The Booksellers is a 2019 feature-length documentary film about antiquarian and rare book dealers; you can watch the whole movie for free on YouTube.
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New Banksy: Blinded by Nationalism
The artist Banksy has installed (without a permit, one assumes) a new statue in London that depicts a man in a suit marching off off a ledge, blinded by a flag.
The artwork has been dubbed Blind Patriotism, although Banksy, enigmatic as always, doesn’t explain the meaning of his latest work. However, many have interpreted it as satirising the rise of nationalistic fervour in the UK, typified by the populist politician Nigel Farage and other forces on the far right.
Another bullseye for Banksy. 🎯
Designer Jenny Volvovski’s collection of unsolicited book cover designs. “I really wanted to design book covers but didn’t have any book cover work. So I hired myself to redesign my personal library.”
KDO Rolodex a list of kindred spirits, friends, open web enthusiasts, role models, fellow travelers, and collaborators
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see full listI’m not a fan of the first part of this music video (reminds me too much of dipshits I had to endure at school), but the single-take choreography from ~4:18 is great.
According to this peer-reviewed paper, the “screeching sound of peeling tape” is caused by tiny sonic booms. The speeds at work here are in the range of Mach 0.7–1.8. Supersonic crafts!
NASA has released some 12,000 unseen photos from the recent Artemis II mission; here are some of the best shots.
The Contiguous 41 States
Nowhere on XKCD’s map of The Contiguous 41 States does it say that you need to find the missing seven states, but that’s immediately where my mind went. And it was a little more challenging than I anticipated — all of New England is present & accounted for somehow?
The answer key is here, along with this tidbit:
The United States did have exactly 41 states for a few days in 1889, from the admission of Montana, the 41st state, on November 8, to the admission of Washington (the state, not DC), the 42nd state, on November 11.
See also this super-sized US map with 64 states.
And then after I wrote all of the above, I decided to check and of course I’d posted about this map before, soon after it came out. *sigh*
“They Would Never Use the Death Star on Us”: Alderaan Residents Reflect on Their Support for the Empire as a Large Imperial Installation Enters the System. “The Senate was ineffective, and the liberal Jedi were out of touch…”
The Visual Comedy of Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs
I’m gonna call it: Every Frame a Painting, my all-time favorite YouTube channel, is back. Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos stopped producing their fantastic video essays back in 2017 and while they have popped up here and there since then, they’ve mostly stuck to their retirement.
But for the past few months, the duo have been releasing video essays produced in partnership with Criterion: Night of the Living Dead: Limitations into Virtues, The Blade (1995): The Edges of Wuxia, and just yesterday, The Visual Comedy of Isle of Dogs (embedded above).
For the past three decades, Wes Anderson has left a distinctive fingerprint in American comedy, with his penchant for artificial worlds, deadpan performances, literary devices, and snappy narration. But there’s something else. These movies are funny to look at. Over the years, Anderson has experimented more and more with visual comedy. And none of this is more apparent than in Isle of Dogs.
It looks like they’re doing about one video a month. I hope they keep it up…I love their videos.
(Ok, maybe don’t read this bit until you’ve watched the Isle of Dogs video, but did you detect that Zhou’s narration seems to be synced to the mouth movements of the characters in the clips he’s talking over? Such a great little detail of visual comedy…I clapped my hands in glee like a toddler when I noticed.)
How Sylvester Stallone Rescued the First Rambo Film With a Radical Recut, Cutting It From 3½ Hours to 93 Minutes. “The solution that ended up saving the movie wasn’t much less drastic, producing a 93-minute cut that excised most of Rambo’s dialogue.”
Ohhhhh dear, Richard Dawkins: Is AI the Next Phase of Evolution? Claude Appears to Be Conscious. “My conversations with several Claudes and ChatGPTs have convinced me that these intelligent beings are at least as competent as any evolved organism.” 😬
Unruly Play: “A collection of 169 works of play in unlikely places. Games about unusual things. Unexpected encounters.”
