Daily-Dose

Contents

• From New Yorker
• From Vox
• From The Hindu: Sports
• From The Hindu: National News
• From BBC: Europe
• From Ars Technica
• From Jokes Subreddit

From New Yorker

• The Titan Submersible Implosion Was “an Accident Waiting to Happen” - Interviews and e-mails with expedition leaders and employees reveal how OceanGate ignored desperate warnings from inside and outside the company. “It’s a lemon,” one wrote. - link

• Could Putin Lose Power? - Regime stability is a funny thing. One day it’s there; the next day, poof—it’s gone. - link

• Why the Champions of Affirmative Action Had to Leave Asian Americans Behind - The original concept in pursuit of diversity was vital and righteous. The way it was practiced was hard to defend. - link

• Beyoncé on Tour, and Russia’s No-Good, Very Failed Coup - Masha Gessen and Joshua Yaffa on the aftermath of the “coup” by the Wagner Group leader, and what lies ahead for Vladimir Putin. Plus, Carrie Battan on the summer’s hottest ticket. - link

• How Much Hotter Can Texas Get? - The state endures high temperatures, but not usually so early in the summer, or for so long. Something is different. - link

From Vox

• 2023’s best books (so far) -

  

  From shipwrecks to hijackings to sex comedies, these are the best books of the first half of 2023.

  The year is half over now. We’ve seen the swell of austere literary fiction in February, the first crop of lazy beach novels for summer. There have been big buzzy memoirs published, and cookbooks, and essays. Now, before the overwhelming surge of fall prestige book season, let’s stop and take stock of all the good books the year has brought us so far.

  As Vox’s book critic, I take a great bite out of all the books that come out every year. In the first half of the year, these have been my favorites: Brainy sex comedies. Environmentalist cookbooks. Shipwrecks and con artists and monsters and yes, why not have another look at that big buzzy memoir. Here are the 11 best books I’ve read in the first half of 2023.

  Fiction

  Scribner Book Company

  Big Swiss by Jen Beagin

  Big Swiss is the wittiest of this year’s novels, and the quirkiest, too. A breakout hit from Jen Beagin that inspired a bidding war for its film rights, Big Swiss concerns Greta, a medical transcriptionist. Greta is obsessed with a woman whose therapy sessions she transcribes, a mystery blonde she has dubbed Big Swiss.

  Big Swiss is a married gynecologist talking to a therapist because she’s never had an orgasm. She also survived a brutal assault from a man who’s about to get out of prison, but she’s not there to talk about that: “I’m not one of those trauma people.”

  Greta, transfixed, tracks Big Swiss down at the dog park. “You must get this a lot,” Greta says, “but would you mind taking a quick look at this thing on my labia?”

  Big Swiss is a romp of a book, a study of trauma that disdains the trauma plot, a sex comedy with deep layers. Beagin’s sentences are so dryly funny they’re ready to snap like crackers, but she never loses sight of the humanity of her odd, lovable characters. Also, there are miniature donkeys.

  Read if you dream of: the first season of Killing Eve but with more dogs, less scatological Ottessa Moshfegh, more warm-hearted Elif Batuman.

  The Guest by Emma Cline

  My teeth gnashed unceasingly while I read The Guest, Emma Cline’s delicious follow-up to her 2016 novel The Girls. I was too tense to do anything but let them.

  The Guest is set in the rarified world of the Hamptons, where everything is beautiful or at the very least expensive, and none of it quite belongs to Alex, the titular guest. Alex is a sex worker whose quasi-client, quasi-boyfriend, Simon, has thrown her out of his lavish Hamptons beach house. The problem is, Simon is currently Alex’s only client; at 22, she’s finding the rest of her regulars have started to dry up. She’s in debt, and she needs him. So she decides to make her own way in the Hamptons for a week and then see if Simon softens up toward her. But in the gated communities Simon frequents, it’s not that easy to be a guest.

  Random House

  Alex’s superpower is her ability to make herself fit in nearly anywhere. “That was the point of Alex,” Cline writes, “to offer up no friction whatsoever.” Marshaling her status as a well-dressed and pretty young white woman, she schemes her way into country clubs and house parties — until, inevitably, she pushes her luck too far and gets kicked out.

  With flat, understated sentences, Cline keeps us crammed and immobile in the vacant confines of Alex’s mind. In chapter after chapter, Alex first systematically empties herself of any opinions or thoughts of her own in order to become the kind of woman her marks require of her, and then impulsively lashes out and creates friction. Alex is a creature of instinct who never seems to quite understand what she’s doing, but in Cline’s precise, elegant prose, we can see how heavily Alex bears the burden of being a woman with no needs of her own.

  Read accompanied by: a Negroni, unsweetened black tea, very dark chocolate.

  Vintage Contemporaries by Dan Kois

  Vintage Contemporaries is a thoroughly charming and warm-hearted novel by Slate book critic Dan Kois. It concerns two best friends, both living in the bohemian East Village of 1991, both named Emily. One of them is brash and bold and wants to direct plays; the other is a more conventional follower who wants to write books. Kois follows them over the course of 14 years, tracking their friendship and dreams as they evolve along with New York itself.

