The Weird Times
Desultory Reporting and Inner Monologues from Outer Spaces
The Weird Times Issue 37 January 24, 2021
“My conscience is clear, and I am confident that my decision is on the right side of the law and history,” —Aaron Van Langevelde, the Republican on the Michigan Board of Canvassers who voted to certify Biden’s win in November.
“It’s not divisive to call out white supremacy. What’s divisive is to not work to eliminate it.” —Rep. Cori Bush
“Any time Mitch McConnell—no longer Senate majority leader—asserts how the Democrats should follow the rules and do what’s right, Democrats should visualize his refusal to hold hearings for Merrick Garland and his ramrodding through Amy Coney Barrett in 8 days.” —Steven Beschloss
Hank Aaron
magically smooth across the forehead
the barest hint of anger in the eyes
at certain moments he is able to focus
on the shamefully simple pleasure
that is derived from smacking
a well pitched ball out of the park
but this is an entire history
a conjunction of events and moments
that trails us as we live our century
as unreflexively as we can
the biceps are muscles of the soul
engaged in warfare of the flesh
a spiritual angst that cannot be relieved
a senseless struggle against the light
turns flesh into gold
a mystery of the heart
from Mobile Alabama in a straight line
across the continent and twenty five years
of political shit to fill our television
soul with love until we cannot sit still
he is hopelessly in love
his home runs are but the surface of his love
what a life must become if it is known
made hero of and fills the sky with hope
a ripple of the muscles beneath
the darkness of the skin
worlds exploding where the angels live
the barest hint of anger in his eyes
the hopefulness of anger in his eyes
—David Wilk (1974)
When I wrote this poem, Hank Aaron had just hit his 715th lifetime home run, to surpass the longstanding record set by Babe Ruth. It was the year he turned 40, having gotten to the major leagues in 1954 at only twenty years old. He was the last player promoted from the Negro Leagues to Major League Baseball.
About the career home run record he set, against the backdrop of terrible racism directed at him for years, Aaron said: "It was supposed to be the greatest triumph of my life, but I was never allowed to enjoy it. I couldn't wait for it to be over. The only reason that some people didn't want me to succeed was because I was a Black man."
Now he is recognized as one of the very greatest players ever and each year since 1999, MLB awards the best offensive player with the Henry Aaron Award. In 2002 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush.
Henry Aaron did as much as anyone to redeem the South, David Von Drehle, Washington Post, 1/23/21
When “The Hammer,” as he was known, died, he died in Atlanta. The place he didn’t want to go had become the place he didn’t want to leave. A prosperous businessman and recipient of the prestigious title of Georgia Trustee, Henry Aaron had done as much as anyone to redeem the South from the clutches of its history and to open a way forward. Not with one swing of the bat, but with tens of thousands; his motto, he said, was “just keep swinging.”
It's So Hard to See My Baseball Cards Move On premiered on Hot Stove on MLB Network and features Chuck D naming Bob Gibson, Seaver, Lou Brock, Morgan, Bob Watson, Wynn, Al Kaline, Jay Johnstone, Niekro, Glenn Beckert, Tony Taylor, Horace Clarke, Dick Allen, Don Larsen, Hal Smith, Lindy McDaniel, Whitey Ford, Bob Lee and former baseball player turned country singer Charley Pride. Several other players are pictured in the video for the song.
"When these players pass, it’s almost like a chapter of your life moves on too, and they’re greatly reflected by the baseball cards that when I became grown, my dad kept in the garage," Chuck D told MLB Network. – Kyle Brown, Cincinnati Enquirer, 1/18/21
Amanda Gorman reads poem “The Hill We Climb” at Biden Inauguration, Amy B. Wang and Stephanie Merry, Washington Post, 1/20/21
“When I started to write, I thought of the grandparents, the children, the fathers and the mothers. I want every single one of them to feel represented in my words. So, as I was writing, rather than keeping a specific person or prototype in my mind, I tried to imagine if I could gather a group of Americans in my living room, and I wanted to replicate that sensation of intimacy and closeness in my poem. How would I speak to someone at my dinner table who is grieving, and tired, and distraught?” —Amanda Gorman, interviewed by the Washington Post about writing the inaugural poem she read.