Ada Palmer & Bruce Schneier: AI Learns Language From Skewed Sources. That Could Change How We Humans Speak – and Think. “Our sense of the world may become distorted in ways we have barely begun to comprehend.”
Who Merits the Longest NY Times Obituaries?
Using the NY Times Archive API, journalist Ted Alcorn built Below the Fold, a dashboard through which you can explore the last 25 years of Times coverage: 2.2 million articles containing 1.5 billion words. You can slice and dice this data in a bunch of different ways — it’s a fantastic resource.
One of the site’s sections is about obituaries. From that data, Alcorn produced this infographic of whose obits contained the highest word count:
As you can see, it’s a lot of world leaders, religious leaders, politicians, and white men. There only appear to be five women on the list. Notable non-politicians include Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Muhammad Ali, and Charles Schulz.
The whole dashboard is fun/enlightening to explore.
Am…am I “alternatively influential”? Defined roughly as “public thinkers and tastemakers who have real clout in their own demesnes despite only modest internet followings”.
The Supreme Court Is Corrupt. This Is What We Can Do About It.
This is excellent: Jamelle Bouie explains why he thinks the Supreme Court is corrupt and what we (through Congress) can do about it. Not all video transcripts work as text, but this one does, so I’m including his full remarks here:
The Supreme Court is corrupt.
You might hear that and think, “Well, Jamelle, you just disagree with the rulings. They’re not corrupt. They’re doing their jobs.” But I want to posit to you that they’re not doing their jobs. They’re in fact doing something very different. They’re acting as a super legislature, an unelected group of people who have taken it upon themselves to correct Congress. Not when Congress has overstepped its bounds, not when Congress has overstepped its powers, but when the court simply doesn’t like what they’re doing.
Typically when we use the word corruption, we are thinking about monetary corruption, bribes and the like. And it should be said there’s some of this. Clarence Thomas in particular is known for taking large sums, large gifts from his wealthy benefactors. Alito has also been the beneficiary of wealthy friends. So there is that kind of corruption as well.
But corruption also has a broader meaning. It can mean the malign use of power, the substitution of the public trust for your own private will, your own private interest. And that is more than anything else what is happening with the Supreme Court. You can see it in many different ways. The Roberts Court is quite fond of simply ignoring the plain text of the Constitution whenever it gets into the way of their particular political and ideological projects.
The Roberts Court wants to do a few things. It wants to gut the Reconstruction Amendments. It wants to aggrandize presidential power. It wants to free corporate speech. It wants to allow the wealthy to interact with the political system in any way they choose. And it wants to pursue the particular partisan interest of the Republican party. And so when the text of the Constitution gets in the way, they changed the text or they ignore it.
The text of the Constitution clearly gives Congress the power to handle racial discrimination and voting. And when it came up to the court in 2013 in Shelby County, the court simply made up a new doctrine, state sovereignty. All states have to be treated equally in order to undermine a provision that subjected states with histories of voting discrimination to stricter scrutiny by the federal government. When the court wanted to protect its special boy, Donald Trump from criminal prosecution, it invented a doctrine of criminal immunity for core duties found nowhere in the Constitution and frankly contradicted by the text, history, and theory behind the Constitution. More recently, rather than just shutting down Trump’s efforts to unravel birthright citizenship, the court has taken them seriously despite the clear text and history of the 14th amendment. Where the text interferes with partisan political goals, this Supreme Court says to hell with the text.
The other manner in which the court demonstrates corruption is by not having any particularly consistent jurisprudence. Despite grand claims of being originalist or textualist, this court often decides not based on any particular theory of jurisprudence, but simply on whether they have a decided interest in the case in question — a partisan or political interest.
