You Can’t Have an Open-Carry Democracy

Last Wednesday evening, as soldiers went room to room clearing the United States Capitol of seditionists, I was on the phone with Michigan State Sen. Dayna Polehanki, who recalled the April 2020 day when men with long guns showed up at the statehouse in Lansing to pressure lawmakers to repeal a COVID-19 emergency law. Like last week’s siege, that incursion was egged on by Donald Trump, who tweeted in support, “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” Some observers even thought the president’s tweet constituted insurrection—the offense for which he is now being impeached.

The intimidation in Michigan worked: Lawmakers did repeal the law, and though Polehanki did not vote with the majority, she told me the threat was clear: “When I can’t speak freely and press my vote button because someone is standing over me with a rifle, you’re infringing on my First Amendment rights.” Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel agreed that the protesters had crossed the line from simply carrying weapons to brandishing them—making a threat. (Later, it turned out that several men present were plotting to kidnap the governor.)

On Monday, the Michigan State Capitol Commission decided to prohibit open carry inside the statehouse, citing the attack on Congress. It was an acknowledgment that—beneath the conspiracy theories, the presidential cult of personality, and the craven Republican Party—the big challenge to returning to any kind of political sense of “normal” is guns. (...)

For a decade, we’ve been slowly adjusting to the new role of guns in public life. We’ve redesigned schools, installed metal detectors at every theater and arena, and endured horrific massacres at events including a Brooklyn block party, a California garlic festival, an El Paso, Texas, Walmart, and a Dayton, Ohio, nightlife district. And that was just over eight days in 2019. While the pandemic has brought some respite from headline-grabbing massacres such as school shootings, the toll of gun violence in 2020 was even worse than the year before. Shootings almost doubled in New York City. Murders in both Chicago and New York rose by 50 percent. This trend was consistent across most U.S. cities.

And while America’s trigger-happy policing is not new, police departments justify the warrior-cop equipment on display at this summer’s protests by citing the heavily armed populace. Indeed, police are more likely to kill and to be killed in parts of America where more people own guns.

So in a way, confronting the role of guns in political life—from Washington to Lansing to beleaguered county commissions—is long overdue. After Michigan, the issue flared again this summer as militia groups confronted Black Lives Matter protesters in Portland, Oregon; Austin, Texas; and Kenosha, Wisconsin. Several people were killed.

When the rioters entered Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s suite in the Capitol last week, staffers hiding in her conference room had turned off the lights and barricaded the door—techniques, she told 60 Minutes, they learned from active shooter drills in high school. (...)

... sooner rather than later, we’re going to have to deal with the oxymoron of open-carry democracy. How do we permit a populace armed to the teeth to safely march, to rally, to watch its government in action, to confront and engage with politicians at will? When does the mere presence of a gun become a threat?

by Henry Grabar, Slate |  Read more:

Image: Seth Herald/Getty Images

[ed. See also: Chekhov's gun: 'If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off.']

Emergency Room Notebook, 1977

You never hear sirens in the emergency room — the drivers turn them off on Webster Street. I see the red backup lights of ACE or United Ambulance out of the corner of my eye. Usually we are expecting them, alerted by the MED NET radio, just like on TV. “City One: This is ACE, Code Two. Forty-two-year-old male, head injury, BP 190 over 110. Conscious. ETA three minutes.” “City One … 76542 Clear.”

If it is Code Three, where life is in critical danger, the doctor and nurses wait outside, chatting in anticipation. Inside, in room 6, the trauma room, is the Code Blue team. EKG, X-ray technicians, respiratory therapists, cardiac nurses. In most Code Blues, though, the EMT drivers or firemen are too busy to call in. Piedmont Fire Department never does, and they have the worst. Rich massive coronaries, matronly phenobarbital suicides, children in swimming pools.

All day long the heavy hearselike Cadillacs of Care Ambulance back up just to the left of emergency parking. All day long, just outside my window, their gurneys sail past to cobalt, radiation therapy. The ambulances are gray, the drivers wear gray, the blankets are gray, the patients are yellow-gray except where the doctors have marked their skulls or throats with a dazzling red Magic Marker X.

They asked me to work over there. No thanks. I hate lingering good-byes. Why do I still make tasteless jokes about death? I take it very seriously now. Study it. Not directly, just sniffing around. I see death as a person … sometimes many people, saying hello. Blind Mrs. Diane Adderly, Mr. Gionotti, Madame Y, my grandma.

Madame Y is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. She looks dead, actually, her skin translucent blue-white, her exquisitely boned Oriental face serene and ageless. She wears black slacks and boots, mandarin-collared jackets cut and trimmed in Asia? France? The Vatican, maybe — they have the weight of a bishop’s cassock — or an X-ray robe. The piping has been done by hand in rich fuchsias, magentas, oranges.

Her Bentley drives up at nine, driven by a flippant Filipino who chain-smokes Shermans in the parking lot. Her two sons, tall, in suits made in Hong Kong, escort her from the car to the entrance of radiation therapy. It is a long walk from there, down a corridor. She is the only person who walks it alone. At the entrance she turns to her sons, smiles, and bows. They bow back to her and watch until she has reached the end of the hall. When she disappears they go for coffee and talk on the telephone.

An hour and a half later everyone reappears at once. She, with two flushed spots of mauve on her cheekbones, her sons, the Bentley with the Filipino, and they all glide away. Glisten and sheen of the silver car, her black hair, her silk jacket. The entire ritual as silent and flowing as blood.

She is dead now. Not sure when it happened, on one of my days off. She always seemed dead anyway, but nicely so, like an illustration or advertisement.

I like my job in Emergency. Blood, bones, tendons seem like affirmations to me. I am awed by the human body, by its endurance. Thank God — because it’ll be hours before X-ray or Demerol. Maybe I’m morbid. I am fascinated by two fingers in a baggie, a glittering switchblade all the way out of a lean pimp’s back. I like the fact that, in Emergency, everything is reparable, or not.

Code Blues. Well, everybody loves Code Blues. That’s when somebody dies — their heart stops beating, they stop breathing — but the Emergency team can, and often does, bring them back to life. Even if the patient is a tired eighty-year-old you can’t help but get caught up in the drama of resuscitation, if only for a while. Many lives, young fruitful ones, are saved.

The pace and excitement of ten or fifteen people, performers … it’s like opening night at the theater. The patients, if they are conscious, take part too, if just by looking interested in all the goings-on. They never look afraid.

If the family is with the patient it is my job to get information from them, to keep them informed about what’s going on. Reassure them, mostly.

While the staff members think in terms of good or bad codes — how well everyone did what they were supposed to do, whether the patient responded or not — I think in terms of good or bad deaths.

Bad deaths are ones with the manager of a hotel as next of kin, or the cleaning woman who found the stroke victim two weeks later, dying of dehydration. Really bad deaths are when there are several children and in-laws I have called in from somewhere inconvenient and none of them seem to know each other or the dying parent at all. There is nothing to say. They keep talking about making arrangements, about having to make arrangements, about who will make arrangements.

