Author: Aaron Weber

Summer Reading

It’s been a minute. I have a draft started about radio edits and the futility of censoring explicit pop music, but it’s going nowhere, so I decided to just send you my current reading list and say hello. What’s up?

I’ve been reading Paved Paradise, by Henry Grabar, about the ways that parking warps our entire perception of the world, land use, and society. And also Nettle and Bone, by T. Kingfisher, which starts as a fairy tale about a princess who needs to complete three impossible tasks in order to accomplish her goal, which is later revealed to be the murder of her abusive brother-in-law.

A few things I’ve been thinking about

Learning about climate refugees makes people more hostile to immigration, which doesn’t bode well for US immigration policy. One winner from our current terrible immigration policies, though, is Canada, which is welcoming a robust new cohort of citizens from all over the world.

A more in-depth explanation of Juneteenth.

A new dialect or at least some local multilingual slang emerging in Miami.

We all know that working from home is hurting commercial real estate, but people in the know worry about the follow-on effects: commercial loans aren’t like residential mortgages, and they will need to be refinanced soon. But with interest rates high and values down, a lot of borrowers are going to go broke, and may take their lenders down with them.

Ragebait

Quis custodiet ipsos custodies, as it ever was.

Told you this would happen: angry grandpa demands tween genital inspection at youth track meet. (He denies it, or at least denies he was rude about trying to get a nine year old girl with a short haircut expelled from a track meet).

A new study on how much it costs to drive everywhere, and a planned documentary on the health costs of driving everywhere, and a new study on gasoline leaking out of gas stations and contaminating everything.

Come out and watch the parade

Album art

Today’s song is Rose Parade, by Eliott Smith. It’s got a quiet, simple melody, and tells the story of a friend trying to cheer up the singer by taking him out to do something fun. Clearly, it doesn’t work.

There’s something incredibly touching and relatable about Smith trying and failing to battle his anhedonia.

You say it’s a sight that’s quite worth seeing
It’s just that everyone’s interest is stronger than mine
When they clean the street, I’ll be the only shit that’s left behind

I’ve been listening it so much this week that Spotify started recommending me a mix called “Sad 90s,” which is somewhere between worrisome and hilarious.

In which I get angry

ghost bike

A few years ago, my city government proposed putting in bike lanes on a busy road where there had been some crashes. The neighbors were furious, arguing that rich young athletic transplants were taking away parking from hardworking long-time Somerville residents. The city changed the plan and painted some markers telling people to share the road.

This past summer, 72-year-old Stephen Conley, a lifelong Somerville resident, was biking down that very stretch of road on his way home from his job at the supermarket deli counter. As he passed along a row of parked cars, a driver opened their door without looking, knocking him to the street. The impact killed him.

By all accounts he was one of the nicest guys you’d ever meet.

Last night, I went to a ghost bike ceremony in his honor. If you’ve never seen a ghost bike, those are the all-white bicycles placed at the site of fatal crashes as a warning and reminder. The tradition apparently began in 2003, in St. Louis, and reached Boston in the mid-2010s. Most of the ones around here are organized by just two people, and Rev. Laura Everett mentioned that she’s led about 20 of them.

The ride home was cold and the air promised rain, but I was a lot less angry when I got home than I had been when I left.

What I’ve been reading


Joy

Canceled

So we finally canceled our NYT subscription last week, after the latest fiasco of an article by Pamela Paul. It’s not just their endless transphobic “just-asking-questions” routine, to be honest. That’s well-documented and embarrassing — and a repeat of their 1990s-era failures to respect gay issues or cover them with the care or attention they deserved. Recall:

The Times… even refused to use the word “gay” in its pages until June 1987, doggedly sticking to the more clinical “homosexual.” And it underplayed the spread of AIDS, waiting nearly two years after its first, now-legendary item broaching the subject to run a story about AIDS on its front page.

The Pamela Paul article was just the last straw for us. Frankly, we should have unsubscribed when they published notorious troll Jesse freaking Singal, someone so beloved by the vilest denizens of the internet that many online critics write his name as J***e S***al to avoid mob harassment from his fans.

But the Times has, frankly, been dropping the ball all over the place. There was the 2020 Tom Cotton op-ed advocating a military coup. There were the numerous times they interviewed Republican operatives and described them as regular everyday voters. And they completely fucked up their coverage of DeSantis’ Florida book-banning campaign.

