This Huffington Post Highline piece is a beautiful read, both for the reporting and writing, and also the overall message of optimism it imparts. 

Most people will have heard of Cape Town's count down to "day zero"—the day that the city runs out of water. Leading up to this cataclysmic day, most media pundits (and even the local government) predicted utter chaos. The fact that water was running out in a city known for a history of extreme racial tension only made predictions more dire.

However, when reporter Eve Fairbanks traveled to Cape Town to see how residents were managing the impending apocalypse, what she found was quite the contrary: People were coming together, across economic and even racial lines, to conserve water and try to find some sort of solution: Voluntary water usage plummeted, and it soon became a badge of honor to "show a visitor day-old urine ripening in your toilet."

She describes residents of Cape Town's behavior as a "beautiful social experiment."

It could be that human beings are just waiting for something that gives them a challenge, a chance to rise above their politics-exhausted cynicisms and prove they can be good neighbors, stand for more than just money and success, and find ingenious tricks, together, to outwit their new tormentors. It could be that certain kinds of disasters—particularly the natural, which feel more neutral and acceptable than politically driven ones—may wedge open spaces for change in other areas in which we feel stuck.

This excellent piece about how Capetonians came together—and what their cooperation achieved—is definitely worth a read. 

“His English is a little broken, but his instructions are so clear I pause to wonder, 'Well, why aren’t I growing a lab meat in my kitchen?'”

The author is referring a conversation with Yuki Hanyu on the growing ‘clean meat’ community. Japan-based Hanyu, who holds a PhD in chemistry, is more than a mere enthusiast on the subject. With the Shojinmeat Project, he connects roughly 30 DIY citizen scientists across Japan — often schoolkids — who all grow artificial meat in their own homes. Apart from offering each other advice and exchanging experience, the group frequently post articles as well as pictures of their work, sharing both their insights and their enthusiasm with others.

In the article, Hanyu describes the delicate process of making meat from cells in a fertilized egg — involving dry ice, centrifuge and an incubator in true Do It Yourself style. The Shojinmeat Project isn’t the only thing Hanyu is up to — in 2015 he funded the start-up company Integriculture, with the hopes of creating “a general purpose large-scale cell culture system”.

With Integriculture Hanyu looks beyond meat, departing from similar companies by thinking in more general terms. Among other things, the company plans on using its cell-growing technology to create customized products for cosmetics and supplement companies. Further out, they want to create a clean-meat infrastructure that they could license out to other companies, reaching a broader market.

“Until lab meat becomes more mainstream, however, Shojinmeat will be growing its own culture of DIY enthusiasts who create their own meat at home. Will you be among them?”

In the wake of the ongoing concern with immigration in the US and the Windrush scandal in the UK, it is worth revisiting this lecture by LSE philosopher Chandran Kukathas. The lecture was given in 2017 at George Mason University, but it could not be more topical. Kukathas's theme is immigration and freedom. But while we often think of this in terms of a migrant's freedom to move, Kukathas points to the impact immigration control has on the prospective host country.

Borders, Kukathas notes, are a political construct. The extent to which borders are enforced is always a matter of degree. Borders are not only about who can enter the country. They also control what they do when they are in that country, i.e. whether they can work, purchase property, or settle. Immigration control, therefore, does not stop at the border.

For instance, enforcing immigration law requires policing non-immigrants who might wish to hire undocumented immigrants. And this policing requires the recreation of new and powerful bureaucracies. Kukathas's lecture points to the costs of attempting to rigorously enforce immigration law.

To control immigration is to control people — and not just outsiders — but also citizens who might be required to provide identification or made liable for checking the status of those they hire. Thus, living in a society that tightly controls immigration means living in a society that’s very heavily controlled with respect to ourselves.

A transcript of this lecture is also available. 

This bite-sized video from the New York Times is an entertaining yet sobering look at media monopolies. It explains horizontal and vertical integration, the two ways that monopolies can form and take over a market segment, usually to the detriment of consumers in the long run.

Given the current potential merger between AT&T and Time Warner, which a judge is set to rule on in June, these economic basics are important for everyone to get a grip on. While in this case the tech and communications giants promise that joining their corporations would make wireless networks faster and more reliable, the merger would also consolidate America’s wireless companies to just three, which is almost certain to bump prices for access to information and communication. Even Donald Trump suggested this wasn’t a good idea.

“The question is whether one huge company plus another huge company, would turn into one enormous telecom and media company controlling so much content and the way it’s delivered to you that it could freeze out other producers and distributors who want to make you laugh, cry, and binge watch.” 

The World Press Foundation recently announced participants for the prestigious Joop Swart masterclass — the list did not include any African-born, Africa-based photographers. Of the 219 nominees, only 20 were from Africa and none were selected. 

There are several factors behind this, including the fact that nominators themselves are based in localities that do not give them knowledge of the existence of African photographers. That is not a good excuse, though, as powerful organizations such as the World Press Photo (WPP) should be doing more to identify photographers in African countries given they do exist and stand most to benefit from networking and training opportunities. 

By choosing who gets to be recognised, selected for training by respected photographers and photo editors, and networked into powerful media houses, such organisations have the power to direct who pictures and narrates our world. 

What is most troubling about overlooking African photographers is that instead such initiatives "reward, once again, Europeans who fly into Africa to photograph locations with which they are not familiar, often through the same, unquestioned and stereotypical lens."

As an African storyteller, I know only too well of the lens through which mainstream media still sees my continent. Born in Kenya and now living in Senegal, I rarely see images in global media that represent the African experience in its full diversity. It's easy to find pictures of slums, garbage heaps, conflict, but rarely of positive images in western media. I turn to Instagram for that. 

By leaving out photographers from African countries, and continuing to skew the selection process towards photographers who are from Europe and North America, the way the world pictures and imagines Africa and Africans will remain as they have historically been framed by the geopolitical west — as a location of a special brand of savagery and darkness to which those in the west have no parallel experiences or equivalent.