Chernobyl, 2026

I finally watched the HBO five-part miniseries Chernobyl over the past two days. I'm not sure why I didn't see it when it came out in 2019. I think it was because I was busy then with people in my family dying and a small business I was trying to launch, plus a few other things since it came out in May, that month when I'm always doing something else. 

If you haven't seen it, I recommend it. 

I've been trying to bring to mind what I remember from 1986, when the disaster occurred. It was not long before I moved to Minnesota, but after I had decided to come here. I remember hearing about it as it hit the news in the U.S. a few days later, and being freaked out about it, but no details about why it happened or anything. 

I moved here just as the Soviets were working to contain the radiation: while people were dying, and they didn't know if it would poison all of Ukraine. I don't know how soon afterward there was very complete knowledge in the West. Was it one of those stories where, by the time the Soviets let the facts out a few years later, U.S. media couldn't be bothered to make a big deal about it? Or was I just too busy with life by that point and I missed it?

I somehow managed to accumulate some general knowledge that people were evacuated from a wide area around the plant, and that the reactor was enclosed in concrete, but not how that happened. Until I watched the series, I had no idea how many people died along the way. 

This summer, I've been consuming a media diet of Soviet-life-as-cautionary-tale. First there was Star City, then Ponies, and now Chernobyl. Each show is a different example of how creating a society where people are afraid to tell the truth to the people in power above them causes dangerous problems. Chernobyl particularly emphasizes why it's a bad idea to subordinate science to political power and priorities.

It's hard to watch any of these shows in our current time without seeing them as a warning. Too bad that message appears to be too subtle for the people who should learn from it. 

If You Have to Learn Anything About AI

I try to avoid thinking about AI as much as possible. That said, here are are two Why Is This Happening podcasts that pair well together.

The AI End Game: Boom or Bust? with Ed Zitron. Zitron is one of those guys whose posts I see on BlueSky, but I never quite knew who he was or why everyone seemed to be quoting him.

The Nerd Reich with Gil Durán. (This podcast is not so much about AI as it is about our tech overlords, but the connection between the two is obvious.) The episode is named for Durán's new book, whose subtitle is "Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy." Lots of stuff about the dark interconnections of Peter Thiel that need to be documented and understood. It sounds paranoid but it's not. 

And Cory Doctorow is always worth reading on AI and the coming bubble. This recent post called Born on technology's third base is a good example.

The Real Fraud

Here in Minnesota, we're constantly inundated with talk of fraud, fraud, fraud. That's Minnesota Republicans' favorite word, since they think they can beat Democrats over the head with it, including in our current race for the U.S. Senate and governor's office. They encourage national right-wing video propagandists to come here to chase random Somali people, assuming anyone who watches their material will believe that people who look East African must be committing fraud. 

A column by former U.S. attorney and now University of Michigan law professor Barbara McQuade called The "war on fraud" is targeting the wrong crimes (gift link to the Pioneer Press) gets at what drives me up the wall about all of that.

She describes J.D. Vance's Fraud Tracker task force, which will turn Department of Justice resources to crack down on small frauds. In the past, prosecutors could go after large-scale white collar crimes, which of course take longer to pursue and require more resources. Now, the attorneys have to carry at least 25 cases at a time: easy to do if there's only one count per case, but not very likely to allow for long-term, complex cases. 

McQuade says that during her 19 years as a federal prosecutor, for instance, SNAP fraud cases were treated as civil enforcement rather than criminal cases. The dollar amounts involved were in the thousands. Or her office would give the cases to state attorneys general or local DAs. That left her office the resources it needed to deal with cases that required wiretaps, national or international jurisdiction, and grand juries. To deal with, you know, corporations — where the real money was being stolen.

The Trump regime has also gotten rid of cryptocurrency enforcement, when the main use case for crypto is money laundering. They have have cut the DOJ workforce by 20,000. And, of course, Trump has famously pardoned or otherwise given clemency to more than 70 convicted fraudsters, so that tells us how seriously this regime takes fraud.

Two things McQuade lists that I had not heard about: the DOJ dismissed two cases against corporations that had been fully investigated and charged, one of which already had a plea and $1.1 billion fine agreed on. They just dismissed them. Never mind!

All of this tells corporations that they're free to do whatever they want, that "everyone is doing it." 

It's a weird thing, because in Minnesota, all of this corporate fraud gets no attention. (This MinnPost column by a progressive writer is the only thing I've seen that counters it, up until the PiPress reprinted McQuade's column. The Star Tribune constantly beats the fraud drum.) 

