David Wallace-Wells in the New York Times:

For decades, visions of possible climate futures have been anchored by, on the one hand, Pollyanna-like faith that normality would endure, and on the other, millenarian intuitions of an ecological end of days, during which perhaps billions of lives would be devastated or destroyed. More recently, these two stories have been mapped onto climate modeling: Conventional wisdom has dictated that meeting the most ambitious goals of the Paris agreement by limiting warming to 1.5 degrees could allow for some continuing normal, but failing to take rapid action on emissions, and allowing warming above three or even four degrees, spelled doom.

Neither of those futures looks all that likely now, with the most terrifying predictions made improbable by decarbonization and the most hopeful ones practically foreclosed by tragic delay. The window of possible climate futures is narrowing, and as a result, we are getting a clearer sense of what’s to come: a new world, full of disruption but also billions of people, well past climate normal and yet mercifully short of true climate apocalypse.

More here.

Luke Taylor in New Scientist:

Defenders of the Amazon rainforest were overwhelmed with relief on 30 October as Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva narrowly secured Brazil’s presidency.

Lula, who was president from 2003 to 2010, beat incumbent Jair Bolsonaro by just 1.8 per cent of votes in the divisive presidential election.

The tight victory could save the Amazon just as it has reached a crucial tipping point, say Brazilian environmentalists.

“During the past four years, the Amazon has been threatened, attacked and destroyed as the government openly promoted environmental crimes,” says Erika Berenguer at the University of Oxford, who was in tears as she spoke to New Scientist. “It was like having to silence a scream inside you every day as you watched the object of your life, your career and passion destroyed. Lula’s election is a victory not only for the region, but for humanity and life itself.”

More here.

Sam Lin-Sommer in Atlas Obscura:

THE SUN IS BARELY VISIBLE in the soot-filled sky; for thousands of miles in every direction, the air is gray and unseasonably cold. Crops are dying en masse, and an age-old question arises: “What will we eat?” If humans are faced with a volcanic winter (an eruption-induced catastrophe that scientists say has a one in six chance of occurring in the next century) or a nuclear winter (its manmade cousin), feeding ourselves will be no easy task.

One possible solution, according to the artist Paul Gong, is to eat garbage. In the imagined world of his Human Hyena project, resourceful humans could transform the taste and smell of spoiled food with a magnifying glass–shaped “Taste Transformer” utensil made from Synsepalum dulcificum (the so-called miracle berry that makes sour foods taste sweet) while inhaling stomach bacteria from hyenas that would allow them to successfully digest putrid food.

More here.

Knitting a Hat for my Small Jizo Statue

Because the hat I knitted for my dead boy taunted me
on the pile of abandoned baby clothes.
Because my fingers ached to hold something, anything.
Because the winter days, though short of sun, were as long as years—
each day a bear holding the hours in its mouth like a limp carcass.
Because I could stare in the mirror and not recognize myself as living.
Because I wanted to be living.
Because I watched the planes cross over Cincinnati every night from my window,
and it didn’t bring him back.
Because I needed somewhere else to go while staying right here.
Because the Japanese do much better with grief and someone gifted me a Jizo statue.
Because death doesn’t care if you’re a republican or democrat, a knitter or MMA fighter.
Because when you feel hurled out of orbit, there’s always a trail of yarn to follow back.

by Rae Hoffman Jager
from Contrary Journal
published Summer 2022

Ann Hanna in More Intelligent Life:

As a teenager growing up in Peckham, an ethnically diverse area of London, the photographer Nadine Ijewere observed the way that the women around her dressed. The neighbourhood “aunties”, as all older women were known, paired Nigerian patterns with Gucci handbags and Burberry motifs; they would style their afro hair in a way that was almost sculptural. Ijewere was interested in fashion photography, but she began to notice that the prints and hairstyles she saw everyday didn’t appear in magazines. She didn’t understand why these “pieces of art in themselves” were not more visible. At weekends, she would take photographs of her friends, many of whom were of mixed heritage like her, in the local park.

