What is this a description of but free association and fantasy gone wrong?

Rust
The largest oil spill in Arctic history
On May 29, 2020, the largest fuel storage tank at Norilsk Heat and Power Plant No. 3 (HPP-3) burst at the bottom and spewed 6.5 million gallons of diesel fuel into the Daldykan River. From there it seeped into the Ambarnaya River, Lake Pyasino, the Pyasina River, and finally into the Kara Sea. It was the largest oil spill in Arctic history.

Digital Rocks
How Hollywood killed celluloid
Eventually DCI scrubbed celluloid film almost entirely from the film industry, ushering in the most significant technological shift since the introduction of sound. The digital revolution transformed nearly every aspect of filmmaking for Hollywood and independent filmmakers. This revolution was invisible, and it was designed to be that way. Its success depended on audiences never noticing at all.

Man of Scarce Means
I was testing not for accuracy, but possibility
For a long time I considered myself lacking in something essential to the identification of my core self, an English-only, foreign-sounding Igbo person. I wondered what it would mean to rectify that.

L’Autore Invisible
Ralph Ellison in Italian
Translators themselves want to seem inconspicuous, like imperial clerks toiling away in a dark garret, resolving geopolitical issues by working out the finer terms in the draft of a big treaty. The collective need for invisibility creates a language that’s even, parsed out, correct — a language that escorts books out of their country and dresses them up as responsible travelers.
The truth is it’s always the brain, reading or writing.
China Brain
If the web was the waking mind of human culture, GPT-3 emerged as its psychic underbelly.
Babel

Primary Sources
That is not how social isolation works, young lady
That dripping nostril was no ordinary toddler snot. That was when you should have known, and stopped working, and stopped drinking from the — write it — water cooler. Fuck. Fuck. When will the wave of absolutely certain regret and terror arrive. Come on already, I can’t wait anymore.

A Trip to Minsk
Marches and trials in Belarus
I was in a cab headed to the Courtyard of Changes when my friends texted to say that the police had just painted over the mural. But by the time I got there, building residents had almost finished repainting it. “This is the sixth time they’ve painted over it, and we always put it up again right away,” they told me, laughing.
I can tell you only what I found helpful.
Baby Yeah
We might move on from complaining about how educating white people is exhausting to just treating them like shit.
American Accomplice

Knowledge Will Not Save Us
Stuck in the mud in South Sudan
One UN staffer, astonished by my knowledge of the kinship networks of the Nuer leadership in Unity, asked me uncertainly: What is fieldwork, exactly? It’s just talking to people, I said. You should try it.