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Catching up after a big move—and an exciting announcement

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My fam, my goodness it has been so long I have really missed each and every one of you and hope you are all holding on tight and finding your peace and joy wherever you can. I suppose the biggest piece of news to get into right up front is that I now live in beautiful Tucson, Arizona in the sunny Sonoran Desert.

What a however many weeks it has been it has been. Where to even start there was the eternal packing in Boston that involved loading up all of our possessions into a miniature storage unit and then shipping it across the country and also a neglected jar of kimchi in the fridge that had to be disposed of like a dead body in the cover of night. A nostalgia tour of Boston that included a brief stay in a fancy old hotel in Back Bay, several indulgent dinners, a mournful visit to the Copley library, a stroll through town to the North End for one more night of pasta and cannoli, a stop at Cheers where after 11 years I finally got Jamie to go with me, pizza in Coolidge Corner, a visit to Hampton Beach for an emotional goodbye to family. Then a truly Chevy Chase movie-like scheme involving three pets and four humans driving an RV and towing a car for 2700 miles in some of the worst road weather you can imagine including the entire state of Texas being pretty much frozen, and all the while, trying to follow via smartphone a full on war erupting in the background. Then literally riding off into the sunset as we somehow, some way, rolled into Southern Arizona with a car full of dead houseplants and very confused dogs.

But we did make it. Returning to a place where you have a strong connection but have not lived in for many years is a unique experience, particularly in middle age. Your less elastic body has to readjust to higher elevation, lower humidity, more UV rays, new kinds of dust in the air, as you feel your way around a landscape that’s like an unspoken language you’ve allowed to rust. All of that coupled with the exhaustion and disorientation of a big move, the thrill and confusion of having no routines or guardrails, not knowing where in your new surroundings you’re welcome, you’re needed, or you’re maybe not supposed to be.

One interesting phenomenon in that process is this strange feeling of being deeply familiar with a physical place, but realizing that that place is now home to an entirely different community than when you were here last, a community that you are not a part of, at least not yet. As a result, there’s this kind of uncanny feeling of being in a space where you feel like you belong and that you are home, but among people who, as warm and welcoming as Tucsonans are, do not yet feel the same way about you. It takes time to become part of a community, even when coming home.

It’s fitting that the last newsletter was about the mesquite tree and the ecosystems it carries forth out of lifeless dust, grounding countless species atop an enormous root system that reaches down many times deeper than its height above the surface. About a week after we moved into our very old house in the Armory Park neighborhood downtown, our spare toilet started backing up. But it wasn’t backing up with sewage. We called a plumber and when snaking out the pipes he was pulling up plant matter. Tree roots. Another visit from the plumber, more tree roots, tangle after thick tangle coming up from our pipes. A third visit, they flushed it out with water, more roots until it was finally clear.

The plumber explained to me that the house’s pipes are made of clay, and if they haven’t been used in a while, tree root systems will infiltrate them at the bends where the joints meet up. Apparently it is pretty common although I had never heard anyone talk about it before it must be like the HPV of home ownership. So anyway, the weird thing is that the plumber said there were no trees near the location where the pipes were getting overwhelmed with roots. He had no idea where they were coming from. In fact, he said, it could have been a root system from a tree that was here before the house was even built. Who is to say what kind of roots they were without like sending them to the lab at the Jeffersonian Institute I guess, but the predominant genus surrounding the house is the spiny, unkillable prosopis itself—mesquite. It would be fitting if that cornerstone flora of our new surroundings had turned on us upon arrival, a reminder that it was here long before us and will be here long after, and it might just take us back into the soil with it if we’re not careful. But, for now at least, it seems to be allowing us to stay and find out if and where exactly we fit in.

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Cool story about your toilet overflowing bro, but where are all the goods about climate change and white supremacy and capitalism, you might be asking. Where are the all the savage burns? Where are the comic book reviews and youtube screencaps?

Well, it has been a wild 1-2 months, and aside from my actual job, I have had that just-moved de facto part-time job in which you spend evenings and weekends alternating between spending hundreds of dollars at the hardware store and then at Target, and in between those trips you unpack boxes, paint the walls, clean up toilet water, etc. We’ve also been fortunate to have some beautiful guests visiting us from out of town already, which in its own way helped us to get settled in, but has also kept things busy. So you know haven’t had a lot of time for the newsy.

Which brings me to the real news of the day, which I think is both exciting and maybe a bit of a temporary bummer. I’ve decided over the Crisis Palace spring hiatus that I’m actually going to be taking another hiatus for a little while. Maybe it’s more of a sabbatical. The reason this time is that, a little while back I decided that I’m going to pull together the best of the newsletter to date into a book—an ebook and maybe a print book, we’ll have to see if it makes sense. Working title being, Crisis Palace Vol. 1: Climate Change, COVID, and What We Build While the World is on Fire. I don’t know maybe needs a little workshopping. I think the final product will be pretty cool though and I hope at least a handful of people will sit down and spend some time with it when it’s done.

I started organizing the contents a while back and planned to chip away at editing it while continuing the newsletter, but especially with the move, it’s just taking forever and I need to sink some real time into it so it doesn’t come out in like 2050. So that’s what I’ll be doing over the next several weeks.

That’s the news. I know, I will miss you once again. But the newsletter is not going anywhere. I’ve really missed this weekly routine and I plan to report back on all sorts of new connections and conversations and yes even a new set of crises from this dusty desert landscape.

Until then, don’t forget to put on sunscreen and drink plenty of water.

Tate

Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism is a grim thesis, but a tough one to argue with right now

Pinetop, Arizona

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And we are back. I have missed you all I hope everyone had a decent if not great holiday and got to spend some time with loved ones and look at some pretty snow. If you have COVID and there is a not small chance you do I hope it is as mild as government and industry assure us that it is. That is to say it has been not a great start to the new year. For me there’s been some good news and good times here and there, but also bad stuff. Where to even begin let’s do our little recap of immediate crises before getting into the main newsletter.

The big thing is that America thought we could half-ass our way through a pandemic and now everyone has COVID, hospitals are filling up, kids are sick, schools have no teachers. With perfect timing, the conservative Supreme Court blocked a vaccine mandate for large employers, in a decision full of Fox News antivax talking points and bizarre logic that because a pandemic exists outside of work too it is not a workplace hazard, though as Adam Serwer points out, OSHA regulates all kinds of hazards with the same quality like, say, fire. So, as with most of the US response to the pandemic, government has left it up to businesses to manage public health. Another bad one yesterday is that, coming as a surprise to nobody, the two worst Democrats signaled that they believe the Senate filibuster is more important to the health of democracy than the right to vote, enabling Republican efforts nationwide to make it harder for people to participate in democracy and lock in minority rule.

So that’s the news and now I will try to shake off some of the cobwebs slash depression and write about this book I read over the break about how capitalism is awful.

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Mark Fisher was an English scholar, teacher, philosopher, etc., who gained recognition through his 2000s-era blogging about music, pop culture and politics under the name k-punk. Sadly, he passed away in 2017 after struggling for years with depression, but leaves behind a beloved collection of books and essays. My friend Doug recommended that I read some of Fisher’s work so I started with 2009’s Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, a short, very powerful collection of essays about “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.”

Fisher describes a congealed state of societal consensus similar to Wendy Brown’s description of neoliberalism in Undoing the Demos, but whereas Brown is depicting a market-fixated mode of reason that guides all of our political and economic systems, capitalist realism is more like the resulting cultural state of being. It’s not quite the right analogy, but I kind of think of it like neoliberalism is a projector, and capitalist realism is a movie blasted onto every surface we can ever view, nonstop, until eventually we just stop trying to look anywhere else. In fact, one of the things I like about Fisher’s writing, which I think contributes to his popularity, is the way that he folds pop culture into politics and philosophy, using movies and music as cultural reflections of the heavy ideas he explores.

For example, in the introduction to Capitalist Realism, Fisher uses as a springboard for his argument the quote, “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism,” attributed to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, and points to Cuaron’s 2006 film Children of Men to show what that looks like. What makes the movie so powerful, and a reason it is a favorite of mine, is that it takes place in an authoritarian dystopia accelerated by science fictional global sterility, but it’s a dystopia that does not look systemically different from our own. It doesn’t rely on the depiction of a concocted tyrannical regime swooping in, but rather a capitalist world very similar to ours in which things just got worse and worse over time, and as a result, people are mostly hopeless.

Once, dystopian films and novels were exercises in such acts of imagination – the disasters they depicted acting as narrative pretext for the emergence of different ways of living. Not so in Children of Men. The world that it projects seems more like an extrapolation or exacerbation of ours than an alternative to it. In its world, as in ours, ultra-authoritarianism and Capital are by no means incompatible: internment camps and franchise coffee bars co-exist.

This is a kind of dystopia that feels even more familiar today, a time when tactical police squads in military vehicles deploy to protect Targets and Starbucks from citizen uprisings. It’s how we can live with such enormous luxury and convenience in some aspects of our lives, but in others feel like such helpless subjects.

The pop cultural elements in the book are also important because, just as Brown does toward the end of Undoing the Demos, Fisher argues that a characteristic element of capitalist realism is the death of imagination, a kind of stagnation of culture. He attributes this malaise in part to the power of capitalism to reduce all of history’s culture into mere artifacts with assigned monetary value. But also the narrative that capitalism, while imperfect, is better than any of the scary alternatives, and therefore, we must lower our expectations for a better version of something to come, something beyond the principle of self-interest.

Just as Brown writes that neoliberalism “wholly abandons the project of individual or collective mastery of existence,” Fisher tells us that capitalist realism is a form of insulation from ideology. “Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed,” he writes, and it “brings with it a massive desacralization of culture.”

So while he doesn’t put stock into the idea that with the fall of the Berlin Wall, we have reached “the end of history,” referencing Francis Fukuyama’s argument that the spread of free market capitalism is the final stage of human society, he argues that under capitalism, we are living in a culture where that is assumed to be the case. Thatcher and Reagan told us there was no alternative and that markets are the best case scenario, and it was a self-fulfilling prophecy that froze us in amber. As a result, things are the way they are, and all there is from here on out is marginally changing versions of the same consumerist society, like a never-ending succession of barely different iPhone models.

This is where, for me, Capitalist Realism really shines—in its description of how it feels to be living in the world as it is, as in the emptiness that is depicted in Children of Men. In another section, he uses examples like Jason Bourne’s form of amnesia in the Bourne Identity to describe an untethered, plastic nature of day-to-day experience that feels very relevant today, whether a result of the disloyal gig economy, a shrinking social safety net, always-changing careers, individuals behaving as corporate firms, the second-to-second news cycle peppered with advertisements. He describes an unrooted Jason Bourne’s “transnational nomadism” and “vertiginous ‘continuous present'” as representative of how we experience time now. Constantly on the move, but nothing really changing.

Another unsettling aspect is akin to what Elizabeth Anderson writes about in Private Government, in which abuses of individual freedom often attributed to the state appear just as readily within corporate structures, but we give them a pass because we’ve come to automatically equate freedom with commerce. Anderson argues that the way our employers control our lives should be viewed as another form of governance, and that if we did so, we’d recognize most of modern existence as living under totalitarian dictatorship. Similarly, Fisher writes that the dystopian bureaucracy Kafka described exists today, not within a government regime, but in the black hole of faceless corporate governance (Amazon and Google come to mind), experienced in the day to day, for example, through customer service interactions:

…the crazed Kafkaesque labyrinth of call centers, a world without memory, where cause and effect connect together in mysterious, unfathomable ways, where it is a miracle that anything ever happens, and you lose hope of ever passing back over to the other side, where things seem to function smoothly.

All of this contributes, by Fisher’s hypothesis, to a world in which some staggering percentage of us are plagued by anxiety, depression and other mental health problems. This feels plausible to me, although it’s the section of the book I liked least, as it relies a lot on the academic writing trope of “let me tell you about some of my messed up students.”

But I do think the unsettled state of being he described way back in 2009 is just as relevant today, and plays a big part in the growing disenchantment with capitalism among young people. The slipperiness, pointlessness, and futurelessness of a world in which the lone virtue is free trade. (Among older people too, as 73-year-old sci-fi writer William Gibson has recently said he finds it increasingly difficult to envision, much less write about, a hopeful future.) It rings even more true as the constant growth and absorption of new markets and resources that allowed capitalism to generate such enormous wealth is hitting hard walls and inescapable consequences. What’s left is this sense that we have nothing better ahead and we’ve been led to give up on anything but self interest—an inability to imagine what might be beyond it as a guiding principle.

