The impacts of protests are often profound but unpredictable

Boston with its environs in 1775 & 1776

---

The scale of the protests against police violence and systemic racism over the past few weeks is unprecedented. Demonstrations are happening in all 50 states, even in small conservative towns with mostly white populations, and something like one in five Americans have participated in one. In Boston, huge crowds have assembled all over the city. And here, as in many places, one of the rallying cries has been to defund the police—or more specifically, to divert police budgets toward underfunded city services that are better suited to deal with social problems than paramilitary units.

This week, Boston had its first opportunity to answer that call, with a Wednesday council vote on the city’s operating budget. The political will seemed to be there for something big to happen. Mayor Marty Walsh has been paying lip service to fighting systemic racism; our new city council is more diverse and progressive than it’s ever been, serving a city that skews left, but is notoriously racist by several measures.

Walsh’s offering under pressure was to carve out $12 million from the police overtime budget to divert to social services, even echoing a progressive rallying cry as he announced it, that “racism is a public health crisis.” At one point, $12 million in funding may have seemed like a bold move, but now, for many, it seemed nowhere near what is necessary.

Ricardo Arroyo, the freshman councilor who represents my district and whose campaign I volunteered on, said as much and more in his testimony during the tense meeting Wednesday. Visibly emotional, he reminded the council of the absurdity of certain budget priorities that have become foregone conclusions, year in year out. A $12 million reallocation may sound like a lot, after all, it represents a 20% cut. To BPD’s overtime budget. The total police budget, on the other hand, remains the city’s second biggest line item at $414 million, four times the budget of say the Boston Public Health Commission.

Arroyo pointed out that cop overtime budget alone, even with the Mayor’s proposed cut, would still be 165% bigger than the community center budget, over 1,000% bigger than the budget to aid seniors, 9,400% bigger than the budget for people with disabilities, 15,000% bigger than the fair housing and equity budget. Hell, the police overtime budget is half the size of the city’s entire public works budget.

Have I made it clear via my aggressive use of command-i that we are still just talking about overtime pay? Where does this $60 million in annual overtime go, you might ask? Well, sometimes it goes to fraud. To the fraud line item. Shockingly large chunks of it go to individual police. In 2016, a 34-year-old cop was the highest paid person at the City of Boston, taking home more than $400,000. Last year, the second-highest-paid city employee was this piece of shit, who has been the subject of 20 internal investigations, six that are currently pending.

“Does this budget reflect my love for my communities? Does it go far enough in providing a much needed hand up to those who are most devastated by this pandemic and centuries of systemic racism?” Arroyo posed to the council. “Is this operations budget just? Is it equitable? The answer for me is no, and so is my vote.”

Other councilors made similar impassioned arguments that the budget was still not nearly good enough, that it did not rise to what the moment was demanding of them. In previous meetings, the councilors had heard hours of testimony from the public similarly asking for cuts to the police budget. The night before, hundreds rallied outside City Hall to call for greater funds to be redirected (groups were asking for 10% of the total police budget), including some protestors who chained themselves together and shut down an intersection. The stars seemed aligned for something big, so surely the mayor’s budget was rejected, right? No, as you may have guessed, it passed with an 8-to-5 vote, thanks to a yes vote from every white city council member, which includes those considered the city’s “old guard” aka guys who look like extras from The Departed.

So yeah, they just weren’t having it. That night it was kind of hard to swallow the outcome after all of the buildup, all of the excitement, all of the news from around the country. Jamie and I were talking about how disappointing it was, but at the same time, knowing Boston politics, how it would have also been a truly remarkable turn of events if the budget had been rejected. You still kind of get this feeling like, if we can’t do something like this now, at a time when the earth feels like it is shaking under our feet with demands for something different, what exactly are we doing here?

The thing I try to remember, though, is that the goal of any protest or social movement is never, or almost never at least, one policy outcome. That’s maybe the biggest misconception about why people protest. You hear it all the time (although I think less often lately) from usually sort of mild-mannered dudes a bit left of center, who just don’t see what protests are trying to accomplish. What, after all, do those Occupy people even want? What are their demands? Not very strategic if you ask me, they say. We heard it from Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who passed a package of police reform legislation, and then announced the need for demonstrations was now over: “You don’t need to protest, you won. You accomplished your goal.”

But they are not stopping. Because the goal, as we talked about a couple weeks ago, is to create a world in which what once seemed like common sense now seems like nonsense. Where progress that previously seemed impossible now seems inevitable. On Wednesday, a clear line was drawn between the city’s leaders who realize they are living in that emerging world, and those who still think they are living in the old one.

If mass protest doesn’t bring about change to something structural and movable like a city budget, you still might wonder if it really does anything at all. For that question, I will turn to this must-read article from Zeynep Tufekci, “Do Protests Even Work?” I highly recommend Tufekci’s 2017 book Twitter and Tear Gas, but she covers a lot of her points from that book in this terse essay that came out this week.

The answer is, yes, of course protests work, but usually not in the way and timeframe that many people think. Protests sometimes look like failures in the short term, but much of the power of protests is in their long-term effects, on both the protesters themselves and the rest of society.

She points out that the impacts of protests are often profound, but unpredictable, in a few ways. They change people’s minds. They change culture. They change individuals’ lives, hooking them on activism for a lifetime. And, maybe most importantly, they erode the legitimacy of power structures.

The Boston old guard is slow to change, but they are slipping behind. A recent poll found that 84% of Massachusetts residents support the Black Lives Matter movement. Similar majorities support broad police reforms. Half of respondents now say police budgets should be reduced and diverted. On that last point, one telling quote came from a white Franklin resident who said, “I find it kind of silly we haven’t done it yet.”

That’s what a social movement does. And if it’s strong enough, even the most entrenched power structures eventually crumble beneath it.

---

Pretty nice sunset in the neighborhood the other night.

---

Links

• Captain John “Jack” Danilecki, aka Pepper Jack, is known for his brutality and has six active investigations against him. He was also the second-highest paid city employee last year, taking home $350,000.
• Target, Google, Bank of America and Microsoft fund police through private donations to police foundations.
• The advocate who tells the stories of people killed by hit-and-runs.
• Thirteen states have criminalized protests against new fossil fuel infrastructure.
• It’s going to be very hot all summer.
• Climate change is increasing risks during pregnancy, and Black mothers and babies are harmed at much higher rates.
• Saguaro cactuses are threatened by climate change, drought, invasive plants like buffelgrass and stinknet, and various human impacts. One gem from this story: saguaros are starting to grow on northern-facing slopes for the first time to avoid the heat.
• Don’t be afraid to love what you love, even if it’s “live, laugh, love.”
• If you just want to read someone saying nice things about someone they love, I recommend this Roxane Gay essay.
• Since its rushed reopening in late May, Arizona has become an epicenter of the pandemic. “No state has seen its rate of hospitalizations increase more rapidly since Memorial Day,” with record use of inpatient beds and ventilators. More per capita cases than recorded by any country in Europe or even hard-hit Brazil. Until recently, the state had prohibited cities from requiring masks, but now city councils are all scrambling to stop the bleeding with state government MIA.

---

Millions of Americans think #Trump is correct in asserting that there are more #COVID19 cases being detected now because there's "too much testing."
But this trend chart @StevenTDennis tweeted isn't "cases" — it's Arizona hospitalizations. This is illness, skyrocketing. pic.twitter.com/XTCPz8q8tn

— Laurie Garrett (@Laurie_Garrett) June 23, 2020

---

Listening

Teardrops, Cory Wong and Jon Batiste

---

I’m not a comics journalist or connected to the industry or anything like that, but for some reason it feels necessary to point out that Warren Ellis, a writer I’ve been a huge fan of for years and whose work I’ve recommended here before, has been using his status to coerce women into sexual relationships for years, according to many people who recently came forward. This is the first time one of the many revelations about abusive men in power has come about concerning someone whose work holds a really big place in my life. And it is horrible and very sad.

Horrible mostly for the women he treated terribly, for the careers he meddled with and those he likely ruined or discouraged. It’s horrible because he was known for challenging people in power in his work, championing young writers and artists, and supporting women creators. But there was clearly an abusive side to all of that, and his awful behavior is a betrayal to so, so many people, of which I am just one very tiny casualty. I don’t have much else to say, except I guess remember that men in power do awful things, and even when they mean a lot to us, especially then, they don’t get a pass.

---

Watching

Sopranos S3. Some good episodes, but the show noticeably declined in this season. Lot of gabagool. Solid mental health advice from Carmine Lupertazzi though:

I take pictures of the TV while I’m watching it.

---

Stay safe and healthy out there especially if you are in Arizona good god. A lot of stuff opening up here and our numbers are looking better but I still don’t think a restaurant or bar is in my near-term future. We are planning a trip to Western Massachusetts in August as kind of a consolation vacation, where we will sit in a cabin in the woods instead of our living room for 10 days despite all of the scary books and movies that have taught me that this is a bad idea. I think it will be fine though.

Get some air if you can. Do some more of the kind of zooms you like and not as many of the kind of zooms you don’t like. Be a better friend to yourself.

Tate

We look back on this chapter in history with self-congratulatory warmth, but loathed it as it happened

The Monk by the Sea (German: Der Mönch am Meer) by Caspar David Friedrich 1808-10

---

Last year, a person you might remember named Barack Obama was addressing a group of wealthy liberal donors and cautioned against the Democratic Party leaning too far toward the views of “certain left-leaning Twitter feeds” or “the activist wing of our party.” It upset a lot of people, and even though he also said “that’s not a criticism of the activist wing,” there was something dismissive about his phrasing that stung, coming from a president who basically campaigned and at least initially tried to run an administration on the basis of wanting to change the system. In fact, you would hope that any elected official left of the GOP would consider activism—fighting to bring about social change—the entire job description.

Even if you give Obama the benefit of the doubt on his comments, there seems to be a widespread sentiment out there that an activist is a marginal voice—someone not to be taken seriously, who is unrealistic or inauthentic, or is merely performing for an audience.

In a recent This American Life, my favorite radio show to swear at, a correspondent did some fly on the wall reporting at a popular New York bodega in the midst of protests against racist police brutality. She spent a lot of time on these two perhaps overly intense protestors who came across as these cartoonish posers, like get a load of these screwballs. When one of them started explaining why they were out protesting, she interrupted him half-laughing, “Wait, are you reciting a speech?”

This also shows up in the way that, whenever there is any mass movement that breaks into public consciousness, there is this sneaking suspicion of anyone who organized it, worked on it professionally, or provided or accepted money to do so. It’s as though demands for change, to be deemed authentic, must be entirely spontaneous and made up of only real people, those who have zero ideology.

Around the time of the Climate Strikes in September, journalists were awestruck that a mere child like Greta Thunberg could singlehandedly stir such a response in millions of otherwise inert people, ignoring the armies of organizers who spent months pulling the events together. Or on the flipside, any whiff of professional organizing was portrayed with deep suspicion—the fix was in.

Black activists are invalidated in particularly aggressive ways, as Keisha Blain and Tom Zoellner wrote recently, through the use of language like “riots,” “mobs,” and “chaos.” “These words are often used to delegitimize and dismiss Black movements – to make them appear too far removed from civil society to be taken seriously.” It cannot be said enough that in the years before he was killed, 63% of Americans had unfavorable views of Martin Luther King, Jr. and in 1964, 74% of Americans thought that civil rights demonstrations were more likely to hurt the cause than help it. We look back on this chapter in our history with self-congratulatory warmth, but loathed it as it happened.

