Foreign Policy January - February 2016

JOSH NEUFELD “In crafting this comics piece, my job was to take Alia Malek’s heartfelt reporting and create a narrative to fill in the visual gaps between the incredible photographs from Peter van Agtmael, who traveled with Alia. I was handicapped, though. Unlike Alia and Peter, I hadn’t actually accompanied our protagonists on this odyssey, so I immersed myself as best I could. Sadly, in recent months, this type of journey has become all too common, so there were a lot of visual resources out there. And with the help of Alia’s notes and Peter’s archival shots, I dove into the minutiae of life vests and German border-police uniforms. For the opening scene on the overloaded raft, I was struck by Alia’s description: ‘Women and children were lined up, supine, on…

A vicious storm surge, powered by monsoon winds, brought several feet of brackish water crashing through Sk Aptauddin’s coastal home in the fall of 2014. The simple concrete shelter where Aptauddin lived with his family on Ghoramara island, 90 miles south of the Indian city of Kolkata, was destroyed. Aptauddin, shown here standing in the remnants of his home, is one of thousands of people on Ghoramara already devastated by the effects of climate change. According to the United Nations, from 1968 to 1999, Ghoramara, which sits in the Bay of Bengal’s Sundarbans delta, lost 75 percent of its territory to encroaching water. Since then, rising sea levels and coastal erosion have only magnified the consequences of flooding. Today, with less than 3 square miles of landmass left, Ghoramara may soon…

1 Canon EOS 7D camera The best way to know if you’ve made a mistake is to take a photo with a flash. It’s good to show a client how they look. The only time I’m not supposed to use it is with VIPs. Even if I say I’m going to delete it, they don’t allow it. 2 Rodial dragon’s blood hyaluronic mask A client introduced me to this, and I had to get it. If I do a 10-minute mask before applying makeup, it plumps the face and makes it look healthier. I can’t use it on everybody because it’s very expensive. 3 MAC lip palette Mixing my own lipstick shades was messy until MAC introduced mixing palettes a few years ago. When I travel, alongside my palettes, I carry at least 12 different…

DESPITE MAKING UP half the working-age population, women generated only 37 percent of global GDP in 2013—a finding from a recent McKinsey Global Institute study that surveyed 95 countries representing 97 percent of the world’s GDP and 93 percent of its female population. The report’s most striking finding is that gender parity isn’t specifically driven by per capita GDP: Rates of female workforce participation actually peak in low- and high-income countries, but sag drastically in the middle, such as in India and Turkey. The reason? In addition to cultural factors and personal preference, the report surmises that in middle-income countries, households weigh the economic gain of two working spouses against many other considerations—like the necessity of unpaid care work (e.g., cooking, cleaning, and caring for elderly family members and children). People…

“I have been studying the global shipping industry since 2000, observing its amazing growth both in cargo statistics and in the size of the ships. My work raises questions about the ultimate outcome of all of this development— namely, how it contributes to climate change. Here, a wrecked container ship sits in Mount Rainier National Park’s Reflection Lakes with wayward cargo floating in the water and strewn about the lakeshore. This imagery proposes a post-apocalyptic scenario: After a cataclysmic event, port implements are stranded far inland, in places we would never imagine they might be. The message is that America’s parks, although protected spaces under the law, are still vulnerable to the deleterious effects of industrial activities. The imagery is also a metaphor for what is at stake when a national…

Pedal to the Metal AFTER LAST YEAR’S landmark climate deal, people are optimistic that the world might finally be turning a corner with clean, renewable energy. Yet solar power, wind, and biofuels can’t quite meet today’s high energy demands for many human activities, such as transportation. In 2014, global oil consumption increased about 0.8 percent; natural gas and coal each shot up around 0.4 percent. But one potential solution, according to scientists at Montreal’s McGill University, has been within reach all along: metals. The team’s research demonstrates that some fine-grain metal particles— such as iron and aluminum, which produce flames with power densities similar to those of fossil fuels when burned— could power an external combustion engine (long ago used in steam cars). Giving fossil fuel-based internal combustion engines a run for…