The Weird Times
Inner Monologues and Desultory Reporting from Outer Spaces: Issue 224, August 25, 2024 (V5 #16)
We have to believe in things that we have not seen before in order to bring them about.—Brittney Cooper
In voting for Vice President Harris, I assume that her policy views are vastly different from my own but I am indifferent in this election on any issues other than America’s Democracy, the Constitution, and the Rule of Law, as I believe all Americans should be.— Judge Michael Luttig
Books, Music, Art, Culture
She asked the question that changed my life: Betty Prashker, dead at 99, Lucian K. Truscott IV, Newsletter, 8/18/24: “She was a force of nature, and she made her mark at a time when women in New York publishing were as scarce as ice in the Sahara. I’m proud to have known her and to have been one of her authors.”
When Emily Dickinson Mailed It In: The supposed recluse constantly sent letters to friends, family, and lovers. What do they show us? Kamran Javadizadeh, New Yorker, 8/21/24: “Writing letters could therefore be for Dickinson not only a withdrawal from the world but also a way of extending herself into many worlds, all at once.”
Fragile Yet Eternal: How Audre Lorde Continues to Inspire: on the Life and Legacy of the Iconic Black Feminist Poet and Activist, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, LitHub, 8/20/24: “Like our bodies, books respond to changes in pressure, humid air. They swell, exhale, and dry again. Become more textured versions of themselves.”
Fifty Years of Paying Attention: A morning in the Bronx with Ian Frazier, Dan Kois, Slate, 8/20/24: “The past bleeds through layers of accumulation like graffiti through whitewash.” Paradise Bronx brings that philosophy, which could serve as a credo for Frazier’s half-century career, to life.”
Guy Davenport—the Last High Modernist: In the essays collected in Geography of the Imagination, one can glimpse the inner workings of the mind of a 20th-century literary genius, David Schurman Wallace, The Nation, 8/21/24: “Davenport was the standard-bearer for a variety of serious belles lettres, the likes of which is rare today—who now has done so much homework?” Book: Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays
How Poetry Can Map Defiance: A conversation with the Diné poet Kinsale Drake about “Making a Monument Valley,” Walt Hunter, The Atlantic, 8/21/24: “I’m invested in images of haunting and everyday rebellion. I wanted to foreground survivance, a term coined most famously by Gerald Vizenor to mean an active sense of presence, a continuance of Native stories, and a refusal to disappear.”
‘A war of who gets to write history’: the artists resisting in Ukraine: Film-maker David Gutnik lasers in on the artists pushing back against Russian aggression for an inspiring yet harrowing new documentary, Radheyan Simonpillai, The Guardian, 8/21/24: “This is a war of shells and missiles and drones. But it is also a war of identity, a war of memory, a war of who gets to write the history. Does the colonizer get to write it or do the people who want state and nationhood and dignity get to write it?”
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: Wild God review – this masterpiece will make you fall back in love with life: Contemplating pain, death and suffering, rock’s former prince of darkness finds euphoria despite it all, on an album of contagious joy and thrilling melody, Alexis Petridis, The Guardian, 8/22/24
Why I left social media: And the surprising lesson I learned, Dan Blank, Creative Shift, 8/23/24: “Sometimes going small is a wonderful way to reinvent your experience and expectations. The goal is meaningful connections with other people.”
What Superfans Know That the Rest of Us Should Learn: The Taylor Swift and ‘Star Wars’ obsessives have unlocked a key to happiness, Rachel Feintzeig, Wall Street Journal, 8/19/24: “If it brings you joy, why not do more of it?” (No paywall)
It’s true I’m dawdling as if I had time to watch the formation of geological layers. Though night already seeps through my brittle bones.
I certainly don’t know what to do to end my days “gracefully.” But the body dies all through our life, thousands of cells every second.
So everything should be very clear.
—from “Doing,” Rosmarie Waldrop
Politics, Economics, Technology
The Shift is Real: How vibes can turn the probable into the possible, Douglas Rushkoff, Newsletter, 8/20/24: “We can’t change what’s going to happen, but we can change how we experience it if we go through it together, with compassion… And the only way to unleash possible outcomes is by unleashing the human.”