The term activist is also used as a cudgel against journalists who openly acknowledge injustice. Often, young journalists and journalists of color especially are labeled with the qualification of activists or activist-journalists or activist-writers (there is a good article I think by Doreen St. Felix about this somewhere but I can’t find it sorry), as a way to signal that this person shouldn’t be taken seriously or you gotta take what they write with a grain of salt.

In 2016, The Nation published a baffling hit piece on three Black journalists working at MTV News at the time, pointing out that they lack “prestigious resumes,” and gain their legitimacy instead through their “well-oiled personal brands.” In the article, Wei Tchou dismissively referred to Ezekiel Kweku, Doreen St. Félix, and Ira Madison III as “young activist-writers entrenched in identity politics.” All three have gone on to outshine MTV News or The Nation, for that matter, with St. Félix now at the New Yorker which is just a little bit prestigious. There is now a delicious series of corrections and a formal apology from Tchou at the top of that article as it resides online. When Nikole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project first launched in the New York Times—before it was awarded a Pulitzer, picked up as a book series, and adapted into classroom curriculum—asshole Andrew Sullivan hissed, “The New York Times Has Abandoned Liberalism for Activism.”

The worst cases of this type of disgust come from a certain type of centrist academic or writer like Sullivan. The only thing these guys can’t stand more than Trump and other retrograde forces in American politics are the very people trying to fight them. The most representative of these contrarian voices is Steven Pinker. Nathan J. Robinson wrote of Pinker, in a profile titled “The World’s Most Annoying Man”:

What’s maddening about Pinker’s body of recent work is that it attacks the very people who are doing the most to address the problems he says he cares about. Progress is made by progressives, as Jeremy Lent pointed out, and it’s yesterday’s “social justice warriors” that are responsible for the declines in racist language and corporal punishment that Pinker shows off as accomplishments of Our Great Liberal Democratic Capitalist Order. … As my friend Sam Miller McDonald put it, “most of those good things that Steven Pinker likes to brag about came about because of the hard work and sacrifice of the kind of people Steven Pinker likes to complain about.”

So what is up with this American pastime of hating activists?

Clearly, this bothers me, and the question came to mind again when reading this book I’m in the middle of called A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit who I talk about here all the time she’s one of my favorite writers. The book is generally about the positive societal outcomes that have emerged from disasters throughout history, but in one section she explores how our culture’s capacity for expressing love and finding meaning in life is artificially confined to the personal and the private.

“…it describes no role for citizenship and no need for social change or engagement. Popular culture feeds on this privatized sense of self. A recent movie about political activists proposed that they opposed the government because they had issues with their fathers. The implication was that the proper sphere of human activity is personal, that there is no legitimate reason to engage with public life, that the very act of engaging is juvenile, blindly emotional, a transference of the real sources of passion.

…

We are often told of public and political life merely as a force, a duty, and occasionally a terror. But it is sometimes also a joy. The human being you recognize in reading, for example, Tom Paine’s Rights of Man or Nelson Mandela’s autobiography is far larger than this creature of family and erotic life. That being has a soul, ethics, ideals, a chance at heroism, at shaping history, a set of motivations based on principles.

For most people, activism or something like it is a very rare experience, one of “citizenship itself, of playing a role in public life, of being connected to strangers around you and thereby to that abstraction we call society.”

I think there’s something to that, as a means of explaining our disdain for activism. In American culture, our self-worth is wrapped up almost entirely in our commitment to ourselves and our own families, often through career achievements. Or maybe our church, which can have its own rewards, but still constricts the scope with which we can outwardly experience love and meaning.

Doing so or watching others do so makes people uncomfortable. For many, sincerity and passion for something beyond self interest feels inauthentic, what is this some kind of speech? Our perception of public life, of citizenship, is seen as a deviation or a lesser version of ourselves. The individual rules. The communal is weakness or maybe sickness. Or at least, annoyance.

At the risk of optimism, I have some hope that what we are seeing now, starting with our most admirable responses to the pandemic, is a reawakening of the communal sense of self. That maybe it sparked there, and erupted into the public demonstrations we’re seeing now, day in, day out, every weekend. Polling now shows that, by a 28-point margin, a majority of American voters support the Black Lives Matter movement, up from a 17-point margin before the most recent wave of protests began. That means that in two weeks, support for the movement grew almost as much as it had in the previous two years.

So maybe one or both of these shockwaves is breaking something open in us. With our, at least temporary, realization that we all need this dimension of our lives, it becomes less absurd, less cartoonish to watch other people pursuing it.

---

Links

• Community policing is a popular concept in Boston but it is perhaps not so good. “There are countless other ways to address harm that don’t include people with guns patrolling a neighborhood.”
• National racial justice protests swayed a Texas town to vote against expanding fracking, due to concerns over environmental racism.
• Surrounding communities in Boston are outraged over plans to extend the life of the polluting Mystic Generating Station.
• There are airborne microscopic plastic particles—everywhere. In the snow, the rain, the wind. We are breathing plastic. “What do you do with that?”
• A petrochemical lobbying group recently advanced anti-protest legislation.
• Look out new Phoebe Bridgers drops this weekend here’s another interview.
• Here are the 98 cities where protestors have been tear-gassed by police. Also tear gas is a chemical weapon designed to inflict suffering there is zero appropriate use for it.

---

---

Watching

Season 2 of Killing Eve, the greatest.

---

Listening

Breezin 1976, George Benson

---

I Endorse

Scented candles. Scented candles are doing a lot of heavy lifting in what you might call the wellness department around this house lately. You have to figure if you are mostly stuck at home for three months and counting, the place should smell nice and if possible like a variety of different nice smells. I just did a quick inventory and there are at least 13 scented candles in our apartment. That sounds like a lot and like maybe we have a candle problem, but to be fair, two of them were accidentally sent to us. Which I guess says something about the volume of candles you’re buying when you start getting candles you didn’t even order.

You gotta be careful too, candles are like furniture in that you have to spend a little money to get something decent, but they can also get randomly expensive for no apparent reason. A few favorites are Woodsmoke by Brooklyn Candle, which make solid, reasonably priced candles. There’s also a nice Creosote candle from Bisbee Soap and Sundry (they make a great Creosote hand salve too). And we have a few candles from HausWitch out of Salem, Mass., some of which have crystals embedded in them, which may be a thing that you want.

---

That candle thing reminds me of this time we randomly met some good friends in rural Pennsylvania for a long weekend. It ended up being kind of a grim part of rural Pennsylvania and the weather was awful so we decided to drive to this old haunted house that was haunted by monkeys but had been converted into a large candle store with every room in the house filled with candles, even in the bathroom a bathtub was filled with candles. But there was also a haunted monkey house museum in the basement. And a big monster monkey statue outside.

This is all 100% true and the worst part is that those candles smelled terrible we ended up throwing them out. We did manage to briefly go kayaking here’s a picture from that.

I miss doing things like that. Not the monkey house part but you know the overall gist of it. In my heart of hearts right now, you and I are in that kayak together, reader, paddling around in the fog, not sure where we are headed but here we are with our tiny lifejackets and little paddles just trying to keep this thing upright.

Tate

Things that do a better job of solving problems we currently entrust with men carrying tools that cause death and pain

Epomops francqueti. Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London.

---

One time I was interviewing someone at a foundation that funds climate work and he posed to me this question: If you magically had the power to do so, would you get rid of fossil fuels today? Fortunately, it was rhetorical and he answered it himself, no of course you wouldn’t, it would cause mass global suffering. Which I guess is true in one sense at least because all of these people would be up in the air flying around in airplanes and then the airplanes would suddenly have no fuel and probably crash I’m not sure I do not know a lot about airplanes. All of my readers who are pilots please respond with what you would do if your airplane spontaneously had no fuel. 

I am trolling, that is not what he meant when he posed that question, and was really just trying to make the point that there are different ways to change the world, and moving too fast can cause a lot of pain. 

But I imagine that when some people hear terms like abolition and defunding of police, which have astonishingly become mainstream ideas in like a single week (albeit not among Democratic leadership) they get freaked out because it sounds like something similar to my funny little scenario—that they are in mid-air traveling in an airplane and people are demanding that airplanes immediately stop existing.

A less silly way of putting this is, there is a misconception that abolition—and defunding as a means of getting there—is a solely subtractive action. When in fact, it’s a process of imagining the world that we are morally bound to pursue, and then going about the business of constructing it, while dismantling what was there before.

I think that misconception of abolition as a subtractive endeavor is one of many reasons people fear the idea, a fear that usually manifests in calling it preposterous, or utter nonsense (Mitt Romney marched in the streets with BLM but said “it would be nuts” to reduce our commitment to police). This has been a topic that I am not any kind of expert in but one that I’ve been learning more about over the past few years and that I think about a lot in the context of climate change or whatever really. For a long time I would personally hear the term abolition, specifically prison abolition, and think sure it sounds great but also like a far-fetched or academic concept. As I wrote about a while ago, Why Prisons Are Obsolete in particularwas a really influential book for me, on how I think about prisons for one, but also just activism in general. 

(OK look, I’m going to say right here that I am painfully aware of how it sounds for a middle-aged white guy to be like oh I read an Angela Davis book and look at me I’m an abolitionist but we’re all on a journey here and I will accept your eye rolling I can take it.)

The way she describes abolition as an act of imagination and creation and putting in place a continuum of new structures that replace the need for incarceration resonated with me and put words to a lot of things I had been thinking about and words against things I had been struggling with. I more recently listened to this great interview with Mariame Kaba on Call Your Girlfriend that was making the rounds all week for good reason, as she also describes this same idea in a way that is very powerful, but at the same time, just sounds like common sense. 

To me that is a huge part of what I had always thought of more broadly as an activist mindset, but I’m learning could be more specifically described as abolitionist. Instead of saying, where are we and what changes could we make to deliver some short-term improvements in the moment, it’s asking, what is intolerable about where we are now, and how do we get to a place where that thing is gone. It’s a process of making what may seem like nonsense right now into the only sensible outcome, while revealing what currently seems to be inevitable as complete nonsense.

“It should be remembered that the ancestors of many of today’s most ardent liberals could not have imagined life without slavery, life without lynching, or life without segregation,” Davis writes.

I had always thought of this as seeking transformative versus incremental change, but as Kaba describes it, you can be an abolitionist working on anything from housing to climate. The distinction as I see it is that, for a reformist, even in advocacy on the left, the starting point is always what is possible today. It’s often painted as a more pragmatic approach toward a shared goal, but that critically different framing can direct your actions, knowingly or unknowingly, toward a completely different, if not opposite outcome.

For example, with the very alluring 8 Can’t Wait campaign that caught a lot of attention recently (don’t feel bad if you posted it remember it’s a journey), criticism quickly emerged that these are actually not the right strategies for stopping racist police violence. The response from supporters was, hang on, this is not our end goal, it’s just a starting point that we can do right now. But the question is not about now versus later or small vs big, it’s about the trajectory it puts you on. And the strategies of 8 Can’t Wait would increase funding for police and further entrench our reliance on them. 

The abolitionist goal is creating something different, with the understanding that violent paramilitary forces with racist DNA and no accountability, responding to a city’s every social problem, will never be an acceptable situation. We need something new, so we take funding away from one thing, and give it to other things that do a better job of solving the problems we currently entrust with men carrying tools that cause death and pain.

There are, in fact, incremental steps you can take toward abolition, what Kaba calls “non-reformist reforms.” In an opinion she co-wrote, the authors state that “abolition is both a lodestar and a practical necessity. Central to abolitionist work are the many fights for non-reformist reforms — those measures that reduce the power of an oppressive system while illuminating the system’s inability to solve the crises it creates.” Reformist reforms like piling on more training or rules are merely “asking police not to be police.” 

