We recently visited family in Chicago. Flying out, we had a clear view of the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in the Mohave Desert.

It’s made up of the three glowing pillars out in the desert. They’re very much relics from a lost civilization. Hardly a decade old, the three towers and the 347,000 mirrors that make their water boil will close next year. They were built in a very different economic moment, when solar panels were exponentially more expensive than they are today.

Back to music: why can’t the various streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple Music, etc.) show liner notes? I’ve written in the past about how the streamers push you away from deep connection with the music. But after getting a record player a year ago and returning to vinyl, a further loss has come into focus for me: many (most?) albums throughout history have included not just lyrics and personnel credits but also essays, letters, art, photos, and other notes to the listener. These are such cool ways for artists to add extra layers beyond the recordings that make up the album. But the digital age, and now the age of streaming, have meant, poof, all of that is just gone. WTF?

(I’m currently on a deep dive into the music and world of Alice Coltrane; both she and John Coltrane made extensive, creative use of liner notes; these are strangely hard to access.)

I enjoyed Benn Jordan’s latest video, about creating “adversarial” music designed to trip up AI training models and degrade their outputs. He’s developed a technique of adding inaudible-to-human-ears sounds that confuse the algorithms. If our government won’t protect artists, maybe artists need to get aggressive in trying to outwit these AI capitalists who think it’s okay to steal our work as “training data” without permission or compensation.

(I love that this YouTube channel, which I started watching mostly for the synth reviews, has become a locus of anti-Spotify agitation and now anti-AI creativity.)

For my work podcast, I interviewed the psychologist Stephen Southern about expressive writing—the idea that writing about your own life can have therapeutic benefits. I’m fascinated by this idea, and I had a million questions, which Stephen gamely answered. I think it’s one of the Seed Field Podcast’s best episodes yet. (I just checked—it’s our 74th.) Plus, you might be interested to know that I introduced the topic by sharing my own story of experiencing and evacuating from the LA fires.

We went to the Alice Coltrane exhibit at the Hammer Museum, and it was both wonderful and frustrating. I may have more to say about the exhibition as a whole—I ended up bringing home not just the catalog but also a reissue of her spiritual memoir and a biography. For now, though, I just want to complain about one thing: why do so many museum shows put print materials (like these rad contact sheets) behind glass cases where if you bend to examine them you cast multiple, deep shadows?

Exhibit designers should be thinking about lighting and shadows and reflections and glare as some of their most key concerns! (I love complaining about professions I know very little about…)

Friend-of-Lightplay Alexander Matthews has a new novel coming out, The President, which sounds wonderful, at least as Alex writes about it in his latest newsletter. Alas it’s only available in South Africa for the time being—but if you’re in South Africa, I think you should pick up a copy! Especially because it comes with this dope risoprint:

Yesterday there was a rally in Downtown LA that drew 36,000 people. It was thrown by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and had musical guests including Neil Young, Joan Baez, and Maggie Rogers. We were planning to go, too—but woke up exhausted and with a chore list a mile long. So instead we watched the livestream on our TV. It felt really good to hear politicians and union leaders and others with some significant voice say it like it is: we’re in a world of hurt. And: a lot of the mess we’re in is because the Democratic Party has, as a rule, been too captured by corporate money to make a strong case against oligarchy, let alone to fight tooth and nail for policies that really help working people.

After virtually attending the rally, a few little thoughts:

• The musical guests were great. Especially Neil Young, who was on his A-game, playing guitar and singing and generally being the weirdest person to cross the stage. Neil Young multiple times led the crowd in chants of “Take America Back.” As counter-MAGA slogans go, it’s pretty good!
• There were many union leaders up on stage—and it’s kind of wild to see union leaders, real workers who have been elected by their fellow union workers to lead them for a while, on your TV. Unlike geriatric members of congress and airbrushed entertainment industry people, these are real Americans, by which I mean they seem like the people I went to high school with. It’s great to see Bernie share his stage with them.
• AOC has real star power. My partner said it was like seeing Obama in 2007, 2008. She just has it—a clear voice and a striking charisma. No wonder they loathe her in MAGAland.

