America Caught In A Revolving Door of Their Own Politcal Stupdity

 Gore Vial dubbed us the United States of Amnesia. More about him later. He said we ignored our history. The one thing my anti-Trump friends and I have in common is having read and paid attention to history.

P.T. Barnum gets the credit for saying there's a sucker born every minute. We've become a nation of suckers.

Farmers in Iowa are struggling in Trump’s economy, but many say they still support him (NBC News).

“Not even a little bit,” Trump said when a reporter asked whether people’s finances were driving him to reach a deal with Iran.

Democrats have seized on Trump’s comment to make the case that he is out of touch. Most of the farmers didn’t take offense.

“We know Trump well enough to know that he sometimes says things off the top of his head and doesn’t think them through,” Arda Van Regenmorter said at her family’s farm in northwest Iowa. “That statement, to me, is one of those. He cares about us financially.”

Really, Arda? 

“It’s going to get ugly for a while, but in the long run, it’s going to help us,” said Loren Van Regenmorter, Arda’s husband. “Trump is the first president we’ve had in a long time that will stand up to China, because China just runs all over us.” 

Really, Loren?

Either of you got any particulars backing you up? Maybe we won't hear about you going to bankruptcy court. 

W.C. Fields: Never give a sucker an even break. 

James Fishback’s Very Weird Groyper Wedding - weren't the Republicans the party of family values?

And when we thought things could not get any more stupid:

‘Logical Conclusion’ of Citizens United as Delaware Judge Lets Corporations Vote in Local Elections  

“According to the law, a person is anyone or anything that can initiate and be subject to legal proceedings. By this conception, any adult, corporation, or institution is a person, but a minor is not a person, a fetus is not a person, and a humanoid robot... is not a person,” the ruling continues. “This highlights that legal personhood is dependent solely on legal recognition.”

The judge noted that in 2008, the Delaware General Assembly amended Fenwick Island’s charter “to expand its voter registration rolls to allow individuals to cast votes on behalf of trusts, limited liability companies, partnerships, and corporations that own property in Fenwick.”

5 things to know about tentative US-Iran ceasefire deal 

What Donald the Doofus will get is the same deal Obama got at the cost of billions and dead schoolgirls and any worth left in the name America. 

 I got listening to Gore Vidal interviews and lectures on YouTube. and I had forgotten how much of what we attribute to Trump was also said about George W. Bush and his crew.

 

 

For Those Who Want To Write and Who Think They Are Out of Touch With Culture

A rather brutal (harsh?) call to arms for those who think they may fit into the category of writer, and a stern admonition for those who think they are not good enough from John Pistelli's Weekly Readings #222 (05/04/26-05/10/26).

Most historic achievements in the arts have been the work of middle-aged men who didn’t spend a lot of time in the gym.3 That’s the demographic that writes the teen pop songs behind the scenes even to this day. (Youth don’t create youth culture; they’re babies and can’t do anything; it’s created for them by the middle-aged.) You have no reason to introject a contempt for your own person culturally disseminated by entities who do not have your interests in mind, such as corporations that steal your self-esteem and sell it back to you with their products or a political class aggrandizing its own power through a divide-and-conquer strategy. I recently re-watched the movie Heat; I hadn’t seen it since (speaking of middle age!) seeing it in the movie theater with my stepfather when it came out; I’d avoided re-watching it any time this century precisely because I associated it with a “type of guy.” And yet it’s a good movie, for that ineffable noir L.A. frisson if for nothing else, one I didn’t understand as a kid but do understand now because it’s about being a middle-aged man, but also, as many movies are, about making the movie, about a life devoted to the laborious pursuit of some ideal over and above normal life. In the central scene, when our heroes confront each other and realize their mutual likeness, each’s dependence on or constitution of the other, they abandon their abortive laments for the normal lives they might have led and conclude, I quote from memory, “I don’t know how to do anything else. I don’t much want to either.” That’s the reason to do it, or my reason anyway. Now on practical matters: no, I don’t especially recommend blind submissions. I’d say self-publish online and try to build a network among the like-minded. Your writing could be bad, my writing could be bad, but “bad” and “good” are unstable categories continually produced with and by art that doesn’t fit prior canons of taste, so you’ve just got to take the risk without guarantees. But above all evict the voice in your head you have allowed to insult and deride you for no reason, as if you didn’t have as much right to live beautifully on the earth as anyone else. 

sch 5/12 

Why Write? Nietzsche Against The Tech Bros! Thursday, right?