So back to “would you get rid of fossil fuels today” question, the funny thing about it is, while making a perfectly pragmatic point, it was being used at the time to defend a foundation’s continued investments in the fossil fuel industry. Investments that, I would argue, are not part of a responsible, incremental transition away from oil and gas, but a perpetuation of them. Just as in 8 Can’t Wait, there are strategies—like working with oil and gas companies, or spending billions on new natural gas infrastructure—that could seem like they are a means toward a shared goal, but they are pointing in the wrong direction. Reformist reforms that further lock us into a system that needs to go away. 

Much like defunding the police, the fossil fuel divest/invest movement and efforts to block the supply side through pipeline protests have inspired new hope and imagination among activists, while also striking fear and anxiety into others. A fear of going too far. A fear of losing money. A fear of losing structures that offer the illusion of comfort and safety—for some. A fear of what comes next, because nobody knows exactly what would come next if we abolished police. And it can be hard to know what steps lead in the right direction.

Getting over those fears is not easy, and the uncertainty never really goes away. But in recognizing that we’re in a process of creating and evolving, instead of merely tearing down, that frightening outcome can go from sounding preposterous, to sounding like the only sensible path. 

Related:

• Imaginable Worlds
• Turn the Soil

---

Links

• Arizona decided to pretend there is no such thing as coronavirus and is now experiencing a dramatic spike in cases and hospitalizations.
• “Their greed is going to kill us.” The fight against fracking in Indian Country.
• A New York-based hedge fund is buying up irrigated land in the West as an investment in water scarcity, and it is understandably freaking people out.
• A great profile of Monica Cannon-Grant, who might be the most powerful activist in Boston. “Here’s Monica, with a sea of people behind her.”
• Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: Climate work is hard, but it’s even harder for Black Americans while living in a country that doesn’t value their lives.
• How the unequal impacts of COVID-19 and the response to it fueled historic protests.
• Minnesota is far from the progressive haven it’s made out to be, and has failed to confront police abuse for decades.
• The city’s ridiculous nightly fireworks are presenting many Bostonians with a fresh opportunity to solve a problem without the police.
• Environmental science and geology (aka climate science) are among the whitest scientific fields.
• I did not read anything lighthearted this week sorry!

---

Watching

Speaking of lighthearted, I got back into iZombie the comedy detective horror show by the creator of Veronica Mars and Party Down. But surprise, in season 4 it takes a dark turn and imagines a Seattle that is walled off after the zombie virus runs rampant, and under siege by a private security company that publicly executes people with a giant anvil. Yes, yes I know. But it is still a very clever, very funny, and suddenly weirdly radical show.

Huge spoiler alert: Fans of Veronica Mars will be delighted to watch Logan Echolls get an anvil dropped on his head.

---

I feel like this one did not have enough pictures or little funny things but I don’t know what to tell you people. I have a template for this newsletter and in this spot it says “CUTE LITTLE ENDING” so maybe on days when I can’t think of a little story from the week I’ll just close with that and it will be our little way of communicating that I just didn’t have it in me today. There doesn’t always have to be a cute little ending I guess JUST LIKE in LIFE.

Have a lovely weekend I got a new lamp coming tomorrow gonna get that set up.

Tate

The things that are deemed acceptable and not acceptable during the pursuit

Fauna boreali-americana, or, The zoology of the northern parts of British America :.London :John Murray,1829-1837.

---

Even speaking as someone who likes to go on and on about the potential speed and power of social movements, it has been astounding to see the response to the latest cases of police killing Black people in the United States. It’s part of a movement that in its modern form has been going since around 2013, but this latest wave seems to be reaching people it did not before. And the conversation feels different too, still somewhat about reforms around the edges (of the kind Minneapolis has been enacting for years before George Floyd was murdered), but also more people calling for abolition, defunding, and otherwise undoing decades of increasing police militarization and control over communities.

One thing that does not feel new is something that I’ve been struggling a lot with this past week, both in my own reactions and in conversations with others. That is this persistent way in which white people, even if we are supportive of racial justice, tend to cordon off and separate ourselves from certain aspects of social change that make us feel uncomfortable.

This is an understandable response to some extent, but it inevitably becomes a form of paternalism over people who are fighting for their own right to exist and by extension, for all of us. And it’s mostly shown up lately in the form of carving out what people consider peaceful protest from what they consider violent protest.

I find this tricky to talk about, because there’s a version of this that is thoughtful and based on good intentions and accurate information. For example, it’s true that many of the people resorting to property damage are likely random actors exercising some form of opportunism or at least white privilege. Movement leaders have called out such people during protests and in print. It’s also true that in these demonstrations, police are instigating the violence, through their appearance, their weapons, their numbers, their crowd control tactics, their eager overreactions to minor nuisances. You watch it happen repeatedly, the sort of main demonstration happens, during which police are mostly sidelined. They stand around with their batons, maybe take selfies with some naive protestors, and mostly wait. Then that phase starts to wind down, and a switch flips, and all of a sudden here we go it’s Call of Duty time. Groups of cops often armed to the teeth close in, start cornering people, marching in formation, taking potshots, and rounding people up.

So on one hand, it’s important not to lump everyone together, and it’s important to call out who is fucking things up and who is being the real aggressor.

But I worry that when we focus too much on separating protestors into different buckets, it can turn into something else. And I don’t mean awful people on Facebook or Trump himself or All Lives Matter kind of people, I mean people who really care about what is happening can start drawing artificial lines that dictate what is legitimate and strategic.

Just as police can’t credibly say that everyone who broke a law in a demonstration was an “outside agitator” who drove in from out of town, as police always try to do, neither can a self-appointed critic of a social movement, trying to feel more comfortable about a cause they are supporting. And that leads to an inevitable divvying up, by a white person who may legitimately care about racial justice, of the things that are deemed acceptable and the things that are not acceptable during its pursuit. (Another version of this, incidentally, is the line of acceptability often drawn between protests of today and past eras, always misguidedly invoking MLK.)

That’s not to say that people don’t have good reasons for being opposed to and concerned about violence. There is the moral argument that it’s just never OK to resort to certain acts. I would consider myself a nonviolent person, but unlike some people, for me, this is a world in which it has been exceedingly easy to remain nonviolent. As Elie Mystal wrote, “I would never throw a rock at the police. I would never throw a brick through the window of a big-box store. I would never set fire to an office building. But I want to. I understand why some people do.” And as Soraya Nadia McDonald wrote in her essay, “Why we can’t stop thinking about George Floyd’s neck” (CW descriptions of violence):

…when our collective necks are threatened, when we are finally forced to do away with civility and politesse because all other options for insisting upon our own humanity have been exhausted, there are white counterparts who remain quizzical about our frustration and fury. We are left reminding our fellow countrymen and women of the quotation widely attributed to Malcolm X: “That’s not a chip on my shoulder, that’s your boot on my neck.”

Then there’s the strategic argument, essentially, that protests that cross certain lines will set back a cause. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a related topic in the book Why Civil Resistance Works, about nonviolent resistance campaigns being more effective than violent ones in bringing about regime change. It’s a very compelling case and I’d be really interested in hearing what the authors have to say about current events, but to be clear, their study was looking at a very different kind of violent insurgency campaign. They also never discount violent tactics entirely, and point out that even nonviolent resistance is very confrontational. Anyway, this is frequently debated in the context of the Civil Rights Movement, and recently Princeton researcher Omar Wasow has made the case that violent protests swung the 1968 election toward Nixon. Which may be worrisome with an election months away, although even if true, I find it debatable that you can point to one election, or presidential politics in general, as an indicator of overall forward or backward progress.

But I say all that as preamble to this—even if there are such reasons to oppose things like property damage or intentional confrontation with police—as white supporters of Black Lives Matter, that is not our concern. And more often than not, what is lying underneath such arguments is actually discomfort with a perceived threat to the order of things.

To kind of overemphasize this part, I’m not out here saying hooray everyone protesting police brutality is throwing bricks and I think that’s awesome. But what I am saying is that I am far more concerned about racist police violence, lives threatened and lost as a result, and a system designed to encourage and absolve that violence. Beyond doing everything I can to help stop that, I have to accept that this will not be resolved without serious disruption.

I’m reminded of a 2010 paper by Barbara Masters and Torie Osborn about how a stodgy institution like philanthropy can support social movements that I also find valuable in understanding how someone in a position of privilege can be supportive of social change. “Because movements, by definition, must be driven by the people who are most affected, foundations cannot determine the goals and timetables of a movement.”

I think sometimes when people say things like they only support peaceful protestors, they are picturing people doing pretty much nothing. Maybe being quiet somewhere in large numbers but not too large. And then a different set of violent protestors maybe swoop in after they go home. But just as movements can be a kind of paradise “where souls get made,” they can also be chaotic, messy things. When you decide to support one, especially as a person whose life is not directly on the line, you just don’t get to prescribe how it goes or what it looks like.

I know, hopefully at least, we are all out here trying to do our best, and I think it’s OK for anyone to be stressed, anxious, uncomfortable. But instead of worrying about property damage and fires, white people would be better off removing ourselves from the role of critic, putting ourselves in the spaces where these struggles are happening, listening and learning.

---

Below is a post from a friend of mine Jason who has an independent comic book store in Downtown Portland. I thought it was a very insightful sentiment on this topic and I suspect a lot of small business owners have similar feelings.

---

Links

• Massachusetts spends millions every year replenishing and bolstering police weapons stockpiles with little oversight or transparency.
• The answer to police violence is not reform; it’s defunding.
• Many threads of the mainstream environmental movement have racist origins and histories but we are seeing some shifts among green groups toward engagement with racial justice.
• Climate change-related flooding has disproportionate impact on Black neighborhoods.
• “First Nations know what it means to live through the apocalypse.” Always love an interview with Julian Brave NoiseCat.
• Late to this one, but loved this profile of Phoebe Bridgers who is one of my favorite musicians. Also this profile of Fiona Apple by Emily Nussbaum I can’t remember if I shared this before.

---

Podcasts

This is more like a poetry corner entry instead of a podcast entry but every once in a while a poem from The Slowdown makes me stop in my tracks and this week it was “supply and demand,” by Evie Shockley. Shockley lists common idioms about money, but replacing the word money with “black boys” as a way to illustrate the commodification of Black lives. You can read and listen here.

---

Comics

Swamp Thing vol. 6. I just love this series sad to be on the last installment of the Alan Moore run. This is an animal made out of water.

---

Listening

Orville Peck, Dead of Night

---

I Endorse

Giving money to Black-led groups working for racial justice and opposing police violence. I work at a philanthropy and nonprofit news site so I think about and recommend this kind of thing a lot I guess but if you want to do something, there are 100% organizations in your community working toward these goals and they 100% are under-resourced.

There are also limits to giving money as activism but it is pretty much always a good first or second or third move. There are a lot of other forms of showing up that are not for everyone (especially during a pandemic), but there are things anyone can do and donating is one of them.

I usually recommend that small donors give locally because that way it can also serve as an entry point to following what groups are doing in your own community and getting involved throughout the year if you can. We just made a round to Mass Action Against Police Brutality and Violence in Boston, and a couple others.

---

An enormous vigil in Franklin Park on Tuesday.

---

Well another week, another year’s worth of new developments. I hope you are getting enough sleep. Things are certainly speeding up aren’t they. Remember when stupid ass Plandemic was a thing yeah that was like 10 years ago it must have been, no it was just two weeks ago huh ok.