The heavy emphasis on fraud by immigrants in Minnesota clearly says it's not everyone doing it, and particularly not corporations... it's only those people. 

It's Always Fear

I don't write often enough about the scourge that is RFK Jr. So to make up for that, here's a recommended story called RFK Jr.'s Toxic World, about how he "uses fear of contamination to denigrate modern medicine and advance a project rooted in vulgar eugenics."

The writer has been diagnosed and is being treated for obsessive compulsive disorder, so he's coming at it from that perspective. I found that useful, as a person with an extremely low level of reaction to violations of the moral principal of sanctity (the spot where fear of contamination comes in). 

That means I find it hard to identify with any of the “precious bodily fluids” thinking that underlies anti-vax thinking. Reading someone who can explain the psychology from the inside and still come out on the rational side of things is very helpful.

Plus you get to read phrases like “recrudescent social Darwinism … a bootstrap mentality applied to the mind.” 

Media Escapism

I finished the three giant escapist fantasy books I was rereading and reading most recently, just in time for the brand new Cork O'Connor book from William Kent Krueger to come out. (I mentioned back in June that I was reading all 24 books in that series; I finished them a few weeks ago.)

Books are not enough to keep me from paying attention to all of the incredible stupidity and depressing dredge that passes for news in Donald Trump's America, but I'm trying to avoid it as much as possible. 

Oh, I also watched the eight-part dramedy series The Residence. It was fun. And did I mention Star City and Ponies? If you're interested in dramatized fiction of what it was like to live in Russia during the Cold War under constant surveillance, both of those short-season series have something to offer to us in our current moment. 

Tom Tomorrow and Flaming Hydra

It's time for my more or less annual reminder to support cartoonist Tom Tomorrow's Sparky's List, as all of the publications that pay cartoonists go out of business in this media environment. 

With it, you get an early view of his weekly comic, which tries to make sense of this indescribable time we are living through, plus his additional thoughts on it, and comments on life in New York City and sometimes an inside view of minor celebrity culture from a guy who's been on the edge of things for 40 or so years.

This week he shared an extra comic, which had the benefit of informing me of the existence of flaminghydra.com. It's a co-op of journalists, essayists, and other creatives, many of whom I see on BlueSky. Not sure why I haven't heard of it before. Like all independent media, Flaming Hydra also needs subscribers ($3/month). 

Here's the comic, to entice you to subscribe to either or both... and to once again remind us all of just how batshit the past 11 years have been:

SpudCells!

Have you heard about SpudCells?

This article in the Star Tribune (gift link) almost a week ago was the first thing I saw, but it had been written up in the New York Times as well.  

Bioengineering researcher Kate Adamala and her team have created the first "synthetic cells capable of growing, dividing and self-sustaining." They've made their findings open-source, and created a nonprofit organization called Biotic to "raise funds to perpetuate the communal, global research" that is needed to carry the research forward to the point where the technology can be used to produce plastics or fuels without petrochemicals, or novel drugs. The New York Times story listed another possibility: the cells could draw carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The Star Tribune article is mostly an interview with Adamala, while the Times article (also a gift link) is more of an explainer. 

Here's a toast to basic science research, the kind of thing that is being defunded, along with all the other things the Trump regime doesn't see a value in.

That's Just It

Rebecca Solnit wrote about the duality of America for the Guardian. 

Using her able way with words, she provided a number of contradictory pairs that will sound familiar to any fair-minded reader. That was her point in writing, but this was my favorite sentence in the piece:

At its heart the US has always been an experiment, an argument, and a question with countless answers, which is to say it was never and will never be one thing, even if it has one federal government that is currently a catastrophic crime scene. 

That's just it: we are being ruled by a catastrophic crime scene. Governed is the wrong verb, because I have come to define that word as meaning something other than "imposition of one will over others." 

We All Belong

I was afraid I had lost track of Philip Bump, the former Washington Post writer. He stopped posting on his blog some additional thoughts back in March, and when I would see him on All In With Chris Hayes, they said he was now with something called CT Insider. What the heck is that?

Well, I guess it's a publication in Connecticut? I still don't get it, but I guess he gets to write what he wants, like this: My family has been here since 1621. That is not what makes me American.

He's a data guy, so he made some cool graphics showing how young this country is, based on things like his own patrinomial lineage and this one of the U.S. presidents, where just four overlapping presidents' lifetimes get us back to 1776:

(Click to enlarge.) 

John Adams to Grant to FDR to Biden. That's all it takes to cover 250 years. 