Maybe the biggest gutpunch of the book for me is the section that poses that even recoiling at the system in disgust actually benefits, or at least it doesn’t weaken the system. Fisher points out that even a wildly popular Disney movie like Wall-E can bring with it an unmistakeable anti-capitalist message, with no consequence: “the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity.” In other words, capitalism doesn’t need you to love it, so long as you do it, and you have no choice but to do it.

In the same manner, global charity to fight poverty, liberal philanthropy, social enterprises offering responsible consumer products, serve to make this all seem OK. Like we’re trying. “So long as we believe (in our hearts) that capitalism is bad, we are free to continue to participate in capitalist exchange.”

Along with Undoing the Demos, this book has been on my mind in the context of COVID regulations, and continued atomization of public well-being into individual decisions and consumer products. The notorious Jen Psaki press conference when she sneered at the concept of government directly providing COVID tests because all things come from the store, dummy. More recently, Vice President Kamala Harris was asked what she’d tell people who can’t find COVID tests, and she said to Google it, just the same way you’d find a good restaurant. And now a Supreme Court decision punts public health decisions to individual business owners. Capitalist realism is a grim thesis, but it is a tough one to argue with right now.

A criticism of the book is that is very heavy on the doom, with a distinct sense of resignation running through it. When I read essays like this, one thing I’m always hoping for is not just a criticism of the way things are now, but some kind of path forward, which I find anti-capitalist writing often under-delivers. Here too, there is only a sketch of the possibilities. Fisher does criticize the left for too often rehashing old arguments, despairing over the failure of previous anti-capitalist forms of government, and “limiting its ambitions to the establishment of a big state.” Instead, he argues, the left needs to resuscitate and modernize the idea of a public that subjugates the state, and exists beyond a collection of individuals, offering something that can rival, not just react to Capital. And here is where I find some optimism in the book, which insists that in all things, we look forward instead of backward, clearing space for something new to emerge from the “ideological rubble.”

This called to mind one of my favorite of adrienne maree brown’s assertions that the next system will be built on the foundations the economic experiments of socialism and capitalism. That capitalism will become a fossil, and we’ll “turn the soil” to grow something new.

Fisher seems less optimistic in Capitalist Realism, but does believe there is hope yet.

The long, dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity. The very oppressive pervasiveness of capitalist realism means that even glimmers of alternative political and economic possibilities can have a disproportionately great effect. The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.

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bell hooks passed away recently, which is very sad. I thought I would link back to an issue I did about The Will to Change, which is a beautiful book that I think about all the time.

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Reading/Watching/Playing Video Games

The Witcher. When I was in high school I worked at Blockbuster Video and would, before it was a thing, binge a particular genre or franchise like one time I watched every Bruce Lee movie they had in the store and my friend said to me you know you’re very compulsive which I guess is true. On that note, I recently watched season 2 of The Witcher, am reading Sword of Destiny the second book in the series, and playing Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt on Switch. It’s almost as though I’m trying to escape some disturbing reality or something.

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Links

• NOAA says in 2021, the US was hit by 20 separate billion-dollar climate disasters, making it one of the most disastrous and costly years on record.
• And yet, NOAA is way undercounting the death toll of those disasters at just 688, according to Buzzfeed report. For example, 670 died in the PNW heatwave alone and 750 died in Texas’s winter storm.
• Fire, drought and flooding are hitting the Navajo Nation hard, one of many Indigenous communities having to choose between their homelands and their safety because of climate change.
• US GHG emissions grew by 6.2% in 2021 which fyi is the opposite direction they are supposed to be going.
• It keeps raining too much, too fast.
• Plastic is “climate change in solid state.” We are drowning in ubiquitous plastic pollution and industry is to blame, manufacturing both products and demand while giving the false impression that recycling has it under control.
• Also I can’t remember if I shared this before but tech industry efforts to “clean up” plastic pollution are pointless as long as we are still producing waste at the volume we are.
• Car ads in France will soon need to include a warning discouraging driving.
• Huge PR firm that has been handling greenwashing for Exxon Mobil: “We have a 30-year history of [climate work], starting with dolphin-safe tuna in 1992.” 🤔
• By standards used to rate the stability of other countries, the United States is no longer a democracy, but an anocracy, a liminal state between democracy and autocracy, and therefore, vulnerable to political violence. The oldest democracy in the world is no longer the US, but Switzerland, followed by New Zealand.
• Rapid tests are hard to come by in Boston, but luxury apartment buildings make sure they are stocked up in lobby vending machines because we live in hell.
• MA’s Republican governor has forbidden districts from teaching online. Unfortunately, all of our teachers have COVID so students are being taught by subs in huge classes in the dining hall.
• Meanwhile in Kansas, a school board lowered the bar for substitute teachers to any 18 year old with a high school diploma because there is no pandemic stop saying there is a pandemic everything is fine.
• White people keep saying we need a new “underground railroad” in response to new abortion laws, which undermines and erases the women of color who have been running such networks for decades.
• The ticking bomb of crypto-fascism.
• Two white guys named Smith are leaving their cushy media jobs to start a new publication serving college educated English speakers. FINALLY. Some good commentary on these media careerist bros and the people left in their wake, by someone who Ben Smith laid off while at Buzzfeed.
• In defense of shame.

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Listening

Tamar Aphek.

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OK there’s another one. It’s been too long my friends. Last week I skipped because I just got back from a perhaps ill-advised trip to a cabin in Pinetop, Arizona with some good friends, in which we left a path of at-home COVID tests behind as omicron swelled all around us. When we got back we discovered that a group of five anti-vaxxers now protest loudly outside the new mayor’s house, which happens to be across the street from our house, every morning starting from 7 a.m. so that has been a fun way to wake up all week.

Meanwhile, several friends and loved ones currently have or have had it, old and young, all vaccinated, and while nobody’s gone to the hospital yet, I don’t know that I would call most of the cases mild. It is very scary and upsetting and frustrating and I might go so far as to say this last week, after all this time, was a personal low pandemic-wise. It’s just a bleak ass time right now and my brain feels like mush.

Still we did get to look at some pretty snow. I think I’ll go rewatch Children of Men now. Or maybe just play The Witcher.

Tate

I am passing the microphone to you—and giving some of you a little present

Magnolias on Gold Velvet Cloth, Martin Johnson Heade, 1888.

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If there are any real number-heads out there, you may have calculated that the next issue of this newsletter will be the 100th. (This one does not count because I say so.) That is a lot of emails, a lot of words, a lot of me talking to you about things I am cranky about in whichever week.

To mark this centenniary, I would very much like to pass the microphone over to you all. I know most of you probably don’t know that much about each other, unless you have like hacked into my mainframe, but trust me, you are a very smart, cool, funny, insightful bunch of people. I mean, the responses to the Dune issue alone.

So specifically, via a little survey, I would like to hear your brief thoughts about the issues and themes that we’ve been talking about all this time, plus just a little feedback on the newsletter. I would also love to round up some music/TV/books that you have loved lately. If I get a critical mass of responses, we can do a reader takeover for the 100th issue next week.

***In return for this nugget of labor I am requesting, if you fill out this questionnaire, I will add you to a drawing in which three people will receive a book that has been featured in the newsletter, as a special little thank you.***

Choices include: All We Can Save, The Uninhabitable Earth, Ministry for the Future, Last Days by Tamiko Beyer, or any novel by Cadwell Turnbull or Sam J. Miller. Or if there are any others you recall that I mentioned in the newsletter that you’d rather have, I’ll see what I can do. Books will be purchased through Papercuts, a small, woman-owned bookstore here in Boston that also runs its own feminist small press. And I will throw into each package a piece of black tourmaline, the official gemstone of Crisis Palace, as a keepsake. It is a grounding stone that protects against stress and bad vibes—or just a cool looking rock you can keep on your desk. And yes I will pay for the shipping don’t worry I’m not going to do you like that.

I should also say that the idea for these writing prompts, and doing a contest/survey was inspired by ~aka completely stolen from~ Tamiko and her newsletter, Starlight and Strategy, which is the best go subscribe now.

OK so what do you have to do?

This little online form linked here will offer a few very brief questions about this newsletter, just for my own use. Then, you will find two prompts that will ask you for your thoughts on Crisis Palacey concerns. You can write a couple sentences or a couple paragraphs, or if you have a lot on your mind, I don’t know just go wild.

You don’t have to answer everything, only what speaks to you (although come on give me just a little something if you want to be in the drawing you know what I’m saying).

The deadline is in one week, end of day Thursday, October 21.

Your responses may be featured (credited or anonymous, up to you) in next week’s newsletter, and I’ll include your media recommendations too. I can’t emphasize this enough, I am really hoping to not have to come up with anything on my own next week. I want to be able to really phone this one in.

Finally, if you are like, give me a break man I don’t want to have to mess around with some google form, the questions are all below. You can always reply to this email with your responses below. EASY.

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Survey

These responses are just between you and me, to help me plan future newsletters.

What are your favorite parts of the newsletter? (pick two)

• Main essay
• Links
• Music recommendations
• Book/comics recommendations
• TV/movie recommendations
• The cute little endings

Would you prefer the emails to be…

• a little shorter
• longer and with more interviews and reporting, but less frequent
• about the same

What have been your favorite past topics/past issues?

What topics would you like to read about (or read more about) in the newsletter?

Who would you like me to interview? (either people in certain fields or specific individuals)

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Writing Prompts for Crisis Palace 100!

Responses will potentially be included/excerpted in Crisis Palace 100. If you do not want your answers to be published or you only want them to be used anonymously, it’s no problem, just let me know in your responses. Don’t worry about punctuation, spelling etc., I’ll clean em up.

Prompt #1: Do you feel like the world is on fire?

Literally or figuratively. How do you feel climate change impacting your life? What other related crises (democracy, inequality, structural racism, housing, transportation, health, etc) do you feel bearing down on you? What emotional response is this bringing up—anger, rage, motivation, energy, grief, dread, anxiety? Who or what are those emotions directed toward?

Prompt #2: What do you want to build in the next world?

What are the elements of the future world you want to see built or help build? Innovations, infrastructure, community resources, social bonds, organizations, businesses, economies, government agencies—whatever. What actions do you want to take in coming years, individual or collective? What are you excited about? How are the problems discussed above shaping your work (either your job, your art, or volunteering)?

Recommendations

Finally, what are some books, TV shows, movies, podcasts, articles, music that have served you well in the past couple of years? As many as you want. Again, let me know if you don’t want me to credit you by name and would prefer to be anonymous.

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Thank you. And thank you for being a part of this project for 100 issues.

Yip yip

Tate

An interview with Sam J. Miller, author of The Blade Between and Blackfish City, on community organizing, how fiction can change the world, and finding joy during apocalypse.

The Wild Beasts of the World. Finn, Frank and Austen, Winifred. 1909

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Sam J. Miller is a writer of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, all told with crackling prose, unforgettable characters, and a dizzying number of cool ideas. The first story of his I read was We Are the Cloud, a queer cyberpunk love story set in a youth group home in the near future, and I have been a big fan ever since. I am not alone—Sam’s work frequently makes must-read lists and best-of anthologies, he’s won a Nebula Award and a Shirley Jackson Award, and been nominated for too many to list here.

His award-winning 2018 novel Blackfish City set a new standard for climate fiction, although that doesn’t come close to describing a book set in a post-apocalyptic floating city in the Arctic run by organized crime and artificial intelligence, where our hero rides atop an orca and has a polar bear as a sidekick. Sam’s latest book, The Blade Between, is a beautiful but conflicted love letter to the small town in New York where he grew up, and simultaneously a chaotic horror story about gentrification and the ghosts of whales.

In all cases, his work is deeply concerned with matters of justice and injustice, and often serves as an indictment of power structures that lift some up and hold most down. But remarkably, his work is never preachy or prescriptive, guided instead by empathy and an appreciation of the complexities of the world. Much of that insight comes from his former day job as a community organizer in New York, which he did for 15 years while working on his fiction in the late nights and early mornings.

I had a terrific conversation with Sam about his work as an organizer, his problems with apocalyptic fiction’s “pornography of suffering,” and how storytelling can serve a similar function as protest. Here it is, condensed and edited for clarity, as we do.

A technical note, if the full interview gets cut off in your email, you can always bring it up in a browser here.

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I remember when I first read one of your short stories, We Are the Cloud, I was taken aback by it, in a good way, because it felt kind of radical. A lot of your writing feels like it has this dissatisfaction or anger at power structures. So I’ve always wondered, to what extent are you doing that intentionally and to what extent do you see your writing as a sort of project of social change or your politics?

