Untangling Complexity
Vince Beiser on tackling thorny issues and making a career in journalism
I’m on the road reporting this week, so I’m handing the reins over to the wonderful journalist Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow. For today’s newsletter, Becca interviewed author and freelancer Vince Beiser.
Becca regularly edits The Reported Essay, and she also spoke to me recently about her approach to freelancing and writing her nonfiction book, Atomic Dreams, which was named one of the “best books of the year so far” by The New Yorker. Becca’s most recent feature story came out last month in The Guardian: “She took chickens from a slaughterhouse. Was it a rescue or a crime?” edited by Jessica Reed, another guest who delved into pitching and stories for The Reported Essay.
I found Becca and Vince’s conversation helpful and insightful, and I hope you do too.
—Erika
Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow
To transition away from the fossil fuels that are disrupting the climate, the world will need legions of solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, and batteries. Despite recent setbacks in the U.S., all of these technologies are spreading rapidly throughout the globe. Yet all of them require metals—such as lithium, cobalt, rare earths, copper, and nickel—as do our phones and laptops. And mining for metals is far from a benign endeavor.
As journalist Vince Beiser writes in his recent book Power Metal, “the electric car I was so proud of, the digital devices I use every day and the renewable energy I was counting on to power them, are together spawning massive environmental damage, political upheaval, mayhem, and murder.”
Beiser’s illuminating book explores the dark side of what he dubs “the electro-digital age.” But he also insists that these downsides aren’t a reason to give up on renewable energy or electric vehicles. Rather, we need to reckon with the problems so we can find ways to alleviate them. In his reporting, Beiser takes us to a lithium mine in Chile and a scrapyard in Vancouver; he tags along with e-waste recyclers in Lagos and introduces us to the founder of iFixit, a service that equips people to repair gadgets instead of tossing them.
Beiser’s book resonated with me because, in writing my book on nuclear power, I also came to see the energy landscape as far less straightforward than I’d realized. That is one of my favorite parts of reporting: gradually unearthing complications and contradictions, until simplistic orthodoxies (e.g., “renewables are good,” “nuclear is bad”) give way to a more textured and accurate picture. But navigating how to portray this complexity is one of the hardest parts of the job.
Beiser and I both began with a concern about climate change, and we were both compelled to question our assumptions. Although we focused on energy, I see the challenges we faced as applying to all journalism. How can we stay rooted in our values without getting blinkered by ideology? How can we embrace curiosity even when it leads us to uncomfortable conclusions? How can we acknowledge nuance without devolving into false balance?
In Power Metal, Beiser meets these challenges with integrity and grace. So I was excited to talk with him for the Reported Essay, about his book and his career as a freelancer.
Vince has reported from over 100 countries, states, provinces, kingdoms, occupied territories, no man’s lands, and disaster zones. He has exposed conditions in California’s harshest prisons, trained with US Army soldiers, ridden with the first responders to natural disasters, and hunted down other stories from around the world for publications including Wired, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Mother Jones, Rolling Stone, The Economist, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times.
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Can you start by talking about the origin of this book?
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