Ursula LeGuin

I knew Ursula LeGuin was in her late 80s, but it seemed as though I was still hearing current news about her appearances or writing, and so her death yesterday caught me off guard. (I guess she hadn't been doing well for a couple of months, but until then was carrying on, just as I'd thought.)

Anyway. I heard the news first on Twitter, and despite knowing she had a great and long life, I teared up each time I would see another post. (As I am now, while writing this.) I finally read the New York Times obituary, which I found pretty half-assed.

For instance the lead said she brought a "tough-minded feminine sensibility" to science fiction, a phrase she would have never applied to herself, I'm sure. The writer also summarized the societies in The Dispossessed like this: Urras is a "messy but vibrant capitalist society, which oppresses its underclass" while Anarres is "a classless 'utopia', which turns out to be oppressive in its own conformist way." The implication being, it seems to me, that Urras was LeGuin's preference, which is obviously not the conclusion of anyone who reads the book with a semi-open mind. She thought Anarres was imperfect, yes, but Shevek returns, right? To work to make it better, more what it is supposed to be, not more like Urras.

My reading of LeGuin's large body of work is spotty. The first book I read was The Tombs of Atuan, because I was 12 or 13 and didn't realize it was the second book in a trilogy. So I met Earthsea through the girl character Tenar, rather than through the young, male wizard Sparrowhawk. Then I read A Wizard of Earthsea and The Farthest Shore. I must have read The Dispossessed next (after rereading the Earthsea trilogy multiple times,) when it was misshelved among the juvenile novels.

I think The Dispossessed affected me and my worldview more than any other book I've read, partly because of the age I was (about 14, I think). One key point is about the concept of deserving. One of the characters puts it this way:

"For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead Kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of deserving, of the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think."

I soon also read The Left Hand of Darkness, The Lathe of Heaven, and the other short novels from her Hainish cycle (loosely connected with Darkness and Dispossessed). I probably read The Word for World Is Forest not long after it came out in 1976.

I've read the stories in The Winds Twelve Quarters and The Compass Rose, and from those discovered "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" and "The Day Before the Revolution." I've read Orsinian Tales, which is made up of stories from her non-SF world. I finally, just a few years ago, got hold of a copy of Always Coming Home.

I have not read many (or maybe any) of her essays, and not much of her other fiction (Malafrena or Lavinia, for instance). Looking through her book list, I see there are later works in the Hainish universe I've missed.

Things to do, books to read. Ideas to appreciate from a woman who has left us with so much good.

Ursula LeGuin, Introducing Him/Herself

It's no secret that I love the writing of Ursula LeGuin. When asked for the title of my favorite book, I have a hard time coming up with anything other than The Dispossessed, even though I first read it when I was 15.

Despite my love of LeGuin, my knowledge of her complete works is less than perfect. I just found out about an essay she wrote in the late 1980s called Introducing Myself, which makes me appreciate her writing even more, if that's possible. In it, she deals with age, gender, and the presentation of the self with such humor that I can't even say anything worth saying about it. Here's one excerpt:

I don’t have a gun and I don’t have even one wife and my sentences tend to go on and on and on, with all this syntax in them. Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than have syntax. Or semicolons. I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after “semicolons,” and another one after “now.”

And another thing. Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than get old. And he did. He shot himself. A short sentence. Anything rather than a long sentence, a life sentence. Death sentences are short and very, very manly. Life sentences aren’t. They go on and on, all full of syntax and qualifying clauses and confusing references and getting old.

I'm not sure how much of the essay is included on the linked site (Brain Pickings). I guess I'll have to check out a copy of the book of essays where it was published in 2004, The Wave in the Mind.

A Half-Built Garden

One of the first things I heard about Ruthanna Emrys was that she was an inheritor of Ursula K. LeGuin's legacy, or something to that effect. Which seemed both a burden for any writer to bear and enough for me to give her a try.

I heard she had a book coming out called A Half-Built Garden. I knew nothing about it, but I put in a preorder at my favorite independent bookstore and when it came out a few weeks ago, I picked up my copy right away and read it straight through.

Now, having read it, I see what the person who made the LeGuin statement means. The book feels like a 2020s, Earth-based, climate crisis conversation with The Dispossessed. Which is just what I need these days!

Not that readers generally have to be familiar with LeGuin or The Dispossessed to enjoy or understand the book.

Emrys is writing in the climate fiction genre, I suppose, within the subsection where many of today's emergencies have been addressed but there are still problems because... well, people. Not to mention the long-term damage from what we have wrought so far. It's a science book, but not the usual sciences of science fiction (water science, earth science, and, as in LeGuin's books, social science).

I don't want to give anything away about the story or the characters because it's all so good to discover on your own. But I will say that I should just start rereading it now, which is what I used to do as a teenager with LeGuin's books.

I Am a Graduate of the Public Library

A few weeks back, Peter Sieruta at Collecting Children's Books wrote that children's authors Vera and Bill Cleaver considered themselves to be graduates of the public library.


I am a graduate of the public library as well, even though I have degrees from other institutions. The library was my first.

My mother took us to our small-town library frequently when we were young. It's a charming, yellow-brick, red-tile-roofed building with dark-stained pillars between the bookcases and old windows whose glass is irregular and rippled. A twisting staircase leads to the asbestos-tiled children's room in the cool basement. This is the place where I found Dr. Seuss and later juvenile novels that haunt my thoughts to this day.

When we got to be teenagers, my mom paid for borrowing privileges at the libraries of two larger towns about 20 miles away. They had more selection, and my sisters and I took advantage of them both. (My mother did too!)

I took out books about house design, as well as lots of fiction. This is where I found M.E. Kerr, Sylvia Louise Engdahl, Ursula LeGuin, and so many other authors I love to this day. After reading LeGuin's Earthsea trilogy, I was browsing through the juvenile novels one day and saw beside the trilogy a new book by LeGuin called The Dispossessed. Misshelved from the adult section it may have been, but it soon became one of my all-time favorite books.

Thanks to Peter for making me think about this. Are you a graduate of your public library?

Three Years Ago

Today is the third anniversary of the death of Ursula K. LeGuin. I saw this photo shared today, along with a couple of quotes I hadn't heard before:

"Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new."

"The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next."

I guess she had a high tolerance for ambiguity.

___

There are too many posts on this blog that mention Ursula LeGuin to list... to find them, put her name into the search field.

Recommendations from Jo Walton

I don't think I've ever read a novel with so many recommendations for other novels in it. Jo Walton's Hugo- and Nebula-winner Among Others deftly integrates critiques of much of the science fiction published before 1980. Written in diary form, it seems like a natural way for a voracious reader like the main character, Mori, to express herself.

I'm not sure what it would be like to read this book if you were new to science fiction, but for someone who has read pretty widely, it's like talking to a friend about books you didn't know anyone else had read.

Ursula LeGuin, Sylvia Louise Engdahl, J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert Silverberg, Susan Cooper, C.S. Lewis, Roger Zelazny, John Brunner. The authors and their books go whizzing past.