  I keep wanting to describe Vintage Contemporaries as a love letter and then changing my mind as to whom the love letter is for. For the great domestic novelist Laurie Colwin, whose influence looms large over one Emily’s career. For the East Village of the early 1990s, when artists squatted in abandoned lofts. For editing and dramaturgy as creative artforms in their own rights. For old friends who know us longer than anyone. For all of the above, and more.

  Read if you like: Laurie Colwin, semi-ironic viewings of Beaches, Veselka pierogies.

  White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link

  Have you ever spent a long afternoon in an art museum and walked out afterward to find that the world looks different than it did when you walked in; different, and more beautiful? As though the museum has trained your eye to find beauty more efficiently. Reading Kelly Link is like that: When you close the book, the world you return to is stranger and, yes, more beautiful than the one you left behind.

  White Cat, Black Dog is a collection of slantwise fairy tales reimagined as short stories. Link gives you “Hansel and Gretel” with vampires and spaceships; “Tam Lin” at an English estate house; “East of the Sun, West of the Moon” on the Upper West Side. Her retellings are thoroughly modern, but she’s able to preserve the strange, shivery emotional core of the originals so that all of them take place in a world regimented by rules that no one will ever quite explain to you.

  Read alongside: Sondheim’s Into the Woods, Robin McKinley’s Rose Daughter, Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin.

  Nonfiction

  Scribner Book Company

  The Everlasting Meal Cookbook: Leftovers A-Z by Tamar Adler

  In 2012, Tamar Adler published An Everlasting Meal, a sort of updated take on the M.F.K. Fisher classic How to Cook a Wolf that focused on solving the environmental problem of food waste by using up all your waste ingredients. The end of every meal, Adler argued in her mannered-in-a-good-way prose, should form the beginning of the next: last night’s roast chicken and vegetables should become the bones and the peels that make today’s stock; the stock can enrich the grain bowl that tomorrow will become fried rice.

  This year, Adler has published The Everlasting Meal Cookbook, the how-to guide that fleshes out the theory of her last book. It takes the form of a vast index of ingredients you might have left over from some other purpose, and all the ways Adler suggests you might salvage them for a new use. You already know that overripe bananas can become banana bread, but Adler is here to tell you that green bananas can become curry or tostones, and banana peels can be dry-fried into thoran.

  Adler’s prose is elegant and delighted at the same time, delighted with food and thrift and her own ingenuity. She can tell you what to do with almost anything, but most compelling are her suggestions for junk food: to simmer leftover french fries with cream and garlic and mash them; to put your leftover chips and onion dip into an omelet. This is a book that fights for environmentalism with hedonism.

  Read if you: keep meaning to figure out how to compost, are a fan of M.F.K. Fisher, always optimistically buy too many greens.

  All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me by Patrick Bringley

  After Patrick Bringley lost his older brother in 2008, he decided to take the most straightforward job he could think of in the most beautiful place he knew. He left his job at the New Yorker’s events department and spent the next 10 years as a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  All the Beauty in the World is Bringley’s memoir of his time at the Met. It chronicles the secrets he learned there, how it taught him to look at art, and how the beauty of art helped to heal his broken heart. It’s a book for everyone who has ever wanted, like Claudia and Jamie Kincaid, to run away to your favorite museum and never look back.

  Read while: choosing the museum where you would most like to Frankenweiler.

  Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer

  Since the explosive just-post-Weinstein days of 2017, much ink has been spilled over the problem of separating art from artist. Little of it, though, has been particularly helpful. In Monsters, critic Claire Dederer dwells provocatively in the ambiguities of the problem: You love the art and can’t unlove it. You also can’t stop thinking about the horrible things the artist did. So then now what?

  Dederer starts from the ground floor, with the definitions. What does she mean by monster? What does she mean by we? What does she mean by genius? She traces the rise of the idea of the artistic genius and the remarkable liberties we grant them, and she puzzles through the problem of how audiences respond as, again and again, our geniuses misbehave. Required reading if you’ve ever felt ambivalent about watching Annie Hall.

  Read equipped with: the annotation implement of your choice for scribbling notes (I myself am a mechanical pencil girl).

  The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann

  David Grann is the rare nonfiction writer whose tightly paced and rigorously documented history books are anticipated as though they were Stephen King novels. His 2018 book, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, was a No. 1 New York Times bestseller and adapted into a Martin Scorsese movie. His latest book, The Wager, is about a doomed 18th-century naval voyage spurred on by hubris and ending in violent disaster. If it doesn’t read quite like it’s ready to be a Scorsese flick, that’s because there’s so much there that I want it to get adapted into a prestige TV miniseries instead.

  Doubleday Books

  The British warship the Wager sails out of London in 1740 under the absurdly named War of Jenkins’ Ear. It was a clash of colonial forces, with Spain and England grappling for control of the New World. The Wager’s mission was to make its way south, down across the hellish and near-impassible Cape Horn below the southernmost tip of South America, and then back up north to the coast of Chile. There it would capture a Spanish galleon loaded with gold.

  Instead, the crew of the Wager develops scurvy and typhus. The ship founders and sinks off the coast of Patagonia. Survivors languish on a desert island, starving and freezing. One of them finds and adopts a dog; the other sailors eat it.