PBS interview with Amanda Gorman soon after she was named the first US Youth Poet Laureate.
Neighbird: A Special Commission from the Poetry Project
The sound of birds out a window offers more than ambient potential—it transforms and expands a room and a moment, creating place-making connections across language and species. This transcendent transmission of feeling is also part of the work of poetry, as it helps guide its readers and writers into a deeper awareness of the interconnections that bind all life across time and distance into an intricate ecosystem of interdependence, responsibility, and care.
The Poetry Project, in partnership with The Feminist Bird Club, is pleased to announce the launch of Neighbird, a multimedia virtual publication honoring collaboration between poets from various backgrounds and locations and the birds they share their home and days with. Neighbird combines poetry, simultaneous tactile practice, and learning in a celebration of mutual dependence and the capacity to share and connect in spontaneous ways.
The first four commissioned participants, Chia-Lun Chang, Saretta Morgan, Maureen Owen, and Sam White were each given directions designed to inspire them to creatively build their own DIY bird feeder at home during shelter in place, along with educational materials for bird identification and bird habitat conservation. They contributed poems, photos, journals, and drawings from their respective locations in Brooklyn, NY; Tucson, AZ; Boulder, CO; and SF, CA
New mutations raise specter of “immune escape” Kai Kupferschmidt, Science, 1/22/21
Emerging variants of the coronavirus have been in the news ever since scientists raised the alarm over B.1.1.7, a SARS-CoV-2 variant that first caught scientists' attention in England in December and that is more transmissible than previously circulating viruses (Science, 8 January, p. 108). But now, they're also focusing on a potential new threat: variants that could do an end run around the human immune response. Such “immune escapes” could mean more people who have had COVID-19 remain susceptible to reinfection, and that proven vaccines may, at some point, need an update.
It Won’t Be Easy to Break Free From Trump’s Media Chaos. If America is going to recover from its Trump addiction, it’s going to need to embrace monotony, Douglas Rushkoff, Gen, 1/20/21
Imagine “the President” as something you think about once a week, not twice an hour. We can have that. Turning away from Twitter and TV is not some luxury of being privileged. Staying on those platforms or glued to the cable networks and making uninformed pronouncements of our own about the issues on which we are being misinformed by entertainment companies and worse—that’s the sign of privilege. It’s okay to stop watching this show, and get on with the real work.
That’s why I believe the best case scenario for the coming year or so is for politics to become boring. Trump leaves Twitter, Biden demonstrates basic but uninspired competence, the cable shows lose their most sensationalist fodder, and people on all sides turn elsewhere for entertainment. We don’t go back to the failed West Wing fantasy of Obama’s presidency, but the successful reality of unremarkable federal administration. We don’t simply ban Trump from social media; we ban all public officials from social media. They have official channels, and shouldn’t be competing for our attention on for-profit networks optimized for polarization and alarm.
'No more broken treaties': indigenous leaders urge Biden to shut down Dakota Access pipeline, Tribes and environmentalists hail decision to cancel Keystone XL pipeline but call on president to go further, Nina Lakhani, The Guardian, 1/21/21
“The victory ending the KXL pipeline is an act of courage and restorative justice by the Biden administration. It gives tribes and Mother Earth a serious message of hope for future generations as we face the threat of climate change. It aligns Indigenous environmental knowledge with presidential priorities that benefit everyone,” said Faith Spotted Eagle, founder of Brave Heart Society and a member of the Ihanktonwan Dakota nation.
