2025-12-22
44 分钟This is The Guardian.
Hi, I'm David Wolff, and I'm the editor of The Guardian Longread.
This December, we're choosing a few of our favourite pieces from the year.
This week I've chosen Life in a Sinking Nation, Tuvalu's Dreams of Dry Land, by Attle Dave.
Over the past year or two,
I've become increasingly convinced that surprise is the key to good journalism.
And what I find so often is that when a writer has the time and resources to do the reporting on a story,
what they find actually always is unexpected.
And that's what I like so much about this story by Atal Dev.
It's a piece about the Pacific Island of Tuvalu,
which is often seen as one of the places in the world most threatened by climate change.
Some estimates suggest the whole nation could be fully submerged underwater by the end of the century.
Tuvalu got a lot of attention in 2022 when it announced that it was responding to this threat by becoming a digital nation.
What exactly this meant remained vague,
but the media were very excited by the idea of the world's first digital nation.
People connected it to the idea of the metaverse,
though again, it was all a little vague what this meant.
And so Atul decided to actually go to Tuvalu one of the world's least visited places,
to find out what people living there made of it all.
And what he found is totally fascinating and unexpected.