Starting 10:43 AM 

Why write?

Louise Glück writes in her Writing as Transformation (The New Yorker, and probably behind a paywall):

It seems to me that I have wanted to write for the whole of my life. The intensity of this insistence, despite its implausibility, suggests an emotional, rather than literal, accuracy. I think my life didn’t seem my life until I started to write.

***

Making up stories, making up anything, seemed to me the most involving and wonderful activity I could possibly imagine. And the story seemed, in some way, more important than anything in the world, I suppose because it was not subject to change. I imagine that people believe in God for the same reason. 

***

How different all this is, in its essence and outcome, from physical life. In the great physical events, extreme bodily pleasure and extreme bodily suffering, the self disappears completely or is lost. Either way, an involuntary act, unlike the struggle to be, to exist, that underlies the need to write.

What good is writing, or any other art?

The Problem of Money: Thoughts on Lewis Hyde’s The Gift (Lit Mag News)

Recently Becky suggested I write something about Lewis Hyde’s book The Gift, which grapples with the question of how writers can survive in a world that requires money. As we all know, lit mags don’t pay. Instead, they charge—fees to submit, to enter contests, to get editorial feedback, for expedited submissions. How is this fair? Shouldn’t we expect something tangible in exchange for our efforts? When they don’t pay writers, don’t lit mags resemble the jerk who asked my opera singer friend to perform at his wedding for free?

The Gift by poet, essayist, translator, and cultural critic Lewis Hyde, reframes the problem somewhat, but before I get to that, I’ll say that the bigger problem, its source, is the way our culture devalues creative work. Even people close to you might not appreciate your time spent writing, and may resent it for taking you away from activities with more visible benefit.

***

Hyde argues that art is a gift. (“I think it comes from God.”) Gifts move us and inspire gratitude. We don’t necessarily do anything to deserve them. They just happen, unwilled and unbidden. This is true of both experiencing art and creating it. (Hyde points out that artists are often described as “gifted.”) Like an encounter with an inspiring teacher, a gift transforms us, and like other intangible goods—natural beauty, love, friendship, happiness—art cannot be commodified. Its value, while significant, cannot be measured.

The problem for us is that our market economy’s method of assigning value is money. (If it doesn’t pay, it doesn’t matter.) Market economies are based upon a system of exchange—yesterday I exchanged twenty dollars for a twelve-pack of canned dog food, for instance—but while I may pay to listen to music, enjoy a film, or read a book, the pleasure art brings me has no direct connection to my payment. There’s no exchange, in other words, not like dollars for dog food. As Margaret Atwood says, a gift “by its nature has spiritual worth but no monetary value, being priceless.”

And because of reading that, Nicholas Low's Superhuman Fantasies (The Point) feels relevant here.

In 2023, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen released a document called “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” in which he proclaimed himself a de facto spokesman of the “effective accelerationist” movement. E/acc, as it is known in online spheres, is billed as a rejoinder to effective altruism and has gained traction in recent years among Silicon Valley technologists and the new right. The fundamental idea of e/acc is that accelerating technological development is the best way to resolve most of our cultural problems. The policy corollary is that we should therefore deregulate the tech industry, especially with respect to AI, nuclear power and nanotechnology.

But Andreessen’s manifesto is not focused on policy. Rather, it is an expression of what we might call “superhumanist” discourse. By this I mean that his proclamations largely revolve around the idea that humankind already possesses the power to become superhuman, if only we could get around a thoroughly nihilistic establishment. In a section headed “The Enemy,” he writes, “Our enemy is deceleration, de-growth, depopulation—the nihilistic wish, so trendy among our elites, for fewer people, less energy, and more suffering and death.” Nihilism is, for Andreessen, generally associated with progressivism, though he is careful not to openly avow either right- or left-wing politics. He concludes: “Our enemy is Friedrich Nietzsche’s Last Man.”

