PICKS are stories from many sources, selected by our editors or recommended by our readers because they are important, surprising, troubling, enlightening, inspiring, or amusing. They appear on our site and in our daily newsletter. Please send suggested articles, videos, podcasts, etc. to picks@whowhatwhy.org.
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Delivering Renewable Energy to the US Comes at a Cost to Canada (Maria)
The author writes, “Construction is underway on transmission lines from the Canadian province of Quebec to power millions of homes in New York and New England. Northeastern states plan to use Canadian hydroelectricity to meet their own renewable energy goals. These deals have been years in the making, but for the provincial power utility Hydro-Quebec, there’s a bigger challenge to keep up with rising demand at home.”
A Record 530 People Died by Firearm Suicide in Wisconsin Last Year. These Gun Stores Hope to Change That. (Al)
From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: “Chuck Lovelace carefully presses the stainless-steel frame of a Colt .357 Magnum revolver against a metal wheel, which makes a high-pitched hum as it polishes away years of rust and grit to restore the gun to its original shine. Lovelace has been handling guns for most of his 45 years. A professional gunsmith, Lovelace repairs and restores firearms that have been damaged by years of wear, neglect, and even fire, making them functional for generations to come. The brilliant instrument that so fascinates Lovelace has also been used by several people close to him to end their lives: friends and family, fellow Army veterans, even one of his son’s high school classmates.”
The City With No Government (Sean)
The author writes, “It was a hot day in Haiti’s newest city, and hundreds of people were standing around a police station, sweating. The station was the city’s first, and they were waiting for the man who was supposed to inaugurate it. It was December 2018. Nearly nine years had passed since the disaster that gave birth to this place: a 7.0-magnitude earthquake that killed between 46,000 and 316,000 people. … A few weeks later, the UN and international NGOs started relocating some of the displaced to an empty plot of land north of the capital, an area known locally as Canaan. Soon, many more followed. They slept in tents and ramshackle shelters and, in time, began claiming small plots of land and building houses of their own. Numbers grew from the hundreds into the thousands, then the tens of thousands, then the hundreds of thousands. Nearly a decade after the earthquake, some 300,000 people called Canaan home. There was just one problem: This city had no government.”
The Clean Energy Future Is Arriving Faster Than You Think (Laura)
The authors write, “Delivery vans in Pittsburgh. Buses in Milwaukee. Cranes loading freight at the Port of Los Angeles. Every municipal building in Houston. All are powered by electricity derived from the sun, wind, or other sources of clean energy. Across the country, a profound shift is taking place that is nearly invisible to most Americans. The nation that burned coal, oil, and gas for more than a century to become the richest economy on the planet, as well as historically the most polluting, is rapidly shifting away from fossil fuels.”
The Volunteer Moms Poring Over Archives to Prove Clarence Thomas Wrong (Reader Steve)
From Slate: “In 2018, after a teenage gunman murdered 14 students and three faculty members at a high school in Parkland, Florida, Jennifer Birch, fearing for the safety of her own children, decided to join the fight against gun violence. … What Birch could never have anticipated is that five years later, she would find herself in the basement of a courthouse poring over 150-year-old county archives. Birch’s mission, as part of a volunteer force for the gun safety group Moms Demand Action, has been to identify Santa Ana, California, firearm regulations from the 1800s and earlier — all part of an effort to satisfy the Supreme Court’s increasingly preposterous whims about what’s necessary to prove a firearm regulation is constitutional.”
A Mysterious Arctic Shark That Can Live for 500 Years Got Lost and Ended Up Swimming in the Balmy Waters of the Caribbean (Mili)
The author writes, “Biologists were stunned to find a mysterious cold-water shark thousands of miles away from its natural habitat, according to a recent marine study. A Greenland shark — the longest-living vertebrate on Earth — was discovered in the tropical Caribbean Sea. Researchers were tagging and temporarily catching tiger sharks off the coast of Belize when they encountered the mysterious shark.”
