(...) The piece is about how mining for the mineral coltan, which is used to make components found in cell phones, laptops, and video game consoles, has transformed the Congo. Harden calls it “a squalid encounter between the global high-tech economy and one of the world’s most thoroughly ruined countries.” Things are so bad, Harden says, that even though coltan mining has disastrous social and environmental consequences, people in the Congo have calculated that the only thing worse than mining coltan would be not mining it (...)