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Hello folks, Kim here. In today’s fraught political landscape and incessant culture wars, I’m reminded of an absurd study that Max highlighted in a hilarious Instagram video for Sequencer. The study’s title is a bit of a mouthful, but the author wrote an article with a more straightforward headline: “Email signatures are harming the planet and could cost people their lives — it’s time to stop using them.” He specifically calls out people who tack on pronouns to their signatures, thus unnecessarily adding to the climate footprint of their emails. Whether that study’s premise is true or not — I strongly lean one way — I want to point out all the ways the study is missing a larger service that asking for and volunteering pronouns provide. My job as a reporter involves telling true stories about people. Mentioning pronouns doesn’t have to be political. More than keeping up with woke culture or basic courtesy, it’s a crucial question in my interviews, as important to get right as the spelling of someone’s name. Of course, I’ve been chastised more often than I would have liked by traditional-minded interviewees, who tell me, “What you see is what you get.” But it doesn’t compare to the gladness I feel for the handful of times when sources tell me they appreciate me for asking. Oh, the stories I could tell. Pronouns come in handy as a part of an introduction and self identification. Names, of course, aren’t always obvious in signaling whether the person is male or female. How many Leslies, Jordans, Blakes, Alexs, Taylors, or Averys do you know of from different genders? If I’m corresponding with a Casey for the first time via text or email, I’d like to visualize whom I'm writing to, and pronouns help me paint that picture. For that matter, neither are appearances and mannerisms always surefire indicative of someone’s pronouns preferences too. For unfamiliar names, it might be even harder to tell. In one article I was fact checking for a white reporter, she had incorrectly assumed that a Vietnamese man used “she/her.” Being from Southeast Asia, luckily I was familiar with the usual genders associated with common names from this region, so I easily caught the error. Whenever we correspond with or write about people from different cultures, it behooves us to double-check pronouns to avoid embarrassing consequences for all parties. Me, I’m a prime candidate for pronoun perplexity. Those who aren’t familiar with Asian names might have a hard time telling whether “Shi En Kim” is a male or female name. Even though I go by my last name Kim, a common female name in the Anglosaxon world, I know at least one other male who also goes by Kim: my dad. I’m fine with the fact that my email signature has my pronouns, and I’m guessing some recipients of my cold emails may have been relieved for that. Now, to get more political here — asking for pronouns, whether someone goes by he, she, or they, is a small step toward atonement, to empower communities such as LGBTQ+ people who have long been put in a box that doesn’t fit them. I don’t need to harp on this point that’s already been written about extensively. As a reporter, here’s my two cents that I can add: Yes, that pronouns can be subjective is still a contentious concept for some people, but they’re part of the story about a character, and by asking my interviewees their pronouns, I’m only hoping to accurately represent how they see themselves and move through the world. I’ve worked with sources who spoke with me on the record even though that may jeopardize their career and safety. In some fields such as the sciences or labor-intensive jobs, women are the minority, so labeling an anonymous female source a “she” may make them identifiable, even if I don’t mention her name. Using “they” is a way of generalizing pronouns to give anonymous sources some measure of protection, rather than being — as some anti-woke groups will jump to conclude — a political statement. But sometimes it can be. During President Trump’s first week in office, right after he froze federal funding left and right, I spoke with one fabulous scientist (who I assumed was female) outside a government building to learn what was going on inside the government agency. When I asked about pronouns to use in my article, the scientist told me, “Let’s go with ‘they.’ I want to stick it to the man.” Yours, Kim (she/her) What we’re working on: Max: Asking people to consider taking action to prevent the government from selling our public lands. Watch a nice primer video from Kyla Scanlon and read more at The Wilderness Society. Also, I’m finishing up an AI story that I felt compelled to write (and I say this as someone who has grown very tired of AI stories). I also have two nature stories in the works that I’m so excited about. Dan: Hello! For Sequencer I interviewed the terrific Alleen Brown, the host of Drilled’s 12th season, on the legacy of Standing Rock and the misinformation wielded by fossil fuel companies (and the ex-Iraq War security forces they employ) to turn public opinion in their favor. Misinformation is a hot topic in vaccines and public health, but I haven’t seen it discussed much recently in use in both on-the-ground protest situations and in the courtroom. In a case that the energy company that built the Dakota Access Pipeline brought against Greenpeace, misinformation flourished, particularly because the people who made up the jury were particularly ripe to be receptive to it. Not because they were stupid or hated the environment, but because the energy company took advantage of a plain fact: The Standing Rock protests were disruptive to every day life, and they persisted for a long time. Greenpeace — essentially a stand in for the broader Standing Rock protest movement — never really stood a chance. Read our conversation about FBI infiltrators, protestors left out to dry by the courts, and more. Maddie: I recently brought a plant to the office and am working on keeping it alive. Also we are moving imminently, so mentally and emotionally bracing for that process. Oh and guys, I have an idea I want to do a recurring interview segment where I talk to scientists while we play their favorite game (that can be played online.) We’d record it and I’d pester them with dumb questions while we played chess, or Fortnite, or Neopets. If you’re a scientist and would be down to pilot something like this, get in touch! maddie@sequencermag.com Kim: My latest article for High Country News is about “produced water” in the Permian Basin. Don’t let the benign-sounding name fool you — produced water is the wastewater from oil and gas drilling, and it’s laden with brine, radioactive substances, carcinogens, heavy metals, and organic leavings from the fossil fuels that operators are pulling up in the first place. Now, New Mexico is considering recycling this wastewater to use off the oilfield for extra-industrial uses, and environmental groups are alarmed for public safety. What we’re reading: Max: Mozilla is killing my favorite offline reader app, Pocket. I’ve been using Pocket for over a decade to bookmark articles, read them later (and get around the occasional paywalls). It’s something of a time capsule because I can scroll through literally thousands of articles in my reading queue that I never got around to reading. So when Pocket started walking the plank, I exported my links and scrolled scrolled scrolled and scrolled on my app until I reached the oldest articles in my queue—articles I never got around to reading. So let’s start this section with a couple of those: ❄️From 2012 an investigation of a snow removal racket in Montreal: Getting Plowed | Maisonneuve 🚗From 2016 on self driving cars: The road not taken | The Verge And some newer stuff: 🗺️ Daniel Steiner videos on YouTube. This guy produces really engaging stories based on old maps and new reporting. Like this one about the deeper story hidden in US Highway maps. 🐻❄️Lois Parshley for Grist on Alaska’s first-ever heat advisory. “With nearly 22 hours of sunlight approaching the solstice, daytime heat accumulates and lingers — not just outside, but indoors. Unlike the Lower 48, most homes in Alaska weren’t built to keep heat out, but to keep it in during months of subzero cold.”
Maddie: I’ve been reading books on radio management (nerd alert!!!) and, I won’t lie, it’s made me a little nostalgic for an era of journalism I very much never got to see. Said era was full of music DJs-turned-talk hosts, and every show was a call-in show. I think on the whole I am happy I don’t live in this era (newsgathering for radio was basically nonexistent, and the mindset was very “if it bleeds it leads”) but I do think it would be fun to go to that reality for, like, a few days at a time. And I also watched this while baking cookies the other night, not sure why I made that choice. But kinda interesting! Kim: I just finished Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver. The Pulitzer-prize winning author — not for this book, but another equally exquisite novel, Demon Copperhead — is my new writing hero. I jumped into the book without knowing what it was about, only that it was “the first major novel to tackle the Trump era straight on and place it in the larger chronicle of existential threats.” Unsheltered seems to have garnered a mixed reception from a variety of readers and reviewers, but I adored every word. Also, this data-heavy piece by my colleagues at High Country News, Annie Rosenthal and Chad Bradley, is a banger! “What defunding public media would mean for the West” has somber news about the state of journalism, namely, rural radio, in the age of Trumpism. It’s scary, but I hope people won’t look away from this yet another threat to democracy.
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