We gather here today in praise and fellowship for the first time since the Inauguration. I streamed the ceremony with Finn as we started our morning last Wednesday; I shared a few internet pictures of Bernie Sanders looking adorably grouchy in his parka and mittens; I hoped that I’d wake the next day with a feeling of relief, or even joy. But the reality is, I mostly just feel weariness; and a wave, rising to fill the space now open in my heart, of grief.
Does anyone else here feel it, too—a grief they’ve long put off just now catching up? A grief for all that’s been lost, violated, and despoiled in the last year since the first reported COVID cases in the US? In the four years of the last administration? In the last four hundred years in this country, my country, our beautiful and unjust country?
The numbers of those harmed by our government’s ineptitude and dishonesty and our society’s cruel inequalities are huge, but my mind shuts down before huge numbers. I’m grieving today instead for individuals. I’m grieving for Sonny Quitlong, whose voice was one of the first I ever heard at St. Mary’s when my mom invited me to mass in 2005, almost a decade before I joined the church. I’m grieving for the more than a dozen federal prisoners who our outgoing administration—led by a Catholic Attorney General—rushed to execute. I’m grieving for Ashli Babbitt, who soaked up years of racist, paranoid conspiracy theories, who stormed the Capitol and who died for a lie.
Our new administration can rush to repair some of the damage done, but it cannot restore any of these earthly lives. As I read the news, my own hope for our nation feels weak: not snuffed out, but flickering. So where do these readings call me to go, and how to do they tell me to make my way?
Some Sundays, the readings are a balm, a relief. But my first reaction to these readings was irritation, uneasiness, sorrow, and fear. An ancient city whose citizens are fasting in sackcloth; Jesus proclaiming repentance; St. Paul warning us that the world in its present form is passing away. Agh! I want to push these readings away, but I do so because of a disquiet I know begins from a recognition of their truth. The fragility of our sense of “normal” is clear to us even as we try to clutch it. Who in the two weeks since the storming of the Capitol, in the last year since COVID, in the last four years since Trump’s victory, could deny that our certainties are weak and that our old comforts are passing away?
So, it was with a gloomy heart that I read of the start of Jesus’s public ministry. “Repent,” he says, “and believe in the gospel.” This was a message those around him were hungry for. “Widen your mind,” this admonition might also be translated, “and trust and commit yourself to the good news.” Good news, good news: in our country’s provincial Galilees and in our imperial Ninevehs, the news doesn’t seem very good. But it is into these very places, into this very history, that Jesus enters.
Perhaps it’s this entry—the One Who Was before the foundation of the world coming as one of us, flesh and blood, into our history—that teaches us how to hear the other readings.
St. Paul’s message, otherwise, is hard to stomach. I want—don’t we all?—to treasure my dearest relationships, to give myself fully to my weeping and rejoicing, to fully enjoy all my impulse online purchases that have gotten me through this pandemic. Although this is a terribly fraught moment for our nation, I don’t wish to believe that time is running out and passing away. “No great reckoning in my child’s lifetime,” I pray; as, perhaps Finn will pray if they become a parent. But St. Paul is merely reminding us of something obvious: we can’t make idols of anything temporary in our lives: our home, our loved ones, our families, our society. Who knows what the future holds? How many of those who stormed the Capitol did so because they’d attached their entire sense of well-being, their entire hope, to a deep investment in our fanatical, paranoid former president? All that endures is God. Helplessly, tenderly, committedly, all I can do is acknowledge that things pass away and try to make God more real in the world.
So OK, how do we do it? How do we go about making God more real? In our Old Testament reading, we hear Jonah, humbled and zealous after three days in the fish’s belly, offering God’s frightening call of repentance to the Ninevites. If you’re like me, the place names in much of the Bible exude a musty but lovely remoteness that means they’re hard to place specifically: they all seem to exist next door to each other in a place called Distant, in a time called Long Ago. So, I was surprised to learn in my research that Nineveh was not in Israel or Judea: Nineveh, instead, was the capital of the neighboring Assyrian Empire, which had recently devastated Israel and sacked Jerusalem. So this means that Jonah, urged along by God, travels to the capital of his people’s enemies to attempt to awaken their hearts to their sin: to their complicity in terrible wrongdoing. He is sent here because the Ninevites, as impossible as it is for Jonah to believe, are precious to God; and Jonah awakens in them a grief that can be the first seed of real transformation.
Who are those who have hurt us? How can we be ready to acknowledge them as they make small changes—as they mourn their own pasts? I think of Ashley Babbitt’s family. What would true healing look like for them? And how, turning the scenario around, can we listen for the Jonahs in our own lives, in our own culture—the youth in the streets calling us to account for our own toleration of racist state violence, the undocumented organizers demanding we actually practice the welcome we always preach? Who is reminding us that we, too, live in Nineveh right now? How can our tears be the first seeds toward a true repentance, a metanoia that widens our hearts and our human solidarity?
The last question of these readings is, where should this repentance carry us? One answer comes in the place to which Jesus returns after his forty days in the wilderness: his old hometown. I was surprised to learn that Galilee, a place whose name I’d sung in so many hymns and savored saying aloud, was looked down on by most Judeans. One of my favorite Bible study guides, Father Gustavo Gutierrez’s book The God of Life, notes that Galilee was remote and provincial, suspiciously close to pagan communities who affected its culture as well as its dialect. (Remember the servant in front of high priest’s house at the end of Matthew’s gospel, who recognizes in a moment that Peter must be one of Jesus’s followers: “even your speech,” she says, “gives you away.”) Yet Jesus begins his ministry precisely by returning to his home district, among the despised and marginal, to proclaim his message—to call us to widen our hearts and to trust and commit ourselves to his good news—and gather his first followers.
But grief comes with hearing this call. Grief at what we’ve lost. Grief at the terrible injustices we’ve accepted, one way or another, as normal. Grief for the future. As Jesus calls us to repentance—metanoia, a widening of mind—our tears are a part of letting Jesus closer to us, letting his wounded but unbreakable love for each human soul pierce us. As in Galilee, as in Nineveh, so in Seattle: tears clear our eyes. In taking our lament to God, we are refusing to forget the suffering we’ve felt, we’ve witnessed, we’ve been complicit in. In our lament, as Sister Elizabeth A. Johnson writes, we refuse to rationalize injustice. We even “express the shadow of a hope for the future.” On the other side of our lament, we can discern more clearly that Jesus is speaking to us, right now, from the fringes of our own society: from the COVID beds, prison cells, neighborhoods surveilled by ICE. “Even today, as Christ sits at [God’s] right hand,” Gutierrez tells us, “some of Galilee’s dust must still be on his feet.”
May I remember that my tears are part of my hope for a more just future; that tears let God into my heart; that tears can guide my feet toward walking alongside those whose dignity, whose beauty, whose humanity are most defiled by this old “normal” that is passing away. May I weep! And at the end of my life, may I be able to show Christ that my feet, too, are dirtied by Galilee’s dust.
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Hi dears. A few times a year I pull together my notes on the essays, Twitter threads, podcasts, and bird memes that have stuck with me, challenged me, or taught me something. Here you go:
1 and 2. Elizabeth Weil, “They Know How to Prevent Megafires. Why Won’t Anybody Listen?” and Marissa Correia, “The Real Cause of California Wildfires.” As I write this, Seattle is blanketed with noxious, purple-gray haze from massive wildfires in Washington and Oregon; 3.4 million acres of California have burned. Why is this happening? Weil, a California journalist, writes: “We keep doing overzealous fire suppression across California landscapes where the fire poses little risk to people and structures. As a result, wildland fuels”–dry grass, dead trees, and dense groundcover–“keep building up. At the same time, the climate grows hotter and drier. Then, boom: the inevitable.” Weil profiles numerous Cassandras, ecologists and fire experts who’ve warned of the dangers decade after decade yet still grimly watch as California steadily deepens its fuel imbalance.
There’s only one large-scale solution, say Weil’s experts: more good fire, creating “a black-and-green checkerboard across the state,” creating dampers and dead ends past which seasonal fires couldn’t spread. But barriers to this include fire politics, property laws, and the size of good fire needed to restabilize. Academics believe that, before colonization and genocide by the Spanish and Americans, “between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres [of California] burned each year,” generally in many much-smaller fires. By comparison, in the last twenty years, California’s fire-management organizations permitted only 13,000 acres of annual controlled burns. Though the state is slowly facilitating more burns, the backlog of fuel on the ground is just too huge. “In February 2020, Nature Sustainability published this terrifying conclusion: California would need to burn 20 million acres — an area about the size of Maine — to restabilize in terms of fire.”