***

Philosopher Charles Taylor has argued that our “secular age” has been defined by the possibility of an “exclusive humanism”—in other words, a “humanism accepting no final goals beyond human flourishing, nor any allegiance to anything else beyond this flourishing.” But one could make the case that, at least in some circles, superhumanism is becoming our new guiding star. The “death of God” may have paved the way for human flourishing to become our supreme value, but that very supremacy has led humanity in turn to pursue self-deification. The same old humans, in other words, but made invulnerable to suffering, tricked out in fancy gadgets and, just maybe, immortal. Elon ex machina.

***

 Rather than solving the problem of suffering and revealing eternal truths, Nietzsche foresaw science uncovering the limits of human knowledge. Science would lead not to an understanding of the fundamental truths of nature, but rather to the realization that humanity is wandering through an endless hall of mirrors. (As with so many of Nietzsche’s ideas, there’s an uncanny prescience to this thought: just a few decades after his death, physicists would undertake experiments that showed that when we examine the universe at the most granular level, we find something like a reflection of ourselves.) He thought that for most people, this knowledge would be devastating and would lead to nihilism, a loss of faith in the value of life.

***

Nietzsche might in some sense condone the idea of a Promethean birthright, but he would never accept Andreessen’s contentions that “there is no material problem—whether created by nature or technology—that cannot be solved with more technology,” or that “the ultimate moral defense of markets is that they divert people who otherwise would raise armies and start religions into peacefully productive pursuits.” Indeed, it’s hard to square Andreessen’s own valuation of superhuman strength and adventurousness with the goal of diverting people into “peacefully productive pursuits.” Working for a tech company is the province of the “last man,” not the Übermensch. 

What if Nietzsche was onto something about aesthetics as a cure for nihilism? Not tragedy in and of itself, but in the act of creativity. What lies behind that creative act is multi-facected - a bit of madness that time and ourselves can be transcended, that love seeds the act, a mystical alchemy uncontained by binary code, a humility rising out of the gap between conception and realization - that is both human and more than. What is more productive than enlightening our souls and the souls of all humanity?  

“After Making Landfall”: Journal of Arts & Letters, Alaska Quarterly Review, ANMLY, Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine, Fairlight Books, Black Moon Magazine, 

“Saved by Rock and Roll” submitted to: Flash Frog, and BRILLIANT FLASH FICTION

A rejection from yesterday:

Thank you for sending us "Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory, 1976 - 1984." We appreciated the chance to read your work. We will not be including your submission in the upcoming issue, but we wish you well with your writing and hope that your work will be a perfect fit for another publication. 

As writers ourselves, we understand the time and effort that writers devote to their craft, and we know that it is never easy to receive these messages. Please know that we receive many submissions and can publish only a small number. Often, decisions are difficult.

We do accept--and encourage--simultaneous submissions. See long lists of other publication possibilities at 

http://newpages.com/

https://www.newpages.com/writers-resources/young-writers-guide

http://www.pw.org/literary_magazines?&perpage=*

http://www.everywritersresource.com/literarymagazines/

https://www.facebook.com/groups/35517751475/

https://discover.submittable.com/

https://publishedtodeath.blogspot.com/

https://thegrinder.diabolicalplots.com/

https://chillsubs.com/

https://heavyfeatherreview.org/calls/#journals

https://www.clmp.org/programs-opportunities/calls-for-submissions/

https://duotrope.com/

Thanks again.

Sincerely,

Barbara Westwood Diehl

The Baltimore Review

 How to Cry in Public Places: Geez, Poland could almost be Indiana. 

Alomst 12:30, and I need a break 

Not much a seista, but I did find my phone.

Worked on the submissions listed above and gave up on doing anymore. Thought about, even gave “Scenes” some tweaks. Then I decided not to pay the submission fees.

Working in fits and starts again.

 We can make it if we try: Despite rural challenges, Hoosier communities say READI critical to housing, quality-of-life goals

After contacting 132 communities across Indiana, reporters found READI has provided many regions with the necessary funding to complete affordable housing, downtown revitalization, workforce development and other projects. 

“READI has been a complete game-changer for rural regions like ours,” said Julie Halbig, vice president of economic and community development for Regional Opportunity Initiatives, a nonprofit advancing economic development in the Indiana Uplands region.  

 Out of Coke, but not wanting to go out - it is hot here now.

 Going to work on reading up on writing stuff.

From the Can't-Help-But-Screw-Up file:

Thank you for reaching out to the editors of Black Moon Magazine. We are currently closed for submissions, but rest assured that your submission has been saved and will be reviewed once we reopen. If you would like to withdraw your piece, please reply to this email thread, and we'll ensure it is no longer considered.

