Tag: Choices
False Choices and Familiar Stories in a California Homeless Encampment
To the untrained, or perhaps even weary, eye, every homeless encampment in California looks the same. The colors of the tents, which range from safety oranges to forest greens and the royal blues of the tarps that keep out the rain, all seem to fade together into an even mix of browns and grays. The effect is almost entirely psychological—if you took the same tent and put it in a campground, its colors would present themselves again. I suppose this
The Terrifying Choices Created by Wildfires
We drove back to her house, near the beach, in the city of Santa Cruz, and Stasiewicz mused on the contrast between our settled way of life and the habits of Indigenous tribes. Native Americans had once moved around seasonally while stewarding their forests by means of controlled burns. Today, perhaps, wildfires and their evacuations are forcing people to return to a semi-nomadic existence. Stasiewicz has friends with respiratory ailments who can’t tolerate the wildfire smoke that now routinely blankets
The Battle for the Donbas Demands Impossible Choices
Soon after Russia invaded Ukraine, Pavlo Kyrylenko and Serhiy Gaidai received phone calls from men they believed to be Russians, based on their accents. Kyrylenko and Gaidai, the governors of the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, respectively, were being enticed to defect. The pair—the top Ukrainian officials in parts of their country racked for years by conflict with Moscow-backed separatists—were offered the chance to join what the Russians were convinced would be their inevitable victory.
“This was before