The Weird Times
Inner Monologues and Desultory Reporting from Outer Spaces: Issue 265, June 8, 2025 (V6 #5)
St. Mark's Place caught at night in hot summer,
Lonely from the beginning of time until now.
Tompkins Square Park would be midnight green but only hot.
I look through the screens from my 3rd floor apartment
As if I could see something.
Or as if the bricks and concrete were enough themselves
To be seen and found beautiful.
And who will know the desolation of St. Mark's Place
With Alice Notley's name forgotten and
This night never having been?
—from “Poem,” Alice Notley
Books, Music, Art, Culture
Alice Notley, Poet Celebrated for ‘Restless Reinvention,’ Dies at 79: Once called “our present-day Homer” for her sprawling, experimental epics, she was honored with prizes and was a finalist for the Pulitzer in 1999, Ash Wu, NY Times, 6/2/25: “It’s necessary to maintain a state of disobedience against … everything.” (No paywall)
Why Cultural Decline in the U.S. Is a Threat to Democracy, Jonathan Sumption, NY Times, 6/2/25: “A democratic culture depends on something more than institutions.…Above all, it requires people to treat political opponents as fellow citizens with whom they disagree — and not as enemies to be smashed.” (No paywall)
‘The Mozart of the attention economy’: why MrBeast is the world’s biggest YouTube star: He’s spent 24 hours immersed in slime, two days buried alive – and showered vast amounts of cash on lucky participants. But are MrBeast’s videos simply very savvy clickbait – or acts of avant garde genius? Mark O’Connell, Guardian, 6/3/25: “His YouTube channel…has 400 million subscribers – ” Here is a crazy example.
Harbinger: Joy and Grief: witness to pain and champion of possibility, Rob Brezsny, Astrology Newsletter, 6/3/25: “Love is an act of heroic genius, requiring bold perseverance and cultivated skill.”
John and Abigail Adams knew where American history was headed: The couple’s letters provide an extraordinary window on the revolt brewing 250 years ago, Joseph J. Ellis, Washington Post, 6/3/25: “They both realized that they were living through a decisive moment in American history.” (No paywall)
Early visions of Mars: Meet the 19th-century astronomer who used science fiction to imagine the red planet, Matthew Shindell, The Conversation, 6/6/25: “[Camille] Flammarion concluded that Mars, an older world that had gone through the same evolutionary stages as Earth, must be a living world.”
“This is where we must always return… pure possibility undergirded by pure humility, From His Keynote Speech from the 2025 Whiting Awards Ceremony, Ocean Vuong, LitHub. 6/4/25: “While art is most powerful when it is prominent to a populace, so too our community movements. It is not how causes are made legitimate by power, but how prominent and useful they are to the communities they serve that lead them to prevail.”
Anti-Porn Laws' Real Target Is Free Speech, Samantha Cole, 404 Media, 6/3/25: “There’s a nationwide effort happening right now to end pornography, and call everything “pornographic” at the same time.”
Where This Is Leading: Taking George Orwell's classic text, 1984, as her foundation, poet Rebecca Foust asks where the current regime is taking us, Portside, 6/4/25: “How can a future exist if we can erase or revise the past?”
The First Rough Draft of the United States’ Homegrown Nazis: the renewed relevance of “Under Cover,” Arthur Derounian’s 1943 exposé of the United States’ Nazi underworld, Michael Bobelian, LA Review of Books, 6/3/25: “…fascism in America is not dead. It has been pretending sleep.”
We're All Gonna Die: Lenny Bruce and Joni Ernst walk into a mortuary...David Brendel, Journal of the Plague Years, 6/7/25: “Ernst speaks of Jesus like she owns him but is willing to share. No, thank you, Herr Senator. You and your ilk suggest that the arc of justice may in fact bend toward the morally dyslexic. Your ethos synchs up with the sick humor of Lenny Bruce, sans irony.”
On Tony Towle's “Late Sketches & Studies,” Martin Stannard, Best American Poetry, 6/4/25: “Tony Towle is one of the New York School’s best-kept secrets.” (John Ashbery)
Listen carefully: All that was imagined
you must now reimagine, or you will never
reach the next level,
and you must reach the next level
or you will remain on this level
bereft of reimagination until the end
of an empty, monoplane existence.
—from “Recreation, or Re-creation,” Tony Towle
AI, Ayee, Oy Vey!
‘Nobody wants a robot to read them a story!’ The creatives and academics rejecting AI – at work and at home: Is artificial intelligence coming for everyone’s jobs? Not if this lot have anything to do with it, Emine Saner, Guardian, 6/3/25: “We keep moving like zombies towards a world that nobody really wants to live in.”