  At the heart of the book is a great clash of wills. The striving and aristocratic Captain Cheap wants the crew to press on to Chile after their mission. The charismatic gunner John Bulkeley wants to return home to England. They vie against each other for control of the remaining crew, well beyond the point at which their struggle turns bloody.

  One of Grann’s great strengths is his ability to toggle between narrative scales. He knows the engine of the story is the fight between the personalities of Cheap and Bulkeley, and drawing from their diaries and letters, he presents each character to the reader as a fully rendered human being. He also never lets us forget that the whole disaster was sparked by imperial greed, and that the colonial striving of Britain and Spain would lead to many more disasters like it.

  Read accompanied by: dark red wine and a good basket of well-salted French fries.

  My Hijacking: A Personal History of Forgetting and Remembering by Martha Hodes

  In 1970, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked a group of commercial airplanes flying in and out of Israel. They landed the planes in the Jordan desert on a makeshift runway of sand and held their hostages there, confined to the planes, for a week. Martha Hodes was one of the hostages. She was 12 years old at the time.

  Today, Hodes is a historian at NYU. Some years ago, she writes, she realized that she had very little memory of the experience of being hijacked. She must have been afraid and sad at the time, but when she thought of the hijacking, she felt as though it had happened to someone else. The emotion was long-buried, so that all that remained of the experience was that every time she walked into an airport, she was struck with the urge to cry.

  In the richly emotional and elegantly constructed My Hijacking, Hodes puts her historian’s training to use to reconstruct the events of the hijacking. She aims to get a greater sense of what she lived through 50 years ago, and see if by doing so, she can reconnect to all the emotions her childhood self tamped down. With novel-like pacing and incredible psychological complexity, My Hijacking is an unflinching search for all the bad feelings we’d prefer not to look at.

  Read alongside: Yezid Sayigh’s Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949-1993

  Dutton

  Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital by Elise Hu

  NPR host Elise Hu moved to South Korea in 2015 to establish a new bureau for NPR. For Hu, American born and of Chinese descent, the culture shock was massive: the shining modernity of Seoul, the technology — and the beauty culture.

  K-beauty is a massive international industry, with South Korea third in the world behind the US and France as an exporter of cosmetics and skin care. It has by far the most plastic surgeons per capita of any country in the world. Gift certificates for plastic surgery are a common post-graduation gift.

  Korean beauty ideals are rigid, but Hu is careful not to demonize those who spend their money and time trying to meet them: it is, she points out, a wholly rational economic decision in a culture where most job applications require headshots. Instead, Hu tracks the social, political, and economic results of a beauty industry big enough to reshape a country. Her ability to lay out a highly rigid and codified standard of beauty in a different culture defamiliarizes our own enough to make its outlines and paradoxes plain.

  Read if you dream of: someone finally sitting you down and explaining exactly how Instagram Face became a thing.

  Spare by Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex

  Spare is a book that defies killjoy distinctions like “good” and “bad,” “petty” and “open-minded.” Prince Harry suffers, he settles scores, he walks you through the process of applying his mother’s lip balm to his arctic-wind-chapped penis. One-third of this book is a gripping account of how the power of the monarchy warps and deforms family dynamics; one-third is juicy gossip about tripping on mushrooms with Courteney Cox; and the final third is unmodulated oversharing that goes well beyond the limits of what anyone ever wanted to know about Prince Harry. The combination is weird, at times off-putting, and undeniably fascinating. It’s not like any memoir you’ve ever read before.

  Read equipped with: a list of the people who have wronged you and a red Sharpie so you can plot your revenge like Harry.

• The unusual factors behind the extraordinary heat across the southern US -

  

  Fast-moving air 8 miles in the sky is pinning hot air over the South, driving the heat index into triple digits.

  The South is no stranger to heat, but the temperatures and humidity right now are testing even the hardiest denizens of Dixie as the hot weather stretches into a third week.

  The heat wave along the Gulf Coast, stretching over Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Texas, and Mexico, is straining the limits of infrastructure and human survival.

  According to the National Weather Service, extreme heat is the number one weather-related killer in the US. The recent weather has already proven dangerous and deadly in places like Texas, which set an all-time energy demand record this week as millions across the state switched on fans and air conditioners to cope with triple-digit temperatures. The heat in Arkansas followed tornadoes, high winds, and hail that knocked out power for 62,000 customers last week.

  ️ ️Here’s yet another way to say, “It’s been hot.” We’ve had excessive heat warnings for two weeks straight! We’ve broken several high temperature records and had incredibly high dewpoint values. #txwx #stxwx #ItsHot pic.twitter.com/rfm4rPkfBO

  — NWS Corpus Christi (@NWSCorpus) June 26, 2023

The recent sweltering weather stands out for its timing, its severity, and its duration. Parts of Louisiana issued excessive heat warnings earlier in the year than they’ve ever done before.

The 100-degree-plus temperatures are a function of normal summer weather on top of unusual atmospheric patterns and global temperature cycles aligning in their hot phases. The southern US also has some unique features that are enhancing the heat. All the while, the planet as a whole is warming up.