One of the things I loved about the story, and Mori, was her total innocence about how publishing works. If she had read one book by an author, she didn't know how to find out whether the writer had published other books (it takes place in 1979-80... so no internet for Mori). But then she starts to go to the library and finds out about inter-library loan. Soon, the books are flying out the door.

And now I have to go find copies of books she mentions that I've never read, despite the fact that they're by some of my favorite authors:

• The World Inside and Dying Inside by Robert Silverberg
• Time Without Number by John Brunner
• Gate of Ivrel by C.J. Cherryh
• Doorways in the Sand by Roger Zelazny
• Babel 17 and Triton by Samuel Delany. I was scared off of Delany by a mistimed attempt at reading Dhalgren when I was 18. But Mori describes Triton as Delany's response to LeGuin's Dispossessed, so how can I not read that?
• Pavane by Keith Roberts (an author completely new to me)
• The Charioteer by Mary Renault. I know, it's not science fiction, but Mori shares my affection for Renault's ancient Greek stories and I haven't read this one.

Time to go check the used book stacks at Uncle Hugo's.

Oh, and one last bonus: Mori dislikes Thomas Hardy, too.

_____

There are three books that Mori never mentions, and whose omissions seem odd, given her interests. I wonder if they were not available in the U.K. at the time?

• The King Must Die by Mary Renault (though she specifically mentions the sequel, The Bull from the Sea)
• Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny (a much better book than Creatures of Light and Darkness, which is discussed)
• The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner (one of his very best)

Returning to LeGuin

A few days ago I finished reading The Telling, an Ursula K. LeGuin novel from 2000 that I had never heard of before. I picked up a used first edition at Midway Books in Saint Paul. 

It was (I think) the last book she wrote that's part of her Hainish stories (the same universe that includes The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Word for World Is Forest, and a number of other novels). It was good — pretty philosophical, and it felt like it was in conversation with the past five years more than the late 1990s, but I suppose that should tell me something about my lack of memory of that earlier time, as well as her ability to write a story that can speak across decades.

After I finished it, I was looking over my to-be-read shelves and piles and noticed I have another LeGuin book I'd forgotten about, Tales from Earthsea. This is also a used first edition, this time one I got at the Book House in Dinkytown. I don't remember when.

It's a short story collection that came out in 2001, though the stories were published over a much longer period. I'm midway through the first story, a novella called "The Finder," which is about the establishment of Roke Island.

It's making me think about rereading the Earthsea books again. I haven't read them since Daughter Number Three-Point-One was about 8, so I guess that's a couple of decades. And I'm not sure I ever read Tehanu at all. 

Seems like a good time for a bit of escapism.

Luck of the Wealthy

I've previously mentioned this quote from Ursula LeGuin's book The Dispossessed. It's the words of a fictional philosopher named Odo, who influenced a revolution that led to the creation of an "ambiguous utopia":

"For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead Kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of deserving, of the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think."

I've always thought that chance had a lot to do with how well any one person does, financially, in our society. Sure, there's intelligence, hard work and perseverance, but even if you have all of those, there are no guarantees. Sometimes it's being in the right place at the right time or sheer chance and butterfly effects that make someone successful.

Well, it turns out Odo and I were onto something. Today's Star Tribune contained an op-ed by local writer Greg Breining, who reports on a mathematical model developed at the University of Minnesota. The model shows that "the fabulously rich get as rich as they do by chance alone."

The model was developed by Joseph Fargione, an ecologist with the U's College of Biological Science, and has been published in a peer-reviewed journal. Breining writes,

The link between ecology and economics is not as far-fetched as it might sound. Ecologists had long thought that environmental factors and the characteristics of species would determine the evolutionary outcome of an ecosystem (just as many people insist that talent, hard work, and good decisions determine wealth). Put the same species together under the same conditions, the thinking went, and you'd get a similar result -- again and again.

But in the 1980s, James Drake, an ecologist at the University of Tennessee, repeatedly assembled "microecosystems" in five-gallon aquariums. He found he could add the same pond species in the same numbers under identical conditions -- and get a different result each time. Different species would gain ascendency and dominate the ecosystem -- as if by chance alone.

Fargione did the math and finds that wealth accumulation is like Drake's aquariums:

by the "inexorable effect of chance," and chance alone, "a small proportion of entrepreneurs come to possess essentially all of the wealth. ... The concentration of wealth occurs merely because some individuals are lucky by randomly receiving a series of high growth rates, and once they are ahead with exponentially growing capital, they tend to stay ahead."

According to Fargione, greater variation in rates of return hastened the concentration of wealth. Inequality grows with time. Wealth concentration continues despite periods of recession and depression. And splitting estates among heirs does not appreciably slow concentration.

In the real world, of course, some people are more skilled at making money than others. And business owners who are making a high rate of return, by operating highly successful companies, tend to continue earning high rates of return. And the rich have connections and other means to increase their wealth that most folks lack. "Those other factors would exacerbate the underlying pattern," says Fargione.

One thing that would break up this randomized juggernaut is a substantial estate tax, according to Fargione. Makes sense to me; why should someone be able to inherit money -- which s/he had nothing to do with acquiring -- without taxation? It seems like those who think people on "welfare" are lazy should be equally against anyone being able to live off of inherited trust funds.

In any case, it's hard to get around the argument that the type of income inequality we're experiencing in this country is unhealthy in a democratic republic and bad for the economy, too. Breining concludes with this:

According to economists Andrew G. Berg and Jonathan D. Ostry of the International Monetary Fund, "In fact equality appears to be an important ingredient in promoting and sustaining growth. The difference between countries that can sustain rapid growth for many years or even decades and the many others that see growth spurts fade quickly may be the level of inequality."

Badly Served by "Deserve"

A letter to the editor from today's Star Tribune cited the following stats:

In Ike's day, the bottom 90 percent (of income-earners) held 60 percent of the wealth. Today, the top 1 percent to 2 percent have 40 percent; the next 8 percent have 33 percent, and the bottom 90 percent have 27 percent.

When people like me or Greg Van Hee, the writer of the letter, give numbers like that, we assume it's self-evident that a change in wealth distribution like this is a problem, and that the 1950s distribution of wealth was closer to the ideal.

People of the Right never seem to hear these stats, or at least appear to be unbothered by them. I think I just figured out why: They believe that the bottom 90 percent in the 1950s worked much harder than the bottom 90 of today, and so that earlier generation deserved their wealth while today's bottom 90 are slackers.

As a correlate, they also think the top 1 or 10 percent today have worked harder and smarter than either the bottom 90 or the top 10 of the 1950s, and so deserve that much more wealth.

Which reminds me of a quote from Ursula LeGuin's novel The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia:

"For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead Kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of deserving, of the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think."

