Our Weekly Discontents: August 10th, 2020
Hi, everybody! Welcome to the third installment of Our Weekly Discontents, the roundup in which each of us Discontented shares what we’ve written and worked on over the past week. I’m Patrick Wyman, creator of Perspectives: Past, Present, and Future, and I’ll be your guide for this installment.
Digital media isn’t in great shape. That’s a sentence you could’ve written at pretty much any point in the past five years, to be honest, but somehow, it’s getting more salient every day. Audiences are definitely interested in quality news, analysis, essays, and the like, there’s no question about that. The problem is figuring out how to get that content to readers, listeners, and viewers without a business model oriented toward paying off rapacious venture capitalists, clickbait harvesters, or straight-up herbs.
That’s why I’m stoked about Discontents: alone, each of us might find a way to make it work, providing the kind of stuff we know folks want; but together, we make it dramatically more likely that we can make a living doing what we love without hitching ourselves to some soon-to-be-sinking outlet owned by a consortium of Roman Roy wannabes. Right now, Discontents is a sampler, with a nice menu on offer. Check it out, try some things. If you like it, tell your friends. If this works, we can do a heck of a lot more down the road.
Foreign Exchanges
Derek Davison
I don’t think there’s any question that the biggest story I covered this week was the disastrous explosion at Beirut’s seaport. On Tuesday, a small explosion and fire whose cause has yet to be determined triggered a massive second explosion when it ignited a very large (some 2750 tonnes) of ammonium nitrate that had been languishing in storage at the port since 2014. The blast destroyed the port and leveled a large chunk of the city, killing over 150 people at last count and injuring thousands. Estimates to repair the damage have ranged as high as $15 billion. An investigation is underway, focused primarily on the negligence that left such a large supply of such a hazardous substance sitting in a warehouse for so long. At this point there’s no evidence that either the initial explosion/fire or the second explosion were intentional.
For Lebanon, a country whose economy was already crashing and whose political elite has been corrupt and dysfunctional for virtually its entire existence, this incident feels like a tipping point. Protesters who turned out by the thousands last fall to demand reform, only to see their movement stifled by the pandemic, are back out in force on the streets of Beirut in the wake of the explosion and are being met with a violent police and military response. It seems likely something new is about to emerge in Lebanon, but what form it will take has yet to be determined.
Welcome to Hell World
Luke O’Neil
This week in Hell World I looked at some of the ways the Trump administration — with a little help from the centrist cable news media — is attempting to criminalize and define upwards the potential threat of leftist protest into “terrorism” around the country.
A second edition which was largely for paid-subscribers only (find an abridged version here for free) concerned people essential to the operation of society that many of us often take for granted: sanitation and postal workers.
In it a postal carrier in California writes in about the dire situation facing the agency. “The problem is, between Covid-19 and the election in front of us, USPS might be as relevant as it’ll ever be right now, and we’re reaching the point where we can’t afford to ignore the corruption and sabotage plaguing the agency.”
In a second piece contributor Brittanie Shey reports on the New Orleans sanitation worker strike. “Like the Memphis Sanitation Strike was, the New Orleans strike is closely intertwined with other social issues — the Black Lives Matter Movement; a looming eviction crisis in New Orleans, a city overrun with short-term vacation rentals; the prison-industrial complex in a state with one of the highest incarceration rates in the world; plus discontent with the way politicians have handled one of the most unprecedented moments of our time, a global pandemic.”
Thanks for reading.
Air Gordon pt. 2
Jeremy Gordon
No newsletter this week, unfortunately — I’m currently navigating an apartment move, which under the circumstances is as stressful as you can imagine. In the meantime, I’d like to recommend a recipe I’ve made twice in the last two weeks: this salmon, caramelized mushroom, and lentil dish that can feed two to four people, and is relatively cost effective/healthy. Some notes: You can use black or green lentils, and probably just a half-cup if you’re cooking for two; the mushrooms and onions can caramelize a little longer than recommended; you should always cut the fish before cooking it so you don’t end up with an uncooked middle. Or, if you really want to go cost effective/have a food processor, there’s also this pea pappardelle dish that comes together so fast and deliciously it feels unfair. Cooking is probably the only quarantine activity that improves my mood 100% of the time, so I bequeath my modest discoveries to you.
Wars of Future Past
Kelsey Atherton
When the internet sees a mushroom cloud, it immediately rushes to the worst possible takes. Over at Forbes dot com, I wrote a little about how the cultural touchstone for the Beirut disaster should be Halifax, the 1917 explosion of an ammunition ship that stands as the largest human-caused explosion prior to the atomic bomb. If you’d like to listen to me talk about on Canadian Radio, you can skip ahead to 22:14 on the August 5th episode of the John Oakley Show and here me place it in context. Expect to read some more in-depth discussion of this disaster, and the whole concept of explosive neglect, at Wars of Future Past later this week.
While most of my weekly beat trends dystopic, I jumped on the latest Loopcast to talk, alongside J.M. Berger, about the ways in which dystopia in fiction informs politics and policy. Imagining bad futures is, Maze Runners aside, a fundamentally political project, and I think as a reporter it's important to be aware of what kinds of actions the authors of activist dystopian visions want people to pursue to prevent those futures.
