Last weekend the Canadian NDP, ostensibly the country’s labour and left socialist party (though you wouldn’t know it looking at some provincial or former federal versions of it), elected Avi Lewis as leader. Depending on your age your familiarity with Avi Lewis can vary drastically. For older, establishment Canadians he is a political nepobaby born into a longstanding political family. For younger folk he’s a documentarian and journalist who started as a talkshow and panel host for CBC, and later Al Jazeera. For those outside of Canada he’s probably best known as the husband of Naomi Klein – the correct Naomi – and one of the original signatories of the Leap Manifesto.

For me, and many 90s kids, he is the host of The NewMusic and MuchMusic’s political guy. Here’s his coverage of the Glastonbury festival in 1995, where he interviews Sinead O’Connor and Elastica (amongst others):

Some very mid-90s looks in this.

For the first time in my life I felt compelled to actually register for a Canadian political party and it was to support Avi. I’m glad I did, though my inbox being absolutely S P A M M E D during the leadership campaign by every nominee made me regret it at first. I don’t have too much analysis about what this means for the NDP, many others have done the work, and my confidence in Canadian electoral politics is absolutely shot, but there’s a glimmer of hope. Seeing most of Canadian (and international anglo) media immediately bash Avi Lewis makes that hope glow brighter. 

Here’s a short interview with the right Naomi from the leadership convention:

And here’s her Guardian essay about The rise of end times fascism from last year, with Astra Taylor.

If we weren’t living in “end times fascism” I’d have been glued to the Artemis II mission. I was such a space kid. I did projects on space probes and imagined future missions. I read and owned all kinds of astronomy books. I had a telescope. I wanted to study astronomy until computers ruined my brain. A rocket sending humans farther into space than ever? Young me would have loved this.

Yet I just can’t in good conscience find any interest in this mission, even with a Canadian onboard, during times like this. 

That said I loved seeing this story about the Artemis II pilot Victor Glover, a black man, having a weekly tradition of listening to Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon” every Monday. And I hope that the return is as uneventful (except for Outlook being unresponsive) as the launch because the real danger lies in re-entry.

And literally as I write this I tuned into the Artemis II live feed, after flying around the moon, and I hear Donald Trump’s meandering voice. After this weekend of lunacy (pun intended) and the threats of war crimes for this coming week, it was the last thing I wanted. Even at 400,000km you can’t avoid this idiot.

Last week Rusty Foster¹ at Today in Tabs had a good newsletter: “Who Goes AI?” The very next day Toronto’s own Stephen Marche wrote in The Guardian “I wrote a novel using AI.” “Who Goes AI?” is a daily question.

Though I have been paid some dollars in the past for writing I am not a professional writer. I am not published. I do not have renown or degrees or credentials. My style is clumsy. I make many mistakes. And that’s fine. I’m learning and I’m finding my words and my style in the process. In an obtuse way this is me saying that I would never go AI. Not in writing. Not in doing the research for the writing. I disable grammar suggestions² and I pepper everything with hyperlinks because in the age of context collapse they remain the currency of network expansion.

Does this promise make anything I write better? Oh no. If anything, it’s probably worse. But it’s mine.

1. I was looking through some old accounts in my inbox recently and realized that an old and stupid tinyletter I had many years ago had Rusty as a subscriber. I ended that one after a few emails and never kept any continuity. Had I kept at things those ages ago when there was momentum maybe I wouldn’t be starting from zero all these years later. 

2. My spelling is OK though auto-correct does get deployed sometimes, though I will note that spelling correction in documents has been a solved problem for decades before LLMs existed.

Related Links

Don't Let AI Write For You

As it’s about technical writing the conclusion of this is predictably too AI-apologetic for my tastes, though the initial points are correct.

The Entire Internet Is a UGC Reaction Video Now

Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted? | The New Yorker. Per Betteridge's law of headlines: No. Absolutely not. None of them can be trusted. RIP Aaron Swartz, a real one.

Listen to this

Los Retros, a project from Mexican-American Mauri Tapia, just released Odisea: an album so, so indebted to bubble-era Japanese City Pop that it is City Pop. I missed the lead single (and video) from February. It’s a chill jam. I will be digging into the rest of the album this week.

To quote the unescapable Trump literally today: “I’m good at language.” I try,

sometimes.