Protest update: we made it out to a No Kings Day protest on Saturday, and it was downright fun. I don’t know if you’ve heard about the iconic Portland frog who backed down a dozen heavily armed ICE officers, boldly, lewdly, a few weeks back.

This frog has inspired dozens or hundreds of copycats. At our protest there was no frog, but there was a blow-up dragon and a blow-up dinosaur (“DINOSAURS AGAINST THE ICE AGE”). Still, this is exactly what a protest movement needs: participatory fun that takes the piss out of the would-be secret police. The kid loved the costumes and was talking about them for hours afterward.

Back in the spring I suggested that we should be “Invoking Mythical Americana to Fight Fascism.” In some ways, these goofy inflatable outfits are even better than what I imagined.

If you’re worried about this regime but haven’t been going to any of the No Kings Day protests, I strongly encourage you try to make the next one. It’s motivating and makes you feel less alone. Plus, as protests go they’re extremely fun and nonviolent. For a recap, I especially loved this report from Sarah Jeong on Saturday’s protests in Portland. Here’s the luminous closing passage:

“ICE is the only fucking terrorism in Portland,” a protester told the feds over a loudspeaker, mocking them for their militarized kit. “Look around. Your enemy is a barista named River.”

While the feds postured from the top of the building, state troopers passed unimpeded through the crowd on bicycles. Local police liaison officers strolled back and forth. Signs and chants still derided the police but no one seemed to be particularly bothered by the actual police. All eyes were on ICE, instead.

“Jump!” the crowd chanted at the feds on the roof. “Jump!”

As the feds turned a blindingly bright spotlight towards them, middle fingers sprouted across the crowd. When I glanced behind me, I could see a sea of upturned faces in the rain, eyes shining in the light.

A zine came in the mail this week from the writer Sarah McColl: the annual print zine for paid subscribers to her newsletter Lost Art.

It’s about quilts!

How nice it is to hold writing like this—a spiraling, quilted essay, full of synchronicity and personality—in your hand. It makes me want to make—and distribute!—a zine of my own. (Watch this space!)

As inveterate cult-doc heads, we watched the latest cult-doc, Thirst Trap: The Fame. The Fantasy. The Fallout, which turns out not to be about a proper cult but is instead about how this young man named William White started making TikToks where he would make sexy faces at the camera, and he quickly developed a rabid following of middle-aged women who bullied him with money into being a full-time livestreamer / sex worker, and things just went downhill from there. It’s a pretty sad story. It’s also, I’d say, a cautionary tale about just how horribly wrong Kevin Kelly’s “1,000 True Fans” idea can go.

Beautiful cover story for the latest issue of The Believer (which we recently subscribed to): Mona Kareem’s “The Labyrinth.” Here’s the subtitle: “One Bidoon father’s all-consuming and occasionally illegal efforts to assemble the perfect personal library.” It’s a moving portrait of the author’s father, a stateless person and profound bibliophile, making a life full of books in Kuwait from the ’70s to the present. I especially loved this passage:

Whenever we ran into someone rich at a bookstore or a book fair—meaning someone who could afford to buy books without checking the price tag or haggling with the bookseller—my father would begin to grumble. He’d express pity for the books bought by that rich customer, for they’d not be read, and chances were they’d not get to see new places and new owners, because rich people would never have to sell their books to make the rent. My father would direct my attention to a rich customer and say: ‘Look at this, this is tragic, they don’t deserve this book. Who’s going to read that book now? Certainly not this man. Tragic!’

Speaking of big vats of yellow liquid, I adore this Youtube series called “Big Batches,” and this one might be my favorite: “How 150,000 People Are Fed For Onam In Kerala, India” If you asked five-year-old me how a kitchen could feed thousands and thousands of people, I would definitely have imagined the immense brass pots and mountains of cut-up vegetables from this Keralese kitchen. Maybe I wouldn’t have imagined that they would be tended by buff, shirtless guys. But how great to see these men cooking in socialist Kerala—like a vision of a different future. Plus, who doesn’t love seeing papadam instantly puff up.

Speaking of ravenous forces in the neighborhood that would, if left unchecked, swallow each and every one of us up and keep on being hungry, how about the sublime stink spirit from Spirited Away (2001). As I recall, that avatar of a polluted river was not defeated by giving it one more thing to eat, and then one more, and then another. Some dangers one must address at their root.

There are a lot of us who wish we could just give something to the supremacists and it would be enough to satisfy them, and then we could go back to whatever it is we liked doing back in more peaceful times. A prominent example of this worldview is the podcaster and writer Ezra Klein. He’s an incredibly influential voice—several close family and friends are on a first-name basis with “Ezra.” Unfortunately, when push comes to shove, this New York Times columnist is willing to trade away, you know, the rights of trans people to exist or women’s bodily autonomy, in the hopes that it might mean electoral gains for democrats and a return to a fantasized state of harmony. This is “enlightened centrism.”

If you’re having some doubts after the last heel turn from the wonk himself—a column titled “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way”—the best piece of writing I’ve seen on it is A. R. Moxon’s “Eventually You’re Going to Have to Stand for Something.” Moxon’s essay focuses on this telling exchange from Klein’s follow-up conversation with Ta-Nahesi Coates:

Coates: Would you define for me how you see what your role is?

