Humanitarian Unknown 024.
1. The Enigmatic Power of Paul Kagame
"Rwanda’s youth cannot imagine life without the current president" – Margaux Solinas explores the "Kagame Generation" and the origins of Rwanda youth's deep sentiments for the country's president.
2. How to Engage with the Taliban, If You Have To.
Jim Grant, the maverick UNICEF's Executive Director (1980-1995), once remarked that he wouldn’t hesitate to “make a deal with the Devil… if it helps kids.”
In this thoughtful reporting, Dr Patricia Gossman and Fereshta Abbasi write that "limiting support to Afghanistan to ever-dwindling levels of humanitarian aid to isolate the Taliban is not the answer" and that "limited engagement = limited support.
In times when more and more humanitarians (known+unknown) question the principle of neutrality, this is an important input into the discussion.
3. ‘We’re Living in a Nightmare:’ Inside the Health Crisis of a Texas Bitcoin Town
"On an evening in December 2023, 43-year-old small business owner Sarah Rosenkranz collapsed in her home in Granbury, Texas and was rushed to the emergency room. Her heart pounded 200 beats per minute; her blood pressure spiked into hypertensive crisis; her skull throbbed. “It felt like my head was in a pressure vise being crushed,” she says. “That pain was worse than childbirth.”"
Bitcoin, y'all. Terrific (and terrifying) reporting from Andrew Chow .
4. (Awesome) visual essay: How Hot Will Your City Feel in 2070?
Feeling a bit warm these days? Where should you and/or your kids consider moving to? The best visualization I've seen to date, from the team at The Pudding .
5. The Importance of Critical Analyses in Examining Social Science Evidence (i.e. the best critique I've read so far of Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation)
If anything, we should be thankful for Jonathan Haidt’s "The Anxious Generation" as it spurred the much needed discussion on the links (or lack thereof) between the use of social media among youth and the mental health crisis.
Peter Gray provides a considerate argument why he hasn't endorsed Haidt's book. There's a lot here, including a good and respectful discussion in the comment section.
6. The Surgeon General Says Social Media Is Like Tobacco. Is It More Like Food, Though?
In this Slate piece, Rosa Li explains that an analogy between tech and tobacco is "...misleading about the effects of social media. Tobacco is clearly and definitively harmful. The research on social media is more ambiguous and complicated."
Instead, the author proposes to compare social media to food: "Big Food is also a multibillion-dollar industry that puts profits over health and hopes to turn youth into long-term customers through marketing and careful product design. But the relationship between food and health is extremely complex, and we intuitively understand that such complexity exists."
7. We Need An FDA For Artificial Intelligence
"At the turn of the 20th century, the commercial medical landscape was littered with self-appointed medicine men who traveled with carnivals, toting supposed cure-all brews. It was the era of the “snake-oil salesman” —?the seller of quack remedies."
What AI regulators can learn from the history of the FDA? A deep dive by Emilia Javorsky MD, MPH .
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8. How Public Universities Hooked America On?Meat
"Americans are eating more meat than ever, but livestock giants still see plenty of room to grow. As pressure mounts for meat producers to improve their treatment of animals and environmental footprints, they’re turning to a tried-and-true strategy — used in the past by the tobacco and oil industries — to expand their markets and shore up the public’s trust in their products: funding favorable research from university scientists."
It must be nice, not to have ethical qualms (after receiving $25M from the food industry to do research on food).
Terrific reporting from Grace van Deelen .
9. Governing for the Planet. How?
"In politics, there is no ‘world’; only states. For pathogens, there are no ‘states’; there is only the world."
Jonathan Blake and Nils Gilman argue that nation-states are no longer fit for purpose to create a habitable future for humans and nature, and investigate political forms adequate to solve the multidimensional nature of planetary problems.
Long read, for the political philosopher in you. Super interesting.
10. Kenya’s Third Liberation Movement
Kenya government continues to emerge as a poster child of "how to make the next generation turn against you" handbook.
I keep including articles about Kenya protests as it's the sign of things to come if the youth keeps being failed by local governance systems ("over $15 million was allocated for new cars for senior government officials, with only $780,000 set aside for youth development") and global governance systems ("IMF not only approved the tax proposal in the contentious Finance Bill but had also anticipated the anti-tax protests long before Kenyans saw the bill and mobilized their rage").
Reported by Kari Mugo .
11. The Price of India's Crackdown on NGO Funds
In case you missed it, as of now Oxfam, Amnesty International, and World Vision, among others, had to practically halt their operations in India.
"Thousands of civil society groups in India have had their licences to receive overseas donations cancelled since Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government tightened surveillance on non-profit groups regulated under the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA).
The government has said alleged irregularities on the part of NGOs were to blame, but civil society activists said the cancellations were part of a larger crackdown to stifle criticism of the government."
Kudos to Kunal Purohit for keeping this story alive.
12. US Gaza Pier to Close After Costing $230m for Day’s Worth of Aid
"From the beginning, almost no one in the humanitarian sector thought the US plan to deliver aid to Gaza via a temporary pier was workable or that it would make a meaningful difference to the amount of assistance reaching people. 'It was only the people who didn’t know humanitarian logistics who thought it would,' Jeremy Konyndyk , president of Refugees International, said".
Eric Reidy reporting on this sad state of affairs.
13. OpenAI Working on New Reasoning Technology Under Code Name ‘Strawberry’.
"AI researchers interviewed by Reuters generally agree that reasoning, in the context of AI, involves the formation of a model that enables AI to plan, reflect how the physical world functions, and work through challenging multi-step problems reliably. Improving reasoning in AI models is seen as the key to unlocking the ability for the models to do everything from making major scientific discoveries to planning and building new software applications."
14. The Honest ExxonMobil Ad (that everyone should see)
From Yellow Dot Studios , a non-profit media studio founded to challenge polluter BS and climate inaction.