Judith Butler: To Imagine a World After This, Democracy Needs the Humanities (and imagination). “The world we have known is the world that is bound up with the movement toward greater destruction. What about a world we are yet to know?”
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Political scientist Adam Przeworski (born in Nazi-occupied Poland) is keeping a diary. “I am trying to find categories in which to place the current situation and historical precedents from which one could draw some enlightenment. I fail in both.”
“If you’re looking for some great databases of the ongoing resistance (as well as some other useful resources) here’s a thread of where to start.”
87% Of Loud Crashing Noises Are Nothing, Report Top Experts From Other Room. “Despite initially reporting ‘Dammit!’ and ‘God dammit!’ separated by several seconds…”
Microsoft claims they’ve made a significant breakthrough in quantum computing involving Majorana quasiparticles. “It’s theoretically possible for an electron to hide itself, with each half hiding at either end of the wire.” 😳
Where Do Trans Kids Go from Here? “I never thought that my country would want to disappear my child, and would want to essentially deny her existence as a person.” Heartbreaking, infuriating, cruel, immoral.
The Information Overwhelm
In the most recent issue of Garbage Day, Ryan Broderick writes about how Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone with shit” has been embraced by the Trump administration in both governance and in messaging.
The brain-breaking feeling you get watching something like the ASMR video or the time you waste trying to determine whether the image Musk shared is real or not is, like with Project 2025 and the executive orders, by design. It’s meant to initially trigger you and ultimately wear you down.
Stuff like this always makes me think of Hannah Arendt’s comments in this 1974 interview, particularly the last line (emphasis mine):
The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie — a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days — but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.
And of Toni Morrison on the true function of racism:
It’s important, therefore, to know who the real enemy is, and to know the function, the very serious function of racism, which is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and so you spend 20 years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says that you have no art so you dredge that up. Somebody says that you have no kingdoms and so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary. There will always be one more thing.
Timothy Snyder writing in the aftermath of January 6th:
When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place. Without agreement about some basic facts, citizens cannot form the civil society that would allow them to defend themselves. If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions.
“Firing civil servants and dismantling government departments is how aspiring strongmen consolidate personal power”. Here’s how that has played out recently in Türkiye, Benin, Hungary, and Venezuela.
“The odds of a city-killer asteroid impact in 2032 keep rising. Should we be worried?” If the JWST can’t rule out an impact in the next few months, we may have to wait until 2028 to know for sure. “Bit awkward, if so.”
Timothy Snyder recaps what he heard at the Munich Security Conference about the new foreign policy strategy being pursued by the Trump administration. He calls it “affirmative action for dictators” (of Russia and China).
They’re Purposefully Traumatizing the Federal Workforce
Russell Vought is a Christian nationalist, a significant contributor to Project 2025, the policy director of the RNC’s platform committee for the 2024 election, and is currently the director of the Office of Management and Budget and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
In 2023, he gave a private speech at a meeting of his Center for Renewing America think tank in which he describes the goal of the purge of governmental employees that’s happening right now. A short clip of the speech obtained by ProPublica:
A transcript:
We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.
From the accompanying article:
In his 2024 speech, Vought said he was spending the majority of his time helping lead Project 2025 and drafting an agenda for a future Trump presidency. “We have detailed agency plans,” he said. “We are writing the actual executive orders. We are writing the actual regulations now, and we are sorting out the legal authorities for all of what President Trump is running on.”
Vought laid out how his think tank is crafting the legal rationale for invoking the Insurrection Act, a law that gives the president broad power to use the military for domestic law enforcement. The Washington Post previously reported the issue was at the top of the Center for Renewing America’s priorities.
“We want to be able to shut down the riots and not have the legal community or the defense community come in and say, ‘That’s an inappropriate use of what you’re trying to do,’” he said. Vought held up the summer 2020 unrest following George Floyd’s murder as an example of when Trump ought to have had the ability to deploy the armed forces but was stymied.
