OMM – December 2024 – #1

~ a curated selection of discoveries ~

Dec 01, 2024

::: The Open :::

Dear Reader,

I hope you enjoy this weekly newsletter (published on Sundays).

If you’re a subscriber, please consider reaching out to a friend you think may enjoy this newsletter and encourage them to sign up.

If you can, please consider signing up as a Paid Subscriber.

I’ll be just as happy if you donate to ONE ART: a journal of poetry.

Thank you for reading and for your time.

With Gratitude,

~ Mark

>>> Please Note <<<

This newsletter may be too long to appear in its entirety in an email.

Click the link or go to the OMM homepage to read in full.

::: Personal Notes :::

Find me on Bluesky.

I probably need to remember how to take a day off.

‘Tis the season for holiday giving.

I recommend checking a charitable organization’s record on Charity Navigator. Sadly, sometimes the money is not going where you wish.

I recommend GiveWell and The Life You Can Save for high impact giving.

I have a list of recommended charities, slightly updated from previous versions. A longer post about gift-giving will be shared on my substack.

ONE ART is about to have to pay a chunk of annual fees for WordPress, other web services, and general operations. WordPress alone is $300. If you’ve been thinking about donating to ONE ART, now is a good time.

Please prioritize your holiday charitable giving to non-profits and those is dire need of assistance.

::: ONE ART :::

Find ONE ART on Bluesky.

10 Journals that Publish Good, Lasting, Approachable Poetry (Editor picks from ONE ART: a journal of poetry) – Chill Subs

I hope other lit mags / editors will make lists like this. It will help poets/writers more easily find suitable homes for their work.

I highly recommend Chill Subs. They are an invaluable research and submission tool.

Planning to subscribe? Get a discount using this ONE ART exclusive affiliate link.

Upcoming workshop:

Weird Up Your Language
Instructor: Grant Clauser
Wednesday, December 11, 7:00pm Eastern
Duration: 2 hours
Price: $25 (payment options – Stripe / PayPal / Venmo / CashApp)

Upcoming Reading:

Sunday, December 8 — 2pm (Eastern)
Featured Poets: Heidi Seaborn, Marjorie Maddox, Erin Murphy, Hayley Mitchell Haugen, Abby E. Murray
Tickets available here (Free or Donation)

::: Podcasts :::

Valuable listen.

Dems — Important as we pivot to thinking about 2026 midterm and 2028 elections.

‘The 'little r' racist idea that swung the election’ (NPR’s Code Switch)

“What lessons should we all be taking from the historic match-up between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris? New York Times political correspondent Astead Herndon says the big takeaway from this election isn't the divide between Republicans and Democrats, it's the divide between political elites and the American public. And he says it may be time to rethink our presumptions about how much voters care about representation.”

Sean Illing interviews Ayana Elizabeth Johnson on The Gray Area.

Here’s a bit more info.

Impressively, Johnson notes, Nature takes care of 30-40% of carbon capture. But that’s not enough due to humanity’s impact.

When discussing the issue between slight increases in temperature, for example, 2% - 4% warming and why the latter (4%) is so detrimental— Johnson makes a useful comparison: If you have a fever of 100 degrees, that’s much less of a concern than a fever of 104 degrees.

“Untreated fevers above 105.8 degrees F (41 degrees C) can be dangerous. If your body temperature reaches this level, your organs will begin to malfunction and will eventually fail.”

All living entities and ecosystems are just as susceptible to slight shifts like this.

I read Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s book, ‘What If We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures’ when in September 2024. A terrific and essential read. I really don’t say this about a ton of books.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson is listed on Vox’s The 2024 Future Perfect 50.

‘Thomas Friedman on the Future of America and the World: The Post-Election Dissection, Part Two’ (Intelligence Squared)

Worth listening to for how to move forward with Israel-Palestine. Includes a direct appeal to Trump to take action.

You can definitely listen to this just fine without having listened to Part One.

::: Music :::

Beware stans.

See recent Chappell Roan statements about setting boundaries.

Let artists have some privacy. Mind your own business, folks.

Going into Trump 2.0 is among the worst times in contemporary American history to be forced to come out.

[below is an excerpt from a USA Today article]

Khalid is speaking out about his sexuality — even if it's "not any of your business."

"🏳️‍🌈!!! there yall go. next topic please lol," he posted on X, formerly Twitter, on Friday night.

