Ten Things, August 2023

The heartbreaking destruction of Cairo’s iconic gardens

Along the street where I grew up, a 1-kilometer stretch of verdant Nile bank with 100-year-old trees has been razed to make way for a strip mall featuring some three dozen American-style cafes. Across the river, gardens, where as a child I collected flowers to press, are now a string of multilevel retail complexes alongside a gas station with blinking neon lights.

WAPO

TK9 RELEASED

https://goodlight.us/writing/tk9/tk9.html

Kenya PROTESTS - Thomas Mukoya/Reuters

Pulitzer material

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/20/world/africa/kenya-protests-tax-hikes.html

Best/Worst Flight Ever

When we landed, the drunk man woke up and hobbled to the bathroom. I took my phone out of airplane mode and quickly fired off a text to my brother. “I just had the worst flight of my life. But boy, do I have a story for you…”

WNYC

Colombia's Elite in League with Armed Groups in Massive Oil Theft

Colombia’s authorities seized the assets of 17 businessmen who allegedly stole and exported $80 million worth of oil belonging to state-controlled oil company Ecopetrol.

PWS

A Socialist Summer Reading List for the Dog Days of Summer

I confess to reading much less than half of these because I have enough depression already, ffs

Jacobin

SOME INDICTMENTS HAPPENED

“A real live question for the America of 2023 is: Are we up to democracy?” he said. “Are we commensurate with the challenges that it poses? Are we willing to make the sacrifices of temporal opinion and temporal victory in order to preserve a constitutional order?”

WAPO

DEGROWTH AS HUSTLE

“Achieving degrowth communism, he believes, is less about personal choices and more about changing overarching political and economic structures. Marxism, he argues, offers a viable model for reorienting society around the maximization of public goods as opposed to the endless pursuit and concentration of wealth.”

[...]

After Mr. Saito spent a few hours driving bamboo stakes into a field with a heavy wooden mallet, Ms. Nakano asked him if he felt energized by his experience wielding a symbol of the proletariat.