Teachers Are Not OK: AI, ChatGPT, and LLMs “have absolutely blown up what I try to accomplish with my teaching, Jason Koebler, 404 Media, 6/2/25
In the Light of Victory, He Himself Shall Disappear: AI and the coming “job bloodbath,” Erik Hoel, Intrinsic Perspective, 6/5/25: “… nothing is gained for free in progress.”
Big Tech’s AI Endgame Is Coming Into Focus: One app to rule them all, Matteo Wong, Atlantic, 6/3/25: “Google…appears to be aiming for something like an everything app: a single tool that will be able to do just about everything a person could possibly want to do online.”
Machines Can't Replace You: on finishing a book that could only have been written by real, live humans, Kathleen McLaughlin, Notes on Class, 6/6/25: “The stories…are connected in ways that are difficult to explain. Ways only humans, not artificial intelligence built on labor stolen from people, could develop, through deeply personal and lived experiences.”
Politics, Economics, Technology
Trump Wanted This Escalation: Trump's calling for 2,000 National Guard soldiers to spread fear and crack down on dissent. This is a time for non-violent defiance, Steven Beschloss, America, America, 6/8/25: “It’s just a question of time before Trump invokes the Insurrection Act; yesterday Vice President JD Vance was already calling protestors ‘insurrectionists.’”
Stop bending the knee to Trump: it’s time for anticipatory noncompliance: US institutions have been doing Trump’s bidding before he even comes after them. Here’s the counterstrategy, David Kirp, The Guardian, 6/8/25: “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”—James Baldwin
Tyranny Has Invaded America Through the Immigration Enforcement Regime: Immigration helps the country become freer and more prosperous and restrictionism is doing the opposite, Alex Nowrasteh, Unpopulist, 6/3/25
Why The Trump Protests Will Fail: The resistance won’t succeed until it stops being a performance and starts challenging the system that got us here, Evelyn Quartz, The Lever, 6/4/25: “That means organizing where power lives, demanding what solidarity requires, and building something that doesn’t keep us trapped in the center’s endless cycle of ‘least bad’ candidates — but instead begins to redistribute power — economic, political, and moral — back to the people.”
Trump's hypocrisy on antisemitism and immigration: Why it matters, Robert Hubbell, Today’s Edition, 6/3/25: “Trump does not care about antisemitism unless it can be used to inflict harm on his political enemies.”
The real cover-up is of Trump's disordered mental state: Sanewashing didn't end with the 2024 campaign, Stephen Robinson, Public Notice, 6/3/25: “The president spreading bonkers conspiracy theories and unleashing vicious personal attacks against his political opponents is certainly more newsworthy than when he manages to read prepared remarks. But major media also ignored how he often fails to execute that bare minimum task.”
The Seditionists: Yarvin and the Machinery of Democratic Collapse: On being proven right about something you desperately hoped to be wrong about, Mike Brock, Notes from the Circus, 6/2/25: “What we're witnessing isn't just political disagreement or ideological capture. It's sedition—the systematic attempt to overthrow constitutional governance by people who explicitly reject democratic legitimacy.”
Neo-Nazi group ‘actively seeking to grow in US’ with planned paramilitary training event: The Base is emerging from shadows and ramping up its ranks as White House turns blind eye to the far right, Ben Makuch, The Guardian, 6/7/25
Right-Wingers To Women: Stay Home And Have Babies! Jim Hightower, Lowdown, 6/3/25: “Trump officials have proposed a “National Medal of Motherhood” for women who have six or more children!”
State Voter Suppression Bills Could Disenfranchise Millions Ahead of Midterms: Trump’s crackdown on immigrants has fueled legislation to restrict access to the ballot in more than two dozen states, Mike Ludwig, Truthout, 6/2/25
“The Whole Government is DOGE Now”: The Coup's Second Wave Begins. A lawless vanguard infiltrated the U.S. government; now they are being institutionalized and will work with Project 2025's own democracy destroyers, Ruth ben-Ghiat, Lucid, 6/5/25: “DOGE is now embedded in over 30 US government agencies and departments.”
Even if Trump chickens out, you should still be worried about the economy: Tariff pauses are keeping us afloat for now. But debt and interest rates are a big threat, Noah Smith, Noahpinion, 6/5/25: “This is not a serious administration, and they don’t have our best economic interests in mind.”
