The Weird Times
Inner Monologues and Desultory Reporting from Outer Spaces
The Weird Times: Issue 63, July 25, 2021 (V2 #11)
Freedom makes a huge requirement of every human being. With freedom comes responsibility. For the person who is unwilling to grow up, the person who does not want to carry is own weight, this is a frightening prospect. —Eleanor Roosevelt
As the ongoing industrial crusade to turn all earthly life to commercial purpose relentlessly impoverishes the biosphere and human culture, our living images of graceful possibility dwindle. —Stephanie Mills
It feels like there is almost too much news for me to cope with this week.
I have been mostly thinking about how we have failed as a nation to imbue our citizenry with a meaningful understanding of political philosophy as applied to daily life, specifically, freedom and responsibility and what it means to be a citizen in a modern democracy that exists in an interconnected planetary civilization.
This problem underpins everything that ails us today, from our ongoing failure to act on climate issues to the deep-rooted inequities in our economic and social constructs, to our inability to understand and control social media and big tech, the rise of a right-wing Republican cult, the inept response to the pandemic, and the failure of public health, even as our biological sciences have provided tools for controlling pandemics, just as polio and measles were controlled years ago.
There’s not enough space here to explore the full breadth of these issues. But I hope this week’s links will contribute something to the conversation.
Baseball Meditation
one man’s fast is another man’s slow
—Amiri Baraka
Because the game is slow
you have more than enough time
to think about all the black boys
who never made it to first or the bad
boys caught trying to steal second.
The slowness of the game makes
you think of slavery and how slavery
was too long and too slow for history
to forget.
—E. Ethelbert Miller
Social Media is not Technology
Why People Are So Awful Online, Roxanne Gay, New York Times, 7/17/21
“Increasingly, I’ve felt that online engagement is fueled by the hopelessness many people feel when we consider the state of the world and the challenges we deal with in our day-to-day lives. Online spaces offer the hopeful fiction of a tangible cause and effect — an injustice answered by an immediate consequence. On Twitter, we can wield a small measure of power, avenge wrongs, punish villains, exalt the pure of heart.
In our quest for this simulacrum of justice, however, we have lost all sense of proportion and scale. We hold in equal contempt a war criminal and a fiction writer who too transparently borrows details from someone else’s life. It’s hard to calibrate how we engage or argue.”
Why is China smashing its tech industry? Maybe because what countries think of as a "tech industry" isn't always the same, Noah Smith, Noahpinion, 7/24/21
“Why do Americans equate “tech” with companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook, anyway? One reason is that the consumer internet industry is something America is really good at — unlike our electronics hardware industries, consumer software is something that hard-driving Asian competitors haven’t yet been able to beat us at. Another reason is that software companies make a lot of profit — Facebook made over $18 billion in 2020, three times Micron or Honeywell and six times Cisco. With their low overhead, network effects, troves of intellectual property, strong brand value, and differentiated products, successful software companies naturally tend to generate high margins. That’s true for smaller software companies as well as big ones. And since in America we often tend to equate profit with value, this means we think of the consumer-facing software industry as being our industrial champion, generating a huge amount of economic value for our nation.
China may simply see things differently.”
Janan Ganesh: “What remains is social media as a cipher for a harder-to-discuss problem. This is human credulity: the demand for nonsense, not the supply of it. Anyone prone to mistrusting a vaccine, or an election result, will hunt out or overvalue corroborating news. If Facebook provides it, so too do talk radio, cable television and word of mouth. At some point, the instrument of misinformation becomes less troubling than the underlying receptiveness to it.”
On Resisting Emperors and Their Delusions, Mark Hurst, Creative Good, 7/22/21
“I recently read the book Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World by Australian author and teacher Tyson Yunkaporta. The book only increased my sense of urgency. Tyson argues that our global machine has run its course, swallowed the world whole, much like Marc Andreessen boasted about software. Now the worm turns, full circle, to swallow itself. The ouroboros. Our ouroboros. Yunkaporta writes with surprising generosity and humility, given that his community has been targeted by the machine’s predation for so long. In one memorable stretch, Yunkaporta writes a poem about our world of fire, set ablaze ina vain attempt to build a shadow of the true connectivity we had before. That rang true this week.
On the day the sun turned blood-red, history’s richest man lay down inside a metal phallus and rode a flame upward, not to heaven, but to glorify his machine, all atop a column of air, a vast poisonous exhalation, all the way up. Whatever he was grasping for – fame, money, reassurance, justification, a celestial anointing – came back to earth, as all such attempts must. The rich man, upon descending to his followers, announced the vision he was given while floating above the mountaintops: the future, he said, would bring a sky full of exhaust, put there by the “polluting industry” he dreams of sending heavenward.