Gypsies are good deaths. I think so … the nurses don’t and security guards don’t. There are always dozens of them, demanding to be with the dying person, to kiss them and hug them, unplugging and screwing up the TVs and monitors and assorted apparatus. The best thing about Gypsy deaths is they never make their kids keep quiet. The adults wail and cry and sob but all the children continue to run around, playing and laughing, without being told they should be sad or respectful.

Good deaths seem to be coincidentally good Codes — the patient responds miraculously to all this life-giving treatment and then just quietly passes away.

Mr. Gionotti’s death was good … The family respected the staff’s request that they stay outside, but one by many one they went in and made their presence known to Mr. Gionotti and came out to reassure the others that everything was being done. There were a lot of them, sitting, standing, touching, smoking, laughing sometimes. I felt I was present at a celebration, a family reunion.

One thing I do know about death. The “better” the person, the more loving and happy and caring, the less of a gap that person’s death makes.

When Mr. Gionotti died, well, he was dead, and Mrs. Gionotti wept, they all did, but they all went weeping off together, and with him, really.

I saw blind Mr. Adderly on the 51 bus the other night. His wife, Diane Adderly, came in DOA a few months ago. He had found her body at the foot of the stairs, with his cane. Ratshit Nurse McCoy kept telling him to stop crying.

“It simply won’t help the situation, Mr. Adderly.”

“Nothing will help. It’s all I can do. Let me alone.”

When he heard McCoy had left, to make arrangements, he told me that he had never cried before. It scared him, because of his eyes.

I put her wedding band on his little finger. Over a thousand dollars in grimy cash had been in her bra, and I put it in his wallet. I told him that the denominations were fifties, twenties, and hundreds and he would need to find somebody to sort it all out.

When I saw him later on a bus he must have remembered my walk or smell. I didn’t see him at all — just climbed on the bus and slumped into the nearest seat. He even got up from the front seat near the driver to sit by me.

“Hello, Lucia,” he said.

He was very funny, describing his new, messy roommate at the Hilltop House for the Blind. I couldn’t imagine how he could know his roommate was messy, but then I could and told him my Marx Brothers idea of two blind roommates — shaving cream on the spaghetti, slipping on spilled stuffaroni, etc. We laughed and were silent, holding hands … from Pleasant Valley to Alcatraz Avenue. He cried, softly. My tears were for my own loneliness, my own blindness.

The first night I worked in Emergency, an ACE ambulance brought in a Jane Doe. Staff was short that night so the ambulance drivers and I undressed her, pulled the shredded panty hose off of varicose veins, toenails curling like parrots’. We unstuck her papers, not from her gray flesh-colored bra but from her clammy breasts. A picture of a young man in a marine uniform: George 1944. Three wet coupons for Purina cat chow and a blurred red, white, and blue Medicare card. Her name was Jane. Jane Daugherty. We tried the phone book. No Jane, no George.

If their purses haven’t already been stolen old women never seem to have anything in them but bottom dentures, a 51 bus schedule, and an address book with no last names.

The drivers and I worked together with pieces of information, calling the California Hotel for Annie, underlined, the Five-Spot cleaners. Sometimes we just have to wait until a relative calls, looking for them. Emergency phones ring all day long. “Have you seen a — ?” Old people. I get mixed up about old people. It seems a shame to do a total hip replacement or a coronary bypass on some ninety-five-year-old who whispers, “Please let me go.”

It doesn’t seem old people should fall down so much, take so many baths. But maybe it’s important for them to walk alone, stand on their own two feet. Sometimes it seems they fall on purpose, like the woman who ate all those Ex-Lax — to get away from the nursing home.

There is a great deal of flirty banter among the nurses and the ambulance crews. “So long — seizure later.” It used to shock me, all the jokes while they’re in the middle of a tracheotomy or shaving a patient for monitors. An eighty-year-old woman, fractured pelvis, sobbing, “Hold my hand! Please hold my hand!” Ambulance drivers rattling on about the Oakland Stompers.

“Hold her bloody hand, man!” He looked at me like I was crazy. I don’t hold many hands anymore and I joke a lot, too, if not around patients. There is a great deal of tension and pressure. It’s draining — being involved in life-and-death situations all the time.

Even more draining, and the real cause of tension and cynicism, is that so many of the patients we get in Emergency are not only not emergencies, there is nothing the matter with them at all. It gets so you yearn for a good cut-and-dried stabbing or a gunshot wound. All day long, all night long, people come in because they don’t have much appetite, have irregular BMs, stiff necks, red or green urine (which invariably means they had beets or spinach for lunch).

Can you hear all those sirens in the background, in the middle of the night? More than one of them is going to pick up some old guy who ran out of Gallo port.

by Lucia Berlin, A Manual For Cleaning Women |

“Good news! He’ll be gone in a week!”

via: Paul Noth

Via Getty

People Thought This Rioter's Name Was "Via Getty" (Buzz Feed)
via: (not Getty)
[ed. Hilarious. The internet is on the case. See also: The Capitol rioters put themselves all over social media. Now they’re getting arrested (Vox/Recode).]

Mobile Homes As Chic Affordable Housing

The following is a lightly-edited extract from a podcast conversation I had with Andres Duany, a principal founder of the New Urbanist movement. In it, Duany proposes the mobile home as an intelligent response to the affordable housing crisis—bucking the dogma and the orthodoxies of our horrified New Urbanist colleagues. The full interview can be heard here (no paywall).

Kunstler: I know for a couple of years now you’ve been studying the mobile home industry, mainly as a way of figuring out how to deliver affordable dwellings to people. This has raised a lot of ire among our fellow New Urbanists, who can’t process the idea. What did you learn from all this?

Duany: It’s not ire. They think I’ve lost my mind. It’s like pity. Okay, first of all where does it come from? (And it took me a long time to arrive at this.) Most people don’t understand how much subsidized affordable housing Liz [Plater-Zyberk] and I have built, because we never show it. We’ve done so much affordable housing for agricultural laborers, for black communities. It’s nice-looking—actually we’ve gotten some prizes. Why don’t we show it? I never show it because you might ask me how much it costs. And it actually costs twice as much as regular market housing. With government subsidies everything blows up in expense. Now, I know very well that there will not be money for subsidies any longer, but there are ways to deliver housing that costs much less to build without a subsidy. (...)

So, I backed into the mobile home industry and I realized that they had solved the problem technically. They know how to build it. And, by the way, it’s not like the 1960s mobile homes, the ones that are collapsing. These are much, much better. The codes have improved tremendously. But they still look horrible.

