The Weird Times

Inner Monologues and Desultory Reporting from Outer Spaces: Issue 215, June 23, 2024 (V5 #7)

Said Tsin-Tsu:
It is only in small dogs and the young
That we find minute observation—Ezra Pound

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes—Henry David Thoreau

Books, Music, Art, Culture

 (Photo by Nuccio DiNuzzo/Getty Images)

Willie Mays was as good — and as cool — as anyone who ever played: I met Mays. I watched Mays for decades. I can still hardly believe what I saw, Thomas Boswell, Washington Post, 6/19/24: “Mays made us normal folks feel just a little crazy, a little more wildly alive, in the best ways.” (No paywall)

Negro Leagues baseball was even greater than the record books can say: Integrating statistics from the segregated leagues should not dim the memory of their struggle, Bob Kendrick, Washington Post, 6/17/24: “The circumstances that dictated the need for the Negro Leagues are painful and sorrowful. But the Negro Leagues themselves vindicate the power of the human spirit to persevere and prevail.” (No Paywall)

Donald Sutherland was an irreplaceable aristocrat of cinema: The late actor was a commanding and versatile presence on the big screen, perfecting everything from villainy to sensuality in films such as Don’t Look Now and Klute, Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian, 6/20/24

The Paradox of the Contemporary Southern Writer: on Summer Brenner's "Dust" and the Necessary Work of Writing About the South, Levi Vonk, LitHub, 6/18/24: “Dust hits upon so many of our current concerns, and it does so not in spite of its southernness, but because of it.” Book: Dust: A Memoir

What we do or who we are? Questions of character from biography & literature, Karen Christensen,  Newsletter, 6/23/24: “It is typical of our time that insistence on character today in the country has almost ceased. Freud and others have stressed the unconscious factors of our personality so that today we do not advise youth about their development of character; we watch and count their actions with almost helpless disassociation from thought of advice.” (quote from W.E.B. Dubois)

Sacralizing Nature: On Marcelo Gleiser’s “The Dawn of a Mindful Universe,” Paolo Musso, LA Review of Books, 6/21/24: “…in order to overcome the current crisis, we must recover a sense of Earth’s sacredness and of our brotherhood with all the other creatures that inhabit it. And, in his opinion, not only scientists but also extant Indigenous cultures have much to contribute on this front.”  Dawn of a Mindful Universe

How Joni Mitchell Pioneered Her Own Form of Artistic Genius: on the Long and Continuing Struggle of Women Artists For Recognition On Their Own Terms, Ann Powers, LitHub, 6/17/24: “Mitchell tapped into the vitality of a space opening up, one that she in part created: a clearing in which women could fully be themselves.”

George Sand: True Genius, True Woman review – a pleasure and an education: Writer Séverine Vidal and illustrator Kim Consigny tell the extraordinary life story of the French author, who cross-dressed and pricked male pomposity, with great care and humour, Rachel Cooke, The Guardian, 6/17/24. Graphic Novel: George Sand, True Genius, True Woman

A Legacy of Plunder: In its reexamination of entrenched narratives about the expropriation of Native land, Michael Witgen’s work is changing how Native people are situated in the arc of North American history, Francisco Cantú, NY Review of Books, 6/20/24 issue: “The Native people in Witgen’s account, however, are recognized not for their victimhood, but for their adeptness at reasserting their rights, dignity, and sovereignty against the supposedly insurmountable power of the state.”  Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America

The mysterious tyranny of trendy baby names, Daniel Wolfe, Washington Post, 6/21/24: “When you toss away tradition as your source of names, something has to fill that gap and it’s our style sense. Sound became everything.” Cool website: Namerology

I Am Laura Kipnis-Bot, and I Will Make Reading Sexy and Tragic Again: Margaret Atwood, Marlon James, Lena Dunham, Roxane Gay: We’ve all agreed to be turned into AI reading companions by a mysterious company called Rebind. I report from the inside, Laura Kipnis, Wired, 6/18/24: “What was fun about being on the ground floor was that they were basically inventing it as they went along. All that was missing was a garage.”