Finally Appreciating Leo and Diane Dillon

At various times, I've written about the illustrators of children's and young adult or chapter book covers that I love (such as Trina Schart Hyman, Richard Cuffari, Emanuel Schongut, Alan Cober, Virginia Lee Burton, or Ellen Raskin). One influential pair of illustrators I've long known about but never loved quite as much was Leo and Diane Dillon.

It's not that I didn't like their work, but it was almost too ubiquitous from the 1970s on, and some of it I found a bit mushy, maybe too airbrushed for my taste. A lot of it is beautiful, though, and now (searching around as I started to write this post) I found that some of their work I didn't even realize was theirs.

I got started on this because Cory Doctorow tweeted this startling piece of theirs from 1970:

It was used on this cover:

Here are some other cover illustrations from that same early-1970s era, which are not very similar to the works they are mostly known for in the children's book world:

I mostly knew about them back in the 1970s because of their woodcut illustrations on these covers for books by Erik Christian Haugaard:

1963

1965

1968 (I may never forgive the designer of Rider for those typeface and color choices.) 

1971

This cover for a John Christopher novel published in 1963, which I don't think I've ever heard of before, looks like a cross between these two styles: 

It's not a woodcut, though you can see elements of woodcut style in the rendering, but it also shows the beginnings of the expressionist psychedelia so clearly shown in the 1970ish science fiction covers.

Something else I learned today (or had forgotten) was that the Dillons did this original hardcover illustration for Madeleine L'Engle's A Swiftly Tilting Planet, and also did illustrations for reissues of A Wrinkle in Time and A Wind in the Door that were published at the same time. (Illustrator trivia: Richard Cuffari did the original cover of Wind, and Ellen Raskin did the original Wrinkle cover.)

I also learned that the Dillons did an Ace paperback cover for Ursula LeGuin's A Wizard of Earthsea that I've never seen before:

Pretty cool.

New York Underwater

Back in December 2014 in one of my Twitter round-ups, I posted this from Amazing Maps:


With this comment:

All of those lightest green areas will flood if the sea level rises enough. Ursula LeGuin's book Always Coming Home takes place in a post-climate-change Northern California that has an inland sea just like the one that this map shows could exist.

I felt a little weird posting it back then because I didn't have any links to back up what I said about flooding in the lightest green areas. So when I saw kottke.org today, I was happy. Oh, no, wait, I wasn't happy because this map is bad news, but I was glad to get a visualization of what happens when the sea level rises:


This is a map of the New York City area if the sea rises 100 feet, made by a geographer named Jeffrey Linn for his website Spatialities. 100 feet is the amount the seas will rise if/when one-third of the world's ice sheets (in Greenland and Antarctica) melt. No one thinks that kind of melting will happen soon, but we're definitely accelerating the process.

The projected flooded areas come from the USGS, which has data on what it would look like from this 100-foot rise up to 250 feet. At that level of increase, all of this part of New York and New Jersey is under water except the Palisades.

More on Linn's maps (and ones of other cities) can be found in this story on grist.org.

M. Schettl Freight Sales, Oshkosh, Wisconsin

Thanks to roadsideamerica.com, I found out about a piece of Americana that was close to our path as we drove across Wisconsin yesterday.

Along a side road northwest of Oshkosh, in a little town called Butte des Morts (translation: Hill of the Dead... I guess that tells us what was there before the French fur-traders came visiting), is a huge collection of fiberglass animals, rusty steel sculptures, and decorative mini-greenhouses, all mixed together with boat trailers, semis and kitchen components.

Welcome to the eccentric world of M. Schettl Freight Sales, where everything is for sale.


It pays to look up while visiting the M. Schettl yard.


There was a whole family of elephants, but I particularly liked the sickly one.


This helpful guide greeted me as I left the car.


Beautiful weathering and texture on the green barn. Each building is numbered to help shoppers.


The combinations of oddball bits and pieces range from absurd to funny and back again.


This large metal dino has a stairway up its rear end so you can see the inside, which is home to a number of lizards and snakes (not real, of course), as well as a spaceship-like seating area complete with steering wheel. (Note the red Citicar in the background -- an electric car made in the U.S. from 1974-1983, and featured in the movie version of Ursula LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven).


A heavy metal twist on the plastic pink flamingo.


Who would design a fiberglass female centaur? What was its original purpose?


A fallen piggy in the midst of the trailer field.


There were half a dozen large buffalo in a range of artificial colors


Inside one of the buildings, surrounded by kitchen cabinets, is a huge number of fiberglass people, from Michael Jordan to the Crypt Keeper to Jesus... your choice, $798.

Morons Marching Away from Omelas

Recently I amused myself by thinking of a situation where two short stories -- "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" by Ursula LeGuin and Cyril Kornbluth's "The Marching Morons" -- were read aloud at the same event. The result was a matter/antimatter explosion that could have been featured on Star Trek.

I've written about "Omelas" before (as has John Scalzi, among others). It's a secular parable, basically in the vein of Christ's reminder, "Whatever you did unto one of the least, you did unto me."

"Morons," on the other hand (perhaps it would be more accurate to say, "on a hand on a different body"), is an antecedent to both Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and the works of Charles Murray. In it, a Rip-van-Winkle-like character named Barlow awakens to find himself far in the future, when the population of the world has been dumbed down because of too much breeding among the "undesirable." The few intelligent people left run everything, but they let the stupids think they're in charge. In the end, Barlow comes up with a plan to convince the populace that we're colonizing Venus and everyone is going, when in reality the rockets the "morons" board are actually sending them off to their deaths in space.

The story (and Kornbluth, one infers) has no affection for Barlow's final solution, but at the same time the whole thing is premised on the idea that disposing of the undesirables was a necessary evil.

This kind of thinking is contrary to the fact that IQs have been going up for the past century, as Steven Pinker reminds us. As PZ Myers put it,

The other premise of the marching morons scenario, that the underclass would sink deeper and deeper into stupidity, is completely absurd. There aren't any human subcultures that don't value problem-solving and cleverness, where apathy and dull-wittedness are desirable traits in a mate (again, there are individuals who are contrary, but we're talking about populations here.) Growing up [working poor, sometimes called white trash], I experienced that social pressure that makes getting good grades in school a problem for fitting in with a certain peer group — but that isn't about despising intelligence, it's about conforming to the trappings of your group and not adopting the markers of another class, especially when that class has a habit of treating you like dirt and talking abstractly about how to expunge you, your family, and your friends from the gene pool.

And no, eating brie, going to Harvard, and reading the Wall Street Journal are not indicators of ability — they are properties of class. Drinking beer, learning a trade, and reading Sports Illustrated doesn't mean you're dumber, or that there are genes driving your choices — it means you are the product of a particular environment. Yet we all practice this fallacy of judging someone's intelligence by how they dress or their entertainment preferences, and society as a whole indulges in the self-fulfilling prophecy of doling out educational opportunities on the basis of economic status.

There are mobs of stupid people out there. Sterilizing them or shipping them off to Venus won't change a thing, though, no matter how effective your elimination procedures are, because you'll just breed more from the remaining elite stock. Similarly, lining up the elites against the wall won't change the overall potential of the population — new elites will arise from the common stock. The answer is always going to be education and opportunity and mobility. That's what's galling about Kornbluth's story, that it is so one-dimensional, and the proposed solution is a non-solution.

