The Weird Times
Inner Monologues and Desultory Reporting from Outer Spaces: Issue 175, September 17, 2023 (V4 #19)
The notion that power should be limited so that no person or institution can enjoy unaccountable influence is at the very root of our democracy.—Tim Wu
We must endure our thoughts all night, until
The bright obvious stands motionless in cold.—Wallace Stevens
Books, Art, Music, Culture
On Not Being a Nihilist: Going on, even when you're without much hope, John Warner, Biblioracle Recommends, 9/17/23: “It does not matter if life is worth living, you’ve gotta just go ahead and live it anyway, so you might as well dig in on the things that matter to you and let the chips fall.”
Are memories fact or fiction? Truth and illusion are woven together as we tell ourselves into being, Sophie McBain, The Guardian, 9/11/23: “Memories are not physical things but rather creative reconstructions. They change constantly because we do.”
Looking for Virginia Woolf’s Diaries, Geoff Dyer, Paris Review, 9/13/23: “It is possible, as you don’t need me to tell you, to buy almost any book on the internet, however long it’s been out of print. But doing that robs life of one of the things that gives it purpose.”
Zeal, Wit, and Fury: The Queer Black Modernism of Claude McKay, Gary Edward Holcomb, LA Review of Books, 9/11/23: “What does the Black modernist future—that is, the Black present—look like when a formerly unread text inserts itself on the scene and thereby radically disrupts and rescripts the known historical narrative—the past-present that contemporary readers have understood to exist?”
How Siblings Shape Who We Are: For many of us, these relationships are the longest of our life, Isabel Fattal, The Atlantic, 9/16/23: “The independence of adulthood … creates opportunities for siblings to build, repair, or discard the relationships of their youth, to stay stuck in or break free of the roles they played as children.”
Quan Millz Was the Biggest Mystery on TikTok. Until Now: The prolific street-lit author’s X-rated books went viral on TikTok. Many believed he was a white writer profiting off Black culture. That was just the beginning, Jason Parham, Wired, 9/13/23: “I’m simply writing to the times that we’re in.”
Bad Bunny on Sex, Social Media, and Kendall Jenner: The genre-busting megastar opens up about his life off the global stage. Just don’t ask about his new music, Michelle Ruiz, Vanity Fair, 9/12/23: “Don’t hide reality behind a disguise.”
WATCH: Ursula K. Le Guin on Her Illegal Abortion in 1950. The Journey That Matters is a series of six short videos from Arwen Curry, director and producer of Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin, a Hugo Award-nominated 2018 feature documentary about the life and works of the iconic author. “I beg you to see what it is that we must save, and not to let the bigots and misogynists take it away from us again.”
Why Human Writing Is Worth Defending In the Age of ChatGPT: On the Detrimental Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Literacy and Cognition, Naomi S. Baron, LitHub, 9/12/23: “If we cede to AI final say about words and even commas, we jeopardize more than artistic pride. We risk convincing ourselves that in the name of efficiency, it’s harmless for AI to assume ever wider swaths of what we previously would have written ourselves.”
In Defense of the Human Brain: It’s a mistake to outsource our creative and critical thinking tasks to AI, Talia Barnes, Persuasion, 9/13/23: “If the digital age—with its outrage-exploiting algorithms and endless streams of “content”—has taught us one thing, it’s that more technical power doesn’t necessarily mean better alignment with human goals.”
When AI Begins to Replace Humans: The Applications & Ripple Effects of AI Automation, Rex Woodbury, Digital Native, 9/13/23: “In all likelihood, incumbents are in for another reckoning and more value creation to startups is yet to come.”
DeepMind’s cofounder: Generative AI is just a phase. What’s next is interactive AI: “This is a profound moment in the history of technology,” says Mustafa Suleyman, Will Douglas Heaven, MIT Technology Review, 9/15/23: “The first wave of AI was about classification. Deep learning showed that we can train a computer to classify various types of input data: images, video, audio, language. Now we’re in the generative wave, where you take that input data and produce new data. The third wave will be the interactive phase…instead of just clicking on buttons and typing, you’re going to talk to your AI.”
What's in a name? Sagas rise and
fall in the orbs of jumpropes, Hannibal grasps a Roman
monkeybar on history's rung, and the mighty heroes at recess
lay dead in woe on the imagined battlefields of Halo.