Well, approximately 100%. I mean, I do really feel like it’s all political. It’s all shit I’m pissed off about. You know, I have a lot of things that I’m angry about and a lot of ways in which I wish the world was different. And that goes back to being a 14, 15 year old kid when my father’s butcher shop went out of business because Walmart came to town, and becoming a vegetarian and learning about global capitalism and exploitation and the exploitation of human labor and animals. And then coming of age as a queer person in a super homophobic world, and dealing with a lot of the toxicity of masculinity and the expectations of boys. 

So, yeah, that’s always been a huge motivating factor in my fiction, is the things that piss me off and the ways in which I wish they were different, or the ways in which I could imagine change happening. Or just bloody revenge on jerks. 

So yeah, We Are the Cloud, like a lot of my fiction, came from the place of having been a community organizer for many years, working really closely with a lot of people who are in situations really similar to the ones that the characters of that story are in, and just being super infuriated at the way the world treats them. The way systems that are supposed to help them actually exploit and manipulate and marginalize them. 

But also the kickass power of them, like the incredible strength and ability and sense of humor and creativity and all these other things that people have in situations like that. And so wanting to explore that as a superpower, as like, yes, people are in terrible situations, but those terrible situations often are the source of people’s awesomeness, or their awesomeness is formed in opposition to or in spite of, or in defiance of all of that. So yeah, people are magic, people are amazing. They’re also terrible, but that’s also a thing that I write stories about.

I know a fair amount about your career as a writer, but I don’t know that much about your career as an organizer, other than that you worked with Picture the Homeless in New York for a long time. Would you be willing to give me the broad strokes? 

Yeah, so when I first moved to New York City, I worked in publishing. I had a job at a book packager that was creating, like cookbooks and lifestyle books. And this was also, you know, late 2001, early 2002, so there was a lot of really active work being done around the response to 9/11. And fighting back against the push for war, and the really rampant abuses of the civil rights of immigrants, especially immigrants from the Middle East. And so I was sort of having this day job of putting together a Christmas cookbook and night job of going to meetings and planning protests. I once had a breakdown of like, trying to find the right piece of art for Santa Claus to go in the lower left hand corner of the page, and I was just like, my Jewish relatives are spinning in their graves. 

I got laid off in the economic downturn of 2003, started doing activism full time, and fell into community organizing. And was really fortunate to end up with Picture the Homeless, which is a great group that was founded and is led by homeless people. They’re about coming together to fight for solutions to the problems they face, and to really ensure that that organizing is led by homeless people. And so it’s not about people who have never experienced homelessness, but studied it in college, or people who are civil servants with good intentions, but no experience of the realities of homelessness, making decisions, shaping policies that homeless people will have to live with. 

I was there for 15 years exactly, and got to just do the most amazing work and organize some incredible protests and help support some great campaigns and we ended up effecting well over 100 concrete policy and legislative changes from really small stuff to pretty big stuff. Ultimately—and I think this is something that happens to a lot of people, especially in community organizing, which requires a huge amount of emotional and physical labor—I had reached a place where I was just like, I think there need to be younger, better people doing this work now, because I’ve acquired the cynicism that I had observed and hated in older organizers.

Do you have any particular points of optimism or pride from that period? Or on the flip side, is there anything in particular that you feel disappointed by coming out of that work? 

I think that spending any amount of time in or around the nonprofit industrial complex leaves you with a really sour taste in your mouth. It’s just really, really hard work that is underfunded and under resourced. And especially for people of color, people from low-income backgrounds. There’s no safety net, there’s no retirement funds, there’s no 401K’s. And I had seen some really amazing organizers who didn’t get to grow old, because they got to a certain age and the work killed them, or they had to bail out of it. 

You have to acknowledge that the whole way the 501(c)(3) tax code is structured is to prevent organizations from effecting systemic change. The question then becomes, do you believe that within the extreme limitations of day job activism, that you can create change? And as long as you believe that, then that’s great. And then you reach a point sometimes where you don’t, or you think that the sacrifices it asks are too much, the framework for change is too limited. So those are the things, the cynicism, the anger, the resentment, the things that I walked away from that I don’t love.

But what I do love, and the best part, is always the people. I got to meet and work with so many amazing people who inspire me to this day in so many ways, and who I still count as friends. Just so many great people. People who are dealing with unimaginable trauma on a daily basis, and still come to the office every day committed to fighting for nonviolent social change. That’s the kind of thing that makes you feel like, yes, the world can be changed. Even if I can’t do it right now in this way.

I think I recall you saying on a podcast something along the lines of, you’re not really writing to convert people or convince people of something. You’re writing to energize people who are in the fight. Am I getting that right and is that still how you feel? 

This is an insight from activism and organizing. When you’re marching down the street with a bunch of people and you’re chanting something, you’re not really doing it to change anybody’s mind. Because the people who are like sitting in their cars fuming that you’re blocking traffic, with their he-who-shall-not-be-named bumper sticker. They’re not going to be like, oh, I never thought of it that way. 

Your sign is so clever...

Exactly. I’ve made a shit ton of protest signs in my day, and I’m proud of many of them, but I’m under no delusions about their ultimate effectiveness. But, you know, I was at a protest the day after the 2016 election. And we were all stunned and shocked, and what made that protest amazing was just seeing the way that people who were scared and upset and angry—the way that they responded was what was energizing, and why we were there. Not because we thought people were going to be like, oh, well in that case, let’s do another election. No, what’s important is making people feel like the thing that they believe, the thing that they’re angry about, that there’s other people who are out there saying it. And therefore, if they say it, if they act on it, if they do something, then that’s great. And it’s safe to do that. 

I think it’s similar with fiction. I would love to believe that a beautifully written story about somebody who goes on a journey from climate change denier to climate change activist would inspire somebody to make that journey. But I also feel like that’s kind of a naive belief, and not really how that typically happens.

I think that it’s definitely possible that somebody who hasn’t made up their mind might make up their mind differently. But typically, I’m writing more for the person who’s like, I think that sounds really interesting. Or I wanted to believe that there was a future that isn’t an ocean full of plastic fragments, and then I read that story about a future where genetically modified fungus has been developed to do everything plastic does, but be biodegradable, or whatever. To tell the stories that can make people think that there’s hope, that there’s possibility, that there’s a reason to get involved. So yeah, you had it mostly right. For me, I’m not really talking to the people who are probably, at least ideologically, my enemies.

There’s this great book Twitter and Tear Gas by Zeynep Tufekci, and she writes about Occupy and Arab Spring, and how a big part of their point was that they created these little communities that reflected how the people wanted to live. You know, there were like, cashless transactions…

Libraries…

Yeah, exactly. And that reminds me of how, in a way, writing stories can be like that. You’re carving out these little worlds for people who want the world to be better, even though it’s not.

And those hopefully will be incubators for people who will make the world better. I think that the far right has historically done a really good job of creating little incubators for people who are going to go out and change the world. And I wish they weren’t doing such a good job of it. But yeah, that’s the power of a space like Occupy or even Twitter. As much as it is annoying, social media can be a place to come together with people who can inspire and excite you about transforming your feelings into action.

Yeah, definitely. I wonder, when you were growing up, did you find your politics and your interest in fantasy and sci-fi and horror to be related? Did they feed into each other at all?

I don’t know. Who can say what’s going on in here? I do think there is a similar sort of giddiness I get from great speculative fiction and great activism and that sense of possibility. You know, like the first time you encounter Octavia Butler or Ted Chiang or Ray Bradbury, when you’re like, oh, you can do this?? Oh! And that’s similar to the idea of like, oh I’ve never met these people before and I’m sitting down planning a protest with them and I love them. So I think it definitely comes from a place of being unsatisfied with reality and wanting to imagine a better reality. And books have historically been an escape and a safe place when I was a little queer boy in a small town where shit wasn’t safe. So I think that there’s definitely similar wellsprings to them.

OK let’s talk about some of your books. I want to talk a bit about Blackfish City because I really enjoyed it and I think about it a lot. What made you want to write a book about, I mean, it’s not solely about climate change, but it’s a lot about climate change, or at least post-climate collapse. And how did you come to your particular approach to it?

Yeah, that book came from like, a ton of places. The real sort of nucleus of it, where the city of Qaanaaq came from, was a short story I wrote called Calved, which was published in Asimov’s, that is about a person who is displaced from a sunken Manhattan and ends up in this floating city. And that was really about American xenophobia and the fact that most of the immigrants coming to America from Central America are coming here because of environmental and economic devastation wrought by the United States on their home countries and their home economies. And so the irony of like, we fucked up their countries, we fucked up the environment, and then when they come here, we give them shit about it, when it’s our fault, right? So imagining what happens when the American xenophobes are the ones who have to go somewhere else because their homeland has been destroyed and then get treated like shit for trying to find a halfway decent life. And so that cyclical nature of oppression was part of it.

But also, I obsess a lot about climate change, I think a lot about mass extinction, I love animals. And thinking about the horrors that we are unleashing on the planet is really upsetting to me on a daily basis. And it’s legit the kind of thing where you’re like, it’s really hard to justify life, and staying alive and feeling good about the future, when this is the toll of human life and human existence. So that’s just sort of a general constant backdrop of my brain of like, we are monsters, we deserve to go extinct. But also, I was responding semi-consciously to a lot of the zombie apocalypse narratives and The Road by Cormac McCarthy, which I hated.

Ooh I would love to hear more but go on.

You know, the idea of the apocalypse is constantly invoked in science fiction, but it’s usually some bullshit that’s never going to happen, as opposed to the very real thing that is happening right now, right? Because the zombie apocalypse, we can enjoy those narratives without thinking, oh, I really should stop creating zombies. You know, The Walking Dead doesn’t make anybody go like, oh let me change my behavior. But climate change apocalypses are like, we’re doing it right now, every time we fucking get a Starbucks. So I wanted to sort of reroute an apocalypse narrative into—no, think about the shit you’re doing. 

But also the other thing that I hate about a lot of those narratives, especially The Road is just the pornography of suffering and the utter fuckedness of it all, as opposed to like, well no, there are still gonna be some awesome things, and there might be some new awesome things. And even when we’ve lost all of this, there’s still the potential for change and for coming together and for building community and fighting back. So, you know, it was about responding to, inverting and also like, undermining the apocalypse narrative.

I’m glad you brought that up because one of my favorite things about Blackfish City is the fact that you make it very clear that there’s still joy in this world. There’s one part in particular where one of the characters and his grandfather are talking and then all of a sudden, they see two seals bump chests, and they just laugh for a second. So even in this city that is horribly fucked up in all these different ways, this grandfather and grandson are still like, “oh look, seals!”

Even if they’re both terrible people. 

Yeah, right. 

They’re still people.

I wonder if you could talk a little about why you are so averse to that kind of disaster porn and why you’re so insistent on including the fact that this is just part of life for people and they’re going about their daily business.

I think part of it is just, it’s boring, right? The unrelenting heaviness and misery. We just watched Mare of Easttown, which in many ways is a staggering achievement, and in many ways is just so fucking grim and bleak. It’s like, oh, and then this person got into a car accident. Oh, look, the baby didn’t drown in the bathtub, and that’s the happy ending to this episode. And so yeah, it’s easy to make people feel things if you go that route, and many people really appreciate and value that opportunity to feel things. So it’s legit, but it’s not what I want to do. 

A big part of it is, I’m trying to psych myself out here. And if I can psych somebody else out, then that’s great. I’m trying to tell myself that there’s hope, that there’s possibility. And I don’t want to tell a narrative that’s just like, everything is terrible. Let’s have a few moments of joy and beauty in amongst all the horror that will inevitably swallow us—because that’s what life is! Life is misery with pockets of joy and bliss and beauty and whatever else we look for in life. And stories are where we can imagine that. So yeah, trying to trick myself, and if other people get tricked in the process, bonus.

Similar to that, I was thinking about how there’s always this debate in science fiction of whether it’s too optimistic or pessimistic, right? One thing that’s cool about Blackfish City is that it’s very hard to define clearly whether it’s dystopian or utopian. Where do you fall on whether science fiction needs to be more of a tool to present a bright future or whether it should be something that scares the shit out of us?

I mean, my particular axe to grind with a dystopia/utopia conversation is that life right now is utopian for many people. There’s lots of people in the world who enjoy unimaginable comfort and abundance. And there’s tons of people for whom life is utter dystopia, rivaling anything in The Walking Dead. And working with homeless folks in New York City, I was able to see that every day. So I don’t think there’s ever been a point in human history where that hasn’t been the case—utopia for some and dystopia for more. And it’s also hard for me to imagine a future where that’s not the case, although I would love to. But no, I think that that’s just how life is going to be. 