One thing about this newsletter when I started it was that it was always going to be about whatever was on my mind at the end of the week and climate change is generally the leading issue. But it’s also just about the rough state of the world and living in it and the good things and bad things that happen and how it all plays out in our lives. And now there have been at least two historic moments back to back or I guess on top of each other this year. But I think it’s increasingly clear to most of us that all of these issues are kind of the same issue if you know what I mean. I’m going to keep thinking and writing about that. Just trying to figure some things out over here.

Hang in there, hold on to something like when Indiana Jones was on that bridge and wrapped that piece of rope around his wrist because this thing is going down.

Tate

‘A lot of folks are tired of that. They’re not going to take it anymore.’

March to the BPD station today

---

This is going to be short because we decided to go to a rally and march this evening organized by Mass Action Against Police Brutality. It is hard to know whether to do anything these days but we ultimately decided it was important to go. My friend Swedlund refers to this kind of decision we all have to regularly make these days as a Catch 2020.

This has been a tough week for people. I’m not exactly sure what to say and I’m also mindful of what is needed and not needed of me right now so I’m going to use this space to share some of the best things I’ve read by other people recently, about the most recent rash of state violence against Black people, and this topic more broadly.

…

Of Course There Are Protests. The State Is Failing Black People, by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

If there were ever questions about whether poor and working-class African-Americans were disposable, there can be none now. It’s clear that state violence is not solely the preserve of the police. …

The convergence of these tragic events — a pandemic disproportionately killing black people, the failure of the state to protect black people and the preying on black people by the police — has confirmed what most of us already know: If we and those who stand with us do not mobilize in our own defense, then no official entity ever will. Young black people must endure the contusions caused by rubber bullets or the acrid burn of tear gas because government has abandoned us. Black Lives Matter only because we will make it so.

…

The Death of George Floyd, In Context, by Jelani Cobb

The video of Floyd’s death is horrific but not surprising; terrible but not unusual, depicting a kind of incident that is periodically reenacted in the United States. It’s both necessary and, at this point, pedestrian to observe that policing in this country is mediated by race. …

There is more to be said about the burgeoning genre of videos capturing the deaths of black Americans, and the complex combination of revulsion and compulsion that accompanies their viewing. They are the macabre documentary of current events, but the question remains about whether they do more to humanize or to objectify the unwilling figures at the center of their narratives. Death is too intimate a phenomenon to not be distorted by a mass audience. Yesterday, very few of us knew who George Floyd was, what he cared about, how he lived his life. Today, we know him no better save for the grim way in which that life met its end.

…

The Toxic Intersection of Racism and Public Space, by Brentin Mock

The Jane Jacobian idea of “eyes on the street” very easily becomes “eyes on the black people” — which is why some African Americans disengage from public spaces like parks altogether. These peaceful green spaces just as easily induce anxiety and trauma for black and brown people, especially when they know the cops can be unleashed at any moment.

White people can weaponize the police against people who aren’t white, and that power only flows in one direction. The way Amy Cooper reacted in the video shows that she was aware of that power dynamic. All it took was for a white person to send a bat signal — or in Amy Cooper’s case, a racial dog whistle — to make a garden unsafe for a black person.

…

From Chaotic Minneapolis protests spread amid emotional calls for justice, peace

“There are folks reacting to a violent system,” [Michael McDowell, founder of Black Lives Matter Minneapolis] said. “You can replace property, you can replace businesses, you can replace material things, but you can’t replace a life. That man is gone forever because some cop felt like he had the right to take his life. A lot of folks are tired of that. They’re not going to take it anymore.”

That’s why, he said, “Minneapolis is burning.”

…

“I don’t think that folks are being anywhere as violent as the system has been toward them,” he said.

…

People Can Only Bear So Much Injustice Before Lashing Out, by Elie Mystal

The fact that most black people do not pick up the rock in that situation is a miracle. The fact that the overwhelming majority of black people respond to the violence and terrorism practiced against us with words and songs instead of rocks and bricks is altogether supernatural. …

This country could be on fire almost every night in almost every city. It’s not, because most black people in this country choose to exercise tremendous restraint. Most black people are still willing to talk this out. Most black people have the courage and fortitude to withstand the violence done against us without lowering ourselves to the level of an American police officer.

America should be more thankful for that. And it should remember that it’s a choice.

…

Breonna Taylor Was Murdered for Sleeping While Black, by Elie Mystal

[Breonna] Taylor’s death is a routine way for black people to die in this country, because the country long ago decided that murdering black people is a legal thing for cops to do. Taylor’s death wasn’t a tragic accident; it was the predictable result of a system that does not value black lives.

Almost every major institutional actor in this country chooses to let the cops get away with murder. The media makes this choice every time it decides to reprint a police report, uncritically, as if the cops can be trusted to represent the truth. Judges make this choice when they sign open-ended search warrants or retroactively admit evidence obtained without a warrant. Mayors and governors make this choice when they seek the endorsement of police unions and bend over backward to keep those unions happy. And prosecutors, juries, and justices make this choice when they refuse to hold cops criminally or financially accountable for their crimes.

…

Yes, Black America Fears the Police. Here’s Why., by Nikole Hannah-Jones

For those of you reading this who may not be black, or perhaps Latino, this is my chance to tell you that a substantial portion of your fellow citizens in the United States of America have little expectation of being treated fairly by the law or receiving justice. It’s possible this will come as a surprise to you. But to a very real extent, you have grown up in a different country than I have.

As Khalil Gibran Muhammad, author of The Condemnation of Blackness, puts it, “White people, by and large, do not know what it is like to be occupied by a police force. They don’t understand it because it is not the type of policing they experience. Because they are treated like individuals, they believe that if ‘I am not breaking the law, I will never be abused.’”

We are not criminals because we are black. Nor are we somehow the only people in America who don’t want to live in safe neighborhoods. Yet many of us cannot fundamentally trust the people who are charged with keeping us and our communities safe.

…

‘I Do It To Survive’: Being Black In America Means Adapting To Constant Risk, by Theresa Okokon

I cannot accept that George Floyd was killed mere minutes from where my family lives, where my niece and nephews could have witnessed it. It messes me up to see images of so many people in the street, risking their lives and their bodies still unadapted to the coronavirus, forced to protest. I do not accept the message of protection and service emblazoned on the side of cop cars, when the men who exit those vehicles murder us. We are not safe. We cannot go for a jog. We cannot be in our own homes. We cannot go bird watching. 

…

From How Tear Gas Works: A Rundown of the Chemicals Used on Crowds

“I think of tear gas as a pain gas,” he says. “Because it directly activates pain-sensing receptors.” [says Sven-Eric Jordt, an anesthesiologist at Duke University.] …

Given the risk of injury or damage, [Rohini Haar, a doctor with Physicians for Human Rights and a public health scientist at the University of California, Berkeley,] says that there are almost no scenarios where the use of tear gas makes sense for controlling crowds. “I can see very few discrete situations where there might be a direct need for tear gas to protect public safety,” she says. “One thing we see more and more now is tear gas causing panic, disorder and chaos. There’s mass deaths from stampedes because tear gas was used.” 

A reminder that tear gas is a chemical weapon that does not work for crowd control. The whole point of it is to cause panic and excruciating pain. https://t.co/5mPjIMGSb0 via @sciam

— Laura Helmuth (@laurahelmuth) May 29, 2020

…

From Jamelle Bouie’s newsletter:

…it is impossible not to note the contrast in how the Minneapolis protesters have been treated compared with armed demonstrators protesting lockdowns in Michigan and other states. I wrote earlier this month about how the idea of “freedom” is shaped by race and racism. Here, we have a perfect example of exactly that: how the perceived legitimacy of protest and dissent is shaped by who is doing the protesting. Screaming, gun-toting white people can demonstrate with little resistance. Mourning black people, on the other hand, are liable to face state violence.

…

Finally if you are angry and want to do something, you can give to these groups:

• Black Visions Collective
• Reclaim the Block
• Northstar Health Collective
• Louisville Community Bail Fund

Or find a racial justice group in your own community also don’t call the police and also educate yourself about how to be anti-racist because none of us are free until all of us are free.

---

More Links

• More than 80 nursing homes in Massachusetts have 20 or more Covid-19 deaths. That’s one out of every five facilities.
• The Navajo Nation wants to use half of its federal Covid-19 relief funds on clean water projects, as 30 to 40% of its households lack running water. That could be blocked under restrictions in the CARES Act.
• Coronavirus is a “sliding doors” moment that could change the trajectory of our carbon emissions. Really into that Gwyneth reference.
• What Were Sports?
• Among ill-advised re-openings, a risk assessment of summer activities. Haircut? Medium to high risk!
• “Indie folk” is kind of a cringey genre name, but this newly updated list is a real gold mine.
• An oral history of Punky Brewster and the horrifying episode where Cherie locks herself inside of a refrigerator.
• Artist, cook, and food writer Tunde Wey has some words for a problematic restaurant industry as the tailspin continues: “Let it die.” (Definitely read this one.)

---

Listening

Jamie got me an iPod for my birthday because I have this huge collection of mp3s that I haven’t really listened to in years. So I loaded it up and have been playing a lot of older music that had kind of fallen off my radar. One example is Gentlemen by The Afghan Whigs. Forgot about this beautiful slow burn with vocals by fellow Columbus musician Marcy Mays.

---

Watching

I am watching Riverdale right now and honestly I don’t want to talk about it that is embarrassing.

---

I Endorse

Enjoying a nice breeze coming in through a window.

---

One of my favorite writers is Simon, who is the 8-year-old son of my two close friends who live in Cambodia. I previously posted his reinterpretation of Mama Mia Papa Pia, and he is also known for a powerful personal essay on what everyone in the house was doing one day. His latest is probably his best work yet, a poem that he was kind enough to allow me to publish here:

Keep these words in mind. You are safe. You can’t go farther than the tide.

Tate

When people show up, you don’t have to compromise

The Zoological journal. London: W. Phillips, 1824

---

If you know the name Erica Chenoweth, it’s probably in relation to the Harvard professor’s widely cited “3.5% rule,” which poses that no government can withstand a challenge from 3.5% or more of its population without accommodating it or in extreme cases falling to it. This is an alluring figure, and one that has been embraced by climate activists among many others. So has research by Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan that found nonviolent resistance campaigns were twice as likely to achieve success as violent campaigns.

That last conclusion comes from their book Why Civil Resistance Works, which I finished earlier this year just as we started to really get into the shit so I didn’t talk about it much at the time. But it’s a pretty remarkable book and I’ve mentioned it here and there but figured I would revisit it now because reviewing a seven year old book two months after I finished it is a solid CP move.

The top line conclusions from the book are important—studying over a century of resistance campaigns the authors found that sometimes nonviolence works, sometimes violence works, but nonviolence works way more often. One big reason is that it’s easier to get to that critical % of participation when you don’t have to recruit people to commit violent acts. Another big finding is that nonviolent campaigns more often result in democratic, stable outcomes.

So that’s really something, but my favorite parts of the book were its case studies of resistance campaigns that succeeded, failed, or partially succeeded and partially failed, and what we can learn from them. So even more useful than the conclusion of “nonviolent campaigns of a certain size succeed” are the details of how different movements reach that threshold, and why sometimes they fail anyway. For example, one critical quality other than sheer size is diversity of participants and tactics. Successful movements are non-monolithic.

The most interesting of the case studies is probably the 1979 Iranian Revolution. This is obviously a big, complicated story, but one of the main factors Chenoweth cites in the success of this revolution is that there was a huge diversity of participants, which made it bigger and more varied in its tactics, and more difficult for the regime to repress. The obvious faction involved was the powerful religious leaders who ultimately seized control in the aftermath and ended up forming another violent, oppressive government. For that reason, the revolution is sometimes characterized as a failure.

