You’re Invited to a Colonoscopy!

Colorectal cancer is the second-most deadly cancer, killing over 1 million people per year around the world — 1.7% of all deaths. In the United States, where colorectal cancer causes 50,000 deaths per year, the foundation of the fight against it is the colonoscopy. Getting one periodically is recommended for everyone over the age of 45.

Colonoscopies are rarely used for screening elsewhere but have been standard in the U.S. for decades. There are many reasons to think that they should work. But they are also expensive, invasive, unpleasant, and rarely — but not that rarely — have serious side effects. Are they worth it?

Until recently we didn’t have any randomized controlled trials that directly tested how well colonoscopies work. We finally just got one and the results were — how can I describe them? Confusing? Ambiguous? Frenzy-inducing?

Let’s try to understand what to make of this trial, and why American gastroenterologists were so quick to criticize it.

Reminders About Tubes

After you swallow food, your body uses rhythmic waves of contractions to send it on a 4-meter (13-foot) journey through your esophagus, stomach, and small intestine. These extract most of the food’s nutrients and render it into a pulpy acidic fluid called chyme. The chyme then travels through your colon, a 1.5-meter (5-foot) tube that reabsorbs water and electrolytes, creating a solid mass that is then moved to your rectum for storage and eventual disposal. Yay!

The outermost layer of your inner colon is a single layer of epithelial cells whose job it is to let the good stuff through and keep the bad stuff out. Stem cells deeper inside the colon constantly divide to make new epithelial cells, which climb to the surface and live for four or five days before committing “suicide.”

Colonoscopies rest on the adenoma-carcinoma hypothesis. The idea is that errors can arise in the DNA, resulting in epithelial cells that don’t die on schedule. If they do anything too weird, your T-cells will kill them. But some mutations fly under the radar, causing little clumps of cells to grow on the surface of the colon. These clumps, or “polyps,” are usually not cancer — they grow slowly, and won’t (yet) spread to neighboring tissues. But if these persist for many years, they can acquire additional mutations that make them start spreading.

To prepare for a colonoscopy, you must empty your colon. This is achieved by drinking some chemicals and enduring some spectacular biological functions. Then a doctor threads a 1.5-meter (5-foot) flexible tube with a light and camera to look at the entire colon and remove or sample any polyps. The idea is not just to detect cancer but, by removing precancerous polyps, prevent it.

The primary alternative to colonoscopies for colorectal cancer screening are “occult blood tests” that look for spooky hidden blood in the stool. The oldest of these use an extract of the guaiacum tree and have RCTs showing they reduce colorectal cancer mortality by 9%-22% when used for screening. Newer tests look for antibodies and/or genetic mutations. These are more sensitive, though we don’t yet have RCTs estimating how much they help with mortality.

Another alternative is an older procedure called a sigmoidoscopy, which is basically a “mini” colonoscopy with a 0.6-meter (2-foot) tube. Compared to colonoscopy, it is quicker, safer, less painful, and cheaper, but it can only look at the lower (“sigmoid”) colon. Still, randomized trials have shown that screening sigmoidoscopies reduce colorectal cancer deaths by 26%-30%.

In principle, colonoscopies should be better than either of these tests. Unlike blood tests, colonoscopies try to remove polyps before they become cancer. And unlike sigmoidoscopy, colonoscopies can examine the whole colon.

But how much does it actually help to remove precancerous polyps? Gastrointestinal doctors often point to the National Polyp Study, but this is not a true randomized comparison — the study did colonoscopies on all subjects and concluded, based on comparisons to base rates in other “similar” populations, that removing polyps helped. And how much does it help to screen the whole colon? Cross et al. compared sigmoidoscopy to colonoscopy in English patients with suspected colorectal cancer and found that sigmoidoscopy was sufficient to detect 80% of cancers.

Because of the cost, the lack of direct evidence for efficacy, and the fact that it’s hard to convince people to do colonoscopies, they are rarely used for cancer screening outside the United States and some parts of German-speaking Europe. So it would be really useful to have an RCT that tested how well screening colonoscopies work.

The Trial

That brings us to the star of our show. The Nordic-European Initiative on Colorectal Cancer (NordICC) is a huge randomized trial aimed at rigorously measuring how much colonoscopies reduce cancer and death.

by Dynomite, Asterisk |  Read more:

Image: Karol Banach
[ed. I've had two, and that's enough. Before the first, I asked my doctor how long would it take? He said "oh, about 6 feet". Everyone's a comedian.]

A Taste for Danger: The Hazardous History of Fugu

There is a scene in a 1977 instalment of the Torakku yarō (Truck Guys) series where the main character is buried in sand up to his neck as a cure for the effects of eating fugu blowfish. The protagonist, played by Sugawara Bunta, feels his whole body going numb after partaking of the fish—famously poisonous if prepared incorrectly—and submits to the surprising traditional remedy.

The film takes place in my hometown of Shimonoseki in Yamaguchi Prefecture, the fugu capital of Japan. Two years before its release, the kabuki star Bandō Mitsugorō VIII died from poisoning after overindulgence in his beloved dish of torafugu (tiger blowfish) liver at a Kyoto restaurant. This raised the profile of fugu and its life-threatening properties.

According to the Ministry of Health, even today half of all food poisoning deaths in Japan come from eating blowfish. In a typical year, some 50 people suffer fugu poisoning in around 30 incidents, some of which result in fatalities. (There are also cases of fugu poisoning in Taiwan, where a total of 11 people died in 15 incidents taking place from 1991 to 2011.) Blowfish contain tetrodotoxin, which causes symptoms of numbness and paralysis 20 minutes to three hours after ingestion. These spread to the whole body, in serious cases leading to death by respiratory failure. People take their life in their hands when eating fugu.

Detoxified Dinners

Is sand burial really a good way to cure fugu poisoning?

“It’s total superstition!” says Ueno Ken’ichirō, owner of the Shimonoseki restaurant Fuku no Seki, which specializes in blowfish—known in the local dialect as fuku. Formerly a fugu wholesaler, Fuku no Seki is now the parent organization for processing company Daifuku, so Ueno knows his blowfish.

There have been no poisoning cases in Yamaguchi Prefecture for decades. Would-be fugu cooks are required to get licenses in many Japanese prefectures, including Yamaguchi, Fukuoka, Ōita, Tokyo, and Osaka. Ueno says, “There are very tight standards in Yamaguchi. We take pride in preparing blowfish safely.”

Four in five Japanese fugu caught in the wild or farm-raised—mainly in Nagasaki Prefecture—come to Yamaguchi, because of the numerous local processing companies. After toxic elements are removed in processing, the fish, rendered harmless, are shipped nationwide.

For this reason, the kind of scene depicted in the film is now almost unimaginable. Fugu served in a professional establishment very rarely causes poisoning. The vast majority of blowfish poisoning incidents in Japan occur when amateurs prepare the dish.

The case of Bandō Mitsugorō VIII was different. Probably many people now would find it difficult to understand how he considered toxic tiger blowfish liver to be a delicacy. Many gourmets of the time, however, dipped fugu sashimi into soy sauce mixed with fugu liver instead of wasabi. The poisonous elements made the tongue smart and go numb—sensations to savor while drinking. Befuddled by numbness and alcohol, Bandō consumed too much, overshooting his tolerance level and succumbing to death. Chefs would not allow this to happen today. (...)

Lifting the Fugu Ban

Shimonoseki became Japan’s fugu center in the late nineteenth century. Yamaguchi Prefecture lies at the western tip of the country’s main island of Honshū and is surrounded by water on three sides. From ancient times the area flourished through trade with China and Korea and was known as the “Kyoto of the West.”

Itō Hirobumi (1841–1909), Japan’s first prime minister, was born in the area. During one trip back home, he visited a restaurant called Shunpanrō. The sea was rough that day, so it was difficult to procure any good fish. The flustered restaurant proprietor’s wife decided to serve Itō blowfish. Although it had been prohibited by law since the rule of Toyotomi Hideyoshi three centuries earlier, locals had perfected the preparation method.