So, what we have is a cultural problem, not a technical problem. Whenever you see new mobile homes, they’re not new parks, they’re old ones being refurbished, switching out the units. You can’t get new ones permitted. But what happens is nobody wants them [anywhere near them] because they’re so distinctly for “losers.” Now, parenthetically, they’re not “losers.” They’re actually people who don’t make enough money to get any other kind of house, and very often they have jobs and everything else. Many are down on their luck, but they’re not dysfunctional people on the whole. They’re paying every month for the charges and for the unit and maintaining them. Don’t think they’re “losers.” They’re just people on a low burn-rate.

But the mobile home industry has cultural problem. The reason is that the mobile home tries desperately to look like conventional housing, with the little pitched roofs, the clapboards, the little shutters. When you compare them to conventional houses, they’re always less good. If you compare them to the 1950s houses by Philip Johnson in Connecticut, the great houses by the chic architects of the ‘50s for the Houston oil people, which are flat-roofed boxes with sliding glass doors—they’re ultra-chic, particularly these days when everybody loves mid-century modern. So, instead of making my mobile homes look like “shotgun” houses, we redesign them to look like mid-century modern.

Suddenly they’re so much better! You know how the [shipping] container houses are so popular? Well, those are actually miserable inside. They’re only eight feet wide and so forth. So, you pick up the aesthetic of the container house in mid-century modern, and suddenly you have a winner—and it’s $90 a square foot! It’s not $50 anymore, but that’s still $100, $200, $300 less than stick-built housing. We’re hacking the industry’s technical abilities, and over-laying on it a very advanced aesthetic. It’s no longer the dwellings of losers but the dwellings of winners.

Kunstler: Part of your idea was a way to provide housing in the big corporate parking lots of companies like Google and Apple, that don’t pay their tech workers enough to live otherwise in these high-priced places, right?

Duany: The kids at Google are earning, minimum, 150,000, okay? God knows maybe more than that. And they’re still commuting an hour and sharing a ranch house somewhere. The traffic jams are unbelievable. So, we said, “why not use the parking lots?” The tiny houses that we design meet the standards of the Department of Motor Vehicles. We followed that code, so they’re legal to park in parking lots. You put them there instead of the car, and the kids don’t have to commute. And they’re very, very chic. They’ve got leather chairs, they’re finished with Japanese interiors, full baths, queen-sized beds. They’re definitely not for losers. They’re cool. They’re not…a ranch house somewhere! We tried so hard and spent a lot of extra money so that they would not be associated with losers. They’d be associated with people who have a choice. This housing is for people with master’s degrees, okay? I say that not to be cruel to everybody else but just to get the damn things permitted, approved by the neighborhood.

by James Howard Kunstler, The American Conservative | Read more:
Image via:
[ed. Imagine repurposing ghost malls with their miles of parking spaces (and infrastructure already in place) for affordable housing, or to help with homelessness. Makes too much sense. See also: Transforming trailers (CNU).] 

The FTC Should Do Its Job

A Simple Thing Biden Can Do to Reset America

“An Extremely Online Riot”

The riot inside Congress last week is going to be with us for a long time, in terms of reaction and policy response. While we can lay responsibility on Donald Trump’s doorstep for inciting the violent behavior, he himself did not participate in the riot itself, nor did he pay for people to come to D.C. to be a part of it. Trump can channel the anger of large numbers of alienated people, but the anger and paranoia exists independently of him, even though he uses this rage for his own purposes. And even when Trump is gone, these angry people will remain in our society.

So who are they? Some are opportunists who flew private jets to D.C. to break windows, others are far-right racists flying Confederate flags, and a few are just normal Republican activists and officeholders choosing to indulge an anti-democratic violent fantasy. But many in what CNN’s Brian Stelter called an Extremely Online riot are middle or lower middle class people who found their way to radicalism through social media. The one who has been profiled in depth is Ashli Babbitt, a woman who died from a gunshot wound as she tried to climb into the Speaker’s lobby. In tracing her life, I think there are some lessons about what we can do to stop the polarization and radicalization of our society. (...)

So here’s the profile of a rioter, a working class person who went overseas eight times in military service, including two combat zones, who then tried her hand at a small business where financial predators and monopolists lurked. She then fell in with conspiratorial social media, and turned into a violent rioter who, like most of the rioters, thought she was defending America by overturning an election.

It’s easy to mock this kind of thinking, to see rioters as losers or racists. And no doubt there’s a strain of deep-seated racial animus that is with us and always will be, but I think ascribing all of it to such an explanation is too simple. Racist or no, Babbitt really was at one point a patriotic American, serving in the military for over half her adult life. More broadly, she’s far from alone in expressing rage at the status quo. There have protests against the existing social order for almost a decade, starting with the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, and then Black Lives Matter in 2014 and accelerating into protests and riots earlier this year. I’ve written about the relationship between unrest and corporate power in the context of those protests, a sense of alienation that normal political channels, that politics itself is not a realistic path for addressing social problems. (...)

There are two paths in a representative democracy if we have a large group who lives in a cult-like artificial world of misinformation, and many more who rightly or wrongly don’t trust any political institution. We can try to strip these people of representation and political power; that is the guiding idea behind removing Trump, as well as a whole host of conservatives, off of Silicon Valley platforms that have become essential to modern society. Removing these people is a choice to not have a society, to pretend that we can put these people into a closet somewhere and ignore them.

The alternative is less dramatic. We can take on the legal framework behind social media so these products aren’t addictive and radicalizing. As I’ve written, there are legal immunities and policy choices that allow Facebook to profit in especially toxic ways through compiling detailed user profiles and targeting them with ads. If we change how social media companies make money, we can change how these services operate to make them socially beneficial instead of engines of radicalization.

More broadly, we can try to rebuild our institutions so everyone has a stake in society again, and end the systemic cheating in our commerce that strips people of community. Just saying ‘trust our institutions’ won’t work, at least not until we make those institutions trustworthy. (...)

The Problem Lies in Policy

If we recognize that a major short-term cause in creating this paranoid cult is social media models based on addiction, monopolization and surveillance, and a long-term cause is systemic cheating in our economy and culture, we can break down our problems in manageable chunks. These problems originate from laws and regulations guiding commerce.

And that’s why I think the solution lies in part at the agency set up to regulate commerce - the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC is a potentially economy-reshaping institution. It has broad jurisdiction over privacy, consumer protection, and antitrust laws, meaning it can reorient how virtually every corporation in the country functions. It can write rules against ‘unfair methods of competition,’ which can include prohibiting anything from discriminatory pricing in industrial gas markets to addictive or deceptive user interfaces to certain kinds of targeted ads. As a small example, the commission took action earlier this year against corporations engaging in ‘merchant cash advances,’ precisely the predatory lending that trapped Babbitt.

by Matt Stoller, BIG |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

A Message to the Country

[ed. Very powerful. Thank you, Mr. Schwarzenegger.]

