The Weird Times
Inner Monologues and Desultory Reporting from Outer Spaces: Issue 220, July 28, 2024 (V5 #12)
The idea of a few “battleground” states determining the next election is an old narrative because we haven’t developed a new one.—E. Ethelbert Miller
I really love America. I just don’t know how to get there anymore.—John Prine
Books, Music, Art, Culture
In Search of the Real Hannah Crafts: The Bondwoman’s Narrative is thought to be the first novel by a Black woman to describe slavery from the inside, but only recently have scholars discovered her true identity, Brenda Wineapple, NY Review of Books, 8/15/24 issue: “Those who think that the greatest evils of slavery are connected with physical suffering possess no just or rational ideas of human nature. There can be no certainty, no abiding confidence in the possession of any good thing.” Book: The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts by Gregg Hecimovich
Notes on a scandal: on why Ursula Parrott’s account of divorce is still alarmingly relatable: Nearly a century after it was first published, Ex‑Wife remains relevant and scathing, Monica Heisey, The Guardian, 7/27/24: “The book is not so much a celebration of the unconventional woman as it is a roadmap of the dangers that might befall her.”
Lewis H. Lapham, Longtime Editor of Harper’s, Dies at 89: Born into a patrician family, he used Harper’s and later his own Lapham’s Quarterly to denounce what he saw as the hypocrisies and injustices of a spoiled United States, Robert D. McFadden, NY Times, 7/24/24 (No paywall): “Mr. Lapham’s last book, Age of Folly: America Abandons Its Democracy … argued that the election of Donald J. Trump was the culmination of decades of degradation of United States democracy under a number of Republican administrations, ending in what he called a dysfunctional plutocracy of the superrich, by the superrich and for the superrich.”
Blues Legend John Mayall Is Dead at 90: A giant of the great British blues boom of the 1960s was a musical change-agent who revered and honored his forebears, Mark Rozzo, Vanity Fair, 7/23/24: “…there is no doubt that Mayall’s adoration of the blues was genuine and uncynical, not to mention daring, vanguard, and subversive—an important dent in the armor of postwar, stiff-upper-lip, class-divided Britain.” Last performance (2022): “Room to Move.”
Abdul ‘Duke’ Fakir, last surviving member of Four Tops, dies aged 88: The beloved Motown group’s co-founder died of a heart failure and had been struggling with bladder cancer, Guardian Staff, The Guardian, 7/23/24
“Weapons of Health Destruction…” How Colonialism Created the Modern Native American Diet: on the Impact of Systematic Oppression on Indigenous Cuisine in the United States, Andrea Freeman, LitHub, 7/23/24: “Frybread…has multiple origin stories, and they all involve oppression and perseverance.” Book: Ruin Their Crops on the Ground: The Politics of Food in the United States, from the Trail of Tears to School Lunch
“Copyright traps” could tell writers if an AI has scraped their work: The technique has been used throughout history, but now could be a tool in one of the biggest fights in artificial intelligence, Melissa Heikkilä, MIT Technology Review, 7/25/24
Chaos Is My Co-Pilot: In Praise of Tumultuous, Unruly Storytelling: Discovering the Virtues of Volatility in Historical Fiction, Jen Fawkes, LitHub, 7/26/24: “Chaos is as necessary as it is dangerous, and one can easily argue the same thing about order.”
The Freedom to Write, Nin Andrews, Best American Poetry, 7/22/24: “I have always admired poets who feel free to speak their minds, who toss aside the criticisms of men and culture and tradition and expectations. I love boldness in writers, especially women writers. It’s refreshing in a world that wants to keep us small, cramped, easily defined.”
‘Sublime eternal love exists within each one of us’: David Lynch on music, friendship and life’s biggest mystery: The director, along with his collaborator Chrystabell explain – or try to – their new album Cellophane Memories and the magical marriage of music and film, Alastair Shuttleworth, The Guardian, 7/26/24
Their eyes met
She started crying
She felt she knew him
From somewhere before
—from “She Knew,” Chrystabell, David Lynch
Politics, Technology, Economics
Voters to choose between two starkly different candidates in US ‘Armageddon election:’ The choice for voters has never been so clear cut as Kamala Harris takes on Donald Trump for the White House, David Smith, The Guardian, 7/28/24: “…one liberal, diverse and optimistic, the other conservative, nativist and, in Trump’s telling, driven by grievance and vengeance.”
Will the People Save Democracy in November? Steven Beschloss, America, America, 7/27/24: “The most promising fact is that, since last Sunday, over 170,000 people from diverse communities have signed up with Team Harris to help get her elected.”