Itō enjoyed the dish so much that he lifted the ban on eating fugu in 1888. He also granted the very first license to serve it to Shunpanrō, considered the finest restaurant in Shimonoseki. In 1895, the establishment played a part in East Asian history when it was the venue for the signing of the Treaty of Shimonoseki by Itō and Chinese politician Li Hongzhang. The agreement brought an end to the 1894–95 Sino-Japanese War. (...)

In Japan, fugu remains have been found at the kaizuka or “shell mounds” that served as garbage dumps for people around the country in the Jōmon period (ca. 10,000 BC–300 BC) and later. The endless deaths from eating the fish ultimately led to Hideyoshi’s sixteenth-century ban, which continued—if imperfectly enforced—until the modern era.

The appeal of hazardous blowfish cuisine was apparent since ancient times. Was the thrill of a brush with death really so entrancing? The boundless nature of human desire is enough to make one shudder. If fugu were not poisonous, they may not have become so highly prized.

by Sumiki Hikari, Nippon.com | Read more:
Image: Fugu ready for preparation. Courtesy Shimonoseki municipal government.
[ed. Enough venom to kill 30 people. Apparently fugu has claimed another victim, this time in Brazil.]

via:

Annie Leibovitz; Elvis Presley's TV, Graceland, Memphis, Tennessee
via:

[ed. Bi-partisian agreement?]

Katie Fuller, everything perfect is already here

via: Claire Rousay

Keto's Promising Clues

Patients say keto helps with their mental illness. Science is racing to understand why.

Iain Campbell was gazing out the bus window on his way to work when he first sensed something radical was reshaping how he experienced the world.

The inkling emerged from an altogether ordinary observation: He felt peaceful, maybe even happy as he watched the trees along the road pass by.

"I hadn't experienced that in a really long time, probably since I was a kid," says Campbell, who lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.

"I didn't know what was going on at the time, but I thought this might be what it feels like to be normal."

Campbell had lived with bipolar disorder for much of his life. Mental illness runs in his family, and he'd lost loved ones to suicide. Over the years, he tried different treatments, but it had become "increasingly difficult to live with."

What had changed? A few weeks earlier, he'd started a new diet.

Campbell dealt with unwanted weight gain and metabolic troubles, a common side effect of psychiatric medications.

In an effort to lose weight, he drastically cut back on carbs and instead focused on protein and fat. It turns out he'd unknowingly entered ketosis: A metabolic state where the body switches from glucose as its primary energy source to ketones, which come from fat.

He started learning about the ketogenic diet, which is high fat and very low carb, on podcasts and YouTube videos. Soon, he was tracking his ketone levels, courtesy of an at-home blood test.

"I realized it was actually the ketone level that was making this shift in my symptoms in a way that nothing else ever had," he says. "It struck me as really significant, like life-changing."

A career-launching moment

How exactly was a diet performing this alchemy? Campbell decided to pursue a PhD in mental health at the University of Edinburgh, hoping to do his own research and learn if it could help others.

In online forums, people with bipolar disorder were sharing similar anecdotes — they were finding improvements in their mood, increased clarity and fewer episodes of depression. (...)

He put together a 45-minute video summing up the biological rationale for using the ketogenic diet in bipolar disorder and posted it on social media, not expecting much after that.

In early 2021, he started working with the eldest son of Jan and David Baszucki, a wealthy tech entrepreneur. Their son Matt had bipolar disorder and had been on many medications in recent years.

Jan Baszucki enlisted Palmer's help as her son gave the ketogenic diet a try.

"Within a couple of months, we saw a dramatic change," she says.

Inspired, she started contacting clinicians and researchers, looking to bring more visibility — and funding — to the treatment. Since rigorous data on the diet is still lacking, she wants to see researchers conduct large clinical trials to back up anecdotes like her son's recovery.

Soon a big-time philanthropist was in touch with Campbell, ready to pay for his bipolar study – and others.

Now, around a dozen clinical trials are in the works, testing the diet's effect on mental illness, most notably for bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and depression, but also for conditions like anorexia, alcoholism and PTSD.

"The research and the clinical interest is suddenly exploding," says Dr. Georgia Ede, a psychiatrist in Massachusetts, who began using the ketogenic diet in her own practice about a decade ago.

From epilepsy care to the mainstream

The classic ketogenic diet contains an eye-popping amount of fat, roughly 90% of calories coming from that alone. Other versions have come along that dial down the fat and allow more room for protein and slightly more carbohydrates.

The diet's entrance into the mainstream has fed plenty of debate about its merits, with some medical groups raising concerns. Yet, there's also growing attention — and clinical trials underway — on its potential, not only for obesity but a variety of other conditions. (...)

Scientists search for more clues

The effect of ketosis on the mitochondria is one hypothesis for why keto diets could work, but it may not be the whole story.

Much of the data on how the diet affects the brain come from research into epilepsy and other neurological diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

Scientists find serious mental illnesses like schizophrenia, major depression and bipolar disorder share notable similarities with these conditions: Inflammation in the brain, oxidative stress, mitochondrial dysfunction, and issues with glucose and insulin.

Research suggests ketosis can be beneficial on these fronts, although human studies are limited. Some of the larger clinical trials now underway for keto diets will seek to pin down what's going on.

For example, Dr. Deanna Kelly is trying to determine if the diet's potential benefits emerge from the microbiome in the gut.

"You're potentially changing the way bacteria are functioning and that could affect your behavior and your brain," says Kelly, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Maryland, who's leading an inpatient trial on the ketogenic diet for schizophrenia.

Other scientists are studying the diet's effect on neurotransmitters like GABA — which acts as a kind of brake in the brain.

Dr. Mary Phillips, who has studied how dopamine affects the reward circuit in bipolar disorder, thinks that may help explain its therapeutic effects.

She hopes her clinical trial of bipolar and the keto diet, which launched recently, also gets at a very practical question:

"How do you know which people the ketogenic diet is going to work for?" says Phillips, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, "It's not the easiest diet in the world to get started on."

by Will Stone, NPR |  Read more:

Images: Tina Russell/Katie Hayes

Feeding Frenzy

Insurance Companies Want Their Money Back For Lahaina Fire Claims

More than 140 insurance industry plaintiffs have joined the cascade of lawsuits filed against utilities and landowners related to the Maui wildfires, a move that could set up a battle over resources available to pay victims of the disaster that killed 100 people and destroyed much of Lahaina in August.

The global insurance industry has swept into Honolulu state court, seeking to collect reimbursements for claims paid to policyholders. Those total more than $1 billion in West Maui for residential property alone, according to the latest data from the Insurance Division of the Hawaii Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs.

The plaintiffs include names familiar to Hawaii homeowners: insurers like State Farm Fire and Casualty Co., USAA Casualty Insurance Co., Island Insurance and Tradewind Insurance.

Also included are scores of additional companies, such as the French and Australian branches of the giant Swiss Re, Japan’s Mitsui Sumimoto Insurance, and Lloyd’s, the London-based marketplace known for insuring everything from ship cargo, fine art and space satellites to Bruce Springsteen’s voice.

  

According to the Hawaii Insurance Division, as of Nov. 30, insurers reported 3,947 claims for residential properties in West Maui, including 1,689 total losses. Estimated losses totaled $1.54 billion, of which insurers had paid $1.09 billion. (Kevin Fujii/Civil Beat/2023)

Defendants include Hawaiian Electric, Hawaiian Telcom, Kamehameha Schools and other unnamed parties the insurers allege were negligent in allowing the fires to start and spread.

It’s a predictable turn of events, says Robert Anderson, director of the Center for Risk Management Research at the University of California, Berkeley.

When a company like State Farm issues a policy to a homeowner, Anderson said in an email, State Farm typically buys reinsurance from another company like Swiss Re to cover the risk from catastrophic events, such as a hurricane hitting an urban area “or a wildfire that spreads and takes out a large number of homes, as happened in Lahaina.”

When such a catastrophe occurs, State Farm would typically pay claims to the insured property owners and get reimbursed by its reinsurers, Anderson said.

If the losses occurred because of negligence, the insurer and reinsurers can sue the negligent parties to recover the payments “in the same way that a health insurance company could seek to recover the costs of treating someone injured in an automobile accident,” he said.

