The Weird Times
Inner Monologues and Desultory Reporting from Outer Spaces
The Weird Times: Issue 47, April 4 2021
“We have a long way to go in terms of respecting Black people, Black bodies, Black lives in this country” —Bernice King (the daughter of Martin Luther King Jr.)
“On matters of race, on matters of decency, baseball should lead the way.”— Bart Giamatti, president of Yale University and Commissioner of Major League Baseball
“He’s just got this magical aura about him. I knew when he shot it, it was going in, I’m telling you. I knew it was going in.” —Gonzaga basketball coach Mark Few describing senior Jalen Suggs after his almost half-court shot beat UCLA in overtime in the Final Four.
How Kitchen Table Press Changed Publishing, Ashawnta Jackson, JStor Daily, 3/27/21
“We really need to do something about publishing,” Audre Lorde said to fellow writer Barbara Smith in a 1980 phone conversation. It was that phone call that launched Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. As Smith wrote in a 1989 essay, “As feminist and lesbian of color writers, we knew that we had no options for getting published except at the mercy or whim of others—in either commercial or alternative publishing, since both are white dominated.”
The Unending Assaults on Girlhood: Rape culture permeates adolescence. The lessons that it teaches girls cast long shadows, Sophie Gilbert, The Atlantic, 3/30/21
Girlhood, Melissa Febos writes in her new essay collection of the same name, is “a darker time for many than we are often willing to acknowledge.” The overall impression she creates is a collage of discomfitingly familiar rites of passage, all distinct and yet all tied together by a thread of learned self-abnegation. The book reads at moments like a meme built from various half-buried abuses and indignities, in which you pick the ones that apply to you—“Tag yourself. I’m Sexually Harassed as a Teenager by My Middle-Aged Boss, but also Stalked on the Way Home From School and Consented to Acts I Didn’t Want to Do to Avoid a Worse Outcome.” Febos is an intoxicating writer, but I found myself most grateful for the vivid clarity of her thinking. During girlhood, she argues, “we learn to adopt a story about ourselves—what our value is, what beauty is, what is harmful, what is normal—and to privilege the feelings, comfort, perceptions, and power of others over our own.”
The week I read this book, seven women and one man were murdered in Atlanta by a man who seems to have resented his desire for women so much that he decided to kill some of them, privileging his comfort over their lives. That same week, a document drawing from hundreds of reports alleging rape, assault, and harassment at my London high school and its brother institution was made public. The file, an open letter to the headmaster of the boys’ school, Dulwich College, is filled with stories of violations both large and small that girls minimized because, like Febos, they were taught extremely early on to protect boys from the reality and the consequences of their behavior. The document is painfully long; each story tore at my heart and made me burn with useless rage.
Do Yourself a Favor This Spring: Go See the American Woodcock’s ‘Sky Dance’: Timberdoodles have one of the wildest mating rituals among North American birds, and you should definitely check it out. Here’s how, Andy McGlashen, Audubon, 3/26/21
We speak, of course, of that doe-eyed early migrant, forest-dwelling sandpiper, and welcome sign of spring known by many names: Timberdoodle. Bogsucker. Labrador Twister. American Woodcock.
How Settlers Convinced Themselves They Were the First Owners of America, Michael Heller in Conversation with Andrew Keen via Keen On, Lithub, 4/1/21
Michael Heller: This is one of the hardest pieces, for me always as a professor, to get across to my law students. They think that “first” is an empirical fact. First is “Native Americans were here first.” But that’s not the way ownership works. First is a story. And in that story, we are always deciding who counts as first and what activities count as first. So when America was being claimed, what the law did is define what it means to be first, is to chop down trees, to plant in rows, to build fences. That’s what it meant to be first.
Andrew Keen: And that’s maybe not the Hobbesian but certainly the Lockean notion of land and production. Is that fair?
