On Wednesday, June 14, a fishing boat carrying migrants from Libya to Italy capsized off the Greek coast. A Google search for “migrant boat capsize 2023” yielded 3,180,000 results; a search for “submersible accident 2023” yielded 128,000,000 hits. This may seem surprising because, on the face of it, the migrant boat story is much bigger than the submersible story on every level. Moreover, the migrant boat story embodied pressing worldwide issues with broad implications—population migration is affecting millions around the world directly, and all of us indirectly. The faith of the submersible tourists poses much easier, technical ones, inherently concrete, definitive, and time-bounded.