It's easy to get bent out of shape by dreck like Murray's or provocation like Kornbluth's. Myers wrote a stirring response to it, as Scalzi has to Atlas Shrugged. (Interestingly, Scalzi and Myers both grew up poor or working poor, so their perspectives have extra resonance.)

But possibly we (or our blood pressure) would all be better off if we just made fun of these ideas, as Douglas Adams did in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe with his own parable of the Golgafrinchans. In what must have been a reference to "Morons," Adams told of a society that had fooled all of its "useless" people into heading off into space for a one-way trip to nowhere. All of the telephone sanitizers, hairdressers, management consultants and marketing executives boarded a ship, thinking they were the first wave of colonization.

All was well for the smarties until they were all killed by a virulent disease spread on contaminated telephone receivers.

Walking Away from Omelas

Poet, essayist and novelist Wendell Berry is known for writing only by daylight. His words stop when the sun goes down.

Why?

Because he's from coal country, and knows the damage coal does to the land and the people. So he refuses to give any more money to the coal-powered utility companies than he must, or to use one more ounce of coal than absolutely necessary.

Recent news stories made me think about Berry's refusal. The West Virginia mining "accident," of course. (I put accident in quotes because, as Tom Vanderbilt says in Traffic, it's the wrong word for an occurrence that could have been foreseen.)

But also the new power line story in Sunday's Star Tribune (not on their website yet), which told of the CapX2020 high voltage lines that are about to be built across southern Minnesota, connecting the Dakotas and Wisconsin. This is part of the new grid that's needed (I assume) to carry the wind power under development on Dakota wind farms, and to generally meet anticipated increased demand. (Actually, demand has decreased in the years of the recession, but the utility companies believe that it will return to the originally plotted rates soon.)

The story focused on homeowners and small business owners opposed to the line. I didn't get a complete picture of why they are opposed -- I got the idea the lines would be loud, though no details were given. I'm sure it's partly aesthetic: who wants a 100-foot-tall metal tower in their line of view? And there were vague and inconclusive references to possible health effects of the electrical fields. The net effect, of course, is that it will be bad for property values.

While reading the story, I wondered if the people living in the path of the power line have done anything to decrease the need for the power line. The Johnsons, who were profiled in the story, have three young children, and live on a large lot in a house that's the result of new or at least recent construction. Assuming the parents have jobs, they're driving some distance to get to them since there isn't much of an economic center in their exurban location. (The newspaper photo shows a long asphalt driveway holding three vehicles, although one of them might belong to the reporter.)

A second homeowner mentioned is Bob Johnson. (I assume he's not related to the other family; Minnesota is the land of 10,000 Johnsons, after all). Having hiried a lawyer, he's fighting the power line from "his office high in the former World Trade Center in downtown St. Paul" -- which means he has a 25-mile commute in each direction.

I know that the driving habits of these people don't affect the amount of electricity needed to power the state. But it seems plausible that one type of energy profligacy will correlate with the other.

Another part of the country facing property value decreases is a 40,000-resident community called The Acreage, west of Palm Beach, Florida. According to a story I heard on NPR, the community has been identified as a cancer cluster -- specifically, a cluster of brain cancer. In children.

How terrible, I thought. But catch this: "Tracy Newfield says she moved [to The Acreage] with her family in 2002 because of the area's beauty and the large lots. The extra land gave her family room for Jet Skis, a boat and ATVs."

That means The Acreage represents the worst kind of sprawl known in the sprawling United States. Its construction destroyed over a hundred square miles of wetlands in Florida's fragile ecosystem. And the privileged families who moved there are shocked, shocked I tell you, that their children's lives are endangered. And angry that the CDC says it's unlikely anyone will ever know why the cluster exists. And outraged that their property values are going to fall through the floor (if they can even sell their houses at all).

One possible cause of The Acreage's cancer cluster might be the fill materials used to even out the naturally swampy topography of the area, making it flat and dry enough for home construction. According to the Palm Beach Post, the materials mostly consist of waste from demolition and construction sites.

Americans need to wake up and realize that our way of life is built on pollution and resource depletion. We need to recast our lives to decrease both as much as possible, and demand that industry and government do the same. Demand that we should be paying the long-term cost of the things we consume, not just the oversimplified production and distribution cost.

I know this sounds like I'm blaming the victims. But we're all villains, as well as victims.

We need to change our behavior, and to do that, we have to change the infrastructure that supports our current ways. And I write this knowing that I am sitting here using a computer to compose this for my blog, while my daughter watches television and does her homework on a computer at the same time. We are all implicated (except Wendell Berry, I suppose).

Almost 40 years ago, Ursula LeGuin wrote a short story called "The Ones Who Walk Away for Omelas." It's a morality fable about a beautiful city, named Omelas, where everyone is happy and well cared for. But the city has a secret that's revealed to young people by the time they're 12 years old: The existence of this utopia is dependent on a starving, debased child who is kept in a dark and dirt-floored closet. Covered in sores. Crying to be let out.

Everyone has seen the child, and while all are disturbed by the knowledge, they also understand that helping the child would destroy the city's prosperity, and so most go back and live their happy lives.

But sometimes, they don't return to their lives. Instead,

They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

Tabs for the Beginning of June

Tabs, tabs, tabs, once again.

Racism and implicit bias show themselves in the smallest of ways, including how pedestrians are treated at crosswalks:

Three black and three white participants were selected to be crosswalk pedestrians for the study.... All six of the pedestrian volunteers were men in their 20s, and were matched based on their height and build. They wore an identical outfit; a long-sleeved gray shirt and khaki pants, to achieve a neutral look without any obvious social or socio-economic characteristics.

Researchers chose an unsignalized, marked crosswalk, located mid-block so that drivers’ yielding wouldn’t be influenced by cross traffic or turning. It was on a two-lane, one-way street in downtown Portland, Ore.

Each pedestrian did 15 crossing trials. These trials resulted in 168 driver subjects.

In each trial, three trained observers stood out of sight of oncoming cars and recorded whether the first car to approach yielded, how many cars passed before someone yielded, and the number of seconds that elapsed before the pedestrian was able to cross.

As hypothesized, the results differed based on race: black pedestrians got passed by twice as many cars, and waited 32 percent longer than white pedestrians.

And get this: "Previous crosswalk studies have shown that driver yielding behavior changes based on social factors. Drivers have been shown to yield differently based on the relative ages of the driver and the pedestrian, the social class of the driver, and the apparent physical disability of the pedestrian (one study equipped pedestrians with canes, and drivers responded with quicker yielding and shorter wait times)." That makes me wonder if the black men in the race study were (once again) falling on the wrong end of a human/empathy continuum, where disabled people evoke the most empathy and able-bodied black folks the least. Just as black children are thought to older than they are, black men (possibly black women, too, who knows, since that wasn't examined here) either are not perceived as needing "help" as much as white men or are not as human as white men.