But the movement itself was overwhelmingly nonviolent in its tactics and involved pretty much every segment of society, succeeding in toppling a repressive monarchy where previous violent uprisings had failed. Participants included student activists, workers, professionals, merchants, academics, you name it. There were mass protests in the streets, but there were also nightly poetry readings. In fact, the majority of the people who participated in the revolution never actually clashed with the regime. One hallmark was people staying home and shouting anti-Shah slogans from their rooftops at night. It was a movement where anybody could do something.

In contrast, there was an armed guerrilla movement happening at the same time, but the authors point out that it was unable to to gain significant participation. In part because it was violent, but also because of its rigid Marxist litmus test that the coalition-based movement did not have.

One of the most interesting things about this diversity of participation is that, while you might expect that kind of big tent approach would lead to compromise or capitulation, in some ways it did the opposite. Toward the end of the revolution, the Shah offered steps toward liberal reform that opposition would have jumped at in earlier days. But by that time, there was only one acceptable outcome—regime change. In other words, when people show up, you don’t have to compromise.

Of course, the shadow of this particular nonviolent resistance is its violent aftermath, what Chenoweth and Stephan call an anomaly in their conclusion that nonviolent campaigns more often lead to peaceful results. For a bunch of reasons, radical clerics ended up having too much power within the coalition and locked everyone else out. The authors pose a couple of explanations for this. First, while its uncompromising goal was to remove the Shah, different factions sought different things and the movement never coalesced around a shared vision of a post-Shah Iran. They also suggest that the secular leftist guerrilla movement provided an excuse for the religious regime to stamp out other secular voices.

So there seem to be two potential dangers here, one being a movement perhaps too ecumenical to form a shared vision. Another in the way that one faction isolating itself by being too rigid in both politics and tactics can be destructive, even setting aside the moral question of resorting to violence.

But for me, the biggest takeaway is just how important it is for campaigns to make it easy for anyone to participate, on some level. You need the people who are the most dedicated, with the savviest politics, who are sacrificing the most, but if that’s all you have, you won’t get to that unstoppable critical mass. Activists tend to emphasize certain kinds of hard or risky work, but different people will have different things to offer a successful movement. That includes the people sitting in and getting arrested and the people just shouting from rooftops to signal their approval. In the contemporary pro-choice movement in Argentina, for example, the performative symbol of just wearing the color green has become a source of real power.

There is this anecdote from another book I have talked about before, Towards Collective Liberation, which makes a related observation in a case study of the Rural Organizing Project in Oregon, which does working-class organizing around immigrant rights through a series of “living room conversations.”

While we want everyone to be an active leader in the struggle for racial justice, we know that is not going to happen immediately. Think of our work as concentric circles. The first circle is ROP board members and staff. The second circle is the leadership of local groups. The third circle is the membership of local groups. The final circle is the broader community that our local groups operate in. When we have a Living Room Conversation, we are essentially taking a slice of this pie with representation from each of these circles. While we would love to have everyone join as a member of the [Immigration Fairness Network], at a minimum we want everyone in the room to not join the Minutemen.

---

Links

• A third of the US population could end up experiencing one or more extreme weather events annually, including fun things like “flash drought” and quick-forming extreme thunderstorms.
• If the US had started social distancing one week earlier we could have saved 36,000 lives, one model of the disease found. Two weeks earlier and 83% of deaths could have been avoided.
• The patchwork nature of the country’s response—and of our social safety net—will make the coronavirus difficult to get under control because instead of a clear peak and decline it’s just going to go up and down all over the place and nobody will agree on what to do.
• Hundreds of workers in Massachusetts have filed complaints with OSHA about unsafe working conditions during the pandemic and OSHA doesn’t seem to give much of a shit.
• The opening Listerine anecdote from this Jason Isbell profile alone is a must read.
• A Quality Inn in Revere has been turned into a quarantine hotel for patients with coronavirus who can’t stay at home.
• Death Angel’s drummer said his COVID-19 coma was like being in hell tortured by Satan. “I’m still going to listen to satanic metal [but] I don’t think Satan’s quite as cool as I used to.” Not going to lie folks this is probably the one to click this week.

---

This is a headline I saw. Strange times.

---

Watching

I’ve been watching HBO’s The Leftovers which is a show all about grief and Justin Theroux’s chiseled torso. I never see that guy working out in the show though he is mostly hallucinating or punching walls but I guess that burns calories. I am 50% through the series and I like it. It has this sort of slow, relentless sadness and randomness to it that feels a lot like life can sometimes. I will say that unlike Lindelof’s Watchmen, there is still a little Lost stink on this show, like it’s meant to be an ABC primetime drama but they threw a Max Richter score behind it and slapped it up on prestige cable. Anyway, another glowing review from me, but it’s a good show really four stars check it out.

This is me discussing my summer plans.

---

Reading

I recently finished Sloane Crosley’s Look Alive Out There and she is very funny and insightful and it was also nice to read little stories about non-quarantine life. One standout essay is about when she unwittingly tried to climb one of the most treacherous mountains in Ecuador without any preparation whatsoever.

The constant state of newness in a foreign country lends a little drama to everything. Even the maiden operation of a local ATM demands problem-solving. It becomes increasingly difficult to parse personal adventure from objective adventure, until you’re certain everything should be a challenge, every path a learning curve. It is only later that someone native to the region hears you decided to ride a bicycle to the airport, laughs, and says: Not that steep of a curve.

---

Listening

New Jason Isbell.

---

---

Some of the things that we have ordered online include a lot of books, some fancy glassware because if you have to drink at home it might as well be classy. And the biggest item is a credenza, a piece of furniture we have desperately needed for the office for like four years but never wanted to buy.

It arrived on Tuesday unassembled in a 160 pound box for which the delivery guy was like I know I am essential but come on screw you guys. The box was on our porch all day because it was too heavy to move and we had nowhere to put it until the night when I hacked the giant thing open with a knife and brought it in piece by piece like the goddamn London Bridge. Wikipedia tells me it took over three years to put the London Bridge back together in Lake Havasu City and that is how long it will take me to put together this credenza.

Have a nice weekend everyone. Get some sun but jesus do not touch anything.

Tate

People buying stuff near constantly and when they stop for even a few weeks things start to crumble

Still Life with a Golden Goblet, Pieter de Ring, 1635-1650

---

It really struck me just how fragile capitalism is, in this particular go round of economic meltdown at least, when the Cheesecake Factory went on a rent strike. Here you had a company with 294 restaurants and some 40,000 employees, with a time-honored, 50-year legacy of stuffing carbohydrates into people, and on March 23—like two weeks into the pandemic—the company told its landlords well we are sorry but we cannot pay our rent, extenuating circumstances, you understand. Because, they explained, our entire existence is predicated on people constantly eating cheesecake and if there is a break in that eating of cheesecake for a mere two weeks we basically have zero money and can’t even keep these lights on.

The company laid off thousands of workers who then were presumably unable to pay their own rents (we know from all the folk songs what happens to a town when the local factory closes down). Those employees—many likely immigrants ineligible for government aid—had far fewer backup options than the Cheesecake Factory, which ended up having a $90 million line of credit and then a $200 million capital investment that showed up after the news spread. So who knows how dire the company’s situation ever really was, at the risk of questioning the integrity of the Cheesecake Factory.

But the whole affair illustrates rather well the unending need for a massive churn of spending, lest the wheels come off of this entire operation, that is so chilling during times of economic downturn. For all the talk of the power of the American economy, it makes you wonder how sturdy of a system we created when it is based on people just buying stuff near constantly and then when they have to stop for even a few weeks, things start to crumble.

Aside from the resulting precarity for workers, it does feel like a lot of this stuff that evaporates when spending grinds to a halt was maybe not necessary in the first place, because otherwise I don’t know that we’d really need a $1.7 trillion marketing industry. But the mass closure of businesses is unfortunately about much more than the loss of a mall restaurant that a coastal elite like me can so easily, and let’s be honest, cheaply ridicule. Because when the mechanisms that keep our institutions going turn out to be quite delicate, it also means we just as quickly lose some of our most precious community resources.

Where I live in the Roslindale neighborhood of Boston, we’re experiencing this in our own business district, as is pretty much every community. Roslindale Village had become this thriving little center with some of the best restaurants in the city, a small independent grocery store, cute little shops. Recently a coffee shop/bar combo opened up that had become a bustling, essential meeting place for local politics, nonprofits, teachers, artists, and on any given day you’d hear at least three languages spoken at its tables. The community fought hard since the 90s to turn the square around—with the help of government grants—and has benefited from both local volunteering and crowdfunded improvement projects.

But right now, over half the businesses there have at least temporarily closed their doors, with some essential stores and restaurant takeout keeping the pulse going. Like a lot of main street business associations, ours has been running fundraisers, providing financial assistance to its struggling members. But who knows which businesses are going to survive. For all of the country’s professed adoration of the scrappy small business, we don’t seem to be doing a very good job of supporting them, with some 100,000 of them closing for good since the pandemic began.

There are some heartening local success stories. Down the road in Jamaica Plain, a beloved independent, feminist bookstore called Papercuts, which hosts readings and events and runs its own small press, raised nearly $60,000 to help cover its costs, which residents were more than happy to donate.

But not every neighborhood is so fortunate to have that kind of private wealth that it can donate to sustain its institutions. Columnist Jeneé Osterheldt recently reported for the Globe that the relatively small number of Black-owned restaurants in the city are facing imminent shutdown. Government relief is notoriously difficult to secure for any business, and those owned by immigrants, Black people, and other people of color struggle to secure loans, liquor licenses, and contracts even absent a health crisis or recession. As Osterheldt points out, these are more than just places where people buy things. They host events to celebrate the community’s teachers, hold gatherings for professionals of color, organize food banks to feed the homeless. “This is often where Black Boston builds, networks, and thrives.”

I think everyone has felt the weight of the loss of such institutions in their own communities, even if it’s just the closure of a local bar. We can feel in our bones that it’s more than one owner’s personal financial enterprise going away, that lots of people have built it into more than a place where money can be exchanged for goods and services.

Two Irish bars in Jamaica Plain have closed in recent years for financial reasons, and both were home to long traditions of community and political organizing. When it was announced this month that after 44 years, bar and rock club Great Scott could not cover its rent, the punk community and young people in general (and also not so young people ahem) were devastated that this scene staple was going away, but you know, too bad so sad.

A slightly different, but trust me it is related example, the comics industry has come to rely on a single distribution company, Diamond, which effectively operates as a monopoly. When it abruptly halted operations it sent an entire creative field into a tailspin. The entire news media is a macro example of something we’ve all come to rely on that lives and dies based on an ill-fitting profit-seeking model.

I guess what I’m getting at is that, though consumer cash flow allowed all of these institutions to take root, it just seems deeply wrong to me that something as fickle as that can bring them to their knees, sometimes after decades, in a matter of months or weeks. We have to be able to do better than this, and the compounding crises of the era, especially, demand it.

One of my favorite things I ever covered was this organization serving Boston’s neighborhoods of color, called the Boston Ujima Project, which is kind of hard to summarize succinctly, but I tried to do it already so here, this is what I said:

At its core, Ujima is a place-based investment fund, controlled democratically by community members to support businesses, real estate and infrastructure projects that would otherwise struggle to find financing. It also layers philanthropy with other forms of capital to mitigate risk and to make it easier for working-class and local people to invest in the fund themselves. Beyond investing, Ujima organizes the community in support of its projects and other social justice campaigns.