Upirngasaq (Arctic Spring)

It is now early June – the beginning of springtime in the Arctic, that brief period between winter and summer when life is miraculously renewed. The snow, apart from patches here and there, will soon vanish from the land. Our delicate plants, such as the purple saxifrage, fireweed and poppies, suddenly freed from their covering of snow, are quickly greening again. The snow buntings – qupannuaq – always the first to arrive, are being followed by flocks of other migratory birds, among them geese, ducks, loons and terns. The snow-white winter plumage of the ptarmigan – aqiggiit, our Arctic grouse – is taking on its summer camouflage. And our favourite fish, the Arctic char – iqalukpik – will soon begin their seaward migration from lakes connected to the upper reaches of the river, where they overwintered, to feed and replenish in the rich coastal waters of nearby Ungava Bay.

This is also a time when families look forward with intense joy to escaping community life for a while, heading to their traditional springtime camping spots near the mouth of the river or on the shores of Ungava Bay. Many of these sites have been occupied by the same Inuit families for generations, and being in any one of these places is to sense immediately the depth of history and connection they hold. In this way, year after year, families simultaneously renew their attachment to the land and to our ancestors. It is a time of storytelling, of remembering who we are. Here, our language, Inuktitut – ultimately a language of the land – reclaims its rightful place. And here our children, according to their age and gender, participate fully in traditional daily activities: learning and absorbing all the essential skills, aptitudes and attitudes required to survive and thrive on the land when their own time to be autonomous comes. In so many ways, the land never fails to invigorate and teach. Family and communal bonds are restored, and our spirits uplifted. We become healthier in mind and body, nourished by the ‘country food’ the land and sea provides. This includes a varied menu of goose and duck, fresh-run Arctic char and trout, and, of course, natsiq, the common seal, a staple food of Inuit coastal dwellers everywhere. This ample diet is inevitably supplemented by seagull, goose and eider duck eggs, gathered from islets just off the shore. At low tide we dig for shellfish, mostly mussels, or catch sculpins, a small, spiny fish we call kanajuq, stranded in rocky pools by the falling tide. Raw, crunchy seaweed, gathered from these same pools, occasionally complements the boiled kanajuq.

With the signs of spring all around me, and my dreams of soon being able to get out on the land again, in season to go berry picking with fellow Inuit women, it’s perhaps not surprising that my thoughts have turned to the place of nature in Inuit life. In our language we have no word for ‘nature’, despite our deep affinity with the land, which teaches us how to live in harmony with the natural world. The division the Western world likes to make between ‘man and nature’ is both foreign and dangerous in the traditional Inuit view. In Western thinking, humans are set apart from nature; nature is something to strive against, to conquer, to tame, to exploit or, more benignly, to use for ‘recreation’. By contrast, Inuit place themselves within, not apart from, nature. This ‘in-ness’ is perfectly symbolized in our traditional dwellings of the past: illuvigait (snow houses) in winter and tupiit (sealskin tents) in summer. What could be more within nature than living comfortably in dwellings made of snow and sealskin!

This is especially true of our relationships with the animals that sustain us: the puijiit – sea mammals – seals, whales and walruses; and the pisuktiit, the land animals, in particular caribou and polar bear. No other people have relied so exclusively on animals as my Inuit ancestors.

In one of the world’s harshest environments, these Arctic animals provided everything needed to sustain human life. Their flesh supplied all the nutrition required for a healthy diet. From their skins, cut and worked as needed, clothing and shelter were sewn. The blubber of marine mammals fuelled the qulliit – our soapstone lamps – providing light and a little warmth for the snow houses in the depths of winter. From bones, ivory and caribou antler, tools, utensils and hunting equipment were expertly fashioned. Thread, strong and waterproof, used with the seamstresses’ delicate bone and ivory needles, came from the sinews of caribou and beluga whales. The reliance on animals was total. Other than berries and roots, in some places available at the end of the Arctic’s brief summer, there was no plant life, no agriculture, to fall back on should the hunt fail.

Our ancient beliefs held that the animals we relied upon had souls, just like ours, which needed to be treated with respect and dignity. In the early 1920s, Avva, an Inuit shaman from Igloolik, whose descendants I know well from my residential schooldays, as well as from the time I lived in Iqaluit, Nunavut, for almost twenty years, famously summed up these beliefs at the very core of our pre-Christian identity:

All the creatures that we have to kill and eat, all those that we have to strike down and destroy to make clothes for ourselves, have souls, like we have, souls that do not perish with the body, which must therefore be propitiated lest they should revenge themselves on us for taking away their bodies.

Founded on respect, our appeasement of the animals we harvested took many forms: for instance, giving a newly killed seal or walrus a mouthful of water, a practice based on the knowledge from a deep understanding of and connection to the animals we hunt that these mammals, having spent all their lives in the sea, craved a drink of fresh water. Taboos associated with particular animals were strictly observed. In this way, care was taken to avoid mingling creatures of the sea with those of the land, and so there were prohibitions against sewing caribou-skin clothing on the sea ice. Nor could the flesh of seal and caribou be boiled in the same pot. I remember my mother reminding me of this even when I would eat both frozen fish and frozen caribou together. Above all, the absolute bond between my ancestors and the animals they hunted (and, by extension, the land, sea and air) was founded on respect. Hunters never boasted about their prowess. Abusing animals in any way, or mocking them, or using them for ‘sport’, resulted in serious consequences for society, as did disputes over sharing. In response to maltreatment or insults, animals would withdraw from hunting grounds. Hunters were obliged to kill only animals who ‘presented’ themselves for the taking. This is exactly why, when I lived in the south and made visits home to Kuujjuaq in the early spring, and we hunted aqiggiit, my mother would say to me: ‘Isn’t it wonderful that the aqiggiit brought themselves to you so that you could take them back with you to eat in Montreal!’ My mother always had that deep Inuit understanding of how life gives life. (...)

I have an early memory that brought all these strands together, underscoring our essential place within nature that I didn’t fully understand it at the time. Inuit have many categories of relationships and relationship terms without an exact equivalent in the Western world. Traditionally, personal names given at birth were said to carry souls and they immediately established a wide network of relationships, even mutual responsibilities, often extending beyond the immediate family. Nor were personal names ever gendered. For instance, a baby boy named after, say, his maternal grandmother would be addressed by his own mother as anaana – meaning mother – and, in some cases, at least until puberty, would be dressed and even socialized as a girl. Family members would notice with delight how he took on some of his grandmother’s personality traits and mannerisms. In this way, his grandmother continued to live through him.

A particularly significant relationship, in terms of linking community and nature, was initiated at birth with the person who cut the umbilical cord, usually a woman. If the baby was a girl, this woman would be known as her sanajik; if a boy, she would be his arnaqutik. The baby then became the arnaliak of her sanajik, or the angusiak of his arnaqutik.