Consider two days in 2022, back to back. On the first of those days, the court held that because you cannot find gun regulation in the annals of American history, therefore there’s no history or tradition supporting New York State’s attempt to regulate individual gun ownership. And then the very next day, the court releases an opinion stating that despite the fact that you cannot find very much evidence of abortion regulation in the American past, that doesn’t mean states can’t regulate abortion or ban it outright. On one hand, gun rights, which the court likes, history is an obstacle. On the other hand, abortion rights, which the court does not like, history is no limit.
In Trump v. Hawaii, the court held that yes, the Trump administration can use race, can use religion, in determining its travel bans — there’s nothing against the Constitution involved in that. Just last year, the court held that you can use race in immigration stops. That’s why we’re calling them Kavanaugh stops. (Brett Kavanaugh wrote that opinion.)
But as it comes to voting, as we’ve just seen, states can’t use race to remedy past discrimination. States can’t consider race to ensure fair minority representation. States can however engage in racial gerrymandering as long as it’s done under the guise of partisan gerrymandering. What’s the difference? Well, the court likes the president’s nativeist policies. It likes the fact that Republicans can try to gerrymander themselves in the permanent majorities. And so, if it needs to use race to do that, the court has no particular problem with it. Only when it comes time to hamper discrimination to protect rights is race impermissible.
The other manner in which we see the court acting in a corrupt way is in its clear preference for Republican presidents and Republican power. Under Trump, aggressive assertions of executive power were given deference. They were allowed to move forward. Aggressive reinterpretations of existing congressional statutes, reinterpretations that may cut against Congress’s intent were given deference, allowed to move forward. Broad policy changes — such as ending agency independence against the clear text of the law and against 90 years of precedence — are given deference under the idea that the president needs to be able to pursue his priorities.
But Barack Obama wants to use the EPA to reduce carbon emissions? Well, that’s a major question. Congress has to deal with that. Joe Biden wants to forgive student loans? Well, that’s another major question. Congress has to deal with that. Under this court, presidential power when held by Republicans is broad and expansive. Under Democrats, it’s cramped, barely legitimate.
I could go on like this, but the last point I’ll make, the last example of the corruption I’ll give, is the total absence of regularity by this court. What makes a court a court is that there are well-defined procedures, processes — they’re predictable. Courts pay attention to precedent. They have the same rules for all plaintiffs and they explain their decisions. Not so much this court.
There’s the shadow docket in which this court issues broad and important rulings with no explanation, shoots down district court decisions with no explanation, and then insists that those courts hew to its new precedents, which it has offered, again, with no explanation.
In cases where the justices have clear political or ideological interests, they will make up fact patterns to support their case. A religious liberty dispute where a coach says that he is having a private prayer, but in fact he’s having a large public prayer pressuring other students. Well, Neil Gorsuch will simply pretend that the private prayer is what was happening, not the actual public prayer. A plaintiff sues not because they have any particular injury because of a law, but because they hypothetically might have an injury because of a law, despite the fact that they’re not even engaged in the particular business that would bring them that injury. Well, the court says, “Hey, no problem. We’ll still give you standing and we’ll still decide your case because we have a vested interest in making sure that religious liberty means you can discriminate against LGBTQ people.”
And again, there is the shadow docket. Major decisions made without a whiff and inkling of reasoning. Congressionally mandated agencies disrupted. Tens of thousands of livelihoods destroyed. All without a single bit of explanation, simply deference to the president’s desires and decrees. It is capricious and arbitrary. It is the essence of an anti-democratic action of an anti-constitutional action.
It is abundantly clear that as long as John Roberts has his majority, nothing the left of center in this country wants to do is safe or stable. Everything can be killed by the court. We can have democracy and self-government in this country or we can have the Supreme Court as it exists, but we cannot have both. We cannot have both.
And so what is there to be done about the court? There is a real chance that Democrats will have a trifecta in 2029. They might even have large majorities. And in that environment, court reform must be table stakes. There is no other choice, no other option. The rest of the agenda is simply not possible without court reform.
