SC Weekly – January 2025 – #4

~ a curated selection of discoveries ~

Jan 26, 2025

::: The Open :::

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::: Personal Notes :::

Well, that was a lot of days of being sick. Likely related, at least in part, to anxiety/stress about Trump 2.0. And here we are. Trump wasted no time as a chaos agent.

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Constantly feeling behind is no fun…

There’s a bunch I’d love to write about if I could buy my time back… including a piece I’ve been wanting to write questioning how writers buy their time back. And unsurprising Catch-22. More on this below as it so happens.

::: ONE ART :::

Upcoming reading!

Sunday, February 9 — 2pm (Eastern)
Featured Poets: Alison Lubar, Sean Kelbley, Jacqueline Jules, Dick Westheimer, Julie Weiss
Tickets available here (Free or Donation)

Other reading line-ups are in progress for the rest of the 2025 calendar year.

Upcoming workshop!

“Stealth Formalism”: Avoiding the Pitfalls of Formal Verse
Instructor: Nicole Caruso Garcia
Date: Tuesday, February 18, 2025
Time: 6:00-8:00pm Eastern
Price: $25 (payment options – Stripe / PayPal / Venmo / CashApp)

::: Podcasts :::

Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion (Hidden Brain)

I teared up during part of this episode. That is usually reserved for watching scenes with dialogue written by Aaron Sorkin.

‘Defeating Trump’s Chaos Playbook with Our New Age of Insistence’

An intense conversation between Stacey Abrams and Melissa Murray on Assembly Required.

Highly recommend. I liked this more than the post-inauguration conversation I listened to with the guys on Pod Save America. PSA was a bit of a ramble session. This was more focused and had stronger takeaways.

Why DEI Scares Trump and Project 2025 and Why It Should

(Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams)

This is the second time in fairly recent history that I’ve listened to a podcast episode on DEI and realized there’s a lot more going on than what we tend to think we know about DEI initiatives. I think many of us are under a false pretense believing that DEI is just a newer Affirmative Action. There’s more. Much more.

‘Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister (We Can Do Hard Things)

Lots of important ferocity in this episode where we hear knowledgeable women discuss historical shifts for white and Black women and how the contemporary socio-political landscape is not, well, all that contemporary. We’ve been here before. While scary, I would like to believe that at least listeners, specifically women listeners, would feel empowered (dare I say emboldened) by this conversation.

The conversation is a reminder that what we’re going through really is precedented. And we need to stop saying it’s unprecedented when, in fact, there is precedent. American history is rife with horrors. And that shifts have historically happened in the U.S. in approximately “75 year cycles”. The 20^th century had a period of liberal politics that, as discussed in the episode, we may not see again for the in the near-term. Gen Z and Gen Alpha don’t have memories of a time before we had Donald Trump as a political figure. They do not have memories of 9/11. Worth stopping to remind ourselves about the state of play.

Brittney Cooper might be the most sane, down-to-earth, pragmatic person I’ve heard talk about our current situation since Trump won the election.

Adam Kinzinger on The Bulwark Podcast

A conversation with Adam Kinzinger about the current horror. At the end of the discussion Kinzinger confirms that surprisingly it was The Daily Mail (not exactly known for their journalistic integrity) who broke a story on his act of heroism back in 2006.

Kinzinger is a good interview and has chosen to align himself with the right side of history, which is appreciated and respectable.

The New Masculinity (ON BOYS Podcast)

Interview with Canadian writer Alex Manley. Manley identifies as nonbinary and notes the irony of having to grow up moving through the world with the last name “Manley”.

Lots of good stuff here in the vein of positive discussion about masculinity you’ll also hear (presented differently though) from folks like Richard Reeves and Scott Galloway.

::: The Literary Community & Beyond :::

Which Countries Publish The Most Books?

Yeah, you could’ve guessed.

Best Microfiction 2025 selections

Was anyone doubting Virginia Woolf was the fun aunt?

Fun throwback:

‘Twitter Doesn't Want to Let the Poets Find Out About Science’ (Electric Literature)

A fun read. I missed this “trend” when it was happening in real time… or simply do not recall.

::: Health & Wellness :::

‘Early Warning Signs You’re Becoming ‘Frail’—and How to Prevent It as You Age’ (SELF)

Having asthma since childhood and… other issues… have meant that (to my embarrassment and displeasure) I have felt frail for most of my life. It’s not a good time. I’ve wanted to avoid feeling frail for a long time… but genetics, nature, nurture, environmental factors— these factors are difficult to sidestep. Sigh. Feeling frail simply isn’t an ideal way to move through the world.

We will inevitably keep learning that GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy have downsides.

::: Trump 2.0 :::

Oligarchy? Kleptocracy?

When it comes down to it, the disturbing aspect is how many Americans seem to have willingly bought in.

I’m currently reading Yuval Noah Harari’s Nexus which provides a clear and sobering description of the precarious territory that America has entered.

