The Top 5: Nuclear weapons test ban, forever chemicals, climate protests, recycling, baby names
Welcome to the latest edition of the Top 5 articles we’ve read this week. Each week, we read dozens of articles in the hope we find essays and reporting that speak to big ideas, trends, future looks, and incredible human stories. We hope you enjoy these articles, and do always let us know if you have a suggestion or a recommendation!
Before we get to the top five, we’d encourage you to checkout Michael’s new longform essay in the respected journal National Affairs that draws on the second chapter of The Spirit of Our Politics on “the disappearance of moral knowledge.
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The Top 5 articles for your week:
“The Toll” (NYT)
Because W.J. Hennigan argues against resuming nuclear weapons testing in the United States.
A return to that earlier era is certain to have costly consequences. The United States and the Soviet Union might have narrowly avoided mutual destruction, but there was a nuclear war: The blitz of testing left a wake of illness, displacement and destruction, often in remote locations where marginalized communities had no say over what happened on their own land. Millions of people living in those places — Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan; Reggane, Algeria; Montebello, Australia; the Republic of Kiribati — became unwitting casualties to an arms race run by a handful of rich, powerful nations.
“Maybe Don’t Spray-Paint Stonehenge” (The Atlantic)
Because Tyler Austin Harper looks at the spate of recent climate protests by environmentalist groups.
Years from now, in a hotter, wetter, more broken world, making fine-grained distinctions between the Stonehenge and Stansted protests might look like pointless quibbling. I find it hard to imagine that members of my infant child’s generation will look back on the current moment and think that either of these acts of protest were too extreme. (They may well think that they were not extreme enough.) I’m inclined to greet the critics of the Stonehenge protest with a bit of a shrug: The site was ultimately left unharmed, just as the protesters planned. At the same time, climate activists, and those who support them, should think strategically about where they shine their spotlight and whose ire they’re attempting to draw.
“How 3M Executives Convinced a Scientist the Forever Chemicals She Found in Human Blood Were Safe” (Pro Publica)
Because Sharon Lerner investigates the origins of forever chemical research and how it was covered up.
Between 1951 and 2000, 3M produced at least 100 million pounds of PFOS and chemicals that degrade into PFOS. This is roughly the weight of the Titanic. After the late ’70s, when 3M scientists established that the chemical was toxic in animals and was accumulating in humans, it produced millions of pounds per year…In 2022, 3M said that it would stop making PFAS and would “work to discontinue the use of PFAS across its product portfolio,” by the end of 2025 — a pledge that it called “another example of how we are positioning 3M for continued sustainable growth.” But it acknowledged that more than 16,000 of its products still contained PFAS.
“Recycling Plastic Is a Dangerous Waste of Time” (Quillette)
Because Frank Celia details emerging environmental research on recycling. This is an excellent essay to read after the one above from Pro Publica!
According to an emerging field of study, the facilities that recycle plastic have been spewing massive amounts of toxins called microplastics into local waterways, soil, and air for decades. In other words, the very industry created to solve the plastic-waste problem has only succeeded in making it worse, possibly exponentially so…If the research is even close to accurate, and to date it has not been substantively challenged, the implications for waste management policies across the globe will be game-changing.
“The mysterious tyranny of trendy baby names” (Washington Post)
Because Daniel Wolfe looks at baby naming conventions and the search for individualism.
People think they’re choosing something totally unique, but they do it in a way that winds up moving with the zeitgeist. As a result, names have actually gotten less distinctive over time, with nearly half of all baby names now following identifiable suffix trends — a phenomenon Wattenberg calls “lockstep individualism.”
ICYMI on The Morning Five and CCPL’s new podcast For the Good of the Public:
The Morning Five: June 17, 2024
The Morning Five: June 18, 2024
The Morning Five: June 20, 2024
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