Love and Magick are Our Best Hope: The easiest, funnest, and most likely path to averting apocalypse, Douglas Rushkoff, Newsletter, 6/19/24: “I feel like the trauma all around us has led me to wrap up my heart too tightly in a protective shield; and the pain and suffering of others has led me to deny myself access to the fun and ecstatic experiences that would actually empower me to do anything about it. I want more touch, more cuddles, more embodied experience that can help loosen this knot of dread and despair.”

‘He’d turned into a weird old grandpa’: how Johnny Cash resurrected his career – and became an icon: In the early 90s, the Man in Black was unsigned, uncool and barely out of addiction. Releasing lost songs from those years that rank among Cash’s best, his son and bandmates explain how he came back around, Michael Hamm, The Guardian, 6/21/24: “…he never lost his drive and he never lost his faith in music itself.”

Don't let anybody see
Deep within the soul of me
Or they'll see that something there
Is not quite right

—from “Spotlight,” Johnny Cash

Politics, Economics, Technology

Sudan Starves: As its civil war rages on, Sudan is facing the largest famine the world has seen for at least forty years, Joshua Craze, Kholood Khair, Raga Makawi, NY Review of Books, 6/23/24: “…the Clingendael Institute, a Dutch think tank, released a report suggesting that 2.5 million people will die from famine-related causes by the end of September. Sudan is experiencing the largest famine the world has seen for at least forty years.”

The Evolution of Empire: The trite answer to the question of why empires fall is that they become victims of their own success, growing too large, too corrupt, and too exhausted to fend off energetic newcomers. Whether this will be America's fate has become an urgent issue in today's increasingly unstable, multipolar world, John Andrews, Project Syndicate, 6/21/24: “Time may not be on the side of those who place their trust in America to protect democracy and ‘liberal Western values.’”

Why so many Americans have misconceptions about crime trends, Judd Legum, Popular Information, 6/18/24: “Americans' views on crime are influenced by how the issue is covered in the media. The media is relaying false statements about crime in America by Trump and other Republicans. And many media outlets appear unable or unwilling to correct the record.” DW: Maybe the media could just stop giving them a platform for their lies.

Tipping the Scales: The MAGA Justices Have Already Interfered with the 2024 Elections: They continue to be no less partisan than the House or Senate GOP Caucuses, Michael Podhorzer, Weekend Reading, 6/19/24: “Now, imagine you were told that in another country, a president who had been defeated in a free and fair election attempted a coup, for which he was indicted. However, four years later, the very judges he had appointed have successfully helped protect him from standing trial. That is America in 2024.”

What is the Invisible Dark Force Destroying Everything? In our post-Citizens United world, when industry or a “generous” billionaire opposes a policy, what they want beats democracy almost every time...Thom Hartmann, Hartmann Report, 6/18/24

The Hollowing of the Eighth Amendment: The Supreme Court’s Republican majority has been quietly rolling back a longstanding consensus over cruel and unusual punishment, Duncan Hosie, NY Review of Books, 6/18/24: “Since Trump’s three appointees lurched the Court rightward, the conservatives have all but closed its doors to prisoners seeking relief from cruel and inhumane treatment.”

Shocker Poll: Trump Verdict Actually Does Matter to Voters—Big-Time: With a new Politico survey finding that independents take Trump’s conviction very seriously, the reporter who oversaw the poll takes us through what these surprising new numbers really mean, Greg Sargent, New Republic, 6/18/24

What to Do About the Gender Divide: The social fabric will suffer if my generation keeps drifting apart, Andrew Zu, Persuasion, 6/20/24 “[Gen Z] men are becoming more conservative, while women are becoming far more progressive.”

