Back from Brazil, and the case for traveling, albeit in a slightly different way

Hello Sequins, 

An apologetic Kim here for finally writing to you after a few weeks of absence. As I hinted briefly in the last, last newsletter, I was on a reporting trip in south and southeastern Brazil to examine rural farming practices. I only came back on Monday. I’m still recovering from my journey, but I’m also basking in the afterglow of an extremely satisfying trip. 

A recent essay in The New Yorker makes the case against travel, and more so, against us gushing about our travels. “Although people like to talk about their travels, few of us like to listen to them,” writes Agnes Callard. So I’m treading gingerly here. While I enjoyed my trip immensely, I’m taking a moment here to reflect on my privilege as a journalist. For my experience was probably vastly different than that of any other normal tourist that’s seeking to hit the must-see destinations and post about them on social media. 

My Brazilian reporting partner, Amanda Magnani, and I traveled to the much less crowded corners of the countryside, where locals hardly ever get to meet foreigners in their lifetimes. We spoke with farmers, their children, students, shopkeepers, bus drivers. They were the kind of everymen who could tell something was different about me simply from the fact that I blew my nose (apparently Brazilians are more tolerant of constant, discrete sniffling rather than loud but brief trumpets of nose-clearing). 

I was on a mission, of course, to find out rural agriculture’s challenges and impacts. Having fun wasn’t a priority. But, I ended up enjoying myself more than I suspect I would have as a typical tourist. I felt that the people I met with were more genuine than those who would only view me as a tourist with deep pockets. The locals were curious why a person from the US wound up in their villages, of all places, and they were as eager to learn about my life as I was about theirs. Unsurprisingly, speaking in appalling beginner Portuguese and being able to laugh at myself is a great way to put people at ease. I got to help villagers feed chickens with corn I crushed myself. Another source shared with me their playlist of retro Brazilian hits. Amanda and I crashed a forró dance party (I loved how much I sucked at it). Among all the dozens of people I spoke with, only two professed that they cared about soccer. So much for stereotypes. 

I’m not trying to exoticize my experiences in Brazil. But I think my position as a journalist rather than as a tourist looking for a good time allowed me to approach my trip with no expectations. I got to see a real side of Brazil, not the sanitized version that would lure globetrotting visitors. And what an honor that has been. 

All this is to say that I feel very fortunate to be doing what I’m doing (a shoutout to the Pulitzer center for funding my trip). My line of work literally opens doors for me that are closed to the rest of the public. Journalism isn’t just a privilege but also a responsibility. Now, it’s my job to represent the truth and honor the life stories of my characters as accurately, sensitively, and ethically as possible to the rest of the world. 

I recognize, too, that parachute journalism — the practice of foreigners swooping in to write a story about an unfamiliar place, then leaving before they truly understand the nuances of local context and culture — continues to present an ethical quandary for mainstream media. Journalism still has a long way to go to decolonize its approach. That being said, I’m glad that I had Amanda as a collaborator and to help me navigate Brazil. I couldn’t have completed my reporting trip without her. She was a valuable interpreter, schooled me on cultural faux pas, understood Brazilians’ informal nature enough to secure key travel logistics over WhatsApp, and went above and beyond to help me reschedule a canceled flight over the phone while I sat dazed at the airport. Plus, she comes with her own journalistic talents and wisdom that will enrich our collective reporting. Local reporters — the so-called “fixers” — are more than means to an end. They’re journalistic partners, equals. 

Would I recommend anyone to visit Brazil? Of course. But I suspect the fun I had isn’t just unique to this beautiful country. I’m still a shameless proponent of traveling — especially the kind in which we slow down to learn about the remarkable diversity and uncanny similarities between different communities around the world, far-flung as they may be. After all, isn’t that the original idea behind traveling in the first place? 

Tchau, 

Kim

P.S. If you’ve read till this part, thank you and please bear with me a bit longer: Sequencer republished a piece about why baby boom advocacy is a scam from The Conversation. More articles are in the works, including a few from me about Brazil. Stay tuned, and while you wait, you may as well forward this newsletter to your contacts. 

What we’re working on:

Maddie: I am pondering a great mystery of our universe, which is corn sweat. I first saw this via a viral tweet displaying a local weather station’s graphic for the ongoing Midwest heat wave. So far, I’ve seen enough good explainers on what the phenomenon is that I don’t feel inclined to write that. Instead, I’m trying to find an ‘in’ that’s more related to why we rely on a crop that isn’t very heat-tolerant and what alternatives exist (breeding corn or engineering it to “sweat” less, or transitioning over to another crop entirely in a way that doesn’t put millions of farmers out of a livelihood.) Oh, and my Sequencer article about mpox was republished in Slate!

