This is the editor’s letter in the The Week magazine.
"Put it back!" That was the consensus reaction on social media this week after valiant earthmovers, an armada of straining tugboats, a swarm of muck-sucking dredging ships, and a super-high tide created by the fortuitous alignment of the moon, sun, and Earth led to the freeing of the mammoth Ever Given from the bank of the Suez Canal. The ship's entrapment was the metaphor for our time — a meme generator, a late-night comedian's dream, 200,000 tons of schadenfreude. We've all had days that left us muttering, "How could I be so stupid?" So there was something comforting, even delightful, in the spectacle of a cargo ship the size of an obese Empire State Building, laden with 18,000 containers, getting wind-blown diagonally into the canal's sandy bank, blocking more than 400 ships behind it for six days. Human error, one suspects, may have been a factor, too.
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