Militant Grad Workers Build Union Power to Fight Attacks on Education and Labor: In this moment, organized labor can both intervene to defend people and articulate a different vision for higher ed, Derek Seidman, Truthout, 6/3/25
Wake Up and Smell the Corruption: How far we've fallen, how fast, Paul Krugman, Newsletter, 6/6/25: “…we no longer have rule of law, just rule by the Leader’s whims. We have abandoned everything America was supposed to stand for.”
Big Tents and Collective Action Can Defeat Authoritarianism, Maria J. Stephan, Just Security, 6/3/25: “The journey from individual angst to collective action, from siloed work to big-tent formations, from overreliance on defensive resistance to building a more desirable future grounded in joy and shared humanity takes time, vision, and commitment. It is also the pathway to victory.”
Notes on the Varieties of Resistance, Rebecca Solnit, Meditations on an Emergency, 6/4/25: “The something we have may get us to enough if we join it, support it, shine a light on it, and that begins by recognizing it.”
A Chilling Prediction by Leo Strauss: Today’s post-liberals hate liberalism but lack a coherent alternative, Francis Fukuyama, Persuasion, 6/4/25: “Strauss’ point is that liberals needed to understand much better the deeper roots of illiberal politics, and to look beyond the horizon defined by liberalism to see the power of the critiques of their doctrine.”
Why This Former Republican Has a Lot to Teach the Democrats: The party should be listening to former Tea Party stalwart Joe Walsh. No, really, Chris Lehmann, The Nation, 6/4/25: “Democrats must fight. I mean really fight. I’ll say it one more time: Democrats must FIGHT.”
A Fiery Brief Fueled by Conservatives Helped Put Trump’s Tariffs in Peril: A coalition including leading figures on the right said the president’s program did violence to the Constitution. One judge cited it eight times, Adam Liptak, NY Times, 6/2/25
‘We're going to need some heroes:’ Connecticut senator Chris Murphy's mass mobilization effort has my attention. Who has yours? Margaret Sullivan, American Crisis, 6/4/25: “The only thing that is ultimately going to stop Trump’s corruption and his destruction of democracy is mass mobilization.”
Israel is Burning the Children of Gaza: How Will We Respond?, Rabbi Brant Rosen, Shalom Rav, 6/4/25: “…any statement, theological or otherwise, made in the presence of some burning children and not others is nothing short of chillul hashem: a desecration of God’s name.”
It takes something round to wrap round something round, press down,
press hard and love comes out. THIS ISN’T HOW LOVING GOES,
I’m yelling at Isaac Luria’s grave, blue as a thwack of sky on stolen
land. The thing about staying, she’s saying, is staying
drapes itself over everything
you’re scared of. Like a blanket full of button holes, and stars wedged
into them. The thing about blankets is they’re less threatening
than love.
—from “The End is the Beginning,” Mónica Gomery
Science, Environment, Wilderness
Meanwhile, back in the real world: There's too much carbon in the atmosphere, so it's hot, Bill McKibben, Crucial Years, 6/1/25: “…we are rushing into the most dangerous period in human history…physics will not cut us any slack because we elected a moron.”
Upside-Down World: Climate Change and the Border-Industrial Complex in the Trump Era: Climate displacement and border enforcement--two dynamics trending distinctly upward--are on a collision course, Todd Miller, Border Chronicle, 6/4/25: “U.S. climate policy now boils down to this: reducing fossil fuel extraction and consumption are far less important (if important at all) than the creation of a profitable border and immigration apparatus.”
Information Pollution Is Undermining Climate Progress, Lili Fuhr, Stephanie Hankey, Project Syndicate, 6/5/25: “To save both climate progress and democracy, we must confront Big Tech business models that commodify attention, reward outrage, and flood the public sphere with AI-generated slop.”
A Food Reckoning Is Coming: Our diets are awful for the planet. But we can’t simply abandon food, Michael Grunwald, Atlantic, 6/3/25: “Agriculture’s footprint is already larger than Asia, and the more it expands, the more nature’s footprint shrinks, expelling the carbon stored in its soils and vegetation into the overheated atmosphere.”
Supreme Court changes the game on federal environmental reviews, J.B. Ruhl, The Conversation, 6/3/25: “…environmental review after the Eagle County decision is not just a new ballgame; it is a new sport.”