Multiply that by thousands of claims, and it explains the enormous number of insurance company plaintiffs, spread out over 26 states and a half dozen countries, filing suit in Hawaii. It’s also a sign that the global insurance market is functioning adequately to spread the risk of a major catastrophe in Hawaii, said Sumner LaCroix, an economist with the University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization.

by Stewart Yerton, Honolulu Civil Beat |  Read more:

Image: Kevin Fujii/Civil Beat/2023
[ed. Wonder where the affected local population rates in priority, and how long it'll be before they see anything (generations)?]

Dr Strangelove at 60: Still the Greatest Big-Screen Satire?

Sixty years ago, Columbia Pictures released the first of two black-and-white movies with the exact same premise: what if American planes with hydrogen bombs were inadvertently ordered to drop their payload on targets in the Soviet Union, potentially triggering an all-out nuclear war that wipe out humanity? The Cuban missile crisis had pushed the superpowers to the brink of conflict less than two years earlier, and film-makers were unusually eager to face their cold war nightmares head on.

The release dates were like a reversal of Karl Marx’s famous line about how history repeats itself, “first as a tragedy, second as a farce”. The farce, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, came first. Then the tragedy, Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe, arrived in October. There was a lot of messy legal fallout over the common origins of the two films, but they complement each other beautifully, with only a slight difference in perspective on our inability to manage weapons of such god-like destruction.

The message of Fail Safe: human beings are fallible. The message of Dr Strangelove: human beings are idiots.

On balance, Kubrick’s message is more persuasive. Dr Strangelove remains the greatest of movie satires for a host of reasons, not least that it hews so closely to the real-life absurdities of the cold war, with two saber-rattling superpowers escalating an arms race that could only end in mutual annihilation. There’s absolutely no question, for example, that the top military and political brass have gamed out the catastrophic loss of life in a nuclear conflict, just as they do in the war room here. Perhaps they would even nod sagely at the distinction between 20 million people dead v 150 million people dead. All Kubrick and his co-writers, Terry Southern and Peter George, have to add is a wry punchline: “I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed.”

Part of the genius of Dr Strangelove is how deftly it toggles between the satirical and the silly without losing any of its power. You can picture the Zucker-Abraham-Zucker team behind Airplane! snickering and taking notes over funny names like Brig Gen Jack D Ripper and Col “Bat” Guano, or the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff taking a call from his lover in the war room. (“Look, baby, I can’t talk to you right now. My president needs me.”) At the same time, the film doesn’t need to put that much spin on the ball. Is there really much of a difference between Ripper (Sterling Hayden) launching a nuclear strike over fears of the Russian tainting “our precious bodily fluids” and the QAnon fantasies of the former lieutenant general Michael Flynn, who occupied a much higher position as Donald Trump’s national security advisor?

Kubrick knows when to pull back, however. Dr Strangelove doesn’t try to be a laugh-a-second spoof, because plausibility is its most important weapon. Nothing in the setup is any funnier than Fail Safe: B-52 bombers with a nuclear arsenal are flying a routine airborne patrol two hours from Soviet targets, awaiting the usual code to return to base. Instead, their superior, Gen Ripper, issues the code for “Wing Attack Plan R”, which not only leads them into the USSR but reduces communications to a three-letter code known only to Ripper. At the war room in the Pentagon, the ineffectual president, Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers), summons the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Gen “Buck” Turgidson (George C Scott), and other military luminaries to deal with the crisis. How could this happen? And what, if anything, can be done to stop it?

The straightforward premise is a lesson in the importance of structure in satire, which is established here not only in the solid parameters of the plotting but in black-and-white photography that presents its own rigorous deadpan. The obsessive precision of a Kubrick production doesn’t stifle the comedy in Dr Strangelove but liberates it, much like Buster Keaton holding a stone face while chaos erupts around him. Because we believe that the “Wing Attack Plan R” code would set up a top secret protocol like the one Major TJ “King” Kong (Slim Pickens) carries out on his B-52, we can laugh when his survival kit includes prophylactics, lipstick and three pairs of nylon stockings. (“Shoot, a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff.”) (...)

Watching Dr Strangelove today, in light of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, is to recognize all the more acutely the human flaws that are baked into weapons of mass destruction, starting with the chief architect of the atom bomb. Some of the best bits in the film barely have to reach for a joke: Kubrick merely has to point out the folly behind modern man’s greatest fear. Hubris may kill us all, but we can get a good laugh out of it first.

by Scott Tobias, The Guardian |  Read more:

Videos: Dr. Strangelove/Sony Pictures

[ed. Sixty years. Time really does fly (kinda like a B-52 bomber; same end result). One of my all-time top 10, with a couple all-time top favorite acting performances (Peter Sellers x 3; George C. Scott).]

Access News Articles for Free: A Guide to Unlocking Paywalls

Are you trying to read a news article that requires a subscription? Even if you do support great journalism, it can be pricey to subscribe to every publication you want to read. If you're not ready to commit to a subscription, there are several ways to access any news article for free—even if it's behind a paywall. This wikiHow article will teach you 12 easy tricks for reading any news articles online without a subscription.

by Nicole Levine, MFA, wiki-How |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Well, it looks like The New York Times has added another brick in their (pay)Wall, which seems pretty effective at preventing unsubscribed access. I've been using two Chrome extensions Cookie Remover and Quick Javascript Switcher for a while now but find they're now no longer functional at the NYT website. The only thing that has worked so far is the advice given above (pasting headlines into Google). Don't know how long that'll last.]

via:

Paul Beatty: Unmitigated Blackness

Paul Beatty is a hugely significant comic writer: one of only a few contemporary novelists whose work is consistently satirical. His most recent novel, The Sellout, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2016, shares DNA with other irreverent, iconoclastic masterpieces like Catch 22 and Slaughterhouse Five. The novel traces the tribulations of his protagonist, Me (nickname Bonbon), as he tries to both reinstate and resegregate his hometown, Dickens, a poverty stricken, largely Black enclave in LA. The resegregation idea is triggered by Bonbon’s friend Hominy, the aging star of an early Hollywood show, who, habituated to ‘the domineering white presence’ craves the overt white supremacy of the old days and insists upon becoming Bonbon’s slave. The satirical conceit of resegregation is obviously an exaggerated gesture, as is Hominy’s desire for enslavement, but both devices, while extreme, are arrived at through logical means, and serve as a way of examining the effects of white supremacy and the tendency for the recognition of racism to become blunted over time.

The iconoclasm of the novel is perhaps most marked in Beatty’s mockery of an African American intelligentsia whose demand for respectability and decorum includes an insistence upon a sanitised version of the history of racist representations. As Bonbon puts it, these paternalistic figures ‘present our case to the world with a set of instructions that the jury will disregard centuries of ridicule and stereotype and pretend the woebegone n—–s in front of you are starting from scratch.’ One of the overt projects of the book is to work against this denial and reassert the history of ridicule and stereotype both in order to better explain that ‘woebegone’ nature and then to examine the repercussions of that history: the despair, the poverty, the internalised self-hatred. The demand for decorum also imposes expressive restrictions, with a dominant literary style that privileges what Beatty, in his anthology of African American humour, hokum, calls a ‘moral, corporeal and prosaic’ approach, which originates, in part, ‘out of a tradition of abolitionist “And ain’t I an intellect?” activism aimed, then as now at whites’. In hokum, Beatty traces an alternative lineage, a Black comic tradition which offers a counter to the insistence upon sobriety, and avoids the doom-laden didacticism of an approach like that of Maya Angelou, whose work Beatty finds both ‘maudlin’ and oppressive. The alternative tradition captures ‘the black bon mot, the snap, the bag, the whimsy upon which “fuck you” and freedom sail’.

