[a pleasurable headache]
It's a bit of an odd one this week as I started this entry way before the allotted Sunday release time. The plan was for me to run a 10K this weekend, the first I've done in quite a while. Training time has been severely limited by Florence's arrival and also getting Covid. Twice.
Florence has recently started nursery and, lo and behold, the first major illness caught from there has manifested itself in the form of a wonderful bout of sickness and diarrhea. Not only that, but there's a chance she may have passed it on to me. So it's touch and go whether I run that 10K after all. Best laid plans and all that.
Moving on, the aforementioned The Perfectly Fine Neighborhood that I have a story in releases on October 1st.
You can find a link to pre-order the print or eBook copy here. Once again, I find it bizarre that I'm featuring on a TOC with the luminaries who grace the front cover above. Unreal.
The other stories in the volume are fantastic and I can't wait to get stuck in myself. It's a no-brainer, especially if you have a Kindle.
Links
We’re In the Midst of an Epidemic of Fake Karens
Fake Viral Karen Videos Are Taking Over the Internet – Rolling Stone
Viral videos featuring meltdowns are clearly staged — but no one really cares
"Welcome to the world of Fake Karens, an emerging subgenre of content that is taking the internet by storm. The Karen is a reliable stock character in viral videos, whose smugness, entitlement, and outrage-inducing behavior is likely to garner hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of views. Large accounts like KarenClips, which has more than 393,000 followers on X (formerly Twitter), and Super Krazy Karens on TikTok, take a curatorial approach to such content, posting videos with captions such as “Karen at Starbucks Strikes Again!” and “Karen taking Ls!” In so doing, they capitalize on the current cultural appetite both for righteous outrage and, in some cases, for retribution, with many commenters working diligently to try to identify the Karens in the videos for public shaming purposes. (The fact that they’re big meme accounts that do not credit the source material also accomplishes the goal of obfuscating their origins.)"
We're that desperate to be outraged that content creators are inventing scenarios to scratch that itch. I imagine most people fathom they are fake, but don't care.
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Naomi Klein on following her ‘doppelganger’ down the conspiracy rabbit hole – and why millions of people have entered an alternative political reality
Naomi Klein on following her ‘doppelganger’ down the conspiracy rabbit hole – and why millions of people have entered an alternative political reality | Naomi Klein | The Guardian
For years the writer laughed off being mistaken for fellow author Naomi Wolf. Then her ‘double’ drifted into a world of conspiracy theories and became a favoured guest of Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson. With the US standing on a political precipice, suddenly the stakes were a lot higher
An excerpt of Naomi Klein's new book about Naomi Wolf and the conspiracy-focused media apparatus that feeds/pays her. Klein is often mistaken for Wolf, blamed for her actions, vilified on social media for Wolf's comments and decided to delve deeper into the world Wolf inhabits.
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James Ellroy Reveals the Real Reason He Writes
James Ellroy Reveals the Real Reason He Writes ‹ CrimeReads
“A literature that cannot be vulgarized is no literature at all, and will not last.” Frank O’Connor laid it out. He wrote the words at the cusp of the 20th century. Said words prophesied the …
Ellroy has a new book out. Here, he is absolutely back on his bullshit in this piece for CrimeReads and I love it.
"I read the L.A. Herald cover to cover. The daily news vexed me. I was prone to vexation and jejune rage. I was set to start high school in September. It scared me. Everything scared me and enraged me. I lived to read hard-boiled crime novels. I recast myself as the frontier male up against urban estrangement. I talked to women who weren’t in the room with me. That habit persists to this day. I was learning to shut the world out and live within myself. I was that way in ’62. I’m that way today. The summer of ’62 was an all-time horrorshow-blast. I knew I’d write a book about it one day."
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The Ripper
The Ripper | The New Yorker
Staying slightly on topic, David Peace is often considered a British version of Ellroy. His Red Riding quartet spans decades and deals with conspiracy and police corruption on a grand scale. I thoroughly recommend them. The TV/movie adaptations are also pretty good (they slimmed it down to a trilogy). I hadn't read this New Yorker piece he wrote which serves as a kind of short 'origin story' for his obsession with crime and the Yorkshire Ripper in particular.
"In the summer and fall of 1980, the Yorkshire Ripper killed two more women, both in Leeds, but by then I had stopped snipping out articles and photographs. I no longer wanted to be the boy detective who caught the Yorkshire Ripper. Now I only wanted for him to stop before he killed somebody else’s wife, somebody else’s daughter. Or mother. This man who had killed thirteen women and left twenty-five children motherless. I begged my mother never, ever to leave our house, and, with my sister, I prayed out loud ten times every night: “Dear God, please don’t let the Ripper kill my mummy.”
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The people of Ecuador just made climate justice history. The world can follow
The people of Ecuador just made climate justice history. The world can follow | Steven Donziger | The Guardian
Voters won a huge battle with the oil industry – proving that we can’t save the planet without robust democracy
Absolutely outstanding news. In my hopeful hear I wish this event would provide a template for others to follow. M
"Days ago, voters in Ecuador approved a total ban on oil drilling in protected land in the Amazon, a 2.5m-acre tract in the Yasuní national park that might be the world’s most important biodiversity hotspot. The area is a Unesco-designated biosphere reserve and home to two non-contacted Indigenous groups. This could be a major step forward for the entire global climate justice movement in ways that are not yet apparent."
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It’s Official: Cars Are the Worst Product Category We Have Ever Reviewed for Privacy
https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/articles/its-official-cars-are-the-worst-product-category-we-have-ever-reviewed-for-privacy/In a development that will surprise no-one who reads this newsletter, Tesla was the worst manufacturer overall.
"Tesla is only the second product we have ever reviewed to receive all of our privacy “dings.” (The first was an AI chatbot we reviewed earlier this year.) What set them apart was earning the “untrustworthy AI” ding. The brand’s AI-powered autopilot was reportedly involved in 17 deaths and 736 crashes and is currently the subject of multiple government investigations."
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What would happen if the world cut meat and milk consumption in half?
What would happen if the world cut meat and milk consumption in half? | Grist
A new paper finds that swapping meat for plant-based foods would have wide-reaching benefits.
"Swapping 50 percent of the world’s beef, chicken, pork, and milk consumption with plant-based alternatives by mid-century could effectively halt the ecological destruction associated with farming, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, China, and Southeast Asia, according to the study in Nature Communications. Such a dietary shift could also lead to a 31 percent reduction in agricultural greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, the study found. That’s the equivalent of not burning 1.8 trillion pounds of coal each year between 2020 and 2050."
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I'm off to cross my fingers. See you in two!