I came across the blog SheRights because of this post about the language of dude feminism. Loved the post, but was also enchanted by the site's clever, pithy logo:


And this additional post on access to "feminine hygiene" products as an important part of women and girls' equality.

Here's another article on the likelihood that parents helping their kids with school work doesn't improve their outcomes, mentioned in this earlier Too Many Tabs post. The Atlantic tells us:

...although conventional wisdom holds that poor children do badly in school because their parents don’t care about education, the opposite is true. Across race, class, and education level, the vast majority of American parents report that they speak with their kids about the importance of good grades and hope that they will attend college. Asian American kids may perform inordinately well on tests, for example, but their parents are not much more involved at school than Hispanic parents are—not surprising, given that both groups experience language barriers. So why are some parents more effective at helping their children translate these shared values into achievement?

Robinson and Harris posit that greater financial and educational resources allow some parents to embed their children in neighborhoods and social settings in which they meet many college-educated adults with interesting careers. Upper-middle-class kids aren’t just told a good education will help them succeed in life. They are surrounded by family and friends who work as doctors, lawyers, and engineers and who reminisce about their college years around the dinner table. Asian parents are an interesting exception; even when they are poor and unable to provide these types of social settings, they seem to be able to communicate the value and appeal of education in a similarly effective manner.

The Twin Cities has a good counter example to this Asian "model minority" myth. We are home to the largest population of Hmong people outside of Southeast Asia. Hmong-Americans have been here for going on 30 years now and are still "mired," as it is so often put, in cultural pathologies not usually associated with Asian-Americans. Most Asian immigrants from other cultures are not refugees and are parts of communities made up largely of legal immigrants with advanced degrees, so even if a child's own parents don't meet that criterion, there are others in the community who do and provide a culture of high expectations. The Hmong didn't have people like that in their community, and they're only just now beginning to get some locally grown achievers to lead the way.

Minnesota comes out well in another Richard Florida piece called Americans Like Living in States With Less Income Inequality. When asked if their state was a good place to live, Americans came up with the following:


Compare that with the Gini Coefficient for each state (shown at right) and you'll find that Texans think their state is a great place to live even though the rich are getting richer more than most places. Note that Texas is the only state in the historic South where a comfortable majority of residents thought it was a good place to live. (While other conservative states like Alaska, Utah, and Wyoming have no such inferiority complex... and more income equality, too.)

Southern states and cities also are much more dangerous places to be a pedestrian, too.

Government Regulations Saved My Life. David Cay Johnston's paean to Ralph Nader and the National Highway Traffic Safety Agency.

Richard Florida on Why People Perceive Some Cities as Safer Than Others. Hey, the Twin Cities comes up at the top of the list of places that residents perceive as safe (though the number is only 80 percent). It's easy to think that these perceptions are based in the reality of lower crime rates in some places than others, except there was "no statistically significant association between perceived safety and a range of crime per capita measures based on the FBI Uniform Crime Reports, including for violent crime and property crime." But the perception of safety also didn't correlate with income equality (Gini Coefficient) or home-ownership levels. Great levels of religiosity, interestingly, were correlated with increased perceptions of danger.

The Case for Term-Limiting Supreme Court Justices by Matt Bruenig. I never would have thought I'd find this persuasive, but he got me with the idea of "single, staggered 18-year terms, such that a new judge would be appointed every two years. This fixes the issue of randomness [among the presidents appointing justices], which can create huge judicial windfalls for certain presidencies. It also fixes the strategic retirement problem, since judges would be forced out after 18 years. Furthermore, it allows the court to change in line with the political tides of the country. The ideological composition of the court at any given time should generally mirror that of the presidency in the 18 years prior."

The Racist Narrative of "Failing" Schools and a nice summary of why external rewards don't work.

I've written before about Ursula LeGuin's book The Dispossessed, and particularly a quote by a character named Odo on the idea of deserving. YA author John Green recently posted a video discussing that same idea. Like author Michael Lewis, Green ascribes a lot to luck and privilege and not a bit to deserving.

Speaking of deserving, here's Matt Bruenig ruminating on "just desert" theory. (Yes, desert, not dessert.)

And then there's this fascinating analysis of the Real Origins of the Religious Right. Hint: It's a more "colorful" reason than Roe v. Wade.

Photos of the devastation that is the tar sands wastelands of Canada.

And on that note, enough tabs for one day.

BlueSky, January 2024

I thought I would switch things up for the new year and do the BlueSky round-up first. 

January was a month of overblown plagiarism charges and way too much attention paid to a few Ivy League universities in the midst of much more important topics that get no or almost no attention. It was the month of the Supreme Court hearing on the Chevron deference case (which I already posted about here and here), but I missed a few comments, I think so those are included.

And it started with a few pure New Year's thoughts, so those are nice.

The posts are in reverse chronological order, except images which I often move up or down to get better visual balance. Everything below the line is quoted from the attributed account.

__

The goal of most AI companies is not to solve your problems, or even to replace your workforce. The goal is to undermine and strip out your institutional knowledge and customizable tools and replace them with an inscrutable blob that you can't do your job without, that you have to pay them to use. Microsoft's consulting business exists to absorb your business inextricably into their Azure Cloud and OpenAI ecosystem so that you can't do their job without them, and you'll pay whatever license fee they ask. That's how they became a $3T company.
@scoopsstp.bsky.social

A real possibility that in my lifetime basically all cultural and media production — news, movies, video, audio — will basically become worthless as a market product.
Chris Hayes

These right wing billionaires just been stewing in their resentment since university admins did anti-racist trainings in 2020. It's actually useful for them to go mask off.
Eli Friedman

Columbia professor Ira Katzelson told the story of a lunch he had with Irving Kristol where Kristol spent a bunch of time laying out all the things he'd done to help his son Bill's education and career. Bemused, Katzelson asked Kristol what he thought of affirmative action. "I'm opposed to it," Kristol replied. "It subverts meritocracy." Plutocrats in a nutshell.
Kurt McMahon @sanjuro89.bsky.social

Beijing had no metro in 1970. Its subway system is now 5 times as long as Chicago's L

Yonah Freemark

The answer to every story about elite college admissions is to make sure every American has access to a low price high quality public education within a reasonable drive of their hometown. The wild thing is we mostly achieved this. Then destroyed it. I'm not so much worried about Harvard as worried about Penn State Erie, UW Whitewater, SUNY Cortland
David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social

Thinking about how the framing of every mental illness as an individual issue rather than a societal failing very neatly reinforces just about every social cause of disparate suffering and absolves perpetrating systems of their full and continued culpability.
happify

I think people are unfamiliar with — and would probably be unsettled by — the amount of annual construction we pretty much need to clear our housing deficit
@profmusgrave.bsky.social

once tried, to no avail, to make this point on tiktok. the national deficit for housing units is somewhere north of 3.8 million, meaning, we'd have to build at least that in a year to stabilize things.
b-boy bouiebaisse @jbouie.bsky.social

