Introducing The Detour
Your weekly dose of important news stories and curiosities from around the world.
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Hey there. 👋
Whether you’re a Frame reader who’s been with us from the beginning, or a newcomer to the Frame-iverse, welcome.
Over the last year we have been working hard on a brand new interactive article format. Moving forward you’ll see these new stories on our website at frame.media, which we hope helps you immerse further in big and small stories that explain our changing world.
Part of this new era is this very newsletter: The Detour. It’s your weekly dose of important and consequential stories from around the world, mixed with a healthy side of the obscure and curious.
Here’s what’s on our radar this week: 🔍 The search for Palestinian ghost towns, ☃️ human rights in the Arctic, 🧠 and the curious psychological phenomenon of repetition.
But first, here’s a bird’s eye view of what’s happened in the world over the last week or so:
51% — The percentage of Republican voters that presidential candidate and former U.S. President Donald Trump won at the Iowa caucuses on Monday — the widest margin of victory at an Iowa GOP caucus since 1988.
29 — The number of United Nations conferences on climate change the world will have had after Azerbaijan hosts COP29 later this year. Last week they selected a former oil company executive to lead the conference.
60 — The number of days Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa has declared a State of Emergency last week following the high-profile gang leader Adolfo “Fito” Macias escaping from a prison. Violence has flared up in the country in recent weeks.
$34 — The amount of USD required to apply for Kenya’s brand-new Electronic Travel Authorization as a foreigner. Critics have decried the policy, which launched this month, as hypocritical amid Kenyan President William Ruto’s aspirations to create a “borderless Africa.”
27 — The number of years Taiwan has been a complete democracy. On Saturday, around 13.5 million Taiwanese citizens voted in the country’s federal elections, with Lai Ching-te of the Democratic Progressive Party, (the center to center-left party’s third consecutive presidential win) clinching a victory.
And now for the main course of this week’s newsletter: On October 7, 2023, the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas carried out an unprecedented attack on Israeli citizens. The attack has triggered a major retaliation on Gaza — which Hamas controls — by Israeli military forces. Over 100 days in, the brutal war between Hamas and Israel has seemingly no end in sight, and world leaders are reluctant to take action despite the unfolding humanitarian crisis.
At the time of this writing, Hamas has killed 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped over 230 Israelis and other foreign nationals. Some of the released hostages detailed being subjected to horrific abuse. Israel’s retaliation has been steep: At least 20,000 Palestinians, including more than 6,000 children, have been killed by Israeli military forces following a coordinated air-and-ground assault on Gaza. Another 50,000 Palestinian are wounded and relegated to overcrowded hospitals, some of which have been targeted by Israeli military airstrikes.
Where does one begin to make sense of this tragedy? Our team at Frame offers you an entry point: Reported on the ground from Israel and West Bank mere weeks before the war came to pass, our cover story this week spotlights a Palestine that now mainly exists in memory.
Ali and Ahmad Zamareh are two brothers who live in Ramallah. Since 2019, they have produced 100 videos of abandoned Palestinian villages. Their project, called “This is Palestine,” is published on social media and tells the stories of Palestinian villages either rendered ghost towns or currently occupied by Israeli citizens following the formation of the State of Israel in 1948. If you aren’t familiar with these events, we explore them in the piece.
This story — which we are proud to call our inaugural piece in Frame’s new format — provides a human portrait of Palestinians contending with places they can no longer return to and explains the complex history that has led to profound tensions between Israel and Palestine.
Frame had an exclusive interview with this political figure. Standby for our story about her, publishing in a few weeks.
The Arctic is perceived by many as a fantastical, icy land at the top of the world. Snow looks deeper; animals seem wilder; and on some nights even the sky performs surreal dances like a kind of alien magic. (Yes, I’m talking about the aurora borealis.)
Everything “way up there” might feel too far away to feel consequential to the daily lives of those elsewhere. But to Arctic locals, the way this 5.4 million-square-mile region is rapidly unraveling has imminent and far-reaching impacts.
Coastal erosion, ice melt, sea level rise, and natural disasters compounded by climate change here will change all of our day to day lives for generations to come.
How, then, are Arctic locals explaining the stakes in ways that genuinely reach the minds and hearts of climate observers everywhere?
The Inuit people have entered the proverbial chat: Through the Inuit Circumpolar Council, they have appealed to global powers with five recommendations to protect their region on the international stage. Among them, an assertion to recognize that Indigenous people hold distinct and crucial knowledge of the land, and climate change policy must be firmly based on human rights. You can check out their letter here.
On Thursday, January 18 — Eagle Cap Extreme, one of the many qualifying races for the Iditarod, takes place in northeast Oregon. The Iditarod, a 100-year tradition where dog mushers from around the world race across 1,000 miles of Alaskan wilderness has struggled recently due to the impacts of climate change. (I saw it myself when I reported from the starting line in March 2020.) Without substantial snowfall and ice cover, the long-adored race — and its mandatory qualifying events — has had to move ever northward.
On Friday, January 19 — This day marks t-minus 30 days before the International Court of Justice continues its public hearings on Israel at the Peace Palace in The Hague, which is the seat of the Court. These proceedings, put forth by South Africa, will look into whether Israel was in breach of the 948 Genocide Convention in its war against Hamas. Read into the inquiry here.
On Monday, January 22 — The remaining names on Epstein’s associates list will be released. Need to be caught up? Jeffrey Epstein, who ran a massive sex trafficking scheme and who died by apparent suicide in jail in 2019 had a list of high-profile clients and associations that has been released peace-meal by a federal U.S. judge. So far, the original document has revealed the names of Prince Andrew and former U.S. President Bill Clinton, among others. (To be clear, this doesn’t mean these associates are directly implicated in Epstein’s sex trafficking scheme.)
On Tuesday, January 23 — The nominations for the 96th Annual Academy Awards will be announced. Speaking of nominations, the U.S. presidential election season is in full swing: New Hampshire hosts its Democratic and Republican primaries on this day — the first state in the U.S. to do so following the Iowa Caucus that occurred Monday. FiveThirtyEight keeps up-to-date charts on the pulse of American public opinion on these elections.
Our CEO, Ben Moe, explores curious philosophical and psychological terms.
Say the word “pumpernickel” out loud once. Now say it 30 more times. Does it sound weird to you after a while? There’s a word for that feeling — semantic satiation.
Semantic satiation is a psychological phenomenon where words temporarily lose their meaning after being read or heard multiple times. The phenomenon shows that humans arbitrarily bestow meaning upon words, and sometimes if we shake those words around enough, we see that the actual letters strung together are, well, kinda weird.
— Ben
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Until next week,
Kelly, managing editor at Frame