OMM (On My Mind) -- August 2023 -- #3
~ findings & research ~
::: The Open :::
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In case you need to…
Feel free to Scream Into The Void
That being said, you never know who is secretly collecting data nowadays. *sigh*
Probably limit you confessions of crimes to those that max out with a misdemeanor.
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::: Recommended Podcasts Episodes :::
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Thoughtful and interesting (especially for poets/writers/artists) conversation about the importance of imagination in everyday life. (Intelligence Squared)
It’s a short listen wherever you get your podcasts.
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Another winner from The Gray Area.
An interview with Kristen R. Ghodsee whose new book Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life sounds enlightening to say the least. In the interview, there’s a strong focus on how the nuclear family has been a problematic force in Western Civilization when it comes to community, income inequality, childrearing, and the list goes on. Ghodsee is not anti-monogamy but explains how humans are biologically engineered for pairing in a way that is not necessarily correlated with raising children. The old saying, “it takes a village” really comes into play. Part of this discussion is geared towards preparing ourselves inevitable shifts in cultural norms. If we were wise, we’d adopt strategies purposefully and through careful selection as opposed to being guided by external forces (like the pandemic) in order to learn how we can improve lives.
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‘How Cable News Changes American Politics and Culture’ (NPR 1A)
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::: Music :::
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This is both cute & good:
Soccer Mommy Covers Taylor Swift’s “I’m Only Me When I’m With You”: Listen (Pitchfork)
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Looking forward to September 29th!
Ed Sheeran and the National’s Aaron Dessner Combine for New Album (Pitchfork)
While I’m not a big Ed Shearan fan… his collaborations are often quite good.
As a fan of The National, this should be an interesting listen if nothing more.
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The is a satisfying headline: “ Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker, and Lucy Dacus have turned their supergroup’s summer tour into a menswear masterclass.”
It’s sort of an article because… content.
In lieu of explanation, here’s GQ talking about the Right doing weird flexes. Agreed, weird.
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::: The Arts & The Literary World:::
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In my position as Poetry Craft Essays Editor for Cleaver Magazine, I just had the honor of publishing this fascinating essay by Kelly DuMar:
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Language evolves… and we know not everyone is cool with it. (Seth Godin’s blog)
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Mary Oliver Garden (McSweeney’s)
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Poetry Foundation Announces the 2023 Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellows
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The British Library Puts 1,000,000 Images into the Public Domain, Making Them Free to Reuse & Remix
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Society in decline.
This $123,000 Watch Was Designed by a 4-Year-Old
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Philadelphia artists kicked out of Rittenhouse Square, art confiscated (Billy Penn)
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Coming Soon: September 27
Wes Anderson’s The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar Gets Netflix Release Date (Pitchfork)
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Have you heard about StoryGraph?
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Save yourself from the trap of the internet rabbit holes… if you can afford an assistant.
“…I have an assistant I can go to and say, here’s something I’d like to get information on, and what can you find for me?” (LitHub)
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::: Small Explorations & Deep Dives :::
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Which arm gets the Covid-19 booster may make a difference, study shows
The current recommendation seems to be (please fact check this for yourself) to get booster shots in the same arm that you have gotten covid shots in previously.
Maybe consider picking one arm you use for covid and another you use for flu.
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Studies have shown hybrid work results in approximately equal level productivity compared to working full-time in the office.
Source: ‘When remote work works and when it doesn't’, NPR, The Indicator, 8/1/23
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What’s Our Problem? | Blog | Andrew Yang
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~ On the path towards UBI ~
US basic income project shows signs of success
“Georgia pilot gives 650 predominantly Black women $850 a month for two years, no strings attached – and it seems to be working”
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‘More Americans Are Ending Up Homeless—at a Record Rate’ (The Wall Street Journal)
Excerpt:
The U.S. has seen a record increase in homeless people this year as the Covid-19 pandemic fades, according to a Wall Street Journal review of data from around the country.
The data so far this year are up roughly 11% from 2022, a sharp jump that would represent by far the biggest recorded increase since the government started tracking comparable numbers in 2007. The next highest increase was a 2.7% jump in 2019, excluding an artificially high increase last year caused by pandemic counting interruptions.
This year’s surge reflects a host of pressures around the U.S. such as rising housing costs, lack of affordable rental units and the nation’s continuing opioid crisis, according to reports from nonprofits and government agencies counting the homeless.
The Journal’s tally thus far includes more than 577,000 homeless people. The outstanding entities, known as continuums of care, declined to provide their numbers, didn’t respond to requests or couldn’t be reached.
