The Weird Times
Inner Monologues and Desultory Reporting from Outer Spaces: Issue 222, August 11, 2024 (V5 #14)
If we open our senses and fully welcome what’s in front of us, we will always be changed. Every moment brings events we have never experienced before.—Rob Brezsny
It is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.—Clay Shirky
And if I have to run through a brick wall, if I have to do the hard things, I’m willing to do it because I’m not angling for anything else.—Tim Walz
Books, Music, Art, Culture
‘We invest in artists as changemakers’: using art to help increase US voter participation: Michelle Obama’s non-partisan organization When We All Vote has partnered with Art for Change for a new collection of artwork aimed at enhancing voter turnout, Vivian Ho, The Guardian, 8/8/24: “This project really harnesses a great creativity and joy to inspire change.”
MLB exec Billy Bean, former major leaguer and advocate for LGBTQ inclusion, dies at 60, Rustin Dodd, The Athletic, 8/6/24: ““’For nine years,” Bean told The New York Times in 1999, “I felt as though I had one foot in the major leagues and one on a banana peel.”
“He’s Absolutely Extraordinary”: Remembering Robin Williams: On the 10-year anniversary of Robin Williams’s untimely passing, we asked more than 20 of his costars, collaborators, and friends—including Billy Crystal, Matt Damon, Ben Stiller, Al Pacino, Sally Field, Jeff Bridges, and Julianne Moore—for their favorite memories of this kind, playful, and uniquely intelligent artist, Tomris Laffly, Vanity Fair, 8/5/24
Frank Zappa’s kids are still grappling with his legacy — and each other: Like their dad’s oddball rock songs, their family defied description. His music, and their pain, has endured, Geoff Edgers, Washington Post, 8/9/24
Be Yourself: In her debut film, Janet Planet, the playwright Annie Baker tells a story about how to live when you don’t know why living is so hard, Lucy Jakub, NY Review of Books, 8/11/24: “Annie Baker’s first film is a slow burn.”
Siding with Ahab: Can we appreciate Herman Melville’s work without attributing to it schemes for the uplift of modern man? Christopher Benfey, NY Review of Books, 8/15/24 issue: “Wouldn’t we prefer Moby-Dick exactly as it is, with its violence paired with its pathos, and its baffled wonderment at the workings of the universe?”
An Intoxicating 500-Year-Old Mystery: The Voynich Manuscript has long baffled scholars—and attracted cranks and conspiracy theorists. Now a prominent medievalist is taking a new approach to unlocking its secrets, Ariel Sabar, The Atlantic, 8/8/24: “It’s an actual object, it exists in space and time, it has a history, it has physical characteristics, and because of that, it has a true story. We just don’t know what that true story is yet.”
The universe suddenly hates satire: Predicting the most likely outcome (by teleological reasoning), Erik Hoel, Intrinsic Perspective, 8/7/24: “…whatever is going to happen, it is ordained that the world will out-satire any satire you throw at it.”
Where did all the Black bookshops go? D.C.’s Drum & Spear survived decades of financial troubles, fires and even FBI raids but was ultimately felled by big booksellers and online retail, Evan Friss, Washington Post, 8/6/24 (No paywall). Book: The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore
We Must Defend Imane Khelif: Transphobia also hurts cisgender women like the Algerian boxer Imane Khelif who don’t conform to a narrow, Eurocentric vision of womanhood, Jules Boykoff, Dave Zirin, The Nation, 8/5/24
Take Eight: The saxophonist Jon De Lucia brings Dave Brubeck’s overlooked octet back to life, Philip Clark, NY Review of Books, 8/6/24: “… their library of tailor-made compositions and takes on jazz standards is marked by sleights of hand with form, experiments with regular meter, Stravinskian harmonies, and freewheeling counterpoint.”
Change is not popular; we are creatures of habit as human beings.
'I want it to be the way it was.'
But if you continue the way it was there will be no 'is.'
—Robin Williams
Politics, Economics, Tech
NOW, HERE’S HOW WE DO IT: 93 Days to a Better World: This Is the First Item I’m Placing in Your 2024 Election Toolkit, Michael Moore, Newsletter, 8/4/24: “This is how Trump will meet his fate: You, me, this Toolkit I’m building for you, and millions of Americans who will be engaged and unforgiving over these next three months.”