Nancy Pelosi’s Quiet, Cunning Power: “As Brilliant as Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos” - “Her attitude was, If you can’t manage it, why the hell are you in Congress?” says a former DCCC chair, Kate Anderson Brower, Vanity Fair, 8/23/24: “People have been underestimating her for a long, long time and they do so at their peril.”
Humor: An Effective Anti-Authoritarian Tool: Being ridiculed is what strongmen most fear, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Lucid, 8/21/24: “It's the summer of weird —the adjective of choice for strange and surreal Republican behavior that has been normalized— and it's the summer that humor has come into its own in America as an effective weapon of anti-authoritarian politics.”
Raise your right hand: We are all jurors now, Lucian K. Truscott IV, Newsletter, 8/23/24: “If I were Donald Trump, I would start looking for beachfront property in Brazil. Not even his Supreme Court can save him this time, because the jury box is filled with the American people, and they have the biggest cannon of them all in their arsenal: their votes.”
How Kamala Made Trump the Incumbent, Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo, 8/23/24: “Harris has made Trump into the incumbent with her as the challenger running on a campaign message to turn the page.”
The total mystery of America's undecided voters: The New York Times is exploring their views, but I have my own theory, Margaret Sullivan, American Crisis, 8/23/24: “My own theory on the undecideds is that many of them are what’s euphemistically called “low information voters.” By their own admission, many Americans don’t pay a lot of attention to the news; they’ve chosen to tune out.”
Leonard Leo’s Swing-State Voter Purge: Lawyers with deep connections to the Supreme Court dark-money operative are attacking voting rights in battleground states in the lead-up to the 2024 election, Katya Schwenk, Jean Yi, The Lever, 8/20/24
What’s scarier than the GOP’s beliefs? The GOP’s lack of beliefs: And the media make it worse by pretending Republicans are sincere, Mark Jacobs, Stop the Presses, 8/19/24: “Their lack of beliefs means they would be willing to do anything – anything – if it suited their ambitions. This is why today’s Republican Party poses a lethal threat to our democracy.”
JD Vance is Just Another Know Nothing Nativist: “Vance seems to assume that large numbers of native-born white people don't constitute ethnic enclaves,” Rebecca Solnit, LitHub, 8/23/24: “As in Scorsese’s blood-soaked movie, the white people who think this country is only for people exactly like them have been the great source of violence and conflict all along, and more of the same is basically the platform Vance and Trump are running on. They’re a problem for which, happily, we have a really good solution.”
The China Walz: On the ground experience in China is a first for a VP candidate, Karen Christensen, Karen’s Letter, 8/20/24
‘Guys go where their buddies are’: the young men recruiting each other to fight for abortion rights: ‘Masculinity is taking action,’ says one organizer: ‘Masculinity is caring for the people that you love.’ Most American men support abortion rights – but activists say too many are sitting on the sidelines. So they’re calling, texting and knocking on doors to build support, Carter Sherman, The Guardian, 8/20/24
10 Reasons Why Technological Progress Is Now Reversing: Or How Silicon Valley Started Breaking Bad, Ted Gioia, Honest Broker, 8/19/24: “I recently shared 52 warning signs that technological progress is reversing. If I had to sum things up in a conceptual chart, it would look like this:
‘Never summon a power you can’t control’: Yuval Noah Harari on how AI could threaten democracy and divide the world: Forget Hollywood depictions of gun-toting robots running wild in the streets – the reality of artificial intelligence is far more dangerous, warns the historian and author in an exclusive extract from his new book, Yuval Noah Harari, The Guardian, 8/24/24
This Woman Secretly Tries to Stop War: Gabrielle Rifkind was trained as a group analyst and psychotherapist. Now she sits down with groups like Hamas and Hezbollah and state actors in Ukraine and Russia, trying to end global conflicts, Maria Streshinsky, Wired, 8/23/24
Ukraine's Invasion of Kursk: Changing the narrative, Lawrence Freedman, Comment is Freed, 8/21/24: “ If (and this is a big ‘if’) the Ukrainian offensive can be sustained for weeks, even months, and in particular if it obliges Russia to devote increasing efforts to expelling the intruders, then we may see a corresponding shift in Russia’s strategic calculations and the prevailing narratives surrounding the war.”
