The Weird Times
Inner Monologues and Desultory Reporting from Outer Spaces: Issue 244, January 12, 2025 (V5 #36)
The winds have brought Armageddon, and a brutal judgement upon the genius and arrogance of mankind’s building on a Garden of Eden, tempting the wrath of creation.—Steve Schmidt
The coming of doom is because of deeds that do not seem evil on the face of it.—Isaac Asimov
Books, Music, Art, Culture
On January 10, 1776, Thomas Paine published Common Sense. “The divine right of kings is a lie; monarchy runs against God’s plans. For all men being originally equals, no one by birth could have a right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others for ever.”
Complexity as a Liberatory Practice: Tara Anne Dalbow explores artist-poet Mina Loy’s thrilling embrace of contradiction, LA Review of Books, 1/2/25: “She published obscene experimental poetry about masturbation and menstruation and enjoyed whirlwind affairs with renowned men, all while also being a single mother who worked tirelessly to support her children well into her sixties. She believed that love was all there was to know of the divine and that love was the ruination of womankind.”
Sam Moore, part of ‘Soul Man’ musical dynamos Sam & Dave, dies at 89: The duo Sam & Dave had 1960s hits including 'Hold on, I’m Comin’ ' and ‘I Thank You,’ but the bonds between Mr. Moore and Dave Prater began to fray, Brian Murphy, Washington Post, 1/11/25
What Does Depeche Mode Have to Do With Vietnamese Americans in California? For the so-called “1.5 Generation,” music allowed an escape from the binary between home and school, Vietnamese traditions and American culture, Sigourney Schultz, HyperAllergic, 1/5/25: “Our rebellion wasn’t just a protest, but rather, a symphony and a dance of liberation.”
How Ericka Huggins and the Black Panther Party Attempted to Liberate Black Women in America: on John Huggins, Angela Y. Davis, and the Complex History of an Oft-Misunderstood Political Movement, Mary Frances Phillips, LitHub, 1/10/25: “As she chanted “All Power to the People,” she underscored the values of the BPP: community practice of love, action, authority, and change, all rooted in the collective strength of the community.” Book: Black Panther Woman: The Political and Spiritual Life of Ericka Huggins
Diversity Syndrome: On Publishing’s Relentless Pigeonholing of Black Writers: What It’s Like to Be a Black Writer of Speculative Fiction, Naomi Day, LitHub, 1/9/25: “Race is deeply meaningful from a story perspective because we’ve made it so in our cultures and our histories. But it is just one part of a human experience…”
Women on the Verge, Virginia Jackson, Public Books, 1/8/25: “Can women poets change the discourses in which we are recognized? Or are we doomed to reiterate the genres—the poetry—of which we are made?”
Eat Their Words: On the Translator’s Appetites, Xiao Yue Shan, Asymptote, 1/6/25: “It is difficult for a translator to fully establish their ‘I’ as a creative presence, but in taking responsibility as the only active speaker of a text in its new language, they are refusing to be defeated by the limits of their work’s impossible nature.”
The Internet Is Worse Than a Brainwashing Machine: A rationale is always just a scroll or a click away, Charlie Warzel, Mike Caulfield, The Atlantic, 1/6/25: “Our current, fractured media ecosystem works far faster and with less friction than past iterations, providing on-demand evidence for consumers that is more tailored than even the most frenzied cable news broadcasts can offer. And its effects extend beyond conspiracists.”
Our nightmare world of AI slop, Mark Hurst, Creative Good, 1/10/25: “the indiscriminate vomiting of generative AI into everything we read and view, every tool we use, every device in our homes, every technological infrastructure we operate or own, means at best an unproductive estrangement, a new mediating layer that no one, expert or otherwise, can really understand or control. A kind of techno-tinnitus, a buzzing hum of interference or diffusion.” (quoting Timothy Burke)
Why Is the Right Obsessed With Epic Poetry? From Elon Musk to Jordan Peterson, a certain strand of conservatism has recruited the poetry of Homer and Dante in their culture war, Orlando Reade, The Nation, 1/6/25: “Toward the end of Paradise Lost, after bringing about the Fall of Adam and Eve, Satan returns to Hell and announces to the other devils that they will all be able to escape and colonize a new world. Instead of applause, he hears a ‘universal hiss.’ They have all been turned into snakes.”
