Credit: xinhua/Xinhua News Agency/PA Images

UnHerd is a place to look at the world without the headlines getting in the way. But we donāt claim to be the only such vantage point. Beyond the froth of the 24 hour news cycle ā and the 24 second social media cycle ā you can find a wealth of writing that doesnāt follow the herd. The aim of my daily UnPacked column is to feature, and comment on, the best of whatās out there.
Iāve counted down the top 50 UnPacked highlights from 2018 ā the facts, figures, ideas and events that may not have made the headlines, but which provide a more reliable insight into the forces shaping the future.
Today, numbers 30 to 21:
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#30
Scandalous link to Russia exposed
With America under Trump, Britain mired in Brexit and France having a riot, Germany looks like the responsible adult of international politics.
But is it? Consider the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, a link between Germany and Russia that undermines the security of the countries in between.Ā AĀ BloombergĀ editorial explains:
āDue to be completed in 2019, the pipeline will double the amount of gas Russia transports directly to Germany across the Baltic Sea. Nord Stream 1, completed in 2011, supplies 55 billion cubic meters a year to Germany; the second pipeline would allow Gazprom, Russiaās state-owned gas company, to funnel an additional 55 billion cubic meters over the same route.ā
This is bad news for Russiaās immediate neighbours:
āGas that gets to Western Europe [via land-based pipelines] from Russia also passes through countries such as Poland, Slovakia and Hungary, all NATO members. They⦠are at risk of being denied supplies and transit revenues once Nord Stream 2 comes online. Polandās government has called the pipeline a āhybrid weaponā created by Moscow to divide the EU and NATO.ā

German irresponsibility threatens Europe
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#29
Where are the clones? There are no clones
2018 began with a very special delivery at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai: the birth of two crab-eating macaques called Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua. What made these little monkeys special is that they are the first cloned primates to make it beyond the Petri dish and the womb.
People are also primates, but no human clone has ever been born (we think).Ā In a fascinating, if somewhatĀ horrifying, report forĀ MIT Technology Review, Antonio Regalado explains why. Basically, itās hugely impractical ā most attempts fail and each attempt is costly:
āā¦[Yi Zhang, a leading stem cell biologist] notes that Chinese teams used 63 surrogate mothers and 417 eggs to make two monkey clones. Just imagine arranging for dozens of human surrogates and egg donors.
āāNo society could accept this,ā says Zhang.ā
Well, one would hope so.

Whatever happened to the human clones?
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#28
China is electrifying
āIf you want to know the future, look at the pastā, said Albert Einstein. Alternatively, look at China.
For instance, the scale of the countryās environmental problems may shock you, but so might the effort going into solving them.
In April, Jeremy Hodges took a look at Chinaās electric bus revolution forĀ Bloomberg:
āThe numbers are staggering. China had about 99 percent of the 385,000 electric buses on the roads worldwide in 2017, accounting for 17 percent of the countryās entire fleet. Every five weeks, Chinese cities add 9,500 of the zero-emissions transportersāthe equivalent of Londonās entire working fleet, according Bloomberg New Energy Finance.ā
If we want to stop catastrophic climate change then we will have to electrify our transport system within a generation. China shows it can be done.

You wait ages for an electric bus, and then three hundred thousand turn up
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#27
America: Not divided, just disappointed
America appears to be a deeply polarised nation. And it is ā but not for the reasons you might think, arguesĀ George Hawley in theĀ American Conservative:
āThe Bible-thumping, pro-war, free-market purist is a rare creature. So is the gun-grabbing, abortion-loving, socialist atheist. Perfect conservative and liberal stereotypes are hard to find in the real world.
āEspecially on economic issues, Americans exhibit a remarkable consensusā¦ā
As shared institutions decline, we become more loyal to unshared institutions like political ideologies and cultural identities. This allows emotionally manipulative, but otherwise incompetent, politicians to rise to the top. In power, they let their supporters down ā creating psychological stress that needs a release:
āā¦we can resolve the tension between our party identifications and our frustration with our parties by increasing our antipathy toward our partiesā opponents. In other words, we can justify our vote choice if we believe the opposing party is worseā¦ā
Utter madness, but it explains a lot.

The worse our politicians get, the more we indulge them
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#26
Whatever happened to Web 3.0?
Ethan Zuckerman is a key figure in the development of the internet. Interviewed by Noah Kulwin forĀ New YorkĀ magazine, he believes that āWeb 2.0ā ā the internet as dominated by the giants of search and social media ā is stagnating:
āI really feel like weāve lost about ten years of innovation. I feel like this last decade has been pretty boring for the web.ā
Heās right. Think about the development of internet in decade-long chunks. In 1988, most of us hadnāt even heard of the internet, but by 1998, email was widespread and websites commonplace. Fast forward another ten years to 2008 and broadband had become the norm. Google and Facebook were also achieving default status ā indeed pretty much everything that dominates digital in 2018 was in place ten years ago.
Thanks to the smartphone, the internet has gone fully mobile over the last decade ā but itās still basically the same internet, only on a smaller screen.

