The Weird Times
Inner Monologues and Desultory Reporting from Outer Spaces: Issue 184, November 19, 2023 (V4 #28)
Laws are always unstable unless they are founded on the manners of a nation; and manners are the only durable and resisting power in a people.—Alexis Tocqueville, Democracy in America
There is no room for theocracy in the American system.—Steve Schmidt
Books Music Culture
Miranda July on Writing a Book That Takes On the Adventure of Aging: The director and author spoke to Vanity Fair about her upcoming second novel, All Fours, and the important realizations about fiction and menopause that helped her write it, Erin Vanderhoof, Vanity Fair, 11/15/23: “I couldn’t have done it when I was younger. I couldn’t have written about midlife, but also I wouldn’t have been brave enough. I just wouldn’t have been. The whole thing just felt so high stakes and terrifying. It was a thrill.”
Musician Jackie DeShannon on her incredible career: ‘It was really difficult being a woman’: The 82-year-old singer-songwriter, known for hits like What the World Needs Now Is Love, reflects on a storied career filled with highs and lows, Jim Farber, The Guardian, 11/15/23: “Back then, it was really difficult being a woman. It’s amazing what’s happening now. I couldn’t be happier about the change.”
Where does all the rage go now? The death of Jezebel and the backlash to our anger, Lyz Lenz, Men Yell at Me, 11/15/23: “Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger,” Audre Lorde wrote in 1981, and that anger can act as a “powerful source of energy serving progress and change.”
The Humanities Humanize Our Society. So “Kill ‘Em,” say Right-Wingers, Jim Hightower, Lowdown, 11/14/23: “The right-wing’s shriveled view is that a university education is not about expanding one’s horizon and enriching America’s democratic society – but solely about training students to fit into a corporate workforce, sacrificing the possibility of a fuller life for the possibility of a fatter paycheck.”
‘On the brink of extinction’: a food historian’s hunt for ingredients vanishing from US plates: In her new book, Endangered Eating, Sarah Lohman chronicles disappearing foods – and why they need protecting, Emily Cataneo, The Guardian, 11/5/23
How to Maintain Hope in an Age of Catastrophe: The psychoanalyst and author Robert Jay Lifton on what seventy years of studying both the victims and the perpetrators of horror has taught him about the human will to survive, Masha Gessen, New Yorker, 11/12/23: “Imagining the real becomes necessary for imagining our catastrophes and confronting them and for that turn by which the helpless victim becomes the active survivor who promotes renewal and resilience.”
Marc Andreessen is right – love doesn’t scale, Mark Hurst, Creative Good, 11/17/23: “Dreams are everything that’s not online.” (quote from Same Bed Different Dreams, by Ed Park)
Ishmael Reed and Boots Riley on the art of cultural agitation, Jordan Coley, Document Journal, 11/9/23: “The pair met to discuss, and occasionally spar on, topics ranging from the misnomer of the recent “50 Years of Hip Hop” celebrations to Richard Pryor to making socialist art under capitalism.”
The Ability to Transform: On Wolves Becoming People, and People Becoming Wolves: Lupine Representation and Demonization Across Cultures, Sonja Swift, LitHub, 11/17/23: “To write about a creature at once mythic and also gravely disappeared is like writing about a shadow.” Buy the book: Echo Loba, Loba Echo: Of Wisdom, Wolves and Women
Is My Toddler a Stochastic Parrot? The world is racing to develop ever more sophisticated large language models while a small language model unfurls itself in my home, Angie Wang, New Yorker, 11/15/23: “What we say is not weighted by probability alone but is given its heft and color by our wish to share our lives. Mere mimicry is not enough.”