Both my grandmother and mother were known for their midwifery skills, and so they had a good number of angusiaks and arnaliaks. One of the main obligations of their angusiaks was to present them with their first catch from the hunt – be it fish, seal, ptarmigan or caribou, a rite of passage, celebrating the very foundations of Inuit society: that is the sacred, interdependent relationship between the animals we hunt and our hunters. When I was a small girl, I saw this ritual played out many times as these budding hunters – my grandmother’s angusiaks – honoured their obligations to her. One at a time, every other month or so, young men would come by our house to present their catch. In response my grandmother put on an amazing performance. This normally quiet, dignified elderly woman would suddenly turn into an animal-like person, rolling around and making animal noises on the floor. Sometimes she would nibble the young hunter’s hand or wrist, acknowledging their power, encouraging him to become a great hunter. I watched this startling performance almost in embarrassment because then, as a child, I didn’t fully grasp its deep ceremonial significance, beyond sensing it was a necessary part of our hunting culture.

For their part, the girls and young women who were my grandmother’s and mother’s arnaliaks would be similarly honoured and encouraged when they brought gifts demonstrating their increasing ability in sewing. Proper, well-made skin clothing, warm and watertight as needed, was an absolute necessity for the successful provider. Inevitably my grandmother’s ritual would finish with the young men or women we had just celebrated leaving the house confident and reassured, knowing that their work or hunt had been well received, endorsed by the woman who had helped to bring them into this life.

Despite the extensive damage done to Inuit society and culture when we moved from the land into the villages, there is, in most of these settlements, an essential core of families instinctively committed to maintaining our traditions. Individual members of these families, even while living within the semi-urban settings, strive to relate to the land and its resources in the same respectful way that sustained us prior to the move. They acquire an intimate knowledge of their local area and the various animal species it supports. The men employ many of the same hunting skills used in former times while the women prepare and soften the skins of seals and caribou for the clothing they make for themselves and their hunters, using techniques, patterns and stitches handed down by an endless succession of mothers, aunts and grandmothers. Most importantly, members of these families embody the essential philosophies and understandings of the land and animals that enabled us to thrive over countless generations before we suffered the consequences of European contact. In a real and substantial sense such Inuit keep the vital flame of our culture alive. They are an irreplaceable resource, in both practical and intellectual ways, and they need and deserve every possible means of support.

But beyond the challenges this already vulnerable way of being endures, in the face of the Arctic’s rapidly increasing urbanization (and globalization), there is another imminent threat – no less insidious – that, unless checked, will end forever our unique attachment to the land and its life-giving resources: climate change.

by Sheila Watt-Cloutier, Granta | Read more:
Image: Sheila Watt-Cloutier

via:

[ed. See also: Rev. Robert Jones, Blues Guitar Lesson - Slide, Resonator, and Open Tunings]

Existential Crisis

Watching MAGA World Fracture in Real Time (The Atlantic)

Following the riot at the Capitol, Trump supporters are having an existential crisis on Twitter.

Bryson Gray, a 29-year-old rapper and Donald Trump superfan from North Carolina, wants to make one thing clear: It was a group of the president’s most loyal supporters that rioted in the U.S. Capitol building on Wednesday, and nobody else. When I spoke with Gray yesterday, he said he had been “too late” to get inside the Capitol itself with the rest of the mob, which broke windows and chanted through the halls of Congress in an ultimately futile attempt to disrupt the confirmation of Joe Biden as president. So he stood outside the building with a crowd and sang the national anthem.

“When I left the Capitol, I actually thought I was going to get on Twitter and see a bunch of support, because it was actually a very beautiful thing,” Gray said. Instead, he was met with a strange message spreading across the site: Trump fans weren’t behind the riots. Instead, it was antifa, the decentralized left-wing group that has become a bogeyman for Republican commentators and politicians, and for President Trump in particular. Many of Gray’s former #StopTheSteal allies had disavowed the insurrection, and a good number of them were using leftist antagonists as their scapegoat. “The first tweet I saw was somebody saying ‘Patriots don’t storm buildings; there were no patriots in the Capitol,’” Gray told me. “I’m like, Uh, that literally makes no sense; what are you talking about?” (...)

There is no credible evidence of involvement by antifa, which is not an organized group and has been responsible for very little violence, while Gray and numerous other known MAGA figures actually were involved in the insurrection. But empirical reality notwithstanding, the antifa story has become a dividing line within the MAGA world this week—and a telling symbol of its internal upheaval.

Over the past two days, Trump loyalists have been bickering online over whether to take credit for and celebrate their most dramatic action yet, or distance themselves from the scene by calling up familiar conspiracy theories to explain it away. Some may genuinely believe, as they say, that paid “crisis actors” are responsible. Many don’t seem to know what they believe, or what is most savvy to present, and pivot from post to post. Still others, like Gray, are consistently frustrated and outraged that anybody on their side wouldn’t be proud of what happened Wednesday afternoon. “The blue-check conservatives, all the popular ones, put ‘1776’ in their bios and tweet about how it’s time for patriots to stand up and fight,” he told me. “Then they turn around and condemn patriots doing exactly that.” (...)

The antifa rumor is unsurprising and sort of stale—a knee-jerk response at this point to anything that certain right-wing commentators see in public and don’t like. “This is such a repetitive tactic that many in the [disinformation] field don’t even track it anymore, because it’s so glaringly obvious,” Donovan told me. Nevertheless, it caught on easily—just as it did last summer, when antifa was repeatedly blamed for stoking unrest during the Black Lives Matter protests, and the summer before, when Trump first tweeted that the “Radical Left Wack Jobs” were a “major Organization of Terror.”

by Kaitlyn Tiffany, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Getty/The Atlantic

Self-Pardon Fantasy Will Meet a Harsh Reality

I don’t believe a self-pardon’s gonna fly.

I don’t mean to say that President Donald Trump will not attempt it. He very well might.

I also don’t mean to say that it won’t be a big deal if and when he does attempt it. It will be a very big deal.

I mean, rather, that a self-pardon will not materially decrease the likelihood of his attempted prosecution by the Justice Department after he leaves office, and may even increase the chances of his indictment.

More important, it will probably not result in legal recognition that the pardon power extends to presidential self-forgiveness. To the contrary, if Trump does attempt a self-pardon in the face of a compelling federal criminal case against him, the result is likely to be Supreme Court rejection of the self-pardon’s legality.

The reason has little to do with doctrine. There is a very plausible textual case that the pardon power—which the Constitution extends to all “offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment”—includes, by dint of not excluding, the issuance of a pardon to oneself. The legal scholar Paul Larkin Jr. of the Heritage Foundation recently offered strong reasons not to read into text restrictions that aren’t there—reasons rooted in the absolute nature of the pardon power, which is historically a creature of royal prerogative. There are also compelling reasons to doubt the constitutionality of the self-pardon, including those spelled out in this thoughtful analysis from Frank Bowman III of the University of Missouri School of Law, which focuses on the word grant as understood in the founding era.

My argument, however, is not doctrinal, but premised on the judicial politics involved in how a self-pardon would make its way to the courts.

