Web Excursions 2023-02-15
Why I Hunt for Sidewalk Fossils
A paleontologist once told me that city sidewalks hold snapshots.
These marks are too recent to pass muster with scientific sticklers, but in all respects except age, they are fossils.
There are many ways to make one.
Some form when a creature is entombed in sediment: Water percolates through, flush with minerals, and over time the mixture infiltrates the bones, where it settles and forms stone.
Other fossils are casts, made, for instance, when a shell dissolves and leaves behind a mold that eventually fills with sediment, which hardens into rock.
But not all fossils involve remains;
some catalog movements.
These are the kind that stipple our sidewalks — nascent trace fossils, records of fleeting contact.
Fossil-finding outings were a relief — an invitation to crouch, touch, lose myself in evidence of skittering and scrabbling, tethering myself to a past and a future.
The fossils fastened my attention to something tangible but also invited it to wander and to think about city streets as collages of past and present, about how our nonhuman neighbors are architects, too.
How we all shed traces of ourselves, whether we know it or not.
The sidewalk fossils felt intimate — the paleontological equivalent of a raft of letters secreted away beneath a floorboard.
When sidewalks are repaired, birds and other animals ignore attempts to keep them pristine.
Leaves do whatever the wind demands.
These fossils are easy to find, and we’re lucky to have them.
When I was lingering in the worst parts of my brain, sidewalk fossils dislodged me.
Unlike the many fossils that represent stillness, the moment when an animal died and the place it remained unless humans carved it free, sidewalk fossils are often peeks into lives that continued
The Crisis of Missing Migrants
The International Commission on Missing Persons was started in 1996, by President Bill Clinton, after the conflict in the Balkans. Forty thousand people had gone missing. The I.C.M.P. helped countries arrange the excavation of mass graves and the extraction of DNA from human remains. Seventy per cent of the bodies were ultimately identified.
Unrecorded deaths have legal ramifications. People who can’t prove that a spouse has died find it difficult to remarry. The relatives of missing migrants face challenges when filing civil suits or joining criminal proceedings against smugglers accused of overloading boats or sending faulty ships to sea. When governments are at fault, it is difficult for families to hold them accountable.
While performing an autopsy on a nineteen-year-old boy, Cattaneo found that he was carrying a plastic bag of soil; she wondered at first if it was drugs. But when her team found other passengers with similar bags, she learned that they were carrying earth from their home countries. It made her think of the summers she spent as a child in her ancestral village, in northern Italy, and then having to return to Canada; she would break off twigs from trees and put them in the pages of her books. “I was surprised, and ashamed that I was surprised,” she said.
A Secret for Falling Asleep So Good It’s a British National Treasure
For many months I put on murder mysteries, but in an effort to embrace a more soothing sort of rest, I have started listening to compilations of the Shipping Forecast, a BBC Radio 4 production that is no fancier than its name suggests: It is, simply, a program featuring weather reports that narrate the gales and tides around the British Isles.
If some people doze off to the sound of rain, I fall asleep to broadcasters announcing the rain that is to come.
The prototype for the Shipping Forecast was established after a particularly nasty storm in 1859 killed hundreds of people and wrecked more than 100 ships in the Irish Sea.
In its aftermath, Vice Adm.
Robert FitzRoy, founder of the U.K.’s Meteorological Department and originator of the term “forecast,” set up a maritime storm-warning system in 1861.
Predictions were first sent by telegraph;
radio broadcasts followed much later, in 1911, but were interrupted soon thereafter by the onset of World War I.
Seven years after the armistice, the BBC sent out its first long-wave transmission of Weather Shipping from the Air Ministry in London.
At some point the name changed to the Shipping Forecast and the number of broadcasts per day increased from two to four.
Read at 5:02 a.m., 12:01 p.m., 5:54 p.m. and 12:48 a.m. G.M.T., each briefing begins with the same words: “And now the Shipping Forecast, issued by the Met Office.”
Although each individual transmission has traditionally been short —
limited to 380 words at most, and often not more than a minute or two of speech —
when heard in hourlong compilations, the Shipping Forecast is poetic and hypnotic, a free-form ode to the seas.
Without a weather writer’s style guide at hand, how are you to know that “backing winds” move counterclockwise, whereas “veering winds” go in the other direction?
Or that “soon,” which means in a short time, is very different from “imminent,” which denotes urgency?
While both words suggest immediacy, in fact weather considered to be “coming soon” is expected within six to 12 hours, whereas weather described as “imminent” should arrive within six.
It would be a pity if the segment ever fell silent, though, because the Shipping Forecast is older than the BBC itself and has become somewhat of a national treasure in England.
The Hunt for Russian Collaborators in Ukraine
Across the city, residents faced the choice of whether to coöperate with the new regime. Dozens of municipal employees went back to work for Russian-appointed bosses. A handful of existing cops joined the city’s “people’s militia,” a Russian-backed police force, as did a motley crew of security guards, handymen, and car mechanics. A station dubbed Radio Z appeared on the airwaves, with local voices broadcasting basic information, such as how to avoid stepping on a land mine, and a heavy dose of pro-Russian propaganda. The occupation administration encouraged parents to send their children back to school, and teachers were pressured to return to the classroom with a Russian curriculum that rejected Ukrainian language and identity.