‘This might be the last thing I ever write’: Paul Auster on cancer, connection and the fallacy of closure: As he was finishing his latest novel, the writer became seriously ill. He talks about making sense of his life through fiction, the secret of sustaining love and how his new book took him by surprise, Nicholas Wroe, The Guardian, 11/18/23: The novel is Baumgartner
Shuggie Otis: Mr. Shoulda-Coulda-Woulda, Mark DaPonte, CultureSonar, 11/15/23
If you arrive and don't see me
I'm going to be with my baby
I am free, flying in her arms
Over the sea
—from “Strawberry Letter 23,” by The Brothers Johnson, written by Shuggie Otis
Politics and Economics
The U.S. won’t back down from the challenge of Putin and Hamas, Joe Biden, Washington Post, 11/18/23: “Our goal should not be simply to stop the war for today — it should be to end the war forever, break the cycle of unceasing violence, and build something stronger in Gaza and across the Middle East so that history does not keep repeating itself.” (gift article)
Netanyahu is a liability for Biden. Peace is impossible until he goes: The US president’s support for Israel’s PM is damaging America’s reputation abroad, hurting his own chances of re-election and prolonging the suffering in Gaza, Simon Tisdall, The Guardian, 11/18/23
Indifference allows the hate to spread, Steve Schmidt, The Warning, 11/18/23: “We are Americans who are alive at the end of the long lives of the men and women who survived the camps and stormed the beaches. We owe them our fortitude and defiance. We owe them our love, and we owe them a searing anger toward the indifference in our country to the Jew hate wrought by a barbarism equivalent to the Nazi pogroms and Einsatzgruppen mobile killers, who lacked the cell phones, but not the glee of their latter day Hamas brethren who have ignited the inferno.”
Voters must take Trump seriously and literally. The stakes are that high: Trump may be a performance artist, but with his shocking provocations, he is telling us what he would do in a second term as president. That’s why taking him seriously and literally is required, Dan balz, Washington Post, 11/18/23 (gift article)
Trump Crosses a Crucial Line: But Americans can still choose a better path, Tom Nichols, The Atlantic, 11/16/23: “As for Trump, he has abandoned any democratic pretenses, and lost any benefit of the doubt about who and what he is.”
‘I’m more worried today than I was on January 6’: top conservative’s warning to America: Retired judge Michael Luttig is battling to stop a Trump victory – which he says would be ‘catastrophic for America’s democracy’, David Smith, The Guardian, 11/13/23: “It is the constitution that requires us to decide whether he is disqualified, whatever the consequences of that disqualification might be.”
Why Do Authoritarians Appeal to People, and Does Trump Study Other Autocrats? Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Lucid, 11/16/23: “As the research of Karen Stenner and others has shown, about 30% of people in any given society have authoritarian tendencies.”
Warnings Grow That US Media Again Failing to Accurately Cover Trump's Fascist Threat: "If it wasn't already clear, our democracy is in very serious danger,” Jessica Corbett, Common Dreams, 11/13/23: "The press must get across to American citizens the crucial importance of this election and the dangers of a Trump win."
Now We Know How Hitler Did It: There are few Americans alive today who remember Hitler, the details are lost to the mists of time. But Donald Trump is bringing it all back to us with a fresh, stark splash of reality…Thom Hartmann, Hartmann Report, 11/17/23: “To the extent that our Constitution is still intact, the choice for our democracy to rise or fall will be in our hands.”
Can a socialist ex-marine fill Joe Manchin’s seat in West Virginia? Zach Shrewsbury faces an improbable task to replace the conservative Democrat in the face of a Republican onslaught – but he won’t be put off, Chris Stein, The Guardian, 11/19/23: ““We need leaders that are cut from the working-class cloth. We need representation that will go toe to toe with corporate parasites and their bought politicians.”
The Roaring 20s are back on track: A healthy economy, strong productivity growth, and a continuing tech boom, Noah Smith, Noahpinion, 11/18/23: “Much of the country is still mired in the atmosphere of pessimism and malaise that followed the Great Recession, the chaotic Trump years, the pandemic, and the post-pandemic inflation. And of course dire events like the Israel-Gaza war continue to dominate headlines. But already I feel like I can sense the green shoots of excitement about the future, from the online “e/acc” mini-movement to nascent optimism about the economy.”
A Mother’s Grief in New Haven: Laquvia Jones lost both of her sons to shootings. Now she wonders why a city with a deep sense of community—and one of the wealthiest universities in the world—can’t figure out how to address gun violence, Nicholas Dawidoff, New Yorker, 11/18/23
The Juvenile Viciousness of Campus Anti-Semitism: Some of America’s students are embracing an ancient evil, Tom Nichols, The Atlantic, 11/13/23: “Many students who think they’re protesting against Israeli policy are actually engaging in anti-Semitism, spewing hatred in a way that will change them as people and alter their lives.”
