 Fear factors The Princeton researcher Rory Truex, a China expert, has had to abort trips to the country multiple times in the past and hasn’t been able to visit for several years: On occasion, he has emailed friends and contacts of his in China to inform them of his decision to avoid travel. Now, he notes forlornly, colleagues in Europe are writing similar notes to him about visiting the US. “The risk of a trip to the States just wasn’t worth it,” one fellow academic told him, fearful of the litany of headlines of travelers being detained or turned away at the American border. The US, Truex argues, has in effect imposed a “fear tariff,” deterring “people, and the ideas they carry with them.” At a recent conference, Chinese researchers visiting the US urged their American colleagues to “be braver” and travel to China much as their counterparts had done to enter the US. The comment irked Truex, “as there seemed to be a false equivalence underlying it.” Yet, he concluded: “Fear tariffs are a feature of the authoritarian world — places like China, Russia, North Korea create barriers to outsiders, deterring critical voices from entering. The American fear tariff is nowhere near the levels in those countries, but it is no longer zero.” Farm war Ukraine is blessed with extraordinarily fertile soil, among the reasons it was a major global supplier of agricultural goods before Russia’s 2022 invasion. Yet since then — quite aside from the enormous death toll that has resulted — Ukraine’s soil has been devastated, dealing incalculable damage to the country, the international food system, and the global climate, because soil overall stores more carbon than the atmosphere and vegetation combined. Restoring Ukraine’s will require several steps, and cost at least $20 billion, according to a new study. Incredibly, those figures may understate the complexity of the problem facing the country’s agricultural sector, Thin Lei Win noted in her food-focused newsletter: Ukraine’s soil was in trouble pre-2022 because of intensive farming. “And when the war stops and the soil is being somehow regenerated,” a researcher told her, “there will probably be an incentive for many people in Ukraine to not necessarily go to more sustainable agriculture, but to maybe go even more intensive, because, you know, there’s a country to rebuild.” Dead reckoning What does it mean to die? The answer used to be fairly straightforward: When you stopped breathing and your heart stopped beating, you were dead. But since the middle of the 20th century, it has become less clear-cut. The invention of mechanical respirators, which could inflate your lungs if you stopped breathing, and cardiopulmonary bypass machines, which kept blood flowing without the heart’s input, blurred the lines. Now, patients can be kept alive for weeks by draining their blood, passing it through an artificial lung, and returning it. “These once unimaginably futuristic technologies have severed the definition of death from its origins,” says the neuroscientist Ariel Zelznikow-Johnston in an extract from his new book. “Where it will finally settle is not obvious,” because there is no suggestion that technological advance will cease. While our current definition involves the death of the brain, it seems that the connections between our brain cells remain for many hours after even that, and could in theory be restored — meaning the person, and their memories, could. “A philosophically rigorous replacement for current death definitions,” says Zelznikow-Johnston, “is needed before this technological trend develops any further.” |
