OMM (On My Mind) – December 2023 – #4

~ findings & research ~

Dec 24, 2023

::: The Open :::

Dear Reader,

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

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Thank you for reading and for your time.

With Gratitude,

Mark

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::: Personal Notes :::

ONE ART Pushcart Prize nominations announced!

‘40 Literary Journals Accepting Poetry Submissions’ (Authors Publish)

Includes a nod to ONE ART, which has rolling submissions (open 24/7/365).

Poems of the Week

Looking forward to posting a new selection tomorrow!

Check out: On My Mind with Amy Small-McKinney

& On My Mind with Louisa Schnaithmann – Ted Hughes is trolling me from beyond the grave

::: Podcasts :::

The Gray Area – How mindfulness went mainstream

::: Music :::

‘TikTok Has Made Shoegaze Bigger Than Ever’ (Stereogum)

Fast-forward eight months later and “Your Face” has been streamed nearly 30 million times on Spotify, almost twice as much as My Bloody Valentine’s classic Loveless closer “Soon.”

::: The Literary Community & Beyond :::

Track your 2024 reads! (Book Riot)

Link to the 2024 Reading Log spreadsheet

(copy and paste to make your own & customize)

What Will Enter the Public Domain in 2024?

Books published in 1928

Does not disappoint:

‘The Wildest Art Stories of 2023’ (Hyperallergic)

‘E-readers were supposed to kill printed books. Instead, they're booming’ (CBC)

“Print book sales are up 10‒14 per cent over three years in most major English-speaking markets.”

~ A Selection of Exciting Reads Forthcoming in 2024 ~

Kelly Link is finally coming out with a novel.

Years ago, Link talked in interviews about how she felt like this might never happen. She’s written some rather long short stories, but good fiction writers will tell you that they can feel how long a story is going to be and a novel arcs much differently than a short story.

You can pre-order ‘The Book of Love’ by Kelly Link here.

+
Kaveh has made the jump to fiction.

You can pre-order the book here.

RuPaul’s new memoir sounds good.

Pre-order here.

New Gabriel García Márquez is forthcoming but… I’d really recommend getting into the back catalogue first.

My personal favorite is ‘Of Love and Other Demons’.

Judith Butler returns with ‘Who's Afraid of Gender?’

Reading Butler was integral to my feminist studies during undergrad.

Hanif Abdurraqib is coming out with a new book (!!) – ‘There's Always This Year’

I just don’t know what can top ‘They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us’ (Two Dollar Radio)

‘Like Love: Essays and Conversations’ by Maggie Nelson is sure to be a worthwhile read.

Pre-order here.

The 10 Most Popular Lit Hub Stories of the Year (LitHub)

The 10 Biggest Literary Stories of the Year (LitHub)

The Biggest Literary Stories of the Year: 30 to 11 (LitHub)

The Biggest Literary Stories of the Year: 50 to 31 (LitHub)

‘Blake Butler on (Not) Finding Your Voice’ (LitHub)

Reading this, much of what I hear is someone in a deeply troubled headspace.

My sense is that he’s really struggling with the repercussions (in part, inevitably, self-inflicted) of publishing ‘Molly’.

::: Health & Wellness :::

Research indicates “long flu” is a problem. This has at least some similarity to “long covid”. My suspicion is that it took the attention and severity to long covid for people to reconsider the possibility that flu took a similar toll on the body that has a habit of persisting.

‘What Should You Think About to Fall Asleep Faster’ (Greater Good)

I’ve been trying this without much success so far. I’m prone to quite a lot of mind wandering as I try to fall asleep. Sigh. My understanding is that this is rather normal.

Interesting to think about what writers/artists might want to think about while falling asleep. Something that your mind likes thinking about but is not too much work. Playing with language is something I do while trying to wind myself down for sleep. Seems like the key is to simply have fun with the little game in your head and reassure yourself that this is not time to be in Creator Mode.

‘Using AI, MIT researchers identify a new class of antibiotic candidates’ (MIT News)

“These compounds can kill methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a bacterium that causes deadly infections.”

