The Atlantic: “Our Cynicism about Afghanistan Comes at a Cost”

Withdrawing completely from Afghanistan is a decision I don’t agree with, even if it’s one that fits the mood of our country (or the slick optics of a war’s ending on the anniversary of the attacks that prompted it). To simply wash our hands of an entire country and its people is deeply cynical. Currently, approximately 2,500 U.S. troops are serving in Afghanistan, a fraction of the 100,000 troops serving there when I left a decade ago. In 2020, more U.S. troops died in training accidents at Camp Pendleton in California than died in combat in Afghanistan. Signaling our commitment by keeping a small U.S. force there wouldn’t prevent every attack, but it would go a long way toward stabilizing the region, and allowing the Afghans to finish the fight against the Taliban for themselves. But the Biden administration has made its choice and doesn’t appear likely to reverse course, no matter how many schoolgirls the Taliban or the Islamic State massacre.

The events in Kabul last weekend teach us that our cynicism comes at a cost, to Afghanistan and to the U.S. In the months ahead, we will see more images like those out of Kabul. Our current hard-edged national mood will endure for only so long. Eventually, we will have to reckon with why we chose this path, one that allows girls to die in the very schools we encouraged them to attend. If we as a country are going to actually “come home” from Afghanistan, we’re going to need to find a better answer than Our effort there at the end was hopeless. Because cynicism won’t allow us to move on. It never does.

Elliot Ackerman

Following the announcement of a complete withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan later this year, I went back and read the investigation published in The Washington Post in late 2019 – about half of it anyway, since it has six sizeable parts. It is truly remarkable how badly the situation in Afghanistan was mismanaged by several consecutive US administrations, from the lack of clear strategic goals, to pumping endless funds into unsustainable infrastructure projects, to a general lack of understanding of the culture and society – and how army generals tried to conceal the lack of meaningful progress.

The New York Times: “Kazuo Ishiguro sees what the Future is Doing to Us”

Speaking of his comparatively small output, Ishiguro said: I don’t have any regrets about it. In some ways, I suppose, I’m just not that dedicated to my vocation. I expect it’s because writing wasn’t my first choice of profession. It’s almost something I fell back on because I couldn’t make it as a singer-songwriter. It’s not something I’ve wanted to do every minute of my life. It’s what I was permitted to do. So, you know, I do it when I really want to do it, but otherwise I don’t.

When he does want to do it, he is capable of going flat out. He produced a first draft of “The Remains of the Day” in a four-week “crash”, during which he wrote from morning until night, stopping only for meals. The practice served him well at the time — he and MacDougall needed the money a new advance would bring — but Ishiguro’s crashing days are now firmly behind him. He has grown suspicious of the modern office and its imperative to be constantly on call. The way our capitalist society is organized, it accommodates the workplace as a kind of alibi, he said. If you’re trying to avoid difficult areas in your emotional life, you can just say, Sorry, I’ve got too much work on right now. We’re invited to disappear into our professional commitments.

Giles Harvey

I must agree with these reflections on the modern office, but at the same time they come off rather hypocritical and entitled coming from a man who did not have to work in an office for the past 40 years, like the rest of us. As others have come to realize about tech entrepreneurs, a large part of their success is not necessarily based on extraordinary abilities and innovation, but rather on the right set of circumstances. In this interview, after admitting that writing is not even his main interest, that is how Kazuo Ishiguro sounds: a man who has exploited favorable circumstances by putting in a minimal amount of effort. And, in my opinion at least, this lack of interest is well reflected in the declining quality of his work.

The Atlantic: “How China Sees the World”

Leaving China, I was even more convinced than I had been before that a dramatic shift in U.S. policy was overdue. The Forbidden City was supposed to convey confidence in China’s national rejuvenation and its return to the world stage as the proud Middle Kingdom. But for me it exposed the fears as well as the ambitions that drive the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to extend China’s influence along its frontiers and beyond, and to regain the honor lost during the century of humiliation. The fears and ambitions are inseparable. They explain why the Chinese Communist Party is obsessed with control—both internally and externally.

The party’s leaders believe they have a narrow window of strategic opportunity to strengthen their rule and revise the international order in their favor—before China’s economy sours, before the population grows old, before other countries realize that the party is pursuing national rejuvenation at their expense, and before unanticipated events such as the coronavirus pandemic expose the vulnerabilities the party created in the race to surpass the United States and realize the China dream. The party has no intention of playing by the rules associated with international law, trade, or commerce. China’s overall strategy relies on co-option and coercion at home and abroad, as well as on concealing the nature of China’s true intentions. What makes this strategy potent and dangerous is the integrated nature of the party’s efforts across government, industry, academia, and the military.

H. R. McMaster

I was ready to dismiss the statements in this article because the author was a member of the Trump administration in its early years, and thus more likely to support its policies of portraying China as the primary US adversary, but certain remarks sound awfully close to the truth, such as the quote below about the United States:

The Guardian: “How maverick rewilders are trying to turn back the tide of extinction”

Over the last 70 years, 98% of wildflower meadows in England and Wales have been destroyed; three-quarters of ponds and heaths have vanished; half the remaining fragments of ancient woods have been obliterated. The creatures inside this habitat have gone too: since 1970, more than half of Britain’s farmland birds have disappeared, while a quarter of mammals are endangered and three-quarters of butterfly species have declined. Overall one in 10 species are threatened with extinction; 500 species have already disappeared from England. Most alarmingly, this dramatic loss of biodiversity has accelerated in the last decade. During the same period, government funding for British wildlife and the environment has been cut by 30%.