The challenge Beatty sets himself in The Sellout is an honest accounting of Black history and experience rendered in a way that, in its irreverence, is true to the vernacular tradition he demonstrates in hokum. And while the approach may be comic, the suffering he delineates remains clear. In a passage when Bonbon is reminiscing about his father, the ‘n—-r-whisperer’ coaxing locals back from the brink of suicide, for example, his descriptions capture the anguish of Friday nights after payday when it all gets too much: the ‘teeming hordes of bipolar poor, who having spent it all in one place, and grown tired and unsated from the night’s notoriously shitty prime-time television lineup, would unwedge themselves from between the couch-bound obese family members and the boxes of unsold Avon beauty products … then having canceled the next day’s appointment with their mental health care professional, the chatterbox cosmetologist, who after years doing heads, still knows only one hairstyle – fried, dyed, and laid to the side – they’d chose that Friday to commit suicide, murder, or both’.

It’s funny but also not. The rhythms and the pacing are comic, as is the observational humour, which has an unabashedly insider quality with the feel of stand-up, but the picture of despair is far from funny. And later, Bonbon is in demand due to the growing success of the segregation, as the overt racism makes the community newly respectful towards one another, forcing them to realise ‘how far we’ve come and, more important, how far we have to go’. He’s in discussion with a local kids’ sports organisation and asks if they have any money:

“We just got a $100,000 grant from Wish Upon a Star”
“I thought they only did things for dying kids?”
“Exactly.”

It’s structured like a joke: with a punchline that reveals the children’s prospects with great economy.

These instances demonstrate the freedom of Beatty’s approach: the unvarnished, forthright statement about life expectancy, the observational material which defiantly plunders the privacy of black life. Even the running gag throughout the novel about the characters greedily eating the fruit that Bonbon grows on his farm, is an insistence upon the freedom to reclaim the racist trope about watermelons (and thus return the fruit to its original symbol as the means to community and self-sufficiency). The politics of respectability require that such matters be approached with reverence and discretion, but Beatty, recognising the degree to which such pieties are defined in opposition (to racist stereotypes, to the white presence), wishes to forge a new path that is genuinely self-created.

In the novel, Bonbon articulates this pursuit of freedom in his description of the evolution of Black identity, from the Neophyte Negro ‘afraid of his own blackness’ (exemplars include Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice), to Stage 4, ‘Unmitigated Blackness’ which ‘is simply not giving a fuck’ (Richard Pryor, David Hammons, Chester Himes). (...)

It’s interesting, however, that a growing unease about comedy is noticeable in his responses to the commentary on the novel. While he initially freely acknowledges the satirical impulse in his work, later, Beatty speaks mistrustfully of the implications of the term: the way it seems to limit a work to a particular time period and how it suggests exaggeration rather than commentary (which risks becoming mere entertainment rather than anything deeper) – both of which can allow for the work to be dismissed. We need only think of the legion of satirical news programmes to understand what he’s worried about – in this context, satire is eminently disposable. He’s also spoken about his discomfort at being called a comic writer, suggesting that the focus upon humour allows readers and commentators to ignore the sadness and the anger that his work attends to. Perhaps the comedy does risk obscuring the tragedy, and perhaps the general air of comic resilience risks disguising the pain. 

by Dr Emma Sullivan, Humour in the Arts |  Read more:

Image: Picador USA via

[ed. This always happens. Whenever I find a book I love it takes me forever to finish it. I go slowly and savor it, jump back and forth and re-read certain passages and chapters, look for quotes I don't want to forget, and just generally avoid letting it come to a conclusion. This is one of those books. Other reviews: here, here and here.]

War Game Shows a Simulation of a Coup After the 2024 Election

The Results Are Not Reassuring.

“You have six hours to prevent a civil war.”

With that ominous prompt, Jesse Moss and Tony Gerber’s documentary War Game gets underway. The movie, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Monday, shadows a training exercise in which veterans of the armed forces, intelligence services, and state and federal government play out the possibility of an organized attempt to disrupt the certification of the 2024 presidential election. Conducted on the second anniversary of the Jan. 6 riots, in a mock-up of the White House situation room, the simulation confronts the sobering possibility that even after that object lesson in the fragile nature of our democracy, the nation may not be fully prepared for what comes next. As Alexander Vindman, the former National Security Council official and Trump whistleblower, who helped design the exercise, explains, the defenders of democracy have learned the lessons of 2021—but so have the “democracy offenders,” the people hellbent on overturning the lawful government of the U.S.

The 2025 insurrection is instigated by a paramilitary group called the Order of Columbus, a loose amalgamation of the Oath Keepers and QAnon. It’s led by a fictional war hero based on Michael Flynn and conceived by Kristofer Goldsmith, an Iraq war veteran who now runs a nonprofit that keeps tabs on the extreme right. He shakes his head as he describes how many people still underestimate the imminent danger of American fascism—a movement that he could, under different circumstances, see himself joining—and he adopts a similar tone during the simulation as he moves his pieces around the board. The main new element in this hypothetical is that the Order of Columbus has factions within the U.S. military itself that are activated as it becomes clear that the incumbent president, played by former Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, will be certified the victor over his right-wing opponent. Members of the D.C. National Guard turn their weapons on their comrades, and other members of the military follow suit across the states, leaving in question what exactly the commander in chief is in command of. The president and his allies are particularly slow to reckon with the infinite megaphone of social media, which the insurgents use as a means to rally their troops until, more than halfway through, someone in the situation room thinks to place a call to Mark Zuckerberg. (When the Transition Integrity Project, in summer 2020, gamed out possible disruptions to that year’s upcoming election, the establishment made a similar error, and corrected for it in later rounds.)

What’s most fascinating in War Game is the ongoing tension between the interventionist forces urging the president to take swift and decisive action and those counseling him to act more delicately, weakening the threat without risking an overt show of force that could add more fuel to the fire. The Order of Columbus isn’t trying just to overturn the election, but to create martyrs for the cause, proof that the incumbent is the tyrant it claims. Goldsmith points out that while the Jan. 6 attacks didn’t succeed in ousting Biden, they did achieve the critical goal of undermining faith in the electoral process, with a majority of Republicans either believing or suspecting that the election was illegitimate.

As the president’s senior adviser, former North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp pushes the idea that the greatest danger is for the government to underreact to the threat: This is, after all, how military coups are made. In the control room, you can see Janessa Goldbeck, whose nonpartisan organization Vet Voice is responsible for staging the simulation, almost fighting the urge to egg Heitkamp on as the casualties mount, because she knows just how bad both this fictional situation and its real-world equivalent can get.

Bullock, however, remains a figure of almost Sorkinesque stoicism. (There are shots that suggest he could have been Martin Sheen’s stand-in on The West Wing.) The crisis spreads to the states, and as official communications become confused, it’s difficult to tell whether statehouses have already fallen to the insurgency. The simulation’s six-hour time frame, further compressed by Moss and Gerber into a 94-minute movie, underlines the terrifying sense of just how quickly the contagion can spread, and from how many directions at once. It’s like a tower defense game with the world’s highest stakes, trying to calculate not just where the threat is but where it will grow and at what speed. As the situation worsens, Bullock is urged to invoke the Insurrection Act, which allows the president to nationalize state forces and override the prohibition against using the military to enforce the law. (The act has certainly been invoked for less, including by George H.W. Bush during the Rodney King riots.) But he hesitates over the ramifications for both the short and long term. What better way to prove himself the despot the Order of Columbus calls him than by turning the country’s military against its own citizens? And in the event that his opponent, or someone like him, becomes president, what’s to stop them from citing Bullock’s example to invoke the Insurrection Act for their own fascistic purposes?

Two weeks before Sundance, Moss and Gerber hosted a screening of War Game in New York, followed by a discussion with several of its participants: Bullock, Heitkamp, and retired Gens. Wesley Clark and Linda Singh, who play the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the chief of the National Guard Bureau, respectively. (The Sundance screening was accompanied by a virtually identical panel.) Clark forcefully pushed back against the idea that members of the U.S. military could be involved in any attempt to disrupt the lawful workings of government, citing the camaraderie his disparate unit showed under fire in Vietnam. But there is ample evidence of extremist elements in the military, which, Heitkamp pointed out, does not even screen recruits’ social media profiles for their political views. “I think the biggest threat is denial,” she said. “We have a problem that we’re not acknowledging.”

by Sam Adams, Slate |  Read more:

Image: Wolfgang Held

Ohno Bakufu, “Squirrel in a Pine Tree” (1951)

via:

The DIY Guitar Pedal Culture Edition

Amongst electric guitarists, effects pedals can be an obsession. These small, sound-distorting aluminum enclosures offer a wide range of effects across curious categories, from optical phasers and rotary flangers to auto-wahs, bitcrushers and fuzz sustainers. And all of them typically contain a printed circuit board (PCB), requisite components, power, and a few audio jacks.