And one big takeaway: it was exciting to watch the rally, even on TV. It felt pressing and a little unscripted. (At one point, the president of a nurse’s union left the stage, along with the eight other nurses on stage with her, to act as first responders to someone in the crowd who was having a medical emergency. When they came back to stage, five minutes later, it was to grand cheering.) More than anything, it reminded me of the Trump rallies my proudly Democratic stepdad couldn’t stop watching, back in 2015. There is something powerful about live political speech in front of a great, big audience, and it means something when big crowds turn out for political events. Back in 2015 it was a harbinger of MAGA’s decade to come. Today, though, there’s something brewing on the left.

As the NBA season winds towards the playoffs, my team, the Golden State Warriors, is currently looking like, as they say, “a problem.” (Friday night they overcame the best player in the world, Nikola Jokic; it was lovely.) This is good news, because a few months ago they looked dead in the water, and for a month or so I even gave up on watching them.

Their season turned when they traded for the wily small forward Jimmy Butler, and I want to just quickly give my appreciation to Butler here by calling back to the time a few season back when he showed up to NBA Media Day—when players take the pictures that will be used in TV graphics all season long—in full goth. Can you believe this guy plays for our team? It’s just awesome.

The latest edition of Sarah McColl’s Lost Art is an audio essay about folk singer Connie Converse. It explores the life, stifled ambitions, and legacy of this singer from the ’50s who never broke through and eventually disappeared into the thin blue air. (The leading theory is that she drove her car into a lake.) Throughout the essay, Sarah interweaves Converse’s story with her own life. It’s a beautiful piece of writing—and even more beautiful read aloud in Sarah’s voice, with graceful editing and snippets of song.

In the intro, Sarah reveals that this is the essay that started the whole Lost Art project—Lost Art is a longrunning newsletter project that explores the “creative lives & works of (mostly) dead women.” By releasing an audio edition of the essay, Sarah revives and improves on the original.

We’re big fans of this project in my household, and I love that Sarah’s now pivoting to audio essays. It’s a delightful way to consume a lyric essay about a singer-songwriter. If you have half an hour to spare, there are a million worse ways to spend it.

Yesterday there were “Hands Off!” protests all across the country. We needed them, and we need more like them. We need to start building momentum and assert our right to protest. As they say, use it or lose it.

The project of taking action against fascists has me thinking about the Battle of Britain, and the country-spanning magical (or magickal) resistance effort organized in the U.K. by Dion Fortune. This essay by Sable Aradia about the “Magical Battle of Britain” speaks so clearly to our present moment and its perils that I have to say I was shocked to find it was first posted in 2015.

One of my favorite insights is that Fortune “invoked the ancient spirits pledged to Britain’s protection, including King Arthur, Merlin, St. Michael and St. George.” And Aradia considers whether American magic-workers, resisting fascism on our own shores, might invoke this land’s protector deities:

Perhaps we can ask Paul Bunyan or John Henry to fight for the working class. Perhaps we can ask Lady Liberty to stand fast against those who would take our liberty from us; perhaps we can ask Mother Canada to cry out against the suffering of Her children.

I think this could be not just a strong piece of magic but also a successful protest tactic: to reclaim these American archetypal spirits and tie them to positive values of freedom, community, and justice. The “Tea Party” fifteen years ago invoked just one archetypal figure, the tri-corner-hat-wearing colonist, and they have had an impact that reverberates to this day. (Of course propped up by billionaire cash infusions.) Here’s my expanded list of figures to dress up as, put on protest signs, and invoke in your workings:

• Lady Liberty
• Paul Bunyan
• John Henry
• Rosie the Riveter
• Johnny Appleseed
• John Brown
• The Cowboy

To be effective, they shouldn’t be historical personages, but instead archetypes. (John Brown sneaks in because his one public act led directly to martyrdom.) As a white person I don’t think it’s my place to nominate Coyote or Guanyin or the Chupacabra, but I could see them fitting in, too. The big point here is: America at its best used to stand for something, even if it never lived up to it. We shouldn’t give up on that dream.

And: can’t you just see a photograph of ICE agents arresting Lady Liberty splashed across every newspaper and social media feed in the land?

One last dispatch from our dystopian present: MKBHD has a new video with the clickbait title, “The Truth about Drone Deliveries!” I found it worth watching, if only because it’s the first time I’ve seen a vision of aerial drones bringing you stuff where the service seems potentially useful rather than exclusively dangerous and scary. I still find these deeply upsetting, but I can see how under Silicon Valley logic they might also be inevitable.