So a bunch of people in the neighborhood get together in a big room and collectively hear proposals for businesses that will serve the community, and decide what to back. It completely upends the risks and incentives of most investment capital in order to fund projects that would otherwise struggle to get off the ground and then stay open, and acts as an organizing platform for broader change.

“I think we’re trying to propose what a new economy could look like,” Lucas Turner-Owens, fund manager for Boston Ujima Project told me at the time. But you should really go read it not just because it is my article but because it is a fascinating undertaking that has become a model for other others like it popping up elsewhere.

I think folks at places like the Ujima Project would be the first to tell you they don’t have this all figured out, but they are trying to imagine a better system, stealing fragments of an old one we know is broken. I particularly like something adrienne maree brown wrote on this topic in her book Emergent Strategy so here it is for the big finish:

I like this visual of turning and evolving, as opposed to destroying the systems in place now. When Wheatley visited Detroit on a learning journey, she said systems built on greed eventually collapse on themselves, topple under their own top-heavy weight. Matter doesn’t disappear, it transforms. Energy is the same way. The Earth is layer upon layer of all that has existed, remembered by the dirt. It is time to turn capitalism into a fossil, time to turn the soil, turn to the horizon together.

---

Links

• Economists say recovery stimulus could either set us on a path to transition away from fossil fuels or locks us into relying on them.
• Jia Tolentino on mutual aid.
• 3/4 of emerging diseases that infect humans come from wildlife and that happens when we mess with their habitats.
• We need a long-term, large-scale philanthropic response to shift power to people and support organizations in building a just and caring society.
• Twenty miles of streets in Seattle will be closed to car traffic by the end of the month—for good.
• Other cities like Brussels and Milan are taking the opportunity to expand permanent bicycle infrastructure.
• Twitter’s the first company to go fully office optional.
• A good interview piece with Warren Ellis et al on how a bizarre show like Castlevania came to be and became a hit.

---

This is you on weeks when you don’t get this newsletter.

---

Listening

Angelica Garcia is my new favorite.

F it let’s do another one

---

Jamie and I are both big podcast listeners and we used to do this fake weekly podcast by ourselves with no recording or audience that we called “Good Eps” in which we discussed our favorite podcast episodes from the week. On Fridays usually, it would always start, so you heard any good eps lately? And then we talk about podcast episodes. I guess when you think about it, two people talking and listening to each other talk is the purest distillation of the podcast medium. Honestly, we’ve had some pretty good eps of that show.

Now that as a couple we are never, ever apart, we still walk around the house sometimes with our separate earbuds in, listening to our podcasts, because our small but loyal audience demands that Good Eps continue even during these challenging times.

But you know what my favorite podcast is? Your podcast. Even if you don’t have one. If you had one, it would be my favorite. Keep those eps coming.

Tate

Living on the brink of oil stained societal collapse, everything going wrong in 20 different directions

Christopher Wood, Zebra and Parachute, 1930, © Tate, CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0

---

I’m going to write about William Gibson today, for the second time in this newsletter, because while he is best known for a book from the 1980s that sort of predicted the internet, his unique perspectives on time, technology, and inequality feel more relevant to me than they have in years. In particular, his 2014 novel The Peripheral takes his famous premise that “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed,” to its extreme conclusion in an era of accelerating ecological disaster.

(conceptual, if not plot spoilers, ahead)

Specifically, it envisions a distant future in which a small aristocratic percentage of the population survives—relying on technology that surged forward during a global crisis—while the remaining 80% of the population is, I regret to inform you, extremely dead.

For some reason, I tend to set aside new books by my favorite authors, but his latest Agency just came out as a sort of sequel to The Peripheral so I figured I better catch up. He’s one of my favorite writers, and ever since I started reading him as a teen, his anti-corporate, fascinated-but-frightened brand of scifi has been kind of a touchstone. While some of his early tropes have long been cliche (who’s ready to jack into cyberspace) his later work took on a more muted, meditative tone, densely packed with ideas about social strata, anxiety and drug use, militarism in the private sector and daily life, and weirdly enough, fashion.

For starters I will disclose that, predictably, I loved this book, even though and I could be wrong here, I got a sense that it was not among his most beloved novels. I probably wouldn’t recommend it as an entry point as it’s long, pretty dense, and deliberately disorienting in a way that can make you kind of queasy. Five stars put that on a book jacket. But especially the first third of the book or so is incredibly well crafted. One thing I’ve always loved about Gibson’s prose is that you have to read it almost the way you read poetry. Not due to any actual verse or other affectations; his sentences are very sparse, holding quiet or even silent details that you can easily miss if you’re not paying attention.

It’s particularly hard to sort out what’s going in this one because, and this is not spelled out for some time, it takes place in two different timelines in which characters end up interacting with each other as a result of some scifi thingies. So I believe one set of characters is in the 2040s in rural Alabama, and the other is living 70 years later in London. The first setting is this kind of high tech trailer trash world of extreme gig economy, poverty, sickness, combat injury, PTSD. Smartphones and septic tanks. The latter is all gleaming post-scarcity, high rise towers in a regreened London that’s flowing with resurfaced rivers. It’s a hell of its own, though, actually far worse than the earlier timeline—a cold and tedious society stripped of its social contracts, democracy having been eradicated, and all affairs now managed via kleptocracy in which wealthy families and corporations jockey for power using a combination of algorithms and violence.

Separating the two eras is an intersectional, human-caused global meltdown known as “The Jackpot,” which we learn halfway into the book killed off 80% of humanity and an unspecified majority of other animal species over the span of about 40 years. It didn’t happen all at once, but gradually,

no comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate; droughts, water shortages, crop failures…every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves. And all of it around people: how people were, how many of them there were, how they’d changed things just by being there.

Keep in mind, this was published in 2014, presumably started at least a couple years prior. But Gibson always bristles at being tagged as prescient, because he always says in writing about the future that he’s really writing about the present. I think about this a lot in relation to Octavia Butler’s Parable series, dystopian books written in the 1990s that many people are pointing out right now were devastatingly accurate. When I first read those books it occured to me that, when fictional dystopian futures seem to come true, it’s not because they predicted the future, rather, it’s because on some level, the worst aspects of humanity just never change.

So in writing about the two eras, Gibson seems to be reflecting on how we are living in both of them today, simultaneously, although neither fully established or pervasive, and running at far quieter volumes. On one hand, it can feel like we’re living on the brink of oil stained societal collapse, everything seeming to be going wrong in 20 different directions. On the other, it feels like we’ve arrived in an advanced future that moves at light speed, but one run on perpetual surveillance, self-dealing corruption, and an ever out of reach ruling class.

Gibson’s work is almost always anti-corporate, if not full on anti-capitalist, but it’s also never explicitly prescriptive. He writes about technology and has a clear fondness for it, but more as a quirk of human evolution than either a root source or a fix for our social ills. So while The Peripheral has a superficially happy ending, it’s not entirely clear what the solutions are to his imagined anthropocenic collapse. I bet some people reading found that frustrating, the lack of a clear assault on tech, opting instead for a melancholy acceptance that it’s always there, always changing, and very often harnessed by a boring flavor of evil, what he calls “the cumulative weight of ordinary human baseness.”

That’s one of the most fascinating things about The Peripheral, and one of the reasons I wanted to write about it here. It doesn’t depict a collapsed future in which everything has gone wrong and everything is bad. In fact, it appears they did fix many of the problems of The Jackpot. Humanity figured it out. We entered a new era of coexistence with the planet. But we were far too late, and it cost us everything.

There is a certain view out there that humanity always figures it out, always innovates its way out of our problems. Whether it’s Covid-19 or the next pandemic or the climate crisis, we adapt, solve the thing at hand, and move on to the next thing, too clever and adaptable to go extinct. And to some extent, our problems and solutions are those of innovation. But when activists use extinction as a frame, the stakes being presented are not necessarily the literal eradication of the species. It’s the potential loss of entire ways of life, biodiversity, entire cultures, demographics (folks of a certain vulnerable age, say), widespread suffering and death that is just as intolerable as extinction.

I have to imagine people who fixate only on developing new technological solutions to problems like climate change really do believe those solutions will lift up all of humanity, and they usually make that very argument. But it’s telling that it’s often people who would very likely be in the 20% who would survive Gibson’s Jackpot. Which makes me think their confidence that we’ll be OK and figure this out is actually confidence that we’ll be OK and figure this out. And that’s not good enough.

As Gibson points out, the price of our survival may well be a world in which we lose our collective decision-making, abandon our sense of morality and justice, and accept a harder, colder world. And most notably, that’s a world in which many if not most are left in the wreckage as technology marches on.

---

‘It is a sewer’

I was off last week but I had a couple of thoughts about that Michael Moore documentary on climate change that came out, which I will never ever watch fyi. I suspect there is some schadenfreude on the center-to-right surrounding Moore’s glorified YouTube conspiracy video, something like oh the left turns on itself how do they like it now. And I think there is always some suspicion that liberals are somehow hypnotized by Michael Moore and do whatever his movies say. So I just feel the need to say that I literally do not know a single person who has been a fan of Michael Moore for perhaps 20 years. The guy is an asshole.

Anyway the weirdest thing about that movie is that it seems to have these sort of theoretically worthwhile rough ideas like attacking corporate influence on environmentalism, you know a valid concern. But the targets he picks are just completely wrong. Saying renewables have the same climate impact as fossil fuels is asinine. And Moore’s movies always center on one big villain, and somehow he chose Bill McKibben. Honestly, I think McKibben’s particular flavor of environmentalism is overrepresented, but the guy has devoted his life to climate change and doesn’t have a corporate sellout bone in his body. Moore could have done something on the Nature Conservancy or the EDF or Walton, all these BINGOs that went all in on market solutions and corporate partnerships instead of regulation. But Bill McKibben? Like, it’s just actually wrong. Anyway, as McKibben himself put it quite nicely: the movie is a “sewer.” Don’t watch it, don’t believe it, and please don’t imagine that this is what liberals or progressives think about climate change. Goodbye!

---

Links

• 81 workers at a Walmart in Worcester contracted the coronavirus. It was forcibly shut down by local health officials, mid-afternoon with shoppers still in the aisles.
• Harvard won’t divest, and nobody knows what its plan to move toward a “net-zero endowment” means. The announcement trots out the case that they don’t want to “alienate or demonize” fossil fuel companies, a strategy that has accomplished worse than nothing for decades.
• The Dutch government is taking fast, sweeping climate action, because they are being legally forced to (after resisting for five years). Let’s get a round of applause for the underappreciated approach of just legally fucking forcing things to change.
• By 2070, one-third of the world’s population is likely to live in areas unsuitably hot for human life.
• Lots of uh useful insights in this interview with Esther Perel on how to be a couple during quarantine.
• Liquor store sales are way up (you’re welcome liquor stores) and hot items include 30 racks of Bud and half-gallon bottles of vodka.

---

Comics

This week I’m going to highlight an artist whose work I have loved for a while now and often provides some calming joy. Her name is Maggie Umber, and she is co-founder of the scrappy indie comics collective 2dcloud out of Minneapolis. 2dcloud has had some fits and starts over the years but they follow in the tradition of indie labels with a distinct ethic and I just love everything they put out they are really pushing the limits of comics.

Umber’s work is a great example, as much of it is painted, and while it is often sequential and has elements of text, there is rarely any dialogue, at least not in what I’ve read. I recommend Sound of Snow Falling, which is pitched as a “paint and paper documentary, observing great horned owls in their natural habitat.” When comics are really good, you can almost hear what is happening in them, and this is a beautiful example.