More importantly for the point of the article, he wrote:

... in 2024, about 25% of immigrants to the United States had arrived before 1990. A quarter of immigrants, then, had been here for at least 1 out of every 7 years that the U.S. has existed.

About 16% of immigrants in the U.S. last year arrived before 1984, the year [J.D.] Vance was born. In other words, they've been here longer than Vance himself. And yet they for some reason supposedly have less purchase on the nation's identity and values than does he? 

Many of my own ancestors arrived in Rhode Island (and Massachusetts and Long Island) in the 1630s, so not quite as early as Bump's, but close. 

I have no patience with ladder-pullers like Vance, let alone recent immigrant-descendants like Stephen Miller, Samuel Alito, or Donald Trump, whose own grandmother was six months pregnant with his father when she arrived in the U.S.! It's a big country, made better by the presence of immigrants. 

Learn to share, as taught in the religions you supposedly belong to.

Two Podcasts Make a Pair

I've mentioned the War on Cars podcast just a few times since I started listening to it in 2024 (here and here).

Two of its recent episodes are excellent.

One is called Changing Lanes. That's the title of a documentary that tells the story of what it has taken to win the electoral and policy fight to rebuild a dangerous car-oriented boulevard in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. There are many lessons in their experience, and it sounds like even more can be learned from the documentary – so I hope to be able to see it soon.

The most recent episode is with Ian Loader, Oxford University professor of criminology. It's called Rethinking Criminal Consequences for Drivers Who Kill. 

Contrary to what one might expect of a biking advocate, Loader does not want drivers to take more criminal responsibility within the current system. These are his concluding words in the podcast, but to understand what he means, you really have to listen to the whole thing:

The standard chain of logic with how we deal with road safety at the moment goes something like this: that driving is basically safe. It only becomes unsafe if individuals do it dangerously. And then therefore the chain of intervention goes something like: individual responsibility [to] enforcement [to] punishment. 

My alternative goes something like: the starting point is that mass motoring is a system of harm production even when people are driving carefully and considerately. And that the chain of intervention should be: start with systems, think about structure, and then bad driving has consequences — not necessarily punishment.

How we get any of the types of changes Loader describes to happen is the main problem. The work described in the Changing Lanes is part of the solution.

A New Clinic, Medical Censorship

There were two medical stories on the same page of today's Star Tribune, both local, though one with a national focus. One good news, one bad news. 

At the top (page 3 within the local section), the headline is "U expands community clinic in S. Minneapolis." It tells about the new clinic building now under construction at Community-University Health Care Center, which is located on Franklin Avenue in the Phillips neighborhood in the heart of the Native American community. 

CUHCC has been there since 1966, providing health care to people regardless of ability to pay. Last year it served 12,000 patients who, according to the story, speak more than 50 languages. In addition to the clinic's staff, medical students and residents from the University of Minnesota can be found working with patients there. 

The new building is being funded by the University and its foundation. So overall, a good news story, despite the parts that referred to operating funding streams that have been or may be affected by federal policy changes (Medicaid cuts, the Minnesota legislature's decision to stop allowing undocumented people to access MinnesotaCare).

In contrast, at the bottom half of the page was a story that could only happen during the Trump regime. The headline is a bit vague: "U professor ousted from conference." Well, that could be almost anything —  maybe it was for a good reason.

But no. 

This was the national conference of the American Diabetes Association, and the U of M professor, a pediatrician who is co-director of the Center for Pediatric Obesity Medicine, was physically forced to leave the conference because he "violated the event's code of conduct, which requires professional and respectful behavior."

What was the violation? 

He was helping to pass out an editorial from one the ADA's own flagship medical journals. Of course, the editorial criticizes the Trump regime for cutting NIH staff, grants, and "destroying what generations have built." 

The lead author of the editorial (who is editor of the ADA journal as well) was also removed from the conference. He had been scheduled to present and to lead another session. Three other people were removed.

The Star Tribune story quotes the U of M professor as saying he was "chest-bumped by a police officer several times" and cites video that shows him being shoved by a cop.

These are the times we live in: a medical organization lets the federal government say who can attend its conference. It kicks out people who want conference-goers to know what the organization's own publication says. 

This is a gift link to a Washington Post story about the ADA conference with more details, which make it even clearer that this was censorship. 

Is It Latin? Well...

Have you ever wondered about the "Lorem ipsum" words that are frequently used for dummy text?