He clarified the statement in ensuing posts, replying to a fan who wrote "Wait hope Mr Khalid isn’t GEHHH!" with: "I am! And that’s okay."

Kinda funny. Drake has taken the wealthy businessman approach to battling Kendrick Lamar.

‘Drake Accuses UMG & Spotify of Scheme to ‘Artificially Inflate’ Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Not Like US’ (Billboard)

::: The Literary Community & Beyond :::

‘Working Black Friday in the Rich Part of Town’ (Electric Literature)

This is among the most enjoyable essays I’ve read in memory.

I’ll be talking about it some more, I expect.

“Though my store carried several high-end brands, it lacked the luxury pedigree of Sephora, its biggest competitor. You could see it in the bags—theirs, a glossy black that stood up on its own, ours, a pale orange sack. Sephora was the wife of Moses, she who declared her husband the bridegroom of blood after circumcising her son with a flint knife, her name derived from Hebrew, little bird. Ulta is ultra without an r.”

“I am not shy. For as long as I’ve had a voice, I have loved the sound of it. At five I talked to the dog. At six to a tape recorder. At seven to the mirror, pretending to be in a Neutrogena commercial. I filled my cupped hands with water, threw the water in my face, over and over murmuring cream cleanser, cream cleanser, cream cleanser. I held up a single Mike and Ike in the back corner of a pizza restaurant and pretended to sell Tylenol to the wall. Later, I began to mimic the beauty YouTubers I watched. They all knew to speak in the same strange cadence. The was pronounced thee, the article a became ay. They spoke the same way I did when I interviewed myself on my Little Tikes tape recorder. It was a clicky, rhythmic pleasure, like a girl who has just gotten fresh acrylics and uses them to punctuate her speech. There is no way to represent it without musical notation.”

“When Teri said our holiday customers were not like our regular customers, I wasn’t sure what she meant. Many of our regular customers were rich—not yacht rich, or summer-as-a-verb rich, but rich enough that Dawn called guest relations putting on your Mount Pleasant.”

“Years later, the world would become obsessed with people like Angela and give them a name: Karen, a breed of high-strung, entitled, affluent white woman who demanded servility from everyone around her. When everyone was talking about Karen, I thought back to Ulta.”

The author, Emily Mester, has a new book out.

‘The 100 Best Small Art Towns in America ‘ (Americans for the Arts)

Index appears to be updated state by state list.

‘I said no to $20,000 because writers must take a moral stand on AI’ (Erik Hoel)

Dictionary.com has named its word of the year and it’s… “demure”

Back in Trump-land… my word of the year for the next 4-years (hopefully 4 max) is “precarity”

‘Theaters Ban Wicked Fans From Singing During the Movie’ (VF)

The Karens of the world have won this round.

Clearly, these are the same folks who did not enjoy Taylor Swift’s eras film experience.

A look at The New York Times “100 Notable Books of 2024) (NYT)

A few highlights from the list:

Poetry

Danez Smith – Bluff

Diane Seuss – Modern Poetry

Mary Jo Bang – A Film In Which I Play Everyone

Fiction

Rachel Kushner – Creation Lake

Kelly Link – The Book of Love

Miranda July – All Fours

Yasmin Zaher – The Coin (plot sounds good)

Sally Rooney – Intermezzo

Percival Everett – James (good idea for plot)

Kaveh Akbar – MARTYR!

Jahmal Mayfield – Smoke Kings (good idea for plot)

Tommy Orange – Wandering Stars

Nonfiction

Hanif Abdurraqib – There’s Always This Year

Jonathan Haidt – The Anxious Generation (just listen to interviews)

Emily Nussbaum – Cue The Sun! (good writer)

Leslie Jamison – Splinters (sounds like it has potential)

Ok, so… the NYT needs to take me on their nonfiction staff ASAP. There are way too many essential reads left off this list.

‘I Give the Worst Writing Advice in the World’ (Ted Gioia)

Ted Gioia:

Sometimes they have very little interest in the writing part of being a writer. A dead giveaway is when they say: “I want to be a writer, but I don’t really know what to write about”—almost as if that’s a minor detail.

That’s like wanting to get married, but skipping over all the vows and commitments. Let’s go straight to the gifts and partying.

And the only part of writing I’m really familiar with is the Vows and Commitments.

