Category: Commonplace

Two: “Humans build cities as fortresses against failure: economic collapse, natural catastrophe, human venality and cowardice. The city walls keep those things out, when they work. If houses are, as the architect Mies van de Rohe said, “machines for living,” then cities are places where those machines get daisy-chained into a society. Cities are machines for cooperation, and survival.”

Smart Cities, Bad Metaphors, and a Better Urban Future

Shannon Mattern’s new book ‘A City Is Not a Computer’ digs into the data, dashboards, and language that keep people from building better, safer communities.

[from Wired]

Also reminded of a companion piece about the work of an acquaintance from college, an architect who has turned to imaging what truly inclusive, pandemic-resistant buildings might look like.

How Architecture Could Help Us Adapt to the Pandemic (Published 2020)

The virus isn’t simply a health crisis; it is also a design problem.

Astonishingly insightful essay. We have a real problem here.

“The defense of white freedom in U.S. history might more accurately be thought of as racialized anti-statism, in which the federal government is understood as a usurper of individual and states’ rights.”

Is Freedom White?

In a political season of dog whistles, we must be attentive to how talk of American freedom has long been connected to the presumed right of whites to dominate everyone else.

Excellent and powerful analysis of the digital world we’ve built over the last 20 years and the underlying, and perhaps catastrophic, problems that are at its foundation. Not only is the Internet we imagined in 1995 better than the Internet we have today, it wasn’t nearly as harmful.

The Biggest Problem Facing America: Misinformation-At-Scale

Big Tech must put community safety and privacy at the core of their business model. But a problem this big will require Federal oversight.

Straight from the gamer trolling wars to the main line of American politics

Beware ‘Smokescreen Trolling,’ Trump Followers’ Favorite Tactic

Trumpists have weaponized a new technique to win the ideological war. How pro-democracy voices respond to it matters.

Absolutely spot on.

“In this environment, cruelty — in the form of demonizing religious and ethnic minorities as terrorists, criminals and invaders — is an effective political tool for crushing one’s enemies as well as for cultivating a community that conceives of fellow citizens as a threat, resident foreigners attempting to supplant “real” Americans. For those who believe this, it is no violation of American or democratic principles to disenfranchise, marginalize and dispossess those who never should have had such rights to begin with, people you are convinced want to destroy you.”

Opinion | The Cruel Logic of the Republican Party, Before and After Trump

Why there was Trumpism long before Trump — and there will be long afterward.

Taking and names.

Plastic Waste Makers Index | The Minderoo Foundation

Plastic Waste Makers Index: Revealing the source of the single use plastics crisis

The call is coming from inside the house, and the house next door, and the house down the street. Or maybe it’s the voices of the miniature parents in Mulholland Drive. Or maybe the only way to win against machine-enabled synchronized and synthesized human revolt, as in War Games, is not to play.

While online behavior is certainly shaped by platform mechanisms, the fear today is less of the mechanisms themselves than of whom they’re enticing. Prior emphasis on the machine threat warned of the unpredictability of automated behavior and the need for humans to develop policies to control it. Today’s emphasis on the social media terror inverts this, warning of the danger posed by unchecked digital mobs, who must be controlled. The risk comes not from the machines but from ourselves: our vulnerability to deception and manipulation, our need to band together with others to hunt down and accost our adversaries online, our tendency to incite and be incited by violent rhetoric to act out in the physical world, and our collective habit of spiraling down into correlated webs of delusion, insanity, and hatred.

While amenable in theory to fears of machine malevolence, there is no real mechanical equivalent in this picture to the central role played by the runaway machine of old. Actually, the roles of humans and machines have switched: The machines must now restrain the dangerous humans.