In another video, Vought stated that the “entire apparatus” of the US government was vulnerable and “exposed to our strategy”. And in this one, he talks about the president’s need to be able to ignore laws.
Over at Vox, Zack Beauchamp wrote about Vought today too: The obscure manifesto that explains the Trump-Musk power grab.
In 2022, Vought published an essay in the American Mind, a publication of the arch-Trumpist Claremont Institution, that provides an answer to some of these questions. Read properly, it serves as kind of a Rosetta stone for the early days of the Trump administration — explaining the logic behind the contemptuous lawbreaking that has become its trademark.
Beauchamp continues:
Vought believes that executive agencies have, with Congress and the courts’ blessing, usurped so much power that the Constitution is no longer in effect. He believes that presidents have a duty to try and enforce the true constitution, using whatever novel arguments they can dream up, even if the rest of the government might reject them. And he believes that threatening to ignore the Supreme Court isn’t a lawless abuse of power, but rather the very means by which the separation of powers is defended.
Russell Vought can call this whatever he wants, but it’s fairly clear what it amounts to: a recipe for a constitutional crisis. And it’s one the president currently appears to be following to a tee.
You should read both articles in their entirety.
Part of what this underscores for me is that this is not just Elon Musk’s coup. Musk seems to be following his own playbook but it’s clear that there are multiple, intersecting, mutually beneficial things going on there with Trump, Musk, Vought, and many Republican members of Congress. As Osita Nwanevu wrote recently in the Guardian:
Democratic republican governance will never be secured in America without turning our attention to the structure of our economic system as well. Dismantling the federal government to prevent that from happening was a key object of the conservative project before Trump. It has remained so with him at the head of the Republican party and will remain so whenever his time is up.
Not sure what else to say about this…their plan is all laid out in Vought’s remarks and in Project 2025. They’ve crossed some of this stuff off of the checklist already, so I guess we should be on the lookout for the rest of it, e.g. when/if protesting ramps up as the weather warms, we should expect Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and attempt to use the US military to quell dissent.
If you’re wondering “where are all the protests?!”, they are happening all over the place. “From Stonewall to Tesla dealerships, protesters are pioneering a form of opposition that doesn’t necessarily center on Washington, D.C.”
Wokeness Is Not to Blame for Trump. “I believe that it’s we elites, who do not enjoy getting dogpiled on social media or having college students yell at us about settler colonialism, who are the most put off by the hyperwokeness of our era.”
Lizzie Wade’s forthcoming book is about human resilience in the face of cataclysm. “For millennia, the rich & powerful have conspired to conceal how resourceful, creative, and resilient humans beings are, and always have been, when the worst befalls us.”
Unbelievably Cruel ASMR Video by the White House of Deporting Immigrants
This afternoon on Twitter, the official White House account posted an ASMR video of an immigrant deportation flight. Elon Musk quoted-tweeted the video with “Haha wow 🧌🏅”. Here’s a screen recording I made of the video & tweet:
A popular genre on YouTube, ASMR videos are designed to trigger feelings of relaxation and low-grade euphoria through sounds and imagery. In this video, the Trump White House invites us to relax to the clinking of handcuffs, the rattling of chains, and other sounds of immigrants being shackled like criminals and placed on flights out of the country. Some of those being deported are not criminals, are being imprisoned in countries other than their own, could be sent to a detention center in Guantanamo Bay, or might be sent back to countries with autocratic regimes to face persecution or death.
This is unfathomably cruel and monstrous. Vile. Evil. The stuff of sadistic dictators and terrorists. Nazis. People who killed cats for fun when they were kids. From the top down, the people serving in the Trump administration are sick, inhuman, heartless. This video absolutely gutted me. I am so very ashamed to be an American today. (via @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social)
Over the past 20 years, archaeologists working in the Amazon have found evidence of an ancient civilization that reached a peak population of 1 million around 150 CE.