California’s indigenous communities understood fire and practiced controlled burning. These communities had observed that, as Correia notes, “fire helps soil retain water, keeps brushy vegetation down, encourages growth of native plants, helps certain trees reproduce and kills off pathogens and overpopulation of destructive insects.” But these communities were ravaged by disease, pushed out, politically marginalized, or exterminated; white cultural memory in the state was deeply imprinted by the devastating fires following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which killed 3,000 and left more than 100,000 homeless: fire became an adversary.
In that time, Correia writes, California was crowded with invasive grasses such as wild oats, an annual that depletes water (forcing out fire-resistant native perennial bunch grasses) and then dies in the summer heat, leaving a dry, brittle, flammable blanket. The state has also been plagued with pine beetles, who live longer due to the warmer weather and loss of predators; the beetles leave tinder-y dead pines throughout drought-afflicted California forests.
In the same period, California’s fire control agencies have become a big business, approaching $1 billion in federal aid this year and contracting full fire suppression (including hugely costly aerial spraying) out to private agencies. By comparison, “planning a prescribed burn is cumbersome”; while a wildfire is an emergency, a planned burn “need[s] to follow all environmental compliance rules” (meaning it can be canceled because of smog levels elsewhere in the state, etc). Such a burn is also politically risky: “Burn bosses in California can more easily be held liable than their peers in some other states if the wind comes up and their burn goes awry. At the same time, [they] typically suffer no consequences for deciding not to light.”
Weil concludes that a healthy state fire policy would require residents to include intentional fire in their land management plans, and to “rethink our ideas of what a healthy California looks like”–including, possibly, acclimating to the idea of regionally smoky skies for much of the summer, as early white settlers reported. One leader in returning to intentional fire is the Yurok Tribe, who were only recently permitted by changing conservation regulations to resume their historical practice of controlled burns.
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3. What spell does this cast for you? Bruce Springsteen in Paris in 1985, singing “I’m on Fire”: I’ll always adore Jo Barchi, a poet I’ve never, like, “met,” for sharing it.
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4. Kevin Henderson and Joseph J. Fischel, “Four Ways to Escape a Sex Panic.” Progressive mayor and part-time U Mass adjunct Alex Morse’s run against long-time House Rep. Richard Neal was torpedoed by bogus homophobic smears about his romantic and sexual life. These attacks were found to be politically motivated, concocted by the state party and by U Mass College Democrats seeking jobs in Neal’s office, but this late revelation wasn’t enough to sway the election’s outcome: Neal won 59-41%. Henderson and Fischel examine the how of moral panic: an exaggerated threat to social order used “stoke public fear, fear that is politically and financially profitable.” Sex panics exist “the confluence of stakeholder manipulation, media sensationalism, and political, regressive fallout too easily triggered by sex—stubbornly and especially queer sex.” The term points to important questions: “How does one measure the difference between wrongful panic and rightful concern?… Might the charge of ‘panic’ glibly trivialize sexual violence?” How can we discern when we’re being manipulated? Henderson and Fischel offer four pointers:
First, “when there’s only smoke, look for a smoke machine”: beware of claims without specifics, or sentences without subjects (from the College Democrats’ attack of Morse: “Where such a lopsided power dynamic exists, consent becomes complicated”). The fuzziness of this claim masks the fact that “there is no charge that the small-town mayor had sexual relationships with a subordinate, an intern, or one of his students.” So where’s the smoke coming from?
Second, “reread the accusations.” As Lisa Duggan writes, “when the terms ‘sexual abuse’ or ‘sexual harassment’ are replaced with ‘sexual misconduct’ or ‘inappropriate sexual behavior,’ that is a red flag that we are leaving the arena of critical politics for the landscape of moral judgment.” It feels, well, gross to some people that Morse, a 31-year-old, had sex with college students (though not his own). The authors write that they, personally, differ “about whether to favor university bans on sexual contact with all undergraduates (‘categorical’) or only those you personally instruct (‘supervisory’),” while acknowledging that “for some students, perhaps especially queer ones looking at smaller dating pools, the categorical ban may itself be a deprivation.”
Third, “be uncomfortable with ‘uncomfortable.'” The College Democrats’ letter wrote that Morse made (again, unnamed) students feel uncomfortable by DMing them on Instagram or matching with them on Tinder, to which these authors bluntly reply: “Nobody has a right not to be uncomfortable. The rhetorical conversion of discomfort into harm and abuse can only serve a sex-negative culture that heaps scorn and shame upon queers, women, and gender minorities, whose bodies and pleasures will too often be sources of “discomfort” under prevailing norms of propriety, monogamy, and coupledom… Morse is not required to come out as a mayor whenever he flirts or has sex. It is the weaponization of discomfort that criminalizes trans men for not having ‘proper anatomy’ in their sexual relations; that disproportionately criminalizes Black men for HIV nondisclosure; that legitimates, or used to, straight men’s violence against transgender women; and that licenses ‘gay panic’ as a criminal defense. Discomfort may signal when something is awry, but it might equally reiterate bias, stereotype, and prejudice. Feelings aren’t facts.”
Finally, “Look around for a politicalcontest.” There’s a long and ugly history of sex panics targeting queers, leading to antigay violence and rollbacks of civil rights; in this case, the attacks on Morse stuck enough to cost him a victory against an entrenched corporate Democrat.
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5. Chris Arnade, “The Non-Voter” and Glenn Greenwald, “Nonvoters Are Not Privileged.” Yes, GOP voter suppression is real and pernicious, but nonvoting is overwhelmingly a choice, and those who don’t vote are disproportionately poorer, younger, less educated, and nonwhite. (But the nonvoting population does not skew left or right: progressive- and conservative-identified people are just as likely not to vote.) Arnade, a photographer and journalist who works among Americans surviving poverty and addiction, writes experientially: “Not voting is about a justified cynicism forged from a lifetime of being screwed over by the status quo… In their minds, and from their experiences, voting has no clear upside… Voting means entering institutions that have given them problems. From schools, where they were tested, measured, and prodded endlessly, only to be then ignored, scolded, or demeaned. To municipal buildings where they were taxed, fined, or charged. Voting means interacting with a class of people who filled and embodied those institutions… It is rejoining a part of America that doesn’t value them, from the way they dress to the way they think… Voting means getting further entangled with a bureaucracy that has done nothing but tangled them up. Hell, it might even come with jury duty.” Unlike the wealthy, successful, or highly educated, who have money on the line in an election, nonvoters know “the outcome won’t change their life because it never has.” Politics, especially presidential politics, is a distant nuisance, or at best, a spectator sport that doesn’t involve them, much less care about them. “[Nonvoters] have strong views, and they might get emotionally involved for a bit, but they know their place is to watch.”
But our political class has done almost nothing to understand this community. As Greenwald writes, as soon as Biden clinched the nomination, political rhetoric around voting Democrat became overwhelmingly shamey, a scolding of hypothetical privileged, clueless Bernie-or-bust leftists whose pouting will return the presidency to Trump. In reality, the primary motive for nonvoting “is not voter suppression but a belief that election outcomes do not matter because both parties are corrupt or interested only in the lives of the wealthy.” As Pew found, “44 percent of eligible unregistered individuals say they do not want to vote,” while another “25 percent say they are unregistered because they have not been inspired by a candidate or issue.” Unsurprisingly, “the candidates most closely associated with the status quo are ones most likely to drive voters away from the polls, while those who appear to be outsiders who intend to deviate from bipartisan consensus are most likely to motivate them”: while he was in the running, Sanders was the candidate with the highest favorability among those who identified as nonvoters.
7.Mike Davis on coronavirus politics. Like Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Mike Davis is a true movement elder–an internationally-minded socialist, a many-decades scholar of global public health, class politics and racism, and urban politics–who we’re incredibly lucky to have in this moment. Davis, recovering at home following cancer surgery, was interviewed on Jacobin’s The Dig in late March. I have a hard time with Dig host Daniel Denvir’s voice, but he asks great and open-ended questions and Davis connects zillions of points in ways I’d never heard before. (The middle of the interview, now sadly dated stuff on the Democratic National Convention, is skippable.) For instance: sub-Saharan Africa has become a site of many new viral illness in part because European overfishing in the Gulf of Guinea forced many Africans to subsist on bushmeat (wild game), increasing opportunities for animal-to-human transmission. Or: in addition to being unspeakably cruel, factory farms are “superspreader events” for viral illness; China’s factory pigs were ravaged by a relative of coronavirus last year before it leaped to humans. Or: we could have had a multi-year, “universal” flu vaccine years ago (as we now do for, say, tetanus), but there’s too little money in it for Big Pharma to bother. Or: while the Global North could barricade itself against the climate-change miseries we’ve inflicted on the Global South, there’s no protecting ourselves from the diseases that neoliberal agriculture and rotten public health are unleashing there. (As wealthy Victorians, moving to London’s West End to avoid the East End’s coal smoke, still couldn’t escape the smallpox devastating London’s poor.) It goes on! When he’s pressed on post-Bernie movement strategy, Davis urges the Left to nurture investigative journalism (not just analysis and commentary) at its news outlets, and to focus on developing an “organization of organizers”–an International-style gathering space to debate strategy and boil down our demands.
