@Nicolas Niarchos, "Buried Dreams," The New Yorker, May 31, 2021. - "Southern Congo sits atop an estimated 3.4 million metric tons of cobalt, almost half the world's known supply." "In Congo, more than eighty-five per cent of the people work informally, in precarious jobs that pay little, and the cost of living is remarkably high."
"According to a recent study in "The Lancet,' women in some southern Congo 'had metal concentrations that are among the highest ever reported for pregnant women." "Children who work in the mines are often drugged, in order to suppress hunger. Sister Catherine Mutindi, the founder of Good Shepherd Kolwezi, a Catholic charity that tries to stop child labor, said, 'If the kids don't make enough money, they have no food for the whole day.' "
"Copper has been mined in Congo since at least the fourth century, and the deposits were known to Portuguese slave-traders from the fifth century onward. Cobalt is a byproduct of copper production." One of Niarchos's sources said that as many as a hundred and seventy thousand 'creuseurs' work informally in his province. Creuseurs around Kolwezi frequently complained to Niarchos that Chinese-owed mines had replicated the harsh conditions of China's own mining industry.
#Andrew Maranty, "The Left Turn," The New Yorker, May 31, 2021. - "The mission of Justice Democrats is to push for as much left-populist legislation as Washington will accommodate." "Annette Gordon-Reed, a historian and law professor at Harvard, has said that since the Reagan era, "many citizens have come to expect ' a government that can't do anything except cut taxes."
"Obama was stuck within a preexisting order, but Biden is inheriting a more fluid moment." "In other countries, parties decide which policies they favor, then select candidates who will implement them; in the United States, the parties are more like empty vessels whose agendas are continually contested by internal factions."
#Nicholas Lemann, "Regulate This," The New Yorker, June 7, 2021. "In the early days of the automobile, efforts to reduce driving fatalities focused on highway design and driver education, not on the car itself. They aimed at preventing car crashes from taking place. The 'second collision' refers to the way injuries occur when an accident does take place: it's the collision of passengers with the interior of the car."
"An N.H.T.S. report from 2015 estimated that between 1960 and 2012, auto safety measures had saved 613,501 lives, and that the fatality rate per mile of travel fell by eighty-one per cent...."
#Louis Menard, "User Manuals," The New Yorker, June 7, 2021. - "Canons define a tradition, a culture, a civilization, by excluding things that don't belong to it." "There are overlapping literary domains, actually, since people tend to believe, not unreasonably, that knowing how to do things for yourself also makes you feel good about yourself." [The 'canon' in the title of Jess McHugh's 'Americanon' (Dutton) consists of thirteen Americanon books....] 'Self-help, she says, 'is in some ways the most American genre of literature. Still, as Beth Blum has pointed out in 'The Self-Help Compulsion' (2020), reading books for life advise is an ancient practice."
"Since the United States was founded on the principle of 'no aristocracy of birth,' which was supposed to distinguish the New World from the Old, it makes sense that how to, and self-help should be central to American life -- and that a book about those books should be called 'Americanon.' " "One reason the 'Americanon' books, and books like them, have been so popular in the United States may be that they fill a vacuum left by the absence of civic education, or that McHugh calls 'civic religious...." We should not want all Americans to think alike.
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