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We’re Getting Opioid Use Disorder All Wrong (TIME)
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Harrison Ford Inspires Name for New Snake Species Discovered in Peru (The Hollywood Reporter)
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Manitoba bus driver cracks Baltimore book store's mystery safe (UPI)
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In the vein of UBI, preventative care, and entitlements to help us all stay healthy:
California food: Prescriptions to improve health?
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The unsurprising confusion about ‘per capita’ (Seth Godin’s blog)
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Philadelphia State Rep pushes for 4-Day Workweek
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The US can’t meet its climate goals unless states step up (Canary Media)
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The following are excerpts from an article published in The Washington Post entitled ‘American democracy is cracking. These forces help explain why.: Behind the sense that the political system is broken lies a collision between forces both old and new (By Dan Balz and Clara Ence Morse)
“The failure has multiple origins, including a collapse of trust in institutions. But one of the most significant is a collision between forces both old and new.”
“The old dates to the writing of the Constitution — debates and compromises that resulted in representation in the House based on population and in the Senate based on equal standing for the states; the odd system by which we elect presidents; and lifetime appointments for Supreme Court justices. In general, the founders often distrusted the masses and sought to create structural protections against them.”
“Votes to confirm judges, Cabinet members, ambassadors and other posts requiring Senate confirmation have become more contentious, with a smaller percentage of the country represented by senators voting in favor.”
“Through gerrymandering, population dispersion and the sorting of where people prefer to live, competition for House seats has declined.”
“These divisions have made it possible for the dominant party to govern with little regard to the interests of those with allegiance to the minority party and often little accountability as well. The result is two Americas with competing agendas and values.”
“To remain a living document, the Constitution needs to be adaptable to changing times, perspectives and conditions. The alternative to amending the Constitution is through judicial interpretation by the Supreme Court. Today the court is dominated by “originalists” who interpret the document through a strict reading of the words and times in which it was written — long a goal of conservatives. But the America of 2023 is not the America of the framers of the Constitution in the late 18th century, a time when enslaved people were counted as three-fifths of a person and women did not have the right to vote.”
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Clickbait: Weird shout-out to Pottstown.
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“That last bit is crucial: It’s not just the number of visits a consumer makes that retailers care about. How long someone spends in the store, called “dwell time,” matters, too. The longer someone is in a store, the more money they’re likely to spend.” (Vox)
“And then there’s the treatment of retail employees by shoppers themselves: The subreddit r/retailhell offers infinite accounts of customers who harangue, bully, and even assault workers. One person who worked at a big-box retailer but did not want to be named for fear of professional repercussions told Vox that retail had been a “nightmare job” for them — that customers “did nothing but torture” employees.”
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Thought-provoking time management strategy:
Why you should divide your life into semesters, even when you’re not in school
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“Now, thanks to the billion-channel universe, the mainstream has gone out with the tide and every belief can feel mainstream if you immerse yourself in it.” (Seth Godin’s blog)
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A shop owner was killed for flying a Pride flag. Sick world we live in.
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Spotless giraffe born in a Tennessee zoo seems to answer the age-old question, “Is a giraffe brown with white spots or white with brown spots.” Now, what about zebras?
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Somehow…well, as they say, you can’t make this stuff up. Our world is truly stranger than fiction.
“Brazil’s former president may be arrested because of expensive watches sold at the Willow Grove Mall” (Philadelphia Inquirer)
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Frankly, these numbers are much lower than I expected. Presumably a bias based on my own personal habits and lifestyle choices.
In U.S., 4% Identify as Vegetarian, 1% as Vegan (Gallup)
“In prior reports, Gallup found that political liberals and lower-income adults were among the subgroups most likely to be vegetarian, and that remains the case in the latest update. Nine percent of liberals today are vegetarian, higher than in any other key subgroup Gallup analyzed, and three times the rate of political moderates and conservatives.”
“Meanwhile, lower-income Americans (7%) are about twice as likely as middle- (4%) and upper-income (3%) Americans to be vegetarians.”
“Additionally, women (6%) are more likely than men (2%) to say they eat a vegetarian diet.”
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An update on the life and times of Harmony Korine…
“One morning Korine and I meet near the water in Palm Beach and take a walk along the ocean. I say that it’s funny to see Korine, who may be older but who still loses his wallet constantly, breaks electronics on contact, and has generally been staggering down his own unique path since he was a teenager, now managing an entire team of people.”