Heat waves are also baking other parts of the world, and many places have already broken temperature records before summer is in full swing. Some of the drivers behind this weather are going to gather strength through the year, so 2023 is poised to become the hottest year on record for the planet.

How the jet stream is fueling the extreme heat

Heat waves are typically defined as sustained temperatures above the 95th percentile for a region. That means that the temperatures that count as a heat wave are lower in Alaska than they are in Arkansas. “Keep in mind, it’s always hot in south Louisiana in the summer,” Barry Keim, Louisiana’s state climatologist and a professor at Louisiana State University, told Vox.

Stretches of excessive heat usually follow a formula: A high-pressure system — where atmospheric pressure above an area increases — creates a column of air that heats up and dries out as it sinks. This drives clouds away, allowing the sun to heat up the ground unobstructed, with the sinking air acting as a heat dome holding the hot air in place over several days.

But there are several other variables amplifying this formula right now. One of them is the jet stream, or rather, jet streams. These are bands of air currents blowing west to east at 275 miles per hour or more, gusting 4 to 8 miles above the Earth’s surface. They usually form circles around the planet and act as boundaries between warm and cold air in the sky. In the Northern Hemisphere, the main streams are the polar jet, ensconcing cold air at the North Pole, and the subtropical jet, holding warm equatorial air at bay. However, the streams can meander and blur together. “If you look at any particular day, it’s not always clear that there’s two distinct streams,” Rachel White, an atmospheric scientist at the University of British Columbia, told Vox.

These undulations are known as Rossby waves. Right now, the jet streams appear to be following a roller coaster track over North America rather than neat, straight lines. “It’s more ‘wave’ than ‘jet’ right now,” White said.

In particular, there appears to be a northward bulge in the jet stream extending over the southern US. That’s holding a high-pressure system in place. “When that pattern persists over the same region for a period of days, that’s how you get a heat wave,” Steve Seman, an assistant teaching professor at Pennsylvania State University, said.

In this satellite image, you can see a patch of clear air over the southern US, bounded by a ridge of clouds:

Climate Reanalyzer/NOAA

On the other side of that hump, the weather is much cooler, as seen in this temperature map:

NOAA/National Weather Service

“Under the ridge, where we are, we’ve had the heat. So in that sense, the jet stream is responsible for our weather, but at the same time responsible for the cooler weather on either side,” John Nielsen-Gammon, the Texas state climatologist and a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, told Vox. “If we just had high pressure extending across all of the southern US, we wouldn’t have gotten the high temperatures that we saw, because the more localized ridge produces a stronger sinking of air and also allows for the clockwise recirculation of air.”

But right along that ridge, there’s a lot of rollicking weather. The rushing jet stream can draw air and moisture upward, fueling convective storms. “Those areas have been very active with storm activity: Tornadoes, high winds, wind damage, and hail have taken place,” Keim said. “Every place to the south of that boundary is basking in very high heat and humidity levels.”

Another big factor here is that the world is in a strong El Niño this year. This is the warm phase of the Pacific Ocean’s temperature cycle, where the sea surface heats up and starts to spread along the equator. That warmer water in turn shifts weather patterns, bringing more rain to some areas, drought to others, and generally more hot weather around the world.

In the southern US, El Niño usually makes the subtropical jet stream more active in the winter, bringing cooler and wetter than average weather to the Gulf Coast. “Since this El Niño has already kicked in, that subtropical jet that we know is normally hyperactive in the winter, we’re actually seeing this hyperactivity taking place in the summer when normally we don’t even notice [it],” Keim said.

Confusingly, wobbly jet streams can induce the opposite effect, too. Rather than letting warm air encroach northward, waves can let cold air drift southward. In 2021, waves in the polar jet stream spilled chilly Arctic air over the US, leading to a cold snap in Texas. “It’s sort of the other side of the same coin,” White said.

Scientists are still trying to sort out how jet streams have changed over time, and they don’t all agree on whether climate change is playing a role. “That’s the million-dollar question,” White said. “My perspective is that there isn’t a strong scientific consensus.”

One proposed mechanism is that the Arctic is warming up to four times as fast as the rest of the planet, and as the temperature gradient between the North Pole and regions farther south gets shallower, the polar jet stream gets wavier. But the ordinary chaos of weather can also induce these waves, and since much of our understanding of jet streams is drawn from satellites, there isn’t a very long record of historical observations with which to compare. “The jury is still out on that, I think,” Seman said.

Warm waters means hot, sticky air

One of the other remarkable aspects of the heat wave across the South is the high humidity. Meteorologists track the combination of heat and humidity with the heat index, which reflects how the weather feels on the human body and how difficult it is to cool off by sweating. When the heat index gets too high, the weather can quickly become dangerous to many people.

NOAA

Gulf Coasters are of course well acquainted with humidity, but there are factors making the current damp spell unusual as well.

The Atlantic Ocean is seeing record-high temperatures this year, helping heat up water in the Gulf of Mexico. And since the 1970s, the gulf has been warming about twice as fast as the rest of the world’s oceans. Hot water holds on to less oxygen, which can suffocate fish. High temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico have already been blamed for a fish kill in Texas this year.