If you’re living in dystopia, it’s a function of who you’re hanging around with or who you are, not what the world is like, and so I’m trying to say, here’s what life is like for this person who’s socioeconomically disadvantaged versus someone who’s super wealthy and powerful—and you know what, neither one of them is happy or they’re unhappy over different things. When I say that people are living in utopia and enjoying unimaginable abundance and comfort, that doesn’t mean they’re not subject to heartbreak and grief and loss and mourning and frustration. So yeah, everybody’s screwed. That’s where I’m coming from. That’s where my stories end up.

There is a line in Blackfish City that I always really liked, in this moment when the characters are like, holy shit everything is about to change right now. You call it “Terrifying, but also thick with magnificent possible outcomes.” And I wonder if you’ve experienced moments like that and also, what do you think it takes to get to those points?

I mean, I think that a lot of it is personal and a lot of it is individual, and I think that those moments come along occasionally and they are often connected with like trauma or crisis or transition. I went to the Clarion science fiction writers workshop in 2012. And that’s a six-week intensive workshop that’s in San Diego away from your life and job and family. And a bunch of people in my class ended up getting divorced after that. Because when you step away from your life like that, you suddenly see it differently and the things that you had grown accustomed to, and maybe the things that you didn’t love, but you had made your peace with, you can suddenly see differently. So those moments of transition where like, maybe we got fired, maybe we lost someone we love, maybe we got dumped, suddenly, it’s like we’ve been jolted out of the way we thought the world was. And that can be a really powerful moment for transformation. 

And the same thing happens in the world, like a political moment. I think that a lot of times elections serve as that moment of oh, now I’m scared, or now I’m empowered and excited. You know, I think that in a lot of ways COVID has been that. Like, oh, we’re not traveling on jets anymore and we actually don’t seem to be suffering as a result of it. So maybe some of the wasteful habits we have have changed. I feel like my relationship to nature changed when I was not in the workaday grind all the time. So I think that moments of societal transition can also be that. 

But often it’s like, who is best positioned to take advantage of transformation? It’s the wealthy and the powerful. I feel like there was rhetoric around 9/11 of, oh, the old geopolitical order is crumbling and now we’re going to see the potential for new alignments, and what actually happened was just racism and xenophobia and anti-Islam and war and militarism and military profiteering just surged. So I think the potential is there for change and usually the change is taken advantage of by the people who are financially the most able to. But that’s not always going to be the case and it’s not going to be the case for everybody. 

Okay, one more question on Blackfish City and that is about one of my favorite lines of yours, which is, “Every city is a war.” And that whole passage is such an amazing insight and such a different insight than the way a lot of I guess rich liberals tend to view cities as these paradises of perfection and openness.

Coexistence, diversity, everyone’s happy, I can get all the good food I want…

Look at this amazing Ethiopian restaurant I can go to, yeah. But I think that’s very counter to the way that like ordinary ass people experience it, so I am curious if your thinking has changed much on that over the years. Do you still agree with that sentiment? 

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. And you know, it’s like, who are you and where are you in the city and in the ladder of the city to see it that way or not see it that way, right? You know who knows that it’s a war? The people who can’t pay their rent and are about to get evicted because their landlord doesn’t give a shit about them as people. And so that’s a war right? 

We we want to tell ourselves that everyone gets along great, but it’s a lot of competing interests for scarce resources. It’s a lot of struggle for power and dominance. You know, I ride my bike in New York City and it’s a nightmare city to bike in, and every cab driver is at war with every bicyclist. And the wars between putting pressure on politicians to create more bike lanes to make it safer, versus demolishing bike lanes and making the city better for drivers is real. 

So yeah, I definitely think that’s still the case, but I also think that that doesn’t mean that the other narrative isn’t true. That this is the city where all the people can get along and we don’t hate each other because of who we are, or if we do, we know not to say that or let that lead our interactions, right? We’re still going to be civil to each other, we still understand that no one is garbage. And that everyone has the power to fuck you up if you insult them. It’s a model of coexistence, and a model of collaboration and an active, beautiful experiment—at the same time as it’s a cutthroat, brutal conflict.

Do you ever see a world in which a city is not a war? I think some people might think of this as like a post-capitalist age or a post-scarcity age. Can you imagine that? Or do you think it’s just always going to be a slog like this, with good stuff and bad stuff?

I mean, I definitely see the potential to make certain aspects of that war less egregious, right? If everyone had the right to a place to live, that war would be less horrific. If everyone had a job that enabled them to take care of their family, that war would be less horrific. So I think that the terms of the conflict can shift and will shift, but it’s always going to be like a business owner trying to make a profit whose needs are directly opposed to their dishwasher, right?  

I don’t know that in a non-capitalist or post-capitalist system that that would still be the case, and this is the old debate about what we think of as human nature. Is that human nature or is that conditioned by capitalism? When I think people are fundamentally selfish and exploitative and prone to making decisions that are in their own interests, even if it hurts others—is that real? Is that universal? Has that always been true? Or is that just because we live in a shitty system where you are incentivized to do all those things? I would love to believe that that’s the case and that there’s another vision of human nature. I’m not sure if I’m convinced of that. Or if my beliefs one way or the other make a fucking whit of difference.

But yeah, I could imagine it being different. And of course, when I say every city is a war that’s not a literal statement. It’s just that there are always going to be conflicting interests. Those conflicts, I can’t imagine those things not still being the case, even if they look super different.

Okay, let’s talk about The Blade Between, which is another one I really enjoyed and I have similar conflicted feelings about where I grew up as I gather you do. You did a really great job of capturing this fear and dread about our hometowns and also the places that we’re currently living, how they’re changing underneath us. It also feels like a really personal book. And so I wonder what made you decide to go down that road and take on those issues in such a personal way, especially?

That was a book that popped into my brain and really rose to the surface when a lot of complicated feelings and anger and sadness and frustration and guilt that had been percolating in inchoate form, suddenly crystallized into a story that I got really excited about. 

The immediate impetus for it was my father, who really loved Hudson, and had been a really important part of its sort of landscape. And I hated Hudson and ran screaming as soon as I could. And so caring for him in his last years and coming to see the Hudson that he saw, and having to juggle those two Hudsons—the shitty homophobic bullying place, and the beautiful, cool place where everyone knew each other, and people were friendly, and had a sort of mentality of like, we are a community.

That really comes through, especially in the way that you treat your characters. You’re very fair and empathetic with your characters. I feel like when I read your books, it’s hard to tell who the bad guy is or who the good guy is. Even the worst guys make some good points sometimes, and even your heroes, like Ronan, for example, does a lot of shitty stuff, no offense. 

So part of me just wants to ask who is the good guy in your books. But I guess another way to put that is, do you feel like you do have some people in your books who provide a moral compass? Or do you feel like they’re all just kind of a wreck in their own ways?

Yeah, everyone’s a mess. Everyone’s a total wreck. I was a cinema studies major in college and one of my favorite films is Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion. And this quote, actually, I think is in The Rules of the Game. But one character says the only really terrible thing in life is that everyone has their reasons. And that has sort of always been my approach. There’s a quote from The Talented Mr. Ripley, where he’s like, you know, no one thinks they’re a bad person, whatever you do, no matter how horrible, it all makes sense to you. And so that’s always been my approach, that even the biggest jerk in the world believes that they’re acting in the best interests of themselves, of their family, of their country, of their company. And it’s my job to sort of bring humanity to them. Because otherwise, I’m going to go crazy with rage at this jerk or that jerk. I’m going to forget that they’re human. 

At Clarion, one of my teachers was Holly Black, who’s an amazing writer, and she said, if you’re going to make a political point in fiction, you almost have to argue the opposite. Because if you just present that this is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong, this is right, people are going to be bored and annoyed. If they agree, they’ll just be like, whatever. And if they don’t agree, they’ll be mad. So if you genuinely want to write fiction that addresses these complex issues, you have to give it the space to not be villainized or stigmatized, to be a legit perspective, even if you think it’s terrible. Because plenty of people have it. So yeah, that’s always been my approach. 

Actually, the novel that I’m working on now, I think finally does have like a real legit villain, but that’s mostly because it is a sentient AI. Insofar as a character is human, they’re probably redeemable, even if they will also die horribly on my watch.

There’s another big theme in The Blade Between, which honestly surprised me a little. You know, when I heard you had written a book about housing and gentrification, I was like, “Yeah, Sam’s gonna burn the whole fucking thing down!” And you do in a lot of ways! But there’s also a very strong message of mending rifts and healing. [SPOILER!] Toward the end, residents start a kind of truth and reconciliation commission.

How much of that do you think is actually possible? Do you think that there is a way to mend these divisions, but also just connect with and be kind to people who we might really hate at the moment?

So, yes, I do think that we have no choice but to figure out a way forward from conflict that is going to honor the conflict and acknowledge that the conflict happened or is happening. And I think that if you look at American history, you can see really clearly the consequences of trying to pretend nothing happened. And the fact that we are still dealing with white supremacy as a fundamental fact and driver and engine of American politics, is because we didn’t have the hard conversations and do the difficult reparations and sit down together to figure out that, no, we share this. Neither of us is going anywhere. So how can we figure this out? 

So with gentrification, that’s something like working on it, paying attention to it, fighting for change around it. I would love for us be able to snap our fingers and all of the gentrifiers will go away, and all of the displaced people will come back, and everything will be great. But I don’t think that’s reality and I think that that isn’t even a desirable outcome, right? That if that did happen—well okay, it’s probably a desirable outcome [laughs]. But it’s not a possible one. And I think that what we really have to do is acknowledge that, no, if I’m a white person who moves into a community of color, I have accountability to my neighbors, I have common bonds with my neighbors, I have an obligation to be part of the community. And that means acknowledging that we have shared interests, and that we have to engage in dialogue. 

This is why elections are unsatisfying outcomes to conflict because, okay, so this side won, but that just means that the other side is going to still be pissed and want to come back harder and do nasty shit to not lose next time, right? So there’s a kind of non-zero sum game that we need to be playing and that historically has been played, and that I think can happen. I think Cadwell Turnbull’s work is a great example of how that can happen in compelling narrative ways. And there’s models for cooperative economics and cooperative political systems that point towards that. 

So I don’t necessarily believe that it’s easy. I don’t know that I would wager money on it being likely. But you know, we’re here to tell stories to make us believe that justice is possible, right? We don’t want every ending to be happy. But we want every ending to feel just. If the bad guy wins, there has to have been a cost, right? If the good guy loses, there has to be a victory, right? So as writers, as storytellers, we have the power to give people that. Justice is a thing that is not present in the real world and we can create the conditions for that. And so we model that, in whatever way feels honest and true and possible and powerful.

That is a great point to end on. Sam, I really appreciate it. This has been great. Thank you so much.

This was a pleasure. This was a great conversation. I appreciate you reaching out.

—

Good interview right? What a smart person, what a fun person to talk to.

Well we are deep into Halloween season and fall in New England which is the best time of year here by leaps and bounds and kind of the only reason worth living here just kidding but not kidding. Last weekend we went to Salem for the day, which was pretty ill-advised as we did not realize the extent of the tourism Salem now attracts during October. There were mobs of people from like Texas or Virginia or Chelmsford, walking around in sparkly purple witch hats and shirts that say “Squad Ghouls,” eating hot dogs and going to haunted magic shows in tents. So it was honestly kind of horrifying and not really in a good way. As my friend Theresa said “sounds like where Halloween goes to die.” 

But you know what, people were having fun so who am I to judge *wink wink* and we had a very good time too. Salem is still such a cool little town with great spots like Hive and Forge, which is owned by some friends of ours and HausWitch, where we picked up a lot of cool new witchy shit. You gotta support your local peddlers of dark arts and scented candles people.

I hope you enjoyed this interview as much as I did, and I also hope you are getting nice and spooked these days, within your own comfort level that is.

Tate 

Ministry for the Future tells the greatest story of our time, brilliantly, and with no resolution

Princesses Astrid and Ragnhild Coasts, Antarctica

—

For years, there was this common refrain in the news media but also regarding books, movies, etc., that climate change is just not a topic conducive to broadly accessible stories. Chris Hayes notoriously once said that talking about climate change on his show is a “palpable ratings killer.” It’s too slow and spread out over time, there are no clear heroes and villains, it’s too technical, it’s boring, nobody wants to read about it.

This is, of course, not actually true, and the success of a book like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future strikes me as proof that climate is actually a topic overflowing with compelling stories. The opening in particular is so gripping that it makes you wonder why we haven’t books like this for years. It’s hard to say exactly why there have been so few breakthrough novels and short stories about climate change. There are actually a lot of them, several of which I have read and liked quite a lot, but not many have made it into the mainstream (Robinson himself has been writing about climate change for some time, including 2312 and New York 2140). So maybe there is some truth to the claim that audiences weren’t ready to confront it head on, or maybe it’s that not enough writers were ready. That would explain the steady flow of fiction that is not literally about climate change, but I would argue is actually about climate change in tone and theme (the surge of apocalyptic horror comes to mind).