She’s also been doing these atmospheric spooky black and white comics that have been running in Now: New Comics Anthology, including one in Now 8 here is a panel:

You can buy a bunch of stuff right from 2dcloud and Now Anthologies from Fantagraphics so go do it.

---

Listening

Obviously I am listening to the new Fiona Apple but so are you so here is something different that would also make a nice pairing with the above pick: Charlie Haden and Antonio Forcione’s guitar and double bass duet, Heartplay. This has been humming in the background quite a lot in the apartment lately. Let’s go with the song Silence:

---

I Endorse

Arcosanti’s Instagram account. This account was shut down for a minute “due to unfortunate events” whatever that means lol but now it’s back. This is about the time of year I usually go back to Arizona to visit family and friends but that’s a big no go this year so I’ve been especially enjoying this virtual window into the experimental utopian architectural project in Northern Arizona, founded by famed visionary and megalomaniac Paolo Soleri. This was a popular field trip destination when I was in school and one time on the way home from one our van broke down and like 30 eighth graders were set loose to wander around the side of the highway in Arizona’s high desert for an afternoon it’s a fond memory. If you are in or from Arizona, you own a Soleri bell we have two.

---

Hey I really missed you all last week I took a few days off to sit in my living room in a different way than usual and it was mostly fine, like 60% as good taking days off in the before times. What have you guys been doing? Looks like mostly draining a bunch of Budweiser and Tito’s from what I’m reading in the news but that’s fine do what you gotta do.

One thing I did was I finally took the plunge and shaved my head but kept my beard the same so I basically look like I’m getting ready to storm a state capitol building in a tactical vest I ordered on Amazon. Jamie was nervous about helping and I said, look there is nothing you can do wrong, I’m shaving it all off. But then she was cleaning things up around the ears and left this huge square bald patch. She was like, oh no we had a good laugh.

Anyway gotta run I hope you are all OK and healthy and reasonably happy but then sometimes mad. You are going to be alright.

Tate

PS. If you like this newsletter and want it to continue throughout the entire Jackpot, one important thing you can do is share this with someone you think might like it. Either forward it or post it on your sosh. Bless you. And if you are new please subscribe.

Listening to the hull of the ship groaning and creaking under the pressure outside

HMS Erebus and Terror in the Antarctic by John Wilson Carmichael (before the fatal Franklin expedition)

---

Last week I was wondering whether we might be learning to live a smaller, slower way of life during all of this, and I think one way we are all experiencing that slow down is in reduced travel. That’s had me thinking about an early issue of the newsletter and so I thought I would revisit that one today. But it’s not a rerun so do not skip ahead I will be able to sense it. Also most of you have not read this before so it’s new to you.

In last year’s Halloween issue I reviewed the first season of this great show called The Terror, which adds these supernatural horror elements to already horrifying moments in history. And there were a bunch of Crisis Palace-y elements in that first season, which is about well actually I already wrote about it so here just read this:

In May of 1845, the HMS Terror and HMS Erebus set out for the Arctic on a mission to chart the last unknown section of the Northwest Passage. For centuries, European explorers had been trying to complete a route between the Atlantic and the Pacific by meandering through the treacherous waters north of Canada, and Sir Jon Franklin was going to be the guy to finish the job.

The expedition sailed into the Baffin Bay that July and was never heard from again. All 129 men aboard died presumably grisly deaths by disease or starvation or exposure, some resorting to cannibalism. It was the worst tragedy in the history of Arctic exploration. It was also a huge mystery, as the shipwrecks weren’t even found for another 170 years. 

The show imagines what happened to the expedition after it got stuck in the ice over the winter and it’s this tense conflict between some people with good intentions trying to cooperate and help each other get through it, and others with not so good intentions, all in this deadly environment that doesn’t really give a shit either way.

There’s this sense of slow-moving catastrophe. One of the most effective touches kicks in after the ships become trapped in the ice pack, a deadly fate that not only carries a ship wherever the ice decides to drift, but can also crush a ship’s hull. Throughout much of the show, we hear this steady, dull creaking and groaning of the ice pressing against the hull, a reminder of what horror is to come. 

The show made me think about climate change no doy, and one theme in particular, which is the way humanity (or at least one element of humanity) seems unable to sit still for one stupid second. So in the case of these 19th century explorers, there’s this unbelievable arrogance and just disaster after disaster from trying to travel from one place to that other place way over there, in part because of yes, expanding global capitalism through new trade routes, but also because it’s just kind of this thing we always do:

There’s a chapter in Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction where she explores what set modern humans apart from our prehistoric relatives like Neanderthals. Evolutionary geneticist Svante Pääbo brings up one important distinction, which is that we just can’t sit goddamn still.

Kolbert calls it our “Faustian restlessness.” See, unlike Neanderthals, it’s only modern humans who started to migrate by venturing out onto open water with no sight of land. 

“How many people must have sailed out and vanished on the Pacific before you found Easter Island? I mean, it’s ridiculous,” Pääbo says. “And why do you do that? Is it for the glory? For immortality? For curiosity? And now we go to Mars. We never stop.”

We never stop.

He hypothesizes that there could be some “madness gene,” an evolutionary quirk that makes humans compulsively explore, and has ultimately led us to alter the ecosystem of the whole planet. 

And yet, Kolbert also explores in that chapter another thing that sets humans apart—our skill at reading social cues, which gives us the unique survival advantage of collective problem-solving.

The Terror made me think of that part of the book, these human tendencies and the tension between them, particularly in the context of climate change—of conquering versus collaborating. You might describe it the way Eric Holthaus did in the last newsletter—the divide between colonialism and “relearning our interdependence.” 

So this suddenly feels very relevant now, first, because the introduction of new viruses and their rapid spread across the planet is one consequence of that Faustian restlessness that Kolbert was writing about. Our razing of wilderness that has led us toward environmental crisis also kicks up these new viruses. Then, when a virus jumps from one species to another species and then to our species, our non-stop international travel just smears it across the face of the planet.

Now that a particularly bad virus is here, we suddenly have no choice but to sit still. As noted in the last issue, Kate Brown wrote in a recent article on the ecological factors behind a pandemic: “In an effort to expand our reach across the planet, we have cornered ourselves.” It really feels like we’re stuck in that ice, listening to the hull of the ship groaning and creaking under the pressure outside.

While we are stuck, we might rethink some of that restlessness. This is difficult, as I certainly traveled before the pandemic and I’ll certainly travel again. But back when things first started getting universally canceled, I remember it being so clear just how much people move around the globe, some way more than others. So many conferences, so many trips to work, so many events. With all of it now ground to a halt, maybe we are going to learn that it had become a little too easy to burn massive amounts of energy to shoot human bodies nearly anywhere on the planet we want to go.

I don’t mean for this to be a diatribe about how awful it is for people to fly in planes. It’s more about to what extent we can control how much we give into that madness gene of constant growth, expansion, exploration, conquering, colonizing, that got us, at least in part, into our current mess, and continues to drive the climate crisis.

Not everyone in England in 1845 was an Arctic explorer, and not every nation in 1845 was the British Empire. There are other ways to be. So instead of raging against our current constraints, rushing to return to slash and burn capitalism, I hope we have the ability instead to call upon our collective problem-solving nature. To work together toward a shared well-being that will get us through the rough times when we’re stuck in the ice, and steer us clear of it in the future.

—

OK one last thing on this, in the original post on The Terror, I noted that while I was first watching the show, there was an Arctic exploration mission just getting underway, the Mosaic Expedition, an international climate science mission that had been planned for several years. The Polarstern research vessel intentionally got stuck in the ice pack to drift with it and study the conditions along the way, in order to improve our understanding of how the Arctic is changing and inform our response to climate change.

The mission was in near total isolation for months as the coronavirus spread, and travel restrictions derailed its plans to resupply the mission and swap out the crew by plane. After considering dozens of alternatives, Mosaic now has a contingency plan to break out of the ice and meet a supply ship in open water, then travel back to complete the mission. The crew of 90 people will have been on board the ship for two months longer than planned. And yes, the ice against the hull of the Polarstern also makes noise, described as a dull scraping.

---

The quarantine state of mind is having 3 solid days where you feel pretty well adjusted, followed by a sudden, unexpected dip into what we call "the hell zone"

— Dan Sheehan (@ItsDanSheehan) April 18, 2020

---

What I Wrote

I wrote a profile of an organization called Foundation for Louisiana, which among other things addresses the cascading societal and cultural impacts of coastal land loss and flooding. One impressive thing about this group is the way it fights against, or rather, funds community groups to fight against the structural racism underlying these impacts. Here’s part:

Underlying FFL’s work is an understanding of how these climate impacts are shaped by Louisiana’s deep history of systemic and environmental racism, dating back to colonialism and slavery, but also generations of wealth inequality and petroleum industry pollution. In particular, there’s a stretch of the state between New Orleans and Baton Rouge known as “Cancer Alley,” or “Death Alley,” because of the several petrochemical plants in the area and regional clusters of cancer cases in surrounding communities of color. 

“The context is that these residents are exposed to any toxic fallout from that industry and are disallowed from fully participating in the economic boom that then came from that industry,” says Caressa Chester, climate justice program officer. 

…

Of all the things they try to impress on funders wanting to have a positive impact in the Gulf Coast region, there’s one piece of advice they recommend above all else—listen. 

“Listen to what has already been going on, because people have been fighting these battles for decades, generations, and they know what they’re doing,” Chester says. “And that doesn’t mean that they don’t need support, and that working together is not necessary, because of course it is. But you just have to listen to Southern black and indigenous leadership.” 

In fact, the team sees the communities they serve as national leaders on climate change, with expertise they can share with other regions. Increasingly, people from other places experiencing coastal flooding and land loss are coming to Louisiana, looking for insights.

“We are not necessarily waiting on a Green New Deal or similar policy at a federal level for us to really transition and build anew the way that our communities and businesses and culture work,” Russell says. 

---

Links

• The push to cancel rent continues. A third of renters across the country couldn’t pay on April 1, and even in places with eviction moratoriums, unpaid amounts will accumulate.
• Researches predict abrupt collapse of many animal species starting in the next decade due to climate change.
• Recent drought in the Southwest was among the most severe in 1,200 years, and human-caused climate change made it 47% worse.
• Another comparison between quarantine and a ship bound in ice, this one in 1898. “Time weighs heavily upon us,” writes the captain, as his crew was overcome with boredom.
• It’s crowds, not density, that contribute to the virus’s spread in cities, and the solution is competent government.
• The renewed importance of our balconies and bodegas.
• Oil prices fell to an all-time low this week, -$37.63 per barrel, yes that’s negative. Here’s an idea—instead of bailing them out, nationalize the fossil fuel industry so we can phase them out.
• The class tensions around the noodle dish in Parasite.
• Numbers losing meaning? Visualize the projected deaths from Covid-19 compared to other causes.

---

Watching

One time way before the pandemic, we were cleaning up the apartment and contemplating getting rid of a bunch of DVDs. My case for keeping them was that maybe there will be some catastrophic event and the internet will be gone, and then we wouldn’t have anything to watch. Jamie said, “Oh so you think during the apocalypse we’re going to want to sit around and watch Forgetting Sarah Marshall?” which goes to show that nobody can dunk on you like your significant other.

But lo and behold, the other night I really wanted to watch the 1978 zombie classic Dawn of the Dead and the only version online was a low quality YouTube version. So I did break out the DVDs during the apocalypse after all and found my copy. Who is glad we kept the DVDs now just me I guess.