Another tin-pot emperor spoke up this week to hand down his own vision. This was Mark Zuckerberg, the only founder of a Big Tech goliath who still rules as CEO. Not content with a rocket to escape this tired world, Zuck proclaimed a new genesis altogether. His goal, he told an interviewer, is “to help bring the metaverse to life.” The metaverse is an idea proposed in the 1992 dystopian sci-fi novel Snow Crash, set in a future America beset by a failing economy dominated by a few exploitative tech giants. Of course Zuck has brought about that future, to some extent, in real life. So it makes sense that he wants Facebook to expand fully into the hellish surveillance state depicted in the novel.”
We All Live Here Together
Coral reefs prevent more than $1.8 billion a year in U.S. flood damage: But climate change and habitat destruction threaten reefs and their ability to offer this protection, YCC Team, Yale Climate Connections, 7/19/21
It’s Not a Border Crisis. It’s a Climate Crisis: There was a time when rural Guatemalans never left home. But back-to-back hurricanes, failed crops and extreme poverty are driving them to make the dangerous trek north to the U.S. border, Sabrina Rodriguez, Politico, 7/19/21
Endocrine disrupting chemicals are an “under-appreciated” diabetes risk factor: Researchers say doctors and policymakers need to factor environmental health into diabetes prevention and treatment, Elizabeth Gribkoff, Environmental Health News, 7/19/21
On Pine Ridge Reservation, a Garden Helps Replace an 80-mile Grocery Trip: For the past six years, a garden program has taught residents of South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation how to build financial independence and food security through gardening, Nadra Nittle, Civil Eats, 7/19/21
The Chef Who Embodies Hawai'i’s Past, Present, and Future, Sheldon Simeon wants you to pay attention to the islands, Elyse Inamine, Bon Appetit, 7/19/21
Hotter and drier: Deforestation and wildfires take a toll on the Amazon, Ignacio Amigo, Mongabay, 7/20/21
Top US scientist on melting glaciers: ‘I’ve gone from being an ecologist to a coroner’ Diana Six, an entomologist studying beetles near Glacier national park in Montana, says the crisis has fundamentally changed her profession, Jyoti Madhusoodanan, The Guardian, 7/21/21
Great Salt Lake Drops to Record Low Levels, Tyler Hewitt, Utah Public Radio, 7/23/21
Western Drought Has Lasted Longer Than the Dust Bowl: Dry conditions have drawn down reservoirs, fueled massive wildfires and stunted crops, Thomas Frank, E & E News, 7/21/21
Extreme heat triggers mass die-offs and stress for wildlife in the West: Sweltering baby hawks threw themselves out of nests, and mussels baked to death in their shells as record heat brought crisis to the Pacific Northwest, Natasha Daily, National Geographic, 7/22/21
Why chemical pollution is turning into a third great planetary crisis: Thousands of synthetic substances have leaked into ecosystems everywhere, and we are only just beginning to realise the devastating consequences, Graham Lawton, New Scientist, 7/21/21
The insect apocalypse: ‘Our world will grind to a halt without them,’Dave Goulson, The Guardian, 7/25/21
Hope for the Future
International team of scientists turns methane into methanol at room temperature, Andrew Myers, Stanford Energy, 7/15/21 “The discovery may be an important step toward a methanol fuel economy with abundant methane as the feedstock, an advance that could fundamentally change how the world uses natural gas.”
Startup Claims Breakthrough in Long-Duration Batteries: Form Energy’s iron-air batteries could have big ramifications for storing electricity on the power grid, Russell Gold, Wall Street Journal, 7/22/21 “A four-year-old startup says it has built an inexpensive battery that can discharge power for days using one of the most common elements on Earth: iron.
Form Energy Inc.’s batteries are far too heavy for electric cars. But it says they will be capable of solving one of the most elusive problems facing renewable energy: cheaply storing large amounts of electricity to power grids when the sun isn’t shining and wind isn’t blowing.”
Entrepreneurial climate change spirit at tribal reservation:A tribal citizen of the Red Lake Nation applies lived experiences, passion, drive, and vision for a future not burdened by global warming impacts, Julie Marckel, Yale Climate Connections, 7/21/21 “We Native people have always been resilient and adaptive people: assimilation, genocide, and reorganizing have not stopped us. The climate crisis is different: I fear it threatens our existence like nothing else we have ever seen.”