In 2018, at the age of 26, Ijewere became the first black woman to shoot a Vogue magazine cover, featuring the singer Dua Lipa draped in white feathers. Ijewere soon became known for her ethereal backdrops, her work with mixed-race models and her meticulous attention to black hair. In 2020, she did another photoshoot with Vogue, which accompanied a piece praising Nigerian “aunties”. The women in the shoot wore traditional head wraps and metallic floral and chequered prints in clashing colours. “I looked at those photographs and saw the women I grew up with,” Ijewere said. “I saw my heritage. And it was special.”

More here.

Dani Blum in The New York Times:

A new national study has suggested that chemical hair straighteners could pose a small risk for uterine cancer. Rates of the disease are still relatively low, said Dr. Alexandra White, head of the environment and cancer epidemiology group of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the lead author on the study. The research also did not definitively show that hair straighteners cause cancer. But the findings are cause for concern, she said.

Rates of uterine cancer have been increasing in the United States, particularly for Black and Hispanic women. The number of cases diagnosed each year rose to 65,950 this year, compared to 39,000 15 years ago. Black women are also more likely to have more aggressive cases of the cancer, Dr. White said, and the study showed they were disproportionately more likely to use hair straighteners.

More here.

Nilay Patel in The Verge:

Twitter is a disaster clown car company that is successful despite itself, and there is no possible way to grow users and revenue without making a series of enormous compromises that will ultimately destroy your reputation and possibly cause grievous damage to your other companies.

I say this with utter confidence because the problems with Twitter are not engineering problems. They are political problems. Twitter, the company, makes very little interesting technology; the tech stack is not the valuable asset. The asset is the user base: hopelessly addicted politicians, reporters, celebrities, and other people who should know better but keep posting anyway. You! You, Elon Musk, are addicted to Twitter. You’re the asset. You just bought yourself for $44 billion dollars.

More here.

Samuel Loncar in Marginalia:

What do you make of the dominance of the conception of “science,” as someone who’s familiar with the European context? “Science” has narrowed its meaning in the English language, moving from the whole of knowledge to just the natural sciences. This narrowness is fairly recent: the mid- to late-nineteenth century is when historians tell us our current idea of “science” and “scientists” originated. So how do you see the current role of the word and concept “science” in our culture?

Lorraine Daston: You’re right about the contraction of the expansiveness of “science,” which in all the European languages that derived some cognate from the Latin scientia used to refer to any form of organized knowledge. But it contracts not only in English but also in French, albeit a bit later in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century. The French term for the scientist or scholar goes from being savant, which is still a word you can easily encounter in nineteenth-century French, to scientifique to refer exclusively to a scientist. And it surely has to do with the soaring prestige of the natural sciences, which is also the case in Germany.

More here.

Graham Readfearn in The Guardian:

A juvenile bar-tailed godwit – known only by its satellite tag number 234684 – has flown 13,560 kilometres from Alaska to the Australian state of Tasmania without stopping, appearing to set a new world record for marathon bird flights.

The five-month-old bird set off from Alaska on 13 October and satellite data appeared to show it did not stop during its marathon flight which took 11 days and one hour.

Tagged in Alaska, the bar-tailed godwit, Limosa lapponica, flew at least 13,560km (8,435 miles) before touching down at Ansons Bay in north-east Tasmania.

The previous record was held by an adult male of the same species – 4BBRW – that flew 13,000km (8,100 miles) last year, beating his own previous record of 12,000km the year before.

More here.

Alberto Polimeni in the Boston Review:

For some, late 2020 brought with it an air of optimism regarding the fate of right-wing populism. In the United Kingdom, Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party faded into obscurity, and the populist right’s GB News experiment foundered. In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro’s disastrous response to COVID-19 seemed to hemorrhage his support and threaten his reelection chances. Greece’s fascist Golden Dawn party was legally disbanded, Germany’s AfD started slowly losing popularity and parliamentary seats, and Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden.