3400 units in a 3 million person metro area is a rounding error, especially when San Diego is adding more new jobs downtown than housing units
Michael Tae Sweeney @mtsw.bsky.social

What you’re seeing with anti-trans laws, MeToo backlash, and abortion bans is that the right is creating an impossibly narrow definition of a  woman—cis, pregnant, healthy, feminine, subservient—and subjecting those who fall outside it to both criminalization and violent hostility from vigilantes. This girl not looking cis enough for some random asshole at her game, E Jean Carroll getting death threats for naming a rape as a rape, Brittney Watts getting arrested because a nurse thought she wasn’t sufficiently upset about her miscarriage: these are all the same project.
Moira Donegan

It doesn't matter how many arrows, lines and bikes you paint on a street, if people don't feel safe riding it's just not good enough:


Tom Flood

Trader Joe's is joining Elon Musk and SpaceX in arguing that the very existence of the National Labor Relations Board, which is prosecuting cases against both companies, is unconstitutional
Emissary Of Night

well shit, I do like Trader Joe's frozen croissants but I guess I'll be foregoing those
Tom Tomorrow

You know what we got out of the Gilded Age? Unions. That's what we got. Before unions, before labor relations, fed-up employees went to the company owner's house with torches and weapons and dragged the man out. Everyone really wants the NLRB.
Sigrid Ellis

For those keeping track, the Biden administration just stopped a dirty fossil fuel project that would make 20 times more pollution than Willow. Oh... and 16 OTHER dirty projects. President Biden is a climate leader. And Trump? He's an arsonist.
Leah Stokes

"Premature tire wear has become an unexpected black mark on [EVs] promoted as a green climate-friendly option to gas-gulping cars." "Tire wear" = tire pollution, which is deadly to fish and may harm humans. Solution: Lighter, less overpowered EVs
David Zipper

How many thriving newspapers should a nation of 350 million people have?
Eric Roston

The idea that creating clean-energy jobs in red states will make Republicans vote for Democrats was concocted by people who haven't much studied the way the media and culture guide behavior. People don't always vote on the basis their economic interests:


Dr. Genevieve Guenther @doctorvive.bsky.social

When you see stats about an increase in people identifying as trans or being diagnosed with gender dysphoria, resist the urge to see it only from the perspective of people who'd prefer those numbers be zero. Every day a trans person is free to be themselves and get the care they need is a good day.
Gillian Branstetter

ursula k leguin: would you torture a child if it resulted in utopia?
united states of america: we shouldnt expect a reward for torturing the child. we should torture the child because it is the right thing to do
@cursedsynth.bsky.social

Sort of feels like between the massive contractions in journalism, publishing and the humanities, we're just setting all our most important stores of cultural and historical memory on fire.
Ned Resnikoff

One of the fundamental principles of systems thinking is that healthy systems require timely and accurate information flows. I think about that as lying escalates, twitter withers, journalists are laid off, and the information stream is polluted by low quality AI products.
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social

Have to imagine it’s a total coincidence that authoritarianism is growing as the long plan to destroy education and journalism is coming to fruition and decades of planned alienation, exploitation, and austerity have already wrought unbelievable damage.
Jared Yates Sexton

it seems like you could solve a lot of problems simultaneously by just making it impossible to make spoofed anonymous phone calls entirely. i don't really see what the legitimate reason for being able to do this is. both swatting and the thing where my elderly parents are inundated by 500 spam phone calls every day trying to rob them
Michael Tae Sweeney

"January thaw" is such a cute term for civilization-altering climate change.
Eric Holthaus @ericholthaus.bsky.social

A system tells you what its values are by what it does not what it says. Expansion of fossil fuels during a climate crisis documented during almost three decades of COPs and IPCC reports that's an indicator of values in fact versus espoused values.
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social

Finally went to drive the car after a whole lot of biking around lately, and it greeted me with more warning lights than I’ve ever seen before, including some new ones I haven’t. Good stuff. My favorite one is “steering wheel surprise!”


Alex @mplsalex.bsky.social

A Texas school district superintendent defended the continued suspension of a Black student over his locs in a full-page newspaper ad: “Being an American requires conformity with the positive benefit of unity"
Phil Lewis @phillewis.bsky.social

That's some quiet part out loud shit right there
Alisha Diane Galloway @adgwatches.bsky.social

Ok, it feels weirdly like there's stronger penalties for riding without paying fare than there are for running red lights in your car.
amityf @amityf.bsky.social

Republicans found out a while ago that if you're extreme enough, people will read an accurate description of your policies and dismiss it as obviously unhinged partisan propaganda.
EssayWells @essaywells.bsky.social

When you find yourself scolded for tone, you know you must be right on the substance.
Dallas Taylor

Decorum requires that you are not allowed to accurately describe racism
@sababausa.bsky.social

I started out my career as an office temp who did cartoons on the side, and now I am going to finish it out as a newsletter-management specialist who does cartoons on the side.
Tom Tomorrow

A conspiracy theorist who blamed the government for forest fires admitted that he started 14 himself.


Climate Tracker @climate.skyfleet.blue

[This is the] distilled pure example of the basic storyline of our times.
Eric Roston @eroston.bsky.social

There's almost no stakes involved in DEI trainings. We're talking about adults sitting through a seminar they barely pay attention to. Some trainings are radical to the left and some are radical to the right but they objectively don't matter all that much. Why have we spent years talking about them? Imagine a left-wing media apparatus that put megachurches on the agenda the way Rufo has relentlessly amplified DEI trainings. This country produces a shitload of deranged right-wing rhetoric — from people far more influential than Robin D'Angelo — but it's not treated as news.
Michael Hobbes

Everything else aside, Trump also  doesn’t seem to understand that the immunity cops, prosecutors, and judges get is from civil liability. *No one* currently gets immunity from criminal liability. He’s inventing an entirely new form of immunity, and asking SCOTUS to endorse it.
Radley Balko

One of the creepiest things about modern GOP culture is the FIRM belief that families should exist as fully independent units, and your neighbors — if you are so unlucky as to have them — should be viewed as dangerous competitors you may have to fend off with semi-automatic weapons.
Faine Greenwood @faineg.bsky.social
·
They've just announced a new Manhattan Institute fellowship for young right-wing journalists to "besiege the Marxist institutions." Fine. Meanwhile, we're yelling at our young people because they're reluctant to vote for Dems. Where are young progressives' fellowships? How are we supporting them? There's a new right wing think tank fellowship to raise up dozens of propagandists... while we tell young people on our side of the aisle to "vote better," "be more respectful," and "don't be so loud." Completely unserious.
Ebony Elizabeth Thomas @ebonyteach.bsky.social

This is amazing: Tesla is telling people they have to literally spotlessly clean their cybertrucks daily otherwise it will corrode
Thomas Fuchs

Every single industry besides finance, weapon-making, and energy is being consumed, liquidated, destroyed, and stripped for spare parts. It doesn’t have to be like that and it shouldn’t either. We can fight this. We have to fight this.
Jared Yates Sexton

Got my new flag today!