Trump will begin his presidency in delicate position, poll finds

Many are concerned about Elon Musk… and for good reason.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at New York University, said: "Historian of fascism here. It was a Nazi salute and a very belligerent one too." (BBC)

“The farm bureau said just the threat of deportation could be enough to deter many of the 55,000 migrant workers the valley needs to operate during harvest season. 'They’re not going to show up for work and that means crops will remain in the field and not be harvested and probably lost at that point.'" A few years ago, under the same president, we all called these laborers essential workers.” (Next Draft)

Bishop vs. Trump

Bishop Mariann Budde: 'I won't apologize' for sermon (NPR)

Deep respect.

::: Small Explorations & Deep Dives :::

‘What Spotify took from us by giving us everything’ (The Verge)

“Art and commerce are unholy bedfellows, and nowhere more so than in the music industry — never a savory business, not in the mob days and not now.”

Great first line. We've been hearing variations on this story quite often now. What strikes me as notable about this one is that it paints a portrait that sounds alarmingly like some of the less positive aspects of the literary community when commerce enters into the conversation. Also, the attention economy and what work draws views.

Time Spent Using Smartphones (2024 Statistics)

This is… distressing. And unsurprising.

No Buy 2025?

Some millennials and Gen Z folks are taking to “No Buy 2025” with the aim of discouraging unnecessary spending and battling financial precarity. The pledge to only buy “essentials” (vague), save/invest, and promote healthy habits.

As an ever-aspiring minimalist this sounds positive, overall.

The Attention Economy – How can we get our time back?

The following are excerpts from an essay in The Atlantic by Chris Hayes which is adapted from his new book.

“If attention is the substance of life, then the question of what we pay attention to is the question of what our lives will be.” – Chris Hayes

“You hear complaints about the gap between what we want to pay attention to and what we end up paying attention to all the time in the attention age. Someone ambitiously brings three new novels on vacation and comes back having read only a third of one of them because she was sucked into scrolling through Instagram. Reading is a particular focus of these complaints, I find. Everyone, including myself, complains that they can’t read long books anymore. We have a sense that our preferences haven’t changed—I still like to read—just our behavior. And the reason our behavior has changed is that someone has taken something from us. Someone has subtly, insidiously coerced us.”

“But maybe we have multiple selves who want different things—a self who wants to read, a self who wants to scroll. There’s a tension here between different aspects of the self that can be hard to reconcile. We contend with what our superego wants (to go on vacation and read novels) and what our actual self does (scrolls through Instagram). As is so often the case, our revealed preferences are different from our stated ones. And who is to say what our real and true desire is?”

“We are not required to suffer under the current form of attention capitalism forever, or even for that much longer. We can create alternative markets for attention, alternative institutions, and businesses that create models different from those that now dominate. We can also create noncommercial spaces where we can pay attention to one another, our hobbies, and our interests and communities without that attention being captured, bought, and sold. And there is yet another path forward that is more radical than these other approaches, one that fundamentally relies on people voluntarily creating new alternatives: We can regulate attention.”

“We as a society can say that children’s attention should not be sold and commodified in the aggressive and alienating fashion of current social-media networks. Just as 12-year-olds can’t really consent to a wage contract, we could argue they can’t really consent to the expropriation of their attention in the way that, say, Instagram exploits it.”

“But what about adults? What if we decided to apply the basic lessons of labor law to attention and simply impose limits on how much attention can be monetized from us?”

“One of the earliest slogans pushing the eight-hour workday was “Eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, and eight hours for what we will.” It feels as if more and more of that leisure time is now taken from us, not willed by us. Our control over the space of our mind, stolen. Are we really spending the precious hours of our waking, nonworking lives doing “what we will”? Or has the conquering logic of the market penetrated our quietest, most intimate moments?”

What do we do? How do we get our time back?

There’s an essay I’ve been wanting to write questioning how writers/artists “buy” their time back (to work on the work that matters most to them).

Please feel free to share your insights/experiences/suggestions.

AI Future

Meta's Yann LeCun predicts 'new paradigm of AI architectures' within 5 years and 'decade of robotics' (TechCrunch)

“Speaking in a session dubbed “Debating Technology” at Davos on Thursday, LeCun said that the “flavor of AI” that we have at the moment — that is, generative AI and large language models (LLMs) — isn’t really up to all that much. It’s useful, sure, but falls short on many fronts.”
I think the shelf life of the current [LLM] paradigm is fairly short, probably three to five years,” LeCun said. “I think within five years, nobody in their right mind would use them anymore, at least not as the central component of an AI system. I think [….] we’re going to see the emergence of a new paradigm for AI architectures, which may not have the limitations of current AI systems.”
These “limitations” inhibit truly intelligent behavior in machines, LeCun says. This is down to four key reasons: a lack of understanding of the physical world; a lack of persistent memory; a lack of reasoning; and a lack of complex planning capabilities.

“Humanity’s Last Exam”

Doesn’t sound ominous at all…

A classic example of benchmarking…ok, I’m kidding, I just can’t help but make corporate speak jokes nowadays.

So…yeah… a test designed to show the limits of human knowledge so we’re more confident about dusting our hands off and saying “Well that’s that” once we’ve seemingly created something preterhuman.

Grim future prospect.

On a light note… White Lotus was signed on for another season (Season 4).

Season 3 premieres February 16.

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

Poetry Town – daily poems

Chill Subs – down to earth submissions resource

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

Becky Tuch’s LitMagNews – literary community news & essential resource

Trish Hopkinson – resource for the literary community