The Weird Times
Inner Monologues and Desultory Reporting from Outer Spaces
The Weird Times: Issue 48, April 11 2021
“The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lies will now be accepted as truth, and the truth defamed as lies, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world — and the category of truth vs. falsehood is among the mental means to this end — is being destroyed.” —Hannah Arendt
“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”—Ernest Hemingway
The Republican outrage over Major League Baseball moving the All-Star game out of Georgia after the passage of the state’s new voter suppression law reveals a bigger crisis in American democracy: the mechanics of our current system do not reflect the will of the majority —Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, 4/4/21
One of my dearest best friends has died: David Southern, July 26, 1946-April 1, 2021
A few months after I moved to North Carolina in 1973, I was lucky enough to meet David Southern, which led to my living next door to him and his family on Randolph Road out in “the county” as it was called at that time, on the outskirts of Durham. David worked at Duke University Press with our other neighbor, the outstanding photographer, John Menapace. David’s place, a ramshackle former farmhouse, had previously been the residence of the soon-to-be famous local band, the Red Clay Ramblers. David seemed to know every interesting person in the region, and was an endless source of wit and wisdom, and was a talented graphic designer, who taught me much about type and page layout. He designed the first books published by Truck Press, including the beautiful Sweethearts by Jayne Anne Phillips that I published in 1975, and made a series of evocative logos for Truck I will always treasure. He was a historian, conversationalist, letter writer, and wonderful friend. I miss him terribly.
More deaths to observe and mourn.
This is the Bobby Brown I remember as a young Yankees fan in the fifties: Dr. Bobby Brown, who won four World Series rings as a Yankees third baseman during a playing career that spanned parts of eight seasons, and who later went on to serve in the Korean War, become a respected cardiologist and, finally, president of the American League, died on March 25th.
During his final Old-Timers’ Day visit to Yankee Stadium in 2019, Dr. Brown recalled giving his future wife advice on how she should describe him to her parents.
“Tell your mother that I’m in medical school, studying to be a cardiologist,” he said. “Tell your dad that I play third base for the Yankees.”
Anne Beatts, National Lampoon,Saturday Night Live writer and Square Pegs creator, comedy pioneer.
“The network likes to have someone they feel comfortable with. It allows them to have a dick in the room. I always had a fantasy of walking into the writers room at Saturday Night Live with a giant dildo slapped on.”
Like many of you, I am fully vaccinated and past the post-vaccination “development of efficacy” period and now, in theory, should be able to go out without risking infecting others and far less likely to become infected myself. Yet I hesitate. Apparently, habits developed during pandemic are not so easy to change.
This raises some interesting thoughts about behavior, who we are as social beings, and how we act when under threat. The will to survive is a powerful drive, isn’t it? What is normative social behavior anyway? What exposures are important enough to take on when the risk is diminished but still not close enough to minor to be risked? How does one’s body determine when it is ready to be exposed to the world and all that goes with that? What is the difference between exposing oneself to others in the street or in the woods, as opposed to being inside a building with other people? Do we enjoy these public social interactions enough to accept them as risky? And how risky is it anyway?
A few years after Beloved was published in 1987, Toni Morrison lamented that there were no suitable memorials — not even a “small bench by the road” — to mark the lives of slaves. In response to that comment, in 2006, the Toni Morrison Society began placing benches “at sites commemorating significant moments, individuals, and locations within the history of the African Diaspora.” There are now 27 such benches around the world, placed “to uplift the events of a treasured past," and over the next few weeks, the organization will install three more in Tulsa (donate). Via Ron Charles, Washington Post Book Club newsletter, 4/9/21
Cells Form Into Living ‘Xenobots’ on Their Own: Embryonic cells can self-assemble into new forms that don’t resemble the bodies they usually generate, challenging old ideas of what defines an organism, Philip Ball, Wired, 4/4/21
When he shows movies of these spontaneously grown xenobots to other biologists and asks them to guess what they are, Levin said that “People say, ‘It’s an animal you found in a pond somewhere.’” They are astounded when he reveals that “it’s 100 percent Xenopus laevis.” These microscopic entities are utterly unlike any stage in the normal development of a frog.
The xenobots are turning some conventional views in developmental biology upside down. They suggest that the frog genome doesn’t uniquely instruct cells about how to proliferate, differentiate and arrange themselves into a frog body. Rather, that’s just one possible outcome of the process that the genomic programming permits.