Welcoming Our New Robot Overlords — The New Atlantis

How warnings of AI doom gave way to primal fear of primates posting

Related:

“We are incentivized, by the coded logic of the social media platforms where public engagement now takes place, to find reasons to hate each other…The conflicts taking place over freedom, justice, and other noble ideas are captive performances in the most technologically advanced human cockfighting enterprise ever designed—one that has converted the essence of human struggle into a sure-win bet for the tech platforms who play the house.“

Human Sacrifice and the Digital Business Model

Debates over free speech ignore the deeper problem: The tech monopolies that control social media have built their profit model on burnt offerings to the digital platform god

Also related:

The heightened scrutiny of the political uses to which social media has been put is necessary and important. But it tends to miss a critical aspect of our situation. Much of the analysis tacitly assumes that our underlying political structures and values have remained relatively stable, that they will not fundamentally change — even if they must be defended against the usual illiberal suspects, who deploy digital media in their efforts to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. If only Zuck would take more aggressive measures to purge Facebook of fake news, and if only Jack would ban all the Nazis from Twitter, then all would be well and we could proceed with business as usual. Much like the proverbial generals who always fight the last war, however, we will be undone in our efforts to make sense of our moment and to respond productively if we don’t recognize that digital media is reconfiguring our politics at a more fundamental level.

The Analog City and the Digital City — The New Atlantis

How online life breaks the old political order

Who will write the digital update to Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power? Where he excavated primal cultures and orthodox religions, the dynamics of our political world are enabled in a digital layer of meta-activities.

One of the nicer things you’ll see online today.

The Beatles’ ‘Blackbird’ Sung in the Indigenous Mi’kmaq Language

Mi’kmaq language, an Eastern Algonquian language spoken by nearly 11,000 in Canada and the United States. A member of the Eskasoni First Nation, the Nova Scotia student sang lyrics that were painstakingly translated by Katani Julian, a teacher who works in language revitalization.

In Tom Wicker’s A Time to Die, his personal account from being an observer during the Attica prison uprising in 1971, he described the unfolding dynamic of the scene when he first arrived and had to pass through camps of heavily-armed State Troopers:

… so many guns must sooner or later become a force in themselves, an imperative acting upon the men who supposedly control them. If the weapons are in hand, the question of those who have them ultimately becomes, “Why not use them?”  The more weapons, the more insistent the question; and the burden of explaining why not to use them falls on those who have no guns. But those who have no guns have little credence with those who do. 

[p.32, Haymarket Books edition]

And in this, we have a description of the state of America today.

A Time to Die

The essential first hand account of the Attica Prison rebellion, back in print for the 40th anniversary of the uprising

Just finished Elizabeth Rush’s amazing book Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore. A climate change book but not laden with scientific explanations—it’s more of an elegy for places we’ve lost and places we’re about to lose in this next Meltwater Pulse.

We’re already far down that road in Louisiana, in Florida, in the New York City area, in the San Francisco Bay area, and the human cost of the inevitable organized retreat the the will be not only inimpact the loss of property and the relocation of infrastructure, but in the mourning of those places we know and love and will not be able to take care of: beaches and wetlands, towns and cities, and for tens of millions of Americans, home.

We tend to think in human periods of the five generations we know (grandparents, parents, us, children, grandchildren) or in financial terms (30 years mortgages) or political cycles (4 year presidential terms, 6 years Senate terms); the earth has a different ebb and flow, and we’re about to be flooded out not with gradual rise over centuries as we’ve been telling ourselves, but in a short pulse of melting ice. The world has been here before and scientists know exactly what’s coming, and coming quickly. While we’re in the phase of desperately trying to buy some time, this book is well worth reading so we can start to make peace with the future we have cast for ourselves and our children. Highly recommended.

elizabeth rush

FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE IN GENERAL NONFICTION

More than suggestions, really. Highly recommended for every American, and for every white American, very necessary. Even the best-intentioned whites don’t know what they don’t know, about the history and foundations of the country;  about the institutionalized conventions of race and caste embedded throughout our society, our language, our behaviors; about what is still walking the streets and the halls of power trying to return to a dark time most of us thought was long past; about the sheer terror of that past, and how it still plays out and plagues us all today.

Reading does not and cannot replace experience, and understanding only goes so far, but we can start. Everyone in America lives in one house, whether we built it or not. Knowing how we are defined by our surroundings and our relationships, knowing that the truth is not always the one we have been taught or choose to hold on to, those are the first steps to being able to repair that house and to make the reality of our country after the vision which, in this century at least, so many of us claim we share.

These are my personal recommendations, non-fiction edition. (Next time I may address fiction and film.)