Klein: I don’t know what my role is anymore. I’ll be totally honest with you, man. I feel very conflicted about that question. The role I want to have is a person curiously exploring his political and intellectual interests in political peacetime. And the role I somehow have is sometimes that. But I’m a political opinion writer and podcaster and so on, and I’m in the business of political persuasion.

Political peacetime sounds great, man. But appeasement ain’t getting us there.

Roxane Gay has a great essay about how “civility—this idea that there is a perfect, polite way to communicate about sociopolitical differences—is a fantasy.” I especially love this part:

They will tolerate a protest but only if you congregate in an orderly fashion, for culturally sanctioned causes, and if you don’t raise your voice or express anger or overstay your welcome.

Within this framework, incivility is refusing to surrender to hatred, refusing to smile politely at someone who doesn’t consider you their equal, refusing to carve away the seemingly unpalatable parts of yourself until there is nothing left.

New Craig Mod “pop-up walk” is nearing its conclusion. He’s walking “100 kilometers south-north along the Kiso-ji in Nagano, and then turning around and walking 100 kilometers back, north-south along the same route.” And he’s sending out a fresh newsletter about every single day of the walk. I’ve followed along on so many of his Japan walks, slurping down his pictures and stories from the day over my morning coffee. (Time zone magic!) This walk has so far been equally great and escapist and fun. Here are the rules he sets for himself, like some sort of newsletter-slinging Marina Abramovic:

As usual, the usual rules will be in place to not “teleport,” to be present:

• No news

• No media

• No podcasts

• No SNS (aside from, perhaps, the members-only The Good Place)

And, of course, every night:

• Collate what we saw that day

• Turn the notes into narrative

• Publish before bed

You can sign up to catch the last handful of installments here.

Promising news from Gen. Z: across the country, college radio stations are overwhelmed with students wanting to get involved. Here’s one station:

Demand for on-air slots is out-pacing “hours in the day” at WEGL (Auburn), GM Rae Nawrocki says. The station has grown from roughly 30 members four years ago to 120 students and 60 on-air shows today.

I’m so happy for these kids, and happy for our culture. Live radio rules, and helping make it can be so fun and rewarding. And what a great antidote to the ways capitalism keeps trying to consolidate music and power.

(I was a jazz DJ in college, and unlike my Slavic major, it actually prepared me for my day job, where among other duties I host a podcast that’s about to turn five.)

Some hopeful policing news out of Baltimore. The city has seen multiple years in a row of stacking 20+% declines in homicides and non-fatal shootings.

‘What Baltimore did that’s so impactful is really invested in a whole ecosystem of community–oriented interventions,’ the Vera Institute for Justice’s Daniela Gilbert told Popular Information. Under Scott, Baltimore has fought violent crime not only through policing but through a network of programs that provide support for housing, career development, and education.

In today’s political environment, these approaches are frequently derided as “woke” and “naive.” But the dramatic decline in violent crime in Baltimore over the last few years suggests that there is a better word to describe its holistic strategy: effective.

Our country’s typical approach to policing, on the other hand, reminds me of the saying, “The beatings will continue until morale improves.”

The other day, Apple Music gave me a notification about a new EP: Promises by Lissie. I started listening, predisposed to like it—I must have listened to her 2016 song “Wild West” 100 times. And I did like it. For me, the standout track was “Everywhere.” I liked Lissie’s version a lot, but after playing it a few times, what I really wanted was to listen to the Fleetwood Mac original again.

It turns out “Elsewhere” is off their final album, 1987’s Tango In The Night. Who knew? Not this millennial. Nonetheless, I know the track so well. I must have heard it a thousand times on the radio. Or maybe I once owned their Greatest Hits? Either way, I became interested in knowing more about this album and immediately read the little blurb included in Apple Music. Here are the last two sentences of the first paragraph:

As a great pop band, Fleetwood Mac has never been ahead of the times—if anything, they’re always just behind them enough to serve as a kind of summary or reflection. Where Rumours feels like mid-’70s pop-rock, Tango feels like the late 1980s: the synthesizers and drum machines (“Everywhere”), the gauzy surfaces (“Seven Wonders”), the sense of everything being suspended in pink perfumed mist (“Little Lies”).

How great is that!? Especially the phrase, “…the sense of everything being suspended in pink perfumed mist”! I love it!

But who wrote it? Apple Music never lets the authors sign these blurbs, and there’s no trace of these phrases on the internet, beyond a few search results from Apple Music / Shazam. Some anonymous music writer wrote this précis just for the streaming service. Like an unsigned letter in a bottle. For what, fifty bucks? It all makes me a little melancholy.

The other day, taking a bath, I perched my laptop on the toilet seat and watched “The Hand,” an 18-minute stop-motion animated film about a sculptor being menaced by a white-gloved hand. I highly recommend watching it—it’s available for free on YouTube (update: it got pulled down)—and also reading the Animation Obsessive essay that discusses not just the film but also its director Jiří Trnka, the conditions of both its creation (in communist Czechoslovakia), and the general reception it received when it was released (as a one-dimensional Cold War parable).