A BILLIONAIRE-FUNDED WEBSITE WITH TIES TO THE FAR RIGHT IS TRYING TO “CANCEL” UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS:Campus Reform and its publisher, the Leadership Institute, are siccing armies of trolls on professors across the country, Alice Speri, The Intercept, 4/10/21
“Campus Reform” is emblematic of the raging battle in American public discourse over so-called cancel culture, which the site’s writers have regularly lamented even as they set out to cancel the reputations and jobs of the people they attack. Campus Reform is also the product of a decades-old conservative and libertarian effort to shape the values of U.S. higher education through a series of organizations that give the appearance of a diverse and organic conservative campus movement but are in fact part of the same coordinated network.
Photo Essay: Finding Pristine Moments In New Jersey’s Urban Landscape, Ray Hennessy, Living Bird, Spring 2021. Subscribe here
Powerlines crisscross northern New Jersey leading to and from the state’s industrial hubs. Beneath the electrical wires, shrubby corridors sprout and are regularly maintained by annual brush-cutting—creating stand-in nesting grounds for the warblers that specialize in early successional habitat. As a bird photographer I’ve learned that spending a few minutes bushwhacking into a powerline cut in spring and summer is nearly guaranteed to yield a warbler of some kind. And when I do, it never ceases to amaze me: so many warblers are struggling to survive as their habitats are ever-shrinking, and yet every spring they show up in Jersey to try again.
Dead Eagles Found Across US Had Rat Poison in Their Blood, Ian Morse, New Scientist, 4/7/21
In a sample of eagles from across the US, rat poison was found in about 80 per cent of the birds. This widespread exposure to toxic chemicals could impair their health or even lead to death.
Seed monopolies: Who controls the world's food supply? Seed laws criminalizing farmers for using diverse crops that stand a better chance of adapting to climate change are threatening food security. Seed sovereignty activists want to reclaim the right to plant, Charli Shield, DW: Made for Minds, 4/8/21
More than half of the global seed market is in the hands of just a few corporations.
"Seeds are ultimately what feed us and the animals we eat," Jack Kloppenburg, a rural sociologist and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said. "Control over seeds is, in many ways, control over the food supply. The question of who produces new plant varieties is absolutely critical for the future of all of us."
Nation’s first quantum startup accelerator, Duality, launches at UChicago’s Polsky Center and Chicago Quantum Exchange, UChicago News, 4/7/21
The University of Chicago’s Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation and the Chicago Quantum Exchange today announced the launch of Duality, the first accelerator program in the nation that is exclusively dedicated to startup companies focused on quantum science and technology—a rapidly emerging area that is poised to drive transformative advances across multiple industries.
Racism, inequities move to the center of the climate debate: COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter protests threw underlying systemic inequity magnifying climate change impacts into sharp relief, Douglas Fischer, The Daily Climate, 4/9/21
Indeed, a report issued last week by the Solutions Project found that mentions of communities of color in environmental coverage jumped from 2 percent in 2019 to 13 percent in 2020—a 500 percent increase. Among articles quoting a spokesperson orlawmaker about energy issues, more than half quoted a woman—"a clear tipping point" in the group's analyses since 2017.
The Elms Along the Mall
Springtime in the capital,
And the elms along the Mall
Resound with flocks of woodpeckers
Hammering, hammering, hammering,
Skewering bugs the way real
Lawmakers skewer dead ideas.
There are groundskeepers too
in long white coats, hoping
To save the trees from below,
Injecting the infected trunks
With hypodermic needles.
But first and higher overhead
The woodpeckers start to work
At the crack of dawn,
Going after beetles in the bark,
Digging them out like the dead ideas
Infesting new laws before Congress.
One dead idea on the floor again
Is whether Yesterday should be repeated.
Another concerns the Good Old Days,
When handfuls of men owned all the land
And everyone who picked their cotton.
There are several other dead ideas
That some still hope
Will come alive again
Rising on the April air, But No!
As we stand and watch, they drift
Off in the wind like so much sawdust.
It is a touch of Spring’s good luck
That the elms along the Mall this year
Are suddenly loaded down
with ranks of woodpeckers
Hammering away, getting the bugs out!