Abortion Is No Joke. Lizz Winstead Begs to Differ: Marking the two-year “Overturniversary” of Roe, the Daily Show cocreator is hitting the road with a new abortion documentary and urging Democrats to fight back more bluntly—and creatively. “We have politicians who have 50 years of not knowing how to talk about it,” she says, Chris Smith, Vanity Fair, 6/21/24

US farmers turn towards Biden over Trump’s past agricultural policies: A growing number of rural Americans now plan to vote for Biden, fearing Trump could cost farmers again, Stephen Starr, The Guardian, 6/21/24

Deluge of ‘pink slime’ websites threaten to drown out truth with fake news in US election: US sites pushing misinformation are proliferating, aiming to look like reliable sources as local newspapers close down, Eric Berger, The Guardian, 6/20/24

Journalism Needs Cultural Adjacency: The media is out of touch. A failure to understand class is the culprit, Alex Perez, Persuasion, 6/19/24: “ The absence of journalists from “adjacent” backgrounds is troublesome because it creates blind spots in news coverage and often results in depicting lower classes and people of color as aliens.”

AI Is Coming for Big Tech Jobs—but Not in the Way You Think: Companies aren’t replacing workers with AI yet. But they are sacrificing thousands of jobs in the race to further innovation in the technology, Amanda Hoover, Wired, 6/17/24: “More than 5,000 jobs were cut between May 2023 and April 2024 where companies cited AI as the reason—but this was either due to companies shifting focus to developing AI tech or because they used AI tools to take over tasks and roles.”

How Vulnerable Low-Wage Workers Power AI Algorithms: the Precarious Labor Behind the Digital Revolution, Madhumita Murgia, LitHub, 6/21/24: “…workers may not even know who their client is, what type of algorithmic system they are working on, or what their counterparts in other parts of the world are paid for the same job.”

The Global Crisis That No Border Crackdown Can Fix: At America’s southern border, arrivals from Mexico to Morocco, China to Chad, are caught in a no-man’s-land between the danger they’ve fled and the paralyzed system that awaits them, Dara Lind, Vanity Fair, 6/17/24

Hopes for a Grand Bargain in the Middle East Are a Mirage Biden is deaf to the intractable nature of the situation, Sam Kahn, Persuasion, 6/17/24: “…everything that the United States has proposed so far appears to be a dramatic departure from reality and a failure to understand the mood either of Israel or of Hamas.”

The Middle East is drifting leaderless to catastrophe. War is just an airstrike away: From Netanyahu to Nasrallah, the region’s politicians are flailing. Will no one stop the lunacy? Simon Tisdall, The Guardian, 6/22/23

Last Poem

shambles this way

antipodean being

come full circle

sparks in darkness

lightning’s eternal return

flipped the ecliptic

—Ronald Johnson

Science, Environment

Is It Climate Change? Americans Mostly Say Yes: Most Americans think climate change plays some role in creating extreme weather, though their perceptions didn’t always align with scientists,’ Grace van Deelen, Eos, 6/18/24

Young climate activists just won a ‘historic’ settlement: The settlement, described as a “world first,” will legally require Hawaii’s transport department to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, Victoria Bisset, Washington Post, 6/21/24: “…will legally require the state to cut its transportation sector’s planet-warming pollution and to consult with young people about its climate impact.”

People are resorting to IVF to have kids more than ever before. We should be asking why, Patricia Hunt, Gail S. Prins, Shanna Swan, The Hill, 6/20/24: “… research has emerged confirming that exposure to manmade chemicals in the environment accelerates ovarian aging, contributing to infertility and earlier onset of menopause.”

The Unknown Toll Of The AI Takeover: As artificial intelligence guzzles water supplies and jacks up consumers’ electricity rates, why isn’t anyone tracking the resources being consumed? Lois Parshley, The Lever, 6/19/24

Instead of Mining the Deep Sea, Maybe People Should Just Fix Stuff: A new report contends that deep sea mining is not just an environmental risk, it’s also not going to help meet the world’s renewable energy needs, Boone Ashworth,  Wired, 6/18/24: “The secret to saving the deep sea is to prioritize systems that focus on the materials we already have—establishing right to repair laws, improving recycling capabilities, and rethinking how we use tech after the end of its useful life cycle.”

