The Weird Times
Inner Monologues and Desultory Reporting from Outer Spaces
The Weird Times: Issue 46, March 28 2021
“The blue social model is in the process of breaking down, and the chief question in American politics today is what should come next.” —Walter Russell Mead
“…the best time to start a business is on the heels of a recession. And while pandemic economics haven’t resulted in a garden-variety recession — in either its duration (short) or its recovery (K-shaped) — there are factors that make this the best time to start a business in over a decade.”—Scott Galloway
Union president says MLB players ready to discuss moving All-Star Game from Georgia in wake of voter-restriction laws, Michael Silverman, Boston Globe, 3/26/21
The 91st MLB All-Star Game is scheduled to be played in Atlanta this July. But on Thursday, in the wake of voting-restriction legislation signed into law by the Georgia governor, the executive director of the MLB Players Association said the players are ready to discuss moving their annual midsummer exhibition out of Georgia.
“Players are very much aware” of the Georgia voting bill, which places restrictions on voting that some believe will make it particularly difficult for Black voters to reach the polls, said Tony Clark in an interview with the Globe. “As it relates to the All-Star Game, we have not had a conversation with the league on that issue. If there is an opportunity to, we would look forward to having that conversation.”
Ten Questions the Press Should Have Asked President Biden: A socially distant press conference shouldn't mean distance from the most important story, Zeynep Tufekci, Zeynep, 3/26/21
The White House press corps did not ask a single question about the pandemic. This is quite revealing of how the political press is often aloof from the core problems that the country faces. Still, it’s not like we’re lacking questions about the pandemic!
Scientists Map Earth’s Undiscovered Biodiversity, Brooks Hays, UPI, 3/22/21
Several years ago, Yale scientists published the "Map of Life," plotting the distribution of Earth's known species. Now, researchers have published a map of undiscovered biodiversity.
The map, published Monday in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, highlights places all over the world where little is known about local biodiversity -- places most likely to host undiscovered species.
The researchers of the new paper hope their work will inspire scientists to set out on expeditions to document some of the world's most poorly understood -- and most vulnerable -- ecosystems.
"At the current pace of global environmental change, there is no doubt that many species will go extinct before we have ever learned about their existence and had the chance to consider their fate," co-author Walter Jetz said in a news release.
moon//sagittarius//06 degrees
I walked home from Catherine's as the clouds exposed the eclipse to me. People were leaning out of their cars with their phones. I wondered about K's agrarian people: Did they drop their plows and break into a run? Did they spend all night whispering to themselves? Were babies born and left on hillsides? The world seemed less harsh, but for that red that seemed to bind the world to itself. —Denise Jarrott, from “Birth Chart,” in Calamity Magazine
I ran a link to the article below in last week’s TWT, but I wanted to highlight this section of my brother and his colleague’s piece.
The value of naming and shaming
The aim of our ongoing research is to get people to think about the environmental burden of wealth.
While plenty of research has shown that rich countries and wealthy people produce far more than their share of greenhouse gas emissions, these studies can feel abstract and academic, making it harder to change this behavior.
We believe “shaming” – for lack of a better word – superrich people for their energy-intensive spending habits can have an important impact, revealing them as models of overconsumption that people shouldn’t emulate.
Newspapers, cities and local residents made an impact during the California droughts of 2014 and 2015 by “drought shaming” celebrities and others who were wasting water, seen in their continually green lawns. And the Swedes came up with a new term – “flygskam” or flying shame – to raise awareness about the climate impact of air travel.
Climate experts say that to have any hope of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, countries must cut their emissions in half by 2030 and eliminate them by 2050.
Asking average Americans to adopt less carbon-intensive lifestyles to achieve this goal can be galling and ineffective when it would take about 550 of their lifetimes to equal the carbon footprint of the average billionaire on our list.
—Richard Wilk and Beatriz Barros, The Conversation, 2/16/21
Congratulations old friend and TWT reader, poet Pierre Joris, who will receive the PEN/Manheim Award for Translation, given to a translator whose body of work demonstrates a commitment to excellence. The committee wrote that Pierre’s work “has long been and remains essential in mapping currents and countercurrents of global modernity.” Lydia Davis will present the award during the April 8 ceremony.