The New Global Wave of Anti-Authoritarianism: We are living through a global renaissance of nonviolent mass protest, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Lucid, 7/25/24: “We in the United States may be called upon to express our dissent to attempts to take our freedoms from us. We should know we are not alone.”
Saved: Who is God voting for? Etgar Keret, Alphabet Soup, 7/23/24: “The last thing I want to do is get into a fight with my Creator, and so tonight I will pray – agnostically but fervidly – that there is no God. Or, that there is one, but He’s the old-school type: less political and controlling, more ethical and vaguely well-meaning. The kind of chill, abstract God who doesn’t pick fights on twitter—the God we all pictured when we were kids.”
Biden's legacy: a summary: Why the best President of my lifetime might get misremembered as a bumbling caretaker, Noah Smith, Noahpinion, 7/22/24: “I see his policy legacy as a mostly positive one, but I think his political legacy could leave his party in a weaker position going forward.”
Riding Into the Sunset: On the universal resonance of Biden’s struggle to accept the reality of aging, Ethan Dodd, Persuasion, 7/24/24: “He didn’t hold out simply because he wanted to cling to power, as the cynics claim. The more fundamental challenge was accepting his own limitations, that his body and mind do not work the way they used to. He overcame one of life’s greatest obstacles: human pride.”
Torch Pass Trilogy: A New Generation of Leaders, One Hopes, Joe Klein, Sanity Clause, 7/25/24: “The torch has been passed to a new generation, and I’m not part of it. So I’ll sit here in the catbird seat of comfortable pre-senescence and keep a weather eye on what she says and what she does. I assume she’ll disappoint me at times, but I hope she lifts me, too—for those of us who still remember the clarion cadences of January 20, 1961, the desire to feel that distant echo of inspiration still abides.”
Gen-Z voters spread the ‘Kamalove’ as Harris’s popularity earns youth support: Pramila Jayapal, progressive Seattle representative, says of ‘undeniable’ enthusiasm: ‘I have not seen anything like this,’ Lauren Gambino, The Guardian, 7/27/24: “We are the underdogs in this race, but this is a people-powered campaign.”
Kamala Harris Isn’t Going Back: Fifty years after Shirley Chisholm ran for the Presidency, we find ourselves yet again questioning the durability of outmoded presumptions about race and gender, Jelani Cobb, New Yorker,7/27/24: ““These extremists want to take us backward, but we are not going back.” The words resonated, and crowds have now taken to chanting them at Harris’s events. She was referring to the days of “chaos” that characterized Trump’s Presidency, but she could just as well have been talking about the days when a candidacy like hers would not have been able to make it as far as it already has.”
Kamala Harris Steps Up: The future of American democracy now rests on the vice president’s shoulders. That’s why it’s more important than ever to understand who she is, Joan Walsh, The Nation, 7/24/24: “I see a Black woman who got sick and tired of trying to please everybody and just said, ‘Fuck it. I’m not gonna make everybody happy. I just have to be me.’”
Kamala Harris steps out on Gaza war: The Vice President is carving out a political identity on Israel that threads the needle between the old guard and progressive wing of the Democratic Party, Elise Labott, Cosmopolitics, 7/27/24
We Need To Talk About The Misogyny, Joyce Vance, Civil Discourse, 7/27/24: “No one, no one, should have an excuse for succumbing to misogyny or to racism given the choice in front of us. We each have a personal role to play in making sure that doesn’t happen, and the stakes are far too high to be polite, avoid making waves, or do the easiest thing and turn a blind eye. Be the voice that calls this out as the danger to democracy that it is.”
The Republican party remains the party of denying women human rights: The GOP ticket of JD Vance and Donald Trump, from ‘menstrual surveillance’ to sexual assault, has made itself clear, Rebecca Solnit, The Guardian, 7/25/24: “Rape is an assault on the victim’s body but also on her (or his or their) agency and right to bodily autonomy, though the assault on agency and autonomy can and does take many forms – and the Republican party and its candidates for president and vice-president support many of them.”
Trump finally said it out loud: He wants this to be our last election, Lucian K. Truscott IV, Newsletter, 7/27/24: “Either we elect Kamala Harris as president, or we won’t have a representative democracy and a constitution anymore. What we’ll have is rule by Donald Trump and his Christian stormtroopers.”
United States v. Nixon at Fifty: Why Judge Cannon Is Wrong About the Attorney General’s Authority to Select a Special Counsel, Marty Lederman, Just Security, 7/24/24: “The consensus understanding of the Attorney General’s statutory authority in the Nixon case was uncontested because it was incontestable. It has persisted for half a century. Actors in all three branches have relied upon it—and never questioned it—ever since.”
AI Is a Services Revolution: How LLMs Reinvent Knowledge Work, Rex Woodbury, Digital Native, 7/24/24: “Administrative office work, legal work, and architecture & engineering lead the way.”
