about 10 percent of the carbon in the deep ocean, and it stays locked up for 600 years or so — meaning, fish poop makes up a sizable cache of carbon.
Yuri Smityukvia Getty Images
A fisherman unloads Alaska pollock in Primorye Territory, Russia.
Ernesto Benavides/AFP via Getty Images
Peruvian anchoveta being processed at a fish meal factory in Lima, Peru.
Fish can also sequester carbon when they die and sink to the ocean floor, according to another recent study in Science Advances. A single fish is roughly 12.5 percent carbon, Gaël Mariani, the study’s lead author, told Vox. That carbon can get locked up in the deep ocean, assuming the fish carcasses stay there.
By contrast, when fish are harvested, the carbon they contain is partially emitted back into the atmosphere a few days or weeks later, according to the study. That means a big fishing operation can release a lot of carbon that might otherwise be stored. According to estimates from the paper, fishing fleets harvested about 320 million metric tons of large fish — such as shark and mackerel — between 1950 and 2014, which “prevented” about 22 million tons of carbon from being sequestered.
“We have to think about the interaction between fisheries management and carbon management,” said William Cheung, a professor at the University of British Columbia and a co-author of the sinking-fish study. “When we manage our fisheries and set targets, we should also think about how that will affect the capacity of the ocean to store carbon.”
The impact of fish and their feces goes beyond just carbon. For example, falling pellets provide food to some creatures in the deep sea, which use up oxygen as they chow down. That affects how much oxygen is available in these dim depths, the authors say, some of which are already oxygen-starved. Climate change stands to mess with the delicate balance of oxygen in the deep sea as well, Kramer said.
Getty Images
Excrement of a blue whale.
Fish are not the only marine creatures shaping ocean chemistry. One study from 2010, for example, suggests that the feces of baleen whales is rich in iron, which can seed blooms of phytoplankton in the Southern Ocean. That, in turn, helps draw down carbon.
If populations of baleen whales recover in the Southern Ocean, it might cause populations of some marine organisms in those waters to balloon, the authors write. “This food chain serves to keep more iron in the surface waters where it is useful to phytoplankton, so [it] sustains productivity,” Stephen Nicol, a researcher at the University of Tasmania and the study’s lead author, told Vox.
How commercial fishing impacts ocean chemistry and climate change
Just as humans have industrialized farming with large, AI-powered tractors and sprawling monocultures, we’ve also figured out how to harvest massive quantities of fish with large nets, trawls, and dredges. In one year, fishing boats can capture over 80 million tons of seafood. Today, more than half of the oceans are covered by industrial fishing runs, research has found, and as of 2017, a third of the world’s marine fish stocks were overexploited.
The problems of overfishing go beyond the damage to important species like sharks and rays andcharismatic, endangered species like the vaquita porpoise. Researchers like Bianchi are showing that they also extend to the climate.
By contrasting today’s depleted oceans with a theoretical “unfished” ocean, Bianchi and his co-authorsare showing what kinds of benefits a fully stocked ocean provides.
“The authors are hypothesizing that an ocean without fishing would potentially have combatted some of the impacts of anthropogenic climate change,” Kramer said. If the ocean wasn’t so overfished, the authors imply that “much more of that carbon would have been taken up,” she said.
That’s to say nothing of the carbon that bottom-trawling dredges up, or the greenhouse gases emitted by shipping vessels. In 2016, for example, industrial fishing vessels released about 159 million metric tons of CO2 emissions, one study estimates. That’s roughly equivalent to the emissions of the Netherlands last year.
Putting an end to industrial fishing wouldn’t be easy.Seafood provides protein to some 3 billion people worldwide and supports some 60 million jobs. And as marine biologistDaniel Pauly argued in response to Netflix’s controversial Seaspiracy documentary, giving up seafood altogether isn’t feasible either. “This is a position that only a small fraction of the population of wealthier countries will take,” he writes.
But there are plenty of ways the industry can improve, and gaining a better understanding of how it impacts the Earth’s climate should be part of that change. What Bianchi hopes others take away from the sinking-poop study is that fish are essential to the chemistry of our oceans. “We have altered their biomass,” he said, “and that has consequences.”
From The Hindu: Sports
2nd T20: Indian batters flop as Australia win by 4 wickets to seal women’s multi-format series - Batting first, India put up an inept performance, scoring only 118 for nine, largely due to a 37 off 26 balls by Pooja Vastrakar.
