The Weird Times
Inner Monologues and Desultory Reporting from Outer Spaces
The Weird Times: Issue 128, October 23, 2022 (V3 #24)
“To write at all is to dwell in the illusion of language, the rapture of communication that comes as we surrender our troubled individual isolated experiences to the communal consciousness.”—Robert Duncan
The world is at a loss and I am part of it
migrating daily.
Everything is up for grabs
—from “Indian Summer” by Diane Glancy
My Trip to Space Filled Me With ‘Overwhelming Sadness,’ William Shatner, Variety, 10/6/22: “Everything I had thought was wrong. Everything I had expected to see was wrong….
It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna . . . things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. It filled me with dread. My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.” (from Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder)
Politicking Time Bomb
The real stakes of 2022, Judd Legum, Popular Information, 10/18/22: “…one thing that is at stake is the future of Social Security and Medicare. There are no Republicans running ads promising massive cuts to these popular programs. But, if Republicans regain control of the House, that's exactly what they intend to do.”
Is the 2022 Midterm Lost to Dems?Not if we ignore the pack-rat punditry and take a closer look, Robert Kuttner, American Prospect, 10/21/22
Mike’s Midterm Tsunami Truth #24: Vote Local, Win National, Michael Moore, Mike’s Midterm Tsunami of Truth Campaign, 10/21/22: “ if you don’t pay attention to your local elections, if we don’t do our duty as citizens, even in the “smallest” races on the ballot, there will be no night swimming left for any one.”
The Tory Present Is The GOP's Future: The New Right buckles under its own contradictions, Andrew Sullivan, The Weekly Dish, 10/21/22
How to Help People Vote in the 2022 Midterm Elections: Here are some ways you can help spread factual information about voting rights and resources ahead of the midterms, Asia Fields, Kengo Tsutsumi, ProPublica, 10/19/22
How the Center Enables Fascism: It’s not enough to be ‘pro-democracy.’ It’s necessary to be pro-worker, Robert Kuttner, American Prospect, 10/19/22: “If we lose our democracy to fascism, one key reason will be that corporate Republicans and Democrats, who profess to care about saving democracy, have relentlessly opposed the populist economic policies that might give working-class people some reason to believe in democracy.”
Two Hatreds Empower Anti-Semitism on the Right: When a movement loses its moral voice and its moral will, David French, Atlantic, 10/21/22: “This is hardly the first time that powerful conservatives have linked arms with open anti-Semites.”
But Her Emails! Behind the New York Times’ Maddening Hillary Clinton Coverage: In an adaptation from her new memoir, Newsroom Confidential, former Times public editor Margaret Sullivan revisits the “many strange chapters” of the paper’s coverage of the 2016 Democratic nominee, Margaret Sullivan, Vanity Fair, 10/17/22
Inside Steve Bannon’s ‘disturbing’ quest to radically rewrite the US constitution: By taking over state legislatures, Republicans hope to pass conservative amendments that cannot be electorally challenged, Ed Pilkington, The Guardian, 10/19/22
The Conservative Stalwart Challenging the Far-Right Legal Theory That Could Subvert American Democracy: J. Michael Luttig is opposing Republican groups in one of the most momentous cases that the Supreme Court is considering this term, Jane Mayer, New Yorker, 10/19/22: “… he signed on as Katyal’s co-counsel because he regards Moore v. Harper as “without question the most significant case in the history of our nation for American democracy.” Putting it more colloquially, he said, “Legally, it’s the whole ballgame.””
How the First Abortion Speak-Out Revolutionized Activism: Fifty years ago, under the banner of a group known as Redstockings, women gathered in a West Village basement to share their abortion stories, a radical act that ripples through movements today, Joy Press, Vanity Fair, 10/20/22
Getting to Negotiations: Why it's so hard to find a route to a diplomatic resolution in Ukraine, Lawrence Freedman, Comment Is Freed, 10/19/22
The War in Ukraine and the Future of Democracy: The future is democracy, or not at all, Timothy Snyder, Thinking About, 10/20/22: “I contend that the “objective” measures that we apply from the outside to judge the existence of a society or a nation, such as ethnicity or language, are themselves often imperial forms of knowledge, suppressing or ignoring the actions and commitments of the people in question.”