For those inquiring about our next issue, we are aiming for a release by the end of December. We apologize for the delay, as our editors are balancing full-time jobs and school commitments. We truly appreciate your patience and understanding, and we anticipate returning to a standard schedule by the end of the year.

Warm regards,

The Editors of Black Moon Magazine

 

Song for the day:

 

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Good Morning: William Kennedy! Spinoza! Kerouac! Abortions! AI Killers! Bridges!

There was a miss on the writer's group yesterday, but it still took two hours out of my life. Only one other showed up and we chatted for about an hour. Then I went to get some Coke Zero at the closest convenience store only to find out I had left my debit card at home. I gave up waiting for the bus because parts were aching. Instead, I walked home; more like limped. There I got the debit card, caught the number three up to The Dollar General and then back to Riverside Avenue. Thereafter, I stayed home.

I stayed home for the rest of the day. Sleeping took out a chunk of my afternoon. Then I was up till around 2 AM working on my research project. Thinking I could make it to Liturgy, I laid down for a while with the alarm set for 5 AM. I am pretty sure the alarm went off, but now I cannot find my phone.

When I woke again, it was off to the convenience store for tobacco and caffeine.

 Then I started on this post and went through browser tabs and email. What follows is the crop for this morning.

“He Breathes, He Writes”: The Voluminous Memory and Deep Empathy of Ironweed Author William Kennedy, the Library of America is promoting its Kennedy anthology with its usual class.

LOA: Ironweed is many readers’ introduction to Kennedy. What do you think explains this novel’s appeal? Why has it been Kennedy’s breakout book?

PG: Bill will say (novelists always say) it’s like naming a favorite child, but he knows that Ironweed is the top of his game, the best he’s ever written. Along with Legs and Billy Phelan in this trilogy, these novels represent a pinnacle.

The term of the day was “bums.” You look past bums. But Bill didn’t look past them. He gives them prominence, and in Ironweed they’re deeply human and interesting and layered and smart and funny. But they’re also broken, and they kind of fix each other—or try to. And the result is beautiful.

Not much happens in the novel; Kennedy is not a plot-driven writer. The characters walk up and down a handful of blocks in Albany, but they’re looking for home, much like salmon returning to their spawning stream. These two destroyed people, on the edge of survival, they’re never going to get their job or their life or their house back, but maybe they’re going to get a cup of soup that day, and maybe they’ll get a place to sleep, and maybe they’ll find friendship, or love. You’re rooting for these people. And it really is Albany. But it’s also any city.

We all want the same simple things. I think empathetic is a good word to describe Bill. These characters are not written with halos over them. They have a lot of flaws and they’ve done a lot of damage. He’s not canonizing them, but he’s giving them their due. They deserve the love they can find. They deserve to live another day. 

 Kennedy is one of the writers I knew of in my twenties and did not get around to reading until my fifties and wish I had read when I was younger.

Listen in: Spinoza, Atheist is a podcast from Princeton University Press. Spinoza is one of those philosophers I have been aware of since I was a teenager and yet who I never got around to reading. He intimidates me and he feels important; unlike Hegel who I think of as overhyped and empty. I listened to the podcast was I working, it seems to cover only a part of Sinoza's career. 

 I have a wary, on-again-off-again relationship with Jack Kerouac. I never succumbed to On The Road as did many people. Once, I thought it showed the limits of my mind and taste. Only to have the same so-what reaction when I read him again in my fifties. I gave up my plan to read his later novels. What I read about his later works has me thinking I am not missing anything. Yet, I continue reading about him. Which led me to Jack Kerouac: The Pseudo-Saint of Mindfulness by Josh Milton-Bell (Liberties). Not that this changed my mind about reading him further, but it has me thinking, instead, there is something to be learned from him.

What is it about Kerouac that still inspires such fervent devotion among impressionable 17-year-olds, nearly seventy years after On the Road’s initial publication? Kerouac lived the experiences that he wrote about, his novels weren’t sterile thought experiments written from the bowels of ivy-thick scholastic towers but muscular records of a life spent tussling on the forest floor. To his disciples, his spontaneous prose radiates wild, kinetic energy, a dizzying musical propulsion of words building on words building on words, the capstone of generative writing, frantic, compulsive hot wanderlust dripping from the walls as the sun rises up over the San Francisco Bay and gleams madly, gladly, while the — and so forth. 