It’s just a never-ending clown show. At some point one has to wonder if they’re actually interested in truth, or if they just want to keep both-sides-ing everything to death.

See Also

McSweeneys: In Order to Keep Our Editorial Page Completely Balanced, We Are Hiring More Dipshits

The Onion: It Is Journalism’s Sacred Duty To Endanger The Lives Of As Many Trans People As Possible

Meanwhile

Wired: Conspiracy theorists think a movement to legalize corner stores is a conspiracy to ban freedom of movement. And they’re harassing traffic engineers and city planners about it.

Defector: A decent analysis of George Santos and the post-shame/post-reality moment he inhabits.

Joy

This dog responding to instructions from a song

This very accurate observation:

whales are a lot like lizards in that neither of them are a species of housecat — whalefact (@awhalefact) February 20, 2023

Check out this live, mostly-acoustic performance of the classic Aphex Twin electronic composition Alberto Balsam, interpreted beautifully by the Swedish psych-rock band Dungen. (Yes, the original song is inspired by shampoo and features samples of the sound of the musician’s hair being cut).

Days Like These

Today’s song is More, by Low. It’s about how difficult it is to dismantle structures of gender-based oppression. It’s also fantastic. The way the distorted riff plays against Mimi Parker’s clean, high tone just works. The whole album, HEY WHAT, is strange and filter-heavy, the culmination of a long journey from their slow, quiet origins, which had sprung, in the mid-1990s, from the inspirations of “Eno, Joy Division, and the boredom of living in Duluth.“

Bonus track: Speedy Ortiz, “No Below.”

More than what it should have cost

In the past few years, Walgreens and other retailers have closed quite a few locations, blaming gangs of shoplifters. They now admit they were lying about it, just like I told you they were.

All of what I didn’t have

Joy

Hand-crafted artisanal marketing copy

I’m a little worried about AI these days. Most of my work right now is not new creation, but adjusting existing materials and ideas for a specific purpose — cutting 500 words of copy to 250, writing a teaser paragraph to get people to download a whitepaper, and so on. AI could do some of that for me, which would be convenient until it could do all of that for me, at which point I’d be out of a job.

Sci-Fi: maybe someday in the future technology will automate all the boring things in life so everyone can focus on their artistic endeavours

Reality: okay so we’ve successfully automated all art so nobody should be distracted from their boring jobs anymore — Roger O’Sullivan (@RogerOSullivan) December 12, 2022

Noah Smith is optimistic, noting that “dystopia is when robots take half your jobs. Utopia is when robots take half your job.” In other words, AI could automate the annoying parts of our work and let us get to the good parts. He imagines that his writing will now be making a list his ideas, having an AI churn out a first draft of a column, and then revising to suit. Unfortunately, he’s one of the lucky few whose job requires original thinking. And honestly, his ideas are already written down. ChatGPT could already remix existing Noah Smith columns to create a “new” one on most economic, social, or technological topics.

As Today in Tabs puts it:

It’s very funny for a professional writer to admit that his job is to come up with some ideas and then encase them in low-value bullshit that a bot could generate, but I do think he’s right, and that generating necessary bullshit is the worst part of many jobs. Writing grants, writing software project proposals, writing pitch decks—lots of jobs consist of coming up with an idea and then coating it in bullshit of a particular format. Lawyers do almost nothing else. A lot of people could nearly eliminate the worst parts of their job with a good bullshit generator, as long as everyone just stays cool and pretends we’re not all using AI to do that. So don’t be a narc.

I’ve tried making ChatGPT write some copy for me. It was able to accurately explain the difference between coordination of benefits and subrogation among insurers (coordination is when you figure out which insurer to bill; subrogation is when one insurer pays a bill and then makes another pay it back). I asked it to write one of this year’s Princeton college application essay supplements, about community service (it says grew up in rural Pennsylvania and identifies specific on-campus service organizations it would like to join). Asked “In 50 words or less, what song represents the soundtrack to your life right now?” it responded:

“The Climb” by Miley Cyrus – a reminder to keep pushing forward and never give up, no matter how hard the journey may be.

It’s not perfect, but it’s good enough to make me think about yet another career pivot aimed at either using AI to generate my marketing bullshit exponentially faster, or developing a brand of hand-crafted artisanal bullshit that I can sell for a higher price.