Emily Zhang, an intrepid YouTube creator whose channel is called Rabbit Hole, found out the full story, and had a beautiful conversation with Hampden-Sydney classics professor Richard McClintock as a major part of it:

I'm very glad I watched this. It's 26 minutes and worth every one. 

We all need something good in our lives these days.
 

How Big Bird Works

A friend sent me a link to a video about Carroll Spinney, the man who was Big Bird from the time Sesame Street began production in the 1960s until he retired at age 84 in 2018, the year before he died.

This link goes right to the part of the video about how he did it from inside the Big Bird puppet — which I never thought about before. Spinney was not nearly as tall as Big Bird, so what part of him held up the bird's head? And if that's, let's say, his arm... what controlled the bird's arms? And… how did he see out of the puppet?

All questions are answered. 

(Spinney also played the Oscar the Grouch puppet.)

The whole video is more interesting than I would have thought, even for someone like me, who has never watched Sesame Street. 

Carroll rehearsing a scene in partial costume.

Bumming Around Watching TV

I spent most of my foot-recovery time this weekend watching two seasons of Shrinking on Apple TV. I had heard just a tiny bit about it before that. Basically, all I knew was that Harrison Ford is in it, and he's a therapist or psychologist. 

Recommended dramedy escapism, heavy on California lifestyles and unapologetic about it. 

With Jessica Williams as a major character, who I haven't seen much if at all since her original run on the Daily Show (which ended almost 10 years ago, egad). I missed her.

Rebecca Solnit, Crystallizing

I have a number of friends who practice daily gratitude. I am not one of them. 

I think it's a good idea, but I can't seem to make a habit of it. When I visit with one of these friends, we often trade gratitudes, and I make an effort, but it feels like work. 

Here's one for today that came to me without effort: I am grateful for Rebecca Solnit.

Every word of this essay in the Guardian is worth quoting, but here are two sentences:

Every department, every branch, every bureau and function of the federal government is being fatally corrupted or altogether dismantled or disabled. All this is common knowledge, but because it dribbles out in news stories about this specific incident or department, the reports never adequately describe an administration sabotaging the functioning of the federal government and also trashing the global economy, international alliances and relationships, and the national and global environment in ways that will have downstream consequences for decades and perhaps, especially when it comes to climate, centuries.

Thank you, Rebecca. I treasure you.

Jamelle, Talking

I love Jamelle Bouie. And in addition to his writing, I love that he makes videos and doesn't try to make them perfect.

This 8.5 minute example is called "The Oligarchs Are Evil, Venal and Dumb as Hell":

It has always been thus, he concludes. "But that doesn't mean I have to like it." And "it makes me very frustrated." 

Talking About Immigration

Lately, I've gotten very selective about which of the few podcasts I have in my phone that I ever get around to listening to. Ostensibly, I'm interested in all of them or I wouldn't have them automatically downloading, but as I think I've said before, listening to other people talk just doesn't fit into my life all that well, no matter how much I like the host(s). 

Here's one I gave a chance: "Why Is This Happening," Chris Hayes talking with David Bier, director of immigration at the Cato Institute. As you probably know, Cato is libertarianism central and not usually my cup of tea, but I knew Cato had recently published a study on the positive effect of immigration (whether legal or illegal). 

So what would Bier have to say about immigration under Trump 2.0? 

It's all worth listening to, but here are a couple of key takeaways:

• In the year before 1924, when immigrants arrived at Ellis Island, 98% of them were allowed into the U.S. This is the type of process many people's families went through when they say their ancestors had to come here "the right way." The various parts of my family, for instance.
• In contrast, during what some people call the "open borders Biden" years, just 3% of people who wanted to immigrate to the United states got in. That small percent includes refugees. It also included spouses and children of American citizens. 
• U.S. immigration law changed in 1924, restricting admission based on racist policies, until 1965 when the law was changed again.

During those so-called open-border Biden years, there was essentially no path to legal immigration as it would have been thought of in the early 20th century. CATO created an online game based on the 2024 rules (remember, the rules are much more restrictive now). It was basically impossible to come here legally even under the 2024 rules. 

Yet it's not uncommon for some Americans to think undocumented people are just lazy and not following an obvious, easy process.

This part is mostly quoted from Bier speaking in the podcast. Some of it might be paraphrased or condensed:

If you ask regular people to design an immigration process from the ground up, it never looks anything like what we currently have. 

[The current U.S. process] focuses on whether someone has exceptional ability or extraordinary ability... which costs billions of dollars to analyze, vs. asking, is this person a threat to the country, are they going to be able to support themselves when they get here? 