“This is a vindication of 10 years defending our waters and treaty rights from this tar sands carbon bomb. I applaud President Biden for recognizing how dangerous KXL is for our communities and climate and I look forward to similar executive action to stop DAPL and Line 3 based on those very same dangers,” said Dallas Goldtooth, a member of the Mdewakanton Dakota and Dine nations and the Keep It In The Ground campaign organizer for the Indigenous Environmental Network.
3 Questions: Daron Acemoglu on the “dangerous situation” still facing the U.S. The author of The Narrow Corridor, about the battle to sustain democracy, weighs in on the country’s political condition, Peter Dizikes, MIT News, 1/18/21
MIT News spoke with MIT economist and Institute Professor Daron Acemoglu, who has written extensively about democratic institutions, political dynamics, and the way democracy increases economic growth. Acemoglu’s most recent book, The Narrow Corridor, co-authored with James Robinson of the University of Chicago and published by Penguin Random House in 2019, contends that we overestimate the supposedly “brilliant design” of the U.S. Constitution as a bulwark against antidemocratic forces. Instead, rights and liberties in the U.S. have depended upon “society’s mobilization … at every turn” throughout our history.
Indeed, Acemoglu asserts, while a state can protect weaker citizens within society, we must also work to limit the power of the state. Liberty and democracy thus exist in a “narrow corridor” between lawlessness or authoritarianism; social action is needed to protect liberty when the state starts to discard the rule of law.
Stop Talking About Section 230. Start Talking About the Business Model, John Battelle, Searchblog, 1/18/21
The debate is frustratingly familiar and hopelessly wrong. The problem isn’t whether or not platforms should moderate what people say. The problem is in whether or not the platforms amplify what is said. And to understand that problem, we have to understand the platform’s animating life force: Their business models.
It’s The F*cking Business Model!
Three years ago I wrote a piece arguing that Facebook could not be fixed because to do so would require abandoning its core business model. So what does that model do? It’s really not that complicated: It drives revenue for nearly every modern corporation on the planet.
Let that settle in. The platforms’ core business model isn’t engagement, enragement, confirmation bias, or trafficking in human attention. Those are outputs of their business model. Again, the model is simple: Drive sales for advertisers. And advertisers are companies – the very places where you, I, and nearly everyone else works. They might be large – Walmart, for example – or they might be small – I got an ad for weighted blankets from”Baloo Living” on Facebook just now (HOW DID THEY KNOW?!).
When advertising is the core business model of a platform, that platform’s job is to drive sales for advertisers. For Facebook, Google, Amazon, and even Apple, that means providing existential revenue to tens of millions of companies large and small. This means that “Big Tech” is fundamentally entangled with our system of modern capitalism.
And killing Section 230 does nothing to address that fact.
The Snarled Lines of Justice, Women ecowarriors map a new history of the Anthropocene, Janelle Baker, Paulla Ebron, Rosa Ficek, Karen Ho, Renya Ramirez, Zoe Todd, Anna Tsing, Sarah E. Vaughn, Orion Magazine, February 2021 issue
In February 2020, a month before the pandemic lockdown hit us, we first sat together as a group of Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) scholars to discuss how best to intervene in discussions of the Anthropocene, this time of human-sponsored environmental disasters. We came together not only because of our concerns about the planet, but also because of our concerns about the conceptual frameworks developed to address Anthropocene nightmares. Too often, environmental and social justice concerns are pitted against each other. Scholars and activists in one sector too frequently dismiss the others’ problems as “beside the point,” as if it were impossible to combine both concerns. As generations of “ecowarriors” (to use Leslie Marmon Silko’s term) have shown us, combining those concerns is not only possible but actually necessary.
As anthropologists, we told stories from our research, using what we learned to develop skills of empathy, translation, and communication. We talked, we walked, we wrote together. As we wrote, we found ourselves drawn to the senses: a framework common to all people on Earth and yet always uniquely tied to a specific moment and position. Instead of describing planetary precarity as a series of climate circulations, carbon calculations, or global moral predicaments, we aimed to show how sensual immersion in a time and place might condense past and present, human and more-than-human, macro and micro, sustainability and unsustainability. We imagined ourselves in the brackish water and thick detritus of a coastal slough, a place where land, water, and air mix together, evoking both the planetary and the particular. Here we surely know that we could never survive alone, that living and nonliving mingle to determine what lives are possible. We became slough-sayers, fish speakers, inhabitants of this tender layer of Earth’s mantle.