All the existential risk, none of the economic impact. That's a shitty trade: I offer "no economic boost," you receive “P(doom),” Erik Hoel, Intrinsic Perspective, 7/22/24: “Despite people often reporting personal AI usage, and firms being enthusiastic, there are no stark signs in the actual final numbers where it matters.”
This Machine Exposes Privacy Violations: A former Google engineer has built a search engine, webXray, that aims to find illicit online data collection and tracking—with the goal of becoming “the Henry Ford of tech lawsuits,” Brian Merchant, Wired, 7/24/24: “you can either search for a term—"pregnancy" or "STD" or "furry porn" or whatever—or a specific website to get a snapshot of all the websites connected to that term that are shipping your data, and search queries, connected to your IP address, to Google, advertisers, and third-party data brokers.”
Will Hezbollah and Israel Go to War? Months of fighting at the border threaten to ignite an all-out conflict that could devastate the region, Dexter Filkins, New Yorker, 7/22/24: “Such a war could wreak terrible destruction.”
Hallelujah
We're gonna feel the magic
When the girls take over (take over)
It's gonna be fantastic
(We need more women in charge)
—from “Put a Woman in Charge,” Keb Mo, written by Beth Nielsen Chapman, John Lewis Parker, Kevin Moore
Science, Environment
The Stakes: Why Beating Trump Is Absolutely Necessary, Bill McKibben, The Crucial Years, 7/22/24: “…both the long-term trends AND the individual extreme years tell us the same thing: we need to cut our carbon emissions as much as possible, as soon as possible….She may be the last president able to truly help stem the tide.”
The Global Temperature Just Went Bump: We’re just sticking a toe into the climatic realm of the previous interglacial period, not living in it—yet, Zoë Schlanger, The Atlantic, 7/25/24: “Monday was likely the hottest day on Earth since modern recordkeeping began.”
4 hottest days ever observed raise fears of a planet nearing ‘tipping points:’ Since last July, Earth’s average temperature has been at least 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels, Sarah Kaplan, Washington Post, 7/27/24
How Soon Might the Atlantic Ocean Break? Two Sibling Scientists Found an Answer—and Shook the World: A gigantic, weather-defining current system could be headed to collapse. Peter and Susanne Ditlevsen had a simple yet controversial question: How much time might we have left to save it? Sandra Upson, Wired, 7/25/24: “We’re just saying, it’s serious. We have to do something now. We have to cut down on emissions. Transition faster to renewable energy, EVs. Give the oceans a chance to recover. Push out the 2057 date.”
The plastic industry’s $30 million lie: Big Plastic’s “advanced recycling” ads are everywhere—and they’re part of a massive greenwashing scam, Arielle Samuelson, Heated, 7/25/24
Polluted Lakes Are Being Cleansed Using Floating Wetlands Made of Trash: Platforms combining plants and recycled garbage could offer a cut-price solution for reviving polluted bodies of water, Hannah Richter, Wired, 7/25/24
A recipe for zero-emissions fuel: Soda cans, seawater, and caffeine: MIT engineers have developed a fast and sustainable method for producing hydrogen fuel using aluminum, saltwater, and coffee grounds, Jennifer Chu, MIT News, 7/25/24: “…when the aluminum in soda cans is exposed in its pure form and mixed with seawater, the solution bubbles up and naturally produces hydrogen — a gas that can be subsequently used to power an engine or fuel cell without generating carbon emissions.”
Researchers test whether peanuts and cotton could grow in a warmer Midwest: The crops have historically grown farther South, YCC Team, Yale Climate Connections, 7/22/24
Inside a new experiment to find the climate-proof coffee of the future: An international public-private partnership is supercharging coffee breeding to save your morning brew, Jonathan W. Rosen, Grist, 7/23/24: “Arabica is so fragile in part because its gene pool is surprisingly narrow.”
Food as You Know It Is About to Change, David Wallace-Wells, NY Times, 7/28/24: “Diets will shift, and with them the farmland currently producing staple crops — corn, wheat, soy, rice. The pressure on the present food system is not a sign that it will necessarily fail, only that it must change.” (No paywall)
Scientists Find Clues to Atlantic Current’s Future in Ancient Iceberg Debris: Modern ice loss from Greenland rivals the most dramatic episodes of ice sheet collapse, Elise Cutts, Eos, 7/23/24: “The past is never the perfect analogue of the future. But we can learn a lot from the past.”
