Greetings, Gnusies! Now that we’re only a few days from the end of 2023, it’s time to turn our backs on all the chaos and craziness of the past 12 months and look forward to all the progress we can make in 2024 if we all pitch in and help make it happen. Here’s to fresh starts and new victories in old battles!
My final GNR of the year will be a little different than usual, because my husband and I are entertaining family this week. I’ve selected a variety of stories that didn’t fit into earlier GNRs, usually because they were either hard to categorize or too long. I hope this will give you interesting reading to dip into for the next few days.
I apologize for not being able to read and respond to your comments this morning. Fortunately, you all know what to do! And I’ll stop by whenever I can today. ❤️
GOOD NEWS OVERVIEW
If you open just one link today, I hope it’s this one.
66 Good News Stories You Didn't Hear About in 2023
From Future Crunch:
Imagine if a child came home with their school report: an assortment of marks, ranging from good to bad. And then imagine if their parents ignored everything except the worst of those scores. No celebrations of success, no attempts at encouragement, just endless rounds of finger pointing about where the Fs came from, what they signify, and what they might mean for the future. That kind of behaviour would be abusive, not to mention the worst possible way to motivate someone. And yet that's exactly what the global media has been doing to all of us for the last 12 months.
The news is supposed to tell us what's happening in the world. It doesn't. It tells us what's going wrong. Thanks to a combination of commercial pressures, cognitive bias and cultural habits, news organisations have become modern-day doom machines, showcasing the worst of humanity, without highlighting any progress, healing or restoration. Yes, journalism is supposed to hold truth to power and when terrible things happen we shouldn't turn away. But when we only hear stories of doom, we fail to see the stories of possibility. We deny ourselves the opportunity to do better.
The American journalist Krista Tippett says that we're all fluent in the story of catastrophe and dysfunction, and what's needed are more of what she calls 'generative narratives.' This year, we found over 2,000 of those kinds of stories, and shared them with tens of thousands of our readers in a weekly email (we also squeezed in a TED talk). Not dog-on-a-surfboard, baby-survives-a-tornado stories, but genuine, world changing stuff about how millions of lives are improving, about human rights victories, diseases being eliminated, falling emissions, how vast swathes of our planet are being protected and how entire species have been saved.
We rounded up 400 of our favourites, and then crammed all of those again into this final list of 66. We're a tiny publication, a fraction of the size of real news organisations. Just think what a newsroom with proper resources could do? Imagine if this was part of the actual news? However, that's not the world we live in. Not yet. In the meantime, you've heard enough about the Fs. Read on to hear about all the As.
POLITICS
The Great Reordering
From Washington Monthly:
Sub-headline: “There can be no doubt now that an epochal shift is underway in how the economy—in America and across the globe—is governed. The mystery is how a moderate, conventional politician like Joe Biden engineered it.”
The pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and the U.S.-China conflict have changed [economic assumptions], of course. But so has Biden, who has led a kind of stealth revolution, the depth and profundity of which have yet to be fully understood by the media, the public, or, indeed, many elites in Washington, D.C. This is perhaps because we haven’t had a true economic paradigm shift in nearly half a century, since the era of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher overturned the New Deal/Keynesian paradigm that had reigned in the United States and much of the Western world for decades before. As Franklin Foer writes in his recent Biden biography, The Last Politician, “Where the past generation of Democratic presidents was deferential to markets, reluctant to challenge monopoly, indifferent to unions, and generally encouraging of globalization, Biden went in a different direction.” Rather than speaking to Goldman Sachs, Biden spoke to autoworkers.
While paradigm shifts take years, indeed decades, to play out, there’s no question that one is underway: A massive boom in manufacturing engineered with federal dollars. Aggressive antitrust lawsuits brought against the biggest tech behemoths. … International agreements on corporate tax evasion, and an even tougher stance on Chinese mercantilism than we saw during the Trump administration. Beyond this, the White House has begun laying out a powerful new post-neoliberal narrative. From Biden’s July 2021 address to Congress announcing the end of trickle-down economics, through to National Security Council Director Jake Sullivan’s April 2023 speech on building back better abroad and the call from USTR Tai last May for a “postcolonial” trade paradigm, a new political economy in America is taking shape. You can call it Bidenomics. You can call it a post-neoliberal world. You can call it “the new economics,” as some progressives who want to separate the changes that are afoot from a single president are inclined to do. But whatever you call it, it’s an epochal shift in how America—and possibly the world—works.