Alexa, how do we disrupt the tech lords?
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#25
Stop fiddling with the gene machine
The first āgene editedā babies were born in China this year. But asĀ Veronique Greenwood reminds us in a piece forĀ Quanta Magazine, an individualās genome is not so much a list of instructions as a complex machine whose different parts interact in complicated ways that weāre nowhere near to fully understanding:
āJoel Bader, a systems biologist at Johns Hopkins University, says⦠that ā[The] closer we are able to look, the more we are able to see that perturbing one gene or pathway has effects that propagate throughout the entire system,āā¦ā
Thanks to techniques like CRISPR, we can knock-out and splice-in genes with ever greater precision. But though weĀ knowĀ howĀ to perform these manipulations, to a very large extent we donāt knowĀ whatĀ weāre doing. Thatās worth bearing in mind before we genetically re-engineer our descendants.

Why much of genetic engineering remains a mystery
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#24
Sheffield A and Sheffield B
The great geographical divides that define the politics of our time ā for instance between āred stateā America and the coastal cities, or between the Eurozoneās core and periphery ā donāt always involve great distances. Sometimes, the same applies to a single city. In an eye-opening piece forĀ CityMetric, Sam Gregory provides a guided tour of what he calls āSheffield Aā and āSheffield Bā:
āUniquely for a British city, where pockets of deprivation are usually nestled uncomfortably between well-to-do suburbs, Sheffieldās dividing line runs directly through the city like the Berlin Wall. How did this happen?ā
Gregory describes a bus route across the city where, between the neighbourhoods at each end, āaverage life expectancy falls by 7.5 years for men and almost 10 years for womenā.
Thereās no physical barrier between the two Sheffields, but that doesnāt stop them from being worlds apart.

The Year UnPacked: 30 to 21
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#23
The birth of two nations
In theĀ New York TimesĀ Quoctrung Bui and Claire Cain Miller describe another great divide, this time among American women:
āFirst-time mothers are older in big cities and on the coasts, and younger in rural areas and in the Great Plains and the South. In New York and San Francisco, their average age is 31 and 32. In Todd County, S.D., and Zapata County, Tex., itās half a generation earlier, at 20 and 21ā¦ā
Across the nation as a whole, the average age of first birth is now 30.3 for college educated women but 23.8 for those without a college degree.
When Benjamin Disraeli wrote about the two nations of Victorian England ā āthe rich and the poorā ā he said that they were āas ignorant of each otherās habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different mannersā¦ā
In a different time and place, itās still true.

America: the birth of two nations
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#22
The great GDP con
Over the last few decades, thereās been a marked slow down in economic growth across the West. However, things could be even worse than the official GDP figures would lead us to believe.
In an article for theĀ Global Poverty and Inequality Dynamic Research Network, Jacob Assa and Ingrid Harold Kvangraven show that some dubious tweaks to the way the figures are calculated mean that weāre not as rich as we think we are.
Not only does GDP include the rent paid by tenants to landlords, it also includes the imaginary or āimputedā rent that āhomeowners would have paid to a landlord had they [the landlord] owned their homeā¦ā
This means that escalating rents and runaway house prices ā which contribute nothing to productivity and make a lot of people poorer ā shows up as a boost to GDP.
No wonder governments are so reluctant to solve the housing crisis.
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#21
Families need fathers and so do entire neighbourhoods
The inequality in life outcomes of black boys and white boys in America is well known. But a new study featured in theĀ New York TimesĀ shows just how pervasive the effect is ā it doesnāt matter how rich the household or how āgoodā the neighbourhood, black boys are more likely to end up in a lower income band as adults than are white boys (and correspondingly less likely to end up in a higher band).
And yet the fine-grained geographical detail of the study did pick out certain neighbourhoods where the effect was much weaker. What was it that made these areas different? Crunching the data revealed various factors, but the most significant had to do with fatherhood:
āā¦these pockets⦠were the places where many lower-income black children had fathers at home. Poor black boys did well in such places, whether their own fathers were present or not.
āāThat is a pathbreaking finding,ā said William Julius Wilson, a Harvard sociologist whose books have chronicled the economic struggles of black men.ā
Fathers arenāt just good for their own families, they can also provide boys in other families with ārole models and mentorsā.
Now read The Year UnPacked 20-11
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