***

Kerouac was pathologically incapable of escaping his desires, of surrendering himself totally to faith. But unlike our wellness industry salesmen, Kerouac actually took his spiritual quest seriously enough to be disturbed by his own failure to rise to it. To some degree he understood these inner contradictions, and desperately wanted to go beyond, to grasp onto true faith and outrun himself. In the second half of The Buddhist Years the reader watches as Kerouac becomes increasingly repulsed by his own inadequacy.  

The essay notes that Kerouac was depressed; some quotes remind me of how I thought when despondent. Then it gave me a reason for my paying attention to Kerouac:

But Kerouac was nothing if not authentic. And this authenticity is no less poignant for being the true expression of a limited man. His continued relevance does not follow from the depth of his spiritual ideals but the poignancy of his sincerity, his evocation of that tormented — sometimes sublime — search for meaning that can come in the absence of true belief. Reading these ragged efforts to will himself into faith, rushing and writhing to ascend beyond, it’s difficult to not feel a profound compassion for him.

He held nothing back from us. Kerouac was unafraid to fail spectacularly, cosmically, infinitely. The inadequacy of his faith may be his greatest legacy.

I worked yesterday on my research project. It came out of the Indiana Supreme Court upholding Indiana's abortion statute. This morning I read Sheila Kennedy's Culture War Consequences, and it puts my work and the work of Indiana's Republicans in perspective:

When it comes to culture-war issues, however, they are simply unable to connect the dots, despite the fact that a number of Indiana businesses predicted–and are now experiencing– problems recruiting employees as a result of the ban.

That connection– between Indiana’s ban and the state’s ability to attract a talented workforce–emerged during a recent, enlightening conversation with some friends.  A former colleague who recently became a grandfather noted that his son and daughter-in-law intended to have another child–but not while they still lived in Indiana. Both are high-tech workers of the sort Indiana desperately needs, and both currently have excellent positions. But they plan to relocate, because–as my colleague’s daughter-in-law explained–she fears what might happen if she has a troubled pregnancy.

Another friend concurred, noting that he had counseled his daughter–a recent elite college graduate–not to return to Indiana. As he explained, although his family would have the means to send her out-of-state for necessary care in normal course, that wouldn’t protect her in the case of an emergency situation.

Is this the plan - to have the educated, the talented remove themselves from Indiana? Think about it.  

 

 Okay, there is a West Newton, Indiana, but no East Newton, or a Newton. Such is Indiana geography.

 Meet the New ICE Queen. Same as the Old ICE Queen. (The Bulwark): Is there any Trump appointee who is competent?

Okay, I’m overstating it. But yesterday, a new report in the Daily Mail1—a hotbed, recently, for scoops from leaky and disgruntled DHS employees—featured anonymous Mullin underlings griping about some remarkable parallels between life under the old boss and under the new boss. For one thing, Mullin is reportedly trying to get his wife Christie on the DHS payroll as a “Special Government Employee”—the same arrangement Noem once used for her boy-toy adviser Corey Lewandowski.

For another, Mullin appears still to be flying around in the same $70 million luxury jet that helped end Noem’s tenure—and using it to spend a good chunk of his working time in his home state of Oklahoma. “He leaves on Thursdays a lot at 11 in the morning and doesn’t fly back until Monday afternoon,” one source complained to the Daily Mail. “He is barely in the building.”

“Mullin seems to think ICE requires less work than a senator, and it shows,” griped another. “Meanwhile, ICE has no direction.”

The Pope WARNS The World About War, AI & Unchecked Power:

 Morality, what a concept.

Feta fries, a hot chicken biscuit and the east side’s favorite rectangular pizza: an illustrated food tour for part of Indianapolis.

Tuesday's song of the day:

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Pondering Character

 I managed to read Highsmith's Tom Ripley novels only in my fifties. Everyone says there is a strangeness, a dangerous quality, in her work. They are right.

But David Bergen on Patricia Highsmith, Backstories, and Why Tom Ripley's Character Works catches the ineffable quality of Highsmith, or so my memory tells me.