In what follows, we begin the process of compiling that multitude of stories that together show the accrual of planetary dangers by structural violence and inequality. Our stories are just a beginning, a glimpse of a practice that should continue and continue. If you care about plagues and pandemics, consider how we have built them into modern landscapes through coerced and transported labor. If you wonder why quarantines and barriers no longer protect us from rising tides, thread your fingers into the permeable materials they’re made from. If you want to know how to weather the coming storms, look to the people who have had to defy their governments to survive. Listen to their stories.
This Site Published Every Face From Parler's Capitol Riot Videos: Faces of the Riot used open source software to detect, extract, and deduplicate every face from the 827 videos taken from the insurrection on January 6, Andy Greenberg, Wired, 1/20/21
Late last week, a website called Faces of the Riot appeared online, showing nothing but a vast grid of more than 6,000 images of faces, each one tagged only with a string of characters associated with the Parler video in which it appeared. The site's creator tells WIRED that he used simple open source machine learning and facial recognition software to detect, extract, and deduplicate every face from the 827 videos that were posted to Parler from inside and outside the Capitol building on January 6, the day when radicalized Trump supporters stormed the building in a riot that resulted in five people's deaths. The creator of Faces of the Riot says his goal is to allow anyone to easily sort through the faces pulled from those videos to identify someone they may know or recognize who took part in the mob, or even to reference the collected faces against FBI wanted posters and send a tip to law enforcement if they spot someone.
"Everybody who is participating in this violence, what really amounts to an insurrection, should be held accountable," says the site's creator, who asked for anonymity to avoid retaliation. "It's entirely possible that a lot of people who were on this website now will face real-life consequences for their actions."
The Capitol riot was not a ‘fringe’ uprising. It was enabled by very deep pockets, Brendan O’Connor, The Guardian, 1/18/21
The Capitol siege was just one battle in an ongoing, decades-long assault on democracy. Racist ideologues have served as the vanguard, but they have long been supported (sometimes openly, often tacitly) by a wide swathe of capitalists. The ultranationalist Maga diehards, Qanon cultists, and various fascists that stormed the Capitol are shock troops searching for a leader. Trump will likely prove too self-absorbed, too cowardly, and too lazy for the job. But no matter how many arrests are made or officials fired, the tide of history has returned us to the rocky shores of political violence and mass upheaval.
Israeli hospital: 98% of staff who got 2nd shot have high-level COVID antibodies, The Times of Israel, 1/18/21
A new serological study conducted at Sheba Medical Center in Ramat Gan has shown 98% of hospital workers who received the second dose of the coronavirus vaccine have developed a high level of antibodies to fight off the virus.
The study of 102 samples, taken a week after Israel began administering the second dose — when the vaccine is expected to reach peak effectiveness — showed most vaccinees had higher antibody counts than among those who have recovered from COVID-19.
The hospital says that a week after receiving the final dose, antibodies jumped to a level between 6 and 20 times higher than that observed after the first shot.
Electric car batteries with five minute charging time produced, Damian Carrington, The Guardian, 1/19/21
Batteries capable of fully charging in five minutes have been produced in a factory for the first time, marking a significant step towards electric cars becoming as fast to charge as filling up petrol or diesel vehicles.
Electric vehicles are a vital part of action to tackle the climate crisis but running out of charge during a journey is a worry for drivers. The new lithium-ion batteries were developed by the Israeli company StoreDot and manufactured by Eve Energy in China on standard production lines.