To understand why a self-pardon gambit is preponderantly likely to fail, imagine the awkward circumstances in which it would realistically play out. Back in 1974, a woman named Mary Lawton articulated what has been the executive branch’s position on presidential self-pardons ever since. Lawton was then the acting director of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which is the guardian of presidential power, the office responsible for interpreting the law on behalf of the executive branch in a fashion that protects executive prerogatives. As such, the OLC tends to take expansive views of presidential authority within the confines of reasonable legal interpretation. Yet during the Watergate era, Lawton wrote that the pardon power does not permit a self-pardon: “Under the fundamental rule that no one may be a judge in his own case, it would seem that the question should be answered in the negative,” she held for the department. [ed. emphasis added] To my knowledge, her opinion has not been withdrawn during the Trump administration, though it is certainly possible that the OLC has done subsequent work on the subject and kept it secret.

The president does have the authority to overrule the OLC, or to just ignore it, so the fact that the Justice Department has long held that he may not pardon himself isn’t a real impediment—except in one important optical sense: The courts, including the Supreme Court, would know that Trump was taking a position far more radical than the executive branch ever has on this matter. Indeed, they would know that he was taking it in contrast with a long-standing Justice Department position.

What’s more, the courts, and ultimately the justices, would know that the Justice Department had—within days of Trump’s self-pardon—reverted to its traditional view. President-elect Joe Biden takes office in only two weeks. He will surely adopt the view that the president may not pardon himself. So the Justice Department under him will undoubtedly argue, representing both the current president and the traditional position of the executive branch, against the self-pardon. Meanwhile, the former president will have taken a position that radically outflanks that of the traditional guardian of presidential power, in a self-serving view of the pardon power that held sway in the executive branch for all of two weeks.

That’s not a good look.

This brings me to a second awkwardness: the facts.

A self-pardon, after all, matters only if the Justice Department tries to investigate or prosecute Trump. Otherwise, it’s quite literally just a piece of paper. The department can contend that it is not a valid piece of paper. The new president can say so as well. And Trump can contend that it is valid. But without an attempted investigation or prosecution, Trump’s action will face no test. It will not set the precedent that the president can pardon himself, merely that he can try to do so—and we already know that. (...)

The first point here is that given the possibility of such a case, the self-pardon would function almost as a taunt to the Justice Department. A pardon given to anyone else would abort an incipient investigation immediately; all the investigative subject would have to do is plead the pardon if indicted, and a court would dismiss the matter. But a self-pardon is different. It presents one of the great open questions of constitutional law, and if the Justice Department backed down from investigating or indicting because a subject had pardoned himself, it would effectively be acknowledging the former president’s power to issue a pardon over the current president’s insistence on the traditional executive-branch position.

by Benjamin Wittes, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Getty/The Atlantic

[ed. Quite a crash course in constitutional law. By the end of the year we'll all be epidemiological and legal experts. See also: What is Sedition? (NYT)]  

The Spirit of Neil Peart

The Spirit of Neil Peart (Rolling Stone)

[ed. Not a Rush fan (or prog rock in general), but quite a nice retrospective for an avowed introspective.]

‘Slow Streets’ Disrupted City Planning. What Comes Next?

When she first heard that “slow streets” might be coming to Durham, North Carolina, alarm bells went off for Aidil Ortiz. It was late May, and by that point, dozens of other world cities had restricted vehicle access to miles of residential streets. With Covid-19 placing a premium on safe outdoor space, the goal was to encourage socially distant walking, biking and play.

But Ortiz was familiar with how good intentions by city planners can miss the mark. As a program manager at the Durham social justice nonprofit SpiritHouse who also sits on the city’s pedestrian and bicycling commission, she’d seen how Durham officials failed to engage communities of color during the planning for the Durham Belt Line Trail, a project to turn an abandoned rail bed into a multi-use trail, in 2018. Concerned that the High Line-esque park could trigger gentrification and displacement, she helped press the city to adopt formal standards for gathering feedback from under-represented groups before transforming the infrastructure that outlined their lives.

Now, as the pandemic was surging, the city was contemplating a significant change set to affect some of the same communities, where Covid case rates were taking off and whose residents had complained for years about dangerous speeding.

“Sometimes people in marginalized communities are very caught off guard by what is seen as priority,” said Ortiz. ”I knew if slow streets were implemented without dialogue and consent and co-ownership, people would resent how it unfolded, and it’d become another example of how some people matter and others don’t.”

Therein lies the moral of an urban design story that defined 2020. Several cities around the world took advantage of traffic lulls during the early weeks of the coronavirus pandemic to launch temporary car-free or traffic-restricted streets programs; some, like Paris’s celebrated “corona cycleways,” have become permanent. The embrace of non-motorized mobility has been widely cheered by safety advocates, environmentalists and foes of auto-centric planning. But in the U.S., slow streets initiatives have also drawn controversy, community resistance and comparisons with racist urban planning practices of earlier decades. They hit a sore spot in a uniquely sensitive moment: As a pandemic claimed Black and Brown lives at disproportionate rates, and outrage over police killings ignited global protests, slow streets became a flashpoint in the planning sphere’s broader reckoning over systemic racism.

As a result, ten months into the pandemic, some planners are rethinking their playbooks, and even the concept of what it means to do their job.

“I think there’s a tension between planners wanting to act fast, because their work is so critical to reduce fatalities and greenhouse gas emissions — the reasons for this work are so compelling and historic,” said Corinne Kisner, the executive director of the National Association of City Transportation Officials. “But the urgency to move fast is in conflict with the speed of trust, and the pace that actually allows for input from everyone who’s affected by these decisions.”

The mixed message of street closures

Nowhere was that tension truer than in Oakland, California, which was one of the earliest adopters of the slow streets concept. In April, the city announced a plan to restrict car traffic on 74 miles of residential corridors, much of it all at once. The project attracted coverage in the New York Times, the Guardian, Washington Post and other national news outlets. Lauded for its speedy implementation and streets-for-the-people messaging, it became an international model looked to by other cities as they searched for rapid transportation-based pandemic response. “This is an opportunity to remember that these are our streets, not just streets for cars,” Warren Logan, the director of mobility policy and interagency relations in the Oakland mayor’s office, told Bloomberg CityLab shortly after the launch of Oakland Slow Streets.

But not all Oaklanders shared this enthusiasm. A few weeks into the project, a survey revealed that, while affluent, white and non-disabled residents were overwhelmingly proponents of the program, people of color, people with lower incomes, and people with disabilities reported much lower levels of awareness, use and support. Local nonprofits criticized the city for its lack of community outreach and for not focusing instead on more urgent pandemic-related issues. Some felt that the street closures themselves sent a mixed message.