The Travails of Maria the Beauty: On the Plight of Indigenous Women in the Brazilian Amazon, Patriarchy and Exploitation in a Context of Modern-Day Colonialism, Alex Cuadros, LitHub, 1/6/25: “Maria had experienced a much more radical kind of isolation, so intense that she could scarcely speak her own native language anymore.” Book: When We Sold God's Eye: Diamonds, Murder, and a Clash of Worlds in the Amazon
power shifts hands
white hair to white hair
loud or quiet
brown blue green find
birdseed on the ground
—from “Wings, Feathers, Beaks” by Charles Alexander
Politics, Economics, Technology
How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy in 53 Days: He used the constitution to shatter the constitution, Timothy W. Ryback, Atlantic, 1/8/25: “The big joke on democracy is that it gives its mortal enemies the means to its own destruction.”
‘There are a lot of bitter people here, I’m one of them’: rust belt voters on why they backed Trump again despite his broken promises, Andrew Gumbel, The Guardian, 1/11/25: “Many in Youngstown, Ohio, believe the president-elect will tackle the town’s decline this time. Others are worried about his character flaws. Their concerns help explain how he returned to power – and how his second term might play out.”
‘He was prescient’: Jimmy Carter, the environment and the road not taken: The ex-president was a pioneer on renewable energy and land conservation but his 1980 defeat was a ‘fork in the road,’ David Smith, The Guardian, 1/6/25
Elon Musk and the new world order: the hijacking of the global conversation: How can we publicly debate policy in the face of the rising – and polarising – influence of the X owner and others whose only aim is to serve themselves, Peter Pomerantsev, The Guardian, 1/12/25: “Until the curtain around how the Musks and Zucks operate lifts, we are a society operating in the dark, influenced and shaped by forces we cannot see.”
Meta surrenders to the right on speech: “I really think this a precursor for genocide,” Casey Newton, Platformer, 1/7/25: “One way to understand these changes is as a marketing exercise, intended to convey a sense of profound change to an audience of one….But these changes are likely to substantially increase the amount of harmful speech on Meta's platforms.”
Zuck's Gift to Trump is an Opportunity for Democrats: If Trump wants to be the president of big business, Democrats should be the party that will stand up to powerful corporations, Dan Pfeiffer, Message Box, 1/8/25
Zuck’s ‘Content Moderation’ Was Always A Crock, Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo, 1/8/25: “I don’t want private companies like Meta, often ones with very bad internal cultures, passing themselves off as something verging on “institutions” that right-minded people need to defend.”
Social Media Has Ruined American Politics: Normal debates and disagreements have been replaced by personal attacks, anger, and cynicism, John Halpin, Liberal Patriot, 1/8/25: “Contemporary social media norms represent the exact opposite of responsible use of our free speech rights.”
ABC, CBS and NBC Evening News Reports on LA Wildfires Ignore Climate Change’s Role Entirely: That climate change is fueling devastating extreme weather events is beyond dispute. Why does corporate media continue to downplay or ignore it? Adam Johnson, The Column, 1/8/25
The Bogus Case Against Birthright Citizenship for the Children of Undocumented Immigrants: John Eastman, the legal brain behind the Big Lie, is paving the way for the next big assault on the Constitution, Paul Gowder, Unpopulist, 1/6/25
Trump Is on a Collision Course With the US Budget, Joseph E. Stiglitz, Project Syndicate, 1/6/25: “If only a handful of Republican lawmakers keep their promise not to increase the US budget deficit, there is no way that the incoming administration can enact its economic agenda and keep the government running.”
Universities and the Coming Storm: It’s difficult for colleges to defend democracy if they aren’t run democratically, Francois Furstenburg, Portside, 1/8/25: “As our Founders understood, power diffused in a system of checks and balances helps guarantee democracy. Centralized power, on the other hand, is always susceptible to abuse.”
The Truth About Migration, Ian Goldin, Project Syndicate, 1/10/25: “Today’s rich countries owe much of their success to the contributions of migrant workers. Yet rising anti-immigrant sentiment threatens to restrict migration, jeopardizing host countries that depend on foreign labor and developing economies that rely on remittances to drive economic development.”
National Security Resilience and Reform: Trump 2.0 and Beyond, Harold Hongju Koh, Just Security, 1/9/25: “…as the 21st century unfolds, I refuse to believe that there will not come a time when we can return to a shared national commitment: not to “America First,” but rather, to being ‘Americans First.’”
