The Calm and The Storm
Dear Reader,
I’m still alive and kicking! Over this sabbatical, I’ve been able to set up my little studio apartment overlooking the MARTA train, the Coca-Cola sign, and the rest of the Atlanta skyline. I picked up a book for the first time in many months (you can read an excerpt of the book I’m reading, Ayurella Horn-Muller’s “Devoured: The Extraordinary Story of Kudzu, the Vine That Ate the South” here.) I attended my first Georgia Tech football game in a couple years. I got a J-school op-ed assignment published! I attended and spoke at my first Online News Association conference last week!
But sadly, as Friend of The Xylom King Williams would say, “there are no boring news weeks in Atlanta.” The first week after I settled down, I saw what I presumed to be victims from the Apalachee High School shooting being airlifted to Grady Memorial Hospital looking out my apartment window. Last week, I panicked about the looming Hurricane Helene, felt relieved that we were narrowly spared, only to realize in horror that most of Western North Carolina where I did a reporting project last year have been wiped out. (You can donate to recovery efforts here.) This week, parts of metro Atlanta are still out of power, under a boiling water advisory, and dealing with a massive chlorine chemical fire that has smoke plumes billowing across the sky. “Unlikely to cause harm to most people” might become the next award-winning lede.
For all the doom and gloom about the demise of local journalism, I am also glad that there are so many of my colleagues stepping up to the challenges of covering disaster zones. Please donate to our INN Network peer outlets The Current (GA), WABE, Blue Ridge Public Radio, Enlace Latino NC, Plateau Daily News, and Carolina Public Press.
It sucks to be sitting on the sidelines. But I must honor my commitment to myself and to the rest of the newsroom; this is a time for me to rest, recharge, and reflect. This is the only way we can continue to produce our work sustainably in the long run. You might notice that we’ve been publishing two stories a week: our Managing Editor Rhysea Agrawal has leveraged our brand new editorial budget developed with the help of the INN Emerging Leaders Council to clear our freelance backlog without sacrificing the rigor of our stories. It’s a testament to her tenacity, and also proof that we can exceed our own expectations.
I just can’t wait to jump back into work next week and provide you with science and society reporting that you can’t find anywhere else! We have just five weeks before the 2024 elections, and the intersection between democracy and disaster coverage has never been more prominent, here in Georgia and across the hurricane-ravaged South. At times like these, we must lean on one another.
Yours sincerely,
Alex Ip
(Incoming) Publisher and Editor
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THINGS YOU SHOULD READ
FAMILY NEWS!
Our alumna Fayth Tan compares the rather amorphous forms of lichen to poetry, thinking about the themes of dependence, power, embodiment and meaning of these symbiotic composite organisms for the magazine Grow.
Another alumna Rose Schnabel published a piece in WUFT about the Mill Creek cave system that runs underneath the ground in Alachua, Florida.
A SOUTHERN FLAIR
SOUTH CAROLINA — South Carolina Is Considered a Model for ‘Managed Retreat’ From Coastal Areas Threatened by Climate Change (Daniel Shailer, Inside Climate News)
South Carolina Office of Resilience is “taking the issue seriously, and they’re looking at it with a degree of sobriety that maybe other places have not.”
- Mathew Sanders, an analyst with the policy research nonprofit Pew Charitable Trusts focusing on disaster resilience.
WARREN, Arkansas — This state calls itself the ‘most pro-life.’ But moms there keep dying. (Annie Gowen, The Washington Post)
“When hospitals are turning you away and you have to go on to the next one, any complication can develop whether you’re in an ambulance or not. You’re putting the mother at risk and the baby at risk.”
- Hajime White, a doula in Warren, AR
IOWA, Louisiana — These small Black-owned farms are growing crops with the climate in mind (Danny McArthur, NPR)
"One of his statements to me that I'll never forget as a child is that all of these inputs that we're bringing into our farm is great, and we're able to make money off of it, but one day we're going to pay for not taking care of the land."
— Hilery Gobert, a farmer in the town of Iowa, LouisianaEUHARLEE, Georgia — Why Mississippi coal is powering Georgia’s data centers (Emily Jones & Gautama Mehta, co-published by WABE and Grist)
Power purchase agreements like the ones Georgia Power has entered into are not uncommon, especially for the Southern Company and its affiliates. The company generally chooses, as a business strategy, “to build and rely on its own resources to meet demand in its territories. That’s the standard utility business model, but the Southern Company pursues that model in a more aggressive way than any other utility company in America.”
- Ari Peskoe, director of Harvard University’s Electricity Law Initiative
WHAT ELSE WE'RE READING
CHICAGO, Illinois – With No Chemistry Teacher, Chicago Student Teaches Her Own Class: ‘They Forgot About Us’ (Mina Bloom, Block Club Chicago)
“It’s a resource issue that’s much larger than Chicago, much larger than the state. We have some big gaps to meet in terms of school funding. We are in a really tough financial time, and that’s coming with some big costs.”
- Erika Méndez, director of P-12 education policy for Latino Policy Forum, a state advocacy organization.
The Covid Vaccine Just Got a Lot More Expensive—If You’re Uninsured (Julia Métraux, Mother Jones)
“For every step that you add in the process of trying to get a vaccine, you’re going to lose people,”
- Elizabeth Jacobs, an epidemiologist and professor emeritus at the University of Arizona.
MUMBAI, India — India shuts down the internet far more than any other country (Ananya Bhattacharya, Rest of World)
The majority of shutdowns in India have historically occurred in Jammu and Kashmir, a region at the center of a decades-long dispute between India, Pakistan, and China. In August 2019, it experienced 552 consecutive days of internet blackout, the world’s longest shutdown in history. “What gets delayed is access to justice, access to emergency services, preservation of evidence, simply because an internet shutdown suppresses the spread of information when it’s necessary.”
- Shruti Narayan, Access Now’s Asia Pacific policy counsel.
THE XYLOM’S RECENT STORIES
Perspective: In new song, Bad Bunny lights up Puerto Rico’s political corruption, climate inaction
Puerto Rico continues to live with the devastating consequences of Hurricane Maria, even seven years after the initial landfall. In his latest song “Una Velita,” Caribbean artist Bad Bunny calls out political corruption and energy inequality in his native Puerto Rico, and asks us all to remember the ones who were lost due to the disaster, Angely Mercado reports.
Maternal Deaths Keep Increasing in Nigeria. Healthcare Services Still Remain Underfunded.
Three years after ambulance trikes were introduced to southwest Nigeria, maternal death rates have raised, while the ambulances sit largely unused. What went wrong? Read this piece by Mohammed Taoheed to find out more.
In Nigeria, Indigenous Communities Bear The Brunt Of Harmful Quarrying Practices
Rock quarrying companies in Nigeria conduct blasting operations close to residences, causing harm to the health of the Indigenous communities that live there. With support from the Pulitzer Center, Samad Uthman and Samuel Ajala reported that despite the severe disruption and ensuing complaints from community members, neither the government nor the companies take any action.
With Another Razor-Thin Election Looming, Georgia Provides Little Clarity on Voting in a Natural Disaster
Managing Editor Rhysea Agrawal reported her first piece for The Xylom where she explored the possible impacts of a potential natural disaster on the state of Georgia, especially during the election season. As she found, the state of Georgia is not prepared.
Perspective: Mount Kenya's Risky Adventure
Adventure tourism is rapidly growing on Mt. Kenya, but has come at the cost of its local communities and the mountain's fragile ecosystems. Unfortunately, as Kang-Chun Cheng (KC) reports, there is a lack of consolidated effort when it comes to protecting them, which puts the wilderness of the peak at risk.