Whether this shift continues past 2024 is, of course, an unknown. What’s even more mysterious, and worth explaining, is how it is being engineered by perhaps the last national leader you’d expect: the “moderate” and “conventional” Joe Biden.
American democracy is cracking. These ideas could help repair it.
An unusually good piece by Dan Balz which actually encourages political activism. Is MSM finally getting it??
From The Washington Post (gift link):
Some of the most commonly cited ideas for structural change to U.S. democracy require amending the Constitution — eliminating the electoral college, for example. But in today’s divided America, changing the Constitution seems a nonstarter. Among major democracies, the U.S. Constitution is considered to be one of the hardest to amend, requiring a two-thirds majority vote of the House and Senate, or two-thirds of the states calling for one, and then ratification by three-fourths of the state legislatures.
Other ideas could be put in place through legislative action, but they also face steep hurdles given divided public opinion and a national government often gridlocked by narrow majorities and deeply conflicting agendas. Some are being given test drives in individual states as their backers seek a bigger foothold nationally. Some, like Michigan’s independent redistricting commission, could be replicated in other states if citizens there take action.
To many analysts, the work of dealing with structural impediments, while necessary, should not ignore the acute threats posed to U.S. democracy by former president Donald Trump, who in his campaign to return to the White House has proposed suspending the Constitution, exercising dictatorial powers and using government to punish opponents if he becomes president again. These analysts say work on both fronts is needed, carried out on separate tracks with differing timelines.
What follows are several of the proposals for systemic change that experts say are most worthy of discussion.
THE U.S.
What Should You Do With an Oil Fortune?
I think we’ve all wondered what we would do with a really significant amount of money. This long profile of a young Progressive who’s an heir to the Hunt oil fortune is a fascinating look at the complexity of that question.
From The New Yorker:
Let’s say you were born into a legacy that is, you have come to believe, ruining the world. What can you do? You could be paralyzed with guilt. You could run away from your legacy, turn inward, cultivate your garden. If you have a lot of money, you could give it away a bit at a time—enough to assuage your conscience, and your annual tax burden, but not enough to hamper your life style—and only to causes (libraries, museums, one or both political parties) that would not make anyone close to you too uncomfortable. Or you could just give it all away—to a blind trust, to the first person you pass on the sidewalk—which would be admirable: a grand gesture of renunciation in exchange for moral purity. But, if you believe that the world is being ruined by structural causes, you will have done little to challenge those structures.
When Leah Hunt-Hendrix was an undergraduate at Duke, in the early two-thousands, she wasn’t sure what to do with her privilege. She had grown up in an apartment on Fifth Avenue, and spent most summers in Dallas with her wealthy churchgoing grandmother. One afternoon, she wandered into a lecture by Stanley Hauerwas, a divinity-school professor whom Time had just named America’s “best” theologian. Hauerwas, as it happened, was also from Dallas; the son of a bricklayer, he could speak in the academic argot of a virtue ethicist or the salty style of a fire-and-brimstone preacher. He rejected the “ahistorical approach of liberal theory,” the assumption that each individual is an autonomous economic unit with a view from nowhere. Instead, as Hunt-Hendrix later put it, “we are born into traditions, and it becomes our task to keep making sense of the world through those traditions, improving them as we go.” Inequality was arguably the defining fact of contemporary American life, which struck Hunt-Hendrix as urgently, intolerably wrong. Hauerwas encouraged his students to reckon with the forces that had shaped their lives, even ones that were set in motion long before they were born.
THE WORLD
Climate change is driving a global youth revolution
A profoundly encouraging story.