Cruel and Usual
Shane Ferro
This week I wrote about Jamison v. McClendon, the Mississippi court decision that came out earlier this week in which Judge Carlton Reeves found the officer involved was entitled to qualified immunity—but also excoriated the law as it stands and asked the Supreme Court to take on the case and overrule him. I focused on a lesser remarked on piece of the opinion, which found that it was not actually voluntary “consent” when a police officer on the side of a dark highway asked a Black man five times if he could search his car, was told no four times, and then finally got a yes. The judge writes very powerfully about the interaction, considering not just the facts in a vacuum, but the entirety of what it might feel like to be Mr. Jamison on that night, and holds that, no, in fact, consent was not given and the search was not constitutional.
A Lonely Impulse of Delight
Connor Wroe Southard
I got literary last week, in a post partly about Claire Keegan’s Foster—one of the great English-language novellas of this century. The piece is also about Duns Scotus, James Wood, the concept of “thisness,” and one of the more specific things we might mean when we use the vague term “well written.” This coming week’s newsletter will likely be about Train to Busan and how to say something about class in a narrative. Now is a great time to sign up, because this week will also be the official beginning of the process of asking my subscribers what they want from premium content.
BORDER/LINES
Gaby Del Valle and Felipe De La Hoz
Two people died in ICE custody last week, making this the deadliest fiscal year for ICE detainees since 2006. Last week, we took a look at the current state of ICE detention, where social distancing is nearly impossible and where, according to emails recently unearthed as part of an ongoing class-action lawsuit, officials at one facility have opted against widespread testing because it’d be too difficult to quarantine detainees if they tested positive.
We explored some of the most common justifications ICE has made for its reliance on detention in the midst of a pandemic. ICE has told reporters that it doesn’t have the resources to test every detainee, that social distancing and quarantining are both possible in detention facilities, that detainees are provided with adequate protective equipment, and that the law requires it to detain many immigrants because of their criminal histories. None of this is entirely true.
In a separate post for premium subscribers, we explained the Department of Homeland Security’s legal justification for sending Border Patrol and ICE officers to patrol protests in Portland and other cities. There are a few statutes that give DHS the ability to dispatch officers to protect federal buildings. But none of them were designed to give federal agents the ability to effectively serve as the president’s personal police force.
Discourse Blog
Hello, Jack (Crosbie) from Discourse Blog again. We had a pretty big week at the blog. Paul wrote about the extremely exciting wave of primary wins this week, I wrote an essay on what happens if Joe Biden actually wins the presidency, which Katherine followed up with a subscribers-only essay on how surreal it is to have two candidates who cannot help but say dumb shit at every opportunity. Also for subscribers, Sam interviewed two tenant’s rights organizers in Chicago about the coming eviction crisis. And in office hours, we debated the Song of the Summer. I still maintain it’s the weird Tiktok cereal commercial.
Perspectives: Past, Present, and Future
Patrick Wyman
Hi all, Patrick again. This week, I wrote about the first people to migrate to the Americas. When, exactly, did they arrive? Who were they? Where did they come from? And what were their lives like? I explore all of that and more, including their drowned homeland of Beringia, a world lost thousands of years ago. If you’re looking for something oriented a little more toward the present, check out this essay I wrote back in June about how police use violence to enforce the social order. This coming week, I’ll have a new essay on current events and why history is a helpful tool for us in understanding our world.
The Insurgents
Jordan Uhl & Rob Rousseau
This week on the show we’re joined by media & technology reporter Justin Hendrix to talk about deepfakes, online disinformation, the Postal Service, and the variety of different ways that the US election in November is going to be a world-historic disaster. Justin also tries, unsuccessfully, to convince us to be positive about the future.
Also: Rob lambasts Donald Trump for incompetently screwing up what could have been a great coup in Venezuela and pitches the Democratic Party on a way to disrupt elections in resource-rich foreign countries in an even more effective and efficient way.
Be The Spark
Kim Kelly
I confess that I did not do a newsletter this week; a few of my freelance deadlines came home to roost, as it were (including my columns for Teen Vogue and the Baffler), and to be honest, my brain has been a little meltier than usual. You see, this Wednesday, August 12th, will mark the third anniversary of what most people call Charlottesville, but what those of us who were there that awful day—or who still live in the current, existing, living Charlottesville, VA—refer to as Unite the Right, or more simply, A12. The name doesn’t matter so much as keeping the memory of it alive; so much has happened since then, and yet, Heather Heyer is still dead, and so many others are still hurting.
On Wednesday, I’ll be picking up a tradition I inadvertently set on August 13, 2017, when I got home from Virginia and immediately sat down to write about what had happened. Every year, on August 12, I reread what I wrote then, and spend the rest of the day dancing with my demons. Last year, I wrote a very long essay on my Patreon about PTSD and what it is like to carry the memory of that kind of terror in your bones. I’ll write another one this week.
As Chairman Fred Hampton once said, “You can kill the revolutionary but, you can't kill the revolution.” I am still here, and so are you, and for that, at least, we can be thankful. Onward, my friends.