—Michael Wolfe
RATATATAT: QUICK HITS
Pandemic Accelerating Shift Toward Electric Vehicles, Ed Blazina, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 4/4/21
New kind of blue found in cabbage could replace synthetic food dye, Alice Klein, New Scientist, 4/7/21
Experts lay out their case against carbon pricing: The authors of 'Making Climate Policy Work' argue that market-based approaches to the problem aren't working and point to a potential course correction, Bruce Lieberman, Yale Climate Connections, 4/7/21
Inside Clean Energy: The Coast-to-Coast Battle Over Rooftop Solar. As California works on a new net metering policy, other states are grappling with similar issues, Dan Gearino, Inside Climate News, 4/8/21
Korean esports players, staff speak out on ‘unspeakable’ racism, harassment in America, Shannon Liao, Washington Post, 4/7/21
More Than 4,000 Blood Tests Suggest Our Bodies Age in 3 Distinct Shifts: In terms of biological aging, the body seems to shift gears three times during our lifespans, research from 2019 suggests – with 34 years, 60 years, and 78 years being the key thresholds, David Nield, Science Alert, 4/6/21
Indigenous Food Sovereignty Movements Are Taking Back Ancestral Land: From fishing rights off Nova Scotia, to grazing in Oklahoma and salmon habitats on the Klamath River, tribal groups are reclaiming their land and foodways, Melissa Montalvo, Civil Eats, 3/31/21
Why this grocery chain is ditching single-use bottled water: If you can get it from the tap, you can’t buy it in these Oregon and California supermarkets, Adele Peters, Fast Company, 4/6/21
Endangered trout may soon return to the concrete Los Angeles River: The paved waterway is best known for movie car chases, but a new project aims to make it a haven for wildlife once again, Chris Iovenko, National Geographic, 4/5/21
Births Among Endangered Right Whales Show an Encouraging Rebound, Yale Environment 360, 4/5/21
How social media turns online arguments between teens into real-world violence, Caitlin Elsaesser, The Conversation, 4/5/21
Amtrak Wants Rail Travel to Be a Better Alternative to Short Flights, Long Drives: Railroad aims to duplicate Northeast Corridor success; critics say $80 billion plan is waste of money, Ted Mann, Wall Street Journal, 4/4/21
Revealed: The Climate-Conflicted Directors Leading the World’s Top Banks: 65% of directors from the banks analysed had connections to polluting industries and obstructive lobby groups, Phoebe Cooke, Rachel Sherrington and Mat Hope, DeSmog, 4/1/21
The Quest for a Pandemic Pill: Can we prepare antivirals to combat the next global crisis? Matthew Hutson, The New Yorker, 4/6/21
Here’s a piece TWT recommends you take the time to read:
Hummingbirds and the Ecstatic Moment: An essay, by Jeff Vandermeer, Orion Magazine, April 2021
By the time we arrived in Peru on one trip, however, I was really sick, the asthma bad. I had a premonition of this on the flight in, wheezing like an old man as we gained altitude. But the silver bullet of a prop plane to get to Cuzco served as wondrous distraction as the pilot, banking and wheeling, miraculously avoided jagged, snowcapped mountains that seemed too close.
This flight, which I remember today more vividly than some things that happened this year, felt like the entry into some other world. The landscape and buffeting winds would not allow me to forget I was flying in a fragile vessel, no matter how it resembled a sturdy metal aircraft.
The way my stomach lurched and ears closed as the plane plunged and then the sheer exhausted, delighted relief at the perfect landing, as the pilot eased up on the engine to plummet and drop safely into the boxed-in valley—and level off onto what had seemed upon approach too short an airstrip.
How like the flight of some miraculous bird.
Bond Vigilante Calls Out ‘Dead Fish’ Credit Investors on Climate: Former debt strategist goes after financial backers of fossil fuels, Alaistair Marsh, Bloomberg Green, 4/7/21
Ulf Erlandsson isn’t your typical climate campaigner: He prefers the trading desk to the picket line.
He pushed Amundi SA, Europe's largest asset manager, into divesting bonds in an Indian bank that was financing a coal mine, shamed HSBC Holdings Plc for failing to hold that same bank to account, and pressured a Japanese lender to announce it would stop funding coal power.