Poet and independent publisher Robert Hershon has died. A tribute page at Best American Poetry documents some of what he meant to so many poets and readers for the last fifty years.
just as part of me fears that if you love me for my cleanliness
i will grow filthy if you admire my elegant clothes
i’ll start wearing shirts with sailboats on them
but i have decided to become a public beach an opera house
a regularly scheduled flight—something that can’t help being
in the right place at the right time—come take your seat
we’ll raise the curtain fill the house start the engines
fly off into the sunrise, the spire of the empire state
the last sight on the horizon as the earth begins to curve
—Robert Hershon, from “superbly situated” in How to Ride on the Woodlawn Express
“Children’s Author” Beverly Cleary was a great writer, period, David Von Drehle, Washington Post, 3/27/21
When my children were in grade school and I read to them every night, I occasionally startled my book-loving friends by announcing that I had found America’s greatest living novelist. Excited by the prospect of a revelation or an argument, they would stare disbelieving when I said the name:
Beverly Cleary.
The Bard of Klickitat Street, the creator of Beezus and Ramona, their friend Henry Huggins, the mutt Ribsy and the cat Picky-Picky. The librarian-turned-children’s book writer who died Friday at age 104. Her art lives on.
I praised her so richly because Cleary accomplished something that few writers have even attempted. She wrote brilliantly about childhood as it really is. Most of the writers who have tried — even those, such as Judy Blume, who were inspired by Cleary — drift toward the adjacent category of “young adult” writing, which isn’t the same; it broadens the canvas and enlarges the palette. To inhabit the lives of children without distorting or condescending is an imaginative feat of the highest order.
Larry McMurtry, Novelist of the American West, Dies at 84: In “Lonesome Dove,” “The Last Picture Show” and dozens more novels and screenplays, he offered unromantic depictions of a long mythologized region, Dwight Garner, NY Times, 3/26/21
Over more than five decades, Mr. McMurtry wrote more than 30 novels and many books of essays, memoir and history. He also wrote more than 30 screenplays, including the one for “Brokeback Mountain” (written with Ms. Ossana, based on a short story by Annie Proulx), for which he won an Academy Award in 2006.
But he found his greatest commercial and critical success with Lonesome Dove, a sweeping 843-page novel about two retired Texas Rangers who drive a herd of stolen cattle from the Rio Grande to Montana in the 1870s. The book won a Pulitzer Prize in 1986 and was made into a popular television mini-series.
“Here Is the Sweet Hand,” by francine j. harris, won the poetry prize from the National Book Critics Circle. “I'm indebted to every Black woman in literature who's ever stood up and offered her voice as a lyric or a tribute or a beacon or a question or a fight or an awkward truth or a difficult conversation or a way forward."
a man who sits inside his canoe, beached at the shore. He sits inside it
swaying. The thick is so close, only a few
ducks swim, visible. The lake itself has vanished. Behind me
traffic lights like helium as evening
—francine j. harris, from “the fat of the fog hovers over”
“Our slaves do not vote. We give them no political power. Yours do vote, and, being the majority, they are the depositaries of all your political power. If they knew the tremendous secret, that the ballot-box is stronger than ‘an army with banners,’ and could combine, where would you be? Your society would be reconstructed, your government overthrown, your property divided… by the quiet process of the ballot-box.” — South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond, March 1858
Georgia's governor signed 'Jim Crow' voting bill under painting of a slave plantation: A Philadelphia Inquirer columnist compared the painting to Brian Kemp ‘working to continue a tradition of white supremacy’ Jewel Wicker, The Guardian, 3/27/21
The Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch created a Twitter thread about a painting of a Georgia plantation that is hanging behind Kemp in the photograph. Writing about the history of the Callaway plantation in Wilkes county, Georgia, Bunch said the place depicted “thrived because of the back-breaking labor of more than 100 slaves who were held in cruel human bondage.”