9. Michael Hobbes, “Everything You Know about Obesity Is Wrong.” As Americans have gotten larger over the last forty years, our medical community has blamed fat people for being fat. The science behind this is flatly wrong, and “the emotional costs are incalculable.” Hobbes interviews half a dozen fat adults who have experienced a lifetime of contempt, wrongful termination, medical abuse, mockery, and suffering; he also exposes two widely-documented truths about the science of obesity “that could have improved, or even saved, millions of lives.”
The first is that diets do not work. “Not just paleo or Atkins or Weight Watchers or Goop,” Hobbes writes, “but all diets… 95 to 98 percent of attempts to lose weight fail and two-thirds of dieters gain back more than they lost.” Losing weight and keeping it off means “fighting your body’s energy-regulation system and battling hunger all day, every day, for the rest of your life.”
Second, “weight and health are not perfect synonyms.” Many lean people are actually deeply unfit, while between a third and three quarters of people classified as obese are metabolically healthy, “with no elevated blood pressure, insulin resistance, or high cholesterol… Dozens of indicators, from vegetable consumption to regular exercise to grip strength, provide a better snapshot of someone’s health than looking at her from across a room.” We’ve been trying the same fixes over and over for “the obesity epidemic” and they don’t work.
Meanwhile, doctors receive very little nutrition education (an average of 19 total hours in four years of instruction), and are ill-equipped to give detailed diet or exercise advice. They routinely urge self-starving fat patients to keep it up, pressure those who fail at meal-replacement diets to try again, and show far less rapport with fat patients. Money is one factor: “While procedures like blood tests and CT scans command reimbursement rates from hundreds to thousands of dollars, doctors receive as little as $24 to provide a session of diet and nutrition counseling.” It’s unsurprising, then, that higher-weight patients tend to avoid doctors, with sometimes fatal consequences.
The misery of social stigma has real consequences for fat people, prejudice against whom has increased as their numbers have grown. “More than 40 percent of Americans classified as obese now say they experience stigma on a daily basis… and 89 percent of obese adults have been bullied by their romantic partners.” Those who feel discriminated against have shorter life expectancies than those who don’t, suggesting “the possibility that the stigma associated with being overweight is more harmful than actually being overweight.” The effects of weight bias are worse for people of color, as shown by increased rates of stress, depression, bulimia, and cardiovascular disease.
Fat pride, however, faces many of the same hurdles as any nascent movement: internalized shame and self-judgment, and cultural disbelief that their identity should exist as something to declare. “Fat people grow up in the same fat-hating culture that non-fat people do… They still live in a society that believes weight is temporary, that losing it is urgent and achievable, that being comfortable in their bodies is merely ‘glorifying obesity.'”
What is actually killing us? Not our portions, but our food supply. “it’s not how much we’re eating—Americans actually consume fewer calories now than we did in 2003. It’s what we’re eating.” Just 4 percent of US food subsidies go to fruits and vegetables, while 60 percent of Americans’ calories are high-sugar, low-fiber, and include additives, throwing off “all of our biological systems for regulating energy, hunger and satiety”: “No wonder that the healthiest foods can cost up to eight times more, calorie for calorie, than the unhealthiest.”
As for Americans who do get care from a dietician, “the decisive factor” (not in losing weight, but in reducing prediabetes and cardiovascular risk) “was not the diet patients went on, but how much attention and support they received while they were on it.”
What policy alternatives exist? “The most effective health interventions aren’t actually health interventions,” Hobbes writes; “they are policies that ease the hardship of poverty and free up time for movement and play and parenting,” while reducing things like suburban sprawl and lengthy commutes. “Developing countries with higher wages for women have lower obesity rates” than the US; policies such as Seattle’s Fresh Bucks program (doubling the value of food stamps spent on farmers’ market produce) increase fruit and vegetable consumption. “Policies like this are unlikely to affect our weight. They are almost certain, however, to significantly improve our health.” Living wages, pay equity, produce subsidies, and better education for doctors are among the campaigns for fat activism and American public health. “Fat activism isn’t about making people feel better about themselves,” one activist says. “It’s about not being denied your civil rights and not dying because a doctor misdiagnoses you.”
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10. Sister Thea Bowman’s address to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, 1989, less than a year before her heartbreaking and untimely death, on Black dignity and brilliance, Christian racism, pastoral leadership, and the spiritual endurance and genius it takes to thrive in an oppressive society. You feel her pushing at the edges of the room.
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11. A Twitter thread by Suyi Davies Okungbowa on the history of the Benin Empire’s interactions with Europe. This–studious ignorance, economic bullying, military violence, looting of treasures–is what a term like “underdevelopment” means in practice. This thread encapsulates, in miniature, the dreadful starting point from which many Global South nations entered “modernity.”
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12. William Davies, “Who Am I Prepared to Kill?” There’s a lot for me to love in the London Review of Books, which is erudite, prickly, eclectic, snappy, and full of excellent writers. I’ve stayed thinking about this essay on our culture of debate in the Global North. It’s become, writes Davies, a massive plebiscite: up- and down-voting rather than debating, “a society of perpetual referendums” instead of argument and deliberation, with products set before us to “acclaim or decry.” Real-time feedback has permanently changed the way culture is produced and evaluated. On social media, Davies writes, “chunks of ‘content’ – images, screengrabs of text, short snatches of video – circulate according to the number of thumbs up or thumbs down they receive. It is easy to lose sight of how peculiar and infantilising this state of affairs is. A one-year-old child has nothing to say about the food they are offered, but simply opens their mouth or shakes their head. No descriptions, criticisms or observations are necessary, just pure decision.” Likewise, “once history itself becomes a matter of plebiscitary decision, we are assigned to cultural camps that we had no hand in designing, and whose main virtue is that the other camp is even worse. One stupid position (‘You can’t judge the past by the standards of the present!’) presumes its only marginally less stupid opponent (‘We must judge the past by the standards of the present!’).” Likewise, “the friend-enemy distinction has become a new type of ‘judgment device’, in which my preferences and tastes are most easily decided by the fact that they’re not yours. Things which you hate must ipso facto be good. It becomes embarrassing or even shameful to appreciate something, if the ‘wrong people’ are also praising it.”
Sure, critiques like this in a bigshot intellectual outlet can feel mummified and complainy, but Davies isn’t interested in carping or performing mob-victimhood; he instead weighs this culture’s values and risks for movements for justice. “It’s hard to deny that focused [and plebiscitary] efforts such as Rhodes Must Fall have had a rallying effect” for decolonization struggles in the UK, “while the evolution of Black Lives Matter would be unthinkable without the forms of ‘acclaim’ and ‘complaint’ that social media is so effective at propagating. The reason racism is being discussed by broadcasters, politicians and historic institutions as never before is largely thanks to publicity tactics that start with a smartphone video of an act of police violence and scale up from there. The challenge is to avoid conflating tactics with goals, as if movements for justice were solely concerned with imagery, reputations and statues. Conservatives and media outlets share a common interest in restricting politics to the level of sporting spectacle, occupying the space where other forms of inquiry and understanding might occur.” Progressives should resist buying in.
This culture of up-or-down fosters parallel delusions in our political culture. The right has been taken over by splitting and projection: “Fearful of having to face up to an unbearable national guilt, the right projects its anxiety onto a culture of violent ‘wokeness’ which it claims is pulling society apart.” But the equivalent symbolic temptation for the online left is “the prospect of the unambiguous baddie, whose condemnation will absolve others of all sin.” This thinking ignores that “guilt and innocence are rarely as easily distinguishable as we might like them to be. This is what it means for a problem to be systemic. Bad things don’t happen simply because bad people intend them; and good people often play an integral part in terrible political acts and institutions.”
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13 and 14. Atul Gawande, “Why Americans Are Dying from Despair” and System Update: “Social Fabric Unraveling.”Cultural sickness is not a metaphor: the isolation and threat-calculus imposed by the pandemic have made existing trends–of isolation, economic precarity, and the politicization of fear–much worse. Our country is killing itself by promoting economic policies that lead to generational joblessness and wage stagnation, eating away at social ties once found in spiritual community and labor union membership, making guns and opioids easily available, promoting a politics of polarization and hate, and cutting away the safety net for those who lost their jobs due to automation and outsourcing. Rates of addiction, anxiety, chronic pain, alcoholism-induced liver disease, depression, and suicidality (one in four Americans between 18-24 “seriously considered” suicide in June) are exploding. Our culture is sick, and it’s getting sicker. Greenwald references Johann Hari, who’s studied depression in Western societies; here’s a TED talk, breezy but still informative, that Hari gave on related themes.