I think there’s also some truth to the claim that climate change is not an easy story to tell. Other writers have certainly done so successfully, but Ministry for the Future is what I tend to think of as the first big swing that an author has taken at writing a climate change masterpiece. Big and all-encompassing, it is clearly the work of a writer who is willing to take on a huge topic, and trying hard to get his brain around the entire thing. It is perhaps too big a swing, in fact, as some will no doubt find the page count daunting. But I think that too is a deliberate decision to honor the subject with the depth it deserves. Because of that ambition alone, but also its overwhelming success in execution, I think Ministry for the Future is a not just great book, but an important book that I would recommend to anyone.

It’s ambitious in scope, but also in its form, and I think that’s a key ingredient to the book’s success. Because climate change is a topic that tends to unravel norms and standards we are accustomed to, it strikes me that writing a great climate change book requires the novelist to toss aside many of the frequently used tools, or at least push them to their limits. So there are many common fictional tropes here, but they are chopped up, stretched out, sometimes left behind in the dust and debris. They are also punctuated by less conventional containers for Robinson’s ideas, whether that’s an imaginary talk show, meeting notes, poems, riddles, or explanatory essays.

That makes for a meandering narrative, but one that moves quickly and is teeming with ideas and imagination. A bit like the essay collection All We Can Save, instead of attempting one singular, linear argument, the book builds a kind of ecosystem of ideas, each of which offers a new potential point of entry for readers. The result is as thought-provoking as it is emotional, stirring up a mix of enthusiasm, depression, distaste, and grief, as any examination of climate change should.

Optimistic, sort of

Ministry is a science fiction book, but it’s not exactly a science fiction book, a distinction I make with reluctance as someone who loves science fiction but understands that not everyone does. I don’t want to denigrate the genre, but it’s one of those books that sci-fi readers will enjoy, and skeptics shouldn’t be afraid of.

It takes place in a world that will look very familiar, but teased out into the future just far enough (2020s-2040s) that Robinson can deconstruct reality to his liking. This is a tried and true sci-fi technique of using an imagined future to better critique the present, allowing us to reevaluate our world and our lives in a way that won’t feel like an attack or a manifesto. But it’s also quite literally a book about what the future might hold.

It’s largely optimistic, although that feels kind of weird to say considering [spoiler] at least many millions of people die, main characters suffer greatly, some are killed, and others are imprisoned for the bulk of the book. But in a societal sense, it asks the question of what the world might look like if society were to actually make radical changes in the face of climate change, sometimes voluntarily and sometimes not. What would it take for us to survive an inescapable worldwide crisis, and then keep going?

And the answer is, often it looks pretty shitty. But other times it looks spectacular. Sometimes it’s a ride on a giant dirigible, sometimes it’s a terrorist attack. And sometimes it’s just a peaceful afternoon on a hike with a friend. Because that’s what living through a global crisis is actually like. Ups and downs. But it’s optimistic in the sense that it is a vision of humanity doing big things, breaking and building, rewriting our own story.

A book of ideas

Setting aside the story for a minute, many people will say in either positive or negative critiques, that Ministry for the Future is primarily a book of ideas. That’s fair, and specifically, it is a book of ideas about how far we would or could or should go in order to continue as a species. Robinson is clearly such an incredibly smart and well-read person, and a lot of this book is him getting all of his dizzying ideas about what could happen in the coming years down on the page.

As a result, it is much less a book about science than I anticipated going into it. I would say much if not most of the book’s speculative elements involve economics, governance, even religion, as opposed to geology or chemistry. So maybe it should be more accurately described as social-science fiction, in which the author’s imagination is applied to societal innovations we might concoct. Every decision we could make as a collective is written as a kind of invention that we might put to use—a solar-powered clipper ship is as much a needed innovation as a new kind of currency or worker cooperative. In one of the book’s discursive chapters, an imaginary debate about technology concludes:

By that line of reasoning, you end up saying design is technology, law is technology, language is technology— even thinking is technology! At which point, QED—you’ve proved technology drives history, by defining everything we do as a technology.

But maybe it is! Maybe we need to remember that, and think about what technologies we want to develop and put to use.

Some of my favorite moments in the book are these sections that are framed as arguments between two nameless, faceless people, in the form of some kind of talk show or debate. I kind of think of them as Robinson debating with his own mind, as we all do, or as a debate between optimism and pessimism, or change and the status quo. Other sections are framed as encyclopedia entries, or persuasive or informational essays.

Many of these ideas are not even that speculative, if at all, reflecting concepts from actual academic papers or fledgling features of our current reality. In that sense, it functions like a synthesis of our current knowledge of the climate problem and its possible solutions, in fiction form. So you might read a chapter and think, oh yeah, I remember that article, except it’s been brought to life in a fictional setting.

It’s also worth noting that the book is told unapologetically from a certain ideological perspective, and I’m guessing Robinson would not argue with this. Ministry is highly critical of the havoc global capitalism has wrought, and a pretty clear proponent of democratic socialism or at least social democracy. But Robinson is not dogmatic in his beliefs, and spends a lot of the book considering how markets can be put to better use. You get the sense that he feels the delineations that define our current political debates will mostly wear out their usefulness amid climate catastrophe.

If anything, he’s using the novel to put his opinions to a kind of stress test, smashing them up against unthinkable barriers and conflicting outlooks to see how they hold up. And in all cases, the underlying message is that the assumptions we currently cling to about the way the world works are nothing more than assumptions, and can be reimagined wherever we have sufficient will.

Denying us a neat sense of closure

In a similar way, the book runs up and down societal strata in a way that I did not anticipate. My biggest fear about the book—coming from a genre that at its worst is about white dudes doing science and computer stuff—was that it would be mainly a story of technocrats and experts bending the environment to their will. There is some of that, with several geoengineering plotlines, which are a lot of fun in the spirit of what if we just said fuck it and did this. There’s a surprising amount of attention paid to blockchain. The main character is essentially a diplomat, and the titular institution a bureaucracy. But neither stays within those definitions, because the situation demands they break out of them.

The narrative, too, breaks out of the initial bounds that it sets for itself. The book’s sort of homebase is Switzerland, and the biggest criticism I have is that more time could have been spent among communities impacted the most and less time could have been spent in Europe. But the action of the novel jumps all over the place, to India, Los Angeles, the rural Midwest, Antarctica, China, and many more locations. At times, it feels like a spy thriller, but just as quickly abandons the genre for an uneventful day in the park. At various times, our heroes are bankers, protestors, NGO workers, farmers, kidnappers and saboteurs.

As a result, mileage will vary with certain threads of the book. I found myself at times thinking, ah man, back in Geneva really. It has a few cheeseball moments too. But it’s never slow, moving along at a rhythm that is fast, but willing to give you a beat between the really heavy moments. Again, it’s not unlike the way All We Can Save uses poetry and sequential art to provide the reader with some time to breathe.

Another downside to this format is that there are plotlines that begin and just trail off, in ways that deny you a sense of neat closure. But again I think this serves a purpose. If Robinson shares my frustration at the lack of popular climate storytelling, the many unfinished mini-novels that populate Ministry could be seen as invitations for all the climate books that haven’t been written yet. I’m eager to read the full stories of (mild spoilers) the failed actor kayaking through a flooded Los Angeles, the great heatwave of the Southwest, the rewilding of Midwestern farmland, the nonviolent occupation of Paris, the NGO worker gone rogue, the premeditated murder of Facebook.

This wandering abandonment of narrative arcs might feel like a failure to some readers, and it can be frustrating at times, but I suspect it’s done intentionally. As much as Ministry for the Future challenges our ideas, our assumptions, the costs we are willing to accept, it also challenges what we should expect from a story about a topic that holds no singular message. Instead of a linear storyline, it’s an emergent one, putting human narratives within a jarring progression of time, picking up and putting down characters as the winds change. It’s more like a flurry of developments that continue until, before you know it, it’s a very different book than the one we started with.

Instead of a climactic resolution, it’s a diffuse one, not really an ending at all. In the final scene, characters look at a statue of Ganymede and Zeus, struggling to figure out what it’s trying to communicate. “It has to mean something,” one says. “Does it?” the other replies. “I think it does.”

It’s a not-so-subtle commentary on the vision that Kim Stanley Robinson himself has put forth in this book. That we’re not going to walk away from this with a sense of resolution or victory or a moral of the story. But it’s still an inspiring, important story, the story of humanity itself, and it’s one we can’t be afraid to tell.

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Links

• I will spare you any articles on what is happening in Congress right now but in case you missed it, it fuckin sucks!
• More than half of police killings are mislabeled, raising huge questions about how much of a threat police actually pose to society and also about racial bias among medical examiners.
• Kids will live through three times as many climate disasters as their grandparents, but in some places it is much worse. “Infants in sub-Saharan Africa are projected to live through 50 to 54 times as many heat waves as someone born in the preindustrial era.”
• The Canadian Rockies are very beautiful and they have these glowing turquoise lakes that are losing their color because of climate change.
• Cities are testing guaranteed income for artists.
• Republicans and industry are using a legislative tactic called “preemption” to make it illegal for cities to pass laws that reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The tobacco industry infamously used the same technique in the 90s to dodge wrongful death lawsuits.
• OK I lied here is one article on Kyrsten Sinema, who is building her career on being a political independent, which means refusing to vote with her party for no clear reason, refusing to say what she would vote for, changing position at the behest of corporate lobbyists, and making everyone all around hate her guts. The ending says it all about just how independent AZ voters really are: “would Ms. Odell actually vote for Ms. Sinema or anyone with a D beside their name? Probably not, she said.”
• Extinction Rebellion blocked the entrance to Charlie Baker’s house with big sailboat and chained themselves to it. (They edited it but at first this article used the term “climate control activists” which I thought was funny and weird.)
• Boston is one of the wealthiest cities in the country we are literally building half a dozen new skyscrapers and entire new neighborhoods for rich people, but our public transit system is falling apart to the point that it is a deathtrap.
• Yes this mosquito season was worse than normal and yes it’s because of climate change.
• The guitarist from Pearl Jam has paid for or helped pay for 27 skate parks in Montana, and three on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

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Listening

I like this LCD cover by Ezra Furman which I first heard on the show Sex Education, which I also like!

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Watching

I read Y: the Last Man comics as they came out issue by issue back in the old days you know the old fashioned way and I’ve been mostly enjoying the TV adaptation. Speaking of Boston being a deathtrap, I was honestly a little flattered that in a recent episode it was portrayed as the one city in the country that had descended into complete rebellion. Some TV writer clearly went to college here and has opinions. Here are some of the Boston moments I enjoyed the most. It was not filmed here, but this is supposed to be Fenway:

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OK that is all for this week. Speaking of Fenway last weekend we went to a Red Sox game with my father-in-law Jimmy and it was a blast it was like we went to church with him. The Red Sox lost but it was still a great time and perfect weather. Here is a fun fact one time we went to a Red Sox game and you can do this fun thing where you ask the organist this awesome guy Josh Kantor to play a song and he will sometimes do it, and Jamie asked him to play a Tori Amos song and he did.

This newsletter is like my own little Tori Amos song played for you, except instead of an organ I am using WordPress. But the love I put into it is basically the same.

Tate

Living with the knowledge that things are going to get much worse in your lifetime

This one’s a little dark so enjoy this nice picture of a rabbit. To be exact, a Young Hare, by Albrecht Dürer, 1502

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One of the takeaways from the IPCC’s sixth assessment is something that I had always been aware of on some level, but the report put such a fine point on it that it’s been this little nugget of doom I’ve been carrying around with me and thinking about in the past week.

That is, no matter what the world does, we are locked into 30 years of worsening climate impacts. The reason being, the world has already warmed by 1.1 degrees Celsius since the 19th century, and we’ve pumped so much carbon into the atmosphere, and the atmosphere and the ocean are so enormous, that you can’t just slam on the brakes and stop these global processes that have been set in motion. So even if starting today, we did everything 100% right—no pipelines, no combustion engines, no coal plants, no gas stoves—all of this *waves hands about* will continue to get worse until at least 2050. Hurricanes, flooding, sea level rise, fires, heat waves, winter storms, blackouts, melting ice sheets, worse, worse, worse.