I love this. “[…] The only part of writing I’m really familiar with is the Vows and Commitments.”

“Instead of pursuing a career plan, I’d simply suggest that you seek motivation and enjoyment in the writing itself.”

::: Health & Wellness :::

Assisted Dying (aka. euthanasia)

Euthanasia (by whatever name) is something I’ve been interested in since I was in, wait for it, 7^th grade. I wrote multiple papers in middle school on the subject. Poet in the making, am I right?

It’s looking like the UK is going to push forward with allowances for assisted dying to become legal.

There are many reasons, good reasons, why people are concerned. There’s a significant gray area when it comes to euthanasia. A major concern is the fear, not irrational, that there will be instances of misuse. As in, people will be put to death who would have preferred to continue living their life.

It’s important to keep in mind there’s a serious jump from assisting terminally ill individuals — who have signed paperwork, decided in advance while it’s been clear they were not cognitively impaired, and those who are aware of what is happening to them, and aware that they are living in agony, and the list of terrible potentialities goes on — to a dystopian Logan’s Run scenario.

Again, gray area.

Change is scary, especially something like this. We, in The West, have not set up traditions and cultural norms to make death easier… and so we are especially ill-equipped to address these types of nuanced concerns about death.

‘Australian Parliament bans social media for under-16s with world-first law’ (AP News)

Restrictions on social media for children.

The other BIG news piece that I’ll be closely following relates to Australia putting restrictions on the use of social media for youth under age 16. This is a good, science-based, idea. The trouble will come with enforcement.

Also, it immediately occurred to me that The Youth are scrappy and they’re going to find some sort of alt platform that isn’t inherently geared towards social media and find a way to turn it into a social media platform. You can imagine using say, the comments section, of a random website for this purpose. Or a platform that isn’t designed in a typical social media format, like Pinterest… to create the equivalent of Finstas (fake Instagram accounts). So, be on the lookout for “Pinstas” or “Pinters” or whatever.

Something like Snapchat, that has a social component, but is also a messaging service, could easily be transformed into a more social media-esque platform. Whatsapp, for instance, or Signal, or Telegram— spaces that are already risky because they lack oversight. Blockchain technology may allow for Mastodon-style decentralized networks that will allow for the creation of “Groups” (like your school class, etc) that can then be used in the old manner of Facebook… but with whatever new disturbing twist that allows kids to bully each other.

If you google “alternative social media platforms” you’ll find a bunch that you’ve probably never heard of.

Due to slow bureaucracy, it will be hard to keep up with The Youth innovations.

In any case, the U.S. needs to watch and learn. We need to figure this one out because it’s not just a moral panic. These platforms are really bad for people’s health and these especially true during early childhood and adolescent development.

Everyone is aging… differently.

‘Inside your body, aging unfolds at remarkably different rates’ (The Washington Post)

‘Don’t sit on the toilet for more than 10 minutes, doctors warn’ (CNN)

Retail Managers will be thrilled if this advice spreads like wildfire.

“Very active people burn about the same number of calories as sedentary people. Your body appears to adapt based on your lifestyle…” (WaPo)

Not exactly news… but… seems true enough. Anyone who has spent time at the gym knows that you end up having to consume way more calories in order to compensate for your physical exertions. The gym seems good for strength training. If you want big arms—gym.

My main goal for fitness has generally been about avoiding injury.

As people get older, there are lots of low impact exercises that seem wise.

At this point, I’m pro walking… especially if you can find an opportunity to walk in natural spaces, especially woodsy spaces.

Your thoughts?

::: Small Explorations & Deep Dives :::

Important:

Stay on top of bias.

‘Version 10.1 of the AllSides Media Bias Chart: Updated Ratings for AP, The Guardian’ (AllSides)

My primary issue with The Guardian (which I’ve loved since the early 2000s) is that they have been accused or having used AI to write entire articles. I’m now skeptical of anything they put out. I primarily read Op-Ed sections of The Guardian… and, I hope, those journalists write their own work.

I was already surprised by the previous chart showing AP as “Lean Left”. Now, I’m further surprised to see AP as wholly “Left”. I was previously under the impression that AP and Reuters were essentially the same in sharing news releases without any attempt to frame the story. This, it seems, is not the case.

AP News

Reuters

See for yourself and let me know your thoughts.