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15. Brandon Taylor and Garth Greenwell, “Queer Beatitudes.” I promise you will love this learned, joyful, hyperbolic, consistently brainy conversation. I jumped out of the bath to start taking notes, saying YES aloud, twenty minutes in, and, if you’re in the bath, I bet you will too.
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10. The opera teacher Salvatore Fisichella’s master class with tenor Andrew Owens: when Cait showed this to me, she said, “This is why I hope humans don’t go extinct.” I don’t understand more than few phrases of what he’s saying but when his (very famous!) student gets it right, I feel it too.
9. Moira Donegan, “Sex During Wartime: the return of Andrea Dworkin’s radical vision.” In college, I knew from my radical friends to dislike and disparage Andrea Dworkin, the unfun dogmatic anti-porn scold, without having read more than a few pages. But ideas central to her work are now being shone back to our larger culture, and I was very grateful for Moira Donegan’s reflection on Last Days at Hot Slit, a new selection of her work. Donegan, summarizing Dworkin’s thinking, writes that “[rape is] not an anomaly, but the fulfillment of a foundational cultural narrative. Rape is not exceptional but common, committed by common men acting on common assumptions about who men are and what women are.” Male power-over, our reduction of women to compliant or brutalized objects, for Dworkin prefigured all other forms of oppression and societal violence; but Dworkin also remained intersectional in her thinking, advocating for accessible trans healthcare and charging middle-class white women to reject the false comforts of their relative privilege to stand alongside, and support, women of color and poor women. And what is the spiritual work of men in undoing the antagonism, humiliation, and violence we’re taught to apply to women? In 1983, she addressed a male audience: “Have you ever wondered why we are not just in armed combat against you? It’s not because there’s a shortage of kitchen knives in this country. It is because we believe in your humanity, against all the evidence.” Can we men imagine and work for a world where non-men are equal historical selves? Our humanity depends on it.
8. A cheat/double: a special shoutout to bad reviews. Most big juicy bad reviews are fun but pointless— critics implicitly flattering their own taste, giving themselves over to purple writing whose insults aren’t as evocative as they think they are. Youngish critics, in their bad reviews, tend toward an overstated outrage at the violation of their precious sensibility; oldish critics in their bad reviews turn “shrill and stale at once” (James Wood on Harold Bloom), pounding at the same advancing targets long past anyone caring. Both types of reviews are fun are fun to nibble on and have next to zero shelf life.
But there are exceptions. Literary critic Andrea Long Chu reviews Jill Soloway’s way-acclaimed memoir She WantsIt, on Soloway’s self-discovery as a director and her work creating the TV show Transparent. Chu’s tone is a measured disbelief at the narcissism, sloppiness, and vacuity she finds in Soloway’s book. In Soloway, Long Chu writes, “one finds the worst of grandiose Seventies-era conceits about the transformative power of the avant-garde guiltlessly hitched to a yogic West Coast startup mindset”; on Soloway’s own performance of identity, Chu writes that “all we need remember is that being trans because you want the attention doesn’t make you ‘not really’ trans; it just makes you annoying”; as to the book’s damage-control subtext, Chu decides that “Jill Soloway has an unstoppable, pathological urge to tell on herself.”
And an ever-relevant good oldie: Eugene McCarraher, a history professor at Villanova, produced what’s still my favorite critical response to the New Atheism, a scrupulous dismantling of Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great called “This Book Is Not Good.” I went back to McCarraher’s essay after reading John Gray’s Seven Types of Atheism, curious to see if I still loved it, and boy I do. Hitchens’ book, McCarraher says, is a “haute middlebrow tirade” that has nothing insightful or honest to say about theology, philosophy, or history and is fed by “a gooey compound of boosterish bromides and liberal nationalism.” As to a dreamt-of world free of religion, Hitchens’ moral imagination sees only “in terms of professional and managerial expertise,” a world given over to technocratic bosses who are in reality every bit as capable of obfuscation, domination, violence, and backwardness as theocratic states. Our war in Iraq, McCarraher says, should show us the brutality and ideological folly our secular, capitalist state is capable of; Hitchens’ delighted assurance in the virtue of that very war sickens him.
7. Our president, wayward and flatterable, has wandered off from his own stated intent to withdraw troops from Syria. Too bad. But Matt Taibbi’s piece in Rolling Stone on the planned withdrawal is still outstanding. Taibbi describes the outrage Trump’s decision drew from our two war parties, and he captures the absolute mind-boggling scope of our venality, violence, and never-ending military mission drift in the Middle East. It can be easy for those of us resisting imperialism to assume our enemies are cunning and all-powerful. It’s not true. Read Taibbi to be reminded just how dumb empire can be. (See also this essay from a genuine conservative on the credulousness and bullying self-importance of two extremely famous pro-war #nevertrumpers.)
6. Obsessed— obsessed obsessed obsessed— with Tierra Whack’s 15-minute, 15-song music video.
5. Journalist Jesse Singal, with Freddie de Boer’s permission, returns to online availability three of de Boer’s bombthrowing essays on the state of Left cultural and academic discourse. I don’t agree with everything in these essays, but de Boer’s moral rage at the left’s internalization of cop culture– what Sarah Schulman would call the equating of conflict with an existential assault, complete with a pile-on on the offender led by a mob of virtuous citizens— is a tonic.
4. Just how much does it cost to call out love-and-light good-vibes spiritual thinkers for their ignorance of racism, persistent inequality, and state violence? Black Muslim feminist spiritual educator Layla F. Saad answers: “I Need to Talk to Spiritual White Women about White Supremacy” part 1 and part 2. The culture industry Saad identifies is associated with female entrepeneurs, but the apothecary-nice-guy subculture is just as guilty of checking out, repeating platitudes, and getting ugly when confronted. Dig the workbook on Saad’s main site too.
3. Lindsay Zoladz is one of my favorite music critics, a brainy and nimble writer who can set a scene in just a few sentences and who’s unafraid to fan out on her loves; her “December Boy: on Alex Chilton” taught me a lot about the lost years of this mercurial genius and reminded me of what I freaking love about Big Star. Growing up weird in a Navy town, my 12-year-old self found in indie music the immense relief of knowing my sensibility wasn’t alone. But most of what I found– John Fahey, Kate Bush, Aphex Twin, Husker Du, Sleater-Kinney, the Velvet Underground– wasn’t remotely utopian. These temperaments had survived, but they didn’t have an imagined better world out there to point me to. Big Star felt different: what was so cool about Big Star’s first two records was how they posited a whole alternate adolescence. In their music I could hang out, fall into a crush, break up, get my ears blasted in the backseat, watch the sunrise.
2. Who was King writing to in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail”? Broderick Greer gives the answer, quoting from “A Call for Unity,” the 1963 letter from white Alabama clergymen who sympathize with civil rights protestors’ “natural impatience” but call their continued direct actions, demonstrations, and protests “unwise and untimely.” King’s letter, smuggled from his cell, is his reply. The voice of the sensible middle never, ever changes. More and more I think of social justice work in terms of strategic radicalism: not “how can we reach across the aisle to create a compromise that will satisfy everyone,” but “how can we tactically force our sorta-allies in the middle to join our moral stand against what we find intolerable”?
1. And: live your best 1:14 by watching this clip of King on the origins of entrenched racial inequality, and the sole demand that will undo it. I showed this one to Finn.
Comments Off on The Ten Best Things on the Internet: February 2019
“Takes,” poems, Tweet threads, reviews, and editorials I’ve read over the last six months that have stuck with me, and why. Punctuated with pictures so no one’s eyes have to cross with exhaustion.
Dan Arnold and Alicia Turner, “Why Are We Surprised When Buddhists Are Violent?” While I take issue with the piece’s implicit “we,” the authors make an important point about secular-dominant progressive American political consciousness. Most of us know Buddhism primarily through the ecumenical, culturally-mixed forms of Buddhism introduced in the last 50 years in colonizer states, which emphasize individual meditation and mindfulness and largely forego the religion’s incredibly varied forms of belief and ritual life throughout Central and East Asia. Because of our American context, it can be difficult for secular progressives to fathom how Buddhism— in Sri Lanka, Thailand, and now certainly in Myanmar— is used to justify horrible mass ethnic-national violence. The causes of this bloodshed are never simply religious, but in each case involved ethnic and state power; and in each case, the violence had passionate Buddhist critics. But Arnold and Turner are at pains to remind readers that any religion can be an instrument of nationalist violence.
Emily Bazelon, “When the Supreme Court Lurches Right.” Though this survey understates its own major point (that the Supreme Court has spent most of its history as a fundamentally reactionary and anti-egalitarian body), it remains a good overview of the shifting history of the court in American public life.