 Critics and readers have focussed on Ripley’s latent homosexuality, and how the repression created an angry young man capable of killing Dickie Greenleaf, a blond blue-eyed young American whom Ripley might desire; a few seconds before swinging the oar, Tom thinks “he could have hit Dickie, sprung on him, or kissed him, or thrown him overboard….” However, Highsmith is more interested in the impulses at the edge of desire, in alienation, in the act of survival, and the subconscious urge to run towards an ideal.

*** 

Highsmith gives us little history of Tom Ripley, and so we have no sense of what “made” Tom. Another writer might introduce a traumatic childhood, or some abuse newly recalled, or the horrible evil stepmother, to justify a character who kills with robotic coldness and efficiency and then cleans up his own messes with very little emotion; a dead body is a mere object to get rid of.

Ripley knows what he has done, but he justifies each violent action as an unfortunate necessity. To create a character who has no background, no formative traits, no history, no emotional purchase, and then to make that character believable and sympathetic, is a feat. 

Origin stories seem a rage now, following the rise of comic books. Yes, David Copperfield and Oliver Twist have origin stories; Morte d'Arthur has an origin story. The Bible has its origin stories. But what are the origin stories of Hamlet, Lear, Ivanhoe, Elizabeth Bennett, Sam Spade, or Jake Barnes? 

It seems to me that some stories require the character's origin. Those seem to be the stories that follow a biographical method. We need to see the beginning to understand the end. Again, see David Copperfield. The character directs action?

Others tell the story of what I am calling a functional character. We do not need to know the complete biography of Sam Spade or Hamlet. Of the latter, all we need to know is he is the Prince of Denmark and his father was murdered; what he was studying at Wittenberg is irrelevant. The action shows the character? 

But The Great Gatsby presents a problem for me. Jay Gatz alters his origin because he aspires to Daisy, but the alteration does not become known until after Gatsby's death. Dreiser works a similar story in the biographical form with An American Tragedy.  So does James T. Farrell in the Studs Lonigan trilogy. We have seen Gatsby chasing after Daisy. When we find out about Jay Gatz, the novel approaches tragedy.

Is the origin story related to the trauma plot? Are we delving into the trauma to understand the character? For Melville, it was enough to tell us that Moby Dick took Ahab's leg to start off Moby Dick. 

Well, enough meandering thoughts before dawn.

sch 5/27 

 

Pig's Feet! Romans! Climate Change! Trump Still Thieving! Libertarians! Addiction Games!

 I talked to Joel C and KH last night. It came in and between my working on the research project.

I had pig's feet for last night; I have three more in the refrigerator.

How to Cook Pig Feet in the Oven? 

The spot where the tooth was pulled is tender and so the face above it. My CPAP mask hits that spot. I did not sleep much last night, so I got up and got to work on blog posts. I also started clearing out the tabs in my Zen browser.

The Guardian published Woman fired from Indiana university over Charlie Kirk post wins $225,000 settlement. It shows off the best of Indiana:

 Mearns said Swierc’s post resulted in a flood of outraged phone calls and emails to the university. Some warned they would withhold donations and at least one parent said she planned to withdraw her children from the school. Some callers threatened violence, Mearns said.

“The reaction was extraordinarily damaging to our University’s reputation and image, and it was exceptionally disruptive to our mission and our people,” Mearns said in his statement.

Having fun with the Romans: Mary Beard on the Classics  

Could nature itself hold the solution to climate change? (The Guardian)

In Argentina’s Iberá national park, you can see a stunning example of runaway revival. After decades of degradation, the reintroduction of jaguars has reduced bloated herds of grazing herbivores, allowing wetland plants to recover. The plants’ roots trap moisture in the soil, and their branches provide a habitat for species that make this one of the most spectacular wetlands – and carbon sinks – on the planet. After just a few years, caimans now bask on the banks, macaws flash scarlet across the sky and giant otters patrol the waterways.

Of course, nature-based solutions are not always so successful. Companies have created vast carbon farms via monocultural tree planting, destroying native species in the process. The drying of peatlands to reduce methane production leads to the release of huge amounts of CO2. Nature’s power lies in its complexity, so attempting to simplify or reengineer the system often backfires.