Good read. “Dismantling the federal government to prevent that from happening was a key object of the conservative project before Trump. It has remained so with him at the head of the Republican party and will remain so whenever his time is up.”
The War on DEI Is a Smoke Screen. “MAGA’s attacks on ‘wokeness’ and diversity, equity, and inclusion are a thinly veiled attack on the Civil Rights Movement itself.”
Ethan Marcotte resigned from his job at 18F (a GSA subsidiary) rather than participate in the Trump/Musk purge of gov’t employees. “I didn’t want to sit down with anyone involved in that, and pretend like any part of their work was lawful, legitimate, or moral.”
Musk and the Trump Administration are lying about not purging anyone from the FAA involved in safety. A fired FAA employee: “The danger to the national airspace can’t be understated. This is a very real threat to the American flying public.”
In case you need a new t-shirt: READ BOOKS PUNCH NAZIS. “All proceeds from this campaign are going to SafePlace International in Oakland.”
150-Year-Olds Aren’t Collecting Social Security
Elon Musk has claimed that his “DOGE” team has found evidence of “massive fraud” at the Social Security Administration, alleging that 150-year-old Americans were receiving benefit checks. I saw this claim easily debunked over the weekend, but Wired has a good writeup of it. Basically, the programming language that these systems are written in (COBOL) often uses an arbitrary date as a baseline…most commonly a date from 150 years ago.
Computer programmers quickly claimed that the 150 figure was not evidence of fraud, but rather the result of a weird quirk of the Social Security Administration’s benefits system, which was largely written in COBOL, a 60-year-old programming language that undergirds SSA’s databases as well as systems from many other US government agencies.
COBOL is rarely used today, and as such, Musk’s cadre of young engineers may well be unfamiliar with it.
Because COBOL does not have a date type, some implementations rely instead on a system whereby all dates are coded to a reference point. The most commonly used is May 20, 1875, as this was the date of an international standards-setting conference held in Paris, known as the “Convention du Mètre.”
These systems default to the reference point when a birth date is missing or incomplete, meaning all of those entries in 2025 would show an age of 150.
The SSA also automatically stops benefit payments whenever someone reaches the age of 115.
Marisa Kabas: Elon Musk & his young acolytes are actual, open Nazis. “Whatever comes to mind when you think of a Nazi, that is for whom this country is currently being run.”
The Personal Toll of the Trump/Musk Government Purges
Brian Merchant, author of the excellent Blood in the Machine (about the Luddites), talked to a bunch of federal tech workers about the illegal purge of federal employees and shuttering of entire government agencies (also illegal): “what’s happening, how they’re processing it, and how they’re pushing back”.
“I will also say that as the Thursday deadline [for the initial fork in the road offers] approached OPM sent out these increasingly desperate emails that felt like nothing so much as a Democratic candidate at a fundraising deadline,” one worker told me. He says his team of over a dozen will soon be down to just a handful of employees. Another tells me that people of color are disproportionately being targeted for layoffs in their department. But DOGE is also trying to winnow staff through other means, too: Demanding a return to office, even for those hired as remote workers and who have never stepped foot in a government office, while at the same time, instructing the GSA to sell off or close federal buildings — making it even harder for employees to find an office to come into.
It all underlies the callousness at the heart of DOGE’s campaign, and the fact that this is an effort to hollow out the state, the firings unfurling often regardless of what a person or department really does.
“I am not a career-long gov employee by any means but even I can feel how the bedrock assumptions of what we do are being swept away,” a federal technologist told me. “Like clearly the people in charge have no interest in the missions of the agencies and there isn’t any recourse to stay the courts, as far as we can tell.”
“If they even sweep away USAID, the velvet glove of US imperialism, because they occasionally piss off Putin and Orban,” he adds, “then it’s not clear how much hope there is for things like clean air and food stamps.”