The usual proposals for court reform are expanding the court. And I think that should be done. Expand the court, expand the entire federal judiciary, expand the number of circuits, expand the number of justices commensurate with the circuits. But I think there’s much more to be done than just court expansion. Because it’s not simply that the court is not on the right side. It’s that the court is too powerful. It’s concentrated too much power in itself and we have to deal with a concentration of power.
So court reform legislation has to be geared towards reducing the court’s power. One of those tools would be what’s called jurisdiction stripping, which is permitted under article 3 section 2 of the Constitution. Congress should say that the court simply cannot adjudicate these particular issues. The Congress should impose ethics reform on the court and it should put sharp limits on justice’s ability to get book deals, go on tours, collect honorariums.
But that’s all small ball stuff. There are more radical options as well. We’re going to talk about those more radical options that really would break up the power of the court and cut the court back down to size to remind it that it doesn’t stand above the entire American system as a council of kings, that it is very much part of the American system, in dialogue with the other branches and accountable to the people.
So we can turn the Supreme Court’s neoclassical building, first and foremost, into a museum of some sort and the court will return to its original place: the basement of Congress. Hell, maybe even an office park in Northern Virginia. I don’t care. Court will lose its ability to select its clerks. We’ll take away a patronage system that has corrupted the legal profession. And the court will lose its ability to choose cases. Remember, much of the court’s procedure is already by statute. The building, the clerks, the ability to choose cases, all of that already determined by Congress, and what Congress can give, Congress can take away. The only thing the Constitution mandates that there shall be a Supreme Court. And it gives it a very narrow original jurisdiction. Disputes between states, disputes involving ambassadors, impeachments, that kind of thing.
So, I know I said I support expanding the court, but I also said that was small ball. The other thing you could do totally constitutionally is restrict the court exclusively to its original jurisdiction — to end its ability to hear appeals and then instead to create a new national appeals court comprised of judges from all the existing circuits. We’re already having full-on judicial expansion and so we’re going to create a couple more circuits. Let’s say we have 15 total circuits and each circuit sends two judges to this national appeals court. A random panel of nine judges chooses cases and a random panel of nine judges hears cases. The original Supreme Court can, again, hear whatever is in its original jurisdiction.
If that sounds too extreme to you, then the other option is just to expand the Supreme Court, give it 20 justices, 21 justices, and have it hear cases based off of randomly selected panels. I’m sure there are other options we can think of here, but the goal is not simply to make the court something that is favorable to my views. The goal is to make the court weaker. The goal is to make it more difficult to game the court’s decision-making. The goal is to uncapture the court, to transform it into an actual court and not some tool of partisan and ideological control. There is simply no other choice here. We can have government by judges or we can have government by the people. But we cannot have both. We cannot have both.
The Film That Attacks You
For his latest video essay, Evan Puschak tells us about Un Chien Andalou, the pioneering surrealist short film by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. The film is particularly notable for a shocking shot in the opening scene, which, if you’ve seen it, you’ve likely never forgotten. Said Buñuel of the film:
This film has no intention of attracting nor pleasing the spectator; indeed, on the contrary, it attacks him, to the degree that he belongs to a society with which surrealism is at war.
You can watch Un Chien Andalou on YouTube:
One wonders what Buñuel and Dalí would have made of YouTube…
I fixed a few bugs on the Rolodex yesterday — some of the feeds weren’t updating and modifying sites wasn’t working properly. (Members get the mini-feedreader view!)
“Since 1900, scientists have observed more than 20 phases of ice, many of them shaped under extreme conditions. The growing list includes hot ice and even ice that conducts electricity.”
On the futility of border walls. “The Ozymandian ruins of many such walls litter our ancient and modern landscapes, because for as long as humanity has built hard borders, people have inevitably found ways to cross, topple or simply bypass them.”
The Secret to Success Is ‘Monotasking’. “We find that in real‑world work, the more switches in attention a person makes, the lower is their end‑of‑day assessed productivity.”