Putin's Legend: The Nonsensical Basis of a Terrible War, Timothy Snyder, Thinking About, 8/25/24: “The rules Putin sets down for interpreting the past cannot be accepted. It is nothing more than fantasy following force. This is the most important point. If we grant that tyrants are right to start wars because of fictions of brothers and babies, because of stories that are not even wrong, then every single corner of the world is subject to invasion and the entire international legal order is void.” (DW: read this entire article!)
If it was a snake it would’a bit me
beaming in some past
I keep desiring like walking
down the main street
of a town that feels like
wearing a vintage dress
—from “House of Green Thunder,” Lee Ann Brown
Science, Environment
The Quantum Mechanics 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, Wired, 8/25/24: “NOAA’s Global Monitoring Laboratory reported that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has risen from its preindustrial level of 280 parts per million to a record high 419.3 parts per million as of 2023, triggering an estimated 1 degree Celsius of warming so far.”
This rare earth metal shows us the future of our planet’s resources: The story of neodymium reveals many of the challenges we’ll likely face across the supply chain in the coming century and beyond, Casey Crownhart, MIT Technology Review, 8/21/24
What seems most true: Information that confirms your beliefs…or information repeated over and over? Even one repetition of false claim about climate change is sufficient to make it seem a bit truer later on, Sarah DeWeerdt, Anthropocene, 8/20/24: “It is therefore important not to expose people to false information in the interest of ‘balanced reporting’” about climate change.”
Corporate climate targets are a mess. Could tracking ‘spheres of influence’ help? New research proposes a new, more expansive way to look at companies’ contribution to global net-zero, Joseph Winters, Grist, 8/21/24: “We have been leaving a huge amount of impact on the table by failing to encourage or invite companies to be rewarded and compared for their significant efforts beyond their value chain.”
Strange and wondrous creatures: plankton and the origins of life on Earth : Without plankton, the modern ocean ecosystem – the very idea of the ocean as we understand it – would collapse. Earth would have no complex life of any kind, Ferris Jabr, The Guardian, 8/20/24
Taking the Long View: Why There Might Still Be Hope For the Earth’s Oceans: on How Best to Mitigate the Anthropocene’s Negative Impact on Marine Ecosystems, Helen Scales, LitHub, 8/19/24: “No matter where you live and what you do, even if you have never seen the sea in real life, you would not exist—none of us would—without the ocean.”
Science Debate That Foretold Our 21st-Century Technological Fears: on the Competing Predictions of Edsger Dijkstra and Douglas Engelbart, Andrew Smith, LitHub, 8/22/24: “What we glimpse here is the clash of two visionary programmers of the same generation, reacting in divergent ways to the legacy of the Second World War.”
Judge blocks Arizona lithium drilling that tribe says is threat to sacred lands, Scott Sonner, APNews, 8/21/24: “Like other tribal nations who for centuries have stewarded the lands across this country, the Hualapai people are under siege by mining interests trying to make a buck off destroying their cultural heritage.”
How can you tell if soil is healthy? Just listen to it: First-of-its-kind research shows how "ecoacoustics" can help scientists monitor the health of soils — using underground critter concerts, Ayurella Horn-Muller, Grist, 8/20/24
Invasive insect could accelerate release of climate pollution from forests: The hemlock woolly adelgid is a major threat to hemlock trees, YCC Team, Yale Climate Connections, 8/23/24
Here a Bee, There a Bee, Everywhere a Wild Bee: Biologists are finding new bee species all over the Pacific Northwest—highlighting how little we know about native pollinators, Anne Casselman, Hakai, 8/20/24: “Most people don’t realize the gossamer web that connects us to all these natural processes that we rely on for civilization to function.”
The Seagrass Species That Is Not So Slowly Taking Over the World: When Halophila stipulacea comes to town, it outcompetes native seagrasses. That’s bad—but its spread brings unexpected benefits, too, Bing Lin, Inside Climate News, 8/23/24
What Greenland’s Melting Ice Tells Us About the History and Future of Global Warming: on the Need to Understand Earth's Ancient Past to Combat Today’s Environmental Threats, Paul Bierman, LitHub, 8/22/24: “The soil that lay beneath the ice sheet was keeping far more interesting secrets than we ever could have imagined.”
