Good morning, and welcome to the weekend.
Grab your cup of coffee or tea, and sit down with a selection of this week’s great reads from The Globe and Mail. In this issue, Doug Saunders spends three weeks visiting workers in several factory districts of Ho Chi Minh City and Can Tho, doing detailed profiles of half a dozen different agricultural villages in the Mekong Delta. Speaking to The Globe, he said climate-related crop failure has made them lonelier than he could have imagined. Migration has become impossible for rice and sugar farmers who are no longer able to farm, he said, so they are forced to leave their families behind and work alone in factory cities. “They only see their children once a year for Lunar New Year,” he said. “The villages are full of lonely children raised by their grandparents, who text their parents in the evening but never see them.”
Erin Anderssen reports on a YouTuber and a Canadian arachnologist who are teaming up to dispel the fake news around spiders. She speaks to YouTuber Travis McEnery and McGill University arachnologist Catherine Scott, who are joining forces to clear up misinformation about spiders.
If you’re reading this on the web, or it was forwarded to you from someone else, you can sign up for Great Reads and more than 20 other Globe newsletters on our newsletter sign-up page. If you have questions or feedback, drop us a line at greatreads@globeandmail.com.
In Tan Phu, Ngo Thi Oanh has held on to the sugarcane business she has worked for three decades, which has expanded to include plots abandoned by families who moved away.GORAN TOMASEVIC/The Globe and Mail
As rising seas ruin crops, hundreds of Mekong Delta farmers are taking to the roads and moving to big cities, straining their finances and families. On the road with Vietnam’s farmers, Doug Saunders finds that climate change makes migration more difficult and unlikely, leaving many feeling trapped. As part of a year-long project exploring the global migration crisis, Saunders aims to challenge conventional wisdom on what ‘climate refugees’ look like and where they go.
Catherine Scott with her tarantula in St John's, Newfoundland. Scott seeks to dispel myths and misinformation about spiders.GREG LOCKE/The Globe and Mail
If you live in Canada, you’ve likely witnessed a spider dozing in a ceiling corner somewhere. This might be unsettling, because if social media has the story right, spiders are malevolent, venomous creatures prowling around your bedroom, waiting to crawl into your open mouth while you sleep. What you think you know about spiders is (probably) wrong. So, why believe it? YouTuber Travis McEnery and Catherine Scott, a McGill University arachnologist, are joining forces to clear up the misinformation.
We can build better, fairer algorithms in a world of angry bias – so why aren’t we?
Illustration by María Hergueta
Tech companies have long guarded their algorithms as proprietary information, even as concerns have grown about all that secret code sorting our personal data and surveilling our behaviour, dosing us with addictive content on social media that can have negative consequences. There is nothing else in this world that has a bigger impact on daily human decisions and behaviour in society than algorithms. Now, several computer scientists have found that computer code can do better. New research shows that algorithms can be tweaked to balance social-media feeds to reduce polarization, correct the biases inherent in many image searches, or adjust for bad data that under-represents some groups and leaves out others entirely. So why isn’t it happening?
Woman on a mission: How Timea Nagy inspired FINTRAC, banks and police to combat sex trafficking
Timea Nagy, an anti-money-laundering expert and advocate for survivors of sex trafficking.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Rita Trichur profiles Timea Nagy, the woman who inspired FINTRAC, banks and police to take action on sex trafficking in Canada. Nagy’s Project Protect, the world’s first public-private partnership to combat human trafficking for sexual exploitation, has helped financial institutions catch many millions of dollars in illicit money as it entered the banking system. It has also increased lenders’ reporting of suspicious transactions to FINTRAC, enabling the anti-money-laundering watchdog to improve the financial intelligence it provides to police across the country for their sex-trafficking investigations.
Drag artists face armed protesters and legal attacks as U.S. right targets performances
Drag queen Cheri Lake (she/her), who performs under the name 'Brigitte Bandit,' prepares to give testimony in the Senate Chamber at the Texas State Capitol in Austin on March 23.Brandon Bell/Getty Images North America
After decades of steadily moving into the mainstream, drag has abruptly become the subject of moral panic and a target for a subset of the U.S. right. As almost 20 states pass or mull laws that would crack down on the performances, candidates put anti-drag planks at the centre of their platforms and messaging turns to archaic, homophobic slurs that accuse LGBTQ2+ people of grooming and pedophilia, Adrian Morrow speaks to several drag performers who are concerned for their safety and their right to express their gender identity.
The 25 most influential people in Canadian television
Supplied
On Sunday, the CBC will broadcast the 2023 Canadian Screen Awards. The Globe’s Barry Hertz, Amber Dowling and Radheyan Simonpillai have compiled a list of the 25 Most Influential People in Canadian Television, which, as they say, includes “the gatekeepers and the ground-level instigators, the power players and scrappy provocateurs.” The show airs at 8 p.m. ET.
Cobblestone roads of France no match for Alison Jackson, Canadian cycling star
Alison Jackson of Canada celebrates moment after she crosses the finish line to win the women's Paris Roubaix, a 145 kilometer (90 miles) one-day-race, at the velodrome in Roubaix, northern France, on April 8.
Alison Jackson grew up on a bison farm near Vermilion, Alta., but it was on the cobblestoned roads of northern France that she claimed the biggest victory of her career, and one of the biggest in Canadian pro cycling. The 34-year-old is now the only North American to have won either version of the famed Paris-Roubaix Femmes race: the men’s race dates to 1896; the women’s had its third edition last weekend. Oliver Moore chronicles her journey to making Canadian cycling history.
Drawn from the headlines
U.S. begins study of possible rules to regulate AI like ChatGPT. Reuters, April 12, 2023, as drawn by Graeme MacKay
Illustration by Graeme MacKay