1843 Media Bias for Past 90 Days

What if we’ve forgotten how to socialise?

During a rare excursion to a clothes shop I took last month, an older woman walked in, looked around at the other shoppers and exclaimed, “humans!” It was an unusual moment of bonding with strangers. Mostly I just hold my breath as people squeeze past me at the supermarket.
1843     Feb 26, 2021

Weapons of mass obstruction: protest symbols, from rubber ducks to pussyhats

unrest, conflicts and war

How does a group of people signal its displeasure? With whatever it has to hand. Sometimes, with the hand itself. The precise method is less important than the numbers. If a crowd can raise a salute or a wooden spoon or a plastic toy, this tells the authorities that other forms of resistance are also possible. Anything, it seems, can be freighted with rebellion: in 2014 police in Bangkok began arresting demonstrators who turned public sandwich-eating into an anti-authoritarian gesture (when protests were banned, pro-democracy activists took to holding sedate picnics instead).
1843     Feb 24, 2021

The barber cutting through vaccine scepticism

health

Covid-19 has left its mark on the Shop Spa barbers. Anti-bacterial wipes and paper towels have joined the bottles of unguents cluttering work stations. The chairs and sofa where customers normally wait have been stacked up and taped off, in accordance with coronavirus regulations. Barbers wear face masks, except when they’re ribbing each other – then they pull them down over their chins. The pandemic is serious business, sure. But sometimes you have to be able to joke around.
1843     Feb 22, 2021

She was trafficked into a giant brothel. Now she runs it

1k 🔥       crime, law and justice

The light was still dim when Monowara Begum (pictured) shuffled into her sandals and began her morning patrol. With a slight wheeze, the 44-year-old paced the alleyways, scowling behind gold-rimmed glasses as she listened for sounds of trouble coming from within the corrugated-metal and cinder-block buildings. A foul-smelling stream of sewage and used condoms ran between the makeshift homes. Several times, she flicked a bangled wrist to disperse a cloud of flies. Her other hand was tense, ready to grab a wooden stick if a situation called for it.
1843     Feb 19, 2021

How the iPhone killed the custom ringtone

Tech

It isn’t often that a king tells a president, “Why don’t you just shut up?” But at a summit in Santiago in November 2007, Juan Carlos, then king of Spain, lost his cool when Venezuela’s president Hugo Chávez called a former Spanish prime minister a fascist. These days such a catty remark would generate a multitude of memes within seconds. Yet 14 years ago few people had the skills for a YouTube remix and Twitter had only 50,000 users. Juan Carlos went viral in what now seems like the quaintest of fashions: as a custom ringtone for mobile phones. Half a million people in Spain downloaded a recording of the outburst, as did many in Venezuela (where the recording had to be voiced by actors to avoid slander). For weeks, mobiles in the Spanish-speaking world blared out, “Por qué no te callas?”
1843     Feb 17, 2021

From doomscrolling to zombie-boxes: a guide to screen-time slang

science and technology

Many of us are spending more time in the virtual world than the real one these days. Birthday parties, meetings and classes are all being held inside tiny rectangles. And after a long day staring at a screen, many of us replace the work computer with another one. This constitutes thrilling entertainment in lockdown.
1843     Feb 15, 2021

The alien hunter of Harvard

There are almost two dozen observatories dotted across Hawaii. The dry, thin air atop the volcanoes of the archipelago makes this an ideal place to gaze into the night sky. Over the past decade, the telescopes here have probed deep into neighbouring solar systems, transforming our understanding of the galaxy. Many used to think that Earth was an anomaly within a cosmic void. Now astronomers have identified thousands of planets and reckon that the Milky Way is filled with billions more, many of them similar to ours.
1843     Feb 11, 2021

I’m spending more time than ever with my children. No one is enjoying it

38k 🔥       social issue

Some time ago, during a brief period of lockdown de-escalation, I went out for pizza with my seven-year-old son. It should have been a chance to relax but as we ate, I couldn’t help wondering whether it was a good idea for the two of us to be sitting indoors within viral range of other unmasked diners who were chatting, laughing and opening their gaping maws. What was the ventilation scenario? How quickly could we make good our escape from this potentially hazardous situation? Between these anxious distractions and my son’s monomaniacal focus on his pizza, we didn’t talk much. But at one point, he took an unhurried draft of his beverage, leaned back in his seat, looked at me with an expression of unclouded satisfaction and told me that this was the greatest night of his life. The fact that it was shortly after 5pm only added potency to his declaration.
1843     Feb 10, 2021