For decades, effects pedals have helped define and inspire musical genres. From Pink Floyd using a Colorsound Power Boost and Binson Echorec to sculpt psychedelic landscapes on Dark Side of the Moon, to Kurt Cobain popularizing the woozy and watery EHX Small Clone Chorus in Smells Like Teen Spirit, to the near mandatory use of a dimed-out Boss HM-2 to achieve peak Swedish death-metal “chainsaw” tones, specific pedals are seen as inescapable staples in every genre. (Stompboxes like the Fuzz Face, Uni-Vibe, Big Muff, and Tubescreamer have iconic tones featured on equally iconic tracks like Hendrix’s Voodoo Child (Slight Return), Pink Floyd’s Breathe, Smashing Pumpkins’ Cherub Rock, and Metallica’s Fade to Black.)

Guitarists spend years questing to find their own amalgamation of grail worthy tones: trying to identify the precise effects used on their favorite track; snapping photographs of pedalboards at live gigs; endlessly listening to reviews on a myriad of YouTube channels; or lusting after legendary (and expensive) pedals made by long defunct manufacturers. And while certain brands like Electro-Harmonix, Boss, and Dunlop have always lined music store shelves, the last decade has seen a frenzy of boutique guitar pedal manufacturers offering a dizzying array of effects, with elaborate graphics and names like Astral Destiny, Rabid Mammal, Lizard Queen, and Tonal Recall, all serving up a true smorgasbord of tonal-manipulation.

Why is this interesting?

Because as people have become ever more passionate about their pedals, DIY pedal builders—a seasoned community of guitarists, electronics enthusiasts, makers, collectors, and at times entrepreneurs—are making their own. While many guitar effects pedals can cost hundreds of dollars retail, they can be made at home for as little as $10 in parts, provided one knows how to solder and can identify the positive lead on a diode. Forums abound with clones, mods, schematics, and debates on the tonal nature of germanium vs.silicon transistors. Pedal making is akin to sonic cross-stitching, hours spent softly soldering resistors, A/B testing components, and tweaking potentiometers until they’re just right. While DIY pedals may offer aural perfection, often the telltale sign of a homemade pedal is its stark blank aluminum enclosure. Occasionally, if you make a keeper, it will get custom spray paint or even an acid-etching.

 

Practically there can be very little, if anything, distinguishing a homemade pedal from a factory or boutique maker. Indeed the allure of cheap replicas is strong, and the DIY community has gone from veroboards and point-to-point soldering, to sites now offering fully pre-made PCB boards citing the retail pedals they directly copy. While it might be tempting to see this as blatant theft, circuit schematics themselves are not protected under copyright or trademark. Furthermore, the reverse-engineering of circuits is not regarded as a trade-secret. Scant are patents in the guitar effects world. This lack of legal protection has caused some manufacturers to “goop” their pedals, wherein they douse the components in thick black epoxy to completely obscure components in a sticky ooze.

While wildly tedious, it is possible to remove this layer in a process known as “de-gooping.” Many in the DIY community see gooping as an affront to consumer transparency. The practice obscures not only the components, but the possibility of a pedal itself being a clone, not to mention the general quality of the workmanship.

With the abundance of clones, some makers have taken to peddling their wares online, offering custom acid-etchings, direct-clones, desirable circuit mods, and frankensteining effects together. Many modern boutique pedal makers got their start in the DIY community, and many new manufacturers make pedals with nods towards those grassroots contributions. The relationship between the DIY community and pedal manufacturers is mostly harmonious.

Perhaps the most notable example of a DIY guitar pedal being cloned by a big name manufacturer is the Klon Centaur. The “Klon” as it is known, was originally released in 1994 by boutique builder Bill Finnegan. A clean-boost pedal, it provided a transparent extra umph to a rig’s setup, and quickly became a staple on many legendary artists’ boards including Ed O’Brien of Radiohead, Jeff Beck, Joe Perry of Aerosmith, Nels Cline of Wilco and John Mayer. As word spread, so did demand. Finnegan was unable to keep up with orders, and prices on the used market went stratospheric, reaching at times above $7,000 for a pedal that originally sold for $225. The Klon was famously gooped, but as prices rose, the collective lust of gear hungry guitarists became too strong. Once again, the DIY community was on the job. Across forums the painstaking de-gooping began, and by 2008 the Klon’s schematic had been mapped. DIY builders sprinted to build their own, followed by a tidal wave of Klon-clones hitting the open market. Now, big name manufacturers were meeting pent-up demand with pedals like Wampler’s Tumnus, Electro-Harmonix Soul Food, and MXR’s Sugar Drive. In a matter of years the Klon went from unobtanium to a $99 staple on nearly every single pedal board, thanks to this reverse-cloning. Bill Finnegan would finally release his own Klon Clone - the KTR (at $269) featuring the same circuit albeit made in a way that allowed for mass manufacturing.

by Chris Moon, Why Is This Interesting |  Read more:

Image: Mitchell-Strauss/Gear Page; Reddit

[ed. Been thinking of a Klon clone myself.]

Valisa Higman, Respite
via:

Not One Tree

The sun hangs low and red like a stoplight over the city. Ten thousand cars idle and litter down Moreland, another interminable avenue, vanishing onward in one-point perspective until the city thins out into strip malls, retail chains, junkyards, and Thank God Tires, where mountains of rubber shimmer in the summer evening heat. It is June 2021, and rush hour in Atlanta, when we drive to the forest for the first time.

The parking lot is half full. A cardboard sign at the trailhead reads LIVING ROOM → in Magnum Sharpie, so we start up the bike path, where a trail of glow sticks hangs from the trees. A quarter mile later, sky darkening in the distance, the glow sticks veer off to the left down a footpath, which zags through logs and opens onto a clearing in the pines. People with headlamps settle onto blankets, popping cans and passing snacks. A dog in a dog-colored sweater chases a squirrel and stands there panting. There is pizza piled tall on a table. Syncopated crickets. A giggling A/V club pulls a bedsheet taut between two trees, angling a projector powered by a car battery just so.

Princess Mononoke, which we watch tonight reclined on the pine straw, is a parable about humans and nature. An Iron Age town is logging an enchanted forest to manufacture muskets. Our prince has been cursed, which is to say chosen, to defend the forest against the destroyers. Will the ancient spirit creatures deep in the woods be able to stop the march of progress? Cigarette smoke swirls in little eddies through the projector beam. The dusk is gone. There are no stars. Fireflies spangle the underbrush. The boars stampede the iron mine, squealing, “We are here to kill humans and save the forest!” The humans on the forest floor around us laugh and cheer.

The forest is a squiggly triangle of earth, four miles around, some five hundred acres, lying improbably verdant just outside Atlanta’s municipal limits. Bouldercrest and Constitution Roads are the triangle’s sides, Key Road its hypotenuse. The surrounding mixed industry indexes the American economy: an Amazon warehouse, a movie studio, a truck repair shop, a church, a tow yard, a dump, a pallet-sorting facility, a city water-treatment plant. Suburbs, mostly Black and middle-class, unfurl in all directions. Prison facilities—juvenile, transitional, reentry—pad the perimeter, removed from Constitution Road by checkpoints, black mesh fencing, and tornadoes of barbed wire.

Viewed from above, the forest triangle is bisected once by a flat straight strip clear-cut for power lines and then again by Intrenchment Creek. This skinny, sinuous waterway is a tributary to Georgia’s South River and swells with sewage from the upriver city whenever it rains. Intrenchment Creek also marks the property line that splits the forest in two. East of the creek is the 136-acre public-access Intrenchment Creek Park, with a parking lot and bike path and hiking trails through meadows and thickets of loblolly pine, and also a toolshed and miniature tarmac where the Atlanta RC Club flies. West of the creek is the site of the Old Atlanta Prison Farm.