Peter Beinart, “American Jews Have Abandoned Gaza–and the Truth.” Beinart deeply identifies as a Zionist— he rejects the idea that the formation and expansion of Israel is intrinsically a settler-colonialist project, and strongly opposes the B.D.S. movement— but he’s been a consistent progressive critic of settlement expansion and of the corrupt, reactionary presidency of Benjamin Netanyahu. He’s also filled with moral horror at the consequences of Israel’s blockade of Gaza, and the spiritual costs to Israel of the human suffering that the state has brought on Palestinians. (His association with Israeli peace groups and his authorship of pieces such as this one are likely behind his recent detention at Ben Gurion Airport.)
Patrick Blanchfield, “The McCain Phenomenon.” This is the best piece I’ve read— free of sentimental glow but also of contrarian reflex— on the meaning of McCain in American public life: it’s a progressive’s examination of McCain as a symbol of America’s reverence for individualism, military honor, and matured rogueishness.
Zach Carter and Paul Blumenthal, “Former Obama Officials Are Riding Out the Trump Years by Cashing In.” Lockheed Martin, Uber, Covington and Burling, Booz Allen Hamilton, Morgan Stanley, Amazon: as soon as their government tenures ended, many of the most powerful figures from Obama’s administration stepped through the revolving door into comfortable positions selling weapons, subprime loans, union-busting regulations, and more.
Jeff Chang on De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising. A joyful essay, an in-depth history of a unique cultural text: a work of incredible lyrical skill and bonkers musical invention, one that you still can’t get on Spotify.
Thomas B. Edsall, “The Democrats’ Gentrification Problem.” Educated middle-class white people and urban black communities exist across a widening fault line of money-mobility, neighborhood history, and a wealth gap deepened by racist housing policies. While this article says little about the role of organized multiracial communities in pressuring lawmakers from the bottom up to create housing equity, it’s still a top-down view of a deep tension between two important Democratic constituencies and the continuing power of white racial kinship networks in maintaining a black economic underclass.
Eve Fairbanks, “Well-Off Millennials Are All Julia Salazar. I Wish We Weren’t.” This piece diagnoses a real social problem— affluent folks feeling they have to exaggerate, or invent, a hard-luck biography to be seen as authentic, especially in high-stakes elite institutions— but avoids looking right at the sources of, or responses to, this phenomenon. My response is: yes. But privileged folks also just need to stop lying about our privilege. First, because it trivializes the reality of suffering we pretend to have experienced. Second, because it’s built on the cancerous belief that a safe, materially-comfortable upbringing makes us inauthentic. But how can we believe this, if we hope to create a world that (while growing beyond capitalist definitions of safety and comfort) actually is safe and comfortable, rich in possibility and relationship for all people? A sense of possibility and comfort isn’t the toxic aspect of privilege: emotional numbing is. The cost of buying in to privilege is choosing to ignore the dehumanization of those on which our comfort depends. (I also think that this habit of exaggeration leaves us less likely to honor the actual pain, our own or others’, that comes with any life. This is its own form of dehumanization.) Fairbanks does describe the transmutation of pain– into visible, nameable forms— she witnessed among her privileged cohort. But I wish she’d gone way, way further– and perhaps even ventured into encountering lives characterized by the suffering our material comfort is built upon. Or questioning the social value of high-stakes elite institutions altogether.
Max Fisher, “Israel Picks Identity over Democracy. Other Nations May Follow.” We’re in a global moment of parliamentary democracies shifting toward autocracy and ethnically-defined nationalism. The question for radicals is: what does the call to solidarity look like as states contract toward reactionary politics? How can we ourselves live out an alternative to the deep comfort of seeking company only in others like us? What is genuinely collective about collective liberation, and how can we articulate the value of the collective when compared to the shortfalls and exclusions of parliamentary democracy?
Paul Gilroy interviewed by George Yancy, “What ‘Black Lives’ Means in Britain.” Gilroy speaks about the power of corporate multiculturalism in Britain and the US; argues that inequality is a relationship, not the possession suggested by the term “privilege”; and describes the difficulties in black-solidarity organizing in a country defined (as Britain is) by economic-imperialist ventures and migration pressures different from the US importation of chattel slaves.
Jack Goldsmith, “Uncomfortable Questions in the Wake of Russia Indictment 2.0 and Trump’s Press Conference with Putin.” Bush II’s former Assisant Attorney General (who left in the wake of the Iraq War and the revelations of torture at Abu Ghraib) asks: What rules of international espionage did Russia break, that the US is willing to pledge to respect? What blowback or unwelcome reciprocity is the DOJ inviting by issuing subpoenas to foreign nationals? What vulnerabilities remain in our e-mail and voting systems? And: what unthinkable disasters are journalists inviting on themselves by encouraging the prosecution of Wikileaks?
Briahna Joy Gray, “How Identity Became a Weapon against the Left.” Gray has argued, here and in The Intercept, that as center-left institutions become fluent in the language of intersectional politics, they employthe signaling characteristics ofthat language toattackthe left as racist and sexist for its emphasis on class. Doing so requires erasing the women and queer folks of color active in movements for (e.g.) single-payer healthcare, fighting Wall Street corruption, strengthening the green economy, or raising the minimum wage, but the center-left has a fabulous track record of doing so already.
N.K. Jemisin’s acceptance speech for her third consecutive Hugo Award win for the Broken Earth trilogy. It’s “a massive, shining, rocket-shaped middle finger” and a reflection on creative and spiritual survival against a steady deluge of racist shit.
Tim Maudlin, “The Defeat of Reason.” Phew, there’s a lot here. This article reviews two huge, argumentative, intellectually ambitious books: Adam Becker’s What Is Real?: the Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics, on the puzzles, obfuscations, and final hope for clarity in quantum mechanics, and Errol Morris’s The Ashtray (or the Man Who Denied Reality), an attack by a former student on the philosophical and cultural legacy of anti-foundationalist intellectual Thomas Kuhn. In the first part of Maudlin’s review, he explores Becker’s historical work and conclusion that the conclusions popularly attributed to a quantum mechanical view of reality— fundamental smeariness, observer-dependence, and inconsistency— are bogus, the result of Niels Bohr’s Kantian dogmatism in defense of his version of QM and the physics community’s shut-up-and-calculate attitude. But Becker suggests that, though quantum mechanics may in fact be more deterministic than Bohr believed, it’s still spooky: electrons must be able to change from waves to particles in an instant, even if the waveform showing the electron’s possible location is immense: a faster-than-light change effected at a distance. Meanwhile, Morris, who despises his onetime teacher Kuhn as a relativist who discounted the importance of reason and evidence, charges at the legacy of Kuhn’s 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn introduced the notion of paradigms (the rules, practices, and examples that bound a theory of reality) and their importance in shaping scientific thought. A paradigm never wins out “by logic and experiment alone” but by power, persuasion, and culture. Further, no two paradigms are commensurable: the inhabitants of two different theoretical frameworks live in two different realities. Therefore, no neutral adjudication is possible– only conflict, and later history written by the winners. In a time where politics and philosophy were questioning the legitimacy of received authority, this idea was a sensation. Morris, now an investigative documentary filmmaker, hates it: “It is one thing to remark how hard truth can be to establish,” Maudlin writes, “and quite another to deny that there is any truth at all.” Morris’s book explores the nature of the reference of terms (the theory of how any noun picks out or denotes something in the real world) and ultimately argues that a belief in shared, neutral, objective truth is a moral issue. “If… we all live in worlds of our own manufacture, worlds bent to conform to our beliefs rather than our beliefs being adjusted to conform to the world, then what becomes of truth?” What are the consequences of believing that we impose, rather than discover, structure in reality? Maudlin’s essay falls short of exploring the appeal of Immanuel Kant’s Transcendental Idealism at the root of both Bohr and Kuhn’s philosophies. I want to hear his argument for why we’re tempted to believe that we merely impose, rather than actually experience, things such as time or cause-and-effect, etc.
Philip Metres, “Imagining Iraq: on the Fifteenth Anniversary of the Iraq War.” How can Americans hope to understand Iraq as more than a backdrop of our imperial history? Metres, author of the intricate and morally damning poetry collection Sand Opera, explores possible paths out of imperial memory.
Ann Pettifor, “Irish House Prices Sky-High Due to Finance Not Scarcity.” Dublin’s housing crisis is even worse than Seattle’s. And, as in Seattle, this is generally justified in microeconomic terms: massive demand on a limited supply. But in reality, the main driver is macroeconomic: housing is such a good investment that there’s a worldwide rush from the wealthy to buy in. If you buy a house, you don’t need to live in it to make money off it, especially if its value grows 6-10% a year. If you invest in a townhouse block and all six units are bought at 10-20% over list price in two months, you’ve just made a handsome return. Until we start taxing investment in things like condo development (or in buying a home you don’t intend to occupy or rent out), house prices will keep exploding.
Hilary Plum, a poem I love called “Lions” and an essay on war, Orientalism, historical memory, and the moral position of citizens in empire “Narrating Forgetting.”