‘UN climate deal will send $300 billion to developing countries’ (NPR)

$1.3T was the minimum need (so far as I understand).

With less $$$ it seems the move is, in turn, to shift focus to reducing impact. This means corporations need to make changes and get real (not token) fines for failure to comply.

AI + crypto are newer examples of tech that is using massive amounts of energy. In the name of "progress" there will always be something so the blame game isn't necessarily the best approach. Instead, we need to focus on varied forms of energy that even somewhat reduce impact.

We should also add some rules about private jet use, sure. The wealthiest people in the world have a massively outsized impact. Fair taxes on “high impact individuals” could be a harm reduction method. At the very least, it would provide governments with more funding to assist those who are already affected, or will some be affected, by environmental changes and unforeseen catastrophes (think: Asheville).

A gift guide by Nora McInerny.

Coffee prices are at a 27-year high.

According to NerdWallet, 28% of Americans haven’t paid off their credit card bills since last year’s holiday shopping.

Battling predatory conmen.

‘AI grandma fights back against scammers’ (CBS News)

“Do not try to help Daisy set up her printer—she is engineered to frustrate you. Daisy is a new British AI granny released earlier this month by UK-based phone company Virgin Media O2, and her job is to waste phone scammers’ time. In one instance, she kept them on the line for 40 minutes.” (Morning Brew)

“How she works: Fraudsters frequently target the elderly for scams, so the company attempted to create the perfect victim. Daisy is simply an AI chatbot with a grandma voice, trained on hours of recorded conversations with one of her creator’s real-life grandmas.”

“While she doesn’t intercept calls, Daisy has multiple phone numbers that have been pushed out to online lists used by UK scammers. But instead of giving into the con, she rambles about her grandchildren, birds outside, and her cat and gets easily confused about technology. She sometimes gives scammers fake bank info.”

“AI granny is a drop in the bucket. Making scammers’ days a little harder is a promising start, but phone scams have become so common that someone reading this probably had to pause mid-sentence to silence one. Last year, phone scammers stole over $1 trillion around the world, according to the Global Anti-Scam Alliance.”

A small look at the horrible manosphere.

‘How These Men Left the Manosphere — and Why Some May Never’ (Teen Vogue)

The manosphere has long been coming for The Youth.

‘More people are dropping out of the creator economy as those at the top get a bigger share of brand deals’ (Fortune)

Interesting, in part, because the “Creator Economy” is bigger than ever. But, it’s never been remotely equally profitable… all ecosystems/microcosms reflect the larger culture. And we all know that life is not fair.

‘Six Ways to Dodge THOSE Pesky Questions During the Holidays’ (Creative Circle)

“By 2027, 86.5 million Americans will be freelancing—about half of the U.S. workforce.”

Somewhat hard to conceive/believe but it’s entirely plausible… especially depending on the potentially rapid and exponential rise of AI-adjacent capabilities.

“We still have a First Amendment right to assemble, to petition our government, and to free speech and a free press. They are ours to insist upon or lose. I intend to insist.” (Joyce Vance)

Further discussion leads me to understand that Trump may be creating a plutocracy rather than an oligarchy.

At the end of the day… it’s still a problem, still not ideal, still not a democratic republic.

Epshteyn.

First time I took note of Boris Epshteyn’s name I thought “Epshteyn”… must be a typo… and, then, I thought... actually, sounds like “Epstein” if someone bit their tongue and then tried to say “Epstein”.

So far as I know… we still don’t live in Scooby Doo land… or a full-on Bond film… though we have plenty of Bond-esque villains wandering about… If we did, Epshteyn would eventually pull off a mask and we’d discover it was Epstein all along.

Cards Against Humanity (CAH) was up to their annual Black Friday shenanigans.

I look forward to the annual CAH antics… as I’m sure many do. It’s a little weirdness in a world that is deadly serious.

This time “Diamond Potato” was the goofy sale.

Congrats to anyone who got diamonds valued at ~$1000…and a potato.

::: Google Search Trends :::

Gen Z’s fantasy salary. Specifically searches for: “gen z 587k”

Consistent Recommendations:

Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American – daily news with historical context

ONE ART: a journal of poetry – daily poems

Verse Daily – daily poems

Chill Subs – down to earth submissions resource

** Want to subscribe? Get a discount using this ONE ART exclusive affiliate link.