Micheal Foley in Saint Paul @foleymo.bsky.social

So much anti-trans propaganda assumes trans-ness is a thing people are being led towards which ignores every social, cultural, economic, and legal barrier that begs, prods, and forces you away from being trans. If anything, we should be asking cis people if they're just doing as they're told.
Gillian Branstetter

Have you noticed that being a Nazi, doing a Nazi salute, praising Hitler, and associating with people who do all of the above are no longer scandals for anyone right of center? That is one of the largest signifiers of how close to fucking oblivion we are.
@vpsreports.bsky.social

Yeah, U.S. policy here is crap and aid should be cut off to Israel until it stops killing civilians, but the position isn't "Yes, yes, kill them all!" Not to mention that there's not a single possible U.S President who would have a different policy right now, unfortunately.
Parker Molloy

since capturing the Court, conservatives have stopped discussing its institutional role altogether. when they viewed it as liberal they would often discuss how it interferes with democracy, and floated theories about the limits of Court power. now they treat it like it’s the corrective hand of God.
Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social

i have pretty much been fully convinced that the right way to look at the trajectory of the roberts court is that it is engaged in a long-term, expansive and unprecedented judicial power grab
b-boy bouiebaisse @jbouie.bsky.social

the martian flag from The Expanse is so good that any eventual martian colony that inevitably has a violent rebellion against its capitalist overlord should just adopt it:


@wormwitch.bsky.social

Here are my thoughts re: Chevron. I wasted three years of law school learning about precedent, standing, actual harm, separation of powers, judicial restraint, and actual legal reasoning, when I should have been learning "find out what billionaires want and work backwards."
Norbizness

“congress doesn’t have the right to delegate authority to executive branch agencies” would be a radical rewriting of the norms of american government stretching back to the 1790s and it would have the not-incidental effect of concentrating power into the hands of the judiciary
b-boy bouiebaisse @jbouie.bsky.social

And so is the idea that the courts have more technical expertise than people hired into administrative bodies? Have people MET judges???
Tressie @tressiemcphd.bsky.social

Well, it's much easier to bribe a judge than it is a whole federal agency. It's all about efficiency.
Jeff Schult

i rag on this place sometimes but i just had an interaction on tiktok where someone insisted that we need the electoral college because urban dwellers might start to treat rural americans like white Americans treated black Americans under jim crow. so yeah, it could be crazier here
b-boy bouiebaisse @jbouie.bsky.social

It’s the biggest tell that people acknowledge structural injustice, but can’t possibly conceive of actual equality. That in their minds any attempt to change the current system could only mean turning injustice back upon themselves
Curtis Wilde

It is my pre-existing belief (so you might want to be wary of my analysis) that models of revenue sharing, shifting core curriculum requirements, and the establishment of undergraduate business majors lie at the heart of the destruction of the modern university. Today's case: U Chicago. If you look at all the "death of history" or "death of liberal arts" essays published in major outlets lately, you rarely see close analysis of core requirements and revenue models. Because they are boring. But it's where the money is, so that's where the bank robbers go. I can accept paying engineers a higher salary than history profs. I cannot accepting paying marketing professors a higher salary than history profs. If marketing profs want to go work in industry and make more money, the door is that way. For example, as best as I can tell, the annualized starting salary of assistant professors in the Booth School of Business is approximately 350 percent that of assistant professors in the humanities, a gap of nearly $250,000 (exclusive of research support, which would magnify the gap, and noting that junior faculty in Booth teach half the load of junior faculty in the humanities). More importantly, women earn less than men at every rank at UChicago: the gap is $21,000 at the assistant professor level and more than doubles—to $44,000—at the rank of full professor. This is known to University leadership. It is a feature and not a flaw of the current operation that the comfort of some is financed by the discomfort of the disfavored. But these gaps are elective
David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social

Learned from Jane Mayer's DARK MONEY that this was done by design... billionaires poured tons of money into b-schools and econ departments that would support their views. And, as recent events have shown us, they've now come for the entire academy.
Ebony Elizabeth Thomas @ebonyteach.bsky.social

In my opinion, not enough people know that there are scores of giant, 25,000-year-old  circular structures made of mammoth bones on the Russian/Ukrainian plain:


Charles C. Mann @charlescmann.bsky.social

one of the most insidious falsehoods we are taught in school is that america was a democracy before the civil rights movement. indeed, we are an extraordinarily young (and therefore fragile) multiracial demcoracy-ish-esque
Sean Kennedy @publichealth.bsky.social

As an aside: Even if we had a judiciary that wasn’t full of GOP ideologues, the court’s new obsession with history would be a bad, dumb judicial approach because judges aren’t trained historians and are in over their heads having to historical work to decide cases.
russms.bsky.social @russms.bsky.social

Nearly 40% of LGBTQ elders are chronically ill; more than half feel socially isolated from family and community. These crises are unfolding within a broader collapse: the nursing home industry is in disarray, and minority groups are especially vulnerable.
The Baffler

The nuclear family is the only care network our government will support—whether for children, the disabled, or seniors—and this punishes anyone who falls outside of it
Gillian Branstetter

Part of growing up is realizing you don't hate everything; you love everything, you're just disappointed in it
Eric Roston

Remember last year when CNN invited Trump for a town hall shortly after a jury found him liable for sexual abuse of E. Jean Carroll? And he used the platform to mock Carroll as the handpicked audience members laughed and laughed? That is my lasting impression of a Trump rally.
Gillian Branstetter

New CBS News poll: nearly half of all voters, and the vast majority of Republicans, agree that immigrants entering the US illegally “poison the blood” of the country:


David S. Bernstein

“Where light traffic knits a community together, heavy traffic rips it apart.” –Donald Appleyard.
Curbing traffic leads to a more compact and attractive urban form; enabling active and sustainable travel, and supporting spontaneous social and economic activity at street level.
Melissa & Chris Bruntlett @modacitylife.bsky.social

Ending Car Culture in media: stop expressing distance in time travel via car, as in “A small town 1 hour south of Detroit,” from a story this morning on NPR. If something is 65 miles away, say 65 miles.
Dan Marshall @danmarstp.bsky.social

Presidents can't end birthright citizenship. They'd need to amend the Constitution, and in order to do that, you need two-thirds of both houses of Congress and 75% of the states have to ratify it.
There's no path forward for this that isn't autocratic. It's nonsense and it is offensive.
Ebony Elizabeth Thomas @ebonyteach.bsky.social

From “technically it isn’t fascism” to “technically it wasn’t an insurrection” to “technically it’s not a genocide,” our intellectuals are really making a bold show of their commitment to sophistry and semantics above any meaningful confrontation with the realities of their time.
Moira Donegan @moiradonegan.bsky.social