Inside Big Oil’s Business as Usual: Failure on Climate and Profits from War: A new report shows oil majors fall short of meeting Paris Agreement targets while fueling global military conflicts, Stella Levantesi, DeSmog, 6/19/24: “Big Oil’s business as usual will increase climate change effects.”

America the Air-Conditioned: Cooling technology has become an American necessity—but an expensive one, Lora Kelley, Atlantic, 6/18/24: “The environmental cost of air-conditioning puts users in an impossible predicament…. until more efficient cooling is widespread, AC will contribute to the rising heat that makes it essential.”

How the small Pacific island nation of Vanuatu drastically cut plastic pollution: With lagoons once choked by rubbish, pressure from the appalled community led the government to ban certain single-use products, Prianka Srinivasan, The Guardian, 6/20/24

Mountaintop coal mine in Kentucky to become a solar farm: The solar farm will produce enough electricity to power over half a million homes each year, YCC Team, Yale Climate Connections, 6/20/24

‘Gold mine’ of century-old wheat varieties could help breeders restore long lost traits: Historic traits could make modern wheat more resilient to disease and other stressors, Erik Stokstad, Science, 6/17/24: “The historic landraces contained twice as much diversity as all the modern varieties.”

How Babies and Young Children Learn to Understand Language: on the Science of Language Acquisition in Early Childhood, Steven Mithen, LitHub, 6/20/24: “Infants a mere three days old prefer listening to the rhythm of their caregivers’ language.” Book: The Language Puzzle: Piecing Together the Six-Million-Year Story of How Words Evolved

Across a Continent, Trees Sync Their Fruiting to the Sun: European beech trees more than 1,500 kilometers apart all drop their fruit at the same time in a grand synchronization event now linked to the summer solstice, Meghan Willcoxon, Quanta, 6/18/24

‘Fantastic’ particle could be most energetic neutrino ever detected: The ultra-high-energy neutrino was spotted by deep-sea detectors and could point to a massive cosmic event, Davide Castelvecchi, Nature, 6/21/24: “The particle probably had an energy of many tens of petaelectronvolts — which would make it the most energetic ever detected.”

This is what it looks like when a black hole awakens: Astronomers say a previously “inactive” galaxy lit up as the massive black hole at its center started to feast on gas and dust, creating a cosmic light show, Rachel Pannett, Washington Post, 6/19/24: “…the black hole in this galaxy, located 300 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo, is unusual in that it is clearly visible.”

The undeniable pull
of passion
is impossible
to let go of

—from “This Tender Riot of Chaos,” Pam Rehm

Health, Wellness

Making art is a uniquely human act, and one that provides a wellspring of health benefits, Gairja Kaimal, The Conversation, 6/20/24: “Creativity is a defining feature of the human species….human brains are not computers processing data. They are biological prediction machines that perceive the environment through memories and the senses, with the capacity to use that information to imagine plausible future scenarios.” Book: The Expressive Instinct

Birds

America's Disappearing Grasslands—and Grassland Birds: For migrating prairie birds, flyover country is an increasingly hostile place, Michael Parks, Sierra, 6/17/24: “The central grasslands are now about 40 percent of their size before European settlement.”

‘Lost’ birds list will aid in protecting species, Pat Leonard, Cornell Chronicle, 6/17/24: “This method helps identify research priorities for possible conservation action.”

Connecticut Warbler: Seeing this bird involves the 3 Ps: Patience, Perseverance, and Providence, Laura Erickson, For the Birds, 6/17/24: “The Connecticut Warbler is an infamously hard-to-find bird.”

The wind takes a break to make us drunk
we carry it on our backs
our way is rugged 
In what language should I speak to you
when the sun loses its way

—from “A Rain of Stars,” Évelyne Trouillot, translated from the Kreyòl by Danielle Legros Georges

Writers of Note

I recently had the pleasure of talking to Karl Marlantes about his latest novel, Cold Victory, a novel set in Finland in 1947, where Americans and Russians were feeling out the beginning of the Cold War and Finland was trying to maintain its independence as a country. It’s a terrific book I can recommend to all. Here’s the interview at Writerscast, also on Apple, Spotify, and other podcast sources.

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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