“Yeah, I know,” he says. He’s wearing lavender corduroys and a polo in the Florida humidity. “I think even my wife is like, ‘What the fuck?’ I don’t know. It just makes sense. It feels right. Like that’s just the progression. And to be honest with you, it’s also in some weird way the most exciting.”
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‘Forever chemicals’ found in 76% of Pennsylvania streams sampled (Philadelphia Inquirer)
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In more thrilling news…
Bigger, earlier and itchier: Why poison ivy loves climate change
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Worth reading the whole article, really.
“CEOs of top 100 ‘low-wage’ US firms earn $601 for every $1 by worker, report finds” (Guardian)
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Oddly satisfying: what’s behind our drive to collect useless items?
“Malone believes there are oddly satisfying elements in one-in-every-colour consumerism, arguing that companies invite us to “design our own aesthetic life at a cinematic level”, selecting props that represent us like characters in a film.” (Guardian)
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In Covid news…
Americans at high risk advised to wear masks as new Covid variant detected (Guardian)
If you’re older and/or immunocompromised it can’t hurt to throw a mask on, right?
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TW: Eating Disorders
A window into one of those area in which the kids, and not just the kids, are not exactly ok.
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Speaking of “The Youth” – they are really into astrology. That’s fine. It’s a thing though. It’s more of a thing than it’s been %-wise for recent generations (I think). What’s your take?
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Minimalist Patchwork Sleeves Are Becoming Really Popular
Be careful what you wish for.
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There’s some sort of Hunter S. Thompson musical… world we live in.
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The ongoing battle against fent.
“The global production potential for fentanyl is just astronomical”. . . as long as precursor chemicals are available, the supply of the finished drug is “virtually endless”
I encourage looking at this article… the visuals… as it zooms in… disturbing… as it should be.
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Is LinkedIn cool now… really, is it? IDK.
Check out Substack.
Maybe Threads will go somewhere.
Maybe soon enough… we will sadly regret the many years we have spent on social media losing ourselves.
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Lego releasing Braille versions of its toy bricks, available to public for first time ever (USA Today)
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Slang coming back around. Uh, I’ve definitely talk of having to 86 someone in my time… so maybe some of these are not all that old hat?
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How to Flirt, According to a Bartender (The Cut)
This is worth reading if, for nothing else, the humorous (and good) writing. There’s also some sage advice.
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On the subject of the thing that the kids these days are calling “bed rotting”
“Doing nothing and not talking to anyone on a Sunday allows me to recharge my social battery so that I’ll have the energy to hang with my pals during the week.”
Not having your brain be constantly over-worked or looking at screens all day (resulting in not blinking enough), or any number of other daily activities we get sucked into (because corporations have designs on us) all land us feeling exhausted and waking up feeling exhausted and if you don’t break this cycle eventually you’re going to probably find yourself stuck in bed anyway feeling sick and run down.
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‘Depression Cooking Zine’ Is a Reminder That Sometimes Eating Is an Accomplishment (Eater)
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Sarah Palin… kinda sorta suggesting Civil War… ugh. Seriously? No. Just NO.
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Fair enough:
“But I'd argue that Millennials are particularly ill-equipped to navigate the obstacle course of estate law.”
Overall:
I felt this article was a little insensitive. Maybe it’s the delivery. Maybe it’s the tone. Maybe both of those and more.
The title of the article, in and of itself, I find morally repugnant.
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It should come as no surprise that the wealthiest people live lives that have almost nothing in common with everyday people. There’s an app, Myria, that’s an example of this. One at once can and cannot quite imagine the conversations and “deals” that go down under these circumstances.
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Women with ME tend to have more symptoms than men, study suggests
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Gen Z Can't Stop Listening to Sad Music
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The Anthropocene: A New Epoch in the Earth’s History (Visual Capitalist)
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Environmental groups recruit people of color into overwhelmingly white conservation world (AP)
“White men have largely controlled American conservation policy for more than a century. The modern conservation movement in the United States began around the turn of the 20th century, led by figures such as Sierra Club co-founder John Muir, who openly derided American Indians as savages, and President Theodore Roosevelt, who doubled the number of sites in the National Park System. Conservationists such as Aldo Leopold and Wisconsin Gov. Gaylord Nelson, who founded Earth Day, followed them.”
“Urbanization, racial segregation, all these histories have separated BIPOC from neighbors with more green spaces,” Drutman said. “It’s become a white people’s thing because of that.”
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