“The signs didn’t really indicate the parameters of the program or its purpose: closed to whom? Closed for what?” said John Jones III, the director of community and political engagement at Just Cities, a social justice nonprofit. He lives on a block that has been partly closed to vehicles, and says he hasn’t seen more than a handful of people jogging or biking on it since April. “It was confusing even to people who lived on these streets. And it conflicted with the idea that we’re supposed to stay in the house. Why close a park but allow people to exercise in the street?”

The rapid implementation of Slow Streets also appeared to ignore the long legacy of distrust towards the city felt by many Oaklanders of color. The city had neglected to talk to residents along the affected streets ahead of time, and follow-up online surveys mostly reached wealthier, whiter people. It initially failed to catch the fact that, on certain corridors, residents didn’t even feel safe crossing a major artery to get to the grocery store, a problem that predated the pandemic — and that Slow Streets did little to solve.

by Laura Bliss, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: Bryan Miller, Front Runner Productions

Loser

Donald Trump’s worst nightmare has come true: He’s going to be remembered by history as the Biggest Loser.

Think about it. He lost the election. Then he threw his energy into the campaigns of two Senate candidates in Georgia, both of whom lost. Then he returned to Washington, where his supporters delayed the certification of the election with a thug-like assault on the nation’s capitol.

When the first horrific videos showed Trump throngs storming the suddenly evacuated Senate, the president of the United States responded with “stay peaceful.” Which is certainly good advice, but hardly of the emotional intensity he uses when howling about himself.

Trump followed up with a video to his supporters. “I know your pain, I know your hurt,” he said while urging them to go home in peace. Great start! Which he instantly followed up with LoserSpeak.

“We had an election that was stolen from us,” he added. “It was a landslide election and everyone knows it. Especially the other side.”

You see now that within a couple of sentences, Trump has managed to turn his call for calm with a couple of jabs that would tend to convince some people that breaking through the windows and doors of the nation’s capitol was an excellent and righteous plan.

All this happened while Congress was attempting to certify the election of Joe Biden, a normally feel-good ritual that, as Chuck Schumer noted, was turned into “an act of political courage.”

While we never thought of Trump as a guy who’d bring us together, his post-election behavior has been so appalling that most of the Senate found itself in a kind of bipartisan revulsion.

“I’ve served 36 years in the Senate. This will be the most important vote I’ve ever cast,” said Mitch McConnell as he prepared to support the certification of Biden’s victory. (...)

“I mean I could go on and on. … I could just go on forever,” Trump said in another I-won speech in front of the White House. Damned straight. It’s becoming increasingly clear that he is probably going to spend the rest of his life explaining how he actually won re-election “in a landslide.”

Be thankful you’re not one of the family or Mar-a-Lago regulars. Thanksgiving dinners will probably feature a half-hour disquisition on the Arizona vote, and the distribution of gifts at Christmas will be a reminder that some people don’t get the rewards they really deserve.

by Gail Collins, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

[ed. And in other non-loser related events Wednesday: 4000 people died in one day, and over 1 million infected in five states. Overshadowed by events in Washington, the virus was deadlier than ever (NYT).]

Pro-Trump Mob Storms Capitol

Live Updates: Pro-Trump Mob Breaches Capitol, Halting Vote Certification (NY Times)

[ed. This is the most disgusting political 'demonstration' I've ever witnessed in my life. Trump actually encouraged these idiots to march on the Capitol after egging them on and amping them up. Wouldn't that be called inciting a riot? Why aren't police using the same brutal control tactics they've used at BLM and other (peaceful) demonstrations across the country? Where are the police? Trump and his sycophantic Republican supporters in Congress who are directly responsible for this sickening spectacle now bravely Twittering, asking for calm (from a safe distance). Update: Trump on video... "go home, you're special, we love you." No. These people should be rounded up, arrested and charged with treason, domestic terrorism, or sedition. How many will that be, I wonder? Disgusting.]

More photos here (Daily Mail - turn off ad blocker if you have one)

[ed. Videos and more police questions here.]

via:

A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

On March 6, 1995, WIRED’s executive editor and resident techno-optimist Kevin Kelly went to the Greenwich Village apartment of the author Kirkpatrick Sale. Kelly had asked Sale for an interview. But he planned an ambush.

Kelly had just read an early copy of Sale’s upcoming book, called Rebels Against the Future. It told the story of the 19th-century Luddites, a movement of workers opposed to the machinery of the Industrial Revolution. Before their rebellion was squashed and their leaders hanged, they literally destroyed some of the mechanized looms that, they believed, reduced them to cogs in a dehumanizing engine of mass production.

Sale adored the Luddites. In early 1995, Amazon was less than a year old, Apple was in the doldrums, Microsoft had yet to launch Windows 95, and almost no one had a mobile phone. But Sale, who for years had been churning out books complaining about modernity and urging a return to a subsistence economy, felt that computer technology would make life worse for humans. Sale had even channeled the Luddites at a January event in New York City where he attacked an IBM PC with a 10-pound sledgehammer. It took him two blows to vanquish the object, after which he took a bow and sat down, deeply satisfied.

Kelly hated Sale’s book. His reaction went beyond mere disagreement; Sale’s thesis insulted his sense of the world. So he showed up at Sale’s door not just in search of a verbal brawl but with a plan to expose what he saw as the wrongheadedness of Sale’s ideas. Kelly set up his tape recorder on a table while Sale sat behind his desk.

The visit was all business, Sale recalls. “No eats, no coffee, no particular camaraderie,” he says. Sale had prepped for the interview by reading a few issues of WIRED—he’d never heard of it before Kelly contacted him—and he expected a tough interview. He later described it as downright “hostile, no pretense of objective journalism.” (Kelly later called it adversarial, “because he was an adversary, and he probably viewed me the same way.”) They argued about the Amish, whether printing presses denuded forests, and the impact of technology on work. Sale believed it stole decent labor from people. Kelly replied that technology helped us make new things we couldn’t make any other way. “I regard that as trivial,” Sale said.

Sale believed society was on the verge of collapse. That wasn’t entirely bad, he argued. He hoped the few surviving humans would band together in small, tribal-style clusters. They wouldn’t be just off the grid. There would be no grid. Which was dandy, as far as Sale was concerned.

“History is full of civilizations that have collapsed, followed by people who have had other ways of living,” Sale said. “My optimism is based on the certainty that civilization will collapse.”

That was the opening Kelly had been waiting for. In the final pages of his Luddite book, Sale had predicted society would collapse “within not more than a few decades.” Kelly, who saw technology as an enriching force, believed the opposite—that society would flourish. Baiting his trap, Kelly asked just when Sale thought this might happen.

Sale was a bit taken aback—he’d never put a date on it. Finally, he blurted out 2020. It seemed like a good round number.

Kelly then asked how, in a quarter century, one might determine whether Sale was right.

Sale extemporaneously cited three factors: an economic disaster that would render the dollar worthless, causing a depression worse than the one in 1930; a rebellion of the poor against the monied; and a significant number of environmental catastrophes.

“Would you be willing to bet on your view?” Kelly asked.

