The Palimpsest

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The Dark Side of the Houseplant Boom

American culture is becoming more and more preoccupied with nature. What if all the celebrations of the wild world were actually manifestations of grief?

“We, when it comes to politics or culture or almost any other human event, is rarely the right term to use; in this case, though, it is the only one that works. The blame is unevenly distributed—and the people least responsible for contributing to climate change often bear the worst of its consequences—but the effects are, ultimately, communal. The Anthropocene, the proposed geological epoch that has been brought about by humans, is a fact of physiography that was popularized by a chemist and that has immediate impacts on biology. It is also, however, a fact of culture. The meals we eat, the clothes we wear, the way we move around the world—these are matters, now, of life and death. Rich introduces a high-school student who, on an outing to the California coast, discovered that the sea stars she loves—Crayola-colored creatures that were plentiful in the same area just a year earlier—have disappeared. “It was like, wow,” she tells him. “Did I do something to cause this?”

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The uneasy intimacy of work in a pandemic year

How capitalism and the pandemic destroyed our work-life balance.

"Odell’s logic suggests that to prevent work from invading the time in which we are not paid to do it, we must be intentional about what we do in our leisure time. So instead of scrolling listlessly through Facebook and Twitter and Instagram in search of frictionless connection with other people, we can join mutual aid groups and form genuine bonds with our actual neighbors, in person. Instead of passively accepting whatever entertainment our screens offer us while we plug away at off-hours work, we can become interested in the natural landscape all around us, in the weeds that sprout up from the cracks of our sidewalks and the birds that nest on our telephone wires."

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[whitepeopletwitter]

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Bernie 4Eva

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Vinyl in Lockdown

How My Record Player Helped Me Feel the Music | WIRED

If streaming can’t cure your stay-at-home blues, a spinning platter just might do the trick.

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They're the same party

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Manufacturing Consent and Chomsky

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Tame Impala and Slow Rush

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Hitchens Being Hitchens

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Essential Workers...

Rich people will cut the line for the coronavirus vaccine

When Rudy Giuliani tested positive for the coronavirus, he didn't want to go to the...

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Congress Sux

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Woke Road and Track

Cheap Fun Cars Are Dying Because Young People Can't Afford Them

Why are attainable enthusiast cars disappearing? Because young working people can no longer afford to buy them.

"The solution is simple, yet inordinately difficult. If we want to welcome more young enthusiasts into the scene, we need wages to rise. The money is there; the problem is how it’s being distributed. If America returned to an income distribution like we had from the 1940s to the 1970s, the median worker would earn an additional $40,000 every year. That money would go a long way to paying down student debts (or medical debts, or credit card debts), securing mortgages, and maybe, just maybe, purchasing a sweet two-door to park in the garage.

It’s no coincidence that the era when American workers had their greatest buying power—1945 to 1974—launched some of the most influential, innovative, and exciting cars in the history of the automobile."

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New Boss, Same Boss

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/12/18/what-shall-we-call-it/

"Every two years, members of the two parties compete for the approbation of the voting public who, regardless of their choice, give unwitting political legitimacy to the brute force of the market. This process, which Thomas Carlyle, the nineteenth century historian and philosopher, called the cash nexus, remains at the heart of American democracy – in which a vote for either party ensures the continuation of their danse macabre. It is this legacy to which Biden, as the country’s next president, is now heir – rightfully so, it may be argued since he has been partially responsible for the last fifty years of its most reactionary manifestations"