For seventy years, Atlanta forced incarcerated people to work the land here, growing food for the city prison system under conditions of abuse and enslavement both brutal and banal. Since the prison closed quietly in the 1990s, its fields have lain fallow, reforesting slowly. Though it’s DeKalb County, this parcel belongs to the neighboring City of Atlanta. It is nevertheless not public property. The driveway to the old prison farm has long been fenced off. The only way in is to scrabble up the berm from Key Road. Or cross the sloping, sandy banks of the creek from the public park and trespass onto no-man’s-land.

For years, the South River Forest Coalition lobbied Atlanta to open this land to the public and make it the centerpiece of a mixed-use megaforest: a 3,500-acre patchwork of parks, preserves, cemeteries, landfills, quarries, and golf courses linked through a network of trails crisscrossing the city’s southeast suburbs. And in 2017, it seemed like a rare success for grassroots environmental activism when the Department of City Planning adopted the Coalition’s idea into their vision for the future of Atlanta. You should see the glossy, gorgeous, four-hundred-page book the city planners published unveiling their plan for a city of affluence, equality, cozy density, affordable transit, and reliable infrastructure for robust public spaces. We no longer thought optimism like this was even possible at the scale of the American metropolis. Even if the dream of the South River Forest had been downsized, the 1,200-acre South River Park was still far from nothing. The book called it “the enduring and irreplaceable green lungs of Atlanta,” “our last chance for a massive urban park,” and a cornerstone in their vision of environmental justice.

How simple things seemed back then! In 2020, local real estate magnate Ryan Millsap approached the DeKalb County Board of Commissioners with an offer to acquire forty acres of Intrenchment Creek Park in exchange for a nearby plot of denuded dirt. Three years prior, Millsap had founded Blackhall Studios across Constitution Road and now was eager to expand his already giant soundstage complex into a million square feet of movie studio. This is no longer unusual for the Atlanta outskirts. State-level tax breaks have lured the film industry here. Since 2016, Georgia has produced at least as many blockbusters as California. As part of the deal, Millsap promised to landscape the dirt pile into the public-access Michelle Obama Park.

Neighbors had already begun to organize to sue DeKalb County for violating Intrenchment Creek Park’s charter when in April 2021, Atlanta’s mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, announced a plan of her own. On the other side of the creek, the city would lease 150 acres of the land abandoned by the prison farm to the Atlanta Police Foundation, because the old police academy was falling apart and covered in mold. Cadets were doing their push-ups in the hallways of a community college. The lease would cost the police $10 per year for thirty years. The new training center would cost $90 million to build. But only a third of this would come from public funds, the mayor assured the taxpayers. The rest would be provided by the Atlanta Police Foundation—which is not the Atlanta Police Department, but a “private nonprofit” whose basic function is to raise corporate funds to embellish police powers.

Rest in peace Rayshard Brooks still practically gleamed in white spray paint on Krog Street Tunnel. The Atlanta police had killed Brooks during a confrontation in the parking lot of a Wendy’s not far from the forest barely two weeks after Minneapolis police killed George Floyd. The nation was still reeling after the upheaval of 2020—and now the mayor of Atlanta wanted not only to give $90 million to the murderers, but to clear-cut a forest to accommodate them. At first we were less indignant than insulted by the project’s intersectional stupidity. Hadn’t the city just agreed to invest in people’s leisure, pleasure, health, and well-being? Instead, the old prison farm would become a new surveillance factory.

In May, some two hundred people showed up to an info night in the Intrenchment Creek Park parking lot. A hand-painted banner fluttered from the struts of the gazebo: DEFEND THE ATLANTA FOREST. There were zines and taglines: STOP COP CITY. NO HOLLYWOOD DYSTOPIA. FUCK THE METAVERSE, SAVE THE REAL WORLD! The orgs were there with maps and graphs. #StoptheSwap detailed the Blackhall–DeKalb deal. The South River Watershed Alliance explained how the forest soaks up stormwater and wondered what would happen to the surrounding suburbs when the hilltop became a parking lot. Save the Old Atlanta Prison Farm narrated a mini-history of the land. Before the city prison farm, it had been a slave plantation.

People mingled, ate vegan barbecue. The cumbia lasted past dark. Half the audience had never been to the forest before, but now wanted to protect or maybe even enjoy it. History has apparently already decided that the movement was started by these organizations—but do you see those young people pacing the parking lot? Ask an anarchist. They all know who painted the banners, who printed the zines, who organized the inaugural info night. Who barbecued the jackfruit, who hauled in the speakers, who gave the movement its slogans and myths and indefatigable energy. Who got neighbors and strangers together to do something more than post about it. Who transformed concerned citizens into forest defenders.

For a city mirrored in skyscapers, of fifteen-lane highways, of five million people and building ever faster, Atlanta is run like a small town, or a bloated feudal palace, royal families overseeing serfs sitting in traffic. For almost a century, a not-so-secret compact has governed the city town council–style, bequeathing positions in the power structure along dynastic lines. The roles at the table are fixed: mayor, city council, Chamber of Commerce, Coca-Cola, the police, the local news, and, uniquely and importantly in Atlanta, miscellaneous magnates of a Black business class. The biracial, bipartisan, business-friendly, media-savvy, moderate, managerial tradition the group perfected during the golden age of American capital is called the Atlanta Way. (...)

Since 1974, every mayor has been Black. Business boomed and suburbs steamrolled the countryside. Railroading begat logistics and telecommunications: Delta, UPS, IBM, AT&T. Olympic fireworks bedazzled downtown in the ’90s, while hip-hop rooted and flourished on the city’s south side, and propagated across continents. The airport ballooned into the busiest in the world. Tyler Perry redeveloped a military base into one of the largest movie studios in America. By the 2010s, the general American pattern of white supremacy looked almost upside down in Atlanta. (...)

Or was it? In a city so restlessly forward-moving, it’s hard to tell sometimes what’s truly new and what’s business as usual. General Sherman burned the city to the ground, and Atlanta has spent the century and a half since the Civil War reenacting this founding trauma. Its motto is Resurgens, its mascot the phoenix, ever resurrecting from the ash heap of history. Every city booster’s plan to make Atlanta more modern, international, or cosmopolitan has been carried out by a wrecking crew, enforcing a disorienting amnesia on its residents.

Last year, all charges against the officers were dismissed, and both were reinstated to the department with back pay. Three protesters identified by police on social media from the night the Wendy’s burned were arrested and indicted with conspiracy to commit arson. Determined to somersault out of 2020 upright and armored, the city began to stabilize. The solution, as ever: demolish and build. The bulldozers aimed for the forest. (...)

The anarchist internet has been on the scoop since the initial info night. It’s Going Down has been exulting over sabotaged construction equipment, exalting the black bloc for smashing the windows of the Atlanta Police Foundation headquarters downtown, exhorting readers to take autonomous action against Cop City’s corporate sponsors. The photos of burning bulldozers also give us that illicit little thrill, but our angle this summer is gentler. Somehow we want to defibrillate liberals into conscience and action. Not everyone in the media group agrees that the liberal establishment, Democratic machine, or NGO-industrial complex can help us stop Cop City, but we all know that no news is bad news. The problem is that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is owned by major donors to the police foundation, which ensures that the mainstream coverage is bad news, too. (...)

The following day, the city council votes ten to four to approve the lease of the land to the Atlanta Police Foundation anyway. The mayor makes a statement: It “will give us physical space to ensure that our officers and firefighters are receiving 21st-century training, rooted in respect and regard for the communities they serve.” We blink past the obvious hypocrisy, drawn instead to that watchword training, deceptively neutral, the ostensible justification of a million liberal reforms, because who could argue against training? The police after all are like dogs: best when they obey. But obey what? (...)