Leave a comment

::: Small Explorations & Deep Dives :::

Real, vetted, high quality journalism sources are more important than ever in a brave new world where AI is allowing for the creation of hundreds of fake news sites written with AI-generated content. (There’s an article from The Washington Post about this.)

We need to abandon false narratives that fuel high levels of mistrust in mainstream media. Many mainstream sources offer balanced perspectives. Yes, some are slightly left or right leaning. This is a far cry from leaning radically to an extreme position.

NPR is generally considered moderate (and always has been). The Right (GOP) will argue that it is Left. The only argument here is that NPR may choose to cover stories that are tinged with left-of-center interest as opposed to stories that are pursued by right-wing organizations.

The New York Times is constantly accused of being Left-leaning. Perhaps a bit. It doesn’t mean that, overall, they do not offer high quality journalism. Counter to Trump’s insistence, “The New York Times” is not “failing”.

Overall, our news orgs have been gutted and lack the resources to fund enough high-quality in-depth longform investigative journalism. This has been a huge problem for at least two decades.

Another well-known problem is the mass loss of local or regional newspapers (print and digital) that act as “watchdogs” and provide important information and coverage. Watchdog news outlets have been historically important for many reasons and I’d encourage looking into this on your own.

I’ve been a long-time fan of The Guardian. The U.S.-oriented Guardian news used to be very high quality and have exceptional Op-Ed columns. Unfortunately, in recent times, the quality has gone down and lots of people have noticed and called attention to this. I still read stories from The Guardian but am disappointed when some are simply clickbait or read like material that’s been aggregated from primary sources around the internet (a problem I’ve had with contemporary articles in The Atlantic for years now).

I’ve fallen back on primary sources such as AP News and Reuters because they offer the news in a top down traditional journalistic format without opinion. It’s just the facts as they are known at the time.

Semafor is a newer outlet, I think is worth looking into. They are attempting to get back to older ways of sharing thoughtful and well-researched news with a small team.

AllSides is intended to share balanced news coverage with both perspectives from the Left and the Right. In my experience, the articles have not been terribly interesting and if you’re relatively educated you can deduce the positions on your own.

I don’t watch TV news or Cable news and I’m not going to encourage anyone to do so. TV news has always had a propensity for “if it bleeds, it leads”, excessive puff pieces, and attention to developing stories that are either not newsworthy or not yet ready for the public to properly comprehend with context. And they say the same damn thing over and over again. This is for news junkies and tv junkies and poly sci majors and armchair political commentators. Let’s be honest. We are rarely “learning” from interaction with television. This has been true since…forever.

Temu wants your money. And, in the short term, they’re willing to lose $30 on every order to gain regular customers.

Part of their “clever” strategy is to have cheap products that they lose money on as well as slightly overpriced items that you could theoretically get a better deal (and possibly better quality) from Amazon (or elsewhere). Temu is competing with Shein, Zara’s parent company Inditex) and (maybe?) Wish (parent company: ContextLogic). Temu is similar to Wish but even more gamified and, frankly, predatory—from even a short glance at their techniques for getting you to buy. Lots of pressure with timed deals and the perception of a highly personalized experience.

Basically, it takes all the components of a social media app and combines them with a casino and uses a combination of brain hacking techniques that we are all highly susceptible to in order to create a sense of FOMO to get people to buy.

I should add that another heavy competitor is TikTok, which I was surprised to learn, just this week in fact, is fast becoming another major competitor to Amazon. I was shocked to learn how much people buy as a result of their time on TikTok and, my understanding is that TikTok is successfully getting people to buy from their app (affiliate links) with greater success than Instagram—and that’s saying something.

Here's NPR with a few tips about not getting taken in by marketing tricks when it comes to “sales” or “discounts” that may not be as good as they seem.

Study suggests [only] 70% of people feel cared for. This doesn’t sound great for the other 30%.

Favorite dog breeds by state.

Delaware goes its own way as usual.

Spotify Wrapped has led some to create “Dating Wrapped”

New Year Vision Board on Pinterest? Sure, why not.

Notably, Pinterest has been increasingly embraced internationally and has had a decline of use in the U.S.

Bullying… in the astronomy community.