The Ancient Tree Hunter: As the old-growth logging crisis heats up in Canada, a photographer goes searching for trees to save them, Jayme Moye, Patagonia.com
CMD Files IRS Whistleblower Complaint Against ALEC for Illegal In-Kind Campaign: Contributions Worth More Than $6 Million, Exposed by CMD editors, Exposed by CMD, 7/21/21 “The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is illegally providing its state legislative members with sophisticated voter management and campaign software deeply tied to the Republican Party and worth more than $6 million per election cycle, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) charged in a submission to the IRS Whistleblower Office today.”
AI firm DeepMind puts database of the building blocks of life online: AlphaFold program’s prediction of nearly 20,000 human protein structures now free for researchers, Natalie Grover, The Guardian, 7/22/21 “Last year the artificial intelligence group DeepMind cracked a mystery that has flummoxed scientists for decades: stripping bare the structure of proteins, the building blocks of life. Now, having amassed a database of nearly all human protein structures, the company is making the resource available online free for researchers to use.
The key to understanding our basic biological machinery is its architecture. The chains of amino acids that comprise proteins twist and turn to make the most confounding of 3D shapes. It is this elaborate form that explains protein function; from enzymes that are crucial to metabolism to antibodies that fight infectious attacks.”
We’re Zeroing In On the ‘Holy Grail’ of COVID-19 Immunity: There’s no good way of measuring whether your vaccine worked—yet, Katherine J. Wu, The Atlantic, 7/21/21
“Scientists are on the cusp of confidently defining some correlates of protection against symptomatic disease for the COVID-19 vaccines. If confirmed, these correlates could revolutionize the way we tackle SARS-CoV-2 immunization: Vaccine makers testing a new inoculation may no longer need to follow tens of thousands of people for many months to test their product’s protection. Instead, they could inject just a few hundred people, snag some drops of blood, and see if the elusive correlate is met. That’s how we tee up new flu vaccines every year without the rigmarole of gargantuan clinical trials.”
Fishermen as scientists? A new app gathers climate observations from people on the water: Fishermen have observed changes in ocean ecosystems for years. But, there was no one place to record those observations. This summer, a new mobile app will gather observations from commercial fishermen on the water to bridge the gap between what they see, and what scientists need to know, Stephanie Maltarich, KDLG.org, 7/20/21
Birds on the Wing
Australia’s cockatoos are masters of dumpster diving—and now they’re learning from each other, Cathleen O’Grady, Science, 7/22/21
“In recent years, some cockatoos living in the Sydney suburbs have figured out how to open household garbage cans, unlocking a food bonanza of sandwiches, fish bones, and fruit. Other cockatoos have picked up on the trick, and the behavior is quickly spreading. What’s more, birds in different locations use slightly different methods to open the cans, making this the first time a parrot has been found with local foraging “subcultures,” say the authors of the new paper.”
Tiny ancient bird from China shares skull features with Tyrannosaurus rex, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Phys.org, 6/23/21
“Researchers from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have discovered a 120-million-year-old partial fossil skeleton of a tiny extinct bird that fits in the palm of the hand and preserves a unique skull with a mix of dinosaurian and bird features.
The two-centimeter-long (0.75 inch) skull of the fossil shares many structural and functional features with the gigantic Tyrannosaurus rex, indicating that early birds kept many features of their dinosaurian ancestors and their skulls functioned much like those of dinosaurs rather than living birds.”
Conn. Audubon: 9 chicks of ‘special concern’ bird species born, Tara O’Neill, Connecticut Post, 7/23/21
Why? We Write
Post Industrial Wilderness, Michael Garrigan, Orion Magazine
“It is easy to fetishize untouched wilderness—distant places where we might connect with something sublime, something larger than ourselves. But while we turn our gaze away, we ignore what we stand on until, inevitably, attention is drawn to what we already have. Look closely: Solomon’s seal sprouts from nutrient-rich soil, railroad spikes, and beer cans. Reach farther down into the soft loam without nicking yourself on that hypodermic needle and you’ll find a new geological layer—culm piles of brick and tire, anthropogenic debris of our lust for whatever burns—the decomposition of an industrial boon that is seeding a new kind of wildness: sycamore, ailanthus, and mountain laurel. By ignoring this, we ignore the resilience of this ridge and these woods. We ignore a home wilderness worthy of protecting. Let us love this, even as it outlasts us.”
Writing a Fictionalized Apocalypse Does Not Prepare You For a Real One: Geoff Rodkey on Accepting the Realities of Civilization-Ending Calamity, Geoff Rodkey, Lithub, 7/23/21
“Back in 2019, when I started writing Lights Out in Lincolnwood—a dark comedy about a privileged-but-hapless family’s attempts to navigate the sudden collapse of their wealthy New Jersey suburb’s entire technological infrastructure—I had a nagging sense that I should finish it as fast as possible, because the daily news cycle had started to feel ominous enough that I was concerned an actual apocalypse might arrive while my novel about a fictional one was still in copyediting.