A discussion with Naomi Klein on wellness culture: ‘We really are alive on the knife’s edge:’ The author examines how some chiropractors, health coaches and fitness fanatics came to embrace far-right theories, Katherine Rowland, The Guardian, 11/15/23: “There is a connection between certain kinds of new age ideas and health fads and the fascist project.”
The Age of Information Tidal Waves: How context-free hyperbolic provocation now regularly washes over and deranges American minds online, Damon Linker, Notes from the Middle Ground, 11/17/23: “Online digital networks are politically destabilizing, not primarily because they spread disinformation, but far more so because they spread one-sided, highly tendentious information that distorts our perception of reality.”
The hidden biases at play in the U.S. Senate: People of color get significantly less representation than White voters. And that’s not the only way the Senate is skewed, Dan Balz, Clara Ence Morse, Nick Mourtoupalas, Washington Post, 11/17/23: “The result of the country’s evolution has been a Senate that suffers from three fundamental imbalances, according to a Washington Post data analysis of population growth, demographic changes and shifts in voting patterns.” (DW: unless we reform the Senate and the Electoral College, American democracy is doomed to fail.) Gift article.
The U.S. Government UFO Cover-Up Is Real—But It’s Not What You Think: Decades of declassified memos, internal reports, and study projects create the sense that the government doesn’t have satisfying answers for the most perplexing sightings, Garrett M. Graff, The Atlantic, 11/17/23 (gift article) Book: UFO: The Inside Story of the Us Government's Search for Alien Life Here--And Out There
There are always choices: A conversation with Professor Margaret MacMillan, Lawrence Freedman, Comment is Freed, 11/19/23: “Do they fully understand how terrible their decisions are? Is there a difference between the decisions of a clearly bad man like Hitler, say, and those like many of those in power in 1914, who bumbled into a great catastrophe doing what they thought was logical in the circumstances of the moment?”
Your heart has been turned inside out.
A whole new set of emotions
have been invented for you.
—from “Young man in the surf,” Tom Meyer
Science and Environment
It's So Hot: Maybe Cooling the War in Palestine Could Help, Bill McKibben, The Crucial Years, 11/19/23: “Yesterday, Nov. 18, 2023, the planet’s temperature went past the 2.0 degree Celsius barrier for the first time. It’s temporary—but it’s a terrible reminder that we’re now in the desperate end game for global warming. And yet no one noticed because—unavoidably—the world’s attention is riveted on the horrors in Gaza.”
Will climate worries lead people to have fewer babies? The first systematic study of the question finds the answer is more complicated than you might think, Sarah DeWeerdt, Anthropocene, 11/14/23: “And for some, political concerns around climate change provided a reason to have more children.”
Here’s How Bad Climate Change Will Get in the US—and Why There’s Still Hope: The nation’s Fifth National Climate Assessment paints a dark portrait of worsening disasters. But it also points toward accelerating progress and a cleaner future, Matt Simon, Wired, 11/14/23
‘Tsunami’ of plastic damaging health must be stopped, scientists warn UN: Global population 'eat and drink' hazardous material, world leaders told amid treaty negotiations, Hayley Dixon, Telegraph (UK), 11/12/23
Plastic Has Changed Sea Turtles Forever: Even if plastic pollution stopped tomorrow, turtles would be dealing with the repercussions for centuries—at least, Katherine J. Wu, The Atlantic, 11/15/23 Gift article
“Plastic will overwhelm us:” Scientists say health should be the core of global plastic treaty: United Nations’ draft treaty pays “lip service” to the known science, according to the group of international scientists who drafted an alternative health-focused treaty, Brian Bienkowski, Daily Climate, 11/15/23
Deep Emissions Cuts Still Needed to Prevent the Worst Climate Change Impacts: A new federal report says the effects of human-caused climate change are worsening in every region of the United States, but the technology to address it exists, Grace van Deelen, EOS, 11/14/23
Microplastics found in clouds could affect weather and global temperatures: Scientists in eastern China find 24 out of 28 water samples have plastic particles commonly seen in synthetic fibers and packaging, Aliya Uteuova, The Guardian, 11/16/23
Environmental groups call dredging of Hudson ‘failure’ in new report: The groups say PCB levels in the river show dredging was not as effective as the federal government predicted, Roger Hannigan Gilson, Times-Union, 11/16/23
Google DeepMind’s AI Weather Forecaster Handily Beats a Global Standard: Machine learning algorithms that digested decades of weather data were able to forecast 90 percent of atmospheric measures more accurately than Europe’s top weather center, Gregory Barber, Wired, 11/14/23
Oil prices plunge 20% from year's peak on weaker U.S., China demand: Oversupply likely to persist even if Saudi Arabia continues production cuts, Yuta Koga, Nikkei Asia, 11/18/23
Wind power boosts his family’s business, Kansas rancher says:‘I always say that wind farming is my best cash crop,’ YCC Team, Yale Climate Connections, 11/17/23
Gila River Indian Community moves forward with solar canal project, first in country, Shondin Silversmith, Source NM, 11/13/23: “This new technology fits and supports our culture and tradition as we look forward to being sustainable in the future in a very real way.”