Nota bene: these are life-altering books. You will be challenged, especially if you are white. You will cry. You will come out different on the other side.

If I could name only two, I would start with these two masterpieces by Isabel Wilkerson. Absolutely magnificent. Neither are tremendously long, but they do require a commitment; both can be easily read within the month. The first tells the story of the Great Migration using a narrative non-fiction convention tracing the lives of three real people, one who migrated from Mississippi to Chicago in the 1930s, another from Florida to New York in the 1940s, and a third from Louisiana to Los Angeles in the 1950s. Absolutely riveting and illuminating, and one of the best books of any kind I have ever read. The second is an examination of America today, recent history through the pandemic, and why it became that way, calling out parallels to the Indian caste system and America’s contribution to the Nazis, who modeled the Jim Crow era to advance their own drive towards white supremacy.

• Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (2010)
• Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of our Discontents (2020)
  

  Isabel Wilkerson

  Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson is the author of the New York Times’ bestseller The Warmth of Other Suns. Her new book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, is available for pre-order now and will be published Aug 4, 2020.

These next are much shorter reads, and in their condensation, very intense personal accounts of what it is like to be a person of color within our lifetimes. Ta-Nehisi Coates writes his story as a letter to his teenage son. I was so moved by this book that I gave a copy to my own son, who will soon be a first-time father, as a reminder to him that fathers of one are fathers to all, and that we all have accountability and responsibility to a larger good. James Baldwin wrote several autobiographical books, none more powerful than The Fire Next Time, which is a great companion piece to Between the World and Me. Each can be read over a couple of nights, Baldwin in one sitting.

• Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (2015)
• James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963)
  

Between the World and Me | Ta-Nehisi Coates

In Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis.

I read Taylor Branch‘s series America in the King Years over ten years ago, before the most recent wave of racial tension. These histories are what most white Americans think of when they think of Black History: the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. And this is an excellent and thorough accounting over thousands of pages. Well worth the time. The limitation is that it is written by a white man, and once you read Isabel Wilkerson’s books, you can easily see that this kind of reporting is only part of the story, and not necessarily the main part. Necessary and valuable but don’t stop here.

• Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963 (1988)
• Taylor Branch, Pillars of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-1965 (1998)
• Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-1968 (2006)

Taylor Branch | Taylor Branch | American author and historian | The King Years | The King Era Trilogy | The Clinton Tapes | The Cartel

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Taylor Branch presents The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President

What’s on my list for this February? I’m continuing to make peace with Toni Morrison after that unfortunate personal incident 40+ years ago (will write a separate post about that soon). Have been long overdue on Michelle Alexander‘s book, and have too wide of a knowledge gap on Malcolm X and his influence. 

• Toni Morrison, The Origin of Others (2017) 
• Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010; new edition 2020)
• Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)
• Les Payne, The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X (2020)

The New Jim Crow - Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness Michelle Alexander

“One of the most influential books of the last 20 years.”
—Chronicle of Higher Education

Also, already purchased, and on the reading stack for later in the year:

• W.E.B. Dubois, Black Reconstruction (1935)
• Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961)
• Chancellor Williams, Destruction of Black Civilization: Great Issues of a Race from 4500 B.C. to 2000 A.D. (1992)
• Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (2016)
  
  Obviously this list of recommendations is not complete, and there are so many others to add — certainly much more Toni Morrison and James Baldwin, Angela Davis’ Women Race & Class, Joshua Bloom’s Black Against Empire, many others. I can say with some confidence that none of the books I mentioned here should be left off. Good reading, and please let me know what you think.

 Supporting a discussion elsewhere on social media, here are my top 100 films of all time, highly subjective of course, arranged alphabetically.  Cut it at 95 to leave some room for films I’ve probably forgotten about or which are on a near-term watchlist that have a chance to make it. Admittedly there’s a fair amount of junk and pop culture on here as I’m a product of my time, and I wouldn’t change the channel on any one of these. Sorry, no Citizen Kane. Documentaries would be a separate list.