Residents agreed to collaborate for a number of often overlapping reasons: fear, pro-Russian sympathies, opportunism, the hope of doing something productive for the city. Power dynamics were fluid and hard to parse. Russian forces acted as if the takeover of Izyum was permanent and immutable, announcing preparations to distribute Russian passports and to hold a referendum on the occupied territories joining Russia.
It wasn’t just the unpleasantness of the work that troubled him—the smell of rot and muck that stuck in your nostrils, the way the decomposing flesh broke apart in your hands—but also the notion that he was coöperating with the Russian occupation. Still, Golub told himself, someone had to collect the remains, and he needed to feed his family. He received his aid packages at the start of his shift, saving him hours in line; occasionally, he got an extra parcel. “None of this was normal,” Golub said. “We understood that we couldn’t just reject this task, but would have to continue, even if we didn’t like it.”
Not long after Golub was detained, Iryna had approached Matsokin and some of his colleagues outside the building. “So, tell me, can you breathe easy in this city?” she asked them. Matsokin looked on, confused. The city is clean, there are no bodies in the streets, there’s no stench or disease, she said. “And do you know who is responsible for this? Pavel.” She added, “And now you’re back in office and he’s in jail.” Iryna said that Matsokin simply turned and walked away.
He walked me through the Ukrainian criminal code for Article 111(1), the law governing collaboration, which Zelensky enacted in mid-March. “In general, collaboration is defined as any purposeful act that harms the sovereignty and territorial integrity of our state,” Kravchenko said.
In practice, that can mean many things. The most obvious cases are those in which a person took up arms against Ukrainian forces or was involved in spying or sabotage to aid the Russian war effort. But assessing culpability can get murky at the level of local governance. “We’re looking for people who worked for the benefit of the Russian occupation,” Kravchenko told me. “But does that apply to a welder or carpenter who maintained buildings or equipment for the occupiers? Or people responsible for critical infrastructure?” There wasn’t an easy answer or policy, he said.
A further complication embedded in Ukraine’s law on collaboration is the question of motive. “Was a person moved to act out of personal belief or under the barrel of a gun?” Kravchenko said. “The first would be a crime, the second not.”
“In a city the size of Izyum, where everyone knows one another, legal responsibility isn’t necessarily the most terrible thing,” Matsokin, the deputy mayor, told me. “Disgust, contempt, the desire of your neighbor to spit in your face—all of that can be much worse.”
At certain points in the Second World War, some Ukrainian nationalists viewed the German military as situational allies in the fight against Soviet power; at others, they ended up targeted by Nazi forces.
Elsewhere in Europe, sorting through questions of guilt and responsibility—not only for the most ghastly crimes of Fascism but also for more humdrum, day-to-day coöperation—was part of the larger project of forging a new sense of national identity and unity. “If postwar governments’ legitimacy rested merely on their military victory over Fascism, how were they better than wartime Fascist regimes themselves?” Tony Judt writes in “Postwar.” The Nazi and the Allied armies had clashed not only as duelling military forces but as representatives of opposing models of civilization. In the aftermath, the victors would have to settle whose cause was just; those who lent their energies to the unjust side would have to face punishment.
This process could be scattershot and inconsistent, rife with excesses in one moment and inexplicably lenient the next. The Norwegian state, for example, put the entirety of the country’s pro-Nazi movement on trial, prosecuting tens of thousands of people at once; the children fathered by German soldiers were stigmatized, committed to psychiatric hospitals, even deported. In France, on the other hand, trials were far less common.
“Since the state itself was the chief collaborator, it seemed harsh and more than a little divisive to charge lowly citizens with the same crime,” Judt writes. Notably, three of the four judges deciding French collaboration cases had themselves served the Vichy regime.
In Izyum this fall, the lingering trauma of occupation left many residents with conflicting emotions. Relief and gratitude for the city’s liberation commingled with a feeling of grievance and offense, that the relatively well-off and well-connected had managed to flee. It wasn’t unheard-of for residents to lash out at their liberators. When I asked a Ukrainian soldier stationed outside the administration building about loyalties in the city, he said, “Fifty-fifty.”
A Russian military station was set up at Izyum’s S.B.U. headquarters, not far from her building. Soldiers would bring out leftover food to share. “Yes, we ate Russian canned beef,” Evmenova said. “What were we supposed to do, die of hunger?”
Evmenova saw the position of someone like Marchenko, the city’s mayor, who had evacuated in the spring, as hypocritical and unfeeling. A small crowd had assembled around us in the courtyard, and some of its members murmured in agreement. “He abandoned us, ran away like a rat, and judges us because we didn’t do the same,” she said. “We lived through something that not many people would be able to bear, and now they call us collaborators?”
In July, a group of Russian soldiers, led by a former accountant in the city administration named Yulia Babaevskaya, who had taken up the post of education director, showed up at the house and instructed Gozha to return to work. She refused. A few weeks later, they came back; Gozha got the feeling that saying no a second time wasn’t an option. “They had guns,” she told me. “They didn’t so much pose a question but simply said this was how things would be.” She went back to school, but said that she mainly focussed on routine matters: cleaning the yard, fixing the windows, stocking supplies. Russian soldiers were everywhere. Gozha referred to their presence as “control”—“control” at school, “control” at home, “control” around town. Some mornings, she said, she would sit frozen on her couch, unable to get up and go to work, and then, by eleven in the morning, “control” would come looking for her. Even when she complied, the soldiers taunted her. “ ‘Oh, so you’re the big Ukrainian patriot, from the pro-Ukrainian school,’ ” Gozha recalled them saying.