Michael Heller: Absolutely right. Early American settlers thought a lot about Locke. This was a very important thinker in that 18th-century milieu. It is very much the case that “first” is up for grabs, just like possession is. These are stories that we tell. They’re stories that kids tell, they’re stories that grownups tell, to figure out who gets what. And it’s important to understand how those stories can be turned upside down to achieve particular goals. Treading lightly through the forest, which is the image that many anthropologists had, not totally correct, about Native Americans, that didn’t count as first, it didn’t count as possession, it didn’t count as labor. What counted as first possession and labor was to make New England look like Old England. So it’s fairly easy for the settlers to convince themselves that they were the first owners of America.
Michael Heller is the co-author of Mine! How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives
Consider the Stork, Katherine Rundell, London Review of Books, 4/2/21
Globally our admiration and love for storks has swung – haphazardly, destructively – between the sentimental and gastronomic. At least four species are endangered because of hunting and habitat loss. Until very recently, Britain was a country without its own storks. The penultimate English-born stork hatchlings were in 1416; then there was a 604-year wait until, last May, five chicks were born to one of the hundred or so birds introduced as part of a rewilding project on the Knepp Estate near Horsham in Sussex. Nobody knows why they became extinct in Britain: it’s said they prefer republics, so we could blame the royals, but it’s more likely they were hunted into nothing for food. They featured in medieval feasts as one of the ingredients of game pie, a delicacy which could also include heron, crane, crow, cormorant and bittern. In Europe, they were part of the ritual of spectacular dining well into the 17th century: food gilded with precious metal, cocks wearing paper hats mounted on pig’s backs like jockeys, boars’ heads with fireworks shooting from their mouths, and storks roasted and then replumed to look as if they had just folded their wings from flight and come to rest on the table.
Biden Should Ditch Bipartisanship and Focus on Pressuring Centrists Democrats: This op-ed argues that there’s no point in trying to negotiate with Republicans, and that President Biden’s legislative priorities hinge on pressuring centrist Democrats instead, Kaylen Ralph, Teen Vogue, 4/2/21
The issue is that Republicans don’t want our democracy to function for the people. And unfortunately, some centrist Democrats, such as senators Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, the latter of whom is the only Democrat who has yet to co-sponsor the For the People Act, are supporting their autocratic endeavors by refusing to endorse filibuster reform.
“The structure is such that there isn’t an opposing party to negotiate with; the Republicans at this point are not on the level of good-faith operators when it comes to governing, [so] there’s no bipartisanship,” Amanda Litman, cofounder and executive director of Run for Something, told Teen Vogue.
“Ultimately, the Democrats are negotiating with ourselves, within our party,” she continued. “And when you get rid of the filibuster, it actually broadens the opportunity for bipartisanship and for compromise in ways that might sometimes frustrate us as a party, but also, ultimately, will make our bills and our legislating more expansive in the viewpoints that are included, or that are considered. While any one Republican or one Democrat might not be the deciding factor, you can actually start to build coalition.”
A Taiwan Crisis May Mark the End of the American Empire: America is a diplomatic fox, while Beijing is a hedgehog fixated on the big idea of reunification, Niall Ferguson, Bloomberg Opinion, 3/21/21
In a famous essay, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin borrowed a distinction from the ancient Greek poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”
“There exists,” wrote Berlin, “a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to … a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance” — the hedgehogs — “and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory” — the foxes.
Berlin was talking about writers. But the same distinction can be drawn in the realm of great-power politics. Today, there are two superpowers in the world, the U.S. and China. The former is a fox. American foreign policy is, to borrow Berlin’s terms, “scattered or diffused, moving on many levels.” China, by contrast, is a hedgehog: it relates everything to “one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision.”
WHEREAS the word whereas means it being the case that, or considering that, or while on the contrary; is a qualifying or introductory statement, a conjunction, a connector. Whereas sets the table. The cloth. The saltshakers and plates. Whereas calls me to the table because Whereas precedes and invites. I have come now. I’m seated across from a Whereas smile. Under pressure of formalities, I fidget I shake my legs. I’m not one for these smiles, Whereas I have spent my life in unholding. What do you mean by unholding? Whereas asks and since Whereas rarely asks, I am moved to respond, Whereas, I have learned to exist and exist without your formality, saltshakers, plates, cloth. Without the slightest conjunctions to connect me. Without an exchange of questions, without the courtesy of answers. This has become mine, this unholding. Whereas, with or without the setup, I can see the dish being served. Whereas let us bow our heads in prayer now, just enough to eat;
From the poem WHEREAS by Layli Long Soldier (Ed.: please click through to read this poem). Whereas is also the title of her book, published by Graywolf Press in 2017.