On Sunday I will arrive at the age my father was when he died. It seemed old then. I was thirty-five. He fell off a ladder was the way he learned he had cancer of the liver. I see him on a ledge outside the hospital. It’s summer. The sun is shining on his face for the last time. I’m with him when he dies. Just me, as if we are having a secret affair. —Laurie Stone, from “Weather Conditions,” Evergreen Review
New Tech to Tackle the Climate Crisis: Here are seven emerging technologies that could help us kick the carbon habit, Tim Dickinson, Rolling Stone, 3/24/21
Climate change can make us feel hopeless. From superstorms and megafires to melting ice caps and rising seas, the ravages of global warming are only getting worse. If human activity is driving us to the brink, the good news is that humans are also developing and deploying new technologies that can help the world kick the carbon habit. We already have affordable, market-ready solutions like solar, wind, and hydropower — the massive deployment of which could make America carbon neutral by 2050. And there are new technologies on the near horizon that could accelerate our trajectory toward a green future. What follows are seven advances — from electric planes to “green” cement to tidal-power generation — that could make modern living more sustainable for our only planet.
The Crow Whisperer: What happens when we talk to animals, Lauren Markham, Harper’s Magazine, April 2021
When the crow whisperer appeared at the side gate to Adam Florin and Dani Fisher’s house, in Oakland, California, she was dressed head to toe in black, wearing a hoodie, gloves, and a mask. This was a few weeks into the coronavirus lockdown, so Adam initially took her garb to be a sign of precautionary vigilance. In fact, it was a disguise. “It’s so the crows don’t recognize me and—no offense—start associating me with you.”
Processed Meat Linked to Dementia Risk, Study Finds, Ed Cara, Gizmodo, 3/22/21
About 2,900 cases of dementia were diagnosed in the entire group, during an average eight-year follow-up period. And when the researchers tried to account for people’s diets, they found a clear association between processed meat and the risk of dementia, but they didn’t see the correlation when it came to other types of meat.
For example, the associated risk of dementia rose by 44% for every 25 grams of processed meat eaten daily. But there was no significant link found between dementia risk and total meat consumption or between dementia risk and a person’s daily intake of chicken. Meanwhile, the associated risk of dementia actually declined slightly for those who regularly ate unprocessed red meat (cooked beef, veal, pork, etc.). The risk of dementia increased for those who carried the APOE ε4 genetic variation, as expected, but this risk wasn’t affected by meat consumption.
“Our findings suggest that consumption of processed meat may increase risk of incident dementia, and unprocessed red meat intake may be associated with lower risks,” the authors wrote.
Barry Gifford’s World, William Boyle, Southwest Review
It’s good to be a Barry Gifford fan. At a recent virtual event with Gifford, Willy Vlautin talked about going into bookstores and always checking the Gs first. He’d hit Leonard Gardner, spending years hoping for a follow-up to his masterpiece, Fat City, and finding nothing. Then he’d check the Barry Gifford section, where there was usually a new book on the shelves. I’ve had that same experience, felt that same great comfort in a new work from Gifford. He’s prolific, that rare combination of literary artist and literary worker that delivers again and again.
In 2019 alone, Gifford released three books: the expanded edition of Sailor & Lula: The Complete Novels, one of his greatest achievements; Southern Nights, an omnibus featuring three of his 1990s novels—Night People, Arise & Walk, and Baby Cat Face; and The Calvary Charges: Writings on Books, Film, and Music, a revised edition of a book with anecdotal reflections on the art that influenced him. The year 2020 has brought us Roy’s World: Stories 1973–2020, collecting Gifford’s tales about Roy, a fictional character modeled on himself as a boy. Taken together, these stories make for one of the most important and moving American bildungsromans of all time. Set primarily between 1947 and 1962, they are, as Gifford has said, “a history of a time and place that no longer exists.”
Yes, handcuffs will fit Big Tech CEOs, Mark Hurst, Creative Good, 3/25/21
As you see footage of the CEOs deflecting and dodging questions, keep one thing in mind: The business models of Facebook, Google, and Twitter are fully dependent on amplifying toxic content. And I mean fully dependent. Remove the amplifier and you kill the company. Conversely, leave the amplifier in place and it doesn't matter what you do, adding human moderators or better AI or anything else - the outcomes will be the same.
There is absolutely nothing new here. Almost two years ago, I wrote Toxic Content Has a Simple Solution: Kill the Algorithm, in which I pointed out the obvious: "If the algorithm is the problem, the solution is to kill the algorithm."
Alternatives to Censorship: Interview With Matt Stoller: As Congress once again demands that Silicon Valley crack down on speech, the Director of Research at the American Economic Liberties Project outlines the real problem, and better solutions,Matt Taibbi, TK News, 3/26/21
As Matt Stoller, Director of Research at the American Economic Liberties Project puts it, describing how companies like Facebook make money: It's like if you were in a bar and there was a guy in the corner that was constantly egging people onto getting into fights, and he got paid whenever somebody got into a fight? That's the business model here.