Though Atlanta is the eighth-largest metro area in the country, its police foundation is the second largest, smaller only than New York’s. Dave Wilkinson, its president and CEO, spent twenty-two years in the Secret Service, was personally responsible for protecting Presidents Clinton and W. Bush, and might be the highest-paid cop in the country. In 2020, he made $407,500 plus five figures in bonuses—more than twice as much as the director of the FBI. Wilkinson lives in a small town outside Atlanta, although, to be fair, three-quarters of city cops live outside city limits too.

We hear the list of major corporations in Atlanta whose executives sit on the board of the APF so often we accidentally memorize it: Delta, Home Depot, McKesson, J. P. Morgan, Wells Fargo, UPS, Chick-fil-A, Equifax, Cushman & Wakefield, Accenture, Georgia Pacific, disappointingly Waffle House, unsurprisingly Coca-Cola—though in October, news breaks that Color Of Change, a national racial justice organization, has successfully pressured Coca-Cola off the APF board. This feels huge! Coca-Cola and Atlanta are conjoined twins, and where one goes, so goes the other. Public pressure is mounting, people keep saying to each other in the forest. We even hear people say they believe that we will win. 

by A.C. Corey, N+1 |  Read more:

Image: Sasha Tycko, Old Atlanta Prison Farm, Georgia. 2022
[ed. Wow. Reminds me of The Overstory by Richard Powers, which I thought was too over the top to be believable. Guess not. Here's another perspective: The Forest and Its Partisians (n+1):]

"So what is the movement “really” about, beyond the trees and the cops? Why this convergence? What is it that all these far-flung groups and individuals intuitively grasp about the importance of this particular struggle? What significance has been forced here? I don’t want Cop City to be built, and neither do my friends who live near its proposed site. I didn’t want them to cut down the forest either, and the progress they’ve made on that front is a tragedy. As worthy as both these causes are in their own right, they are not, in themselves, the reasons I care so much about the movement, nor are they the reasons why so many others do, nor are they why you should. You should care because the movement is both 2020 in miniature and a direct bridge to the mass struggles to come.

On top of its organic local base, the movement has ties and supporters across the country and across the world. Right now, that support has been spread largely through the milieus of those drawn to the flashier moments of direct confrontation. Mirroring this, the shrillest outrage and calls for crackdown are rooted in the fascoid Trumpist wing of the Republican Party and its further-right orbiters. The police and broader repressive state machinery, meanwhile, have rolled out tools of repression old and new, from age-old methods of surveillance, intimidation, physical violence, and murder to a test run of Georgia’s draconian domestic terrorism statute and the attempted prosecution of members of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund for alleged financial crimes. The further right lurks in the background, taking pictures and writing articles that DHS cribs from when they publish their extremism advisories. Somewhere in an FBI office, someone is compiling files on the various support groups the movement has inspired in cities across the country and assigning threat designations to bookstores. Insurgent left, insurgent right, repressive state: it is clear to all three types of partisan that Atlanta is a test case and a site of innovation, that the contours of any future uprisings are being shaped here. (...)

As a forest defender friend put it, “the skills we emphasize and practice in this movement should be the skills we want to take with us.” This is a very young movement, but one that’s attracted the involvement of seasoned oldheads with wisdom to spare. Thanks to that wisdom, and to the movement’s unusual vibrancy and much-vaunted “diversity of tactics,” the learning opportunities are unique and extremely valuable. Just as Atlanta has attracted veterans of Line 3, Standing Rock, and older struggles, you can be certain that alumni of this movement will be on the frontlines of whatever comes next. On the second: echoing state and federal law enforcement, the White House itself has indicated the importance of Cop City as a model for the rest of the country and—as another friend, a criminal defense attorney, observed about the unprecedented, draconian legal repression the movement has faced—“the state would love a new set of prosecutorial tools to go along with their fancy new training facility.” Fighting the development of these tools, inside and outside the courtroom, will have a direct impact on protest and repression in the years to come."

The 100-Year Extinction Panic Is Back, Right on Schedule

Apocalyptic anxieties are a mainstay of human culture. But they are not a constant. In response to rapid changes in science, technology and geopolitics, they tend to spike into brief but intense extinction panics — periods of acute pessimism about humanity’s future — before quieting again as those developments are metabolized. These days, it can feel as though the existential challenges humanity faces are unprecedented. But a major extinction panic happened 100 years ago, and the similarities are unnerving.

The 1920s were also a period when the public — traumatized by a recent pandemic, a devastating world war and startling technological developments — was gripped by the conviction that humanity might soon shuffle off this mortal coil.

Understanding the extinction panic of the 1920s is useful to understanding our tumultuous 2020s and the gloomy mood that pervades the decade.

Hearing that historical echo doesn’t mean that today’s fears have no basis. Rather, it is crucial to helping us blow away the smoke of age-old alarmism from the very real fires that threaten our civilization. It also helps us see how apocalyptic fears feed off the idea that people are inherently violent, self-interested and hierarchical and that survival is a zero-sum war over resources. That suite of ideas is traditionally associated with political conservatism, though it can apply as easily to left-wing climate doom as to right-wing survivalist ideology. Either way, it’s a cynical view that encourages us to take our demise as a foregone conclusion.

What makes an extinction panic a panic is the conviction that humanity is flawed and beyond redemption, destined to die at its own hand, the tragic hero of a terrestrial pageant for whom only one final act is possible. The irony, of course, is that this cynicism — and the unfettered individualism that is its handmaiden — greases the skids to calamity. After all, why bother fighting for change or survival if you believe that self-destruction is hard-wired into humanity? What the history of prior extinction panics has to teach us is that this pessimism is both politically questionable and questionably productive. Our survival will depend on our ability to recognize and reject the nihilistic appraisals of humanity that inflect our fears for the future, both left and right. (...)

***

Contrary to the folk wisdom that insists the years immediately after World War I were a period of good times and exuberance, dark clouds often hung over the 1920s. The dread of impending disaster — from another world war, the supposed corruption of racial purity and the prospect of automated labor — saturated the period just as much as the bacchanals and black market booze for which it is infamous. The ’20s were indeed roaring, but they were also reeling. And the figures articulating the doom were far from fringe. 

On Oct. 30, 1924 — top hat in hand, sporting the dour, bulldog grimace for which he was well known — Winston Churchill stood on a spartan stage, peering over the shoulder of a man holding a newspaper that announced Churchill’s return to Parliament. He won the Epping seat the day before, after two years out of Parliament. The dapper clothes of the assembled politicians and his wife in heels and furs were almost comically incongruous with their setting: a drab building with dirty windows and stained corrugated siding. It was a fitting metaphor for both the decade and for the future prime minister’s mood. Churchill was feeling pessimistic.

The previous year saw the publication of the first of several installments of what many would come to consider his finest literary achievement, “The World Crisis,” a grim retrospective of World War I that laid out, as Churchill put it, the “milestones to Armageddon.” In September of the following year, one month before his Epping election, two other notable events in Churchill’s intellectual life — one major, one minor — offered signs of his growing gloominess. The major event was his decision to run for Parliament as a constitutionalist with Conservative Party support, marking the end of his long affiliation with the Liberal Party and the beginning of a further rightward drift. The minor event was the publication of a bleak essay that argued new war machines may soon wipe out our species.

Bluntly titled “Shall We All Commit Suicide?,” the essay offered a dismal appraisal of humanity’s prospects. “Certain somber facts emerge solid, inexorable, like the shapes of mountains from drifting mist,” Churchill wrote. “Mankind has never been in this position before. Without having improved appreciably in virtue or enjoying wiser guidance, it has got into its hands for the first time the tools by which it can unfailingly accomplish its own extermination.” (...)

***

One way to understand extinction panics is as elite panics: fears created and curated by social, political and economic movers and shakers during times of uncertainty and social transition. Extinction panics are, in both the literal and the vernacular senses, reactionary, animated by the elite’s anxiety about maintaining its privilege in the midst of societal change. Today it’s politicians, executives and technologists. A century ago it was eugenicists and right-leaning politicians like Churchill and socialist scientists like Haldane. That ideologically varied constellation of prominent figures shared a basic diagnosis of humanity and its prospects: that our species is fundamentally vicious and selfish and our destiny therefore bends inexorably toward self-destruction.