Blooming and Dooming: How to be Online This Election Season, Timothy Snyder, Thinking About, 8/11/24: “Recognize the doomers, and ignore them. Most of them are not human, most of the humans are not American, and none of them care. They are like a pothole in the road: there is no point reasoning with them. Just keep moving along, doing your thing. And your thing should be to help others to bloom, by acting offline.”
What Me Worry? I'm not Gonna Nitpick...for now, Joe Klein, Sanity Clause, 8/10/24: “I’m thrilled with the needling and prodding of the bloated Orange delusion. It’s just a goddamn relief.”
The Democrats' new sunny vibes: Suddenly, the country has an opportunity to leave the madness of the 2010s behind, Noah Smith, Noahpinion, 8/7/24: “… this election will be a referendum on whether Americans are more interested in normalization or four more years of rage.”
Democrats Have Needed Someone Like Tim Walz for Decades, Sarah Smarsh, NY Times, 8/7/24: “In conveying the dignity and reality of what is casually derided on the coasts as “flyover country,” Mr. Walz speaks plainly yet eloquently in the parlance of my place and thereby fills a decades-long geographic messaging gap for Democrats. He is also, clearly, a likable guy.” (No paywall)
Democrats should adopt a new agenda: Make America Minnesota Already: Tim Walz’s policies have been politically smart, fiscally sound and family friendly, Catherine Rampell, Washington Post, 8/8/24 (No paywall)
Can Tim Walz Help the Democrats Win Back Rural America? Rural Democrats rally behind the Harris-Walz ticket but recognize the challenges ahead, Roger Kerson, Barn Raiser, 8/8/24: “The road to democracy is going right through rural America.” (Jess Piper)
20 Years Later, Political Press Still Falls Hard For Swift Boat Attacks, David Kurtz, Talking Points Memo, 8/8/24: “…political editors still get played like a fiddle when it comes to covering GOP attack lines.”
How Republicans dodge questions and get away with it: A guide to spotting the right wing’s favorite rhetorical sidesteps, Mark Jacobs, Stop the Presses, 8/5/24: “I’ll take the combo platter, with multiple dodges.”
Taxing the Superrich Is More Possible – and More Necessary – Than Ever, Gabriel Zucman, Project Syndicate, 8/6/24: “Regardless of nationality, the world’s ultra-rich share two striking similarities: the vast majority are men; and they typically pay much less tax, as a share of their income, than their employees and middle-class workers in general. The concentration of wealth is thus a global issue, and it's getting worse.”
Building a Public Energy Commons: Ashley Dawson reviews Stephen Maher and Scott Aquanno’s “The Fall and Rise of American Finance” and Brett Christophers’s “The Price Is Wrong,” Ashley Dawson, LA Review of Books, 8/6/24: “…finance and industrial capital are more interwoven than ever before. If financial capital has outsize power in determining which renewable energy projects get funded and built, this is because asset management companies have historically unprecedented power to shape industry in general in the US and beyond.”
Life After The Googleopoly: A federal judge ruled Google violated antitrust laws to maintain its search-engine monopoly — what happens now? Matt Stoller, The Lever, 8/7/24: “The next stage is called the remedy phase, during which the court will hear arguments about what to do to address the bad conduct.”
High Interest Rates Finally Bite: The US Federal Reserve appears to have finally brought about the recession that it engineers whenever unemployment is low and the president is a Democrat. If it costs the party the White House in November, may its leaders use their time out of power to reflect on the unwisdom of their decades-old bargain with Wall Street, James K. Galbraith, Project Syndicate, 8/6/24
Will Democracy Survive the Tsunami of Rightwing Dark Money Coming this Fall? If Democrats survive the onslaught that’s coming and emerge victorious at the federal level, the first order of business next year must be to strip the cancer of dark money out of our body politic...Thom Hartmann, Hartmann Report, 8/9/24
Inside Project 2025’s Secret Training Videos, Andy Kroll, Nick Surgey, ProPublica, 8/10/24: “…the links between the speakers in the videos and Trump are many.”
The ‘Dred Scott’ of Our Time: In ruling in favor of Donald Trump’s claims of immunity from prosecution for his official acts, the Supreme Court has invested the presidency with quasi-monarchial powers, paving the way for MAGA authoritarianism, Sean Wilentz, NY Review of Books, 8/15/24 issue: “The ruling is every bit as radical, as detrimental to the rule of law, and as authoritarian as Justice Sotomayor states in her dissent.”