Indian Premier League 2021 Qualifier 1: Experienced Chennai holds edge over Delhi - Chennai Super Kings, over the years, have been in final eight times while Delhi Capitals one time.
Flower appointed Afghanistan’s consultant for T20 World Cup - Flower had played a pivotal role in guiding England to a victory at the T20 World Cup in 2010 during his time at the helm between 2009 and 2014
Had asked Maxwell if he wanted strike but he said ‘you can finish it off’: Bharat - Bharat smashed 78 not out off 52 balls as he lofted Avesh Khan for a straight six with five needed off the last delivery to chase down DC’s target of 165
U.S. Open champion Raducanu loses in straight sets to Sasnovich at Indian Wells - Raducanu lost 6-2, 6-4 in the second round, ending her 10-match winning streak that began in New York.
From The Hindu: National News
Maharashtra govt. must seek out freedom fighters and kin to give pension, not make them file applications: Bombay HC - The court also noted that there cannot be a rigid time limit for making such applications.
PM Modi to launch Indian Space Association on Monday - He will also interact with representatives of the space industry on this occasion.
Dalai Lama hails Nobel winning journalists for their courage - “Journalists have a key role to play in promoting human values and a sense of social and religious harmony,” he said, adding that he greatly admires the courage of both the journalists.
Police team loses its way in forest - The team was searching for a suspected ganja plantation in Walayar forests
Mandaviya urges States to increase vaccination pace, ensure adherence to COVID-19 protocols during festivities - India has so far administered over 94 crore Covid vaccine doses.
From BBC: Europe
Poland stokes fears of leaving EU in ‘Polexit’ - By challenging the core primacy of EU law, Poland fuels concerns it is heading towards the exit.
Havana syndrome: Berlin police probe cases at US embassy - Police say the investigation into the “alleged sonic weapon attack” began in August.
Russia labels reporters foreign agents after Nobel award - The announcement comes hours after independent editor Dmitry Muratov gets the Nobel Peace Prize.
Nobel Peace Prize: Journalists Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov share award - The high-profile Philippine and Russian editors face threats and intimidation for doing their jobs.
COP26: Pope will not travel to Glasgow for climate summit - Pope Francis previously said he planned to attend COP26 but it would “depend on how I feel” following health issues.
From Ars Technica
How to transfer save data from one Nintendo Switch to another - Bring all your games with you when you move into that shiny new Switch OLED. - link
Millionaire Twitch streamers react to their leaked earnings - “I’d never want to hide how much I make, so I’m down to make a meme out of it.” - link
Baking Impossible: The great nerdish bake-off for the engineering set - Netflix combines Home Ec and wood shop, delivers charming reality series. - link
Shareholders pressure Microsoft into expanding its right-to-repair efforts - The promises are vague, but we should know more by mid-2022. - link
Unvaccinated patients are getting kicked off organ transplant waitlists - Transplant recipients must take immune-suppressing drugs, raising risk for COVID. - link
From Jokes Subreddit
An 18 year old Italian girl gets pregnant… -
She tells her Mother that she has missed her period for two months. Very worried, the mother goes to the drugstore and buys a pregnancy kit. The test result shows that the girl is pregnant. Shouting, cursing, crying, the mother says, “Who was the pig that did this to you? I want to know!” The girl picks up the phone and makes a call.
Half an hour later, a Ferrari stops in front of their house. A mature and distinguished man with gray hair and impeccably dressed in an Armani suit steps out of the of the Ferrari and enters the house. He sits in the living room with the father, mother, and the girl and tells them: “Good morning, your daughter has informed me of the problem. I can’t marry her because of my personal family situation but I’ll take charge. I will pay all costs and provide for your daughter for the rest of her life.”
“Additionally, if a girl is born, I will bequeath a Ferrari, a beach house, two retail stores, a townhouse, a beachfront villa, and a $2,000,000 bank account. If a boy is born, my legacy will be a couple of factories and a $4,000,000 bank account. If twins, they will receive a factory and $2,000,000 each. However, if there is a miscarriage, what do you suggest I do?”
At this point, the father, who had remained silent, places a hand firmly on the man’s shoulder and tells him, “You fuck her again.”
[A classic joke, and it’s time for it to be enjoyed again]
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