Sebastian Purcell, “Life on the Slippery Earth.” An introduction to what’s survived in the historical record of Aztec moral philosophy, especially its emphasis on group– rather than individual– virtue.
EDIT to add this single tweet from Dana Regev, which– out of the whole spectacle of vicious male backlash and horrible retraumatization for women and femme folks in Kavanaugh’s nomination, Dr. Blasey Ford’s testimony, Kavanaugh’s ugly response, and his subsequent appointment to the Supreme Court– felt like the thing that I as a man/cismen most needed to sit with, journal about, talk with other men/cismen about, let haunt me.
Nate Silver, “There Really Was a Liberal Media Bubble.” It’s incredible the extent to which many professional journalists and think tank intellectuals are able to make a living having opinions while talking to almost no one but one another. Silver is, of course, not exempt from this himself, but it’s to his credit that he includes his own organization, FiveThirtyEight, in the scrutiny of this article.
Tim Urban, “The Fermi Paradox.” Why don’t we see evidence of the presence of other intelligent species in the Milky Way? This article, chirpy listicle style and all, is a good look at a scientifically and philsophically significant question, a different perspective on literally every sort of human problem I can imagine.
Bonus feature, “now without clip art!,” on the institutional Catholic Church: The Church as an institution is in a state of huge crisis; here are some readings about it.
A bomb-toss of a letter from pissed-off former Papal Nuncio (ambassador) Carlo Maria Vigano alleged in August that Pope Francis was aware that Cardinal McCarrick was a serial predator, and that Francis had nonetheless lifted the sanctions imposed on McCarrick (a lifetime of prayer and penance and withdrawal from public life) by the previous pope, the traditionalist Benedict XVI. Vigano claimed that Francis was willing to tolerate McCarrick’s behavior as he sought McCarrick’s help as an ally in fundraising and the appointment of more-progressive archbishops.
So: what to make of it? Well, Vigano’s letter is full of awful homophobic sinister-gay-mafia bile equating gay relationships, same-gender sexual abuse, and pedophilia. In its direct attack on Francis himself the letter is clearly intended as a means for right-wing European and American Catholics to concentrate their rage at Francis’s attempted reorientation of the church (toward suspect things like mercy, political egalitarianism, inclusivity, environmental stewardship, and concern for migrants and the poor) and build power for their own political projects. Finally, Vigano’s letter has since been revealed to be wrong in its particulars: it now seems that Benedict had never formally sanctioned McCarrick, but as of 2010ish informally asked him to keep a low profile. Nonetheless, there’s strong circumstantial evidence that Francis, like popes before him, was willing to trust his advisers in overlooking credible evidence of abuse to rehabilitate a potential political ally.
Here’s a Tweet thread from a Catholic with whom I imagine I’d agree on very little except for the moral parallel between two clubby, secretive institutional cultures that would tolerate those credibly accused of abuse: the Catholic hierarchy’s welcome for McCarrick and the Yale-Federalist-DC world’s support of Brett Kavanaugh.
And, you ask, where are the voices of actual gay clergy, in the midst of a shitstorm of fingerpointing, secrecy, and homophobia? Here’s one voice, from Fr. James Alison.
Essays, “takes,” news articles, and one Twitter thread that have affected me in the last three months. Curious as always for your thoughts and reflections.
Carsie Blanton, “The Problem with Panic.” A sex-positive musician and educator reflects on sexual autonomy, #metoo, and the moral power of sex in our culture. Sex remains one battleground in which patriarchy controls, devalues, and silences women. But sexual assault also weaponizes a shame already present in our culture’s understanding of all sex. Blanton is fearful that the left may come to believe that we can legislate our way to “prudence” or “temperance,” without working to undo this sexual shame by talking honestly and specifically about the complexity of sex. “Sexual assault is about power; sex works as a method of control because sex and its attendant cultural narratives are so powerful.” Sex offender registries– enacted in a moral panic– do not deter first offenders or reduce recidivism. These punitive systems also fail to make important distinctions between different “sexual offenses,” in a way that Blanton feels destroys lives and also ultimately trivializes rape and assault. Blanton ends by reflecting on the work of undoing sexist socialization, toward a fuller sense of agency for women, that will make both sexual autonomy and intersectional solidarity more possible.
Agnes Callard, “Can We Learn to Believe in God?” Callard invites readers to consider openness to religion not as self-deception, but as an act of aspirational faith, similar to the fragile, doubt-filled hopes we hold about things such as our friends’ fidelity or our dreams’ likely success. As with sharing any new pleasures with a skeptical acquaintance, “you want him to try to believe them to be more valuable than he has currently has reason to, in order to learn their true value.” It takes openness to believe that there could be something utterly wonderful– something that could connect us with a more profound sense of meaning, kinship, and durable joy– waiting for us in life. Callard encourages us to view that openness as something other than self-manipulation.
Google researcher Francois Chollet posted this thoughtful, scary Twitter thread on Facebook’s use of AI. As algorithmic curation gets more pervasive and AI gets smarter, humans’ innate vulnerability to social manipulation is more and more under the power of systems such as Facebook that control what information we consume. He ends: “If you work in AI, please don’t help them.” I add: please consider getting the hell off of Facebook!
Terry Eagleton, “‘Cast a Cold Eye’: How to Think about Death“: An article from my favorite Christian Marxist theorist, on the liberating possibility of the acceptance of death. The call to “act always as if you and history were about to be annihilated” can be a call toward the radical affirmation, not negation, of value. Since no act can be undone, each act can be a preparation for the finality of death. So, in pursuing a moral commitment to liberation even to death, we can wrest meaning from death, in an assertion of the durability of the virtues we’re ready to die for. “Resurrection” promises not perpetuity, but an unimaginable transformation and redemption. Death itself, meanwhile, remains both unremarkable and inconceivable. “…Like love, death searches out what is most singular about a person, poignantly highlighting their irreplaceability. One of Plato’s objections to tragedy is that by furnishing us with images of death it reminds us of our apartness, thus undermining political solidarity. For Hegel, death, like law, is a universal truth that nonetheless confronts us with our utter irreducibility as individual selves, at once leveling and individuating. Like the human body, it is both an external fatality and radically one’s own, a mode of distinction but also a shared condition.”
Andi Grace, “Power under Abuse: What It Is and How to Heal.” How do we have mutual accountability in relationships when there are profound differences in power? This article asks extremely tough, complex questions about survival mechanisms from trauma and oppression; about comfort, entitlement, and shame; and about compassion.
Shaun King, “Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner Promised a Criminal Justice Revolution. He’s Exceeding Expectations.” When I saw scholar, professor, and activist James Forman Jr. speak in Seattle, he stressed that mass incarceration was constructed not by a single cultural turn but by countless small, often local, policy decisions. Forman said, too, that undoing it would require similar small, local steps, and encouraged activists to work not just for noble public defenders and City Council members, but enlightened and anti-racist prosecutors and DAs. Such people are out there and should be encouraged to run, Forman said. Larry Krasner has been a spectacular example of this: since taking office, he’s fired 31 prosecutors for opposing a civil rights agenda; he’s permanently prohibited 29 of Philly’s most tainted police officers from ever being called as witnesses; he’s ordered his prosecutors to decline charging marijuana possession or sex work; he’s increased diversions and softened the plea-bargain process; and he’s mandated that post-release probation be shortened to 12 months or less. Institutional transformation is, of course, vulnerable to rollback; it’s also not the same as structural transformation. (Like, does Philly have the staff in its diversion programs necessary to accept the flood of those newly referred to them? Does the police chief support Krasner enough to stem the plainly predatory and racist police practices that lead to arrests in the first place? What would it take for Philly’s schools to also adopt a diversion-based, civil rights vision of discipline?) But damn, it’s something.
Esther Perel, “The Secret to Desire in a Long-Term Relationship.” In this TED-ish chat, Perel examines the cultural uniqueness of modern Western coupledom— the strained belief that a partner can be one’s village, co-parent, friend, lover, and life partner— and then talks about the work of cultivating a space for the erotic– the playful, selfish, exploratory, resistant, vibrant– amid the commitment and responsibility of love. Some cool Freudian stuff as well about the messages our child self receives about the danger and joy of the world beyond the parents’ arms.
Evan Rytlewski looks back to an album I used to love and now can barely stomach, Sublime’s 40oz. to Freedom. Its eclecticism still feels utopian; the genres it sponges up I still adore; the musicianship is outstanding. But Brad Nowell’s lyrical boorishness and shameless copycatting wear me out. Why did this album strike the chord it did? Read on…
Rebecca Traister, “This Moment Isn’t (Just) about Sex. It’s Really about Work.” One critique of #metoo is the movement’s focus on violations in professional, rather than domestic, spaces. But, Traister says, this economic emphasis is important to examine for its own sake, beyond our patriarchal culture’s fascination with perceived threats to women’s virtue. “What makes women vulnerable is not their carnal violability, but rather the way that their worth has been understood as fundamentally erotic, ornamental; that they have not been taken seriously as equals;that they have been treated as some ancillary reward that comes with the kinds of power men are taught to reach for and are valued for achieving.” Traister notes that spaces and professions populated by poorer POC women haven’t been examined in this movement’s moral reckoning; she ends with the hope that this moment may begin the work of “addressing and beginning to dismantle men’s unjustly disproportionate claim to every kind of power in the public and professional world.”