The big miss in the video is that the only possible downside Marques sees fit to mention is light pollution. Ummm… 1984 would like to have a word. Every police force in the world is going to want their own little fleet of these bad boys! Talk about a parole officer’s dream. We’re like five years away from a droid reading you your Miranda rights. (Already when we drive to our pediatrician’s we always pass a programmable road sign that flashes between two messages: “WELCOME TO BEVERLY HILLS” and “POLICE DRONE IN USE”.)

The latest scandal from the “losers with aircraft carriers” currently running our federal government is that they made a big group chat to share war plans, on a consumer chat app, and they accidentally added a journalist. Classic buffoonery from a group of people for whom hypocrisy is a fun way to show dominance. But for me, the most ghoulish detail from the text messages themselves is a casual reference to the open secret that the U.S. military now routinely carries out single-target assassinations even when civilian bystanders are guaranteed to die en masse. Here’s the passage that got me:

[National Security Advisor] MICHAEL WALTZ

The first target – their top missile guy – we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed.

[Vice President] JD VANCE Excellent

[CIA Director] JOHN RATCLIFFE

A good start

MICHAEL WALTZ

👊🇺🇸🔥

Nice emojis, bro. I hope no one you love ever makes the mistake of having a military leader’s girlfriend for a neighbor.

I can’t say I recommend the breathless AI girlfriend thinkpiece in this week’s New Yorker. It reminds me of the Sam Altman move of waving your hands about how scary AI is and how it’s going to change everything, all just so we give him our attention and investment dollars. Here the message seems to be: get afraid that your kid will soon be dating their telephone’s operating system. (?!) This makes a good deal more sense when you google the article’s author (Jaron Lanier) and realize that for the last 19 years he’s been working at OpenAI’s main partner, Microsoft. It’s telling that he’s chosen to mix his labor with the most charmless of the evil five; of course he indulges the thrill of worrying about AI. (Kate Folk dealt with this whole train of thought more succinctly and with infinitely more humor and insight in her short stories “Out There” and “Sur”.) All that said, I did crack a smile with this sentence:

A.I. conferences and gatherings often include a person or two who loudly announces that she is in a relationship with an A.I. or desires to be in one.

My brother in Christ, no matter what the New Yorker’s style guide says, the indefinite pronoun you are looking for is they.

Check out the instructions for “How to Build an Electrically Heated Table” over at Low-Tech Magazine. Doesn’t a heated table in a chilly room just sound cozy as can be?

(Also: what a cool website! I love how all the images are dithered—ostensibly to keep filesizes minimal (for their solar powered website) but also (I just know) because they look cool and vibey, the digital equivalent of a risograph print)

I had two reminders in my Notes app for topics to write about: “Our mail carrier giving Orlando and us oranges” and “Lisa’s newsletter.” But then I read the latest installment of Not Know How and saw that Lisa had herself written a beautiful meditation on walking around our neighborhood, worrying about the state of the world, and, would you know it, receiving unexpected gift oranges:

On the last block before our building, we met our mail carrier, sitting in her parked truck. She handed my son three oranges, one for each of us, the second time she has given us this gift.

You should read the full essay. Plus, after the essay there’s an interview with noted graveyard writer Jessica Ferri. And a plug for You Know What’s Good, which she described as a “delicious, ASMR-adjacent vignette series.” (!!!) I may be biased, but I find Not Knowing How to always be full of beautiful insights and literary genius.

Speaking of newspapers, I finally canceled my Washington Post subscription. After many last straws, it was this bit from Jeff Bezos:

There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader’s doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views. Today, the internet does that job.

Get bent, loser! God I hate billionaires. Get rid of em! Let em just be $999 millionaires! There are worse fates!

In the latest n+1, the opening editorial (about Frederic Jameson and ways of seeing the present and the future) coins a new term:

…in one of the stealth editorials it calls ‘News Analysis,’ the Times proclaimed the end of the ‘Post-World War II Era of US Leadership’…

Stealth editorial! I’m immediately stealing that.

I also loved this towards the end of the piece:

No—real futurelessness is the terrain of the Democrats, a party stuck in a cycle of impotence that, come to think of it, resembles nothing so much as the contemporary English department: visionless, gerontocratic, hobbled by a structural incapacity to meet or even recognize its many sectoral crises.

n+1 is always a cover-to-cover read for me.