Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

An inhumane system demands inhumans, and so it produces them in stories, editorials, newscasts, movies, and television. 

— Ta-Nehisi Coates / The Message

Long has paled that sunny sky:
Echoes fade and memories die:
Autumn frosts have slain July.

— Lewis Carroll / “A Boat, Beneath a Sunny Sky”

“On average, the first result in an Amazon search is 29 percent more expensive than the best result for your search,” Doctorow claims. “Click any of the top four links on the top of your screen, and you’ll pay an average of 25 percent more than you would for your best match. On average, the best match is located seventeen places down in an Amazon search result.”

From the perspective of these platforms and their shareholders, you might call Stage 3 enrichification. But, for users and business customers, Doctorow writes, this is “the end-stage of enshittification, the stage at which a platform turns into a pile of shit.”

— Greg Rosalsky / “A theory why the internet is going down the toilet” / npr

Parties passionate for
power Crashed No words were binding No
oaths reconciled When the plague
broke us We broke each other

— Rosanna Warren / “They set about wasting the land”

Each of these steps has elements of military theatrics and cosplay authoritarianism, but the more the White House insists on the trappings of war—the troop deployments, the “warrior ethos” grooming, the emergency legal powers—the more it risks nudging us toward an actual one.

— Benjamin Wallace-Wells / “Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, and the ‘War from Within’ “ / The New Yorker

I have lived on the land long before swords turned man into prey.
I belong there.

— Mahmoud Darwish / “I Belong There”

The Trump years amazed a certain kind of white person; they had no reference for national vulgarity, for such broad corruption and venality, until it was too late. The least reflective of them say, “This is not America.” But some of them suspect that it is America, and there is great pain in understanding that, without your consent, you are complicit in a great crime, in learning that the whole game was rigged in your favor, that there are nations within your nation who have spent all of their collective lives in the Trump years. The pain is in the discovery of your own illegitimacy—that whiteness is power and nothing else.

— Ta-Nehisi Coates / The Message

What I’m Listening To:

Baby’s on fire
Better throw her in the water
Look at her laughing
Like a heifer to the slaughter
Baby’s on fire
And all the laughing boys are bitching
Waiting for photos
Oh the plot is so bewitching

— Brian Eno / “Baby’s On Fire”