Talking Points
- A fuel tanker exploded, killing 75 people in Haiti
- Lower back pain emerged as a symptom of omicron
- Analysts sparked global concern over Log4j vulnerability
- California's governor pledged to use Texan abortion law for weapons ban
- Australia saw growing opposition to Assange's extradition
- 150 people were rescued from the Hong Kong WTC blaze
- India faced a new vaccine supply headache: no buyers
- New Caledonia voted against independence from France
- Belarus jailed Sergei Tikhanovsky for 18 years
- German police foiled an anti-vax political assassination
Dive deeper
After an unrelenting year of coups, crashes, and covid, it's time to start unwinding. This week the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) unveiled the 2021 additions to the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
Something to dance to
Within UNESCO, the team responsible for reviewing World Heritage Sites has a plum gig. Fly to Phnom Penh, visit Angkor Wat. Then on to Palmyra, Teotihuacan, Moai. Tick, tick, tick down the list of man-made wonders. Doubly so for the natural world. Imagine being the person who has to fly to the Great Barrier Reef or Yosemite and ponder the question: is this place good?
But spare a thought for their colleagues working on the list of cultural practices passed down through time. Is hurling of critical value to our species' shared experience? What about the Cossack songs of Ukraine's Dnipropetrovsk region? Not quite as easy, is it? Cultural output is both emergent, and transitory. So what makes one expression of culture more or less worthy of preservation? Luckily you don't have to answer that: you can just rejoice in what's been selected.
First to the Congo River, where on a still night you might hear Congolese rumba wafting across the water from the mirrored capitals of Brazzaville and Kinshasa. Both Congos (Republic of, and Democratic Republic of) share what is known locally as Rumba Lingala. It's been described as the soundtrack to Africa's history. It is a local adaptation of the Son Cubano wave that arrived in Africa in the 1940s. But Son Cubano was a fascinating mixture of Spanish sounds that had merged with traditional African NKumba songs on the slave plantations of the Caribbean. See what we mean about emergent and transitory ? In the 1960s and 70s, Congolese artists rose to enormous prominence in Africa. Their music was held aloft with pride during the period of anti-colonial struggle. Rumba lingala blared out of tinny speakers in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Give it a listen and you'll see why it is so popular.
Something to marvel at
In the centuries after the death of Gautama Buddha, scripture concerning his life blossomed. Buddhist canon expanded rapidly with voluminous texts of Lord Buddha's exploits and teachings. Among them are the Jataka tales, which chronicle (through 547 poems) the various lives that the Buddha would live prior to the form we know. Sometimes he appears as a human, sometimes as an animal, but always with some wisdom to impart upon creatures in a spot of bother. A great many of the Jataka tales are eastern analogues of Aesop's fables. As Malay culture was inculcated with Buddhism over the last several centuries, a local variant of a Jataka tale became popular. Manohara is the story of a half-woman, half-bird deity who is trapped in the human realm. It is a love story, and one that ends with an epic journey back to her ethereal kingdom. Fast-forward to today, and in the Su-ngai Padi area of Thailand's Narathiwat province, you'll find young women in striking costume paying homage to Manohara. The Nora, an extraordinary slow-dance can take several days for a full recitation.
Another dance too, of a different kind, was noted in the 2021 list. The rhythmic movement of hand over paper to produce Arabic calligraphy has also been recognised for its grace and harmony. Some words are worth a thousand pictures: just look at the Dome on the Rock.
Something to eat
To West Africa, where the recipe of theibou diene (or ceebu jën) is passed from mother to daughter in an unbroken and fragrant chain. On occasions of tradition one can tell the importance of an event (or guest) by the quality of the fish. This three-hour dish ("rice and fish" in the dominant Wolof language) starts as all good dishes do: with onion, garlic, and carrot frying in oil. Aubergine and tomatoes are a must; cassava, okra, and white cabbage are regional additions. Fresh-caught fish is scored, marinated in herbs, and deep fried. It's then cooked alongside the vegetables and rice in a brothy pot. You can get away with eating it with cutlery at a restaurant but on formal occasions you must keep the bowl in your left hand, eat with your right, and display your manners by not dropping any grains of rice. Or else, you mightn't be invited back for another serving of Senegal's national dish.
Worldlywise
A safer way to launder money
Keanu Reeves may chortle , but a quick glance at this week’s headlines shows the market for non-fungible tokens (NFTs) reaching Wachowski levels of dystopian weirdness. There’s Snoop Dogg’s ‘Snoopverse’ (not to be mistaken with the Snoopyverse), where one ‘Snooper’ paid £340,500 for the honour of being the rapper’s digital neighbour. Companies like Nike and Applebee’s are looking to cash in with virtual sneakers and burgers . And a missed decimal point cost one very unlucky trader a cool $297,000.
The ‘fat finger’ story gets even more dystopian when you consider the buyer was probably a bot programmed to snap up NFTs listed below their market price. Professional traders already have a distinct advantage in the cryptocurrency market, paying higher fees for priority access and using bots to buy and sell in a volatile market. A small number of insiders are also reaping most of the big gains in the burgeoning market for NFTs. They do this by gaining priority access to exclusive ‘minting’ events, where they can purchase a new NFT as it is turned from a very-fungible digital file into an ostensibly 'non-fungible' digital asset. Users on the ‘whitelist’ make a profit about 75% of the time — otherwise it's just 20%.
