The woman fighting Europe’s last dictator
... plus curiosities from the top of Mount Kenya, the San Diego Zoo, and more.
Welcome back to another edition of The Detour. Here’s what’s on deck this week:
🇧🇾 They threw her husband in jail, so she ran for president of Belarus
🐻❄️ Find My Friends for polar bears
🧠 The psychological recipe for happiness
But first, here’s a closer look at what’s been going on around the world in the last week or so:
$16.6 billion — The value of U.S. farmland by the end of 2023, which has more than doubled over the last three years. Investors from the tech industry and beyond have descended upon the last remnants of American tillage, viewing it as a hot commodity that will outperform as the world’s population grows and natural resources dwindle. But lawmakers could put forth policies that would restrict unyielding purchases to prevent price creep.
36.8 million — The approximate number of lightning strikes that hit the ground across the United States yearly, with the Gulf Coast clocking in the most hits, according to research released this week by the U.S. National Lightning Detection Network. But, how did they even find this out? The NLDN uses “strategically placed antennas” to listen for the radio waves produced by a lightning strike.
4 — The number of aid airdrops Jordan has sent to Gaza this week, following the suspension of aid deliveries by the World Food Programme on Tuesday amid "complete chaos and violence due to the collapse of civil order.” Jordan has sent 16 airdrops since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas, with the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and France joining in recent days. Airdrops are known to be a highly inefficient way of delivering aid, compared to road deliveries which are less dangerous and more cost effective.
90% — The percent of ice lost over two decades by tropical glaciers atop Mount Kenya, Mount Kilimanjaro, and the Rwenzori Mountains in East Africa, according to a new study published this week in the journal Environmental Research: Climate. Precipitous loss in cloud cover and increase in regional temperatures explain this change, scientists note, with a total loss in ice possible within the next 50 years. This could spell trouble for the delicate equilibrium of flora and fauna in the area.
2 — The number of giant pandas China has agreed to send to the San Diego Zoo in California by the end of this summer. The move has resurfaced talk of China’s so-called “panda diplomacy” with the Western World. The exchange promises to bolster “increased scientific understanding of giant panda biology, care and wellness, and what pandas need to thrive in a changing climate,” the San Diego Zoo noted. But, they’re only pandas, right? What’s the big deal?
“Pandas in and of themselves are not coveted; what is coveted is the expression of good standing from the Chinese government reflected by the gifting of pandas,” argued Georgetown University (GU) professor and former U.S. Ambassador Barbara Bodine in an article by GU.
For the curious, BBC news wrote a primer on the history of China’s panda diplomacy here.
Now onto the main course: Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya’s path to politics is anything but political.
The 41-year-old former teacher once was the right-hand to her husband and pro-democracy Belarusian activist Sergei Tikhanovsky, who carried out his own political endeavors via his viral YouTube Channel, “Country for Life.” In it, Tikhanovsky interviewed everyday Belarusians about their daily triumphs and challenges, highlighting the corruption and dangers of Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko.
Tikhanovsky’s first arrest in 2019 was a warning shot. But when he announced his candidacy for president in a YouTube video on his channel on May 7, 2020, that was the last straw. He was arrested by Belarusian authorities two days later.
Denied the chance to formally register from detention, Tsikhanouskaya went to the Central Election Commission to fill out the forms for him. But authorities prohibited her from filing for the presidency on his behalf. It was in that moment she made a spontaneous decision to run herself — a choice that would change the course of her life and that of the thousands of pro-democracy activists who would fight alongside her.
Since 2020, Tsikhanouskaya has been battling head-to-head with Europe's last remaining dictator. She sat down with Frame for an interview to discuss her rise to prominence, eventual exile, ongoing fight against a dictatorial regime, and Belarus’ surprising part in Ukraine’s fight against Russia.