We're looking for wide open spaces
High above the kitchen
And we're strangers here
On our way to some other place
—from “The World Where You Live,” Crowded House, written by Neil Finn
Books and Culture
Alis Lesley: the ‘female Elvis’ who takes centre stage on Bob Dylan’s new book cover, Christian Kriticos, The Guardian, 10/21/22: “Dylan pays homage and tribute to these rock’n’roll pioneers who came before him. But, perhaps, he also acknowledges how brief their moment was – how “the present now will later be past” and today’s “modern song” is tomorrow’s history.” Book: The Philosophy of Modern Song
Baseball, Architecture, Time, and Creativity, Richard Saul Wurman, Designers & Books, 10/18/22: “Time is literally, liberally part of the game.”
Mary Karr on Navigating Memory While Writing Memoir: “A single image can split open the hard seed of the past,” Mary Karr, LitHub, 10/21/22
The World According to George Saunders: With Liberation Day, the author delivers his first collection of short fiction in nearly a decade. He's had a lot of time to think—and write, Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire, 10/18/22. Book: Liberation Day: Stories
The First Climate Fiction Masterpiece: On John Wyndham’s 1953 Novel The Kraken Wakes, Matthew James Seidel, LA Review of Books, 10/15/22: “…he anticipated how political gridlock would frustrate necessary action, how the erosion of trust in the media would create the perfect environment for conspiracy theories to thrive, and how rejecting scientific evidence would only make real solutions more difficult to achieve.”
Its 'not a book ban': Doug Mastriano claims while advocating for books to be banned, Meghan Ellis, Alternet, 10/19/22
“I Was a Seventeen-Year-Old Pornographer.” Steven Heller on His Stint as Art Director of the Underground: “Art direction was a mighty dangerous job,” Steven Heller, LitHub, 10/21/22. Book: Growing Up Underground
Joy Harjo On When She Realized Poetry Has Power, Christian Allaire, Vogue, 10/18/22: “We all have gifts that are almost folded up, and they’re placed in between the heart and where your spirit lives, and then they unfold at different times. They need a way out.”
What JK Rowling and John Cleese get wrong about cancel culture: A belief in accountability does not involve condoning threats or violence – and freedom of expression does not mean freedom from consequence, Billy Bragg, New Statesman, 10/18/22
Insurgent Hoop: An essay on John Edgar Wideman’s 'Hoop Roots,’ Ross Gay, Orion, 10/22: “Better than any writer I know, he articulates the fiction of race and the material conditions that fiction has wrought.” Book: Hoop Roots
AI is changing scientists’ understanding of language learning – and raising questions about an innate grammar, Morton H. Christiansen, Pablo Contreras Kallens, The Conversation, 10/19/22: “For years, many linguists have believed that learning language is impossible without a built-in grammar template. The new AI models prove otherwise.”
How Do the Books We Read Change Our Brains? On Measuring the Effects of a Really Good Story, Gregory Berns, LitHub, 10/20/22: “…when you read about someone hitting a home run, your brain unfolds a compressed representation of hitting a homer and then uses your sensorimotor cortex to simulate it.” Book: The Self Delusion: The New Neuroscience of How We Invent—and Reinvent—Our Identities
The Internet’s Ultimate Censors: A few companies have the power to banish entire websites and applications from the web. They have begun caving to activist pressure, Elizabeth Nolan Brown, Persuasion, 10/21/22
Makeup-free Miss England finalist defies ‘unrealistic beauty standards:’ Image without a caption, Samantha Chery, Washington Post, 10/18/22
Remembering Peter Schjeldahl, a Consummate Critic: A voice is what he always had: distinct, clear, funny. A poet’s voice—epigrammatic, nothing wasted, David Remnick, New Yorker, 10/21/22. My first poetry writing teacher, and a great one.
“For nothing is wiser than the body
When it puts itself on and goes out”
Environment and Science
Stunning new Webb Telescope image showcases the “Pillars of Creation:” Protostars steal the show in this new image from the telescope's Near Infrared Camera, Jennifer Oullette, Ars Technica, 10/19/22
What Drives Galaxies? The Milky Way’s Black Hole May Be the Key: Supermassive black holes are engines of galactic evolution, but new observations of our galaxy and its central hole don’t quite match expectations, Thomas Lewton, Wired, 10/16/22
Inside the Proton, the ‘Most Complicated Thing You Could Possibly Imagine:’ The positively charged particle at the heart of the atom is an object of unspeakable complexity, one that changes its appearance depending on how it is probed. We’ve attempted to connect the proton’s many faces to form the most complete picture yet, Charlie Wood, Merrill Sherman, Quanta, 10/19/22
What could possibly go wrong? Five unfortunate delusions along the path toward environmental redemption, Peter Dykstra, Environmental Health News, 10/16/22
This startup uses volcanic rock dust to capture carbon on farms: Lithos is pioneering an unusual approach to carbon capture on more than 1,000 acres of farmland, Adele Peters, Fast Company, 10/20/22
Vast marine protected area 'boosts tuna stocks', Maddie Malloy, BBC, 10/21/22
Science that saves free-flowing rivers & rich biodiversity, Mike Gaworecki, MongaBay, 10/19/22 (Podcast)
The Precarious Position of Treaty-less Tribes: What a five-year fight over a few dozen clams shows about the inconsistent rights of Indigenous tribes, Ashley Braun, Hakai, 10/17/22
Titanium dioxide coating could keep roads and bike paths cooler: Like mineral sunscreen, it works by reflecting UVA and UVB rays from the sun, YCC Team, Yale Climate Connections, 10/17/22
Clean energy transition gains speed, despite global tumult, Benjamin Storrow, E&E News, 10/17/22
“Dirty” cows are destroying the Amazon rainforest: The beef industry is flattening the Amazon, even when companies tell you it’s not, Benji Jones, Vox, 10/19/22. Conclusion: If you’re going to eat beef, buy locally grown meat!