Erlandsson sees his particular brand of activism, shaped by almost two decades working in the debt markets, as a new form of bond vigilantism. He now spends his time pushing fixed-income investors and bankers to face up to the risks posed by climate change and their role in underwriting a warmer planet. He wants them to use their financial heft to increase the cost of capital for polluters and pressure companies to reinvent themselves for a low-carbon future.
‘Race against the clock’: the school fighting to save the Ojibwe language before its elders pass away: Northern Wisconsin’s only Ojibwe immersion school built a successful program to revitalize its language. Then the pandemic upended the tribe’s life,Mario Koran, The Guardian, 4/7/21
“We put all this investment into making Ojibwe speakers. We just couldn’t risk them – both the elders and the families our students and teachers return home to. That’s something that’s really hard to convey to people on the outside,” said Brooke Ammann, Waadookodaading director, who prefers to be identified by her Ojibwe name, Niiyogaabawiikwe.
The United Nations lists Ojibwe as one of the world’s “severely endangered” languages. A combined 500,000 people living in the US and Canada identify as Ojibwe people, but fewer than 100 native speakers remain in the US, and a few thousand in Canada – the majority of whom are elders, according to Anton Treuer, professor of Ojibwe at Bemidji State University.
Why aren't we calling the Capitol attack an act of treason? There has been little public discussion of the term as the framework for understanding what happened on 6 January, experts say, Lois Beckett, The Guardian, 4/5/21
But in the three months since 6 January, however, there has been little public discussion of “treason” as the framework for understanding what happened, Larson said. “Everything was ‘Treason, treason, treason,’ when it wasn’t, and now you have an event that is closer to the original 18th-century definition of treason than anything that’s happened, and it’s almost silent. Nobody is using the term at all,” he said….
The definition of “seditious conspiracy”, in contrast, seems like a much easier match, Larson and Carroll agreed, particularly because it includes conspiracies “to prevent, hinder or delay the execution of any law”, which the Capitol invaders appear to have accomplished by forcing lawmakers to hide and delaying the certification of the 2020 election results.
“Seditious conspiracy captures the flavor of January 6,” said Steve Vladeck, a federal courts expert at the University of Texas school of law. “You had a whole lot of people – who may not have had exactly the same motive, or may not have committed the exact same acts – who were in a very large degree involved in a common plan, the goal of which was to somehow, in some way, keep President Trump in office.”
“If that’s not seditious conspiracy, I don’t know what is.”
Andy Revkin hosts a special Earth Institute Sunday "Arts and Hearts" show kicking off the Global Vaccine Poem Project of Wick Poetry Center of Kent State University and the University of Arizona Poetry Center. They have organized a worldwide call for vaccine-related verse. This episode features Naomi Shihab Nye, Jane Hirshfield, Ethelbert Miller, Danusha Laméris, Cathy Song and Jacqueline Saphra.
“[That first game] is what really made me [a baseball fan], because it was more than just the radio. Baseball was the backdrop to other activities in the house—my grandpa listening to the radio while we did something else. But going made it come alive.” —Carla Hayden, Librarian of Congress, as told to Sherri Dalphonse, The Washingtonian, 4/2/21
I had a friend was a big baseball player
Back in high school
He could throw that speedball by you
Make you look like a fool boy
Saw him the other night at this roadside bar
I was walking in, he was walking out
We went back inside sat down had a few drinks
But all he kept talking about was
Glory days well they'll pass you by
Glory days in the wink of a young girl's eye
Glory days, glory days
—Bruce Springsteen, Glory Days
Musgrove makes history, spins SD's 1st no-no, Justice delos Santos, MLB.com, 4/10/21 — Joe Musgrove, who grew up rooting for the Padres, threw the first no-hitter in the franchise’s 53-season history Friday night. He blanked the Rangers across nine near-perfect innings with 10 strikeouts in a 3-0 victory at Globe Life Field.
As society seeks to return to some sort of normalcy, my thoughts turn to baseball—Mark McCarthy, Star-Herald.
(Mine too —DW) Stay well everyone, and here’s hoping that we relearn how to be with each other again soon. Love to all.
Dear Editor, Your "Ratatatat" section is a great addition. Thanks for including my woodpecker poem too, celebrating the arrival of a new kind of Congress in Washington. On, on! Michael Wolfe