One reason I wanted to watch this movie was I kept thinking of this sequence where the main characters settle down in a shopping mall during a zombie apocalypse and fall into this numb, hypnotic routine of bourgeois distractions. It is eerily familiar and might be a liiiittle on the nose for you right now but here it is queued up to the start of the five-minute montage if you are up for it.

---

I Endorse

Let’s not end on that depressing note, instead I endorse watching concerts on TV, with other people if possible. Every year for the past 11 years, my friend Eric Swedlund has thrown this kind of ridiculous music festival in Tucson to celebrate his birthday. This was the first year he couldn’t do it since Swedefest (yes that is what it’s called) started, so for his birthday on Monday, a few us got on a video call and watched some concert movies, Stop Making Sense and then Shut Up and Play the Hits. It was a lot of fun. Two weekends ago, Jamie and I watched a short concert of Phoebe Bridgers playing some songs in her pajamas, and then an old video of a boygenius concert. It is a little sad to see huge crowds of people dancing to live music but it is also nice, you can say to each other, oh it’s this song I love this song yeah me too it’s a good one, etc. Feels good.

Where are your friends tonight

---

So you know, good moments, bad moments, we’re all having them. Last Sunday I sat out in the backyard with a book and it was just a little too cold and windy to do that activity and I was just a little under dressed for it. But I decided to stay out there anyway with my little dog and book and just be cold for a while. For a few minutes, it felt like when you go on a vacation, and maybe you didn’t pack warm enough and you’re sitting on a beach or a deck or something and catch a chill and everyone is like, ooh got a little chilly, but you stay out there anyway because you’re on vacation and that’s what you came to do after all, just be some place, and a little cold never hurt anyone. So that was a nice moment for me is what I’m saying.

Maybe close your eyes for a second and imagine that we’re all on vacation together you and me and all the readers of this newsletter, and it’s a little cold but we can stay outside for like an hour more before it’s time to go in and make dinner.

Tate

P.S. There won’t be a newsletter next week, but don’t freak out everything is OK just taking a skip week.

In an effort to expand our reach across the planet, we have cornered ourselves

Vanitas still life with a globe, sceptre, a skull crowned with straw, Hendrick Andriessen, c. 1650

---

One of the big ideas echoing around the world right now, because we live in this weird time when everyone is always thinking about the same thing, is that in some yet to be understood ways we are on the brink of a restructuring of society. Depending on your outlook this might be a source of hope, or cynicism, and I imagine for pretty much everybody, anxiety.

I was listening to an interview with Dr. Sandro Galea, dean of the BU School of Public Health, who is a scholar of the social determinants of health, and back in March he was saying this pandemic could be one of those generational moments when our outlook on the world changes forever, citing 9/11 and the AIDS epidemic as previous examples. In his case, he was hoping one outcome will be a better understanding that there’s no such thing as “health for some” and that public health is a shared good.

There’s a temptation to think of these moments as opportunities for a triumphant recovery and leap forward. But that’s never quite the case, is it? As we learned from the post-9/11 era, change doesn’t happen like that. Some good things happen, some bad things happen, some things go back to the way they were.

I really like the way Kaitlyn Greenidge wrote about this recently as she was coming to grips with the hollow promise that things always get better.

So I look a bit further, and I find these words, from Alondra Nelson, a historian, in a recent interview: “The great mythos of American life is the idea that we’re always improving, always moving forward. And the great story of science and technology is that it is also always leaping forward to good ends.”

She notes that we have “an overinvestment in a progress narrative — particularly with regards to racial politics, issues of gender equality and equity — without sufficient attention to the fact that there’s the falling backward as much as there are leaps forward” and that “this political moment should be one of humility, of paying attention to looping back, and of acknowledging that sometimes looping back means failure, means going back to the woodshed, means throwing out what we thought we knew and thinking again.”

Farhad Ebrahimi, founder of the Chorus Foundation and someone I’ve talked with a lot over the years about climate justice and social movements, likes to use an analogy that I’m going to steal from him because it feels similarly appropriate. It’s the science fiction trope of the gravity temporarily going off in the spaceship, and everything suddenly becoming weightless, floating around, massive objects hurtling across the room. But the gravity inevitably comes on again, and everything crashes back to the ground with its full weight.

He uses it to refer to fast-moving, “movement moments” that happen periodically in social change work, but I think it also applies to any time of general upheaval and change. Right now, for example, the gravity is off. We’re experiencing the terror of floating around in space untethered, while also wondering how we should move some things around before the gravity comes back on—what we want the new status quo to look like once everything falls back to the ground.

Last week I talked about how exposed public health inequalities and societal vulnerabilities are one reason people are saying that now is not the time to back off on climate action. This is another: During a crisis, everything is on the table—for a while.

The big obvious thing here is the extent to which we try to take the moment to transition away from oil and gas. But lately I’ve been thinking how it might lead to a shift in our overall perceptions of consumption and economic growth, and how that’s manifesting in my own experience. While not all pandemic solutions are aligned with climate solutions, I wonder if a smaller, slower economy might be one that serves both, and maybe leads to a better way of life.

This is actually related to a pretty heated debate in climate circles. So there’s one crowd that says climate change is just another thing we have to figure out and it will be hard but we’ll innovate our way out of it and continue our general upward trajectory of better technology and economic growth. Another crowd says, actually, climate change is indicative of a sick relationship we have with the planet and its resources—overconsumption, consolidation of wealth, corporate globalization, industrial agriculture, loss of biodiversity.

If you’ve read any of my other emails or just the way I wrote that last sentence, you will rightly suspect that I lean toward the latter story, but like all of these stark divides on climate, I think there’s some truth in both. The idea that we should somehow dial back technology and standard of living and return to some kind of agrarian society seems both impossible and undesirable (Bill McKibben is a climate hero, but he lives in rural Vermont and that says a lot if you know anything about rural Vermont, and I once heard him say in an interview that in some ways maybe life wasn’t so bad in the Middle Ages it’s like come on Bill McKibben).

But coronavirus—and the urbanization, deforestation, and trade of wildlife that spark pandemics like it—casts a firm vote for the idea that our relationship with our surroundings is broken. It’s one consequence of what’s been called the “Great Acceleration,” a rapid expansion since the middle of the 20th century in human energy use, emissions, and population growth. We’ve reached a point where people, some people at least, go everywhere all the time and have anything they want, and it just can’t continue. As Kate Brown put it in a recent article on the ecological factors behind a pandemic, “In an effort to expand our reach across the planet, we have cornered ourselves.”

I guess this is a pretty traditional concept in environmentalism, one of anti-consumption, but I don’t think the answer is we all just tighten our belts or go and live in the woods like Michael McKean in The Good Place. So I don’t know, I think it has to be both. We can’t go backwards, but we can’t continue the same way. We have to make it different, better.

Right before things started getting bad, I read this opinion by economic anthropologist Jason Hickel, who made a case for abandoning growth of GDP as our measure of success. For one, he cites data that says if we carry on economic growth as usual, the rate of decarbonization required becomes far outside the realm of possibility. Keep in mind that, as renewable energy has rapidly expanded, burning of carbon has still well outpaced it.

But besides the climate argument, he writes, “Beyond a certain point, which high-income countries have long since surpassed, the relationship between GDP and human wellbeing completely breaks down.” There are several examples of countries with GDPs a fraction of our own having much better life expectancies, education, healthcare, and investments in public goods. That’s largely because when economic growth gets to a certain point, the vast majority is going straight to the wealthy, so you get this split economy of a top tier reaping massive rewards of growth, with everyone else scrambling at unsustainable levels of busyness just to cover expenses. Hickel proposes economies with less material production (and therefore emissions), less consumption, less planned obsolescence, and eliminating massive intentional inefficiencies built into our current economy—and yes, less work. Just. Less.

I think a lot of us right now are feeling what this kind of contraction might be like, sort of unintentionally trying on different aspects of it to see how they fit. That includes traveling less, shrinking our workloads through lightened expectations, or unfortunately, furlough and layoff. We’re slowing down, pruning our lives back. We’re buying less, burning less, trying to figure out how to sit around and do nothing more. For me, for corona- and non-corona-related reasons, this has been a slower than usual month for work, so it’s been little things like waking up without an alarm, not tracking all my working hours with productivity apps. I spend two hours every day reading. When I want to buy something, I know I can’t have it in on my doorstep in exchange for a relative pittance and in mere hours, but instead now it’s maybe weeks or maybe it’s not available at all, so I rethink it. These are all surprisingly uncomfortable things and they feel weird.

You always want to be careful with this talk, for one because my kind of experience is an enormous privilege that is only accessible to people in very fortunate positions. And even if crisis is changing our perceptions, the still-baked-in inequality means that for many others, life is only faster, harder, and worse. You don’t want to glamorize poverty, and the temptation to celebrate silver lining environmental benefits of human tragedy is a form of eco-fascism. Nobody should look around at how things are now and say, yeah this right here is the way I want life to be. The clear skies may be nice, but this is a nightmarish way to get there.

If this isn’t the way life should be, though, I’m thinking about how personally and on larger level, we might take some new habits and perceptions away from this tragedy, and use them to shift things into the way we do want life to be, one that is maybe smaller, slower, and hopefully better.

---

Watching

The other day this video came up on my Facebook feed and it’s 2:43 minutes and my attention span is basically fried these days I read like 50 articles and 1 million tweets a day. But this little video is so beautiful and a couple times during it I found myself clicking away to something else and then I was like you know what just sit down and watch these fucking elk for two minutes and forty three seconds with the sound on you deserve it. So I did and I encourage you to do the same.

---

America's upstairs neighbors are vacuuming their way through the pandemic

— Tate Williams (@TateJW) April 15, 2020

---

Links

• Arts and events power the economy in Western Mass and now they are suffering a huge blow. MassMoCA has lost 70% of its budget.
• AHP: We are all confused and angry at each other.
• “None of us signed up for this. It feels like we’ve been drafted into war.”
• The quiet revolution of Animal Crossing.
• More data that social distancing is working, but how does it end?
• New York Magazine art critic Jerry Saltz has the most infuriating method for acquiring and consuming coffee.
• Images of Amabie, a mythical mermaid-like creature from Japanese folklore are appearing all over the internet. “Should an epidemic come,” it is reported to have uttered, “draw me and show me to the people.”

An amabie from a woodblock print, late Edo period

---

Listening

I recently found out about this musician Hailu Mergia, who I guess is a keyboardist but he plays all kinds of things he did an accordion record and originally was famous in Ethiopia during the 80s for his role in the Walias Band. They played jazz and funk mixed with traditional Ethiopian music. Anyway he has this wild story where he tried to make it in the US, didn’t have much success so drove a cab for years in DC, then was rediscovered in 2013 and has been putting out new music since.

This song is a little different than most of his music, more quiet contemporary jazz but with these unique rhythms and layered melodies in there. The other day I got stuck listening to it on repeat for like a half hour and it kind of put me into a trance. The song title means “singing about love” the kind of wistful humming you might do about a distant loved one.

---

Finally, I want to close this week with a video from the National Network of Abortion Funds, which is where Jamie borat voice my wife works which is why wherever we (used to) go random people thank her and ask if they can give her a hug. NNAF made this video with Padma Lakshmi and Molly Crabapple and it’s a really powerful message about access to abortion but also just about imagining a world where we treat each other with love. Here it is:

Take care out there folks. If you can, slow things down, prune things back, and see how it feels. Watch the elk and listen to the piano song as many times as you want. You deserve it.

Tate