From The Christian Science Monitor:
The Climate Generation looks like Atlas Sarrafoğlu, a boyish 16-year-old with a shy smile, Nike high tops, and a cardboard sign of accusation: “Your mistakes, our future.” He has it resting next to him by a park bench in Istanbul along the banks of the Bosporus, where growing up he played soccer and listened to rap music. ✂️
...we suspected there was more than gloom and doom to the Climate Generation’s shared experience of a changing world. So, for the past year, the two of us have traveled around the globe to talk to them.
And it turns out there is much more.
From the gleaming financial capital of Frankfurt to the sea-breeze coasts of Barbados, from the big skies of Montana to the waterlogged streets of Bangladesh, from the sunny countryside of Portugal to the windblown ice of the Arctic, a breathtaking transformation is underway.
Climate change is shaping a mindset revolution.
If the Industrial Revolution rippled across the globe and human consciousness with new definitions of progress, time, responsibility, and work, the climate crisis is redefining those conceptions. In our travels, we met innovators and regenerators, activists and adapters, conservationists and challengers. All of them, in their own ways, are pushing back against the silos in which we’ve understood our world in industry, environment, or geography. They are seizing on a crisis moment to tackle the inequalities and injustices that have long saddled their nations – crafting a new ethos about consumption, “progress,” and what it means to have a good life.
MEDICINE
In The Gut’s ‘Second Brain,’ Key Agents of Health Emerge
An eye-opening article that shows how complex our digestive systems are and how much we still need to learn about what goes on in our guts.
From Quanta Magazine:
From the moment you swallow a bite of food to the moment it exits your body, the gut is toiling to process this strange outside material. It has to break chunks down into small bits. It must distinguish healthy nutrients from toxins or pathogens and absorb only what is beneficial. And it does all this while moving the partially processed food one way through different factories of digestion — mouth, esophagus, stomach, through the intestines and out.
“Digestion is required for survival,” said Marissa Scavuzzo, a postdoctoral researcher at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio. “We do it every day, but also, if you really think about it, it sounds very foreign and alien.”
Breaking down food requires coordination across dozens of cell types and many tissues — from muscle cells and immune cells to blood and lymphatic vessels. Heading this effort is the gut’s very own network of nerve cells, known as the enteric nervous system, which weaves through the intestinal walls from the esophagus down to the rectum. This network can function nearly independently from the brain; indeed, its complexity has earned it the nickname “the second brain.” And just like the brain, it’s made up of two kinds of nervous system cells: neurons and glia.
Glia, once thought to be mere glue that fills the space between neurons, were largely ignored in the brain for much of the 20th century. Clearly, neurons were the cells that made things happen: Through electrical and chemical signaling, they materialize our thoughts, feelings and actions. But in the last few decades, glia have shed their identity as passive servants. Neuroscientists have increasingly discovered that glia play physiological roles in the brain and nervous system that once seemed reserved for neurons.
A similar glial reckoning is now happening in the gut.
SCIENCE
The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong
A nice long deep dive into all the reasons why it’s “time to bury Man the Hunter for good.”
From Scientific American:
Even if you're not an anthropologist, you've probably encountered one of this field's most influential notions, known as Man the Hunter. The theory proposes that hunting was a major driver of human evolution and that men carried this activity out to the exclusion of women. It holds that human ancestors had a division of labor, rooted in biological differences between males and females, in which males evolved to hunt and provide, and females tended to children and domestic duties. It assumes that males are physically superior to females and that pregnancy and child-rearing reduce or eliminate a female's ability to hunt.
Man the Hunter has dominated the study of human evolution for nearly half a century and pervaded popular culture. It is represented in museum dioramas and textbook figures, Saturday morning cartoons and feature films. The thing is, it's wrong.
Mounting evidence from exercise science indicates that women are physiologically better suited than men to endurance efforts such as running marathons. This advantage bears on questions about hunting because a prominent hypothesis contends that early humans are thought to have pursued prey on foot over long distances until the animals were exhausted. Furthermore, the fossil and archaeological records, as well as ethnographic studies of modern-day hunter-gatherers, indicate that women have a long history of hunting game. We still have much to learn about female athletic performance and the lives of prehistoric women. Nevertheless, the data we do have signal that it is time to bury Man the Hunter for good.
