Saturday Links
A swimmable Seine, a history of the swing, coronation art, James Bond after Fleming, and more.
Good morning. Will Paris make the Seine swimmable again? In Bloomberg, Feargus O’Sullivan reports on the push to clean the river in time for the Olympics:
Just in time for the 2024 Summer Olympics, the River Seine in Paris will be clean enough to swim in.
The French capital is well on the way to achieving this long-cherished goal, according to a statement from Paris City Hall last week. A swimmable Seine would be a major turnaround for a busy urban waterway once notorious for its filth, allowing Paris to stage aquatic competition events in one of the world’s most famous, photogenic metropolitan riverscapes.
The cleanup hasn’t been cheap and persuading Parisians to swim in the river if the cleanup is deemed successful may be difficult:
Paris is investing €1.4 billion ($1.54 billion) in a vast new storm drain with a capacity of up to 30 Olympic swimming pools. It has also banned boats from releasing their dirty water into the river, offering people who live on boats up to €6,000 to convert their craft so that it can discharge at a municipal pumping station . . . Beyond Paris itself, the clean-up will also require more treatment of water flowing into the Seine and Marne — and the replumbing of 23,000 homes upstream across the Paris region whose wastewater currently goes straight into the river system.
Keeping Paris waters clean enough to swim in has already proven an elusive goal in the past. In 2017, the city opened a basin in the Canal Saint-Martin, which runs into the Seine, for swimming, only having to close it almost immediately after bacteria rapidly repopulated the water. It’s unsurprising that locals interviewed by newspaper Le Parisien said that getting into the water would require a major leap of faith on their part.
Time has also published a long report on the cleanup efforts: “Last summer, hydrologists measuring fecal bacteria in the Seine at the Olympics’ planned river venue in central Paris found that 90% of samples were already clean enough for swimming, according to city officials. The city is also hopeful that three pools built more recently along the La Villette canal in eastern Paris, which opened for swimming in the summer of 2016, can help build public confidence that the Seine can be safe for dips. Grégoire says the water is tested daily for bacteria. ‘We manage to have the pools open for swimming 95% of the time,’ he says. Still, when the polling agency Ifop asked 1,000 French people in 2021 what they thought of the Seine, 70% described it negatively, with some calling it dirty, polluted, and smelly.”
In other news, John Wilson will be writing a monthly fiction column for Prufrock. Read his first one here.
The dark history of the swing: “Long before it entered the urban playgrounds of the 20th century, the swing was a ritual instrument of healing, punishment and transformation.”
A response to a paper on the damaging effects of “whiteness” in physics education was rejected three times by Physical Review . . . for being scientific. Lawrence M. Krauss reports: “Essentially, the editor’s rejection implied that while the Comment was written from a scientific framework, the PRPER article, despite being funded by the National Science Foundation, was not. Yet, somehow, this fact had not disqualified the original article from being published in PRPER in the first place. Moreover, it also effectively immunized it against scientific criticisms in a scientific journal!” Read the rejected response here.
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