Negative creep

Born in the USA

I think it’s kinda funny, I think it’s kinda sad

John Wick except it’s Gonzo and the mob just killed one of his chickens — @popeawesomexiii@mstdn.party (@PopeAwesomeXIII) December 3, 2022

Joy

It Sucks and You Like It

One of the canonical, oft-repeated anecdotes of my marriage is that one time, years ago, my wife and I were at the cheesemonger’s when the radio began playing Belle & Sebastian. I said “Oh, I haven’t heard this song in ages!”

Disgusted, she asked “What is it, Sublime?”

“What? No!”

“Whatever, it sucks and you like it!”

In that spirit, I present you some of the best single posts from the website which sucks and which we nevertheless like, Twitter:

And these longer threads that make me laugh until I cry:

Twitter is dying, and new platforms struggle to be born. Now is the time of Elon and his muskrats.

Vocabulary

This week I have picked up a book called Shadow & Claw, recommended by internet acquaintances who describe it as the great American sci-fi/fantasy epic. The New Yorker describes author Gene Wolfe as a “difficult genius” and relates that he’s been called the Melville of sci-fi by no less than Ursula K. LeGuin. I can see why.

The book has clearly been written to compete with Tolkien, not with elves and such, but with an enormous, carefully imagined world and a backstory so vast as to be incomprehensible even to the protagonists. Most importantly, the prose style asserts (perhaps too much) that the genre is worthy of literary respect. Wolfe stretches for antique words in a way that shouldn’t work, but somehow does: a man is strangled with a lambrequin rather than a simple garotte; peasants step aside for armigers rather than minor nobility; cavalry ride destriers to meet carracks arriving at the shore; an officer leads a lochus of peltasts; a weary traveler leans upon a paterissa. I haven’t had to guess at meanings or open a dictionary so frequently since I was a tween tearing through the grownup sci-fi/fantasy section at my hometown library. Trying to make sense of unfamiliar words in almost-familiar contexts manages to create a a sort of unheimlich sensation, the familiar tropes of a genre rendered once more uncanny… when it’s not just a colossal pain in the ass.

Joy

This cat is two sauces long.
AI-generated packages for different regionally popular candies.
Cat or underwear model?
The hazards of having a retriever at Halloween.
Rather longer but well worth your time, this absolutely scathing article about the state of the UK Conservative Party.

Swim and Sleep Like a Shark

I usually like to start these newsletter/blog posts off with some of my own thoughts but I haven’t got any for today. Instead, here’s the song “Swim and Sleep (Like a Shark)” by Unknown Mortal Orchestra.

What I’ve Been Reading

Interesting Articles From Sources I Don’t Entirely Trust

Joy

Did You Get You a Haircut?

Today’s song is Haircut by Petey & Miya Folick:

Sure you can touch it, and yes it’s so soft,
No I don’t feel different, I still feel fucking lost.


On Feeling Lost

A personal essay about passive suicidal ideation.
A personal essay about being so depressed you force force an AI to create a thousand portraits of Spongebob Squarepants.


On Politics

A word about Christian fascism from Jared Yates Sexton.
A word about Christian fascism from a town that’s closing its local library rather than allow it to have books about gay people.
A word about Christian fascism in the form of a profile of an NYT profile of Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters.

Related: people feel unsafe and push for police crackdowns not because of crime specifically but because of visible poverty. We could address many of these highly visible, highly upsetting problems by providing more housing, but because we regard them as criminal we do the American thing and just add guns to the mix, to predictably terrible results.


On Joy

Branch manager and assistant branch manager.
Dog learns how to pet a cat (kinda).
This goofy-ass dog.
Dog wears makeshift hat.
This is what yawning elephant shrews look like.
A highly-rated dog.
Cat or potato chip?
Say Anything, carcinization edition.
Pitbull x dachshund.

It Takes You a Long Time to Bleed to Death. But You Do.

Even before this month’s Supreme Court attack on women’s bodily autonomy, doctors in conservative states were refusing or delaying care for women having miscarriages, and with the legality of basic medical care in question, things are about to get a lot worse. Several Kansas City hospitals have already stopped providing emergency contraception for fear of lawsuits. If the history of other places that have banned abortion is any indication, we’re about to see teen suicides rise even beyond their current elevated levels.