"I am a citizen of the United States and an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, meaning I am a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation--and in this dual citizenship I must work, I must eat, I must art, I must mother, I must friend, I must listen, I must observe, constantly I must live."
Janet Yellen: Climate change poses ‘existential threat’ to financial markets: The FSOC focused on climate for the first time since Congress established the body in 2010, Victoria Guyda, Politico, 3/31/21
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Wednesday called climate change “an existential threat” and the biggest emerging risk to the health of the U.S. financial system, pledging to marshal regulatory forces to guard against its harmful effects.
Yellen made the promise during her inaugural appearance as the head of the Financial Stability Oversight Council, a panel of top regulators tasked with policing Wall Street behavior that has the potential to crash the entire economy.
McConnell: From Moscow’s Mitch to Beijing’s Bozo, Harold Meyerson, American Prospect, 4/1/21
Or, if you prefer, China’s Chum.
In today’s New York Times, Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell provided a quote that may be the quintessence of McConnellism. Asked about whether he’d support President Biden’s infrastructure proposal, McConnell replied:
"If it’s going to have massive tax increases and trillions more added to the national debt, it’s not likely."
And there, in one admirably succinct sentence, is the reason why the Republicans are the party of national decline. (Ed. note: highlight added for effect) Any major new governmental initiative perforce will either be paid for with tax increases, or increase the national debt, or be offset by cuts to existing programs. In one sentence, McConnell has ruled out the first two options, leaving unsaid that his preferred option, and that of his party, is to slash benefits and social services. That’s why McConnell considers his job to be killing all new initiatives, if and only if he can’t pay for them by reducing his fellow Americans’ living standards.
Larry Brilliant Has a Plan to Speed Up the Pandemic’s End: We'll never get herd immunity, but with speedy, deft combat against new infections, the epidemiologist says we could get back to normalish life, Steven Levy, Wired, 4/1/21
WHAT HAPPENS TO Cassandras when their warnings become reality? If you are epidemiologist Larry Brilliant, you work to mitigate a situation that would not have been so terrible if people had listened to you in the first place. Pre-Covid Brilliant, along with many of his peers, had been ringing the alarm on pandemics in op-eds, a much-viewed TED talk, and a tragically prophetic horror movie he advised on called Contagion. In the last year, Brilliant—best known for his work in helping to eradicate smallpox—has been active in helping people understand Covid-19, as founder and CEO of Pandefense Advisory.
Now, along with noted epidemiologist Ian Lipkin and Pandefense Advisory colleagues Lisa Danzig and Karen Pak Oppenheimer, he has proposed a plan to help us avoid an unnecessarily lengthy recovery. Basically, Brilliant and his coauthors are instructing us to discard the panacea of herd immunity and gird ourselves for localized combat against a virus that produces ever more infectious variants. Ultimately, Brilliant envisions a framework that will not only get us to normalish but also position us to fend off pandemics to come.
How mRNA Technology Could Change the World: mRNA’s story likely will not end with COVID-19: Its potential stretches far beyond this pandemic, Derek Thompson, The Atlantic, 3/29/21
The triumph of mRNA, from backwater research to breakthrough technology, is not a hero’s journey, but a heroes’ journey. Without Katalin Karikó’s grueling efforts to make mRNA technology work, the world would have no Moderna or BioNTech. Without government funding and philanthropy, both companies might have gone bankrupt before their 2020 vaccines. Without the failures in HIV-vaccine research forcing scientists to trailblaze in strange new fields, we might still be in the dark about how to make the technology work. Without an international team of scientists unlocking the secrets of the coronavirus’s spike protein several years ago, we might not have known enough about this pathogen to design a vaccine to defeat it last year. mRNA technology was born of many seeds.