Those are reasonable questions to answer in an honest system. That is not what our system is about, it's about keeping people out.

If you want people who are hard-working, looking for a better life, not doing harmful things... That's not what we have. 

I think back to my late sister's intractable attitude about immigration and it just doesn't make any sense. It has to come down to xenophobia or racism. Or maybe more simply, some deep-seated fear of contamination. At one point in the podcast, Chris Hayes said something about comparing the fear to people who are neurotic about hand-washing, but he and Bier didn't pursue that. Maybe he was on to something with that. 

Mike Meyers, Newspaperman

My home office finally reached that negative tipping point where I absolutely had to deal with it. This always happens when I can't find some critical piece of paper, and the only way past it is to winnow through all the piles that have accumulated in the years (yes, it is years) that I've been letting it go since the last time someone visited and used the office as a guest room.

Part of my excuse is that I was being treated for cancer during a year or more of that time, and the other part is that during treatment I moved my base of home operation to the living room, so the office became a repository. That meant the office didn't need to function as a workable space, and my normally bad habit of piling things led to worse-than-normally bad piles on the floor. You begin to get the picture.

Anyway, today was the day that I went through it all and mostly got it under control. 

While I was doing that, I found a page from the Star Tribune I had saved because I wanted to write about it here. It's from October 13, 2024. But other than the fact that it's an obituary, the article is relatively timeless.

Because I still want to say that I appreciated its subject, Mike Meyers, who was a long-time reporter and writer at the Star Tribune (gift link).

I knew when I saw his byline, whether it was during his lengthy career covering economics or in a commentary after he retired in 2009, it would be worth reading. I didn't know until I read his obit that he had started working as a journalist near where I grew up and went to college, or that he was a single guy his whole life, or that he had been active in the Newspaper Guild.

He was only 75 when he died, it appears from some kind of complications after a fall and a broken ankle. 

No funeral was held, the obituary reported, "but friends will gather privately to share memories." For the record, this reader also remembers him and his work fondly.

__

The obituary was written by Randy Furst, Meyers's long-time colleague who retired in February 2025 from the Strib at age 78, after more than 50 years at the newspaper. 

Photo of Mike Meyers by Star Tribune photographer David Joles
 

A Good Time for Casablanca

I watched Casablanca for the first time this weekend. 

It was hard to place myself as a viewer as if I were seeing it when it first came out in 1942, not knowing who would win the war, but I tried. By doing that, I identified with the main characters more than I might have if I had seen the movie in my formative years, or at some later point. 

That's being a bit overly dramatic, but not by much. We have no idea how the current dire situation of our country will turn out, but we know for sure that many people are not safe, and large incarceration centers are being created all over the place for some purpose. Which makes no sense, if the people who are grabbed will be deported at all quickly. 

Casablanca came out before the Allies knew about the realities of Germany's concentration camps, and before the camps had reached the full extent of their deadly outcomes. The film is genteel compared to what was discovered later. 

I'm glad I finally saw the film, and in some ways, now is a good time for Casablanca.

The Need to Quantify

Today, I have a couple of slightly disparate media recommendations that fit together in my head.

First, a Science Friday segment from last week. The guest was C. Thi Nguyen, a philosophy professor at the University of Utah. His book is called The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game, and he and host Flora Lichtman were discussing how metrics — I would call this quantification – are, essentially, bad. 

At one point early in the conversation, he said, 

One of the core experiences I had in my life was this kind of drift in my values, where I started doing things, like starting to diet, trying to get better at rock climbing, trying to get better at philosophy. And at first, there was a scoring system nearby, and I could mostly ignore it and be like, what I cared about is the interesting questions, is feeling better in my body. And over time, there’s this drift.

What happens with the drift is that I started caring deeply and immediately about the metric. So I’ve been calling this value capture. And value capture is what happens when your values are rich and subtle and then you get put in a setting, typically an institutional setting, that presents you with some simplified and quantified version of your values. And then that starts to take over. You start caring immediately about getting more likes or ... getting higher in those rankings.

The whole discussion has more nuance than my brief description, and Nguyen (being a philosopher) wouldn't say something as simple as "metrics are bad," of course. 

This conversation confirmed a lot of my priors — since I am a person who has resisted the whole "quantified life" trend since it began. I admit that. 

Second is a recent edition of the education podcast "Have You Heard," called The Curious Case of Kindergarten. It's about an upcoming book whose author visited American kindergarten classrooms across the country. Part of the discussion is about how metrics and the supposed acceleration of K–12 curriculum have damaged kindergarten and, therefore, children.