Forget ‘Man the Hunter’ – physiological and archaeological evidence rewrites assumptions about a gendered division of labor in prehistoric times, Sarah Lacey, Cara Ocobock, The Conversation, 11/17/23: “There is a growing body of physiological, anatomical, ethnographic and archaeological evidence to suggest that not only did women hunt in our evolutionary past, but they may well have been better suited for such an endurance-dependent activity.”
Scientists have discovered what may be the first ‘vampire’ virus: Dubbed MiniFlayer, the unusual microbe was found attached to another virus in a soil sample from Maryland, Carolyn Y. Johnson, Washington Post, 11/14/23
Why the Godfather of A.I. Fears What He’s Built: Geoffrey Hinton has spent a lifetime teaching computers to learn. Now he worries that artificial brains are better than ours, Joshua Rothman, New Yorker, 11/13/23: “Hinton argues that the intelligence displayed by A.I. systems transcends its artificial origins.”
Rogue Worlds Throw Planetary Ideas Out of Orbit: Scientists have recently discovered scores of free-floating worlds that defy classification. The new observations have forced them to rethink their theories of star and planet formation, Charlie Wood, Quanta, 11/13/23: “We’re missing something, and we don’t know what it is.”
you're born and you grow and as you're growing up
things never quite happen in the right way
and you never get enough of everything
and then suddenly you're a little bit older
and you're getting too much of everything
and then you're quite a bit older
and everything hurts a little
then, alas, you die
—Ted Berrigan, quoted by Anselm Hollo in “rue Wilson Monday”
Health and Wellness
Common pesticides in food reducing sperm count worldwide, study says, Sandee LaMotte, CNN, 11/15/23: “Men who were more highly exposed to the pesticides, such as those who work in agriculture, had significantly less sperm concentration than men who had the least exposure to organophosphates and N-methyl carbamates, the study found.”
The Trouble With America’s Ultra-Processed Diet: Concern is rising about ultra-processed foods in American diets, and their effects on our health, Andrea Petersen, Wall Street Journal, 11/14/23: “When looking at product labels, choose items with fewer ingredients overall and try to avoid those with ingredients you don’t recognize.” (gift article)
Birds and Birding
The Naturalist and the Wonderful, Lovable, So Good, Very Bold Jay: Canada jays thrive in the cold. The life’s work of one biologist gives us clues as to how they’ll fare in a hotter world, Brian Payton, Hakai, 11/14/23: “Little was known of Canada jays before Dan Strickland took an interest 50 years ago.”
What's behind the toxic levels of mercury in tropical birds? Gold mining, study shows, David Colgan, Phys.Org, 11/14/23: "The most important finding of our study was that mercury concentrations were nearly four times higher at sites impacted by artisanal and small-scale gold mining activities.”
Without an exchange of questions, without the courtesy of answers. This has become mine, this unholding. Whereas, with or without the setup, I can see the dish being served. Whereas let us bow our heads in prayer now, just enough to eat—from “Whereas” by Layli Long Soldier
My humble thanks to all of you who take the time to read this weekly compendium and special thanks to all of you who have written to me. The weirdness of each week continues. Wherever you are and whatever you are doing, thanks for who you are and what you do. Please keep in touch. Stay well. Share love. We need each other, now more than ever.—David