1. REUTERS: Greece train crash kills at least 36, injures scores

In a horrific accident in Larissa, Greece, a passenger train and a freight train collided head on, resulting in the deaths of dozens of people and injuries to many more. A “station master” was arrested, though it’s not yet clear what specific failure allowed this to happen. The piece linked above includes the following curious sentence:

Part of the problem here is the ambiguity of the word “as.” The sentence does not mean that officials were saying they expected an escalating death toll while temperatures rose to 1,300° Celsius in one train car, though it can easily be interpreted that way. The sentence does not mean that officials said they expected an escalating death toll because temperatures were rising to 1,300° Celsius. The sentence does not even intend to communicate that anyone died as a result of any fire, including the one that burned at such an extremely high temperature in one train car.

Officials said the death toll was expected to rise further as temperatures in one carriage rose to 1,300 Celsius after it was engulfed in flames.

It’s just a bad sentence in a newswire article, yes, I know this. It’s not a very big deal. The part of the sentence before the “as” has nothing to do with the part of the sentence after the “as,” except that it is vaguely trying to communicate the severity of the incident by tying the expectation of a higher body count to the extremity of the fire. I think the existence of the sentence can be explained by an inherent bias in news media to explain things causally even when they are not attempting to locate a cause, combined with a bias towards describing events as if they are happening right now. The sentence should simply be presented as two distinct facts, unconnected from each other and only relevant to each other because they arose from the same event. Alternatively, in another likely unintended possible understanding of the sentence, perhaps we were meant to take it like this:

Officials expect the death toll to rise as more remains are identified, a task made more difficult by the fact that the fires burned at extremely high temperatures.

If that’s what they meant, it is very poorly communicated, indeed—but I doubt it. I think it’s just a bad sentence that sounds very much like a newsy and important sentence because of its syntax, and that’s why it’s there. It’s a sentence that couldn’t possibly exist except for the odd conventions of newswriting.

UPDATE 3/6/22! The article has since been modified, and the sentence in question changed to the following:

Officials said the death toll was expected to rise further - temperatures in one carriage had risen to 1,300 Celsius (2,370 F) after it caught fire.

In what can only be described as an edit undertaken to personally troll this blog, the word “as” has been removed, replaced with a single hyphen. I am not sure what the Reuters style-guide says about this, but generally speaking that should probably be an em-dash, not an en-dash offset by spaces on either side. Either way, they’ve removed both any causal implication and any time-coincidental implication, and left us with the same awful ambiguity that the sentence had in the first place, having clarified nothing. Great work, everyone!

2. AP: Greek transport minister resigns over train crash; 36 dead

Officials resigning out of respect for the dead and injured despite seemingly bearing no reasonable personal or institutional responsibility for the event is odd to me. This is possibly because, as an American, I never expect to see a public official resign, even when they are very clearly personally or institutionally responsible for some awful event or accident. Americans plow through the shame, because though shame is intense in this culture, it is also short-lived. Shame has a very short half-life, here. An American transport minister wouldn’t have to commit hara-kiri over this or anything else—he’d just have to wait it out. Go take a shower, or something. It’ll wash right off.

Transport Minister Kostas Karamanlis resigned Wednesday, saying he felt it was his “duty” to step down “as a basic indication of respect for the memory of the people who died so unfairly.”

This is a resignation seemingly made out of deference to grief, or as part of some wider collective grieving process, which seems so foreign to the way we might expect to hold leaders—or even bureaucrats—to account in moments like this. Maybe there is nothing to be gained by staying in that job and trying to figure out what went wrong, and examining the possible culpability of the head of the entire Transport Ministry in allowing such a thing to happen “on his watch,” so to speak. Maybe the duty of stepping aside out of respect for the dead is greater than whatever day-to-day expertise he brought to the table as Transport Minister.

Though it may be appropriate, I don’t see what it accomplishes. On the other hand, for all I know the Transport Minister is a fluffy position given out to some friend of a friend as a political favor, and the best thing he can do is to symbolically go away.

Barely able to hold back tears, Greece's Transport Minister Kostas Karamanlis told reporters at the crash site that authorities would investigate “in all seriousness and complete transparency” the causes of the crash.

“We will do everything to investigate the causes and won't leave anything to be swept under the carpet,” Karamanlis said.

Who the fuck is “we” anymore, guy? You’re resigning! I’d tell this guy that I appreciate the sentiment but there’s work to do, and you’re the Transport Minister, and your job has never been more important than right now, so get back to work.

3. NYT The Daily: Why So Many Buildings Collapsed in Turkey

The opening of this episode of The Daily had me laughing pretty good:

The scale of death in the earthquake in Turkey and Syria is now raising questions about who is to blame. In Turkey, the government has placed that blame squarely on builders and property developers, accusing them of choosing profits over safety. But the reality is far more complicated. Today, my colleague Ben Hubbard on why a good part of the responsibility may rest with the Turkish government itself.

I’m not, of course, laughing at the tens of thousands of dead people. Earthquakes are still, more than any other natural phenomenon, “acts of God.” Hurricanes and tornadoes and forest fires and whatnot are all always being attributed to climate change as a result of human activity. Though I see the occasional story about how fracking or humans messing with water with dams can result in seismic activity, these big earthquake events are not framed as a result of climate change in the way everything else is. When I see or hear a story about some awful disaster, and then the news presenter offers an explanation for the event that is less than entirely convincing but offered with something approaching absolute certainty, I imagine God up in his Heaven getting increasingly irritated at not being given credit for his awful actions.

