Further Reading #7
Mariupol's climate secret, history returns, Whoppers, Satchmo in the USSR, making galaxies, Byzantium, air electric, rumbling an Italian racket and long cons
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I hope you enjoy this week’s most diverting and thought-provoking readings!
Double Tragedy
The key to fixing climate change was hiding in Mariupol’s concrete
But for a small band of scientists in Ukraine and beyond there is an added horror to these pictures. They realise that alongside the terrible human catastrophe here, something else may be lost.
For Mariupol has long held a precious secret. Its apartment and office buildings might look much like any other Soviet-era concrete blocks, but some of them are made of a unique building material — one which may hold the clue to one of the biggest challenges facing the modern world: how to create cement without destroying the planet.
Political decay
Francis Fukuyama: We could be facing the end of “the end of history”
He’s quick to point out how most people claiming his theory is incorrect have misinterpreted the original premise. Fukuyama didn’t envision the end of history to be a utopian state or predict that “the whole world is going to be democratic” with a “straightforward, linear movement in that direction”. He also didn’t suggest that “nothing would happen from now on”. Indeed, Fukuyama has long maintained that events – another way of saying more history – would continue to take place.
Supersize
The pandemic saved the fast-food industry
Imagewise, the industry may have reached its nadir in 2016, when McDonald’s confessed in a widely circulated memo that just one in five millennials had tried a Big Mac. Bear in mind, this was the heyday of the celebrity chef and experiential dining, when the trendiest food was performative, not convenient. The top restaurant in the United States, according to the James Beard Foundation, was Alinea, a Chicago temple of molecular gastronomy where customers enjoyed four-hour-long meals and capped off dessert with edible ballons, made of sugar and filled with helium.
Fast food, meanwhile, was a muckrakers’ dream, derided as nutritionally suspect (see: the movies Fast Food Nation and Super Size Me). And the premise of a drive-thru — once a nostalgic hallmark of post-war car culture — seemed outdated, stigmatized, and soulless. Cities like Minneapolis started banning new construction of fast food drive-thru windows, largely on aesthetic grounds.
Bebop Encounters
For decades America’s foremost jazz musicians travelled the world as Cold War cultural ambassadors
As America competed with the Russians for moral ascendancy alongside military and technical might, it was obliged to acknowledge that racism made its ‘liberty and justice for all’ rhetoric a lie. Something had to be done to raise America’s tarnished international profile, and congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. proposed music as the solution. A clergyman and representative of several New York districts including Harlem, where he was born, Powell argued that while Soviets had the Bolshoi Ballet, America had jazz. Heeding his advice, in 1956 the US State Department began sponsoring concerts of world-famous American musicians, appointing Powell’s friend, be-bop giant Dizzy Gillespie, as its first jazz ambassador and sending him to Pakistan, Lebanon, Yugoslavia, Turkey and Greece. Pioneering jazz trumpeter Louis ‘Satchmo’ Armstrong visited the Congo, and Cairo 1960-61, where he was photographed blowing his horn for the Sphinx; big band leader Benny Goodman played his clarinet in Moscow’s Red Square in 1962; and consummate composer, pianist and orchestra leader Duke Ellington was emissary to South Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe in 1963. Call it propaganda but audiences were rapt and the musicians loved it, basking in the glow of multicultural welcomes while absorbing new rhythms and sounds.
The world in a grain of sand
What Can We Learn About the Universe from Just One Galaxy?
In December, Genel, an expert on galaxy formation, presented the preliminary results of the paper to the galaxy-formation group he belongs to at the Center for Computational Astrophysics, in New York. “This was really one of the most fun things that happened to me,” he said. He told me that any galaxy-formation expert could have no other first reaction than to think, This is impossible. A galaxy is, on the scale of a universe, about as substantial as a grain of sand is, relative to the size of the Earth. To think that all by itself it can say something so substantial is, to the majority of the astrophysics community, extremely surprising, in a way analogous to the discovery that each of our cells—from a fingernail cell to a liver cell—contains coding describing our entire body.
No country for old men
A new history of Byzantium reveals the inner workings of a late antique empire
Parts of the book are uncomfortable reading in light of current world events. The plague that swept the empire kept coming back, recurring throughout the sixth century and even into the mid-eighth, at the same time as the light was faltering and unknown volcanoes were continuing to throw up their pestilence to further darkness. Papyri cited by Stephenson indicate that taxes rose to three times higher than their rate before the plague pandemic, reflecting not only the disruption and death toll brought about by the disease, but the effects of crop failures and climate events, too.
Just in Time
Electric Planes Might Come Sooner Than You Think
And then there is the issue that electric aviation, targeting smaller planes and shorter routes, won’t ultimately put the kind of dent that’s needed into the industry’s emissions reduction goals. “On the emissions side, 95 percent of the carbon footprint of the industry is airplanes larger than 100 passengers,” Engler says, explaining Wright Electric’s decision to target the development of bigger planes.
Kaestner notes that since “transcontinental or even true long-haul operations are still out of scope for the foreseeable future,” cleaner emerging energies like sustainable aviation fuels and, further afield, hydrogen power, must be the industry focus for longer routes.
Stabilimento
Italy’s £27bn beach clubs feel the heat of Brussels
The decision has been bitterly opposed by many owners, and the name of Frits Bolkestein, the former Dutch European commissioner responsible for the original 2006 directive that the Italian government is belatedly implementing, turned to mud.
This month, thousands of concession holders went to Rome to stage a protest against the Direttiva Bolkestein — many of them brandishing umbrellas. Enrico Schiappapietra, head of the Ligurian branch of their union, complained of a “grave injustice”. “We will lose our companies, and all the efforts made in recent years to enhance them, our jobs, families and employees,” he said.
Grifters
Why we fell for the con artist
Popular culture has always magnified and marketed our fears — the Bomb, terrorism, technology out of control — and it’s not hard to see why we are currently preoccupied by deception. The 2008 crisis revealed that the global financial system was a Ponzi scheme built on the repackaging of mortgage debt, and almost nobody went to jail for it. Since then, a number of ballyhooed tech start-ups and cryptocurrencies have turned out to be built on sand. Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes — the subject of The Dropout, a book, a documentary, a podcast series and the forthcoming Adam McKay movie Bad Blood — is only the most extreme example of a slick entrepreneur who exploited hype and greed to pull in vast sums of money for digital snake oil.