I am 43 years old, so let me get the old calculator out, in 30 years if all goes according to plan I will be 73 years old. But you know people are living longer these days so if I eat my spinach maybe I’ve got a good good run left and in my golden years I just start to see us get this climate change thing under control. But wait a second, that is definitely not going to happen because we definitely aren’t doing everything right, and probably won’t for some time spoiler alert. So that means that, by certain measures, for the rest of my life, each decade will bring more extreme disasters than the decade before. And then I’ll die zzzz goodbye. And even if we all do a really, really good job during the rest of my life, I’ll have been dead long before the climate begins to somewhat stabilize if it does at all. It might keep getting worse for another 50, 100 years after that for all I know.

I know that is a grim way to look at things, and also pretty self-centered. After all, there are far more reasons to try to make the world a better place than securing your own personal comfort during old age. You know, leaving the world a better place, etc. But mainly I’m using my own lifespan as a ruler to demonstrate the very long, very slow, very unsatisfying march of progress.

It’s rare that we get such scientific certainty of failure, but this little exercise is a good representation of the way I and probably a lot of people have been feeling about a lot of things in the past week, which is to say, that they are going to get a lot worse before they get better. That certain measures of progress and quality of life seem like they will be on a downward trajectory for as long as we have the good fortune of being a human on earth.

That, again, may sound dramatic, and I know speaking with these kinds of certainties is a fool’s game for anyone who doesn’t want to sound like an idiot in a week or so. But what I’m trying to do is put my finger on the way things feel right now. And this week really did feel like another one of those moments where you have a clear view of the trajectory of history, like Paul Atreides when he chugs a bunch of spice, and that things are really not looking good.

I don’t think I need to fully recount what I’m talking about, but for one the country has been besieged by stacked natural disasters: wildfires in California/Nevada, deadly flooding in Tennessee, tropical storm Ida, which ravaged the Gulf Coast as a category 4 hurricane, one of the strongest to hit Louisiana in 165 years, then moved up to the Northeast where it killed dozens more, inundating streets, subways, homes, even an elevated highway, and turning basement apartments into death traps.

On the political front, Thursday was a reminder that, though we felt some sense of reprieve when Trump was denied a second term, we’re still very much living in the country that produced him, and the steady dismantling of democratic guardrails hasn’t even slowed. Namely, the Supreme Court did not take action to halt the Texas abortion ban, though it is certainly unconstitutional, signaling to many that we are on a path toward legal abortion no longer being the law of the land in the United States in the year 2021, a retrograde turn of events that would set us back 50 years in the nation’s history, and put us in an exclusive club of patriarchies and theocracies most of which you would not categorize as free or democratic. Which sounds shocking unless you realize that several states in the union have, for all practical purposes, already been at this point for years.

If that were not bad enough, the Democratic senator who likes to shoot climate change bills with a gun indicated he would not support the $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation bill that has been almost comically tasked with carrying the full weight of the Democratic agenda, despite the party theoretically controlling both chambers of the legislature and executive branch. Not only that, for many people who are not me, it was also carrying the hope that there remains a centrist, bipartisan path to federal policy that would patch our physical and social infrastructure and take even pitiful little baby steps toward climate mitigation. All things that, by the way, the majority of the country supports, but can never pass under our system of strengthening minority rule.

And so, many of us found ourselves in this moment of recognizing what seems surely to come, which is, bad shit. Another disastrous election in a few years, more political violence, more medieval state laws, more cars driving into protests, more fires, more floods. And maybe the worst part is, all of this is happening in a time when it feels like we are actually making progress toward a multiracial democracy. In fact, we know that much of this backlash is actually happening because we are making progress. And that is leaving many of us with emotions. Mainly, I think, a kind of sadness at this gauntlet of tragedy. But also anger, frustration, helplessness.

This flood of feelings right now in some way betrays a level of privilege to have been sheltered from them in the first place. There’s a certain whiteness to this kind of melancholy. “How do I manage my climate dread” we ask over and over, the only real answer being, well, you don’t, so buckle up. But this is also a ride with ups and downs for all of us. To varying degrees, there will always be a gap between any macro-level rotten state of affairs and your day to day state at any given time. For example, though no decade in the rest of my life will be less disastrous than the one that came before it, I’ll continue to have good days, I will go on nice vacations, see beautiful things, spend time with people I love, laugh, watch movies, read books. And on the flip side, I will keep having to do quotidian stuff to continue being of use to the economy. I will still have to circle back on that email.

This meme comes to mind, which was making the rounds over the week, and really was how it felt:

Or this tweet that seemed to hit right on Sept. 2:

Even setting aside the particular devastation of the past five days or so, this is a sensation that anyone who considers themselves a progressive or an activist or otherwise pushing back against the worst aspects of the world will be familiar with. We do experience transformative change, but it’s rarely linear or lasting, and even tangible advances get engulfed by new abuses of power, or dwarfed by a much larger struggle. In his history of abolitionists in the British Empire, Adam Hochschild ties the movement back to a meeting of a dozen people at a London bookstore and printing shop in 1787. Though the effort gained momentum very quickly, the British slave trade continued for another 50 years, another 25 in the United States, and it would be another 100 years until we nominally achieved racial equity under the law with the Civil Rights Act, and even still, elements of slavery continue through the prison system and worker exploitation.

In a recent interview on the Ezra Klein Show (dollar in the Ezra jar), Ta-Nehisi Coates and Nikole Hannah-Jones were describing the power play that landed them in faculty positions at Howard University, after Hannah-Jones was denied tenure at UNC as a result of a racist backlash against her work on the 1619 Project. The move was largely celebrated, but Coates described how they almost immediately received criticism regarding poor working conditions at Howard University.

“At first I was like, can I just get a second of peace man? Do you know how hard it was to get this done? But as I thought about it, I think the conversation reflects something true about life, that this is what it is, it’s constant struggle. Question after question after question. There is no place where you reside and you get to feel like you are the good guy in the story.”

So one one level, dejection over a setback on any one issue is a perfectly valid emotional response and often a form of grief in response to real-time harm. But taken too far, it misunderstands the nature of progress, a misinterpretation that moderates often make about social movements—that they exist to tick off a box.

In her collection of speeches and interviews Freedom is a Constant Struggle, Angela Davis emphasizes the danger of fixating on leaders triumphing within movements because “they tend to enact historical closures. They are represented as historical high points on a road to an ultimately triumphant democracy; one which can be displayed as a model for the world; one which perhaps can serve as justification for military incursions…” Posing progress as an endgame, in other words, presumes an eventual perch atop a hierarchy. A better framing is movement struggle as a series of continuities instead of closures, continuities that span both time and location. For example, she points out, the Black Panther Party’s Ten Point Program from 1966—which demands things like freedom, housing, education, health care, and an end to police brutality—mirrors 19th century abolitionist agendas (and today’s Movement for Black Lives agenda, for that matter). It never ends, nor should it.

In that same interview, Nikole Hannah-Jones laments that people are viewing the 1619 Project as an effort to teach people to hate whiteness, because “even at the darkest moments in this country, there was also always a biracial, sometimes a multiracial group of citizens, who are pushing for it to be better. Who were fighting for this country to live up to its highest ideals.” I find that connecting with that continuity to be sincerely, profoundly comforting—it is to not be alone.

I bring you platitudes that may be cold comfort, but you know what, sometimes they are classics for a reason. So I will leave you with one more, which is the fact that solace does happen within the struggle, in the pockets of community that we temporarily carve out within unjust systems. That is not always the case, and I’ve definitely had jobs working on progressive issues that replicated systems of oppression far more than they created communities of care. But if you’re doing it right, movements prefigure the world we are trying to create, and keep you going. As Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez said Thursday, “It feels better to be in movement.”

You can read a dual meaning in the phrase “freedom is a constant struggle.” One, that achieving freedom involves a struggle that never ends. But you can also read it as a belief that we achieve freedom in the struggle itself. That there is freedom in knowing its perpetuity and in the process itself. Davis was once asked how she has stayed optimistic over all her decades of being an activist:

Well, I don’t think we have any alternative other than remaining optimistic. Optimism is an absolute necessity, even if it’s only optimism of the will, as Gramsci said, and pessimism of the intellect. What has kept me going has been the development of new modes of community. I don’t know whether I would have survived had not movements survived, had not communities of resistance, communities of struggle. So whatever I’m doing I always feel myself directly connected to those communities and I think that this is an era where we have to encourage that sense of community particularly at a time when neoliberalism attempts to force people to think of themselves only in individual terms and not in collective terms. It is in collectivities that we find reservoirs of hope and optimism.

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Links

• Three days before Manchin threatened to kill the $3.5 trillion economic plan, this article ran about a massive corporate lobbying effort to kill the $3.5 trillion economic plan.
• Rebecca Solnit on the Texas abortion ban, which “seethes with violence and lies.”
• “The only way to understand the court’s action is that there are five votes to overrule Roe vs. Wade.”
• “I thought someone would swoop in and save this from happening. I am worried, that’s an understatement — and I feel ill.”
• Record shattering rainfall turned New York basement apartments into death traps.
• New York invested billions in storm protection since Sandy, but it did little to stop this week’s flooding, because it had been focused mainly on storm surge from the coast, not rain flowing downhill. It hits you from all directions.
• Sign this petition to stop the New York Times from running fossil fuel ads.
• Andrea Campbell gets the Globe’s endorsement for mayor. I’m voting for Wu, but would be thrilled with Campbell too I wish we had ranked choice voting. (One funny thing in this endorsement is praise for Walsh for expanding housing stock, yes thank you Secretary Walsh for a million units nobody can afford and a whole new, all-white neighborhood that is going to be overtaken by sea level rise, housing is fucking awesome in boston thanks to your tireless efforts.)
• Meanwhile the worst mayoral candidate by far says she would hire up to 300 new cops in Boston, a 15% increase to an already gargantuan budget. I wish there were ranked choice voting so I could rank her last out of any person in the entire city.
• This short video about people dying in the name of freedom from vaccines is brutal.
• A 35-hour workweek trial in Iceland found that services were not impacted, stress and burnout decreased, happiness increased both at work and at home.
• If you want to read even more about air conditioning, this interview is interesting, including some skepticism about the HFC reduction plan, history of racism in terms of who has AC, and some compelling ideas about communal air conditioning solutions.
• An environmental racism scorecard ranked ExxonMobil in last place with a negative score. Hey did you guys know that I fuckin hate ExxonMobil it’s true I do.
• Food banks are embracing small scale urban farms even though they provide a tiny fraction of the food they distribute. They see it as a way to strengthen their mission, build relationships and community, and form a more meaningful connection to the practice of feeding people. It struck me as a strong parallel to the value of individual lifestyle changes.

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I endorse

Longtime readers may have noticed that I love pictures of flowers. Still life in general, but flowers in particular. Especially like kind of washed out or slightly melancholy looking flowers. Goth I know. One of my favorite instagram accounts is British florist Milli Proust. She is an amazing florist and gardener but also a great photographer of flowers. I think we could all use some pictures of flowers to look at right now so go follow enjoy.

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Listening

What do you guys want to listen to how about RADWIMPS this Japanese emo band here’s their big song from the anime Your Name which is a movie that I love.

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A Saturday newsletter what kind of bullshit is this, you’re probably wondering. Well I ran fresh out of words yesterday and had to wrap things up today. But you know what it’s kind of nice to see you all on a Saturday like we decided after enjoying each others company around the office it was finally time to meet up over a coffee or do like a little group picnic in the park. I think it went pretty well, but I don’t know let’s not make a habit of it we all need to keep healthy boundaries so I will see you next Friday. Have a nice Labor Day and say a little thank you to unions, thank you unions.

Tate

For a while we all get a good look at what exactly we are reaping and none of us can easily turn away

Sand Dunes at Sunset, Atlantic City, Henry Ossawa Tanner, c. 1885

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When the infamous “hothouse Earth” study came out a couple years ago, painting a picture of the irreversible catastrophe that could be created by runaway climate change, journalist Eric Holthaus encouraged people who were appropriately terrified to remember that the point here is that this future is not inevitable, and we should use such terrifying possibilities as cause to redouble our commitment to urgent action. “This dead world is not our destiny,” he wrote, which is a sentiment that I periodically return to when things seem really bad.

But now and then, through a convergence of trends, coincidence, and terrible decisions, it’s like a portal opens up and for some period of time we get a glimpse of this dead world. I don’t mean that the past week was the same as living in the doomsday scenario of hothouse Earth, not even close, and we don’t even need that particular worst-case scenario in order to be terrified, because we are already experiencing lesser but still deadly versions of it all over the world, all the time. What I mean is that we occasionally get a good taste of just what it is that we are fucking with here. For a while, we all get to take a good hard look at what exactly we are reaping, and it’s something that none of us can easily turn away from.