Elon Musk’s X accused of bias after pro-Harris accounts labeled as ‘spam:’ A string of incidents raises questions about whether X is restricting accounts that oppose Musk’s political views, or just mishandling a rush of political speech, Trisha Thadani, Washington Post, 8/7/24
Some thoughts on the future of the tech industry: The internet is mostly complete. Where does tech go from here? Noah Smith, Noahpinion, 8/11/24: “The century-long quest to connect every human being on the planet with high-speed electric-powered text and voice communication is reaching its endpoint.”
How Tribal Nations Are Reclaiming Oklahoma: After the Supreme Court ruled in favor of tribal interests, suddenly nearly half of the state was Native territory. What exactly does that mean? Rachel Monroe, New Yorker, 8/5/24: “How far does sovereignty extend, and how far will the state go to fight it?”
America Isn’t Ready for the Wars of the Future: And They’re Already Here, Mark A. Milley, Eric Schmidt, Foreign Affairs, 8/5/24: “The U.S. military needs to reform its tactics and leadership development. It needs new ways to procure equipment. It needs to buy new types of gear. And it needs to better train soldiers to operate drones and use AI.”
Confronting Tisha B’Av and Gaza: Ten Years Later, Rabbi Brant Rosen, Shalom Rav, 8/9/24: “We are facing a deep and profound divide between those who place political nationalism at the center of their Jewish identity and those who refuse to associate settler colonialism, apartheid – and now genocide – with their Judaism.”
a witness goes missing
translucent as a porcelain
with binoculars on the future in
her hand
—from “In space surface tension will force
a small blob of liquid to form a sphere,” Maureen Owen
Science, Environment
Tim Walz Might Be a Pivotal Climate Leader: Less because of carbon than because of neighborliness, Bill McKibben, The Crucial Years, 8/8/24: “If we are going to both prevent the worst of the climate crisis, and cope with that which we can no longer prevent, than the most important thing we can do in this country is restore as much a sense of neighborliness as possible.”
Climate Change Is Shifting the Planet’s Most Basic Properties: Humans have managed to slow the Earth’s spin and shift its axis, Marina Koren, The Atlantic, 8/6/24: “…this is the first time in history that humanity has been able to witness itself, in real time, reshaping the most basic facts about our planet, which once seemed like they were beyond human influence.” (No Paywall)
Rat poison is moving up through food chains, threatening carnivores around the world, Meghan P. Keating, The Conversation, 8/9/24: “It’s likely that large carnivores such as wolves are consuming rat poison by eating other poisoned carnivores, such as raccoons and bobcats.”
Ancient Pines Could Reveal the Heat of Thousands of Past Seasons: A novel 3D CT scan approach unlocks temperature records preserved in the gnarled wood of bristlecone pines, Sarah Stanley, Eos, 8/5/24
Why Methane Removal Might Be Our Best Bet to Stop Rising Global Temperatures: Ways Businesses, Scientists and Governments Can Work Together to Clean the Atmosphere, Rob Jackson, LitHub, 8/5/24: “Methane removal could help shave tenths of degrees off peak temperatures and buy us more time to cut carbon dioxide emissions further.”
Fusion power might be 30 years away but we will reap its benefits well before: Discoveries made in pursuit of nuclear fusion have potentially huge practical applications in everything from curing cancer to superior batteries for EVs, Stuart Clark, The Guardian, 8/11/24
What dinner in Burrard Inlet looked like 500 years ago: Tsleil-Waututh Nation hopes to use data on its ancestors’ diet to restore habitat and heal the heavily industrialized Burrard Inlet, Steph Kwetásel’wet Wood, The Narwhal, 8/7/24: “‘Incredibly heart-healthy and high-energy’ diet was the norm in Burrard Inlet before European contact.”
Vermonters planting native gardens to help pollinators prosper: Their mission is to reduce the distance that pollinators like bees and butterflies need to go to get nectar and pollen, Kate Kampner, VT Digger, 8/5/24
‘Every building sits on a thermal asset’: how networked geothermal power could change cities: The ground is humming with geothermal energy that could heat or cool our homes – and now the big US utilities are starting to take note, Matt Simon, The Guardian, 8/9/24
A Legal Fight Over Legacy Oil Industry Pollution Heats Up in West Texas: A “first of its kind” lawsuit contends that oil companies including Chevron failed to properly plug and decommission wells on private property, challenging common assumptions about plugged wells, Martha Pskowski, Inside Climate News, 8/6/24
She’s the New Face of Climate Activism—and She’s Carrying a Pickax: Sabotage. Property destruction. For Léna Lazare and her cohort, radicalized by years of inaction on the environmental crisis, these aren’t dirty words. They’re acts of joy, Morgan Meaker, Wired, 8/7/24: “We act when infrastructure has a serious impact on environments and on living beings.”