Hotter water also evaporates more readily. “​​That ‘pump’ off the Gulf of Mexico is becoming even stronger, raising the humidity levels,” Keim said. “By virtue of that, our heat index values … go up to 113 [degrees Fahrenheit]. We’re getting into a very dangerous range.”

Further inland, the hot air is drawing water out of soil and vegetation. “We’re already seeing some crops starting to wilt from the heat and lack of moisture,” said Nielsen-Gammon.

The heat wave isn’t just manifesting at the upper end of the temperature range; it’s also pushing up minimum temperatures so that it stays warm overnight and into the early morning. When temperatures linger into the 90s after the sun sets, people get little relief from the heat. It can disrupt sleep patterns and worsen underlying health problems.

“There may be more danger than a typical heat event, due to the longevity of near-record or record high nighttime lows and elevated heat index readings,” the National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center reported on Friday. Heat waves that occur earlier in the season tend to be more deadly because people are less acclimated to hot weather. Older adults, people with preexisting health problems, and people without access to cooling, like those in prisons, face especially high risks from high temperatures.

These effects are all further enhanced in dense cities like Houston and New Orleans where asphalt and concrete soak up the sun, creating heat islands that get hotter than their rural surroundings.

On top of all this, the climate is changing. Average temperatures are rising, increasing the likelihood and severity of heat waves in much of the world. “Climate change looms large and hangs over all of this,” Keim said.

The heat wave across the South may break over the next week, but it is setting the stage for even more scorching weather. The current heat wave “will probably further increase the chances of hot temperatures because it’s accelerated the normal drying out of soils that takes place across Texas during June, July and August,” Nielsen-Gammon said. So drink plenty of water, stay in the shade, and take frequent breaks as you brace for the heat that lies ahead.

• Why the media too often ignores the connection between climate change and meat -

  

  The burger-sized hole in climate change coverage, explained.

  Last weekend, Elon Musk posted one of his more outrageously false tweets to date: “Important to note that what happens on Earth’s surface (eg farming) has no meaningful impact on climate change.”

  Musk was, as he has been from time to time, wrong. As climate experts rushed to emphasize, farming actually accounts for around a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions.

  Before you add this to your list of criticisms of Musk, know that if you’re anything like the average person — or Musk himself — you too probably underestimate just how much agriculture, especially meat and dairy production, contributes to climate change and other environmental problems.

  Late last year, Madre Brava, an environmental research and advocacy group, commissioned a poll of 7,500 consumers across the US, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Brazil, asking which industries and environmental issues they thought were the biggest contributors to global warming. People generally ranked industrial meat production as one of the smallest contributors, even though it’s one of the largest.

  The tens of billions of chickens, pigs, cows, and other animals we raise and slaughter for food annually account for around 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, primarily from cow burps, animal manure, and the fertilizer used to grow the corn and soy they eat. More than one-third of the Earth’s habitable land is used for animal farming — much of it cleared for cattle grazing and growing all that corn and soy — making animal agriculture the leading cause of deforestation and biodiversity loss globally.

  Deforestation causes emissions itself, but it also represents a missed opportunity to sequester carbon. If that land were “rewilded,” or retired as farmland, it would act as a carbon sink, sucking massive amounts of climate-warming carbon out of the atmosphere. But we keep clearing more and more forestland, especially in the Amazon rainforest and elsewhere in the tropics, mostly for beef, pork, and poultry.

  

  The consumer survey findings are bleak, and one major reason for them could be the fault of my own industry: journalism.

  Madre Brava also conducted a media analysis that found that between 2020 and 2022, less than 0.5 percent of stories about climate change by leading news outlets in the US, the United Kingdom, and Europe mentioned meat or livestock.

  Last month, two groups that work on issues related to animal agriculture — Sentient Media and Faunalytics — published an analysis with similar findings. The organizations looked at the 100 most recent climate change stories from each of the top 10 US media outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and CNN, and found that 7 percent mentioned animal agriculture. Of that 7 percent, most only discussed how climate change-fueled weather events like droughts, floods, and heatwaves impact animal farmers. “Across the 1,000 articles we examined, only a handful of stories reported in depth on the connection between consuming animal products and climate change,” the researchers wrote.

  The media is an easy target, and some criticism is deserved — it’s a disservice to readers to largely ignore a leading cause of the climate crisis. Part of the problem is that the media, like everyone else, operates in an information environment in which the meat lobby downplays and in some cases suppresses the full extent to which burgers, ribs, and chicken nuggets pollute the planet. But journalists could be doing more to cut through the noise.

  The food misinformation environment that reporters swim in

  Estimates vary, but peer-reviewed research says that animal agriculture causes between 15 percent to 19.6 percent of climate-warming emissions. The United Nations’ most recent estimate puts animal agriculture’s emissions at 11.1 percent, but it hasn’t been peer-reviewed and has been questioned by some food and climate researchers.

  Last month, journalist Sophie Kevany explained in detail for Vox why there’s such a wide range in estimates, but here’s the gist: It’s hard to measure emissions from farms, there’s evidence these emissions are undercounted, and different models use different carbon accounting methods.

  The range of estimates has left room for meat lobbyists to muddy the waters, creating an environment of misinformation and exaggeration.