StoreDot has already demonstrated its “extreme fast-charging” battery in phones, drones and scooters and the 1,000 batteries it has now produced are to showcase its technology to carmakers and other companies. Daimler, BP, Samsung and TDK have all invested in StoreDot, which has raised $130m to date and was named a Bloomberg New Energy Finance Pioneer in 2020.
At home I do all my stuff. I soak my feet. I like soaking my feet. I read my email. I eat. I can just eat again and again. It’s still that kind of day. I want to dance. The object is to make the dancer dance. That’s what I heard. It’s the singer’s job. And people are dancing everywhere. Adam says what are you doing. I’m steeping. He laughs. I need a couple of hours. Should we go walk around or avoid everything and watch a movie. Movie sounds more perverse. And we do. We watch this movie (in masks) where a woman is dancing in a field and later we learn she’s killed someone and this is how she feels about that. And after that she’s sitting on a bus. I think what she felt became different later. —Eileen Myles, from “Relationships” in the Harper’s Magazine special supplement Life After Trump, February 2021.
The outstanding community-based Woodland Pattern Literary Center in Milwaukee has gone virtual this year. Their 27th Annual Poetry Marathon is a two day affair, January 30 and 31. Many great poets and writers will be featured during the 24 hours of readings, an amazing feat of organizational skill, presenting a joyful and uplifting array of poets (including yours truly during the 9 pm central time hour on Saturday the 30th). Amanda Gorman’s reading at the inauguration has reminded millions of Americans just how much poetry matters to us, now more than ever. I hope you will be able to find some time to visit the Woodland Pattern event, make a donation, and enjoy the experience of listening to poets read their work out loud.
If My Blackness Turns to Fruit
Dear America, my love,
If my blackness turns to fruit, do not pull it from the vine.
Let it grow from earth to sky untouched by hateful hands.
So sweet my juice, my jazz, my blues, so sad but true.
Dear America, my love, look behind your prison walls.
Count the black seeds behind bars, the cells where nothing blooms.
Can hope flower from despair?
Yes, America, my love.
Resistance comes, and then the rain.
text: © 2016 E. Ethelbert Miller, Willow Books, The Collected Poems of E. Ethelbert Miller
music: © 2019 Richard J. Clark | RJC Cecilia Music, Boston MA
Quick Hits:
A quarter of all known bee species haven’t been seen since the 1990s, Karina Shah, New Scientist, 1/22/21
We’re running out of lithium for batteries – can we use salt instead? Katharine Sanderson, New Scientist, 1/20/21
How Covid-19 could become as mild as a common cold, Anthony King, New Scientist, 1/21/21
The Second Generation COVID Vaccines are Coming, Zoe Cormier, Scientific American, 1/20/21
12 new books explore fresh approaches to act on climate change, Michael Svoboda, Yale Climate Connections, 1/22/21
Eli Lilly says its monoclonal antibody prevented Covid-19 infections in clinical trial, Matthew Herper, STAT, 1/21/21
Cleansing Ourselves of Trumpism, Jim Sleeper, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, 12/20/21
Listen to my interview with historian Jeffrey Ostler, author of Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the Revolution to Bleeding Kansas on Writerscast.com. This is a terrific and important book, well-researched and powerfully evocative.
In the grass that has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out
blade of grass in his mouth
gazing at the clouds.
—Wislawa Szymborska, "The End and the Beginning " from Miracle Fair, translated by Joanna Trzeciak, W.W. Norton
The rising smell of fresh-cut grass
Smothered cities choke and yell with fuming gas
I hold some grapes up to the sun
And their flavour breaks upon my tongue.
With eager tongues we taste our strife
And fill our lungs with seas of life.
Come taste and smell the waters of our time.—Follow, song written by Jerry Merrick, sung by Richie Havens
Have a listen! My latest project just launched - Livewriters.com - the destination site for anyone interested in podcasts about books, writers, and publishing.
Thanks once again for reading The Weird Times every week. I hope it helps you get through it all. I know it helps me to know you’re out there reading. Stay well and healthy, and above all, keep in touch with as many people as you can.