Promo: Our Friends at Turbulent World
The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey offers incisive and thought-provoking analysis of the geopolitics, the politics of sports, and religious rivalry in a swath of land stretching from Africa's Atlantic coast across the Middle East and Central Asia to the borders of China. You can subscribe here.
Hi, I’m Jeremy, Frame’s Product Designer. This week, we have just a couple of curious questions for you all.
With the advent of Apple Vision Pro, the Frame team had the opportunity to test out what our stories look like on their medium. (It was wild!) The buzz around AR got us thinking about news consumption habits.
Until next time,
Jeremy
Every winter up in the Arctic, sea ice freezes to such an extent that wildlife can have exponentially more range to explore, hunt, and mate. And every summer, the ice melts nearly completely, forcing the same critters to retreat back to the land. But climate change has rapidly threatened this rhythm of ice freeze and ice melt, threatening wildlife, increasing coastal erosion, and even escalating late-summer and fall storms across the region.
In Hudson Bay, Canada, scientists have crafted ingenious ways to track the impact of these changes on one animal that is crucial to the high north’s ecological balance — polar bears. By fitting female polar bears with GPS collars, their decades-long research has provided some of the world’s best long-term datasets of the apex predators.
On the research team’s website, you can spot these polar bears moving in real-time. The site shows you how far they have traveled and where in the Arctic they’ve gone so far.
For example: GPS collar #X17082 is tracking one 26-year-old female polar bear and its baby cub:
So far, the pair has traveled just over 326 miles since late November 2023, where they began traversing off the coast of Canada and are currently in the middle of the frozen sea. In honor of yesterday’s International Polar Bear Day, I invite you to explore the site and learn more about their groundbreaking research, which has influenced global climate policy.
This Week — Sweden will finally join the NATO military alliance following Hungary’s long-awaited approval of the northern European country’s accession. The move breaks with Sweden’s decades of neutrality. It will formally join the alliance after it submits something called an “instrument of accession” with the U.S. government. Sweden and Finland were likely pushed to join the alliance in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
On Friday, March 1 — Women’s history month begins. To kick off the festivities, I introduced our social media audience to the absolute badass that was the French Egyptilogist Christian Desroches-Noblecourt. Throughout her 50+ career that began in the 1930s, Desroches-Noblecourt was a fierce advocate for the preservation of Egyptian monuments and antiquities — and did so while breaking down the doors of the men’s club of archeology.
On Thursday, February 29 — The English singer-songwriter Jacob Collier releases a new album, Djesse Vol. 4. The artist has gone viral in recent years since posting videos of his live shows, where he’s featured enthusiastically conducting his audiences to sing gorgeous multi-part harmonies. The five-time Grammy Award winner has performed with the likes of Coldplay, T-Pain, and Alicia Keys.
On Sunday, March 3 — The Romford Horror International Film Festival, showcasing 180 feature films and short movies from across the world, ends in the United Kingdom. This one seemed so interesting to me: In “Profondo Rosso,” a jazz pianist and a journalist are “pulled into a complex web of mystery after the former witnesses the brutal murder of a psychic.”
I came across a concept the other day that felt to me like it should be more of a mainstream idea: autotelicity.
Autotelicity is a psychological trait where an individual is driven more by internal satisfaction rather than any external factor, be it acclaim, money, or comfort.
The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who is best known for coining the idea of “flow”, as in being in the zone, wrote that autotelic people don’t chase external validation or success because they live much of their lives in flow. That is, they are subsumed by activities — reading, exercising, spending time with friends — and enjoy them in and of themselves, rather than as a means to an external goal. Research shows people with autotelic personalities exhibit curiosity, persistence, and humility.
Autotelicity is also a literary concept. The 20th century American poet Archibald MacLeish said, “‘A poem should not mean | But be.”
While some individuals have more autotelic personalities than others, it is a way of experiencing the world and a mental outlook that can be practiced through activities such as mindfulness, sports, poetry, and painting.
— Ben
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Until next week,
Kelly at Frame