  For example, in recent years the beef industry has promoted a misleading method of counting the warming impact of methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas emitted by cows. “It’s the [beef] industry choosing metrics which make their impact look small,” Drew Shindell, a professor of Earth science at Duke University, told Bloomberg about the industry’s alternative math. “It’s not a credible way to approach the problem.”

  The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the industry’s leading lobby group, runs a “climate messaging machine,” food journalist Joe Fassler recently wrote in the Guardian, that trains influencers to confuse the public and downplay beef’s emissions.

  The list goes on. Last year, leaked documents showed that delegates from Brazil and Argentina successfully lobbied the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to remove any mention of meat’s negative impact on the environment, or recommendations for people in rich countries to reduce their meat consumption, in its recent report. Meat giant Tyson Foods spends a much bigger share of its revenue than ExxonMobil lobbying Congress to stop climate policy.

  Outside the animal rights movement, there aren’t many voices pushing back against these narratives. The US environmental movement has largely shied away from campaigning to reduce meat and dairy production, with some leaders outright rejecting the notion that we need to eat fewer animals. Policymakers largely avoid the issue too.

  It’s no wonder that public health researchers, in a paper published last year in the journal Sustainability, found that the media often engages in “both-sidesism” on meat’s role in climate change, treating it as more of an open debate than it really is.

  There’s also a human element at play. Food is a touchy subject, and telling people to change what they eat can turn some readers hostile. “Ask me how I know,” said Tamar Haspel, a food and agriculture columnist for the Washington Post who regularly encourages people to eat less beef and more lentils, during a recent Sentient Media panel discussion.

  A 2014 study of US, Canadian, and Swedish environmental activists found a prevailing sentiment that climate groups felt influencing meat production wasn’t a part of their core mission and that changing diets has limited social and political appeal. That last part is true — people love to eat meat. But it’s on journalists and environmentalists to be clear-eyed about the realities of the climate crisis, and cover ideas — changing diets, yes, but also government food policy and farming practices and technologies — to try and get us out of it.

  Improving how we talk about meat and climate change

  Given recent newsroom closures and mass reporter layoffs, news outlets aren’t likely to be hiring scores of reporters specializing in agriculture and the environment anytime soon. But there is something any newsroom can do: treat agriculture and climate change with the same level of skepticism and nuance as any other issue. There are plenty of examples in recent memory in which journalists haven’t.

  For example, President Joe Biden’s landmark climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, included $20 billion for “climate-smart” farming, but there’s scant evidence that the IRA’s agricultural initiatives will meaningfully reduce emissions, especially since they don’t touch emissions from livestock. Despite the limits of the legislation, most mentions of the agriculture component of the law received little to no scrutiny in initial news coverage.

  “The [meat] industry is something we should really remain skeptical of … It’s every bit as powerful as oil and tobacco before that,” said Georgina Gustin, a reporter at Inside Climate News, at the Sentient Media panel. “I think that if we give industry too much credit by kid-gloving our treatment of farmers, then we’re making a mistake as journalists.”

  Leading news outlets have exaggerated the potential emissions savings from feeding cattle seaweed. Many headlines have framed “regenerative agriculture” — an approach to farming that aims, among other aspirations, to store carbon in the soil — as something that could “save the planet.” But its carbon-storing potential remains speculative, and regenerative agriculture generally requires much more land than conventional farming, an environmental drawback.

  Also, be skeptical of meat alternative startups. I think developing better veggie burgers and nuggets is an important pursuit to cut food system emissions, but the field has been prone to hype. Most products are still too expensive and don’t taste good enough.

  On top of applying healthy skepticism to claims made in the food and agriculture sphere, journalists could also be more specific by naming animal agriculture as the top cause for an environmental problem when appropriate, not agriculture writ large. For example, “agriculture” is sometimes cited as a major cause of the Colorado River water shortage, which could lead readers to think that the current sky-high levels of water use for agriculture in the Western US are just an inevitable part of feeding the world. But at least 70 percent of the water diverted from the Colorado River for agriculture is used to grow feed for beef and dairy cows, and animal products generally require much more water than plant-based foods.

  Covering this huge, complex issue with skepticism and nuance requires time, resources, and specialization, all luxuries many reporters don’t have. The problem is a symptom of bigger challenges in journalism.

  To be sure, in addition to journalists quoted in this article, there are a number of news outlets, non-profits, and writers that regularly report on how what we eat contributes to climate change. But an enormous coverage gap remains. It may just take time for stakeholders in the climate crisis — journalists, policymakers, environmentalists, and consumers — to catch up.

  “The food conversation is probably about 20 years behind the energy conversation, and it is catching up, but it’s not visceral to people in the way energy is — that they immediately know energy is a climate issue,” said Michael Grunwald, a food and agriculture columnist for Canary Media, in the Sentient Media panel discussion.

  But time is in short supply. Experts say that if we don’t change what we eat — especially reducing beef and dairy — we can’t meet the Paris climate agreement of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius or less. Journalists have risen to the occasion before: Coverage of climate change has increased in recent decades, especially in the last few years. Hopefully reporting on the emissions from what we put on our plate will follow a similar trajectory.