Day job: surf conservation and new papaya disease dropped.

Kim: Sleeping! And going through notes from my trip. 

Dan: I read this paper on how the presence of zinc — the metal — changes the behavior of symbiotic nitrogen fixing bacteria living in the nodules of legume roots. Symbiosis and nitrogen-fixation has been something of a theme for me recently — I wrote a lot of words about this in Quanta recently. It’s back-to-school season so just a reminder that “nitrogen fixation” is the process of converting nitrogen gas — present in the atmosphere in huge quantities but in a biologically unavailable N₂ form, held together with a strong triple bond — into a nitrogen-containing molecule that is more accessible for use within cells. 

But this time around I’m not thinking much about the nitrogen. Good molecule, fine stuff, strong triple bond that we’re all familiar with and in awe of. Instead I’m thinking about zinc. The above-mentioned paper is cool because it shows that an inanimate object, zinc, the metal, the element, can act as a link between environmental conditions and a change in gene expression in an organism. In this case, researchers at Aarhus University in Denmark and La Trobe University in Australia discovered that zinc and nitrate — NO₃, the most abundant form of accessible nitrogen in the soil — control the behavior of root nodules like opposing levers. In the presence of low nitrate, cellular zinc increases, which increases nitrogen fixation. In low nitrogen, zinc tells bacteria to fix more nitrogen. With high nitrate, the exact opposite thing happens: zinc decreases and so does fixation.

The reason this happens is because zinc isn’t just a metal but is a key building block of how cellular machinery works. The researchers linked this behavior to a gene called FIXATION UNDER NITRATE (in plant science nomenclature gene names are in all caps, which gives the appearance of someone yelling), or FUN. The FUN protein turns on and turns off a bunch of other genes involved in nitrogen fixation but also has a little piece sticking off the side: a zinc sensor. As cellular zinc increases, FUN detects it and acts accordingly.

This is less about the environmental concerns that might arise around zinc contaminating the soil and more about how life itself is inextricably rooted in the abiotic conditions it grows around, not just in the world but inside their genes and proteins. Many, many proteins have evolved that interact with a bunch of individual atoms of different sizes (like heme proteins in your blood held together with an atom of iron) but zinc, truthfully, might be the most important of them all. Zinc gives proteins structure (there’s an entire superabundant class of proteins called “zinc fingers” which need zinc to form 3D shapes). Zinc is the second most common metal in human bodies (besides iron, which is the most abundant element by mass on Earth and is almost entirely needed for hemoglobin and myoglobin). Upwards of 10% of the human genome encodes a zinc-binding protein. Life itself is shaped by the elements, and discounting iron since it’s mostly sucked up by two proteins alone, zinc might be the most important sculptor in the body. 

Max: Thinking about how to continue getting the word out about Sequencer and connecting with our audience in creative ways. Email me with any ideas or just to say hey (see what I just did there?).

What we’re reading:

Kim: Notes from my trip, interview transcripts, translations! Not the most fun part, but wading through this material transports me back to those wonderful places and times.  

Dan: Like most people did a year ago I’m reading Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar. The main character is a talented dilettante whose life is seemingly sculpted by forces outside his control, resulting in him living his day to day existence like an apple bobbing along a river, aimless. He is awash in despair and desperate to give his life, or even his death, some kind of meaning. But, well, circumstances arise. I can’t relate. In an interview with The New York Times earlier this year, Akbar talked about how 11 years ago his life was in such a pit, deep in the bottle, he regularly pissed his bed, something which somehow becomes a plot point in Martyr! Good book.

Last night I watched one of my favorite movies of all time: The Hunt for Red October. I love submarines. 

Max: Ok so I just read this story by Dylan Matthews at Vox about a pancreas donation scandal (The case of the nearly 7,000 missing pancreases). Private companies (known as "OPOs") get assessed by a sort of "recovery rate" stat: How many organs they recover divided by how many organs they deem eligible. "They deem" is operative here. Companies would (allegedly) fudge their stats by claiming some donors "ineligible." Well when this loophole closed a few years ago, Matthews writes that a new one apparently opened: claiming that a pancreas was recovered for research.  

"But while OPOs couldn’t muck with the denominator anymore, they could still muck with the numerators. Being a donor generally means that your organs are used in a transplant, but there’s a carveout for one organ: the pancreas. … But the federal government never asked for any proof that these organs were part of any FDA-approved research. Sure enough, the total number of pancreata that OPOs labeled as for “research” grew from 513 in 2020 to a whopping 3,238 in 2023."

Fascinating stuff, I suggest reading the full story.