Republicans will almost certainly push for a nationwide ban next, which makes you wonder how much more polarized things can get. Ron Brownstein, writing in the Atlantic, sees two historical parallels. The more recent is Jim Crow, when the states of the old confederacy took a “defensive” approach to their anti-rights agenda, enforcing segregation in-state but not trying to codify it nationwide. The other is the “offensive” runup to the Civil War, when the states of what would become the confederacy tried to spread slavery nationwide. Brownstein is careful to note he isn’t saying we’re doomed to an actual all-out war, but offense seems inevitable. As state-level voting rights violations, a hard-right Supreme Court, and the regressive nature of the US Senate itself lead an extremist minority to national power, we’re going to see a good deal of offense and escalation.

We’re already seeing stochastic terrorism. With Iowa and other states making it legal to run over a protestor with your car, for example, it was pretty much inevitable that we’d see some dude driving his F-150 Raptor into a Cedar Rapids pro-choice protest. Nobody died this time, fortunately, but the driver did not face any immediate consequences, which doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the next time.

And there will be a next time.

Clipping Service

Bill McKibben in The New Yorker on yet another in the apparently interminable series of monstrous decisions:

But, of course, the Court has also insured that “getting a clear statement from Congress” to address our deepest problems is essentially impossible. The decision in Citizens United v. F.E.C., in 2010, empowered corporations to game our political system at will. That explains, in part, why Congress has not passed a real climate bill in decades. The efforts that Democratic Administrations have made to try and control greenhouse gasses have mostly used provisions of the Clean Air Act because it is the last serious law of its kind that ever came to a President’s desk (Nixon’s, in this case).

The Imperfectionist on how to give yourself a break about a challenge that seems difficult but is in fact impossible:

Here’s a surprisingly useful question to ask yourself next time you’re stumped by a problem, daunted by a challenge, or stuck in a creative rut: “What if this situation is even worse than I thought?”
…
Imposter syndrome? Worse than you think – because you think the issue is that you don’t yet have the qualifications to hold your own among your colleagues, when in fact the truth is that everyone is winging it, all the time, and that if you’re ever going to make your unique contribution to the world, you’re going to have to do it in a state of unreadiness.

Ali Griswold on abortion care as a corporate perk (and the hypocrisy of companies offering it):

It should go without saying that turning access to basic life-saving women’s health care into a corporate perk to attract and retain talent is the sort of perverse and dystopian outcome you’d only encounter in a country like the U.S. In addition to making people more dependent on their employers, it’s also a band-aid available to a tiny percentage of the working population and a potential privacy nightmare.

Michelle Wilde Anderson at Lithub on the the downward spiral of insolvent cities:

In public services, as in so much of life, you get what you pay for, which drives the gaping inequality among cities. Decades into a process of fiscal decline, a local government will have no more loans to take, taxes to raise, services to privatize, or assets worth selling. As the city reduces or eliminates staff, local government seems less competent and more irritating. Infrastructure and public space decays. “It’s death by a thousand cuts,” says Reverend Joan Ross of Detroit, referring to the city’s collapse in services. “It takes you a long time to bleed to death. But you do.”

Joy

To Give Up Eating for Fear of Choking

Peter Hessler is one of my favorite writers on just about any subject, and this month he has a story about how he lost his job teaching English in China. Nobody is exactly sure what the real rules are, and everyone denies having said anything when contacted by fact-checkers, but Hessler clearly became slightly too controversial for administrative comfort after one of his comments on a student’s essay was misquoted and went viral on Weibo.

What fascinated me was how the students navigated the Kafkaesque political landscape of nebulous rules with inconsistent enforcement. They all had to use illegal VPNs to do better research for term papers. They all know the cruelty and capriciousness with which success can be granted or taken away, no matter how hard they work. But the system, cruel and capricious and corrupt as it is, still seems too immense to change, and grants them enough rewards that it seems worthwhile. So, they live with it, even though most aren’t strongly nationalistic and don’t believe the propaganda. The idiom that keeps coming up is that one should not yinyefeishi, or give up eating for fear of choking. As long as living standards continue to rise generation to generation, the failures of the current system are acceptable, and radical change isn’t necessary or desirable to most people.

The article doesn’t guess at what might happen if the system fails to deliver, if a gerontocracy refuses to relinquish its hold on power, if standards of living and life expectancy start to drop for the next generation. Perhaps the US will find out before China.

You Were the King of Carrot Flowers

Oh Comely

How Strange it Is To Be Anything at All