Valentine’s Day: how chocolate became the food of love

Even in a pandemic – perhaps particularly in a pandemic – nothing can stop the onslaught of Valentine’s Day adverts. Goods of all shapes and sizes briefly morph into heart-shaped objects. All manner of food is coloured red or sold as a more romantic version of its former self (spicy “love sausage”, anyone?). Yet when the pressure is on to express our passion, many of us fall back on a Valentine’s staple: chocolate, the ultimate food of love.
1843     Feb 08, 2021

Myanmar: “A coup is worse than covid. I’ve lived through three”

disaster and accident

Maung Kyaw is hunched over his key-cutting machine, perched on the pavement in front of a bubble-tea stall and a tourist hostel. In his pink shirt and blue-and-orange-check lungyi, he has the same, slight build as the old men in my family, the result of decades of hardship. Only in the past ten years, after the government began to liberalise the economy, have the middle classes in Myanmar been able to gorge on fried chicken and sugary snacks. Even now, many people still go hungry.
1843     Feb 05, 2021

The throne behind the power: from Putin’s toilet brush to Trump’s golden bowl

art and culture

We know how Vladimir Putin would like us to think of him: President Eternal, shirtless in khaki combat pants, galloping over the Urals in search of a bear to wrestle. We also know the areas of his life he would prefer to remain in a blur of unknowing – his wealth, his relationship status, his tally of children. We can be fairly sure, I think, that he takes little pleasure in the image dumped into the Russian imagination by Alexei Navalny, the Novichok-proof and now-jailed leader of the Anti-Corruption Foundation. Vladimir Vladimirovich, trousers gathered at his ankles, piping a whorl of excrement into a toilet bowl, flanked by a symbol of cartoonish decadence – an $850 lavatory brush.
1843     Feb 04, 2021

A house redivided: how the pandemic changed our homes

health

Exactly 40 years ago, Faith Popcorn, one of the first people to style herself as a futurist, coined a new meaning for the word “cocooning”. She used it to describe the ambiance sought by 1980s suburbanites as they slouched on their rhino-sized sofas in front of their rhino-sized TVs. In Popcorn’s folktale, the drugs and dancing of the 1970s gave way to a new prestigious pastime: fatigue. Exhausted cocooners, hellbent on dodging the disco, headed for their dens.
1843     Feb 01, 2021

Ye olde Substack: publishing’s hot new business model has 17th-century origins

Business

As Twitter and Facebook become more acrimonious and less trusted, an older means to get information has made a comeback: the email newsletter. Chances are that newsletters make up a larger part of your media diet than they did a couple of years ago. You may even be paying for some of them.
1843     Jan 28, 2021

February/March 2021

1843     Jan 27, 2021

Gulp! The secret economics of food delivery

economy and finances

Ertugrul Elmas reckoned that a career designing fabrics would be a safe bet. Trends come and go but people always need trousers. He failed to appreciate that clothes could be made anywhere. When his employer moved its factories from Turkey to China in 2000, Elmas emigrated to London and found work in the textile industry. For five years, he earned a good living overseeing a cloth manufacturer in Romania. But after the country joined the European Union in 2007, many workers emigrated and the garment industry collapsed. Elmas decided to enter the restaurant business instead. After all, people would always need a good place to eat.
1843     Jan 26, 2021

Coronavirus has robbed me of petty annoyances

crime, law and justice

I belong to that infuriating group of people who regard the pandemic as a blessing in disguise. No more commutes, no more trips to the office, no more dinner parties. What could be better? Some time ago I came to the conclusion that the ideal life would be conducted physically in the 21st century (not least for the dentistry) but intellectually in the 19th century – with an endless diet of Wagner, Tolstoy, George Eliot and, for light relief, Trollope and Dickens.
1843     Jan 25, 2021

Sorry Scotland, haggis is actually English

When Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, appeared on the “Daily Show” in 2015, she was keen to talk about Scottish independence. Her party, the Scottish National Party, had just performed unexpectedly well in the UK general election, winning almost every seat in Scotland. Jon Stewart, the host, had a more pressing question for her: “What is haggis?”
1843     Jan 21, 2021

Fear and hope on Biden’s inauguration day

1k 🔥       social issue

I spent the evening after Barack Obama’s first inauguration with sanitation workers in Washington, DC. In 2009 I was too junior a reporter to receive any invitations to the inaugural balls and I wanted to see how my home town tidied itself up after the festivities. Two things stand out in my mind, 12 years on: the pride of the workers, all of whom, I think, were African-American; and the fact that, amid all the whirling rubbish on that freezing night, I didn’t spot a single discarded image of the president. Everyone had taken their posters home.
1843     Jan 21, 2021