‘How a bullying scandal closed a historic astronomy department’ (Nature)

“At Lund University in Sweden this week, astronomers moved out of a building that was custom-built to hold telescopes and other artefacts from their 350 years of history, and relocated to a physics building down the road. That’s because the astronomy department no longer exists, having been dissolved in the wake of a bullying scandal.”

“This is an insane situation,” says an astronomer who asked to remain anonymous because they are still at the university.

“A May 2020 employee survey revealed the long-running tensions: it found that 70% of respondents at the observatory had observed harassment and bullying in their workplace, although it didn’t name the people allegedly responsible.”

In water news…

“How to take ‘forever’ out of forever chemicals” (Nature)

“Science has named GLP-1 drugs the Breakthrough of the Year.” (Science.org)

New medications such as Wegovy or Ozempic are making society reconsider what body type means. In short, if people can more easily choose their physical appearance, what does your body say about your identity…?

Body politics have always been extremely complicated. A touchy subject. We know this.

A look into the wild world of Costco…

“Costco basically wants to provide insane value to consumers. They want you to get a better deal as a member than you could possibly get by shopping anywhere else. How do they go about doing this? They have enforced a strict cap on the margin that they are willing to make on any product. They have decided internally that they are not allowed to markup anything more than 14% above what the suppliers sell it to them for.”

“I'll tell you, they are tough but fair with their suppliers and making sure that they get a great price for their members. Costco decides, we will only markup anything a maximum of 14%. They actually do mark other things up less than that because things like electronics, they actually can only mark up 6%, 7%, 8%. Maximum is 14%. The only exception to this is Kirkland Signature, where they cheat a little bit and let themselves go up to 15%. Quite indulgent.

“How does this compare? I think that's the interesting thing here. A common practice at department stores is literally 100% markup. Someone gets a good for $50, they sell it for $100. Even at Walmart, a "discount" marks up 25%, which is almost twice as much as Costco's margin.”

“Jim Sinegal has a great quote on this. He was asked about it, and his response was, "You could raise the price of a bottle of ketchup to $1.03 instead of $1, and no one would know. Raising prices just 3% would add 50% to our pre tax income. Why not do it? It's like heroin. You do it a little bit, and you want a little more. Raising prices is the easy way."”

‘Broadway audiences are getting a little bit younger and more diverse’ (NPR)

“The report says that the average age of the Broadway theatergoer is 40.4 years old — the youngest demographic the League has seen in 20 seasons, but only 0.2% younger than in 2018 — and 65%, are female. Meanwhile, 29% of attendees self-identified as people of color, the highest percentage the League has had in its history of these reports. In 2018, that number was 25%.”

1 in 5 adults over age 65 are still working. (Pew Research)

Years ago, this would have been extremely surprising.

“Dr. Sarah Riccardi-Swartz, a professor of religion and anthropology at Northeastern University, explained in The Conversation what Trump is talking about. Autocrats like Orbán and Putin—and budding autocrats like Trump—are building a global movement by fighting back against the expansion of rights to women, minorities, and LGBTQ+ people.”

(Heather Cox Richardson, December 17, 2023)

‘YOUR MONEY

More than half of U.S. high school students will take a personal finance class before graduation, following the passage of a new Pennsylvania law’ (CNBC)

I’m really happy about this.

I’ve been saying for years that I wish I had been forced to take a class in high school that taught basic, necessary skills such as how to do your taxes. But, what I was really advocating for (this news piece reminds me) is adequate classroom time spent on personal finance.

Lacking this kind of basic information is a recipe for disaster. Credit card debt. Failure to understand compound interest. Not realizing that focusing on making money in your 20s is ideal for a vast number of reasons… including financial independence [later in your life] as well as the ability to establish a level of wealth that can provide ROI insofar as a secure future + enough money to have a higher chance at “happiness” and avoid the stress/anxiety of living paycheck to paycheck (and your average American not having more than $400 in emergency funds). I could go on & on.

12% of bird species

“Humans are probably responsible for the extinction of around 1,500 bird species over the past 126,000 years. (Nature)

Great apes and chimps can remember faces of friends and relatives for decades (phys.org)

“This unwillingness to fund a crucial partner in its fight against Russia has resurrected concerns that the Trump-supporting MAGA Republicans are working not for the United States but for Russian president Vladimir Putin, who badly needs the U.S. to abandon Ukraine in order to help him win his war.”