Jenna Wortham, “Is RuPaul’s Drag Race the Most Radical Show on TV?” An awesome, nuanced profile of RuPaul. Wortham looks hard at some of the critiques of drag– from the malleability that drag assumes of femininity, to its fraught relationship to trans rights, to its roots in the interpretation/satirization of black womanhood– and also at the cultural earthquake that Drag Race has precipitated. Wortham points out the risks drag performers take on in a patriarchal society, the contempt aimed at those seen as willingly giving up the protected domain of male privilege. She also reflects on the profound generational shift around questions of identity that RuPaul reflects: from the 90’s-rooted idea that liberated communities could arise from satire and free play, to our current relationship to identity where “sharpening categories [is] a means to demand inclusion and recognition.”
Matt Yglesias, “Everything We Think We Know about the Political Correctness Debate Is Wrong.” The assumption among nervous liberals, outraged right-wingers, and everyone who absorb their thinkpieces– that college kids increasingly reject reasoned argument, that righteous young people mob-attack dissent, and that media echo-chambers have left us all less tolerant– isn’t supported by survey data. “”Overall public support for free speech is rising over time, not falling. People on the political right are less supportive of free speech than people on the left. College graduates are more supportive than non-graduates. Indeed, a 2016 Knight Foundation survey showed that college students are less likely than the overall population to support restrictions on speech on campus.” But dig the utterly unsurprising exception: “Among the public at large, meanwhile, the group whose speech the public is most likely to favor stifling is Muslims.”
Childhood memories of the Edwin Hawkins Singers blasting on Sundays as we cleaned the house… Crying 25 years later just from the sound of the harmonies on “Let Us Go into the House of the Lord“… That rising ecstasy of the music, that first experience of the idea that art must embody what it describes. Deeply sorry Hawkins is gone.
Hi friends: Had the personal grief and cosmic honor of being present and holding my dad’s hand as, after a six-year journey with prostate cancer, he died at home.
I’m feeling, still, the terrible intimacy of final illness and death— a second infancy out of which, if we’re lucky, we can be midwifed by our loved ones and caregivers.
My dad was my first teacher, someone who was thrilled to learn anything new about the world. One of my first memories is of him passing me his tinted sunglasses on a drive so I could really appreciate the mountainous pileup of the cumulus clouds out the window; in the last month of his life, he couldn’t wait to ask my brother what he’d learned in lab about how a mess spectrometer works. He loved being a parent; he also believed that learning is moral work. He largely turned away from the privileges his Ivy League diploma offered him to instead provide legal aid and safe spaces to GI’s seeking conscientous-objector status; to work for free clinics; to organize medical supplies for victims of our Latin American guerrilla wars; to do mental health work with poor and struggling kids; and to devote thousands of hours to supporting community media. And he took notes on every damn book he read after turning 25, so if– as he urged me ever since I committed myself to liberatory politics– I ever read Marx’s Capital (“especially chapters 24 and 25”) and Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, I’ll have his voice as my teacher.
I’m feeling so much love and gratitude for Kathy, his companion and wife for his last decade and more, who was devoted, imaginative, and tender as a caregiver in the months of 24-7 labor needed as my dad became less and less able. Love too for Charlotte, the caregiver and CNA who was here to give him his last bath and diaper change and sponge of water, and who called us over, as his breathing slowed and thickened, to hold his hands and tell him it was OK, tell him he could go.
After eighteen months and seven days, I’m again mourning a parent, feeling like an adult, feeling like there’s nothing now between myself and the sky.
(My dad’s obituary ran in his hometown paper on November 26; here it is.)
Photos: My dad in his last week; my dad with scowling newborn me; my dad politely enduring the 1940s.
I almost didn’t have the heart to complete this reflection. After a 6-year journey with prostate cancer, my dad, Sanford, moved to hospice care in June and is near the end of his long goodbye with his wife Kathy, his family, his years of reading and thinking, and the birds that come to the feeder in his garden. A sudden death is a painful shock, but a slow death grinds us down: this loss erodes my strength, drains my hope, and isolates me from my usual gifts and comforts. My grief has more often felt crushing than illuminating. But, in praying on this gospel and writing this reflection, I re-learned a lesson that I’ve gotten over and over as a parent: it is comforting to give comfort. Seeking the soul-nourishing meaning I could uncover and share here in Christ’s parable nourished my own soul.
I re-read this week’s gospel on a sunny early morning in our neighborhood’s P-Patch: a community garden full of squash, greens, tomatoes, huckleberries, a beehive with a few last bees circling, and a sweet hanging smell of jasmine. It was easy, in that garden, to feel close to the love and labor of the prophet’s friend in Isaiah, or of the landowner in Christ’s parable: the P-Patch was busy but quiet, charged with its own inner life and eager for the care of its gardeners.
In one of my favorite books, Kathleen’s Norris’s memoir The Cloister Walk, a Benedictine nun tells the author that the “enemies” spoken of in the Psalms and the parables—the unbelievers and mockers and military foes who humiliate or overpower the psalmist; the “wretched men” in today’s parable—are best understood not as external enemies to vanquish, but as aspects of ourselves we must overcome. Hearing this relieved the troubled feeling I’ve often had at the harsh, and final, punishments the psalmist asks God for. The psalmist is speaking of an inner struggle.
This reframing also gave me a clearer understanding of today’s parable. In the beauty of the morning garden, I had no problem understanding the vineyard in Christ’s parable as our magnificent creation. This world is a free gift of God, and we’re called to be grateful stewards of this gift. But I see now that Christ is also speaking to us of our inner garden. Our humanity is also a free gift. As Father Armando said last week, we are not human beings having a spiritual experience, but spiritual beings having, for the duration of our lives, a human experience. How might we tend these spirits of ours if we believed this?—If we felt the incredible good fortune of receiving this magnificent inner garden to tend?
I don’t know about you, but I can identify with the “wretched men” of this parable. I’m often painfully aware of the wretched, possessive, fearful, jealous sides of my spirit: my love hesitates, my courage falters, my faith flows out under me like sand, my sense of solidarity shrivels.
I’m also wretchedly aware of all the ways I participate in what St. John Paul II called “structural sin”: how, by my silence and inaction, I too often consent to a society that pulls apart families based on immigration status; sells bombs to the world’s warlords; degrades and excludes women; robs the dignity of LGBTQ people for how they express their love, their gender, and their sexuality; riddles poor communities with opioid addiction, joblessness, and despair; and consigns young men of color to police violence and mass incarceration.
To work for justice in our relationships and in our society is to labor in the vineyard of God’s creation. But to do so is also to tend our inner vineyard. Close your eyes for a moment and imagine a natural thing you find beautiful: a bed of jasmine, a field of undisturbed snow, a great blue heron, a sleeping cat, a clear forest stream. Now imagine that, in God’s eyes, each of our small acts of courage, tenderness, or solidarity are that beautiful. These are the fruits and blossoms of our inner garden, and God sees them and loves them and loves us for them. To cultivate these qualities in ourselves is to lead a more beautiful life. But it is also to say thank you to the first gardener, of whose work we are the stewards.
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is Laniakea, measureless heaven in Hawaiian: the 500-million-light-year-wide fibrous structure which contains the Milky Way and 100,000 other galaxies in clusters like knots in a spilled skein of yarn.
It’s a structure so vast that no one thought to look for it—to look past the Virgo supercluster which contains the Milky Way for any sort of larger shape or order governing the movement of our galaxy—until 2014, when astronomers in Hawaii and Lyon announced their discovery. Its name, chosen to honor the Polynesian navigators whose astronomical knowledge guided them across the Pacific, was suggested by Nawa’a Napoleon, a community college professor of the Hawaiian language.
(Speaking of Hawaii and astronomy: a word about the struggle of indigenous Hawaiian people against the construction of a giant telescope atop Mauna Kea, the most sacred mountain to indigenous practitioners of pre-conquest Hawaiian religion. Arrests, public actions, court conflicts, and the experience of years of repression of indigenous spirituality are at work here. For now, a judge has ruled that construction can go ahead, with “mandatory cultural and natural resources training” for the telescope’s employees. This is small comfort for communities who have seen their sacred lands despoiled and occupied for centuries, and certainly not the challenge activists were hoping for to the colonialist presumptions of many American scientific institutions.)