“I had BigBalls in a meeting,” another worker told me. “When I saw him I balked, and I thought ‘Oh hey, someone brought their teenaged son to work today.’ He showed up along with some others, and was not introduced as anything but an advisor.” In fact, that was one of the leading DOGE officials, wielding significant power over the US government.
(via the morning news)
“The future of the Department of Education — and of the students with disabilities who depend on it — will likely hinge […] on the world views of two billionaires who abhor what they perceive as weakness and waste.”
NBA star Victor Wembanyama brought a book with him to the All-Star Game and said that he reads before every game. My new favorite player! 📗❤️
The Global Economic Policy Uncertainty Index is at an all-time high right now, besting even the economic uncertainty at the start of the pandemic (May 2020).
“We, the opposition, are the majority. Take heart,” says Hamilton Nolan. “How do regimes manage to impose minority rule on enormous populations? By getting the majority to give up. Don’t do that.”
Amid shortages of air traffic controllers & fatal aircraft events, the Trump administration has purged several hundred FAA employees. Casual detail: the firing email came from a Microsoft email address, not a .gov one. (But her emails, etc.)
Elon Musk’s attack on key US government systems and agencies continues with the IRS: “US tax agency has received request for access to classified system containing personal financial records of US taxpayers”. Everyone’s tax records, nbd.
From Heather Cox Richardson, an overview of what the Trump administration is doing in terms of foreign policy. Their war on liberalism in the US is being matched by a war against liberal democracies.
The Evolution of Electronic Music (1929-2019). Interesting that it took so long for electronic music to creep into pop music and now you can barely find any music that doesn’t have electronic music in it.
Cool thing that I did not notice about The Wild Robot: at first the robot was computer-generated but gets more and more hand-painted throughout the film. “She literally begins to fuse with the island as she adapts and becomes a resident.”
New Evidence Suggests Humans Developed Written Language To Avoid Breaking Up In Person. “Early Mesopotamians created the first cuneiform tablets in 3200 BCE because they couldn’t bear the idea of looking their partner in the eye…”
My Recent Media Diet, the Endless January Edition
Hey look at this, a media diet post that’s not months and months since the last one! Phew, it’s a been a long-ass six weeks since the beginning of the year, hasn’t it? Here’s a list of what I’ve been reading, watching, listening to, and experiencing to help get me through the days.
Nosferatu (2024). Not usually a fan of horror movies, but I liked this a lot. Great acting and cinematography. (A-)
Shōgun by James Clavell. This took a bit to get fully into, but I was riveted for the last 600-800 pages, even though I knew what was going to happen from having seen the TV show. So much more delicious detail in the book though. A great reading experience. (A)
September 5. Loved this. Solid journalism thriller in the vein of Spotlight, The Post, and All the President’s Men. (A)
Silo (season two). In agreement with many other viewers that the middle of the season was not all that compelling, but the final two episodes were great. (B+)
Not Like Us. For whatever reason, I ignored the Drake/Kendrick feud, so I got to this late but wow. “Hey, hey, hey, hey, run for your life…” (A)
Arca Tulum. Eating at this sort of restaurant should yield exclamations like “I’ve never tasted anything quite like this”. I thought this at least three times at Arca. But also: a pile of rocks is not the ideal plate for messy food. (A-)
Aldo’s. This is a Mexican gelato chain and they had a Biscoff-flavored gelato that was so good that I went back for it three more times. (A)
Antojitos La Chiapaneca. This is the only restaurant I ate at twice in Tulum — their al pastor tacos are so good. (A)
The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer. A quick read but very relevant to what’s happening in the world right now. In keeping with the theme, I left the book at my hotel for someone else to read. (B+)
Janet Planet. A little too contemplative for me. (B)
Abruzzo. Mario Carbone created the menu for this Italian place at the Newark Airport. I had the penne vodka and I think it was the best thing I have ever eaten at an airport? Is it insane that I kinda want to plan a trip with an EWR connection so that I can have it again? P.S. the Tripadvisor reviewers haaaated this place. (A)