A divine maiden of the air descends to undifferentiated waters. She becomes pregnant from the wind and a duck lays an egg on her leg. Incubating, it grows too hot to touch. When she flinches, it falls, and the world, sun, and moon are formed from the shards. Then comes her son, Väinämöinen, who sows the forests. And things take a turn for the worse. He gets into a contest with a wiseman from the North, captures him in a mire. As a last resort, the defeated offers his sister’s hand in marriage. But Aino would rather drown than wed Väinämöinen. And from her mother’s tears come the rivers, come the birches, come the cuckoos, who still sing these songs of sorrow. — English Translation of Finland's Epic Poem, The Kalevala (1898), Public Domain Review
Returning Fundy’s Fish to the Wild:From the gene bank to the wild, a novel conservation effort has brought the inner Bay of Fundy Atlantic salmon back from the brink, Amanda Leslie, Haikai Magazine, 3/24/21
Fifty years ago, 40,000 iBoF salmon returned to 32 rivers that empty into the Bay of Fundy between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. By the late 1990s, that number had dropped to 200. A few years later, there was a season when no fish came back at all.
The population would have been lost forever if researchers at Fundy National Park in New Brunswick hadn’t started preserving a live gene bank of wild salmon. In 2001, scientists and technicians from Parks Canada started working with the Fort Folly First Nation to round up living fish, keeping them in a hatchery at the Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s (DFO) Mactaquac Biodiversity Facility in a last-ditch effort to protect the population’s unique genetics. Over the past two decades, that effort has evolved into a groundbreaking recovery program that has been offering a glimmer of hope for this endangered population.
RATATATAT: Quick Links
When an Oil Company Profits From a Pipeline Running Beneath Tribal Land Without Consent, What’s Fair Compensation? A Marathon Petroleum subsidiary was ordered to pay $187 million for trespassing, but in January a Trump official reduced the judgement to $4 million. Now Biden wants another look, Judy Fahys, Inside Climate News, 3/28/21
Merck’s Little Brown Pill Could Transform the Fight Against Covid: The antiviral drug molnupiravir, still in clinical trials, would give doctors an important new treatment and a weapon against coronaviruses and future pandemics, Cynthia Koons and Riley Griffin, Bloomberg Business Week, 3/26/21
Nearly half the Amazon’s intact forest on Indigenous-held lands: Report, John C. Cannon, MongaBay, 3/26/21
There Is No Vaccine for Global Warming, In the past year, carbon emissions dropped significantly as the Covid-19 pandemic kept us all home. How we move forward will determine the fate of the planet,Tom Engelhart, The Nation, 3/23/21
People gave up on flu pandemic measures a century ago when they tired of them – and paid a price, J. Alexander Navarro, The Conversation, 3/23/21
How Covid-19 Supercharged the Advertising ‘Triopoly’ of Google, Facebook and Amazon:The three tech giants now collect more than half of all ad dollars spent in the U.S. The pandemic economy got them there, Keach Hagey and Suzanne Vranica, Wall Street Journal, 3/19/21
The sea ice in northern Labrador is thinning — fast. Here's why the Inuit are worried: Ice that is normally 1 metre thick near Makkovik is only about 15 cm this year, Lindsay Bird, CBC News, 3/24/21
THE PARAQUAT POISONING PROBLEM: A former Syngenta scientist calls the failures to heed his warnings about the deadly pesticide “a conspiracy within the company to keep this quiet,” Sharon Lerner, The Intercept, 3/24/21
Svalbard study finds high levels of pharmaceuticals in marine life: The drug remnants could be coming from untreated sewage, Kevin McGwin, Arctic Today, 3/24/21
‘Mystery chemicals’ found in pregnant Bay Area women: "It's the role of the government to ensure that chemicals used in the marketplace are known. That's obviously not the system we're in right now,” Quinn McVeigh, Environmental Health News, 3/26/21
CDC ‘deeply concerned’ about rising Covid cases as vaccinations accelerate: Most recent weekly average shows 7% increase in Covid infections in US from previous week, at about 57,000 cases a day, Jewel Wicker and Joan E. Greve, The Guardian, 3/26/21
A Top G.O.P. Pollster on Trump 2024, QAnon and What Republicans Really Want: Kristen Soltis Anderson has done some of the most in-depth surveys of the party’s voters to date. Her findings are unnerving, Ezra Klein, NY Times, 3/26/21
Unequal treatment for college women’s basketball players has deep historical roots, Lindsay Darvin, Anita M. Moorman, Ann Pegoraro, The Conversation, 3/24/21
Interview with an Indie Press: Melville House, Dennis Johnson and Valerie Merians on Risk, Change, and Making Mistakes, Corinne Segal, Lithub, 3/5/21
Publishers work with the same kind of delusions that authors work with, which is that every time out you think it’s going be The Beatles. It’s going to be, you know, the revolutionary avant-garde piece of work that, amazingly enough, the mainstream media will adore and it will make everybody’s dream. In reality, of course, that very rarely happens so that when it does, you’re pleasantly surprised. [How to Do Nothing by] Jenny Odell is one example. We thought that was a very good book and that it would do very well, but it really exploded.