One of my favorite categories of discovery is the one which changes our sense of cosmic scale. Edwin Hubble discovering that the Milky Way wasn’t alone in the dark but was one of at-the-time-uncountable galaxies; the 1964 hypothesis and then discovery of quarks; the 1998 discovery that the universe’s expansion is accelerating over time. We feel a change like this in our body, a tug at the fibers that constitute our sense of self and place. The feeling is awe. One of my favorite Jesuits, astronomer (and former chair of the Pontifical Sciences Council) George Coyne, was asked, “When you pray, does it make any difference that the universe has 10,000 billion billion stars?” Coyne replied:
Absolutely. When I pray to God, it’s a totally different God than I prayed to as a kid. The God that I pray to now is a God who not only made me but brought me to be in a universe that is dynamic and creative. The universe is not itself a living being, but it is a universe that has thus far given birth to human beings who can pray to God.
I pray to a God that, from my scientific knowledge, has made a universe in which people have come to be and are still coming to be, even from a scientific perspective. The universe is continuing to expand. Just in the past 50 years, look at what the human being has come to be.
The awe of these sorts of discoveries is sublime, but it’s not exactly comforting, especially considering the mounting scientific evidence that worlds like Earth, congenial to life, are not common as once thought, but are probably very rare in the Milky Way, in Laniakea, and in the universe as a whole.
Why are Earth-like planets rare? (I sponged up much of this information is from two popular-science books I adore, Peter Ward and Don Brownlee’s beautiful downer Rare Earth and John Hand’s breathtaking summary-of-everything Cosmosapiens. Hurry up and read them both.)
First, our sun is in perfect galactic real estate—far from the crowded, explosive environment of the galactic core and the sterilizing lashes of radiation that emanate from the black hole at the Milky Way’s center; far too from the obscuring clouds of unaggregated cosmic dust at the Milky Way’s edge—and it’s stayed in this sweet spot for its full lifespan. The Sun is a G2 star, not too big or small, and stable (few flares, no surprise expansion) over its multi-billion-year life. Both of these factors mean that life has has 4 billion relatively undisturbed years to flourish on Earth.
Earth also had a lucky collision early in its existence: fewer than a billion years after it was formed from loose rock and dust, our young hot planet was struck by a meteor the size of Mars.
This meteor’s iron core sank and was absorbed into Earth’s, enlarging and strengthening our magnetic field, which protects our planet’s surface from the scouring, cancerous effects of solar radiation. The rubble blown off from this collision also collected into one satellite: the Moon. The Moon’s mass considerably slowed Earth’s rotation (its day), so our nightside surface can shed heat that could otherwise collect into a planet-wide greenhouse effect. The Moon also stabilized Earth’s axial tilt: this means our planet is spared what would otherwise be a violently wobbling axis periodically turning the Arctic tropical and vice versa. Tilted now at 23.4 degrees, our planet instead enjoys steady, regular seasonal change: great for life.
Earth is also blessed with a helpful big brother, Jupiter. The immense mass of Jupiter draws in most meteors and comets that come charging through our solar system. Instead of crashing into Earth, these meteors and comets collide with Jupiter. It’d be much harder for life to flourish on Earth if our planet was struck every few million years by a dinosaur-killing-sized meteor.
Our earliest ancestors likewise got lucky with where and how life first appeared. (First learned about this from, of all places, the appendix of a wonderful Natural Geographic book my dad got for Finn.) As simple proto-algae creatures spread throughout the ocean, they absorbed CO2 (which further limited the greenhouse effect), and breathed out oxygen. This oxygen rose from the ocean and was fused into ozone, creating an additional buffer against the Sun’s radiation for the life that did eventually creep onto land. If life had appeared on land first, solar radiation through Earth’s early ozone-less atmosphere would have introduced mutations so severe that evolution over time may never have taken off.
No one knows exactly how life itself first appeared, but it now seems likely that there are billions of near-miss planets in the universe: nice, temperate worlds with liquid water that never got a chance for life (or where life could never spread) because of galactic or solar radiation, a too-short or too-long day, a veering axis, or meteor bombardment. We now have strong enough telescopes that we can find evidence of planets around other stars. We can detect their mass and movement by how their gravity causes stars to wobble, and by how their transits slightly dim the stars they circle. The vast majority of the planets we’ve found are not even near-misses: they’re just no good for life. They’re “hot Jupiters,” gas giants squeezed up closer to their stars than Mercury is to the Sun, or they’re rocky but tidally locked, with the same side facing their star (and cooking into lava).
As a kid who read a lot of science fiction, I drew comfort from the idea of a universe as busy and amicable as a beehive with intelligent life. This dream now seems unlikely. Some scientists argue that any civilization that develops sufficiently may not choose to explore and populate the planets of other stars; but, in any case, our galaxy seems quieter than my kid self had hoped, and less congenial to life than we’d thought.
So, is Laniakea still beautiful in a universe full of stone and fire, radiation and rainbow dust, but largely empty of life? Yes, but it’s a beauty more like a thundering waterfall than like a garden: a beauty that doesn’t comfort us, but one that, for now, “serenely disdains to annihilate us.”
How does it change your perspective and life to find yourself at home in Laniakea? Or, put in terms closer to me, what prayer is appropriate to this scientific knowledge? The king-and-parent language of my own tradition feels impoverished before these discoveries, but I feel myself drawn toward the simple root prayer of the Orthodox: kyrie eleison, Lord have mercy! Or the open-palmed confession of human smallness and contingency in Islam: allahu akbar, God is greater. Or the recognition, central to Hinduism, that our being and will themselves are grounded in God: “What cannot be thought with the mind, but that whereby the mind can think: Know that alone to be Brahman, the Spirit; and not what people here adore… What cannot be indrawn with breath, but that whereby breath is indrawn: Know that alone to be Brahman, the Spirit; and not what people here adore” (Kena Upanishad). This prayer says that God–whatever that bare, wonderful word means to you–is the condition, the ground, for our questioning, smallness, curiosity, and fear. Our planet’s cosmic improbability and fragility might provoke the same questions as we face when we think about our own mortality: If it’s so delicate, so brief, what was ever the point? Did it matter that we ever lived if our planet will be boiled by its dying Sun and our universe stretches the fabric of itself into a fizzle of loose, dead particles? Questions like this resist an answer, but demand a response. How do you live, having absorbed knowledge like this into your body?
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1 and 2. Elizabeth Weil, “
4. Kevin Henderson and Joseph J. Fischel, “
5. Chris Arnade, “
7. 
9. Michael Hobbes, “
Fat pride, however, faces many of the same hurdles as any nascent movement: internalized shame and self-judgment, and cultural disbelief that their identity should exist as something to declare. “Fat people grow up in the same fat-hating culture that non-fat people do… They still live in a society that believes weight is temporary, that losing it is urgent and achievable, that being comfortable in their bodies is merely ‘glorifying obesity.'”
11. A Twitter thread by Suyi Davies Okungbowa on 
12. William Davies, “
Sure, critiques like this in a bigshot intellectual outlet can feel mummified and complainy, but Davies isn’t interested in carping or performing mob-victimhood; he instead weighs this culture’s values and risks for movements for justice. “It’s hard to deny that focused [and plebiscitary] efforts such as 
9. Moira Donegan, “
But there are exceptions. 
And an ever-relevant good oldie: Eugene McCarraher, a history professor at Villanova, produced what’s still my favorite critical response to the New Atheism, a scrupulous dismantling of Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great called “
4. Just how much does it cost to call out love-and-light good-vibes spiritual thinkers for their ignorance of racism, persistent inequality, and state violence? Black Muslim feminist spiritual educator Layla F. Saad answers: “I Need to Talk to Spiritual White Women about White Supremacy” 
3. Lindsay Zoladz is one of my favorite music critics, a brainy and nimble writer who can set a scene in just a few sentences and who’s unafraid to fan out on her loves; her “
2. Who was King writing to in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail”? 
Dan Arnold and Alicia Turner, “
Peter Beinart, “
Zach Carter and Paul Blumenthal, “
Jeff Chang on De La Soul’s 
Paul Gilroy interviewed by George Yancy, “
N.K. Jemisin’s 
Tim Maudlin, “
Hilary Plum, a poem I love called “
Tim Urban, “
This meteor’s iron core sank and was absorbed into Earth’s, enlarging and strengthening our magnetic field, which protects our planet’s surface from the scouring, cancerous effects of solar radiation. The rubble blown off from this collision also collected into one satellite: the Moon. The Moon’s mass considerably slowed Earth’s rotation (its day), so our nightside surface can shed heat that could otherwise collect into a planet-wide greenhouse effect. The Moon also stabilized Earth’s axial tilt: this means our planet is spared what would otherwise be a violently wobbling axis periodically turning the Arctic tropical and vice versa. Tilted now at 23.4 degrees, our planet instead enjoys steady, regular seasonal change: great for life.
Jay Aquinas Thompson 
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