The lost history of what Americans knew about climate change in the 1960s: It wasn't just scientists who were worried, but Congress, the White House, and even Sports Illustrated, Kate Yoder, Grist, 8/5/24
Arizona Residents Fear What the State’s Mining Boom Will Do to Their Water: Nearly 80 percent of Arizona lacks any form of groundwater regulation, allowing big users like the copper mines supplying the energy transition to consume vast amounts of the scarce resource, Wyatt Myskow, Inside Climate News, 8/9/24
The rise of ‘ento-veganism’: how eating crickets could help save the world: They are a great source of protein and taste like beef or lamb when cooked. So are our kitchens and restaurants finally ready for the insect revolution? Tim Dowling, The Guardian, 8/7/24
Do Dolphins Give Each Other… Names? on What It Means When Dolphins Whistle To Each Other, Arik Kershenbaum, LitHub, 8/7/24: “There is something deeply and fundamentally different about creatures that can invent unique sequences of sounds to refer to themselves.”
The Physics of Cold Water May Have Jump-Started Complex Life: When seawater gets cold, it gets viscous. This fact could explain how single-celled ocean creatures became multicellular when the planet was frozen during “Snowball Earth,” according to experiments, Veronique Greenwood, Wired, 8/11/24
Meet the surprisingly complex ancestor of all life on Earth: Complex life may have evolved shortly after Earth was formed, a study says, Kasha Patel, Washington Post, 8/4/24: “In the most extensive analysis of the organism to date, scientists propose in a new study that this hypothesized ancestor was more sophisticated than previously known — thought to possess an immune system to fight off viruses, for instance.”
Physicists Pinpoint the Quantum Origin of the Greenhouse Effect: Carbon dioxide’s powerful heat-trapping effect has been traced to a quirk of its quantum structure. The finding may explain climate change better than any computer model, Joseph Howlett, Quanta, 8/7/24: “…global warming is tied to a numerical coincidence involving two different ways that CO2 can wiggle.”
If you’ve lost your way to laugh and
Can’t remember how to dance and
If you’re out of tears to cry
Take my hand
I'm on your side
—from “I’m by Your Side,” Michael Franti
Health, Wellness
From Covid-19 Peaks to New Viral Threats: What You Need to Know, Katelyn Jetelina, Your Local Epidemiologist, 8/6/24: “We are knee-deep in a substantial Covid-19 infection wave…clearly Covid-19 is still unpredictable and will likely take another decade to find a rhythm.”
Animal apocalypse: Deadly bird flu infects hundreds of species pole-to-pole, Sharon Guynup, MongayBay, 8/6/24: “Scientists say this virus now presents an existential threat to the world’s biodiversity, with the risk to humans rising as it continues to leap the species barrier, reaching new host species.”
BPA Exposure in Pregnancy Linked to Autism Risk, Kathryn Powley, Neuroscience News, 8/7/24: “The research suggests that BPA disrupts hormone-controlled fetal brain development, particularly in males, by suppressing the aromatase enzyme.”
Birds, Birding
A Dystopian Effort Is Underway in the Pacific Northwest to Pick Ecological Winners and Losers, Avram Hiller, Jay Odenbaugh, Yasha Rohwer, NY Times, 8/8/24: “Very soon, the federal government may authorize the killing of nearly a half-million barred owls in the Pacific Northwest in a desperate bid to save the northern spotted owl. The killing could go on for decades.” (No Paywall)
the world appears as constant pulses,
present running into present—Jerry Rothenberg
I say this every week because I really mean it — wherever you are, whoever you are with, whatever you are doing — thanks for who you are and what you do. Please continue to keep in touch. Send messages and your own news. Hearing from you makes this all worthwhile.
Above all, stay well; share love; work for good. We need each other, now more than ever.
Love always—David
PS - I realized recently, I have never mentioned this - whenever you buy books from links I provide, Bookshop.org sends money to local bookstores. Please buy books!