This past week was one of those little windows, during which it felt like the full reality of climate change reared its head up from the sand for a moment, took some of us in its jaws, and then dove back under. Even for those of us not severely impacted by the week’s extreme weather, there was that ambient hum of anxiety hanging in the atmosphere combined with varying levels of discomfort in the form of the syrupy heat brain that slows down your will to do much of anything other than get the hell out of this heat even just for a second.

It was also one of those weeks where it was hard to even keep up with everything that was happening. So this is going to be one of those occasional mostly-links newsletters where I just try to take stock of things for a minute here. Where we all just take a second. Here are some of the things that happened.

Pain and suffering

* Lytton, B.C. broke the record three days straight for the hottest temperature ever recorded in Canada, peaking at 121.3 degrees. And then, a wildfire burned 90% of the town. “There won’t be very much left of Lytton.” Lytton is northeast of Vancouver, about the same latitude as London. 

* The heatwave broke, but in Canada it has been followed by wildfires across the west, with more than 100 burning as of Friday, 86 of which started in the past two days. 

* The heatwave in the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia was “of an intensity never recorded by modern humans,” considered a “once in a millennium” event. The heat dome is the combination of patterns in the jet stream and human-caused climate change, which makes events like these more common and more extreme. Two weeks prior, another history-making heatwave hit the Southwest, Intermountain West, and California. 

* Hundreds died as a result of the latest heatwave, with the death toll at 79 in Oregon alone, where in the past 20 years combined there were just 72 heat-related deaths recorded. British Columbia recorded at least 486 sudden deaths from Friday to Wednesday afternoon, a five-day period in which 165 such deaths are typically reported.

* The Portland Streetcar was forced to shut down because the heat melted its power cables. 

* Heat-induced illness spiked in the region, as seniors and people experiencing homelessness in particular suffered vomiting, loss of consciousness, fatigue, confusion, and dizziness, the symptoms of heat stroke. In King County in Washington, there were 41 heat-related visits to emergency rooms on Saturday and 91 on Sunday, while the previous daily record was just 9. 

* Super-high temperatures are shocking and dangerous, but just as deadly is the combination of lower levels of high heat combined with high humidity. At a certain point, sweating and evaporation will stop dissipating the heat, causing the body’s core temperature to rise and eventually shutting down organs. This danger is measured by the so-called “wet bulb temperature” at which evaporative cooling can occur. When the wet bulb temperature hits 95, a location reaches an “unlivable heat” because the body becomes unable to regulate its temperature.  

* The heat triggered rolling blackouts as temperatures and energy use threatened to blow out transformers, strain power lines, and break other equipment. Someone from a utility said they have never “experienced this kind of demand on our system and this kind of impact to our system. This is very unprecedented.”

* Record heatwaves also roasted parts of Eastern Europe and Siberia, leading to drownings in rivers and swimming pools as people swarmed bodies of water to cool off. In a recent study, scientists concluded that “human-induced climate change has dramatically increased the probability of the frequency and magnitude of heatwaves in the larger Siberian region.” Satellite imagery this week recorded ground temperature in at least one location in Siberia above 118 degrees Fahrenheit (that is in the Arctic Circle).

* Last weekend in Detroit, a cloudburst created by a cold front and a mass of humidity colliding hammered the city with rain, overwhelming its drainage system. Between 1958 and 2012, the heaviest 1% of storms in the Midwest became 37% more powerful. “The drainage system was working as it was designed to; it just isn’t equipped to handle that much rain.”

* Teviston, a small rural community in California’s Central Valley, lost its running water during a drought as temperatures hit 100+. Their only functioning well broke and residents are either leaving town or relying on bottled water for drinking, cooking, bathing, and flushing toilets. The pump should be fixed in two weeks but local officials fear the well has actually dried up. Teviston isn’t an isolated incident, as thousands of wells in the San Joaquin Valley are at risk of drying up this summer. 

* As of earlier this week, there were two dozen wildfires in Arizona that had burned more than 366,000 acres so far, signaling a wildfire season on pace with the past two years. A UA professor who studies the history of fires put it bluntly: “You can’t put a Band-Aid on this problem. There is no simple fix until you get serious about climate change.”

* Boston hit 100 degrees Wednesday for the first time since 2011, blowing past the record for that day, which was set in 1945 at 95 degrees. We also just wrapped up the hottest June in the city’s history.

* A recent report found that record-setting heat and drought in parts of the US are threatening the long-term power supply, as fossil fuel plants and nuclear power plants require massive amounts of water to operate. 

Obstruction and delay

You might expect terrifying conditions like this would increase a sense of urgency around climate action, but you would be wrong. Even though he said this week that “we have to act and act fast” on climate change, Biden achieved a bipartisan “victory” by cutting his celebrated infrastructure plan to one quarter of its original size and stripping it of most of its key climate change measures, abandoning several campaign promises. This is following the pattern of an enduring, enormous gap between the Biden administration’s stated climate ambitions and its actions. 

* Items that were stripped from the bill include a national renewable energy standard, hundreds of billions in tax incentives for clean energy, and an end to the almost $15 billion in handouts the federal government showers on the oil, gas, and coal industries, artificially lowering their costs. 

* Electric vehicle and transit spending is much smaller, environmental justice spending is whittled away to almost nothing, and there’s not even any spending on energy research and development, which climate conservatives disingenuously claim they support. 

* The administration and Congressional Democratic leaders are insisting that they will pass a separate bill in reconciliation that will close the gap, but honestly that seems impossible considering they would need every Senate Democrat to vote yes and at least one of them is pretty clearly in the pocket of the oil industry. 

And the reason we know that (at least the latest smoking gun) is a recent Greenpeace UK investigation that caught Exxon lobbyists talking, at length, about the extent to which the company is working to block climate action, including in this infrastructure bill. Exxon like most oil companies made a public-facing pivot to frame itself as part of the solution to climate change, but we all know that is complete horseshit and Keith McCoy, a senior director of federal relations for Exxon Mobil, made that very clear for everyone. Some of the things McCoy offered up: 

* On the infrastructure bill, Exxon was very worried that if it got too big, it would have to be paid for by rolling back Trump’s corporate tax cuts, which would cost them billions. So they lobbied to strip the bill down to just pre-climate crisis infrastructure priorities: “you stick to highways and bridges, then a lot of the negative stuff starts to come out” by negative stuff he means stuff that must absolutely happen to rein in global catastrophe. And all that stuff got taken out!

* The Exxon lobbyist listed several Democratic senators the company is targeting, one of which is, of course, Joe Manchin, who is a guy from West Virginia who because American democracy is a disaster somehow holds the fate of the world in his stupid hands. “Joe Manchin … I talk to his office every week. He is the kingmaker on this, because he’s a Democrat from West Virginia, which is a very conservative state, and he’s not shy about sort of staking his claim early and completely changing the debate.” 

* Exxon has worked to deny climate science and sow doubt in order to prevent regulation. “Did we aggressively fight against some of the science? Yes. Did we join some of these shadow groups to work against some of the early efforts? Yes that’s true. But there’s nothing illegal about that. We were looking out for our investments, we were looking out for shareholders.” 

* The company’s public support for a carbon tax is nothing but a PR move, a “a great talking point” for the company, but something they can comfortably back because they know it will never happen. 

And one more good one! 

* A report from Brown researchers concludes that from 1989 to 2009, the US Chamber of Commerce was a “powerful force in obstructing climate action.” The report looked at dozens of documents and found concerted messaging campaigns to prevent public concern over climate action and protect the bottom line of corporations. 

Resistance and relief

* This week, hundreds of climate activists descended on the White House to protest the Biden administration’s abandonment of his promises on the issue. Led by Sunrise Movement, which has been an ally to the Biden campaign and the administration, the demonstrators rallied across the street from the White House holding signs calling the president a coward, and eventually blocked entrances which led to arrests. No permanent friends, no permanent enemies. “When the next climate disaster hits, the next wildfire comes or the next hurricane comes, it won’t be bipartisanship that saves us all,” 18-year-old John Paul Mejia told NPR. 

* Demonstrators led by Native water protectors continue to fight the Line 3 tar sands pipeline, which would pump hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil through Minnesota’s wetlands, which by the way is oil that we cannot burn. In Waltham, Mass., protestors were arrested after occupying overnight the offices of the Canadian energy company behind the project. In a classic example of state violence supporting corporate violence, a Minnesota sheriff’s office barricaded access to the private property where protestors have set up an encampment that has served as a jumping off point for many direct actions. Oh and the Canadian oil company has a slush fund set up to pay public law enforcement for their loyal actions. Activists were hoping Biden would withdraw the Trump-era federal permits, but he did not. 

* As they (we) suffer the impacts of climate change, more than 20 cities, states and counties are suing fossil fuel companies, seeking retribution for driving the climate crisis and then offloading the costs onto the American public. The latest such suit comes from Baltimore, where densely populated heat islands are roasting residents, with communities of color suffering the greatest burden. Community nonprofits in Baltimore are setting up cooling stations and distributing fans and water to low-income residents. 

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So there is a week for you. I guess I want to reiterate that, as Eric Holthaus says, we are not locked into a dead world. I don’t even think we are locked into a government incapable of action on climate change. My pessimism knows no bounds, but also, big incredible changes can happen much faster than we give ourselves credit for. Throwing our hands in the air and giving up is the worst sin we could commit right now.

Weeks like this do make it clear, however, just what the stakes are beginning to look like in our daily lives, and the cruelty of the trajectory that we are on. And the complete inadequacy of what we have done so far and what we seem willing to do.

There was this narrative for a long time around climate change that the real tragedy was that humans just aren’t that good at understanding these kinds of time scales, or making sacrifices in anticipation of the future. With that came a sense that, as the consequences became clearer, of course we would respond with full force and everyone would get on board, Republicans and oil companies alike, but the tragedy might be that it will be too late.

I think it is becoming clearer that even this 11th hour come to Jesus moment is far from an inevitability. There is a strain of human nature or a segment of the human population or however you want to think of it that has an endless tolerance for widespread suffering, so long as they feel as though they’ve still got it better than some other set of people and they don’t have to give that up. They will cling to this dying world with everything they have because it’s the one they sit atop of. We saw it during the pandemic and we’re going to see it as temperatures and sea levels and death tolls continue to climb.

Maybe things go well with reconciliation and I will write a much rosier newsletter soon enough, but there is a block of opposition here that is just never going to come around, and there’s no compromising with that. I really don’t think Democrats get that yet. There is no compromise with Exxon Mobil. There’s no compromise infrastructure bill that doesn’t take radical action on climate change. Because what good is infrastructure in a dead world.

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Watching

Succession, Season 2

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Sometimes The Strategist is a handy publication that offers a helpful product recommendation and sometimes it is The Daily Journal of Capitalist Hellscape:

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Listening

This black metal album inspired by the video game Skyrim.

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That is the thing for this week and what a week it was. I feel like one day I will look back at this issue and be like, oh how quaint I thought that was so bad like when Gal Gadot made that video where all those dumdums were all wistfully singing Imagine and it was only day 6 of the pandemic. But if it makes you feel better, we can all take a minute and right now, in unison sing a song together what song should we sing hmm how about The Humpty Dance by Digital Underground. 1 2 3 start now

Talk to you next week Humptys.

Tate

Maybe the best thing about MacKenzie Scott’s philanthropy is that she is making other billionaires look terrible.

Ferns in a Forest, Isaac Levitan, 1895, oil on canvass

I wasn’t planning to write about MacKenzie Scott’s philanthropy for the newsletter, because it is all anyone is talking about in the nonprofit and philanthropy world this week and we are working on like 5 stories about it at my editor job, including a really good analysis by one of our writers Mike Scutari that touches on some of the points that I have here. But I do have some thoughts on the matter and a couple non-philanthropy people have asked me about it already so maybe I can do something useful here.

I say useful because I get the feeling there is some understandable puzzlement as to whether or not Scott’s multibillion-dollar giving spree is something we should be happy about. When I hear people talking about it, by that I mean normal well-adjusted people with only casual relationships with the theory and practice of philanthropy, I can sense this inner conflict that I am extremely familiar with. It’s an unsettling ambivalence that anyone who is a critic of the sector knows very well, a recognition that philanthropy can be a force for social change—sometimes even anti-capitalist change—while being rooted in the most fucked up things about capitalism, namely the obscene reality that in a country where 1 in 10 households have been unable to feed themselves, a single individual can own, say, $200 billion.

I can almost see the chain reaction of thoughts happening where someone is like, wow I actually really like a lot of these groups that just got more money than they have probably ever had, so hang on a second, is this a really good thing? Do I like this billionaire? Do I like what is happening right now? But how can that be when I’m pretty sure I don’t like any billionaires at all and I definitely don’t like Amazon, the place where all this money is coming from.