—from “Urban Renewal,” Major Jackson
Politics and Economics
With democracy on the ballot, the mainstream press must change its ways: US news organizations have turned Biden’s age into a scandal and continue to cover Trump as an entertaining side show, Margaret Sullivan, The Guardian, 9/15/23: “The stakes really are enormously high. It’s our job to make sure that those potential consequences – not the horse race, not Biden’s age, not a scam impeachment – are front and center for US citizens before they go to the polls…be truthful, not neutral.”
US economy going strong under Biden – Americans don’t believe it: Despite a strong economy, an exclusive Guardian poll shows mistrust in media and government means disbelief in both parties, Dominic Rushe, The Guardian, 9/15/23: “…fears are widespread – and reinforced by disbelief of or ignorance about official figures and a mistrust of the media’s reporting of them.”
The Swiftboaters are Back with the Biden Impeachment: Slander campaigns like this must instead be hit head-on with outrage and ferocity...Thom Hartmann, Hartmann Report, 9/13/23
The Democrats must keep the Senate at all costs – and the coalmine canary is Ohio: Sherrod Brown is a true-blue, pro-union progressive beloved by many Ohioans. But Republicans are preparing for a ‘dogfight,’ Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Guardian, 9/14/23
What Ginni Thomas and Leonard Leo wrought: How a justice’s wife and a key activist started a movement: Thanks to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, a trove of so-called “dark money” was about to be unleashed. Two activists prepared to seize the moment, Heidi Pryzbyla, Politico, 9/10/23
How the Right-Wing is Trying to Turn Public Education Into Corporate Obedience Schools, Jim Hightower, Lowdown, 9/14/23: “The GOP’s push to remake education is a billionaire’s wet dream of a compliant, subservient workforce: Don’t ask questions—just keep pulling that plow.”
Wisconsin GOP’s impeachment threat against state Supreme Court justice is unsupported by law and would undermine judicial independence, Robert Yablon, Derek Clinger, The Conversation, 9/13/23: “The impeachment of a recently elected justice based on lawful campaign conduct and a legally grounded decision not to recuse would negate the people’s votes for Protasiewicz, in our view striking a blow to the principle of judicial independence.”
Will January 6th be Buried Like the JFK Assassination? Will January 6th be like the Kennedy assassination? Will we never know the whole story? Thom Hartmann, Hartmann Report, 9/14/23: “Why are so few people openly speculating that corrupt individuals — possibly only a handful — within the FBI, Secret Service, and Department of Defense may have participated in a plot led by Donald Trump to overthrow our government? And how many of Trump’s stooges are still in our government, perhaps waiting for his return?”
Child poverty is a choice, Judd Legum, Tesnim Zekeria, Rebecca Crosby, Popular Information, 9/13/23: “The massive increase in child poverty last year was a completely predictable and avoidable tragedy. Powerful people inside and outside the federal government chose to let this happen because they had other priorities.”
Ross Douthat’s Theories of Persuasion: At a time of distrust and polarization, the conservative Times columnist seeks to bridge the worlds of the Christian right and the secular left, Isaac Chotiner, New Yorker, 9/11/23: He’s developed a sly distance that has allowed him to make his genuinely reactionary sentiments seem slightly ironic when they are actually sincere.”
The key to understanding Donald Trump's enduring appeal is Vince McMahon, Judd Legum, Popular Information, 9/11/23: “But right now, the thing that grabs people to vote is very often just: Do I find this person entertaining, recognizable, iconic, or funny? As opposed to: Will this person do a good job in the elected office that I'm voting for them for? And wrestling turned that into a science.”
Donald Trump’s Politics of the Berserk: Why Trump's rivals for the GOP nomination stand no chance, Damon Linker, Persuasion, 9/15/23: “Trump’s demonic genius was to blend this distinctively American tradition of antinomian hucksterism with politics, synthesizing the anti-government impulse within Reaganite conservatism with a far more radical populist drive to break free from and tear down any and all constraints imposed from above.”
When Americans Abandon the Constitution: Mitt Romney foresees a disaster, Tom Nichols, The Atlantic, 9/14/23: “A very large portion of my party really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.”
Republicans Are Putting Democracy on Life Support: The authors of How Democracies Die are back with a new book that tackles the threat of minority rule—and how our political institutions can be reformed, Brian Stelter, Vanity Fair, 9/14/23
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Seek Common Ground: To build community, we have to step outside of our bubble,, Kristy Nabhan-Warren, Barn Raiser, 9/13/23: “It will involve healthy doses of humility. It will require self-reflexiveness and inward turning. It will take a lot of soul-searching. It will involve not only being curious but acting on curiosity.”