The Fourth Surge Is Upon Us. This Time, It’s Different: A deadlier and more transmissible variant has taken root, but now we have the tools to stop it if we want, Zeynep Tufekci, The Atlantic, 3/29/21
We appear to be entering our fourth surge.
The good news is that this one is different. We now have an unparalleled supply of astonishingly efficacious vaccines being administered at an incredible clip. If we act quickly, this surge could be merely a blip for the United States. But if we move too slowly, more people will become infected by this terrible new variant, which is acutely dangerous to those who are not yet vaccinated.
Study sounds latest warning of rainforest turning into savanna as climate warms, Malavika Vyawahare, Mongabay, 3/31/21
A recent study from Brazil shows that heat stress is disrupting a critical component of photosynthesis in tree species found in the Amazon and Cerrado belt.
Leaves heat up faster than the ambient air, and sufficiently high temperatures can cause irreversible damage to them and endanger the tree.
The area has become hotter in recent decades and faced increasingly intense heat waves, fueled not just by global warming but also local deforestation.
Tropical forests could look more and more like deciduous forests or savannas in the future, which are better adapted to deal with higher temperatures, the study found.
As the planet warms, it isn’t just humans who are feeling the heat — trees are too. Rising temperatures are disrupting a primary engine of life on Earth: photosynthesis.
Turning Wood into Plastic: Plastics are one of the world’s largest polluters, taking hundreds of years to degrade in nature. A research team, led by YSE professor Yuan Yao and Liangbing Hu from the University of Maryland, has created a high-quality bioplastic from wood byproducts that they hope can solve one of the world’s most pressing environmental issues, Josh Anusewicz, Yale Environment, 4/2/21
Efforts to shift from petrochemical plastics to renewable and biodegradable plastics have proven tricky — the production process can require toxic chemicals and is expensive, and the mechanical strength and water stability is often insufficient. But researchers have made a breakthrough, using wood byproducts, that shows promise for producing more durable and sustainable bioplastics.
A study published in Nature Sustainability, co-authored by Yuan Yao, assistant professor of industrial ecology and sustainable systems at Yale School of the Environment (YSE), outlines the process of deconstructing the porous matrix of natural wood into a slurry. The researchers say the resulting material shows a high mechanical strength, stability when holding liquids, and UV-light resistance. It can also be recycled or safely biodegraded in the natural environment, and has a lower life-cycle environmental impact when compared with petroleum-based plastics and other biodegradable plastics.
Sea level is rising at fastest rate in 2,000 years, and the quickest in N.J., Rutgers study says, Jonathan D. Salant, NJ Advance Media, 3/30/21
Climate change is causing glaciers to melt faster, raising sea levels along the Atlantic coast at a rate not seen for 2,000 years, according to a new study led by a Rutgers University resercher.
The study found that sea levels were increasing the most in South Jersey. Two of the locations studied were Cape May Court House and Leeds Point.
The Science of Making Americans Hurt Their Own Country: A new report lays bare why Russian disinformation succeeds, Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic, 3/19/21
For decades now, Russian security services have studied a concept called “reflexive control”—the science of how to get your enemies to make mistakes. To be successful, practitioners must first analyze their opponents deeply, to understand where they get their information and why they trust it; then they need to find ways of playing with those trusted sources, in order to insert errors and mistakes. This way of thinking has huge implications for the military; consider how a piece of incorrect information might get a general to make a mistake. But it works in politics too. The Russian security services have now studied us and worked out (it probably wasn’t very hard) that large numbers of Americans—not only Fox News pundits and OANN broadcasters but also members of Congress—are very happy to accept sensational information, however tainted, from any source that happens to provide it. As long as it suits their partisan frames, and as long as it can be used against their opponents, they don’t care who invented it or for what purpose.