This is the paradox of big philanthropy. Even when very rich people are giving away their money, even in the best way possible to the most important things, it’s still often reinforcing this plutocratic order that led to the accumulation of their wealth in the first place. It happens either through unfair tax breaks (the charitable tax deduction benefits the wealthy more than the rest of us) or through reinforcing this false narrative that accumulation of private wealth is the best way to meet the public’s needs. And yet, there are all of these pools of wealth and all of these causes that need money, right?

So if you are conflicted by the windfall of funding MacKenzie Scott is sending to hundreds of important, underfunded causes, you are not alone. All of these impulses are simultaneously valid. But I would also say there’s one very good reason to like Scott’s unusual philanthropic project, and it is kind of hard to put into words but I will try. And that is, I suspect she is the first billionaire megadonor who has figured out how to give away staggering sums of money, while sitting atop a hoard of even more money, but still managing to undermine instead of reinforce the system that provided her with that money in the first place. At least at the scale at which she’s operating.

It’s a remarkable kind of magic trick that to my thinking is what truly sets what she’s doing apart, whether it’s intentional or not. In other words, the best thing about MacKenzie Scott’s giving is that she is the rare billionaire donor who makes other billionaires and even the very concept of being a billionaire look terrible.

OK maybe not the best thing and definitely not the only good thing about Scott’s philanthropy. She is funding causes at a scale that is hard to overstate, in a way that has never really been done before. One way to put this into perspective is that in less than one year, she has given away $8.5 billion. The country’s largest institutional funder, the Gates Foundation, gives away about $5 billion a year, and to do so, relies on a staff of 1,600 employees. Scott has zero staff other than a mysterious team of advisors (more on that in a bit), and seemed to ramp up giving beyond that of Gates in no time at all. She has shattered the philanthropic truism that giving away money is hard, and that it requires the smarts and savvy of the wealthy people who earned it in order to direct it in an effective manner.

That’s true in the amount she gives, but also in the execution. Some 90% of typical philanthropic giving is restricted, meaning it can only be used for express purposes, often very limited projects that the donor wants to see happen. So it’s less like giving someone money and more like subcontracting with grantees to carry out a donor’s whims. Scott’s giving is all unrestricted. Recipients can do whatever they want with it.

Also, many of the recipients are very small, under-resourced organizations. Another paternalistic norm she has broken is the common practice for funders to only give money in proportion to the group’s current budget. In other words, if I have a budget of $100,000 a year, I might only get a grant of $5,000. If I have a budget in the millions, I could get millions. That might sound like it makes some sense, after all, you don’t want someone to be so reliant on one grant. But what it effectively does is institutionalize inequality in the nonprofit sector. Small groups stay small. Big groups get bigger. Scott has no such rule, showering tiny nonprofits with amounts that are in some cases are probably more than they’ve received to date.

The latest round of giving went to 286 groups totaling $2.7 billion, averaging $9.5 million per group. Not all recipients received that much, but a look at the list of grantees reveals organizations that are not accustomed to receiving funding anywhere near that amount. Scott also puts a focus on groups led by women and people of color, which typically receive far less funding than large, mostly white NGOs. A brief sampling of the new recipients include Favianna Rodriguez’s Center for Cultural Power, Nick Tilsen’s NDN Collective, Boston-based Afro-Latin power building group the Hyde Square Task Force, the Black-led Movement Fund, the American Indian College Fund, Latinx dance troupe Ballet Hispanico, and so so many more.

So that’s great, right? Problem solved. Philanthropy figured out. Well, not really, because Scott’s giving is still problematic in ways that are common to all mega-donors and some ways that are unique to her own giving. Much of what these groups do shouldn’t even need to rely on private funding in the first place, much less one individual’s checking account. And what if you’re a very similar nonprofit as these groups and all of a sudden one peer has a budget that is many times larger than everyone else’s in the field? Why did that happen and what does that do within a movement? Meanwhile the process of how these decisions are being made is totally opaque. We don’t know who is making these calls, and it’s impossible to apply for funding.

There’s also the problem of Scott’s wealth itself, and whether it can ever truly be given away, the way this project has been framed. When she first announced her intention to “empty the safe” following her divorce from Bezos, Scott had around $36 billion. A year later, having given away $8.5 billion, she’s now worth $60 billion, thanks to surging Amazon stock. Wealth is so unbelievable sticky, such a black hole for more wealth, is it even possible to give away a fortune that size? Maybe, but I don’t know, and that’s why I’ve always been highly suspicious of the Giving Pledge and the overall concept of philanthropy as a means of large scale wealth distribution. It doesn’t really work.

So this puts Scott right in the dark heart of the paradox of big philanthropy. A reluctant billionaire who seems to not like the idea of being a billionaire, or the very idea of billionaires at all, but sees the tremendous need and impact she could have. At the same time, she runs the risk of becoming yet another Bill Gates, fueling the superhero myth of this class of people who stand above everyone else, swooping in with their riches to save the world.

But this is where I think Scott’s philanthropy gets really weird and really interesting. Through some combination of her writing about philanthropy (she is a novelist after all) and the news cycle-grabbing way she is doing it, Scott has managed to make the giving part look really good, and the wealth part look really bad.

In most cases, the typical narrative of billionaire philanthropy is, here I am, a person who has worked hard and done something remarkable and come into more money than I know what to do with as a result, and now using the talents that got me here, I will turn that excess into glorious charity. But there’s rarely much of an indication that the donor thinks there’s anything wrong with this arrangement. Scott, through words and action, is sending a very different message. It goes something like, What a ridiculous thing it is that I, or anyone really, would have this much money. Take it away. As Mike Scutari pointed out, that comes across more explicitly in her latest blog post than it has previously. Scott writes:

“Putting large donors at the center of stories on social progress is a distortion of their role. … We are all attempting to give away a fortune that was enabled by systems in need of change. In this effort, we are governed by a humbling belief that it would be better if disproportionate wealth were not concentrated in a small number of hands, and that the solutions are best designed and implemented by others.“

So she’s very openly criticizing the economic system that gave her her wealth, a very rare thing among donors. But perhaps even more impactful is the shock and awe that comes with the level of giving she’s doing, which has this weird emergent effect of demonstrating how ridiculous it is that people can own and then just give away this kind of money. From my perspective working in nonprofit media, I was flooded with many multimillion-dollar gift announcements all in one morning, an unusual occurrence. It was almost like someone had set the sprinklers off in a crowded, stuffy office building.

I don’t mean to elevate Scott into some kind of folk hero or revolutionary. At the end of the day, she’s a person with $60 billion in Amazon stock. I also don’t know if others are even having this same reaction—it’s possible people are mainly experiencing this as either the typical warm, fuzzy feeling or angry cynicism toward yet another rich person.

But I feel like it’s different than that. I think this rapid flurry of billions of dollars being given away, no catch, no limits, is having a more disruptive effect. It makes it difficult to ignore the absurdity of one person having this amount of wealth, and also reminds us that there are all of these other people out there who have similar hoards of money, who are clearly just sitting on it or counting it over and over again or tying it up in strategic planning processes or rolling around in it who knows.

There have always been wealthy people, often heirs, who come to the conclusion that they have too much money and that they don’t want it. But never with the scale and urgency of what we’re seeing here. It’s creating strange secondary impacts beyond that of the grants themselves. Intentionally or not, she’s creating a spectacle, an exaggerated caricature of wealth and mega-philanthropy that is somehow simultaneously outperforming and undermining the subject of its ridicule.

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Links. Cooking ourselves alive edition.

• “I feel like I’m in Hell.” The West is roasting and it’s not even summer. “And as bad as it might seem today, this is about as good as it’s going to get if we don’t get global warming under control.”
• The Earth is trapping nearly twice as much heat as it did in 2005, called “unprecedented” and “alarming.”
• Burn units brace for surges as people come in contact with “superheated pavement.”
• Miami appointed a chief heat officer to contend with climate change’s “silent killer.”
• Salamanders are masters of surviving heat, drought, and wildfire, able to shut down for months or years at a time and some can cover themselves in a “protective mucus sheath.”
• The pandemic did nothing to slow climate change. “Carbon and methane concentrations in the atmosphere just reached their highest-known level in millions of years.”
• The United States cannot pass a climate bill to save our lives, but we’ve still made climate progress by way of a “green vortex,” which sounds a lot like a mix of catalytic cooperation and behavioral contagion.
• Native organizing wins and the Keystone XL pipeline is fuckin dead goodbye. Emily Atkin collected a list of times very serious people said the pipeline was inevitable.
• Bill Nye’s What I Can’t Live Without is predictably charming, especially his love of canned gin and tonics.
• A man drove his car into a crowd of protestors and killed a 32-year-old woman in Minneapolis. At least three states have passed laws softening penalties for people who hit protestors with a vehicle.
• For years, the indulgent gig economy services used by city dwellers were being underwritten by Silicon Valley venture capitalists. That is coming to an end.

Remembering when I used to think that when climate impacts became obvious then we'd see ambitious action.

— Dr. Elizabeth Sawin (@bethsawin) June 15, 2021

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Reading

I Got a Monster: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Corrupt Police Squad, by Brandon Soderberg and Baynard Woods. Two Baltimore journalists tell the story of the Gun Trace Task Force in the Baltimore Police Department, a plainclothes unit run by supercop Wayne Jenkins that he operated as a de facto organized crime syndicate, even amid the heightened scrutiny following the police killing of Freddie Gray. I heard an interview with the authors who said they wanted to write a compelling True Crime book that didn’t valorize law enforcement the way they often do, and they definitely succeeded. It reads as both a page-turning thriller and a condemnation of the criminal legal system.

The antics of GTTF are truly jaw-dropping, but what makes the book really effective is its portrayal of a general atmosphere of lawlessness and abuse within a police department. It’s not just about the crimes of these particular cops, it’s the fact that the unfettered power given to police makes it more or less within each cop’s own discretion just how corrupt they would like to be, with little accountability so long as you don’t get too greedy and make it onto the feds’ radar. Even supposed reform efforts like body cams are turned into tools of corruption, initially making cops more cautious, until they realized how to stage cam footage to cover up abuses.

Also all kinds of wild legal quirks, like the ease with which cops can listen to jailed suspects’ phone conversations, and the fact that you can have your property seized by police and never get it back, even if you are never charged. And, of course, all the dirty tricks like planting drugs and guns, dropping BB guns at crime scenes to justify force, blocking in cars without probable cause by driving against one way traffic, causing car crashes during pursuit and abandoning the scene, robbing cars and houses and reselling seized drugs, and mysterious deaths of people who crossed cops. It’s basically The Shield but it’s all real.

A must read for anyone who is concerned about policing in America, or you just enjoy a ripping crime story.

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Listening

A friend of mine recently put out a solo instrumental record called Paths, recording under the name Tewksbury, and it’s really good I’ve been listening to it a lot lately. Seems to be doing pretty well too. Doug lives in Hamilton, Ontario where he’s a communications professor teaching on media studies, culture, technology, and social justice. He describes Paths as being about “climate change and trying to find hope in these dark times for our planet.” The longest track, Viscosity, is based on Thomas Morton’s concept of hyperobjects, which I wrote about back in CP63.

If you like experimental or minimalist instrumental music, like Max Richter or Nils Frahm or Jon Hopkins or are just feeling contemplative I think you’ll really like it, you can stream on all the platforms and purchase on Bandcamp.

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Watching

Film festival is over. Hacks on HBO. It’s very funny, sometimes sad, and has occasional social commentary on topics like gender roles, generational divides, and wealth inequality and also how totally fuckin weird Las Vegas is. Highly recommend.

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Sorry I didn’t tell you guys that I was taking a skip week last week I took the end of the week off so that ~*my wife*~ and I could go spend a couple of days in Northampton, Massachusetts staying in this inn that used to be a textile mill. Then we went to her cousin’s wedding which was the first big gathering I’ve been to since the you know what. I even bought a new outfit which was fun because it meant not wearing a t-shirt and basketball shorts which I wear way too often for someone who doesn’t play basketball.

At the wedding, which was in the Merrimack Valley which will either mean something to you or it won’t, a fellow guest said to me, “Has anyone ever told you that you look like, what the fuck’s his name, from the royal family. Harry.” I said oh thank you no I’ve never heard that. Then later I heard the same person say to another guest, “Doesn’t he look like Prince Harry?” and that guest said, “Yeah but I don’t think that should be taken as a compliment.” Which is some cold shit but honestly I’ll take Harry any day because these days I’m looking more and more like William if you know what I mean.

Anyway it was a nice trip and I think YOU look like either a prince or a princess whichever you prefer, and one of the good-looking ones who is not racist.

Tate