The picture looks different today. Trump continues to claim election fraud, Bolsonaro may win reelection later this month, and far-right parties have advanced in Sweden and Italy. But with the apparent respite came a flurry of political analysis seeking to draw key lessons from it—about strategies used to defeat the populist right and structural reforms that could codify these victories.

One of the most prominent voices on these trends has been Princeton political theorist and historian of political thought Jan-Werner Müller.

More here.

Pony

When I first met Pony he wouldn’t
touch a drink. He dealt pot and
he worked at an aircraft factory
and had a blond girlfriend
who he said was crazy.

He let me stay at his place
overlooking the Pacific.
He bought me canvas to paint on,
gave me food to eat.
He kept me alive.

Now Pony calls me from bars
where loud music is playing
in the background.
He says, “Ray, what’s happening
man. How’s the lady, the kid,
how’s the writing, you’re a painter,
how’s the painting? Man, I’d like
to see you, but you know how it is.
Having a good time and living
the life. Maybe I’ve got a gig
going.”

A year later he calls.
“Ray, what’s happening man?
How’s the . . .
How’s the . . .
“Whatever happened to that lady
you were with?” I ask him.

“Where have you been?”
“At the end of the earth, man.”
“ And where are you now?”
“Man,” he says, “don’t ask metaphysical
questions.”

by Raphael Zapeda
from Paper Dance- 55 Latino Poets
Persea Books, NY, 1995

Amir Arian in The Baffler:

“THIS TIME THERE IS NO WAY BACK,” Hamid said. “People have imagined life without them.”

He had to yell these words into his phone to record the WhatsApp voice message he sent me, or else the background din would have drowned him out. He was standing on a street in Tehran, in the thick of a protest on an early autumn afternoon. Around him, people were chanting in one moment and stampeding the next while cars roared and honked, paintballs hissed, and police sirens shrieked. He was forced to run for safety before he could finish speaking, so his last words were interrupted by panting. Despite the danger, his voice was loaded with excitement.

Hamid and I have been friends for nearly twenty years. We regularly met to talk politics while I was in Iran and stayed in touch after I left. The last time I heard him speak so excitedly was in June 2009, during the early days of the Green Movement, which rose in protest of the result of the presidential elections.

I listened to his message in my home in a small town in upstate New York.

More here.

Nicole Narea in Vox:

Friday’s brutal attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, at their San Francisco home was overtly political — and a logical endpoint to the decades deeply personal villainization House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has weathered from her political opponents.

It’s now clear the speaker was the target of Friday’s attack. The assailant broke into the home looking for her, reportedly shouting, “Where is Nancy?” — echoing the chant insurrectionists called out when they breached the US Capitol on January 6 — and saying that he would wait “until Nancy got home” as he tried to tie up Paul Pelosi. The speaker’s husband suffered a skull fracture and serious injuries to his right arm and hands that required surgery after the assailant bludgeoned him with a hammer. (A spokesperson for the speaker said in a statement that Paul Pelosi is expected to make a full recovery.)

Even before she became speaker, Republicans in the party, and those adjacent to it, have demonized Pelosi regularly featuring her in attack ads and lambasting her on Fox News. At least one of her colleagues in the House, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), has directly indicated support for violence against her. And members of right wing militia groups such as the Oathkeepers and the Three Percenters have sought her assassination.

More here.

Liza Batkin in the New York Review of Books:

Two weeks ago, the Supreme Court took a break from wrecking our rights to hear oral arguments in a case about a series of Andy Warhol silkscreen prints of Prince. It was an unusually raucous affair. Justice Kagan ribbed Justice Thomas when he confessed to liking Prince’s music in the 1980s. “No longer?” she asked. “Only on Thursday nights,” he replied. The courtroom erupted with laughter then and a dozen or so other times over the course of the morning. In a term full of proceedings that will imperil voting rights, affirmative action, and democratic elections, perhaps the Court felt it deserved some levity in a case about a pop star and an iconoclast. But the stakes are high here, too. Depending on who you ask, the case has the potential to diminish copyright protections or chill artistic progress.

