We’re halfway through 2023 and I’ve managed to actually maintain doing this newsletter every week! This is not an impressive achievement for most people but for me it’s pretty good. Thanks for reading it!
I want to be able to know precisely how cruelly we have robbed ourselves.
“I don’t know how to write about all that hasn’t happened since the fall of Roe”, Alexandra Petri for The Washington Post
Some things I remember from this time last year: sitting alone at my kitchen table numbly staring at my phone, going to a rally with Melissa and running into George (seeing George, who I know from Occupy Wall Street, is always a gift but George at a protest is at his most radiant), being unsure if going to a yoga class would just make me more angry and being vaguely reassured by the fact even the Lululemon-bedecked rich moms were furious and distraught and everyone understood no amount of wellness koans would improve the circumstances.
I am often ambivalent about making art at times like this—caught between is this important when things are so bad and getting worse and this is so important precisely because things are bad and getting worse. It is difficult when one is overcome by all the doom to not make art where the audience’s role is, as Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba describe it in Let This Radicalize You, merely “doom appreciator.” And I worry that Petri’s desire for a detailed inventory of unfathomable losses is a kind of doom appreciator demand, but I certainly understand it.
Once, he stayed up 36 hours straight labeling elbows and knees and heads in photographs of crowds — he has no idea why.
“Inside the AI Factory”, Josh Dzieza for The Verge and New York
Haunted by the idea of an Only Elbows and Knees and Heads AI model and the kind of person who decided it was necessary.
The thin cream of Daly City was still dribbling through the door, posing for Jenna Lila’s camera with the self-importance of the small-town big time.
The Shamshine Blind, Paz Pardo
Full disclosure that I went to high school with Paz. And Paz writing an alternate history sci-fi noir set in Daly City in which Argentina has become a world superpower through inventing color pigments that can psychologically manipulate people is extremely on brand.
Every year I sought to perfect the recipe, never getting close, sometimes getting further away.
“Maintaining a Private Cult”, Sam Dolbear for Vittles
Submitted by v.
Earth may be a spooky place but it is quite often a familiar place riddled with predictable, productive, and nourishing forces.
“Mine/Machine”, Mazen Labben for Dialogues in Human Geography
I often feel bad for Mazen Labban that he wrote a very good academic journal article that introduced a concept he called “the planetary mine” and when Martín Arboleda ran with that concept in his book Planetary Mine (in which, to be fair, he cites Labben for the concept) it became more associated with Arboleda’s book, which in my particular niche of research interests feels like a book everyone doing critical mining-related stuff is obligated to cite even if they didn’t really like it. This sentence comes from a review of the book that Labben wrote, which is honestly more generous to Arboleda than I am but I’m also not fully committed to the project of academia which means I am more easily annoyed by the academic tendency to spend thirty pages making sure the reader understands exactly which kind of Marxist the author is. I like that this sentence uses the words “spooky” and “nourishing”; has the feeling of two great tastes you wouldn’t expect to work together.
You look like a well-read fisherman with secrets.
Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023)
Oh, don’t act like you’re better than torrenting the Dungeons and Dragons movie on a Friday night. You know who says this line? HUGH GRANT. And he says it with gusto, baby! Just enjoy the silly little fantasy romp that was clearly made by people who love the game, don’t be a baby about it.