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PICKS are stories from many sources, selected by our editors or recommended by our readers because they are important, surprising, troubling, enlightening, inspiring, or amusing. They appear on our site and in our daily newsletter. Please send suggested articles, videos, podcasts, etc. to picks@whowhatwhy.org.
‘This Is What a River Should Look Like’: Dutch Rewilding Project Turns Back Clock (Maria)
The author writes, “‘On the way to being one of the most beautiful nature areas in Europe,’ reads a sign overlooking a construction site near the village of Grevenbicht on the Meuse River in the southern Netherlands. Looking at the diggers, other bits of large machinery and bare soil, this is a stretch of the imagination. ‘You have to sell your story,’ says Frans Schepers, managing director of Rewilding Europe, who was leading the largest river-restoration project in Europe. Construction work has already been completed along 50 km of the Meuse River floodplain as part of the Border Meuse project to undo 500 years of world-renowned Dutch water engineering.”
The Smoking Gun in Martha’s Vineyard (Dana)
From Popular Information: “Popular Information has obtained documentary evidence that migrants from Venezuela were provided with false information to convince them to board flights chartered by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R). The documents suggest that the flights were not just a callous political stunt but potentially a crime. Last Wednesday, two planes landed in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, and dropped off about 50 migrants from Venezuela. DeSantis quickly took credit. The migrants were used as political pawns in the hopes of provoking a negative reaction from a liberal community.”
‘I Have No Idea What Any of These Even Mean’: Massachusetts Clerks Are Getting Bombarded With Conspiracy-Fueled Records Requests About the 2020 Election (Reader Steve)
The author writes, “On Election Day in Shutesbury, population 1,700, voters place their marked ballots into a narrow wooden box on their way out of town hall. With the turn of a crank and a ‘ding!’ of a bell, each ballot gets passed through a wheeled mechanism and falls into a bottom compartment of the box. White numbers on the manual counter tick up by one: The ballot is counted. So the town’s part-time clerk, Grace Bannasch, was confused when she began getting pummeled with public records requests demanding voting machine tapes and serial numbers, copies of digital ballots, and file names, all related to the November 2020 presidential election. She’s not the only one.”
Letter to Congress on Ending Single Member Congressional Districts and Adopting Proportional Representation (DonkeyHotey)
The authors write, “An Open Letter To Congress: As the 2020 redistricting process comes to a close, it is clear that our winner-take-all system — where each U.S. House district is represented by a single person — is fundamentally broken. We call on Congress to adopt inclusive, multi-member districts with competitive and responsive proportional representation. According to a recent analysis of the newly-redistricted House map, more than 90% of districts are effectively a lock for one of the parties this November. This means that many millions of voters have no meaningful say in general elections, with the overwhelming majority of Congress effectively chosen by low-turnout primaries. In other words, winner-take-all increasingly means we already know the outcome of almost any given race.”
Dreaded Side Effect Rears Its Ugly Head in Latest COVID Variant (Sean)
From The Daily Beast: “All over the world, the rates of death and hospitalization from COVID keep dropping. But our successful mitigation of the worst outcomes of the 33-month-old pandemic belie a growing crisis. More and more people are surviving COVID and staying out of the hospital, but more and more people are also living with long-term symptoms of COVID. Fatigue. Heart problems. Stomach problems. Lung problems. Confusion. Symptoms that can last for months or even a year or more after the infection clears.”
Residential Exposure to Petroleum Refining and Stroke in the Southern United States (Mili)
The author writes, “The southern United States (US) sustains a disproportionate burden of incident stroke and associated mortality, compared to other parts of the US. A large proportion of this risk remains unexplained. Petroleum production and refining (PPR) is concentrated within this region and emits multiple pollutants implicated in stroke pathogenesis.”
Peak Cuteness, and Other Revelations From the Science of Puppies (Sean)
From The New Yorker: “Alexandra Horowitz, the head scientist at Barnard College’s Dog Cognition Lab, has conducted a longitudinal observational study on the first year of life of a member of Canis lupus familiaris. In other words, like many others, Horowitz got a pandemic puppy. And she paid a lot of attention to that puppy, whom she and her family named Quiddity, or Quid, meaning ‘essence of.’ She chronicles this in The Year of the Puppy, a book with an unsurprisingly adorable cover. Since Horowitz already had two dogs, a cat, and a son, her motivation for getting a puppy is somewhat convincingly presented as being in the service of science.”