President Biden Should Pardon Ethel Rosenberg: A newly released classified document shows that the National Security Agency knew Ethel Rosenberg was not a spy—and that the government executed her anyway, Phillip Deering, Portside, 1/9/25
A Survival Guide for the Worst-Case Scenario, John Pavlovitz, Beautiful Mess, 1/9/25: “Lately, I daydream about the things we could all be doing over the coming years if we didn't have to work tirelessly to protect ourselves from the incoming President and his rogues gallery Administration. I imagine you do, too: Be relentlessly present., Cultivate nourishing relationships.
In the Face of Disaster, A New Age of Solidarity, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Lucid, 1/9/25: “ As things fall apart, we can choose to come together, creating something genuine and constructive out of tragedy.”
ICYMI: How to live under Trump II: What will be your posture in a second Trump era? Resistance? Retreating into the local? Returning to your craft? Anand Giridharadas, The.Ink, 1/8/25: “What I’m seeing is people attempting to attend more holistically to a nation in ill health. What I see is people spreading back out across many lanes, taking on what they know how to take on — at the level of the symptoms, and at the level of the causes. What I see is many postures of trying.”
The People's Cabinet: Naming a Positive Form of Opposition, Timothy Snyder, Thinking About, 1/11/25: “Opposition and resistance will take many forms. But a people’s cabinet would be a specific form of activity for politicians. It should be composed of present and past elected officials, and perhaps also past holders of high offices. Unlike journalists or academics or activists or others, such people bear not just ethical but political responsibility. They might have a political future in a restored American democracy. That is the point.”
Some helpful to know election statistics from Michael Podhorzer’s “Weekend Reading”
The popular vote result was almost entirely a collapse in support for Harris and Democrats, not an increase in support for Trump and MAGA.
Most of Harris’s losses were due to anti-MAGA surge voters staying home.
I promise if you hear
Of me dead anywhere near
A cop, then that cop killed me.
—Jericho Brown
Science, Environment
The LA Fires and the Big Bang: The human quest for knowledge, and the descent into willful blindness, Bill McKibben, The Crucial Years, 1/9/25: “It’s both simple and complicated: here’s a remarkable paper from Nature explaining how the melt of Arctic sea ice, by affecting the jetstream, is making West Coast fires worse.”
How Big Oil Hindered The Fight Against L.A.’s Wildfires: California’s oil and gas companies avoided paying billions of dollars in taxes that could have been used to fight the inferno, Freddy Brewster, Lucy Dean Stockton, The Lever, 1/8/25: “It makes no sense to continue to subsidize these polluting corporations, which have been making record profits, while state and local governments face significant deficits and cuts to critical infrastructure.”
Learn smart lessons from the L.A. fires, not stupid lessons: Ignore the political propaganda. We live in a world with more fires now, and we need to prepare for it, Noah Smith, Noahpinion, 1/10/25: “The insurance industry as we know it is in big trouble. Climate change is making wildfires worse, but there’s not much we can do about that right now. Forest management needs to get a lot more proactive, but is being blocked by regulation.”
We Can Choose the Ending to This Disaster Movie: The Los Angeles fires are either a wake-up call or a funeral pyre. It’s our decision, David Sirota, Zeteo, 1/11/25: “Day to day, climate is simply not part of the news and political discussion in the US, and it is particularly absent in smaller, so-called heartland outlets…fossil-fueled global heating goes unmentioned in the news coverage of the causes of climate-related disasters.” DW: ask yourself, why is this? Isn’t the answer obvious?
The California Fires are a Disaster. The American Cruelty is a Tragedy, John Pavlovitz, Beautiful Mess, 1/12/25: “America has shown how much damage we are willing to do to one another, regardless of what the weather or circumstances bring.”
Climate Models Can’t Explain What’s Happening to Earth: Global warming is moving faster than the best models can keep a handle on, Zoë Schlanger, The Atlantic, 1/6/25: “…the exquisitely local scale on which climate change is experienced and the global purview of our best tools to forecast its effects simply do not line up.”
Learning from Beavers to Build Dams and Restore Ecosystems: In Jackson County, Wisconsin, Jim Hoffman builds BDAs—beaver dam analogs—to restore wetlands, Bennet Goldstein, Barn Raiser, 1/5/25: “Nature can repair itself, but the process of restoring stream complexity can take millennia. Mock beaver dams can jump-start the process, reducing the timing to mere decades.”
Shrinking trees and tuskless elephants: the strange ways species are adapting to humans, Patrick Greenfield, The Guardian, 1/6/25: “One tragic adaptation in response to the devastating pressure of poaching in previous decades has been an increase in the proportion of African elephants born with shorter tusks or no tusks at all.”
