Over at the New Yorker, Evan Osnos has a fascinating though not very encouraging long-read re Samantha Power, our UN ambassador and President Obama’s whom-shall-we-invade-next gal about town. Amidst much seriousness, Osnos also records this scrap from Samantha about how refreshing it is to get out of DC and into the field (in this case, Africa during the first phases of the Ebola crisis): “It’s oxygen for me,” she [Power] said. “I’m like a plant.”
Actually, it’s animals that find oxygen refreshing, not to say life-sustaining, rather than plants. Green plants “breathe” carbon dioxide, stripping out the carbon to create sugar, using energy ultimately derived from photosynthesis, while exhaling oxygen. I know you don’t have to know this to be the UN ambassador, but still.