Farewell, Voting Rights Act
Adam Serwer writing about the yesterday’s Supreme Court decision that guts much of whatever remains of the Voting Rights Act:
In states with large Black populations that remain under Republican control — half of the Black American population resides in the South — lawmakers will now be able to draw districts that dilute Black residents’ voting power. In his opinion for the right-wing majority, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that “in considering the constitutionality of a districting scheme, courts must treat partisan advantage like any other race-neutral aim: a constitutionally permissible criterion that States may rely on as desired.” The Court’s decision is consonant with the philosophy, articulated by Kilpatrick in his earlier days, that the state is oppressive when it interferes with the right to discriminate, and respects liberty when it allows discrimination. And the decision fits just as well with Kilpatrick’s later spin on that philosophy: Attempts to ban racial discrimination are themselves discriminatory — against white people.
What Kilpatrick wanted, and what the Roberts Court is making possible, is a country where white people can maintain their political dominance at the expense of Americans who are not white. The anticaste provisions of the Reconstruction amendments, intended by their authors to reverse the “horrid blasphemy” that America was a white man’s country, are being inverted to defend that dominance. This is not the color-blindness of Martin Luther King Jr., but what the scholar Ian Haney López has called “reactionary colorblindness,” the purpose of which is to maintain racial hierarchy through superficially neutral means. It takes the view that the Constitution’s “color-blindness” renders any attempt to remedy anti-Black racism unconstitutional, because by definition that would involve making racial distinctions. Similarly, the ruling in this case does not explicitly overturn the VRA’s ban on racial discrimination in voting so much as rewrite it to allow such discrimination.
I can’t tell you how much I fucking hate this, and every other stupid fucking thing conservatives have done to this country. I try to keep my cynicism (or what I like to think of as being realistic) about the American political situation off the site for the most part, but seeing this decision come down yesterday morning let all the air out of my balloon. Not that it contained much air to begin with…the balloon is shot right through with holes from the past decade+ of authoritarian shenanigans and general acquiescence of institutions that are supposed to protect us.
On a personal note, in these moments I find it increasingly difficult to go on — being engaged here, keeping up with the news, highlighting positives in the world, showcasing the enthusiasms of others, informing ppl of harms & how they can help, hyping hope, not letting the bastards grind me down. It’s nothing new — I’ve talked about it here before — but as the situation becomes more unstable & uncertain (or rather: as I grow more certain about its instability & fuckedness), it grows more difficult to keep going. I know this is self-defeating & self-centered, but I’m angry and scared and grieving and tired. I’m gonna publish this before I just delete the whole stupid thing.
The Angine de Poitrine Argument for UBI. “If universal basic income enables even one more Einstein to become Einstein over the course of the next century, it will have paid for itself a thousand times over.”
Who Are the Unexpected Friends in Your Life? “Little did I know that I would find this kind of friendship with my 70-something neighbor, Jesse.”
“There is a feeling I search for: being in good hands. It is the feeling I look to give and the feeling I look to receive. I know I am in good hands when I sense a cohesive point of view expressed with attention to detail.”
“Trump did not cause the attempts on his life. But it would be dishonest to deny that he is responsible for shaping the environment in which we live — for creating an atmosphere in which these kinds of events are more likely.”
On May 22, Boards of Canada is doing a handful of listening parties around the world (NYC, Tokyo, London, etc.) for their new album. “Tickets live Friday 1 May. Sign up for access by Thursday 30 April, 15:00 BST.”
Holy moly, DJ Shadow is doing a 30th anniversary tour for Endtroducing… Starts Sept 24 in San Diego. Endtroducing… is one of my all-time favorite albums.
I Bought Friendster for $30k — Here’s What I’m Doing With It. “I created an iOS app for Friendster, and I made it so that in order to connect with someone as a friend, you have to actually tap phones together in real life.”