Searching for a Breakup, Scott Galloway, No Mercy/No Malice, 9/15/23: “This isn’t about just search engine advertising, or even tech. The power of incumbents to suffocate insurgents before they can grow is mirrored in our society at large. Ground zero for many of the biggest challenges facing America can be traced to one core problem: For the first time in our nation’s history, 30-year-olds aren’t doing as well as their parents were at 30.”
Elon Musk likes to think he saved us from Armageddon. He’s just brought it closer: Whatever his new biography says, by giving into Russia’s nuclear blackmail the X boss can only encourage more threats from Putin, Timothy Snyder, The Guardian, 9/17/23: “The plotline about the oligarchical supermen is indeed fictional, but it does real harm in the real world.”
The moment in the heart
where I roam restless, searching
for the thin border of the fence
to break through or leap.
—from “Last Ink,” Michael Ondaatje
Science and Environment
Earth is outside its ‘safe operating space for humanity’ on most key measurements, study says, Seth Borenstein, AP News, 9/13/23: “Earth’s climate, biodiversity, land, freshwater, nutrient pollution and “novel” chemicals (human-made compounds like microplastics and nuclear waste) are all out of whack, a group of international scientists said in Wednesday’s journal Science Advances.”
Our Evolving Understanding of Biological Carbon Export: The array of processes and organisms that make up the biological carbon pump has immense influence on Earth’s carbon cycle and climate. But there’s still much to learn about how the pump works, Emily Osborne, Jessica Y. Luo, Ivona Cetinić, Heather Benway, Susanne Menden-Deuer, EOS, 9/12/23: “The BCP’s effects on Earth’s ecosystems and climate are global in scale. The BCP is a composite of numerous interacting biogeochemical and physical processes—some poorly known—that operate over a range of spatial and temporal scales. Three main mechanisms transport biological carbon through the ocean: passive gravitational sinking of particles, active vertical migration of zooplankton and fish, and physical advection and diffusion of particulate or dissolved carbon.”
How Indigenous knowledge could help tackle climate change: New US research hub wants to use the traditional ways of Native peoples to address environmental problems, Sorcha Bradley, The Week, 9/14/23
Inside Exxon’s Strategy to Downplay Climate Change: Internal documents show what the oil giant said publicly was very different from how it approached the issue privately in the Tillerson era, Christopher M. Matthews, Collin Eaton, Wall Street Journal, 9/14/23: “This is the first X-ray into Tillerson’s head and shows he wanted to throw climate mitigation off the rails. It’s obituary-changing.”
Green infrastructure can set off a virtuous cycle of climate action: A new study suggests that greener cities not only reduce carbon emissions, they also can absorb them, Sarah DeWeerdt, Anthropocene, 9/12/23
Eco-concrete is Cementing Itself as a Climate Solution: A race is on to change how concrete is made and reduce the huge carbon footprint of the world’s most ubiquitous building material, Melissa Rossi, Outrider, 9/11/23: “…by creating concrete that has trapped both the carbon dioxide and the methane from sewage products, which normally would be released when the organic matter decays, the process offsets the CO2 released in making cement and ultimately produces concrete that goes beyond carbon-neutral because it sequesters more carbon than is emitted during production.”
A Viable Alternative to Conventional Lawn? Cornell May Have Found One.: Cornell Botanic Gardens is testing sustainable options for replacing your backyard grass. The bonus: They don’t need to be cut more than twice a year, Margaret Roach, NY Times, 9/13/23: “Cornell’s Choice: Two Species of Danthonia.”
Drought Resistant Millet, a Crop for a Changing Climate: "I've never seen a crop that stood the heat and stood the drought and still made me money," says Matt Little, who grows millet in Ellis County, Oklahoma, Eva Tesfaye, Barn Raiser, 9/12/23
What Arizona and other drought-ridden states can learn from Israel’s pioneering water strategy, Gabriel Eckstein, Clive Lipchin, Sharon B. Megdal, The Conversation, 9/12/23: “Israel also has implemented extensive water conservation, efficiency and recycling programs, as well as a broad economic review of desalination. Together, these sources now meet most of the nation’s water needs, and Israel has become a leader in both water technology and policy innovation.”