The risks and trade-offs tend to disappear, though, when you get one vital part of the equation right. Time and again, when the revival of local biodiversity improves the livelihoods and wellbeing of local people, change becomes truly sustainable. Whenever people are intrinsically motivated to protect the environment around them, they become an integrated part of a natural feedback loop that can quickly gather momentum. 

Todd Blanche’s Effort to Grant Trump and His Family “Forever Immunity” Hides a Greater Danger 

 The Libertarian Party of Indiana (oddly no updates to its blog since last year, are they sure about offering a choice?)

Elevating The Mediocre (Sheila Kennedy) has an interesting study of how the under-educated get recruited and stay loyal to tyrants.

Struggling to get your children off Fortnite? There’s a reason for that (Irish Times)

Schüll’s central insight is that machine gambling is not primarily about money. Instead, gamblers are in search of a flow state that allows players to “manage their affective states and create a personal buffer zone against the uncertainties and worries of their world”.

While flow states are good, both gambling machines and video games can weaponise them to the extent that some players become numb to everything else.  

The Book That Plunges You Into Messy American History (The Atlantic)

During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration made what may well be the nation’s most explicit and pernicious attempt to demand loyalty. In 1942, roughly two months after Pearl Harbor, the government began to detain Japanese and Japanese American residents of the West Coast and Hawaii. Eventually, some 120,000 people, two-thirds of whom were American citizens, were imprisoned in large inland camps. During their detainment, which lasted up to four years, internees had to take a survey that, among other things, asked whether they would serve in the Army “on combat duty, wherever ordered” and “swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America”—that is, to the country that had just imprisoned them, presuming their disloyalty. If Loyalty Day is uninteresting because it’s artificial, then this was something far more sinister. For many internees, the so-called loyalty questions seemed like a threat.

Questions 27 & 28, the author Karen Tei Yamashita’s tenth book, gets its title from those loaded questions. The novel roves through time, space, and literary styles to tell stories of many Japanese immigrants and their descendants in the United States. She brings to life nearly 100 people who were interned—or their ancestors were, or their children, or their legal clients, or a wide range of other connections. All of these stories merge into a sprawling exploration of what it was like to have to answer the loyalty questions, and how those questions echo through American history to this day. Crucially, Yamashita does this without ever legitimizing the test itself. “Those questions,” she writes, “that damned questionnaire, are meaningless, but the consequences of interpreting them, choosing yes or no, shape the future.”

Is this when America was great? 

Onto other things, like getting ready for the writer's group.

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Reading Lists

 I have a pile of books here to read, some for personal reasons and some for research, but I keep looking at lists of books for which I lack the time to read. Maybe I can come back to them, and perhaps you can get to them before me.

Midwest: A Regional Spotlight on Independent Publishing (Community of Literary Magazines and Presses)

A Reading List for Jewish American Heritage Month 2026 (Community of Literary Magazines and Presses)

I got two things from 19 Novels You Need to Read This Summer (Literary Hub). First, Téa Obreht has a new novel (about time), and then this that gave me thought about my writing:

But the thing one craves in good fiction is the eye-widening prompt to see things differently. 

Makes me wonder if I do enough of that.

We Should All Be Autodidacts: The Case For Reading the Great Books at Your Own Pace (Literary Hub) is not a list but about reading a particular list that puts the pin into scholarly pretensiousness.

When people ask whether they should read these books, I have two answers. The first is “Why would you not want to read all these old famous books that you’ve heard about all your life?”

The second answer is that the Great Books tend to share one quality. They have a lot of integrity. They tend to be unflinchingly honest about whatever their subject happens to be. And this means that even when they come down on one side of a question, they usually make a fair case for the opposite side.

Books ‘Andy Burnham’s life was changed by the poet Tony Harrison’: writers discuss literature, politics and the 100 best novels is about a list.

The Guardian’s list was topped by Middlemarch, and while it featured many 19th and 20th-century classics, newer novels including The Vegetarian by Han Kang, Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel and My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante also made the cut.

Asked why older titles are finding popularity among young people, Mosse said that such books “contain a wisdom that is not about the endless revolving door that we live in now”.

“This is a time of transition and it’s a very bewildering moment,” said Shafak. “We’re dealing with so many crises. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we’re focusing more on 19th-century literature unknowingly. Most of the problems that we are dealing with today are actually still the repercussions, the ramifications of the 19th century.”

I will end with a little Joe Tex whimsicality:

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