Reservation Dogs (season three). I reviewed Res Dogs in the last media diet post (“I enjoyed the first season more than the subsequent two”) but I’d like another crack at it. The last three episodes of the show were fantastic, especially the hospital breakout and Elora meeting her dad. (A+)
Flow. Reminded me strongly of Studio Ghibli’s films, but this wonderful animated movie is also uniquely its own thing. (A+)
The Bends. My usual Radiohead fare tends towards Kid A and In Rainbows, but I’ve been listening to The Bends a lot lately and appreciating the less polished rockiness of it. (A-)
Wool. Since the book (more or less) covers the events of the first two seasons of the TV series, I read half of it after season one and the other half after the latest season. And…I think the TV series is much better? (B-)
Thelma. A gem of a film, like Mission Impossible crossed with About Schmidt (or maybe The Bucket List). June Squibb is *fantastic* in the lead role. (A)
The Great British Bake Off (2024). Overall I enjoyed this season — they recruited a selection of talented bakers and the changes they’ve made (e.g. getting away from stunt bakes). But I found the semifinal and final difficult to watch because one of the contestants forgot he was supposed to be entertaining on television and totally lost his composure. (B+)
GNX. I also reviewed this in the last media diet post but I’ve continued to listen and I think GNX may have moved past DAMN. as my favorite Kendrick album? (A+)
Hundreds of Beavers. Super fun and inventive…this is like an animated movie with video game elements made with live-action actors. If you’re the sort of person who loves movies like Monty Python and the Holy Grail, you’ll probably love this movie. (B+)
Orbital by Samantha Harvey. A reviewer complained that the final third of the book took on the style of a writing exercise and I agree. (B)
Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. I must have watched this 50 times on VHS as a teenager — I can still recite every line. (A)
Alligator Bites Never Heal. Love this album. (A)
The Penguin. Colin Farrell is unrecognizable (and great) as Oz, and Cristin Milioti is a chillingly fantastic Sofia Falcone. The first few episodes were really strong but I felt it slipped a bit as the season went on. (A-)
I’m also in progress on Severance season two and Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time — but more on those next time.
Past installments of my media diet are available here. What good things have you watched, read, or listened to lately?
How Trying Became Cool Again
Nathan Zed argues that a lack of effort and vulnerability has made art, media, design, music, and architecture boring — that everything has the “soulless, monotonous no-personality vibe”. But artists like Tyler, the Creator; Chappell Roan; Doechii; and Kendrick Lamar are making trying cool again.
It has become uncool to just try. Like, just to put in some effort. Don’t do too much, okay, it’s embarrassing — just be nonchalant, be cool, be effortless. This has made everything boring! Everyone is too scared to try because that would be vulnerable. I feel like only now are we seeing a shift back to people putting in effort and being rewarded for it.
Ken Burns’ Criterion Closet Picks include Seven Samurai, a Fellini box set, and Wim Wenders’ Pina.
Thought-provoking musings on AI from Robin Sloan. “The language model reads Everything, and leaves Everything untouched — yet suddenly this new thing exists, with strange and formidable powers. Is that okay?”
The Crazy Thing About Babies
man the crazy thing about babies is that like, some people would think that reading a baby a book about farm animals is teaching them about farm animals, but really it’s teaching them about the concept of a book and how there’s new information on each page of a single object, but really, beyond that, it’s teaching them how language works, and beyond that it’s really actually teaching them about human interaction, and really really it’s them learning about existing in a three-dimensional space and how they can navigate that space, but actually, above all it is teaching them that mama loves them.
Girls Who Code’s “Five by Five” strategic plan is “reaching 5 million girls, women, and nonbinary individuals by 2030” with their programs designed to educate girls, women, and NB folks for careers in technology.
I love this week-by-week map of Gina Trapani’s life. “This is a map of my life, where each week I’ve been alive is a little box. Tap a box to see what I was doing where that week.”