Normalization: “The term ‘accident’ has normalized road deaths to the extent that it is difficult to create buy-in for action... When crashes are framed as accidents, people view road carnage as a fact of life, a cost society pays for the ‘luxury’ of travelling by automobile.”
Post-Denialism: “Engineers know wider roads lead to higher speeds and longer crossing distances, both of which result in more deaths. Yet corporations lobby for wider roads, smoother surfaces, and other speed-inducing measures, under the smokescreen of ‘improvement projects.’”
Melissa & Chris Bruntlett @modacitylife.bsky.social

Why do people let economists talk about poor countries this way? Malthusianism. I was lucky in my human rights career to spend a decent amount of time in Zimbabwe and nothing about it resembles the 14th century. Zimbabwe is poor due to a number of easily identifiable modern trends, not 1300s-style:

Michael Hobbes @michaelhobbes.bsky.social

I also find it astounding how the GOP has largely succeeded in brushing the whole “the January 6th insurrectionists repeatedly said they intended to kill members of Congress, had the tools required to do so, and came horrifically close to doing it” thing under the table
Faine Greenwood @faineg.bsky.social

I feel like we haven’t fully reckoned publicly with the fact that people in the Capitol were looking for specific members of Congress, calling their names, finding their offices. What does a column like this suppose would have happened if they’d found them?
Linda Holmes

It sure has been fun to watch "Ashley Babbit" trending cyclically on Twitter every few months to reinforce the narrative that she was an innocent little girl who was killed for NO REASON in a situation where no other lives were at risk.
Edward Carney

Baseline:


Tom Flood

“Republicans work exclusively for wealthy fanatical religious creeps who want to control your bodies and your lives through punishment and pain.” Put that message on the airwaves in every media market. Use the 100s of thousands of real-life stories proving that it’s true.
A.R. Moxon @juliusgoat.bsky.social

Look around. Does it *feel* like a meritocracy?
David Roberts @volts.wtf

desantis ranting about “disney making kids trans” is a good example of why this particular political position is a total electoral loser. he sounds like a freak.
b-boy bouiebaisse @jbouie.bsky.social

Sunlight is not the best disinfectant. I personally quite like bleach. But fire also works well. Whiskey isn't bad if you're trying to disinfect your insides. Lots of options. Sunlight ain't one of them.
David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social

I somehow always had the idea that if someone were to manage to ruin this country, they would have to have some level of intelligence and creativity to do it.
300ps.bsky.social

When trans rights is described as a "wedge issue," it's important to note the wedge being driven isn't between liberal and conservative voters but between moderate Republicans and their far-right primary opponents. What we do with our own bodies is an obsession on the right and nowhere else.
Gillian Branstetter

A Florida Republican lawmaker has introduced a bill that would make it defamation to accuse someone of racism, sexism, homophobia, or transphobia
Phil Lewis

Truth as a defense is a thing. Happy discovery!
Citizen E

Proud co-owner of a CO2 meter and it's been fascinating to bring with to different places. So far, the public locations with the highest CO2, by far, have been grocery stores. A single data point at a high traffic time, but 1910ppm at one TJ's.
happify

we’re 5 DAYS into 2024 and *125* anti-trans bills have been filed across the US. do cis people know this map? this is risk for *adult* trans people across america. FL is already “do not travel.” i must have a few cis followers. please share this. consider if you could live in a country like this:


jamie quinn @threnody.bsky.social

Trump didn't just call and ask state officials to fix the election, he called and called and called and pressed and pressed and pressed. The New York Times published a complete timeline.
Eric Roston

It should not go unnoticed that the very same billionaires conducting the Plagiarism Crusade against non-white, female university presidents have their entire life savings tied up in a Plagiarism Machine.
Ben Collins

"Declining trust" isn't some universal, nationwide problem we all need to do our part to address. The majority of Republicans think that climate change is fake, abortions should be illegal and the last election was stolen. It's extremely reasonable to distrust people like that! It's such a bizarre understanding of personal morality, the idea that it's up to me to endlessly extend good faith to people who think I'm a groomer just so the country as a whole can address its (fake) "polarization" problem. It's immoral to ask people to do this!
Michael Hobbes

conservatives seem to have replaced “CRT” with “DEI” as a catch-all vessel for their complaints about the feeling they get when someone makes them think about racism
Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social

Trump running again after he should have been banned from politics forever is going to make 2024 like one long slow motion end-of-the-horror-movie jump scare
Tom Tomorrow

The acting president of the University of Minnesota was formerly the CEO of Hormel. I’m sure he’s a very nice man. Blue state public university leadership and trustees are participants in the degradation of American higher education, when we need them to resist those forces.
David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social

Elon Musk's specific point is xenophobia on its own is insufficient to prevent this "collapse"--you also have to boost birth rates by banning abortion, limiting contraception, and punishing queers for leading lives that don't center reproduction. This is what's meant when they rail against "gender ideology"
Gillian Branstetter

A new 5-year Belgian study shows the BIG impact of increasing vehicle weight on road deaths and injuries. When a person on a bike or walking is hit by a pick-up, the risk of serious injury increases by 90% compared to a car. The risk of death goes up by 200%.


Brent Toderian

Trying to keep score, where are we now... Ah yes: ...then they came for the university presidents, but I didn't protest, for I am not a university president...
Eric Roston

At some point we just need to acknowledge that nothing will satisfy other than the near-total resegregation of elite and governing institutions in the United States.
Adam Serwer

I just get tired of how relentlessly car-centric everything is. Like the little things. Waiting for a massage appointment but she's finishing up with a client and can't buzz me in the building. Suggested I wait in my car. So, I'm standing in the cold
Hecate @danademaster.bsky.social

the ability of conservatives to invent stories and then create constant news coverage in ways that serve their agenda has been a constant, for me, since whitewater. Which is when I started paying attention.  I'm sure @sethcotlar.bsky.social has already posted a dozen older examples.
David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social

In a little over two decades we've seen the most elite media in the country fall for the Iraq War lies, for James O'Keefe's bullshit and for Rufo and somehow they retain their credibility (ok not with you or me but with many). and of course not only "fall for" but actively fucking promote
Tom Tomorrow

Entering the public domain like a boss:


Chris Steller

Something I learned making You're Wrong About is that mobs rarely come after women and minorities for nothing. There's alway some minor transgression that gives the far right an excuse — and elite institutions cover for appeasing them.
Michael Hobbes

The obvious answer will be to never hire an academic for a university administrative post ever again. No one ever accuses a hedge fund manager of plagiarism.
Convolver

remember: Climate Change IS Geoengineering
Build Soil Plant Chestnuts

Seeing some takes that are like "Rufo isn't an evil genius" and like one of the biggest things people are going to have to understand about the coming years is that wielding power and harming others rarely requires cleverness or intelligence to do.
Michael Tae Sweeney

Mormons are no longer in the majority *in Utah* according to new research. The trends aren’t in their favor either.
Hemant Mehta

Kamakura, Japan. Chocolate-covered bananas for New Year's:


Charles C. Mann