Casey Baskin Aneurysms, literature, science, Uncategorized

You Can Do a Lot with 4 American Shitcoins

People complain about it a lot, but COVID lockdown was a boon for a certain brand of aspiring shut-in. Wait — you’re saying I have to stay home and not talk to anyone? Tell me more.

I’ve long thought that people would probably want to act like COVID never happened once it was “over” (a term used advisedly), and that seems to be true — at least, the pretending part. But vestiges of the crisis are not going away, even as employers try to shepherd and frog-march their workers back into icy cubicles. Working-from-home is still going to be a thing in many people’s employment, to one degree or another, and certainly online teaching looks to be a permanent feature of K-12 and higher ed. Yet again, the past isn’t past.

Hoatzin, or Canje pheasant, of South America

In what the late, great naturalist Loren Eiseley called “all the strange hours,” I’ve spent the time alone mostly watching BBC nature documentaries and cartoons. The natural world can’t escape the miasmic evil of humankind, it should go without saying, but spending time with hoatzins and Siamese fighting fish and emperor penguins and spectacled bears creates a sense of otherworldly separation. Theirs is a different world from ours — if not different or separate enough to save them from us.

One of the most remarkable things I’ve ever seen is the David Attenborough-narrated story of Barbara Steininger, an Austrian biologist who has nurtured baby bald ibises of a species nearly driven to extinction by humans. She spends nearly all day, every day with the scrawny hatchlings, finding ingenious ways to “imprint” on them that she is their birdy mamma. Then — incredibly — Steininger and her team figured out a way to guide the little ibises to their traditional feeding grounds in Italy, and then back again, carried in a bizarre low-flying vehicle alongside the flock and squawking out bird-sounds to assure them that Mom is guiding them along. As Attenborough observed, the younglings know instinctively, on some level, that they’re supposed to migrate somewhere, but they don’t know where exactly. The goal was to create a thriving new population of ibises in a safe landscape in Switzerland, and somehow it worked.

Bald ibis in a reflective moment

How is that for good news? Anyway, here are some pieces of mostly bad news, selected by our editors:

  • Zhang Yongle on Trump vs. Fukuyama: Reconfiguring Hegemony (New Left Review)
  • Remembering Oleens, the gay bar that fought Charlotte, North Carolina’s AIDS crisis (WFAE)
  • Lisa Borst on the New TV Novels: Not Literature, but Dramaturgy (n+1)
  • Cracked, Costly Fantasies: Dan O’Sullivan traces the legacy of right-wing ideologies in California (Los Angeles Review of Books)
  • ‘Weapons’ and the Demonization of Teachers (Autostraddle)
  • Indonesia’s Rulers Are Whitewashing the Crimes of Suharto (Jacobin)
  • Karen Hao on AI tech bosses: ‘Many choose not to have children because they don’t think the world is going to be around much longer’ (Irish Times)
  • David Attenborough and the ibis chicks (no, it’s not a #MeToo, thank god) (BBC)
  • Saving the Northern bald Ibis in a changing world (BBC Earth)

  • FBI Raids Home of Former Trump National Security Adviser John Bolton (WSJ)
  • Five years after CHOP in Seattle, teen’s death is without answers (Seattle Times)
  • Hal Foster on the Pinstriped Tycoon and Art in a State of Siege (London Review of Books)
  • Maya Posch on the Death of Industrial Design and the Era of Dull Electronics (Hackady)
  • Matt Simon on the tiny ocean organisms that could help the climate in a big way (Grist)
  • By Trying to Kill High-Speed Rail, Trump Is Saving It (Zocalo Public Square)
  • How Retirement Was Invented (Atlantic)
  • Mel Brooks: ‘Hitler was bad to every Jew in the world, but he was good to me’ (Telegraph)
  • Indigenous knowledge is key to saving the great desert skink and other species (ABC)
  • Car Seat Headrest’s Will Toledo on Chronic Illness and His “Scholarship of Faith” (Exclaim!)
  • Meet the Spectacled Bear: South America’s Only Bear (Cool Green Science)
  • “Shopping cart archery” because…. Germans (WAPL)