A gamer’s quest to prepare kids for climate change: Lil Milagro played Dungeons and Dragons to escape reality. Then she realized that she could use the game to help others make sense of the world around them, Daisy Simmons, Yale Climate Connections, 9/11/23
Rivers Are Drowning in Toxic Sludge: Harmful algal blooms are taking over as the world warms and grows richer in carbon dioxide—and there’s no easy fix, Chris Baraniuk, Wired, 9/12/23: “Cyanobacteria are proving to be a menace practically everywhere.”
The global food system is failing small-scale farmers — here’s how to fix it: Maybe we don’t need Jamaican coffee in the middle of US winter, Alexa White, Daily Climate, 9/13/23: “…small-scale farmers, which produce more than 70% of the food we eat, are often the populations with the most malnourished individuals living in absolute poverty.”
A New Map of the Universe, Painted With Cosmic Neutrinos: Physicists finally know where at least some of these high-energy particles come from, which helps make the neutrinos useful for exploring fundamental physics, Thomas Lewton, Wired, 9/10/23
Physicists Observe ‘Unobservable’ Quantum Phase Transition: Measurement and entanglement both have a “spooky” nonlocal flavor to them. Now physicists are harnessing that nonlocality to probe the spread of quantum information and control it, Charlie Wood, Quanta, 9/11/23
Scientists Say You’re Looking for Alien Civilizations All Wrong: A new report lays out a modern way to search for E.T., calling for better use of big data and machine learning techniques, Ramin Skibba, Wired, 9/13/23: “In the past, searches for extraterrestrial intelligence focused on radio. I’m personally skeptical about this because it basically makes an assumption that an advanced civilization wants to send signals and would use the technology of mid-20th century planet Earth to do it, and in a way that we can understand.”
Some fools think of happiness
Blissfulness, togetherness
Some fools fool themselves, I guess
They're not foolin' me
—from “Love Hurts,” Everly Brothers, written by Boudleaux Bryant
Health and Wellness
Food Can Be Literally Addictive, New Evidence Suggests: Highly processed foods resemble drugs of misuse in a number of disturbing ways, Marta Zaraska, Scientific American, 9/11/23
Oregon launches legal psilocybin access amid high demand and hopes for improved mental health care, Andrew Selsky, AP News, 9/15/23:” No prescription or referral is needed, but proponents hope Oregon’s legalization will spark a revolution in mental health care.”
Alzheimer’s disease is partly genetic − studying the genes that delay decline in some may lead to treatments for all, Steven DeKosky, The Conversation, 9/15/23: “Despite over 20 years of doubts and therapy failures, the past several years have seen positive results from three different treatments – aducanumab, lecanemab and donanemab – that remove amyloid plaques and slow loss of cognitive function to some extent.”
Forget It
Don’t remember; all this will go away:
the good, the bad, will go. We’ll go away.
And something already is that still will be.
—William Bronk
Birds
Ruby-throated Hummingbird Migration: Even more miraculous than we used to think, Laura Erickson, For the Birds, 9/15/23: “The study found that juvenile Ruby-throateds use overland routes around the Gulf rather than crossing it, and that departure timing from stopover sites (locations where migrating birds rest and refuel) was correlated with wind direction.”
The Sea Eagles That Returned to Mull: Almost 50 years ago, conservationists reintroduced white-tailed eagles to Scotland. It’s gone well. Some say too well, Emma Marris, Hakai, 9/12/23: “There is an inherent violence in biodiversity. Behind that dry-sounding term are complex food webs: plants eating sunlight, herbivores eating plants, predators eating herbivores, scavengers and detritivores eating the leftovers.”
North America’s Rarest Warbler Visits Maine: Jeff and Allison Wells, Penobscot Bay Pilot, 9/13/23: “A Kirtland’s warbler was photographed on Matinicus Rock on Sept. 10.”
Let us simmer over our incalculable cauldron, our enthralling confusion, our hotch-potch of impulses, our perpetual miracle — for the soul throws up wonders every second. Movement and change are the essence of our being; rigidity is death; conformity is death: let us say what comes into our heads, repeat ourselves, contradict ourselves, fling out the wildest nonsense, and follow the most fantastic fancies without caring what the world does or thinks or says.—Virginia Woolf
It’s been another busy week with way too much news for anyone to cover in depth. And still much to be thankful for. We must endure our thoughts. And we will!
Love to all—David