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 political contest.” 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.
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6. Surely someone else also identifies with this plate-raider
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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.
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8. Jia Toletino, “Interview with a Woman Who Recently Had an Abortion at 32 Weeks.” The agony, the terrible burden, the love, the gnawing self-doubt, the impossible moral choices of the subject of this profile have stayed with me.
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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.
Jay Aquinas Thompson 
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