To whatever extent, then, that the diagnosis proved prophetic, it’s worth asking if it might have been at least partly self-fulfilling.

Despite the similarities between the current moment and the previous roaring and risky ’20s, today’s problems are fundamentally new. So, too, must be our solutions. It is a tired observation that those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it. We live in a peculiar moment in which this wisdom is precisely inverted. Making it to the next century may well depend on learning from and repeating the tightrope walk — between technological progress and self-annihilation — that we have been doing for the past 100 years. It will depend, too, on rejecting the conservative doommongering that defines our present: the entangled convictions that we are too selfish to forestall climate change, too violent to prevent war with China, too greedy to develop A.I. slowly and safely.

Extinction panics are often fomented by elites, but that doesn’t mean we have to defer to elites for our solutions. We have gotten into the dangerous habit of outsourcing big issues — space exploration, clean energy, A.I. and the like — to private businesses and billionaires. Our survival may well depend on reversing this trend. We need ambitious, well-resourced government initiatives and international cooperation that takes A.I. and other existential risks seriously. It’s time we started treating these issues as urgent public priorities and funding them accordingly.

The first step is refusing to indulge in certainty, the fiction that the future is foretold. There is a perverse comfort to dystopian thinking. The conviction that catastrophe is baked in relieves us of the moral obligation to act. But as the extinction panic of the 1920s shows us, action is possible, and these panics can recede.

Less than a year after Churchill’s warning about the future of modern combat — “As for poison gas and chemical warfare,” he wrote, “only the first chapter has been written of a terrible book” — the 1925 Geneva Protocol was signed, an international agreement banning the use of chemical or biological weapons in combat. Despite the many horrors of World War II, chemical weapons were not deployed on European battlefields.

As for machine-age angst, there’s a lesson to learn there, too: Our panics are often puffed up, our predictions simply wrong. Human life and labor were not superseded by machines, as some in the 1920s predicted. Or in the 1960s or in the 1980s, two other flash-in-the-pan periods of A.I. hype. The takeaway is not that we shouldn’t be worried but that we shouldn’t panic. Foretelling doom is an ancient human hobby, but we don’t appear to be very good at it.

In 1928, H.G. Wells published a book titled “The Way the World Is Going,” with the modest subtitle “Guesses and Forecasts of the Years Ahead.” In the opening pages, he offered a summary of his age that could just as easily have been written about our turbulent 2020s. “Human life,” he wrote, “is different from what it has ever been before, and it is rapidly becoming more different.” He continued, “Perhaps never in the whole history of life before the present time, has there been a living species subjected to so fiercely urgent, many-sided and comprehensive a process of change as ours today. None at least that has survived. Transformation or extinction have been nature’s invariable alternatives. Ours is a species in an intense phase of transition.” Much turns, as the novelist well knew, on that ambiguous final word. Both transformation and extinction are transitions, after all.

by Tyler Austin Harper, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Cari Vander Yacht

The Enduring Influence of the Op-Ed

Early in Pedro Almodóvar’s 1995 film, La flor de mi secreto (The Flower of My Secret), we see a writer and editor meet inside the printing room at the El País headquarters in Madrid. “I would like to write about literature for your paper,” the writer says. This is the first time the two have met, having been connected through a mutual friend. As the conversation moves from the printing floor to the editorial offices, the gap between the writer’s ambitions and reality widens. “I don’t want this job as a favor to my friend,” she explains. “I actually want to earn it, but I haven’t published anything. I just have a draft of a novel and two essays,” handing the editor a hefty stack of printouts. Within a matter of scenes, the editor gives the writer a job as a books columnist for the newspaper’s weekend literary supplement. Her first assignment is to review the latest short story collection from a famous author of romance novels, which she gets in part as a result of her open contempt for the novelist. The editor, who is a fan of the novelist, assigns himself a positive review of the same collection, which will appear alongside her negative review.

Soon comes the twist: the amateur writer who landed the gig as a columnist is, in fact, the pseudonymous romance author whose book she is supposed to review. The twist throws into relief the film’s many ironic criticisms of newspaper columns and novelist intellectuals. In 1990s Spain, the film seems to argue, newspaper columns are a dime a dozen. Any amateur writer with a personal connection to an editor can land one. Moreover, columns in the Sunday pages function as cultural gatekeepers, allowing a high-minded newspaper like El País to decide which artifacts of popular culture deserve a stamp of approval. Not only that: nepotism is rampant in the clubby world of newspapers. So rampant, in fact, that writers are even allowed to review their own books! And, to cap it all off, shady editorial decisions often hide behind an outward appearance of balance, where each side of an issue receives equal column space—literally, in the case of the short story collection, which will receive exactly one positive and one negative review. Once one sees how the sausage is made, such balance, the film underscores, looks more and more like a charade.

A decade later, Almodóvar’s criticisms of newspaper opinion columns would seem prescient. In a 2005 column at El País, the very newspaper Almodóvar was satirizing, the writer Elvira Lindo diagnosed—and, as an op-ed columnist, self-diagnosed—a condition that increasingly afflicted the Spanish public sphere: “opinionism.” Every morning, she wrote, thousands of professional opinion-makers go to work knowing “that they have to come with a well-formed opinion… that they must defend it vehemently… [and] that they must draw blood from those who don’t think the same way.” Whether these opinionators actually had any expertise, knowledge, or worthwhile opinions on the topics of the day, she noted, was beside the point. They were required to have opinions all the same, whether that pressure came from a public sphere in which not having a forceful opinion was “interpreted as not wanting to take sides or just being an idiot,” or from the desire to keep one of the precious few jobs in the opinion-making industry.

Fast-forward a decade and opinion-making appeared to have undergone democratization. In a 2018 editorial, the American literary magazine n+1 diagnosed “the generalization of the op-ed form across the internet.” “Everything is an op-ed now,” the editors argued. For every columnist at a highly visible outlet like the New York Times, there is an entire “reserve army of op-ed labor waiting in the wings.” Social media in particular, they wrote, “has helped turn the internet into an engine for producing op-eds, for turning writers into op-ed writers, and for turning readers into people on the hunt for an op-ed.” The twenty-first century, it seemed, had conditioned journalists and writers to produce opinion columns on demand. To become an intellectual one no longer needed one of the precious few columnist jobs at a major newspaper or website. But one still likely needed an opinion column.

“The opinion column is the sonnet of journalism.” No line connecting literature and journalism has become quite so iconic in Spain. Its author, Francisco Umbral, perhaps the country’s most influential columnist since the transition to democracy, first made the comparison in the early 1980s, in the introduction to Spleen de Madrid 2 (1982), a collection of Baudelaire-inspired columns on the countercultural scene in the Spanish capital. The phrase has since become a literary-journalistic refrain, with much energy spent attempting to peel back its layers of meaning. Many commentators have taken this phrase to refer to the column’s literary qualities. Like Baudelaire’s prose poetry, Umbral’s opinion columns are said to innovate aesthetically by compressing meaning and observation into a limited prose structure. For me, however, the oft-quoted phrase most importantly draws our attention to the genre’s staying power.

The op-ed’s durability as a genre of opinion writing is indeed puzzling. Despite fears that an array of new shortform writing on the internet would spell an end to the op-ed, the opposite seems to have happened. Blog posts and Twitter threads have morphed into “think pieces,” each of which argues its own “hot take” on current affairs. Make no mistake: this is the language of opinion journalism, dressed-up for twenty-first century internet culture. If forms of internet writing had become as universal and generalized as many had assumed, there would be no need to convert their arguments into an op-ed form. But op-eds are still the universal medium of opinion writing. The genre’s capaciousness to translate ideas that were initially published on Twitter or Facebook, delivered as TED talks or academic lectures, or written for peer-reviewed publications or personal diaries, even today, remains unparalleled. Although the New York Times decided to retire its use of the term “op-ed” in 2021, some five decades after popularizing it, the form of opinion journalism the term came to represent will very likely endure for decades to come.

by Bécquer Seguín, The Millions | Read more:
Image:The Artists Father Reading a Newspaper; Albert_Engstrom