(Heather Cox Richardson, December 11, 2023)

“The vulnerability of the MAGA Republicans showed up in another way, today, too. Today is the eleventh anniversary of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, in which a 20-year-old murdered 20 children between the ages of six and seven years old, and six adult staff members. In that wake of that mass shooting, Americans demanded background checks for gun purchases, a policy supported by 90% of Americans. But the measure was killed in the Senate by lawmakers who represented just 38% of the American people.”

(Heather Cox Richardson, December 14, 2023)

“NATO has held strong in response to Putin’s war in Ukraine and rising challenges around the world,” Kaine said. He added that the legislation “to prevent any U.S. President from unilaterally withdrawing from NATO reaffirms U.S. support for this crucial alliance that is foundational for our national security. It also sends a strong message to authoritarians around the world that the free world remains united.” (Heather Cox Richardson, December 15, 2023)

“At the Washington, D.C., meeting, the attendees discussed how to “carry…forward the world of encouraging the fine arts as a function of the Federal Government.” Their first speaker was First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who “expressed her sympathy with the idea of the Government’s employing artists,” and all the other speakers followed suit. The following Monday, the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) opened its doors, and artists lined up outside government offices to apply. By Saturday, December 16, artists were receiving checks. When the project ended four months later, 3,749 artists had been on the payroll, producing more than 15,000 paintings, sculptures, and public murals.”

(Heather Cox Richardson, December 8, 2023)

The Boston Tea Party was 250 years ago.

The amount of tea destroyed in the Boston Tea Party (~90,000 pounds) is estimated (in today’s money) to be valued at between $1M to $1.7 million.

‘Philadelphia certified as sensory-inclusive; here's what that means for people with autism, ADHD and PTSD’ (Philly Voice)

x1000 (Seth Godin)

“One freakish storm is something many economies and communities have a chance to recover from. But 1,000 days of weird weather is more than we can handle.”

‘Scientists found out why reindeer eyes glow a vivid blue in the winter.’ (The Washington Post)

“Reindeers’ unique eyes change to let in more ultraviolet light. This makes it easier to find their favorite food, lichen, which absorbs UV light and appears dark in the snow.”

Hi, it’s me— a polar bear.

‘Polar bear fur-inspired sweater is thinner than a down jacket — and just as warm’ (Nature)

“Although the polar bear-inspired sweater was one-fifth as thick as the down jacket, it had the best insulation of all the garments.”

CNN created an “interactive” good news generator for 2023. (CNN)

Proof, I suppose, that all years have their moments.

Makes sense:

“All Star Home found that West Virginia is currently the most “house rich” state, with a home-to-income ratio of 2.53 and 74 percent of homes occupied by their owners. Iowa and Michigan were the second most house-rich states.” (All Star Home)

“While Biden and the Democrats are working hard to support the demand side of the economy, Republicans are firmly in the camp of the supply side. On this date in 2017, then-president Trump signed into law the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, sometimes referred to as the Trump tax cuts. Passed with Republican votes alone, the law cut tax rates for individuals until 2025 but made cuts in the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% permanent.” (Heather Cox Richardson, December 22, 2023)

::: News of The Weird :::

Rare quadruple rainbow.

‘Hermès billionaire plans to leave half of fortune to ex-gardener and cut ties with charity’ (Guardian)

“Nicolas Puech begins legal process of adopting former gardener and cancel agreement with charity.”

What is this a bizarro episode of The O.C.?

‘Brazilian Prison Swaps Out Guard Dogs for Guard Geese’

::: Google Trending Searches This Past Week :::

Everyone in every state is looking to save money.

Most of the country wants to learn how to save on their electric bill.

Parts of the Midwest and the whole West Coast are focused on saving on their taxes.

Alaska, New Mexico, Indiana, Louisiana, and Georgia are the states most focused on searching for ways to save on groceries.

In short, people want to know why everything is so expensive right now.

The People are not dumb. They have noticed a sharp increase in shrinkflation.

The People are a bit confused about how deflation works and, frankly, so am I.

OMM (On My Mind) – December 2023 – #4

~ findings & research ~

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