After 60 Years, Silent Spring Is Still Changing the World: A scientist, farmer, journalist, biologist, and community organizer reflect on the power and ongoing impact of Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking book, and the work that remains to be done, Anna Lappe, Civil Eats, 10/19/22
The West’s biggest source of renewable energy depends on water. Will it survive the drought?Glen Canyon and the Hoover Dam are “not the whole story,” Emily Pontecorvo, Grist, 10/18/22
Why "per capita emissions" is a bad frame for the climate debate: It nudges us toward ideas that actively hurt the fight against climate change, Noah Smith, Noahpinion, 10/21/22: “What we need for deep rapid global decarbonization is not personal abstemiousness, but government policy.”
Unraveling the Causes of the Pandemic, and Preparing for the Next: David Quammen was one of the first science writers to report on the spillover of viruses from wildlife to humans. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, he talks about what scientists now know – and don’t know – about what caused the Covid-19 pandemic and why it matters, Nicola Jones, Yale Environment 360, 10/19/22
How to treat, not trick, the planet with your Halloween candy: Chocolate, a fixture of Halloween, can have serious environmental, climate and social impacts, Allyson Chiu, Washington Post, 10/14/22: “In terms of sustainability, the biggest problems in confectionery are in chocolate…”
On climate protests, the media misses the point, Ans Irfan, The Daily Climate, 10/20/22: “whenever those subjugated and oppressed react, the polite politics of the liberal elites insist just how unproductive it is to engage in the type of protests that might be against their sensibilities and comfort.”
If we were vampires and death was a joke
We’d go out on the sidewalk and smoke
—Jason Isbell
Birds
The Galapagos penguin, one of the world's rarest, sees a glimmer of hope: Biologists created a unique method to boost numbers of the tropical bird—and it seems to be working, Christine Peterson, National Geographic, 10/13/22
Seabirds are on the rise on islands off Maine’s coast: After a devastating year caused in large part by climate change, a rapid resurgence in 2022 has research teams ecstatic, Derrick Z. Jackson, Maine Monitor, 9/18/22
3D techniques shed light on what makes a bird's lungs so efficient, John Maina, Phys.org, 10/20/22
Some seabirds survive typhoons by flying into them: It’s the first time this behavior has been observed in any bird species, Frieda Kreier, Science News, 10/17/22: “Some seabirds don’t just survive storms. They ride them.”
So my body went on growing, by night,
went on pleading & singing to the earth
—Yosef Komunyakaa
“In fact, more than a third of independent voters and a smaller but noteworthy contingent of Democrats said they were open to supporting candidates who reject the legitimacy of the 2020 election, as they assigned greater urgency to their concerns about the economy than to fears about the fate of the country’s political system.” (Reported in the New York Times by Nick Corasaniti, Michael C. Bender, Ruth Igielnik and Kristen Bayrakdarian)
At least according to the media, the price of gas matters more than democracy to enough of our fellow citizens for them to give up on the so-called “democratic experiment.” Perhaps America turns out to not be so exceptional after all, disappointing the living memories of a lot of those who came before us, but probably not surprising after all. Germans wanted trains to run on time, Americans want cheap gas.
But yet and still, we can’t give up. Majority rules! Fight for democracy! Michael Moore: “Believe in our collective power! What are you doing this weekend to get out the vote?! Now is the moment!”
Vote! Tell everyone you know to vote, help others vote, especially your children, and their friends. It’s always a turnout election and this one matters more than any other.
These are indeed the weird times.
Love to all—David