Having completed the March issue of the NYRB I've moved on to the February - April issue of the Mekong Review. The first few articles have been excellent, but generally make for depressing reading. The first, a coruscating account of the plastic soup that has engulfed the world, by Robert Templer, set the grim tone. He makes a convincing case for the idea that pervasive pollution through plastics is possibly an even greater problem for mankind than climate change. And he suggests, convincingly, I must say, that it may be a problem with no actual solution. Oh dear.
After a number of insightful but worrying articles on protests in Hong Kong, I've now got as far as Benjamin Zawacki's piece on the genocide of the Rohingya people starkly titled Humanitarian breakdown, and had to stop reading after three bleak paragraphs. Of course, I'll get back to it. There's a kind of moral imperative to bear witness. But I'm not sure that feeling entirely hopeless is helpful to anyone.
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