As a result, supplying an edited audiotape or a piece of false evidence to one of the bottom-feeders of the information ecosystem is incredibly easy; after that, others will ensure that it rises up the food chain. Russian disinformation doesn’t succeed thanks to the genius of Russians; it succeeds thanks to the sharp partisanship of Americans. Russian disinformation works because Americans allow it to work—and because those same Americans don’t care anymore about the harm they do to their country.
I don’t have much to say today
I don't have much to say
you ask too many questions
it's impossible to be specific enough
to satisfy your every need
there is nothing else to say
yet I find myself
continually explaining
what you do not understand
there are too many ways to
misunderstand what we mean
to each other
there is no noticeable difference
in the outlook today
yesterday seems forgotten already
I don't have much to say
and I am still talking to you
and you are still not listening
are you afraid of what I am telling you?
—David Wilk
RATATATAT – QUICK HITS
Fracking Brings Pollution, Not Wealth to Navajo Land: Two wells, two accidents — but no answers, Jerry Redfern, Capital and Main, 3/29/21
Can California’s Organic Vegetable Farmers Unlock the Secrets of No-Till Farming? Reducing tillage—which often relies on herbicides—has long been out of reach on organic farms. Now, a group of veteran growers are undertaking a soil health experiment with implications for California and beyond, Gosia Wozniacka, Civil Eats, 3/30/21
Meet the Briton leading a Tesla rival who wants to save the planet: Peter Rawlinson says Lucid, which is about to list for $24bn, has drawn interest from big carmakers, Jasper Jolly, The Guardian, 4/3/21
Biden’s Plans for Electric Cars is Already Outdated, Levi Tillemann, Washington Post, 4/2/21
Georgia's Black churches are horrified by Republican voter suppression – and ready to fight, Carlisa N. Johnson, The Guardian, 4/3/21
Covid-19 Vaccine Passports Are Coming. What Will That Mean? Scores of plans to verify immunity are in the works. But there are even more questions about how they’ll use data, protect privacy—and who gets certified first, Maryn McKenna, Wired, 4/2/21
The Chip Choke Point A single machine from the Netherlands could catapult China to the leading edge of the semiconductor industry. If the U.S. allowed it, that is, Tim De Chant, The Wire China, 2/7/21
Genomic surveillance: What it is and why we need more of it to track coronavirus variants and help end the COVID-19 pandemic, Alexander Sunderman, Lee Harrison, Vaughan Cooper, The Conversation, 3/31/21
Recovering from the Emotional Challenges of the Pandemic, Isaac Chotiner, The New Yorker, 3/30/21
Ty Buttrey, 28-year-old pitcher for the LA Angels, announced he is quitting baseball.
“My whole life I’ve played the game for everyone else. I just wanted to prove everyone wrong….
It was never my dream to make it to the Hall of Fame, win a World Series, or become an All-Star. In my head, I accomplished what I wanted, to prove people wrong and accomplish something extremely hard.”
“I couldn’t be any more excited to finally become just Ty. I love my family, my close teammates, friends and especially Halo Nation. I’m tired of not being there for my loved ones, and I’m tired of pretending and lying to the best fan base in the world. Life is super simple. Find your true passion, find people you love and don’t give a damn what any person outside those lines thinks. People love to have control over others.”
…I am beyond excited to finally be a normal, hardworking dude, that loves his family and friends. Life is short so just do what you love and don’t ever look back! I’m going to miss the fans more than I’m going to miss the game.
I saw a buddha pull up in a limousine
Tip his fedora to the porno queen
She said, "Come on in, we're shooting the scene"
This town is on the rocks
Looks like a painting by Hieronymous Bosch
All the souls are tied up in knots
Sometimes I think I'm gonna drown
—Stranded, by Amy Correia (2000)
April 4 Birthdays
Tris Speaker (1888)
McKinley Morganfield (Muddy Waters) (1915)
Mickey Owen (1916)
Gil Hodges (1924)
Maya Angelou (1928)
Bart Giamatti (1938)
Hugh Masakela (1939)
Take care everyone. Do keep in touch. Send poems, art, musings, if you feel the urge to contribute to the weird times that continue on all around us. It is a busy spring, isn’t it? Thanks for reading —David