Allegra Goodman writes about the “life-saving power” of listening to audiobooks (Austen, Caro, Dumas, Voltaire) with her son. “We spent hundreds of hours together and had a respite from each other too.” I *love* listening to audiobooks w/ my kids.
Wes Anderson’s next movie is called The Phoenician Scheme, an “espionage comedy-drama thriller” that will be released in US theaters in May 2025. Stars Benicio del Toro, Michael Cera, Riz Ahmed, ScarJo, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Willem Dafoe, etc.
Kevin Kelly’s 50 Years of Travel Tips
Kevin Kelly is the biggest traveller I know and he recently shared some of the advice he’s learned over his 50+ years on the road. Here are a few of my favorites:
If you hire a driver, or use a taxi, offer to pay the driver to take you to visit their mother. They will ordinarily jump at the chance.
Crash a wedding. You are not a nuisance; you are the celebrity guest!
When visiting a foreign city for the first time, take a street food tour.
Co-sign on the food tour. I’ve been doing this for the past few years and it’s such a good way to orient yourself in a new place.
The most significant criteria to use when selecting travel companions is: do they complain or not, even when complaints are justified? No complaining! Complaints are for the debriefing afterwards when travel is over.
Sketchy travel plans and travel to sketchy places are ok. Take a chance. If things fall apart, your vacation has just turned into an adventure. Perfection is for watches. Trips should be imperfect. There are no stories if nothing goes amiss.
It is always colder at night than you think it should be, especially in the tropics. Pack a layer no matter what.
I packed a warm layer for my recent trip to Mexico and was shocked that I didn’t need it for the whole 10 days I was there.
The hard-to-accept truth is that it is far better to spend more time in a few places than a little time in a bunch of places.
To book a train anywhere in the world outside your home country, your first stop should be The Man in Seat 61, a sprawling website which will conveniently help you book the train you want.
If you are starting out and have seen little of the world, you can double the time you spend traveling by heading to the places it is cheapest to travel. If you stay at the budget end, you can travel twice as long for half price.
When asking someone for a restaurant recommendation, don’t ask them where is a good place you should eat; ask them where they eat. Where did they eat the last time they ate out?
Kelly also breaks travel down into two modes: retreat or engage, which reminds me of this recent interview with Rick Steves.
Deadline: “Starz has acquired the rights to Miranda July’s buzzy novel All Fours to develop as a TV series.” I wonder if July herself will be starring…
From Nolan RoYAlty (cReAtor of oNE Million chEckBOXES), A globAL CAPS LOCK. “whenever AnYONE running the CLIENt Presses caPs LOck, it PRESSEs for everyone ELsE.” (i wrote tHIS POST WItH IT.)
Jerry Lawson was one of Silicon Valley’s first Black engineers and is known as “the father of the game cartridge”.
An Update
Hey, everyone. This week has been a little wonky/distracted for me — I was tending to a sick kid for a couple of days and am trying not to get sick myself, so I didn’t get to spend as much time as I would have liked here at KDO reporting on the coup and what we can do about it. As I said in this comment on the wild skating post, this feels like a new job to me and this week I was barely hanging on. I’m hoping to have a cleaner slate next week for getting a better handle on things.
That said, I am sensing that we could use a bit of a break from the Ń̵̥̆̐̕͝͝E̶̗̹̩̩̞̽̓̉͂̿͂̽̚͝W̸̯̠̬̝̗̖͇̅͒̀̕͠S̴̛̩̆̒̅̀̎̓͘. Or at least I do — it’s Friday and I feel like sharing some art, good news, and foolishness. Foolishness Friday or some such. Anyway, I’ll be back on Monday (or maybe over the weekend) with, uh, that other stuff. ✌️
How to stop Trump’s power grab. “Trump isn’t inevitable. Here’s a plan to keep democracy intact.”
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