From The Hindu: Sports

• Austrian GP 2023 | Verstappen sees off Leclerc for fourth pole in a row - The session proved a nightmare for Perez, who already 69 points behind Verstappen after eight races all won by Red Bull, had three laps deleted for exceeding track limits

• I am a cricket lover like every Indian, our work will silence murmurs about dynasty politics: Rohit Pawar - The Maharashtra Cricket Association president speaks about plans to better support former cricketers, expand the Maharashtra Premier League fanbase and radius, improve district cricket infrastructure, ensure fair treatment across men’s and women’s State teams, revenue sharing models, and BCCI support

• Ladies Finnish Open | Diksha fights back to make cut in Finland alongside Pranavi - Needing a good solid second round after a birdie-less first round of 74, Diksha played a stunning 5-under for the front nine but dropped two bogeys against just one birdie on the back nine

• Neeraj Chopra wins second straight Diamond League title in Lausanne - Coming back from a one-month injury lay-off, Chopra’s title-winning performance at the Lausanne leg in challenging conditions was below his own top-10 efforts but he still stamped his authority in the prestigious One-day meet

• Duleep Trophy 2023 | North Zone thrashes North East by 511 runs, storm into semifinals - Chasing a mammoth 666 to win, North East Zone were bundled out for 154 in their second innings; North will face Mayank Agarwal-led South Zone in semifinals

From The Hindu: National News

• M.P. High Court requests Centre to reduce women’s consent age to 16 from 18 - The court’s request came on June 27 through an order quashing a First Information Report (FIR) against a man who was accused of repeatedly raping a minor girl and impregnating her in 2020

• Right time to bring UCC, Opposition should refrain from communal politics: Naqvi - The mood of the nation is to make Uniform Civil Code free from the “clutches of communal conspirators” who held this hostage for the last seven decades

• Demonstrations held in Manipur demanding peaceful resolution to crisis - In Imphal East district and Jiribam district, women staged a sit-in.

• Groundwater department to ramp up infrastructure for testing groundwater quality - As per a proposal cleared by the State government on June 27, the department will arrange more observation wells in regions where groundwater quality is a matter of concern.

• LiDAR survey soon to speed up trains in Thiruvananthapuram-Mangaluru corridor - DPR for third, fourth tracks on Ernakulam-Shornur stretch to be submitted to Railway Board by July-end

From BBC: Europe

• France shooting: Macron accuses rioters of exploiting teen killed by police - At a crisis meeting, France’s president condemns three nights of riots as “unjustifiable”.

• France riots: Nanterre rocked by killing and unrest - The town of Nanterre is shaken by nights of rioting after 17-year-old Nahel was shot by police.

• Deciphering Vladimir Putin’s many appearances since mutiny - The Russian president has popped up on TV screens multiple times since last weekend’s dramatic events - but to what end?

• Moldova attack: Two dead as man opens fire inside Chisinau airport - The man was denied entry to Chisinau airport and then shot two officials, authorities say.

• Greece boat disaster: Survivors blame Greek coastguard for tragedy - Survivors of the Greece boat disaster say an attempt by the Greek coastguard to tow the boat made it sink.

From Ars Technica

• Clever DNA tricks - As cells divide, they must copy all of their chromosomes only once or chaos will ensue. - link

• Saturn’s rings steal the show in new image from Webb telescope - Webb turned its gold-coated mirror toward Saturn this week. - link

• Death toll rises to 7 in fungal meningitis outbreak; cases at 34, 161 at risk - Anyone exposed should get medical care and testing immediately, even without symptoms. - link

• The Asus Zenfone 10 is a tiny 5.9-inch phone with flagship specs - Asus invites small phone lovers to put their money where their mouth is. - link

• FBI finally tracks “swatting” incidents as attacks increase nationwide - Experts aren’t sure the database will reverse troubling swatting trend. - link

From Jokes Subreddit

• Forging A Return To Productive Conversation: An Open Letter to Reddit -

  To All Whom It May Concern,

  For fifteen years, /r/Jokes has been one of Reddit’s most-popular communities. That time hasn’t been without its difficulties, but for the most part, we’ve all gotten along (with each other and with administrators). Members of our team fondly remember Moderator Roadshows, visits to Reddit’s headquarters, Reddit Secret Santa, April Fools’ Day events, regional meetups, and many more uplifting moments. We’ve watched this platform grow by leaps and bounds, and although we haven’t been completely happy about every change that we’ve witnessed, we’ve always done our best to work with Reddit at finding ways to adapt, compromise, and move forward.

  This process has occasionally been preceded by some exceptionally public debate, however.

  On June 12th, 2023, /r/Jokes joined thousands of other subreddits in protesting the planned changes to Reddit’s API; changes which – despite being immediately evident to only a minority of Redditors – threatened to worsen the site for everyone. By June 16th, 2023, that demonstration had evolved to represent a wider (and growing) array of concerns, many of which arose in response to Reddit’s statements to journalists. Today (June 26th, 2023), we are hopeful that users and administrators alike can make a return to the productive dialogue that has served us in the past.

  We acknowledge that Reddit has placed itself in a situation that makes adjusting its current API roadmap impossible.