Tagging seals with sensors helps scientists track ocean currents and a changing climate: Seals are great swimmers, which makes them a great candidate for collecting ocean data, Lilian Dove, The Conversation, 7/26/24
‘Dark oxygen’ in depths of Pacific Ocean could force rethink about origins of life: Charged metallic lumps found to produce oxygen in total darkness in process akin to how plants use photosynthesis, Agence France-Presse, The Guardian, 7/22/24: “The discovery of oxygen produced outside of photosynthesis requires us to rethink how the evolution of complex life on the planet might have originated.”
The Physics of Cold Water May Have Jump-Started Complex Life: When seawater gets cold, it gets viscous. This fact could explain how single-celled ocean creatures became multicellular when the planet was frozen during “Snowball Earth,” according to experiments, Veronique Greenwood, Quanta, 7/24/24
Seeing Green: Why We Should All Be Paying Attention to Plants: on the Arrogance of Anthropocentrism and the Overlooked Wonders of the Natural World, Klaudia Khan, LitHub, 7/23/24: “So much beauty, so much drama, so much wisdom we miss out on if we fail to connect with plants…. Looking at plants and seeing them for what they truly are is like stepping into another realm.”
Fossil Fuel Development and Invasive Trees Drive Pronghorn Population Decline in Wyoming: A new study shows that herds of the iconic ungulate are rearing fewer young as oil and gas wells, renewable energy developments and trees spread into their rangeland habitats and migration corridors, Najifa Farhart, Inside Climate News, 7/22/24
Fire Once Helped Sequoias Reproduce. Now, it’s Killing the Groves: Two recent studies find that sequoia groves burned in megafires of 2020 and 2021 were so severely damaged that the world’s tallest trees may not be able to naturally regenerate, Caroline Marshall Reinhart, Inside Climate News, 7/23/24
Study Finds ‘Forever Chemicals’ Are Increasingly Common in Pesticides: The presence of long-lived chemicals known as PFAS in pesticides is on the rise, raising environmental and health concerns, Lisa Held, Civil Eats, 7/24/24: “Any chemical that outlives me is probably not good to have moving around the environment.”
The Best Quick Fix for Climate Change? Curbing Methane: The greenhouse gas warms the planet far more than carbon dioxide but dissipates more quickly. There are many promising ways to cut emissions, Rob Jackson, Wall Street Journal, 7/25/24 (No paywall)
In the Developing Field of Climate Psychology, ‘Eco-Anxiety’ Is a Rational Response: Some therapists have found that cognitive behavioral therapy, designed to help patients see that they are “catastrophizing,” isn’t enough because the potential impacts of climate change are truly catastrophic, Nina Dietz, Inside Climate News, 7/26/24
enough
of the kneeling and the rising and the looking
inward and the looking up
—from “The End of Poetry,” Ada Limon
Health, Wellness
‘Dream come true’: study suggests drug could extend women’s fertility by five years: Co-lead says rapamycin can be repurposed to slow ovaries from ageing and is safe for younger women, Amelia Hill, The Guardian, 7/22/24
The Highly Infectious FLiRT Variants Behind the Summer Covid Wave: The latest dominant Covid variants have stronger infectiousness than their predecessors and the ability to evade vaccine-induced antibodies, Ritsuko Kawai, Wired, 7/24/24
Thoughts like dreams drift from mind to mind. Some are heavy and sink to the ground or disappear under water where they grow like sea plants, while others are light and glide upwards like helium molecules.
—from “Sleeping for Kafka,” Nin Andrews
Birds, Birds
Scientists figure out why there are so many colorful birds in the tropics and how these colors spread over time, Field Museum, Phys Org, 7/26/24: “All modern birds are members of Neornithes. The model produced by Eliason and his colleagues suggests that the common ancestor of all Neornithes, 80 million years ago, had iridescent feathers that still glitter across the bird family tree.”
The bird flu doom loop: Is bird flu here to stay? Kenny Torrella, Vox, 7/24/24: “… it’s highly likely that it’s already endemic in wild birds.”
I usually post TWT every Sunday morning. Most Sundays are quiet news days, but as we all know, last Sunday was an energizing exception. And this has been an incredible week. Hope and optimism suddenly abound for most who believe in and work for a world of freedom and positive change. While there is much work to be done, now it appears to be more possible that we can stave off the dark forces of authoritarianism.
So let’s joyfully organize ourselves and be active. There is no doubt that the authoritarians are devising ways and means to win, regardless of election results. The best way to beat them is a resounding victory at the polls. This is the most important get out the vote election in American history.
Let’s do it. Never give up hope: Hallelujah - We're gonna feel the magic
I say this every week because I really mean it — wherever you are, whoever you are with, whatever you are doing — thanks for who you are and what you do. Please continue to keep in touch. Send messages and your own news. Hearing from you makes this all worthwhile.
Above all, stay well; share love; work for good. We need each other, now more than ever.
Love always—David