“Sure,” Sale said.

Then Kelly sprung his trap. He had come to Sale’s apartment with a $1,000 check drawn on his joint account with this wife. Now he handed it to his startled interview subject. “I bet you $1,000 that in the year 2020, we’re not even close to the kind of disaster you describe,” he said.

Sale barely had $1,000 in his bank account. But he figured that if he lost, a thousand bucks would be worth much less in 2020 anyway. He agreed. Kelly suggested they both send their checks for safekeeping to William Patrick, the editor who had handled both Sale’s Luddite book and Kelly’s recent tome on robots and artificial life; Sale agreed.

“Oh, boy,” Kelly said after Sale wrote out the check. “This is easy money.”

Twenty-five years later, the once distant deadline is here. We are locked down. Income equality hasn’t been this bad since just before the Great Depression. California and Australia were on fire this year. We’re about to find out how easy that money is. As the time to settle approached, both men agreed that Patrick, the holder of the checks, should determine the winner on December 31. Much more than a thousand bucks was at stake: The bet was a showdown between two fiercely opposed views on the nature of progress. In a time of climate crisis, a pandemic, and predatory capitalism, is optimism about humanity’s future still justified? Kelly and Sale each represent an extreme side of the divide. For the men involved, the bet’s outcome would be a personal validation—or repudiation—of their lifelong quests.

by Steven Levy, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Wired staff/Getty Images

[ed. See also: By the Waters of Babylon; by Stephen Vincent Benét]

The 21st-Century Fantasy Trilogy That Changed the Game

THE STONE SKY
The Broken Earth: Book Three
By N.K. Jemisin

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, in a world strikingly similar to ours, the literary genre known as epic fantasy was widely perceived as a realm of straight white men, whether as readers or writers — a realm built from the recycled myths and legends of northern Europe that modernity had left behind. Sometimes it was said that these men had wild, unkempt hair, lived in cantankerous tribal groups in caves illumined by a strange blue glow, and favored T-shirts with whimsical sayings or the logos of defunct 1970s rock bands. Possibly such tales have grown exaggerated in the telling. Reader, you be the judge.

This was of course never entirely true. From the beginning, there were many readers who loved the imaginative universes of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien and so many who came after them, but had to fight their way into those worlds past what could at best be called old-fashioned gender stereotypes and willed cultural blindness — and at worst looked like forces much darker than those. (The deeper one goes into the origin stories of the elves and orcs in the “Lord of the Rings” universe, the less pleasant they become.)

Like all good stories in this genre — like N. K. Jemisin’s extraordinary Broken Earth trilogy of slavery, revolution, destruction and redemption, for instance, which concludes with her new novel, “The Stone Sky” — the story of how epic fantasy and the adjacent realm of science fiction were transformed is a long one. It has many pioneers and legendary heroes, including (just for starters) such authors as Ursula K. Le Guin, Anne McCaffrey, Samuel R. Delany and Octavia E. Butler, not to omit those white male writers who have sought to broaden the genre’s cultural palette for reasons of their own. Neil Gaiman and George R. R. Martin come to mind, as does Frank Herbert, originator of the Dune series (inevitably, the “Duniverse”), whose apocalyptic blend of science, magic and planetary or ecological consciousness strikes me as an important precursor to the Broken Earth.

None of that is meant to diminish the impact or importance of Jemisin, an African-American woman who was born in Iowa and now lives in Brooklyn (and who writes the Book Review’s Otherworldly column, about science fiction and fantasy). She burst on the epic fantasy scene with her earlier Inheritance trilogy (completed in 2011) and has pretty well conquered it with the Broken Earth. Last year she became the first black writer to win the Hugo Award for best novel, one of the biggest prizes in the fantasy and science fiction realm, for “The Fifth Season,” first volume in the trilogy. This year, she won it again, for the middle volume, “The Obelisk Gate.” (Both books were also nominated for the Nebula, the other major prize in those genres.)

Jemisin’s ascent has paralleled an often-unsavory culture war in the fantasy and science fiction world around issues of identity and representation and perceived “political correctness,” which all too closely mirrors larger cultural and political disputes one could mention. When it comes to reading Jemisin’s actual books, it’s probably fair to say that such issues both do and do not matter, or perhaps that they matter if you want them to. Her epic yarn of a divided and warring mother and daughter on a tormented, unitary continent called the Stillness — possibly a reverse-Pangaea, deep in our planet’s future — unquestionably subverts or inverts the conventions of old-school fantasy in innumerable ways. (...)

Jemisin strives to tell the story of Essun, Nassun and the broken world around them — haunted by fragments of “deadciv” technology that will seem almost familiar or plausible to 21st-century readers — with a minimum of exposition and a maximum of action. Since the history of the Stillness is exceedingly complicated and each incident dense with important detail, “The Stone Sky” is not always easy reading. In this sense, “Game of Thrones” fans should feel at home: Yes, you need to read the earlier installments first and yes, rereading individual chapters (or the whole book) at a slower pace — after your first pell-mell rush through to find out what happens — is recommended.

by Andrew O’Hehir, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Orbit (publisher)
[ed. I'm finally nearing the end of this Trilogy and can highly recommend it. I'm not a fan of "fantasy" books per se (magic, demons, etc.), but there were some good reviews so I picked up "The Fifth Season", the first installment in the series, figuring I could always bail if it wasn't to my taste. My skepticism only increased after finishing it. I still couldn't figure out what the plot line was, what the characters were doing, or, in some cases, what the characters even were. It all seemed so broken and confusing. Fortunately, there were enough inventive and intriguing ideas that I kept going. Good thing, because eventually everything began to coalesce and make more sense until, by the end of the second book (The Obelisk Gate), I couldn't wait to start the third, this one. I think the last sentence in this review is really the way you have to approach these books. Slow pace to let things sink in (that'll be hard), re-reading earlier chapters as you go along (sometimes all the way back to the first book), and just being more attuned to clues and incidents that later have a large influence on events. Really, an interesting style of narration, not unlike my all-time favorite sci-fi writer Neil Stephenson, but also, completely different. See also: N. K. Jemisin’s Dream Worlds (New Yorker).]

Last Minute Details

Trump auctions Arctic refuge to oil drillers in last strike against US wilderness (Guardian)

Image: Acacia Johnson

[ed. Update: Sale of Drilling Leases in Arctic Refuge Fails to Yield a Windfall (NYT).]

Ani DiFranco

The sky is gray
The sand is gray
And the ocean is gray.

And I feel right at home 

In this stunning monochrome 

Alone in my way.

I smoke and I drink.
And every time I blink
I have a tiny dream.
But as bad as I am.
I'm proud of the fact
That I'm worse than I seem.

What kind of paradise am I looking for?
I've got everything I want, and still I want more.
Maybe some tiny, shiny key
Will wash up on the shore...

by Ani DiFranco, Grey (lyrics)

[ed. Depression. A song for our times.]