  However, we have the following requests:

  • Commit to exploring ways by which third-party applications can make an affordable return.
  • Commit to providing moderation tools and accessibility options (on Old Reddit, New Reddit, and mobile platforms) which match or exceed the functionality and utility of third-party applications.
  • Commit to prioritizing a significant reduction in spam, misinformation, bigotry, and illegal content on Reddit.
  • Guarantee that any future developments which may impact moderators, contributors, or stakeholders will be announced no less than one fiscal quarter before they are scheduled to go into effect.
  • Work together with longstanding moderators to establish a reasonable roadmap and deadline for accomplishing all of the above.
  • Affirm that efforts meant to keep Reddit accountable to its commitments and deadlines will hereafter not be met with insults, threats, removals, or hostility.
  • Publicly affirm all of the above by way of updating Reddit’s User Agreement and Reddit’s Moderator Code of Conduct to include reasonable expectations and requirements for administrators’ behavior.
  • Implement and fill a senior-level role (with decision-making and policy-shaping power) of “Moderator Advocate” at Reddit, with a required qualification for the position being robust experience as a volunteer Reddit moderator.

  Reddit is unique amongst social-media sites in that its lifeblood – its multitude of moderators and contributors – consists entirely of volunteers. We populate and curate the platform’s many communities, thereby providing a welcoming and engaging environment for all of its visitors. We receive little in the way of thanks for these efforts, but we frequently endure abuse, threats, attacks, and exposure to truly reprehensible media. Historically, we have trusted that Reddit’s administrators have the best interests of the platform and its users (be they moderators, contributors, participants, or lurkers) at heart; that while Reddit may be a for-profit company, it nonetheless recognizes and appreciates the value that Redditors provide.

  That trust has been all but entirely eroded… but we hope that together, we can begin to rebuild it.

  In simplest terms, Reddit, we implore you: Remember the human.

  We look forward to your response by Thursday, June 29th, 2023.

  There’s also just one other thing.

  submitted by /u/JokeSentinel
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• God: “Adam, I’ll let you name the birds” -

  Adam: “Tit”

  God: “Uhh ok”

  Adam: “Boobie”

  God: “Stop naming them after breasts”

  Adam: Looks at rooster

  submitted by /u/MudakMudakov
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• Have you ever noticed how most Ford vehicles names are more fun when you put “anal” in front of them? -

  Probe, Explorer, Excursion, Endeavor, Ranger, Focus

  submitted by /u/Sean_0510
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• A man was away on a business trip, and decided to call his wife and to let her know he had arrived safely -

  A little girl picks up the phone. “Hello?”

  “Hi, Honey. This is Daddy, is mommy near the phone?” Daddy asks

  “No, Daddy. She’s upstairs in the bedroom with uncle Paul.”

  After a brief pause, Daddy says “But, honey, you haven’t got an uncle Paul.”

  “Oh, yes I do, and he’s upstairs in the room with mommy, right now.”

  Dad takes a second to process this, then speaks. “Uh, ok, then this is what I want you to do. Put the phone down on the table, run upstairs, knock on the bedroom door and shout to mommy that daddy’s car just pulled into the driveway.”

  A few minutes later the little girl comes back to the phone. “I did it, daddy!”

  “And what happened, honey?” he asked

  “Well mommy got all scared, jumped out of bed with no clothes on and ran around screaming. Then she tripped over the rug, hit her head on the dresser and now she isn’t moving at all!”

  “Oh my god! what about uncle Paul?”

  “He jumped out of the bed with no clothes on, too. He was all scared and he jumped out of the back window and into the swimming pool. But I guess he didn’t knew that you took out the water last week to clean it. He hit the bottom of the pool and I think he’s dead.”

  A long, silent pause

  ​

  Then Daddy says, “Swimming pool?……. Is this 418-6819?”

  submitted by /u/castle_03
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• Two rednecks decided that they weren’t going anywhere in life -

  They thought they should go to college to get ahead. The first goes in to see the counselor, who tells him to take Math, History, and Logic. “What’s Logic?” the first redneck asks. The professor answers by saying, “Let me give you an example. Do you own a weedeater?” “I sure do.” “Then I can assume, using logic, that you have a yard,” replied the professor. “That’s real good!” says the redneck. The professor continues, “Logic will also tell me that since you have a yard, you also own a house.” Impressed, the redneck says, “Amazin!” “And since you own a house, logic dictates that you have a wife.” “That’s Betty Mae! This is incredible!” The redneck is obviously catching on. “Finally, since you have a wife, logically I can assume that you are heterosexual,” said the professor. “You’re absolutely right! Why that’s the most fascinatin’ thing I ever heard! I cain’t wait to take that logic class!!” The redneck, proud of the new world opening up to him, walks back into the hallway, where his friend is still waiting. “So what classes are ya takin’?” asks the friend. “Math, History, and Logic!” replies the first redneck. “What in tarnation is logic???” asked his friend. “Let me give you an example. Do ya own a weedeater?” asked the first redneck. “No,” his friend replied. “SO YOU LIKE GUYS, Don t Ya ?”

  submitted by /u/kickypie
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