Devices inspired by a moth could help protect bats from wind turbine strikes: They use high-frequency sounds to deter bats, YCC Team, Yale Climate Connections, 1/8/25: “…people have built these bat deterrents that emit high-frequency noises, thinking that, maybe it’ll jam bats’ echolocation.”
The business case for saving coral reefs: A growing body of research shows the nation’s coral reefs protect $1.8 billion in economic assets each year and should be protected for our sake and their own, Saqib Rahim, Grist, 1/6/25
New research shows a quarter of freshwater animals are threatened with extinction, Christina Larson, AP News, 1/8/25: “Freshwater habitats – including rivers, lakes, ponds, streams, bogs and wetlands – cover less than 1% of the planet’s surface, but support 10% of its animal species.”
U.S. Support and New Investments Buoy Hopes for Marine Energy: Producing energy from waves and tides has a stop-and-start history. But with a new U.S. testing site opening in 2026, recent federal investment, and accelerating efforts to reach net zero emissions, developers aiming to harness the vast power of the sea are feeling optimistic, Nicola Jones, Yale Environment 360, 1/6/25
‘Dinosaur highway’ from 166 million years ago is unearthed: Four giant herbivores and one predator walked across the same spot in modern-day England. “It’s the closest we’ll get to a time machine,” said one of the lead excavators, Leo Sands, Washington Post, 1/6/25
Dinosaurs roamed the northern hemisphere millions of years earlier than previously thought, according to new analysis of the oldest North American fossils, Univ Wisconsin, ScienceDaily, 1/7/25: “…evidence that the reptiles were present in the northern hemisphere millions of years earlier than previously known.”
The Ocean Teems With Networks of Interconnected Bacteria: Nanotube bridge networks grow between the most abundant photosynthetic bacteria in the oceans, suggesting that the world is far more interconnected than anyone realized, Veronique Greenwood, Quanta, 1/6/25
Rapid return of water from ground to atmosphere through plants: Research reshapes understanding of terrestrial water cycle, implications for climate and ecosystem health, Chapman Univ, ScienceDaily, 1/9/25: “the time it takes for water to flow through plants (referred to as transit or turnover time) and return to the atmosphere is among the fastest in the global water cycle, ranging from just five days in croplands to 18 days in evergreen needleleaf forests.”
Becoming Moss
I lie on the ground.
I open my mouth.
I suck on a spoon.
I embrace a stone.
A beetle crawls by.
I empty my mind
I stuff it with grass
I'm green, I repeat.
The sun is a drink.
The yellowest squash
I can't get enough
I can't get enough
I can't get enough
I can't get enough
I can't get enough
I can't get enough
—Ella Frears
Health, Wellness
Landmark study affirms fluoride’s link to lowered IQ, adds to debate, Douglas Main, New Lede, 1/6/25: “The 13 analyzed studies that quantified individual exposures from all sources found an IQ score decrease of 1.63 points per 1 ppm increase in urinary fluoride.”
Elderberry juice shows benefits for weight management, metabolic health, Wash St Univ, ScienceDaily, 1/8/25: “A clinical trial found that drinking 12 ounces of elderberry juice daily for a week causes positive changes in the gut microbiome and improves glucose tolerance and fat oxidation.”
trail sounds lure
what none thought edible:
see-through,
the forest comes.
moist eyes running back
all mossing toward the sun.
—from “Where/Did You Sleep Last Night,” Brody Parrish Craig
Birds, Birding
Bird strikes drop by more than 95% at McCormick Place after bird-safe film installed, Kaitlin Washburn, NBC Chicago, 1/8/25
Chuckwalla becomes a national monument. What’s next for the protected land, Mackenna Sievertson, LAist, 1/7/25: “President Joe Biden officially designated the Chuckwalla National Monument…protecting more than 600,000 acres of land and several endangered species of plants and animals.”
I hear the birds singing outside my window,
trapeze artists twirling their tiny bodies
from one branch to the next.
Pigeons are heavy, seem stupid, clueless,
not like these air magicians on my lemon tree.
—from “Longing,” Kim Dower
Support victims of the LA fires:
Los Angeles Fire Department Foundation
Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.—Theodore Roethke
TWT reflects my weekly attempt to collect and share what seems most important or useful for us to know about. Please don’t let any of it defeat you. There is still so much we can and must do, all of us together. The communities we make will save us.
(And toward that end, if you can share TWT with friends and family, that would be swell too…)
Be well everyone. Stay strong.
Love the ones you’re with.
Love always—David
Love is always the place where I begin and end.—bell hooks