The scale of death in the earthquake in Turkey and Syria is now raising questions about who is to blame.

God: :: listening intently, rubbing his hands together :: Yes…go on!

In Turkey, the government has placed that blame squarely on builders and property developers…

God: Oh, come on! That was ME! You going to let Erdogan blame construction workers?!

But the reality is far more complicated.

God: Fuck yes it is! The unimaginable power! The ability to shift the very foundations of the earth, to make it shake and rumble and bring all that you fools would try to build to a destructive end! Have you mortals even the slightest concept, any more, of my awful capacity for—

Today, my colleague Ben Hubbard on why a good part of the responsibility may rest with the Turkish government itself.

God: :: throws up his arms, snatches the radio off, mumbling :: Just what the fuck does a demiurge have to do to get credit for anything around here these days.

That’s not to say that humans don’t bear plenty of the responsibility for excess death. It really does seem like the politicians fucked up in this case.

The reason this is so unsettling for Erdoğan is that the nature of these tens of thousands of deaths—pancaked concrete apartment buildings—strikes at the core of his party’s governance strategy. In the early years of AKP’s reign, Turkey’s recovery from economic slumps in the 1990s and apparent resilience following the 2008 financial crisis was heralded as a kind of economic miracle. In truth, this resilience was abetted by an overly aggressive construction sector. In a rush to build massive amounts of new housing, the Turkish government has issued hundreds of thousands of exemptions from earthquake safety standards across the country, including 75,000 buildings in the area affected by these earthquakes.

I’m sure Erdogan will be quick to take personal responsibility for his and his government’s failures, and step down in shame out of respect for the dead, like our pal in Greece, and not just willy-nilly arrest a bunch of people in an attempt to shift blame from himself to a bunch of relatively powerless nobodies. From the BBC:

More than 600 people are now being investigated in Turkey over buildings that collapsed in the deadly earthquake on 6 February, the government has said.

On Saturday, Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag said 184 suspects - including construction contractors and property owners - had already been arrested.

For years, experts warned that endemic corruption and government policies meant many new buildings were unsafe.

The confirmed death toll in Turkey and Syria has now exceeded 50,000.

Oh.

4. NYT Charles Blow: The Spectacular Fall of Lori Lightfoot and the Politics of Race and Crime

The mayor of Chicago, Lori Lightfoot, will be a one-term mayor after failing to qualify for an upcoming runoff election. She was quick to blame racism and sexism and homophobia (NYPost).

“I’m a black woman in America. Of course,” she replied when asked by a reporter if she had been treated unfairly.

But she called being Chicago’s mayor “the honor of a lifetime.”

“Regardless of tonight’s outcome, we fought the right fights and we put this city on a better path,” Lightfoot said, as she urged her fellow mayors around the US not to fear being bold.

Amid heavy criticism for the crime wave, homelessness and other troubles plaguing the city, the mayor had also injected race into the run-up to the election.

“I am a black woman — let’s not forget,” Lightfoot, 60, told the New Yorker in a piece that ran Saturday. “Certain folks, frankly, don’t support us in leadership roles.”

You were the mayor of the third largest city in the country, Lori. Many, many people voted to make it so. Who gives a fuck what certain folks do or do not support? You lost because you were unable to convince people that you were doing a good job at mayoring.

From the Blow piece:

In our interview, she was brutal in her racial assessment of Vallas: “He is giving voice and platform to people who are hateful of anyone who isn’t white and Republican in our city, in our country.” She is also surprisingly candid about how race operates in the city itself: “Chicago is a deeply divided and segregated city.”

There is nothing “surprisingly candid” about this statement. This is someone deflecting blame. It is the opposite of candid, to blame other people’s racism for their failure to support you after you have already been the duly elected mayor of a place that continues to experience much turmoil. Lori Lightfoot is not telling hard truths about her city, she is blaming it for her failure—and maybe that’s fair, in some ways! Not the ways she means it, but in some ways. Maybe it’s silly to expect a mayor to control that which is uncontrollable, to be accountable for things for which no one should be expected to take ultimate responsibility, besides the demiurge. That’s not how they do it in Greece, obviously, but this is Chicago.

5. The Hollywood Reporter: Pivot to … Something? The Blurry Future of Podcasting

As top podcast executives and creators gathered at the Wythe Hotel in Brooklyn for the Hot Pod Summit on Feb. 23, a question seemed to underlie each conversation: As the industry seeks an injection of new energy amid an advertising market correction and creators experiment with formats like video, what really is a podcast these days — and how will people make money?

Money?! Are you telling me that there is actual money in this podcasting racket?! Fuck!

The general sentiment is that video podcasts can help drive more views, especially if a podcast host has a notable guest on for an interview, and can more easily be shared and have a chance to go viral on popular social platforms like TikTok. And with more views means more ad impressions and money going into the pockets of creators and executives.

You know what makes a podcast great? The possibility that a lengthy and in-depth conversation that is generally otherwise unachievable through other traditional modes of media can be clipped and turned into a sub-two-minutes TikTok that millions upon millions of people will see and then immediately forget as they see the very next thing in their TikTok feed, never having to think about it, or anything else, again.