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Related:
Keller's sidebar* on memorable portrayals of work in the arts
Work, meaning and choice, and Calvin Seerveld on Jubilee on the Job, from Comment
My entry on the Union Stockyards and The Jungle in my Chicago album

From the New York Times :

COPENHAGEN*—According to Sweden, [Danish immigration] laws have led about 1,000 mixed Danish-foreign couples, barred from setting up households in Denmark, to live across the strait between Copenhagen and Sweden. In many cases, the Danish partner crosses the long causeway bridge from Malmo to Copenhagen every day, or takes the ferry … to work or study. The bridge was called the Love Bridge by The Economist, which carried an account of the situation a couple of months ago, though the term does not seem to have caught on among the couples actually living lives divided between two countries … Throwing out Danes was not the intention of the new law, some of the legislation's sponsors say, but an unavoidable result of the effort to reduce the influx of foreigners, often from non-European countries, who, they argue, burden the social welfare system, commit more than their share of the crime and tend to form enclaves within Denmark, defying efforts to integrate them.

TUCURUÍ, Brazil* - A funny thing happened back when the Brazilian government was building the giant $8 billion dam that bears the name of this town in the eastern Amazon. Somebody neglected to cut down the trees and clear the other growth in the 1,100-square-mile area that would be flooded, and 20 years later that has become a problem. Decomposing vegetation has resulted in the emission of millions of tons of greenhouse gases. Submerged tree trunks hinder navigation, scientists worry that increasing acidity of water in the reservoir could corrode the dam's turbines, and mosquito infestations have been so intense that some settlements have been forced to relocate. To solve the problem, until recently, divers using special hydraulic chain saws had been swimming down 70 feet or so into the reservoir, attaching themselves to submerged tree trunks, cutting them and then watching as the trunks were hauled to the surface by iron cables. … Early this year, however, Eletronorte, the government agency that administers the dam, ordered a stop to the tree removal … [saying] that they now see environmental benefits in leaving the reservoir intact.

• The New York Times Magazine may be making a belated discovery when it finds that evangelical colleges, like Biola University, are not all fundamentalist drill centers of conformity, but are "encouraging a new level of engagement with the secular world." The point was made in a 2000 cover story of the Atlantic Monthly by Alan Wolfe (discussed here by John Wilson and here by Mark Noll). But the Times Magazine piece is notable for writer Samantha Shapiro's patience and care to explore the tension between fundamentalism and cultural engagement at Biola, and to understand, rather than caricature, the students she meets. She may be overeager, however, to endorse Biola professor Craig Detweiler's message that, as Shapiro summarizes, "creative people who start with a message are propagandists, not artists." Article*
• Is it true, asks a letter writer to the Chicago Reader's answer man, Cecil Adams, that the diamond trade is a scam, and is this an excuse not to buy one for one's wife? At the risk of endorsing one husband's cheapness, Adams says there is indeed reason to see a conspiracy lurking behind the world diamond market, even without tackling the question of worker exploitation. Affirming the view of journalist Edward Jay Epstein in his 1982 book The Rise and Fall of Diamonds, Adams says, "Prices are kept high by a cynical cartel that preys on vanity and stupidity," he writes. De Beers in South Africa stifles its supply to keep demand sky-high, and manipulated the 1930s-era media to resurrect the custom of buying engagement rings. As a result, the diamond market soared from $23 million in 1939 to $2.1 billion in 1979. The only thing that can stop it, perhaps, are new artificially produced but high-quality diamonds, such as those made by chemical vapor deposition—a vast improvement on cubic zirconium knockoffs. Column
  Related:
  Sapphires in space, from Slate

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