Plastic 'Bombardment' Putting Antarctica at Risk From Hitchhiking Invaders, Tom Howarth, Newsweek, 8/21/24: “Researchers have revealed that floating debris, including plastics and organic materials, can transport invasive species to Antarctic waters from a broader range of sources than previously understood.”
Microplastics are infiltrating brain tissue, studies show: ‘There’s nowhere left untouched:’ Twenty-four brain samples collected in early 2024 measured on average about 0.5% plastic by weight, Douglas Main, The Guardian, 8/21/24
The world-saving potential of nuclear fusion just got a huge boost: The goal of limitless clean energy is now clearly on the horizon, thanks to AI accelerating research, Stephen Cowley, Washington Post, 8/20/24: “a revolutionary approach is taking shape: using the combined power of artificial intelligence and high-performance computing to steer fusion innovation, shaving decades off development timelines.” (No paywall!)
India’s lunar lander unearths evidence the moon had a magma ocean: A new batch of data supports the molten moon scenario, delivered by a rover that India deposited last year near the lunar south pole, Joel Achenbach, Washington Post, 8/21/24 (No Paywall)
you are there—
breathed into completion, a
sphere,
into all it is.
—from “All It Is,” Alfred Corn
Health, Wellness
What links aging and disease? A growing body of research says it’s a faulty metabolism, Melanie R. McReynolds, The Conversation, 8/22/24: “In our newly published research, my team and I discovered a new connection between disrupted glucose metabolism and neurodegenerative disease. This led us to identify a drug originally designed for cancer that could potentially be used to treat Alzheimer’s.”
Never take health tips from world’s oldest people, say scientists: Scientists still trying to work out why some people live beyond 100, but agree it is best to avoid taking advice from centenarians themselves, Nicola Davis, The Guardian, 8/24/24
‘Nonna Caterina was right’: olive oil wastewater heralded as new superfood: The bitter-tasting and previously discarded by-product has been found to have many health-giving properties, Giulia Crouch, The Guardian, 8/24/24
Newly Identified Proteins May Explain Devastating Effects of Alzheimer's, Tessa Koumoundouros, Science Alert, 8/20/24: “This suggests they might be a basis for new therapies for this terrible brain affliction that's been frustratingly resistant to treatment over the years…”
Blood sugar fluctuations after eating play an important role in anxiety and depression, Mary Scourboutakos, The Conversation, 8/20/24: “Every time we eat sugar or carbohydrates such as bread, rice, pasta, potatoes and crackers, the resulting rise in blood sugar triggers a cascade of hormones and signaling molecules.”
The Case for Hypochondria: Caroline Crampton’s new book studies the fuzzy boundaries between sickness and health, Anna Altman, New Republic, 8/21/24: “Our bodies remind us that there is so much we do not know: what an ache or a tickle or a lump means, whether it is benign or dangerous, an inevitable change over the course of a long life or a menacing omen of something much worse. So it makes sense to worry about our health.”A Body Made of Glass: A Cultural History of Hypochondria
You spend enough time with a mystery
Its powers start to atrophy
So if you can't get to the heart of me
Let's just walk away
—from “Still Strangers Sometimes,” Dawes
Birds, Birding
Why do so many pelicans keep dropping dead in California? A significant die-off of brown pelicans in California has scientists searching for answers, Dino Grandoni, Washington Post, 8/19/24
How Giant Birds Stay Aloft at Great Heights Where the Air Is Thin: Seven miles high, you look out the jetliner window and lock eyes with a vulture. It's beyond rare, but it happens. How do those bald beauties stay up there? Ruth Schuster, Haaretz, 8/21/24
Don’t just sit around and complain. Do something.—Michelle Obama
If you want to help with voter protection, here is the National Volunteer Interest Form. This is for people who are available to volunteer for relatively shorter periods of time, such as shifts during Early Vote or on Election Day.
Late Help Form. This is for people who can volunteer full-time or otherwise for a substantial period of time.
Want to volunteer for Harris for President? This is for all volunteer activities, not just Voter Protection.
I say this every week because I 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. Hearing from you makes this all worthwhile.
It’s been (another) great week for hope and optimism. Stay well; share love; work for good. We need each other, now more than ever. Let’s get to work.
We can do this.
Love always—David