Can one individual do anything about an extinction crisis caused by the way we live, farm and build? White is doing something. For almost all of his 61 years, he has laboured mostly alone; for the last 10 years, he has been breeding native butterflies from his modest terraced house in the East Midlands for release across the country. He is part of a small, scattered band of secret breeders – or “introductionists” as they prefer – who have taken it on themselves to bring back wild species that have fallen victim to what one nature writer calls “the great thinning” of non-human life.

Patrick Barkham

Wonderful initiative in the UK from a small group of passionate people, working to introduce locally extinct butterflies back into the environment. While I admire their commitment to this worthy cause, I am unsure that their efforts will make a noticeable impact in the long term. The major issue behind the disappearance of these species is habitat decline. As long as this is not properly addressed, the butterflies will not survive for more than a couple of seasons, and new populations would have to be periodically reintroduced in favorable areas.

The Verge: “Airbnb’s CEO thinks the platform can replace your landlord”

At the same time, Airbnb is expanding its idea of travel beyond short vacations. Chesky says that nearly a quarter of Airbnb bookings are “long term”, or 28 days and longer. “Millions and millions of people” are staying and living at Airbnb listings on a monthly basis, he says, and in cities like New York, that figure is more like 60 percent. He views this as a a shift from travel to “living”, which has been propelled by people discovering they do not need to be tethered to one location to live and work, per the company’s latest earnings report.

I think eventually in the future people will start paying for rent the way they pay for cable television, or for Netflix, you pay on a month-to-month basis, he says. He didn’t mention how this could impact tenants, like those who prefer long-term rentals because it locks in their rent at a set price and offers legal protections. The idea is that more people are going to want flexibility and the ability to parachute into a destination and live like a local. Chesky says that Airbnb has dealt with evictions and squatters in the past and hasn’t found any “intractable issue” that can’t be handled.

Ashley Carman

Not quite sure how this ‘parachuting’ is supposed to work once you have a partner, children, pets, or simply more belongings than you can fit in a luggage. Working from home has introduced a new degree of flexibility, but most companies will probably revert to a hybrid model with regular visits to the office once their employees are vaccinated, so I doubt there will be much room for ‘parachuting’ in a couple of months. But hey, Chesky cannot claim the title of visionary tech CEO unless he lives in a parallel reality, with little connection to the real world.

STAT: “How the Covid pandemic ends: Scientists look to the past to see the future”

How did those pandemics end? The viruses didn’t go away; a descendent of the Spanish flu virus, the modern H1N1, circulates to this day, as does H3N2. Humans didn’t develop herd immunity to them, either. That’s a phenomenon by which a pathogen stops spreading because so many people are protected against it, because they’ve already been infected or vaccinated.

Instead, the viruses that caused these pandemics underwent a transition. Or more to the point, we did. Our immune systems learned enough about them to fend off the deadliest manifestations of infection, at least most of the time. Humans and viruses reached an immunological détente. Instead of causing tsunamis of devastating illness, over time the viruses came to trigger small surges of milder illness. Pandemic flu became seasonal flu.

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That immune system training will likely turn future Covid-19 infections into the equivalent of a cold, the authors concluded. Over time, as a degree of protection becomes more standard in adults, the people who will most commonly catch Covid will be young kids, in whom infections even now are rarely serious. That’s the pattern with human coronavirus infections.

I think the scenario… remains the most likely one, said Marc Lipsitch, an infectious diseases epidemiologist at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. That essentially, almost everybody has some form of immunity from natural infection and/or vaccination and/or one followed by the other, and that that will persist long enough so that they don’t get really sick when they get it again. And then we transition to endemicity.

Helen Branswell

Interesting historical perspective, but with big caveats: all pandemics of the past century were caused by influenza strains, not by a coronavirus, which may significantly change the interactions with the human immune system and the timeline to becoming endemic. Scientists are still unsure how long immunity against SARS-CoV-2 lasts, either from natural infection or vaccination. The possible emergence of more aggressive mutations, able to evade available vaccines and natural immunity, would also upset any estimates of a pandemic endpoint.

The New York Times: “Censorship, Surveillance and Profits: A Hard Bargain for Apple in China”

The entrance to Apple’s new data center, which the company hoped to complete next month. Keith Bradsher/The New York Times

Behind the scenes, Apple has constructed a bureaucracy that has become a powerful tool in China’s vast censorship operation. It proactively censors its Chinese App Store, relying on software and employees to flag and block apps that Apple managers worry could run afoul of Chinese officials, according to interviews and court documents.

A Times analysis found that tens of thousands of apps have disappeared from Apple’s Chinese App Store over the past several years, more than previously known, including foreign news outlets, gay dating services and encrypted messaging apps. It also blocked tools for organizing pro-democracy protests and skirting internet restrictions, as well as apps about the Dalai Lama.

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U.S. law has long prohibited American companies from turning over data to Chinese law enforcement. But Apple and the Chinese government have made an unusual arrangement to get around American laws.

In China, Apple has ceded legal ownership of its customers’ data to Guizhou-Cloud Big Data, or GCBD, a company owned by the government of Guizhou Province, whose capital is Guiyang. Apple recently required its Chinese customers to accept new iCloud terms and conditions that list GCBD as the service provider and Apple as “an additional party”. Apple told customers the change was to improve iCloud services in China mainland and comply with Chinese regulations.

Jack Nicas, Raymond Zhong & Daisuke Wakabayashi

Apple likes to regularly repeat in their press releases how it complies with local legislation – until the company can find a convenient loophole to bypass it, as it has done numerous times to evade taxes. Most of these details have been reported for years, from internal self-censorship of any Chinese criticism – going as far as firing an employee because he failed to remove an AppStore app – to public silence regarding Chinese surveillance and human rights abuses.