Debt by David Graeber was a much longer slog. Nobody believed in that book except us. It was an extremely hard sell, even internally. It took months and months and months to make that book a hit but when it did it just rolled and rolled and rolled along. Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada was similar, although I always thought that was going to do well, but when it did, I was still surprised.
Burning Bodies, Lamorna Ash, New Left Review Sidecar, 3/23/21
The acute, tender personal essays of Megan Nolan have developed a significant online following in recent years. Her readers – myself included – look forward to the publication of her next piece, where we will no doubt find some aperçu that will illuminate things we knew to be true about ourselves but lacked the words to articulate. Nolan, born in Ireland in 1990 and now based in London, specialises in unflinching self-exposure: her articles for the New Statesman, the New York Times and elsewhere are assured exercises in introspection that tend to circle around the body, sex and relationships. The particular feeling or concern to be anatomized tends to be announced in the opening line. A recent essay on what lockdown has meant for those like her, for whom ‘social comfort comes from dating or from having sex with strangers’, begins: ‘In early lockdown, I spent most evenings in the front room of my mother’s house, drunk, staring at a computer, reeling at the prospect of my body being deprived indefinitely of touch’.
One of her most affecting pieces deals with her history of self-mutilation and compulsive biting of her fingers. It is a condition Nolan shares with the unnamed narrator of her debut novel Acts of Desperation. The essay, published in 2019, is typical of her writerly procedure: an event, in this case the engagement of her best friend, prompts her to focus in on an aspect of her life she considers shameful. Her ‘dermatophogia’, as she categorises it, is then traced back through her history – she notes how when single she would let the tearing of flesh become so bad as to grow infected, causing her to be ‘ashamed of what feels like uniquely, viscerally ugly behaviour, the mess of skin and bone and chewing, all so animal.’
So I'm lying here
Just staring at the ceiling tiles
And I'm thinking about, oh what to think about
Just listening and relistening
To Smiley Smile
And I'm wondering if this is some kind of creative drought
Because I'm
Lying in bed
Just like Brian Wilson did
Well I am
Lying in bed
Just like Brian Wilson did
—Steven Page, “Brian Wilson,” Bare Naked Ladies
She was not a slowpoke grownup. She was a girl who could not wait. Life was so interesting she had to find out what happened next.—Beverly Cleary, Ramona the Pest
I don't have to tell you that the one constant through all the years has been baseball. America has been erased like a blackboard, only to be rebuilt and then erased again. But baseball has marked time while America has rolled by like a procession of steamrollers. —WP Kinsella, Shoeless Joe
Thanks for reading and for responding to The Weird Times. We remain in perilous straits, but it always helps to find and accept the joy and beauty and hope that still surrounds us. And to recognize our relative insignificance…
In the book I am reading now, Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, Professor Avi Loeb says: “Looking into the universe, astrophysicists also come face to face with the physical immensity of the cosmos. We can see light that was emitted earlier in cosmic history. The universe resembles an archaeological dig centered on us. The deeper we look, the more ancient are the layers we uncover.”
Studded with stars in belt and crown,
the Stadium is an adastrium.
O flashing Orion,
your stars are muscled like the lion. — Marianne Moore
Stay well, keep reading, get outside as soon as possible. Take heart. Send news. Best wishes all.