All of this begs a very good question: why are users throwing billions of dollars into a rigged game? Well, art has always been a good way to hide dirty money, for one. And buying a digital document anonymously with crypto is a whole lot easier than convincing an art dealer to hand over a Dalí in exchange for a calico bag full of bloodied banknotes. The auction houses are already embracing NFTs in a big way — both Sotheby’s and Christie’s recorded upwards of $100m in NFT sales in 2021. Long-term, the ancient rivals will look to attract younger buyers with galleries and auctions in the metaverse, where people are apparently clamouring for a pair of Triple Black Air Huaraches.
Christmas jeer
Given his track record, it should come as no surprise that Boris Johnson's Plan B is turning out to be yet another debacle. The package is a series of restrictions aimed at curbing the fast-charging omicron variant. It is timely: the country reported a record 78,000 cases on Wednesday . It is sensible: masks in theatres, work-from-home guidance, and limited vaccine passport requirements. It is nothing new: the United Kingdom has already endured far more onerous limitations. And it is headed towards a cliff: the prime minister has lost control of his parliamentary colleagues.
To be fair, Plan B did pass a vote in the Commons - 369 to 126 . Unfortunately for Johnson, it wasn't his Tory colleagues who were voting for it. 100 of Johnson's backbenchers (including 13 former Cabinet ministers) rebelled — the bill only passed thanks to Labour votes. Everywhere one looks, Tory backbenchers are trying to trash Plan B on loosely freedom-y grounds. It seems party discipline in today's Conservative inner circle is now limited to ensuring a "proper spread" at a knees-up. The anti-public anti-health activists sitting on the government's side of the Commons are looking ahead to the 2024 election. A whisper campaign (read: constant press backgrounding) is being waged against the premier who is now viewed as a liability to the party .
The prime minister's poor standing with the electorate has finally dawned upon his colleagues. An agonising slowdown in reform, the quagmire of Brexit, a surfeit of personal scandals, and a messy trail of botched initiatives have left Johnson isolated, with only his rhetoric for company. And even that is now well understood to be a tapestry of lies, half-truths, and misrepresentations. The election is still two years away — that's time enough to steady the ship. But Downing Street is taking on water just trying to get to Christmas.
The best of times
The transformation of Hyde
London's Mayor, Sadiq Khan, is working with the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to radically re-wild one of the most densely populated metropolises on Earth. The manicured spaces of Hyde Park would be reimagined with "more wild spaces, more scrub, river rewiggling, and species introductions". Beavers and deer back in the suburbs — imagine that.
Sun chasers
On April, 28 NASA's Parker Solar Probe flew into the Sun's corona — it has since reentered twice. This is the first time a manmade object has touched the atmosphere of our star; even at a distance of 10 million kilometres from the surface the probe needs to be able to withstand temperatures of up to 999,000°C (1.8m°F). This is a child finding out what happens when they touch the stove, in maximal scale.
The worst of times
2021 Arctic Report Card
Not good . This week the World Meteorological Organisation confirmed that the heatwave of June 2020 resulted in the region's hottest-ever temperature . 38°C (100°F for our friends still on imperial measurements). As a WMO spokesperson said, that temperature was "more befitting the Mediterranean than the Arctic.
A slap shot to the face
No doubt you've seen the horrifying spectacle of Sioux Falls high-school teachers scrabbling on all fours in the middle of an ice hockey rink to scoop up $1 bills. The "Dash for Cash" promotion — devised by the hockey club and a local bank — was intended as a bit of community fun. Teachers could supplement their teaching supplies in a desperately underfunded school system - one dollar at a time. Comparisons to the South Korean show, Squid Game, are banal: this is as American as apple pie.
Weekend Reading
The image
The quote
"Santa Claus is an imaginary character. The red colour of his coat was chosen by Coca-Cola for advertising purposes."
– Roman Catholic Bishop Antonio Staglianò is doing his best to keep the youth of Sicily laser-focused on the self-resurrecting son of God at Christmas time. The Vatican's staunch counter-offensive against Coca-Cola Amatil is one of the lesser known fronts in the War on Christmas.
The numbers
Debris at 37,000ft
- The devastating 'Quad-State tornado' supercell that tore across the Midwest this week was historic in scale and toll. It struck Mayfield, Kentucky with such force that radar operators catalogued debris from the city being lifted 10km in the air — the same height that commercial airliners cruise at.
A $380,000,000 settlement
- The several hundred victims of serial predator Larry Nassar have reached a monumental settlement with USA Gymnastics, the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee, and their insurers. It is the culmination of a five-year case into how the institutions failed the girls in their care, and at points shielded the famed gymnastics coach.
The headline
"South Korean dairy brand apologises for controversial advert where women morph into cows" – The Evening Standard .
The special mention
There was quite the hullabaloo when TIME named Elon Musk as its 2021 Person Of The Year. But we'd recommend that you don't waste a single second of your precious time on this planet thinking about that. Instead, direct your thoughts to Kuttiyamma , the 104-year-old who this year fulfilled her lifelong dream of learning to read. She is our special mention. There is so much beauty in this world — if we can learn to get past the noise.
A few choice long-reads
- Malta is a sun-scorched island known for beaches, tight-knit families, and hawking European Union passports. To this list, Bloomberg Businessweek adds "shady online business".
- A monster of a read from The Atlantic on the myth of voter fraud. A timely and searing essay ahead of America's 2022 midterms.
- The Chinese-built port of Gwadar in Pakistan was held aloft as an emblem of Beijing's new place on the world stage. It hasn't worked. And Foreign Policy wants to know why.