A Georgia teen diagnosed with a rare cancer used his Make-A-Wish gift to help the homeless in his community. “I got out of my version of heck, and I want to help others who are in a similar situation, their own version.”
The intelligence of LLMs is “a function of the social complexity of the civilization whose language it digested”, and their widespread use will lead to a thinning of that complexity, “undermining the conditions for its own advancement”. (And ours.)
Teaser trailer for season four of Ted Lasso. Looks like he & Coach Beard are back in the UK to coach AFC Richmond’s women’s team. Premieres Aug 5 on Apple TV.
Remembering Roberto Clemente’s 3000th Hit
This story by Kevin Guilfoile about his aging father (who worked for the Pirates and the Baseball Hall of Fame) and the mystery of what happened to the bat that Roberto Clemente got his 3,000th hit with is one of my favorite things that I’ve read over the past few months.
[My father’s] personality is present, if his memories are a jumble. He is still funny, and surprisingly quick with one-liners to crack up the staff at the facility where he lives. He is exceedingly polite, same as he ever was. He is good at faking a casual conversation, especially on the phone. But if you sit and talk with him for a long time, he gets very anxious. He starts tapping his forehead with his fingers. “Shouldn’t we be going?” he’ll say. You tell him there’s no place we need to be, but 30 seconds later he’ll ask again, “Shouldn’t we be going?”
What happens to memories when they’re collapsed inside time like this? They don’t exactly disappear, they just become impossible to unpack. And so my father, who loved stories so much — who loved to tell them, who loved to hear them — can no longer comprehend them. The structure of any story, after all, is that this happened and then that happened, and he can’t make sense of any sequence.
That is the real hell of this disease. His own identity has become a puzzle he can’t solve.
Objects have stories, too. Puzzles that need to be solved. Like a pair of baseball bats, for instance, that each passed through Roberto Clemente’s hands before they passed through my father’s. One hung on my bedroom wall throughout my childhood. The other is in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
These objects never forget, but they never tell their stories, either.
Without a little bit of luck, we’d never hear them.
Or more than a little luck:
My father has lots of old baseball bats given to him by players he worked with over the years. He has Mickey Mantle bats from his years with the Yankees, and Willie Stargell and Dave Parker bats from his days with the Pirates. The one I always loved best was an Adirondack model with R CLEMENTE embossed in modest block letters, instead of the usual signature burned into the barrel. On the bottom of the knob, Roberto had written a tiny “37” in ballpoint pen, presumably to indicate its weight: 37 ounces. It also had a series of scrapes around the middle where someone had scratched off the trademark stripe that encircled all Adirondack bats. Former Pirates GM Joe Brown gave my dad this bat several years after Roberto died. For much of my childhood it hung on the wall of my bedroom, on a long rack with about a dozen other game-used bats.
My dad had been working at the Hall of Fame for more than a decade when, in 1993, his old friend Tony Bartirome, a one-time Pirates infielder who had become their longtime trainer, came to Cooperstown for a visit. Tony and his wife went to dinner with my folks and then came back to our house to chat. The only way to go to the first-floor washroom in that house was through my old bedroom, and on a trip there, Tony noticed that Adirondack of Clemente’s hanging on the wall.
Tony carried it into the living room. He said to Dad, “Where did you get this bat?” My dad told him that Joe Brown had given him the bat as a gift, sometime in the late ’70s. “Bill,” Tony said. “This is the bat Roberto used to get his 3,000th hit.”
My father was confused by this. “That’s impossible,” he told Tony. “The day he hit 3,000 I went down to the clubhouse, and Roberto himself handed me the bat he used. I sent it to the Hall of Fame. I walk by it every day.”
“Well,” Tony said. “I have a story to tell you.”
It’s a wonderful story, read the whole thing. Or get the book: the story is excerpted from Guilfoile’s A Drive into the Gap, available here or for the Kindle.
