Delaware Liberal

DL Open Thread Sunday Magazine: September 21, 2025

El Somnambulo

‘The Hollowness Of The Easy Victory’–Robert Redford Took The Road Not Often Taken:

Redford’s insight into elite sport, as he remarked during a promotional tour in 1970, was that “frequently it fits you only for the wrong things, even breaks you utterly.” Winning, and its attendant praise, in Downhill Racer’s telling, lasts about a minute. Then it begins to corrupt, a truth rendered in the final scene, when Chappellet briefly catches the eye of the young Austrian racer who was beating him until the Austrian crashed. Chappellet’s jolt of self-awareness, that he just as easily could have lost if the Austrian hadn’t caught an edge, is immediately overwhelmed by a congratulating crowd. At the final frame, you can already feel the inevitable toll coming, the day when he will be defeated, just another limping veteran.

Redford tells this story time and time again in his films, even the most unsporting. The Candidate? It’s about a race—and the final three minutes are among Redford’s finest, as he plays the newly elected Senator Bill McKay’s aghast awakening from mindless competitiveness: “What do we do now?” Ordinary People, which he directed, is an excruciating essay about a sporty boating-and-golfing couple who imagine themselves securely among life’s winners but prove incapable of dealing with real crisis. A River Runs Through It—a film I’ve seen possibly 10 times, and never without being wholly absorbed by the loveliness of its frames and of Redford’s poetic narration—focuses on a handsome athlete-fisherman, played by Brad Pitt, whose ease duels with recklessness. Quiz Show is about nothing if not how the hagiography that attaches to a “winner” can twist the most benign-seeming men. “What was I supposed to do at that point, disillusion the whole goddamn country?” Charles Van Doren asks in an effort to excuse his cheating.

He told a 2014 forum at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, “One of the themes that I’ve tried to work in films is the subject of winning, that this is a country that’s all about winning.” He continued, “I was told a slogan as a kid when I was playing baseball: Listen, it doesn’t matter whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game. That’s what’s important, and that was drummed into my head and drummed into my head. Yet, what I experienced was just the opposite. What I experienced was winning was everything. So, I think that sunk so deep into my psyche that when I became able, years later, to be an artist or to make film, I wanted to tell the truth about my country that wasn’t being told.”

Advice For Using Water–Cool it!:

You may not be giving a second thought to setting your washing machine on the hot cycle, cranking your showers to a steamy temperature or scrubbing your dirty dishes under a stream of scalding water.

If you did, you’d find that you probably don’t need to use so much hot water — and that you could be saving energy and cutting your utility bills. Water heating is responsible for more than 10 percent of both annual residential energy use and consumer utility costs, the biggest share after air conditioning and heating, according to the Energy Department. An American household uses an average of 64 gallons of hot water a day — close to the amount needed to fill an average bathtub — by doing laundry, showering, washing the dishes and running kitchen and bathroom faucets.

Some helpful hints.

Six World Leaders Discuss Addressing Climate Change With the US AWOL:

International collaboration on climate change is fraying. The Trump administration withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement, the 2015 treaty aiming to limit global warming, and has penalized the renewable-energy business and promoted fossil fuels. Ten years after Paris, a vast majority of countries are not on pace to meet their climate targets. With the United States sidelined and China ascendant as a clean-energy superpower, the global map of alliances on climate action is being redrawn. On top of all this, the planet keeps warming.

Debates around climate change often focus on the world’s largest economies and biggest emitters. But much of the hard work of figuring out how to adapt — both to a hotter planet and to a new geopolitical landscape — is happening in countries that have contributed relatively little to the problem yet are still navigating complex climate-related issues. Hoping to better understand how global warming and the changing world order are affecting some of these often-overlooked places, I spoke with six world leaders from different geographic regions. I heard some common themes: the ravages of extreme weather, the difficulties posed by the Trump administration’s retreat. But these conversations also illustrated the intensely varied predicaments facing world leaders right now.

Six interviews.  It’s Sunday, take some time.  Read them.

Honeybees–Do-Bee Or Don’t-Bee?:

It was Giannutri’s isolation that drew scientists here. They were seeking a unique open-air laboratory to answer a question that has long intrigued ecologists: could honeybees be causing their wild bee cousins to decline?

To answer this, they carried out a radical experiment. While Giannutri is too far from the mainland for honeybees to fly to it, 18 hives were set up on the island in 2018: a relatively contained, recently established population. Researchers got permission to shut the hives down, effectively removing most honeybees from the island.

When the study began, the island’s human population temporarily doubled in size, as teams of scientists fanned out across the scrubland tracking bees. Then came the ban: they closed hives on selected days during the peak foraging period, keeping the honeybees in their hives for 11 hours a day. Local people were sceptical. “For them, we were doing silly and useless things,” says Dapporto. But the results were compelling.

“‘Wow,’ was my first response,” says the lead researcher, Lorenzo Pasquali, from the University of Florence. When the data came together, “all the results were pointing in the same direction”.

The findings, published in Current Biology earlier this year, found that over the four years after the honeybees were introduced, populations of two vital wild pollinators – bumblebees and anthophora – fell by “an alarming” 80%. When the honeybees were locked up, there was 30% more pollen for other pollinators, and the wild bee species were sighted more frequently. Scientists observed that the wild species appeared to take their time pollinating flowers during the lockups, displaying different foraging behaviour. “The effect is visible,” says Dapporto.

Doo-bee-doo-bee-doo:

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