A Place of Healing: on the Medicinal Plants of the Adirondacks: “If we value the medicine the land offers us so generously, we must become medicine for the land,” Robin Wall Kimmerer, LitHub, 6/2/25: “The Adirondacks continue to be a healing place, where we can recover from those stresses and learn from the land another way to live. Book: Campfire Stories: The Adirondacks
Is Your Shampoo Washing Up in Antarctica? Researchers have found chemicals from personal care products like shampoo, deodorant, and laundry soap in Antarctic snow, Javier Barbuzano, Eos, 6/3/25
Analyses Expose Ocean Protection Failures Before UN Summit on 'Unprecedented Crisis': “Conserving 30% of our ocean by 2030 is not just a target—it's a lifeline for communities, food security, biodiversity, and the global economy,” Jessica Corbett, Common Dreams, 6/5/25
How 3 years of war have ravaged Ukraine’s forests, and the people who depend on them: Nearly 5 million acres have burned since Russia’s latest invasion in 2022, ignited by rocket fire, artillery shelling, and explosive devices, Chad Small, Grist, 6/5/25
Small underpasses offer amphibians an extraordinary escape from death: Residents of a Vermont town rallied for construction of wildlife tunnels to save amphibians from becoming road kill. The benefits startled scientists, Warren Cornwall, Anthropocene, 6/4/25: “The tunnels, it turned out, weren’t only for frogs and salamanders. Wildlife cameras captured black bear, bobcats and porcupines crossing beneath the road as well.”
A Century On, the Chincoteague Pony Swim Still Sparks Unbridled Joy: The Virginia tradition connects generations of Saltwater Cowboys, the descendants of Misty herself, and two islands where wildness reigns, Susan Orlean, Garden & Gun, June/July 2025 issue
How Much Energy Does It Take To Think? Studies of neural metabolism reveal our brain’s effort to keep us alive and the evolutionary constraints that sculpted our most complex organ, Conor Feehly, Quanta, 6/4/25: “Our brains regulate our bodies’ key physiological systems, allocating resources where they’re needed as we consciously and subconsciously react to the demands of our ever-changing environments.”
Skeleton house
Church
I am homesick
I am teaching myself
To pray
It is true
It is true
It is true.
Jamie Ayze (Trans fr Diné by the author)
Health, Wellness, Wellbeing
The Trump admin's quiet (but deadly) attack on repro rights: They're doctoring science and changing policy to make pregnancy more dangerous, Lisa Needham, Public Notice, 6/6/25
How ‘Inflammaging’ Drives Cancer—and Points to New Treatments: Inflammation fuels the high rate of cancer in people over 50, researchers find, leading them to test anti-inflammatories like allergy drugs to fight it, Betsy McKay, Wall Street Journal, 6/3/25 (No paywall)
Game theory explains why reasonable parents make vaccine choices that fuel outbreaks, Y. Tony Yang, The Conversation, 6/5/25: “…because of a fundamental tension between individual choice and collective welfare, relying solely on individual choice may not achieve public health goals.”
Diquat herbicide poisons the gut, may severely damage other organs, research shows, Pamela Ferdinand, US Right to Know, 6/3/25
‘Problematic’ MAHA report minimizes success of lifesaving asthma medicines, doctors say: Asthma is one of the most common childhood chronic diseases, Nada Hassanein, Stateline, 6/6/25
This could be RFK Jr.’s most costly mistake: What sense does it make to take away a potent tool against future pandemics? Leanna S. Wen, Washington Post, 6/5/25: “The federal government…will pull more than $760 million committed to developing shots for bird flu.” (No paywall)
Cannabis and Care: Howard University Groundbreaking Study Explores Marijuana in Treatment of Sickle Cell Disease, Washington Informer, 6/4/25: “Increased demand for holistic treatment options has encouraged clinicians to research the use of medical marijuana in conjunction with, or as a substitute for, opioids.”
Birds, Birds, Birding
Birds vs. Wind Turbines: New Research Aims to Prevent Deaths: Window collisions and cats kill more birds than wind farms do, but ornithologists say turbine impacts must be taken seriously. Scientists are testing a range of technologies to reduce bird strikes — from painting stripes to using artificial intelligence — to keep birds safe, Adam Welz, Yale E360, 6/4/25
These Little Birds Are All But Extinct – But There Is Still Time To Save Them: “We will never hear the po‘ouli honeycreeper’s song again, but we can learn from its genetic code,” Katie Spalding, IFL Science, 5/31/25
Friends:
We can, we must be optimistic about the future! It’s time to organize, to work together, defend our values, and build a better world.
We always have each other to rely on. We stand together in our communities of all kinds and shapes. What is happening right now in Los Angeles is a harbinger of much worse to come. Be prepared. Build networks of friends to help defend our communities and stand up to a militarized Federal incursion into our communities.
Please keep in touch…hearing from you makes the work I do worthwhile. And please do share TWT as widely as you care to.
I send my love to all of you—David
Compassion is not a hierarchy. It's the entire ladder of humanity.—Summer Brenner
The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.—Audre Lorde