• • • After Hours
    • Alien
    • All the Presidents Men
    • Animal House
    • Annie Hall
    • Amarcord
    • Amadeus
    • Apocalypse Now
    • Armageddon
    • Badlands
    • Bacurau
    • Belle de Jour
    • The Bicycle Thief
    • Blow Up
    • Body Heat
    • Breakfast at Tiffany’s
    • Breathless
    • Boondock Saints
    • Brokeback Mountain
    • Casablanca
    • Claire’s Knee
    • Cleo from 5 to 7
    • Close-up
    • Coco
    • La Collectionneuse
    • Contempt
    • The Dark Knight
    • Day for Night
    • Day of the Jackal
    • Dead Poets Society
    • The Deer Hunter
    • Deliverance
    • The Departed
    • Do the Right Thing
    • Die Hard
    • Dr. Strangelove
    • Dog Day Afternoon
    • Easy Rider
    • Fargo
    • Field of Dreams
    • Forrest Gump
    • Gladiator
    • The Godfather (Part 1)
    • The Godfather (Part 2)
    • Goodfellas
    • The Graduate
    • The Great Escape
    • Hiroshima Mon Amour
    • House of Games
    • In the Heat of the Night
    • Lion King
    • Local Hero
    • Jaws
    • Jules and Jim
    • Jurassic Park
    • Kill Bill 1 & 2
    • Last Year at Marienbad
    • A Man for All Seasons
    • A Married Woman
    • The Matrix
    • Mean Streets
    • Memento
    • Moneyball
    • Mulholland Drive
    • No Country for Old Men
    • Ocean’s 11
    • One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
    • Pirates of the Caribbean
    • Platoon
    • Pretty Woman
    • The Professional
    • Psycho
    • Pulp Fiction
    • Raging Bull
    • Raiders of the Lost Ark
    • Ran
    • Renoir
    • The Right Stuff
    • Rio Bravo
    • Rome: Open City
    • Scarface (1983)
    • Se7en
    • Shakespeare in Love
    • Silence of the Lambs
    • Swept Away
    • Taxi Driver
    • The Taking of Pelham 123 (original)
    • Toy Story
    • True Romance
    • Variety
    • Viridiana
    • Vivre sa vie
    • Without Limits
    • Working Girl
    • Z

An absolute masterpiece. Don’t forget to visit “The Grift Shop.”

Donald J. Trump Presidential Library

Presidential Library for the 45th President of the United States

[from C-SPAN]

User Clip: Toni Morrison - Racism and Fascism

Toni Morrison - Racism and Fascism

The book is currently widely available in paperback:

The Source of Self-Regard by Toni Morrison: 9780525562795 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

Here is Toni Morrison in her own words: a rich gathering of her most important essays and speeches, spanning four decades. These pages give us her searing prayer for the dead of 9/11, her Nobel...

Important essay. Our problems are huge and cannot be fixed with one vote.

“Viewing the solution to these problems as simply electing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris both underestimates the depth of the problems and trivializes the remedies necessary to undo the damage.”

[from The New Yorker]

Voting Trump Out Is Not Enough

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes on Joe Biden’s election victory over Donald Trump, Philadelphia activism, and tensions within the Democratic Party over how to address structural racism, economic inequality, and suffering caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

[from YaleEnvironment360]

Learning How to Talk: What Climate Activists Must Do in the Biden Era

A broad coalition brought Joe Biden to victory. If activists want real progress on climate in a Biden administration, environmentalist Bill McKibben writes, they need to learn how to press their case aggressively without alienating those they must work with to get things done.

“He also gave our unique brand of ugliness — rooted in racism, exceptionalism, recklessness, arrogance and a tendency to bully our way to power — a name. Trumpism is now rooted in the lexicon, and although white supremacy may be the better, more clinical term for what ails America, Trumpism is a useful, colloquial alternative. It encompasses an even wider category of people that includes not just avowed racists who have publicly supported the president but also those who downplay the problem, or align with it for personal gain, or are simply unwilling to acknowledge its history and persistence.”

Perspective | Trumpism is a lifestyle disease, chronic in America

Driving through the Virginia countryside and reflecting upon the ugly truths Trump made us face.

He’s only the first. Two words: Tom Cotton.

[from Foreign Affairs]

Trump Won’t Be the Last American Populist

The conditions that produced Donald Trump need to be understood to be addressed.