ENVIRONMENT
A juice company dumped orange peels in a national park. Here's what it looks like now.
A stunning and totally unexpected environmental success story.
From Upworthy:
In 1997, ecologists Daniel Janzen and Winnie Hallwachs approached an orange juice company in Costa Rica with an off-the-wall idea.
In exchange for donating a portion of unspoiled, forested land to the Área de Conservación Guanacaste — a nature preserve in the country's northwest — the park would allow the company to dump its discarded orange peels and pulp, free of charge, in a heavily grazed, largely deforested area nearby.
One year later, one thousand trucks poured into the national park, offloading over 12,000 metric tons of sticky, mealy, orange compost onto the worn-out plot.
The site was left untouched and largely unexamined for over a decade. A sign was placed to ensure future researchers could locate and study it.
16 years later, Janzen dispatched graduate student Timothy Treuer to look for the site where the food waste was dumped. Treuer initially set out to locate the large placard that marked the plot — and failed. ✂️
FOOD
30 of the all-time best Washington Post recipes, according to readers
I’m a sucker for “favorite recipe” lists, and this one has something for everyone.
From The Washington Post (gift link):
ART
Drip Painting Was Actually Invented by a Ukrainian Grandmother… Not Jackson Pollock
A fascinating excerpt from a book by art history professor Noah Charney called “Brushed Aside: The Untold Story of Women in Art” which I’m looking forward to reading. BTW, Lit Hub’s newsletters are a great way to discover books you might otherwise miss.
From LitHub:
We’re supposed to think that Jackson Pollock invented drip painting, and with it the American branch of Abstract Expressionism. He did, didn’t he? So say Life and Time magazine and countless art history books and professors in dimly lit lecture halls, their brows tinted by the light from the projector, their words backed by the windy hum of its motor. The first drip, or all-around painting—made by the revolutionary technique of splattering and dripping paint on the fly while approaching the canvas from all angles, as it lay on the floor—was Pollock’s 1947 Galaxy. Wasn’t it?
It makes for a good story. Pollock was the macho, hard-drinking, Wyoming-raised cowboy of postwar American art—Hemingway with a paint bucket. Painting within the lines, the traditional way, wasn’t manly enough for a rebel like him. And he certainly made a name for himself. He remains one of the two most famous American painters, along with Andy Warhol. Americans, especially American men in the 1940s and 1950s, blazed trails and cast their shadows across the globe. This is the narrative that we’ve been taught.
And it’s all wrong. Or rather, it’s been airbrushed and skewed to fit this idea that men, particularly American men, are the trailblazers. This is so in just about every sphere, but in our case, we’re talking about art.
"Waiting for Victory" - Children's Art from Ukraine
From RAZOM:
If you would like to support the work of RAZOM, here’s the donation link: www.razomforukraine.org/...
ANIMALS
Rosy and Rascal have chosen their favorite animal videos of the past year for you to enjoy again — or for the first time, in case you missed any of them.
Dogs getting on a bus
How a cat helps kids getting glasses for the first time feel comfortable
Cat Is Obsessed With His Tiny Love Bird
And the best for last — Nubs!!
DONATIONS
I usually focus on donations to political nonprofits in the "Do Some Good” section of my GNRs, but since many of us make donations to a wide variety of nonprofits at the end of the year, today I’ll give you a list of my favorite non-political nonprofits in alphabetical order:
MUSIC
To close this year-end GNR, I’ve chosen a stunning live performance of “L’inverno” (Winter) from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, played on original Baroque instruments by violinist Cynthia Miller Freivogel and Voices of Music. I hope you enjoy it!
❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️
Thanks to all of you for your smarts, your hearts, and
your faithful attendance at our daily Gathering of the Herd.
❤️💙 RESIST, PERSIST, REBUILD, REJOICE! 💙❤️