Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

The city of Boston will ramp up protections for bike lanes, including cracking down on illegal parking, and more broadly revive other street safety programs following the death of a City Hall transportation planner who was struck and killed by a truck last week while cycling on busy Tremont Street.

— Niki Griswold / “‘We just want to see change’: Wu must act on vow to make streets safer following city planner’s death, advocates say” / The Boston Globe

The heatwave that affected England and Wales in June killed about 440 people a day during its three-day peak, scientists have estimated. Across the whole of the June heatwave, plus the one in May, about 2,700 people lost their lives prematurely.

The data starkly illustrates the danger of extreme heat, which is being supercharged by the climate crisis. More than 40% of the people affected would not have died without the 1.4C of human-caused global heating to date, according to the analysis. For comparison, about four people die each day as a result of road traffic collisions and about 35 a day because of alcohol and drug use, according to government statistics.

— Damian Carrington / “May and June heatwaves killed about 2,700 people in England and Wales, data suggests” / The Guardian

Sadness, fertilizer of my joys. It blocks us, 
this wire mesh spilled from inkwells everywhere. 

— Jean Cocteau / “Soft Eyes”

I think there have been three World Cups: one in Canada, one in Mexico, and one in the United States, and I think they’ll all be remembered very differently.

Canada’s World Cup has been the most low-key, but what will be remembered is that for the first time they went deeper into the tournament – and with an overwhelmingly Afro-Caribbean version of Canada on the pitch, whereas normally the sporting representation of Canada would be big white dudes playing ice hockey. That’s been an extraordinary moment, particularly for a country where 30% of the population wasn’t even born there.

If we’re talking about vibes and energy, then Mexico won the World Cup. The Azteca has been an extraordinary experience – one of the most beautiful and historically weighted stadiums, for all the controversy around its rebuilding. Mexico showed North America what a football game is meant to sound and look like: the atmosphere at the Mexico-England game was extraordinary, very few World Cup games can match it. And Mexico coped with mass protests, teachers’ strikes and protests over the disappeared, all without resorting to tear gas – which, of course, was Brazil’s method in 2014. I wish I’d spent the World Cup there.

The United States is another matter. The charge sheet is very long, for both the federal government and FIFA, and both of their presidents. It’s been ugly: eye-wateringly expensive tickets, rapacious resale sites, hydration breaks turned into ad breaks for Fox, the infantilising kick-off countdown, and of course the disgrace and desecration yet to come: the 30-minute half-time show in the final match.

And then the federal government – above all the meanness, the cruelty, the pettiness of refusing entry to the Somali referee, of effectively racially profiling the Senegalese and the Uzbeks at the border, making the Iranians stay in Tijuana, and above all Trump boasting about fixing the Balogun red-card – infecting everything with the same bottomless cynicism that consumes what’s left of his soul.

— David Goldblatt / “Football 1-0 Fascism” / equator.org

So much for the fighting
                                       and the sex,
I want to be alone
with you in the next room.

— Kathleen Ossip / “Marriage”

Many enemies of the United States seek to undermine faith in American elections—but “no regime, no spies, no saboteurs have yet matched the damage that America’s own president did tonight.”

— Tom Nichols / “Trump Just Did More Damage to American Elections Than China” / The Atlantic

Suddenly it became all too apparent that riding in a bike lane, being adept at handling two wheels, or knowing the location of every jagged pothole, dangerous pinch point, or blind intersection was not enough to simply stay alive, much less avoid a bone-breaking brush with a multi-ton vehicle.

— The Editorial Board / “Louisa Gag’s death demands a full investigation — and an end to Wu’s slowdown on bike lanes” / The Boston Globe

What I’m Listening To:

I don’t want to be lectured.
I like to burn my food up.
Flames baptise the filth of plastic surfaces
that has migrated onto my precious natural ingredients.

— Dry Cleaning / “Evil Evil Idiot”