Depending on how loosely you define “apocalypse,” that’s more or less what happened.”
Cabo Verdean President Jorge Carlos Fonseca: Poetry Is the Only Instrument of Radical Change, David Shook, Words Without Borders
“It’s quite curious that, when it comes to literature, I have published more since becoming president of the republic than I did before. This may mean that the time we measure so precisely is not the same as writing time. Sometimes I wonder if I sleep to write (what is for sure is that I don't write to sleep!). I write in any situation: during a lunch; listening, as a function of my duties, to dull speeches; while I’m waiting during trips, most of all on long flights. I write a lot during my constant [spells of] insomnia, which is why for years I kept a small tape recorder on my bedside table, and more recently a notebook and some pens.”
Tongva Writers Today: The Past, Present, and Future are Unfolding Simultaneously, Christopher Soto, LA Review of Books, 7/21/21
“As a guest on this land — since Los Angeles is land stolen from the Tongva people — I feel it is my obligation to know to whom my respects are due. As a person living in Tovaangar (the name for the Los Angeles Basin in the language of its ancestral caretakers), my responsibilities fall first to the people who have stewarded this land for thousands of years, before the recent centuries of colonization. Through the last three centuries, the Los Angeles Basin has been colonized by Spain, Mexico, and the United States. With each wave of colonization, the Tongva people were besieged not only by settler violence but also by multiple waves of diseases those settlers brought along with them, including smallpox, influenza, and, more recently, the Coronavirus. The spread of these deadly diseases, alongside the histories of incarceration and genocide, the enduring pressure for Indigenous peoples to assimilate to the culture of their conquerors, and so many other forms of violence continue to contribute to the loss of Tongva culture, knowledge, and history. Colonization is not something that exists solely in the past, but rather percolates through the present in an unending chain of often unacknowledged atrocities.
I wanted to interview contemporary Tongva writers in order to not only raise awareness of their work, but also to raise awareness of the histories of the land currently called Los Angeles. The conversations below with five Tongva women writers — Cindi Alvitre, Jessa Calderon, Casandra López, Kelly Caballero, and Megan Dorame — offer an opportunity to hear them speak about their current creative projects, what inspires them, and their goals on the horizon. Following their lead, I hope we can continue fighting for Indigenous sovereignty and reparations. As a person who puts great stock in the power of literature to preserve culture and inspire change, I hope that reading the work of Tongva women can give everyone a glimpse into the past, present, and future of Tovaangar.”
Ishmael Reed Gets the Last Laugh: America’s most fearless satirist has seen his wildest fictions become reality, Julian Lucas, New Yorker, 7/19/21
“For half a century, he’s been American literature’s most fearless satirist, waging a cultural forever war against the media that spans a dozen novels, nine plays and essay collections, and hundreds of poems, one of which, written in anticipation of his thirty-fifth birthday, is a prayer to stay petty: “35? I ain’t been mean enough . . . Make me Tennessee mean . . . Miles Davis mean . . . Pawnbroker mean,” he writes. “Mean as the town Bessie sings about / ‘Where all the birds sing bass.’ ””
The wonderful writer Ruth Krauss was born 120 years ago, July 25, 1901.
“A hole is to dig. A book is to look at.”
A transcendent listening experience:
God Only Knows by the Beach Boys, a cappella
From the US Constitution, Article IV, Section 4:
The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.
Robert Kuttner, Kuttner on Tap in The American Prospect, 7/21/21 “Question: If a combination of extreme voter suppression and gimmicks that allow the incumbent ruling party to overturn elections leads to the permanent entrenchment of one party, at what point does this violate the Guarantee Clause? Can a one-party state based on rigged elections, by any stretch, be considered a “republican form of government”?”
What If?
The Olympics Could Be a Covid-19 ‘Super-Evolutionary Event’ In a warped version of international cooperation, the Games could provide a place for variants of the virus to spread and then return home with athletes, Adam Rogers, Wired, 7/23/21
The land of four o’clocks is here
the five of us together
looking for our supper.
Half past endive, quarter to beets,
Seven milks, ten cents cheese,
Lost, our land, forever.
—Lorine Niedecker, from New Goose
“No matter how your mind works, baseball reaches out to you. If you're an emotional person, baseball asks for your heart. If you are a thinking man or a thinking woman, baseball wants your opinion.” — Bill James
Stay well, be safe. It’s always great to hear from you, so please do share your stories and what you are thinking about. Comments about The Weird Times are welcome too.