This is interesting: Talkie is a vintage LLM, trained on “historical pre-1931 English text”. “The training data for the base model is entirely out of copyright (the USA copyright cutoff date is currently January 1, 1931).”
Some Cool Movie Explosions
Listen, sometimes you just want to watch things blow up. But safely and without consequence (although Arnold Schwarzenegger did somehow become the governor of California). So, can I interest you in three minutes of movie explosions? The 80s and 90s were really a golden age for kick-ass movie explosions. (via @tvaziri.com)
“A half-century after it was published, The Soul of a New Machine does a better job challenging AI hype than most current criticism.” I thought something similarly (about the web) when I read Kidder’s book 25 years ago, during the aftermath of the dot com bust.
Do I Belong in Tech Anymore? “Why am I here? Does any of this work actually matter? And if I stop caring about the quality of my work… will anyone notice?”
“British energy major BP on Tuesday reported that first-quarter profits more than doubled from a year ago, following a surge in oil and gas prices driven by the Middle East conflict.” Oh, surprise surprise.
I Love Boosters
Boots Riley made his directorial debut with the totally weirdo (complimentary) movie Sorry to Bother You in 2018. He’s been quiet since then, but he’s back with a new comedy, I Love Boosters. This looks great. From a review on Letterboxd:
Maximalist social commentary delivered with anime action and colourful high strangeness. Did it kind of fall off the rails towards the end? Absolutely. Was it fun as fuck and creative right to the end? You best believe it. God bless the shoplifters. I got major Everything Everywhere All At Once vibes from this…
The film debuted at SXSW in March and is opening in theaters on May 22.
On the Propaganda of Early Nazism, and How We See it in America Today. “Unlike other political systems, fascism was not meant to be intellectualized or discussed; it was meant to be experienced.”
The Era of AI Malaise. “The AI has learned to code. The AI is building itself. Will I have a job tomorrow? Will the market crash? Why does OpenAI need a bunker? Do I need a bunker? Maybe I should have a bunker.”
It’s the Age of Electricity and America Isn’t Ready. “Our grid is too old and our supply of electricity too small. If we don’t meet this moment, we will face an impoverished future of more expensive, less reliable energy, and slower economic growth.”
Elizabeth Kolbert’s profile of EPA head Lee Zeldin. “In a little more than a year, Zeldin has transformed the E.P.A. from an agency devoted to protecting human health and the environment into one that, more or less openly, sides with polluters.”
The Self-Defeating Both-Sidesism of the US Press
Greg Sargent writing for The New Republic:
There’s no clean way to hive off terms like fascism or authoritarianism from Trump’s policies. Even if you disagree that the words apply, their use is backed up by a genuine attempt at intellectual justification for it. The use of these terms just is deeply linked to assessments of Trump’s actual policies, from the lawless renditions to foreign gulags to the unleashing of heavily armed militias in American cities to the naked intimidation of large swaths of civil society.
By contrast, when Trump and MAGA media figures call Democrats “Communists” or “antifa,” all of that is entirely disconnected from any policy realities. Many press figures would like it if there were an Archimedean midpoint between the two parties on all these matters. But there isn’t. At the most basic level, one party continues to function as an actor in a liberal democracy, whereas Trump and much of his movement, with the eager participation of many Republicans, simply do not. Dispensing with harsh but accurate descriptions of his real goals would whitewash them.
See also Republican Extremism and the Myth of “Both Sides” in American Politics.
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò on magical thinking and elite impunity. “We are ruled by a class of people who seem either to believe or presume that war, disease, and apocalyptic destruction are things that will only ever happen to poorer and browner people.”
Crocheted Technology
Nicole Nikolich is a textile artist whose current focus is making crochet artworks that reference old school technology. You can explore her work on her website, at Paradigm Gallery and on Instagram. Some of her artworks are available for sale here.
I’m a sucker for these types of projects because innovations in textile production led to the development of the first computers and the work of artists like Nikolich bring that relationship full circle. See also The Embroidered Computer.
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