The dispute arose in 2016 when a rock photographer named Lynn Goldsmith claimed that Warhol had infringed the copyright of a picture she’d taken of Prince when he used it to make several prints. In deciding the case, the Justices will have to clarify when artists can lawfully borrow from copyrighted artworks under a doctrine called fair use.

More here.

Alberto Toscano in Sidecar:

On 29 October 1922, Benito Mussolini was propelled to power by the March on Rome, inaugurating L’Era fascista. The date was subsequently declared the first day of Year One of the Fascist calendar. Like any founding event, the March was also the staging of a spectacle and the forging of a myth. An early and opportunistic reader of Georges Sorel’s Reflections on Violence (1908), Mussolini was persuaded that politics was inseparable from mythmaking, that it was a kind of mythopoiesis. In his Naples speech a few days before the March, he announced that

We have created our myth. Myth is a faith, a passion. It is not necessary that it be a reality. It is a reality to the extent that it is a goad, a hope, faith, courage. Our myth is the Nation, our myth is the greatness of the Nation. And to this myth, to this greatness – which we want to translate into a fulfilled reality – we subordinate everything else. For the Nation is above all Spirit and not just territory.

The myth of the Nation, of its lost and future greatness, continues to animate the resurgent far right across the globe. As in the speech delivered this week by the new Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, this myth is now often accompanied by paeans to ‘freedom’ which are meant to serve as antidotes to lingering suspicions of authoritarianism. This is not freedom as emancipation or liberation, but market freedom – yoked to what Meloni, quoting Pope John Paul II, described as ‘the right to do what one must’. Without rushing to shaky historical analogies, it may help to revisit fascism’s origins, one hundred years since its emergence, in order to understand its particular relationship with the market, and complicate the widespread perception of it as liberalism’s antithesis.

More here.

Nubar Hovsepian and Peter Beinart revisit Edward Said’s 1989 letter, in Jewish Currents. Nubar Hovsepian:

“THE WAY BEFORE US is quite clearly marked,” Edward Said wrote in 1989, in an unpublished “Open Letter to American-Jewish Intellectuals.” “We are either to fight for justice, truth, and the right to honest criticism, or we should quite simply give up the title of intellectual.” Said was responding to what he saw as an epidemic of bad faith among the American Jewish intellectuals of his time with regard to Israel’s dispossession of Palestinians. By offering support for Israel via the “dehumanization, dismissal, and, after the mid-1970s . . . demonization of the Palestinian people,” Said argued, these intellectuals had “played a critical role” in providing the Jewish state with ideological cover for its destruction of Palestinian life.

I read Said’s piece late in 1989 when he was trying to decide whether to publish it. Edward Said and I had been close friends since the 1970s; he was intrigued that I, an Armenian from Egypt, was involved in Palestinian movement politics in Beirut. I secured the rights to publish his book Orientalism in Arabic, and together we collaborated on many efforts in the struggle for justice in Palestine. I favored publishing the piece, but other friends and advisors—the socially well-connected writer and editor Jean Stein, literary scholar Masao Miyoshi, and Pakistani political theorist Eqbal Ahmad—disagreed. Entries from the diary I kept during that period record that these interlocutors thought the article was “not constructive enough” and that it “would expose him to great criticism.” They were right in the sense that, had Said gone ahead and published his entreaty, angry denunciations from Jewish intellectuals would have filled the pages of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, Commentary, and The Atlantic.

Yet I ultimately found their caution misguided, because Said, the most prominent Palestinian in the US, was already under attack on multiple fronts.

More here.