Sundays are for firing up Twine and thinking you know what, if that fancy IF tracker had existed when I was a student I might have kept all my exam revision notes as a text adventure. I have two more boxes, reassuringly heavy, containing tabbed, color-coded index cards that you could conceivably arrange to form a maze, navigable using the compass controls. Go down the west corridor, from Middle English to Renaissance, and – ah, bullshit, you got eaten by a Crane. Certainly Has anyone thought about this, in the decade and changes since Twine’s release? I mean, we already have 3D museum exhibits pulled from Wikipedia.
Sundays are also for going to the vegetable garden and messing with the tomato plants, which have decided to go crazy as soon as the growing season ends. I thought you were done with those pesky nightshades. I thought I could leave you alone for the rest of the year. Finally, Sundays are dedicated to sharing good reviews, like below.
Here is a difficult and hopeful test by Palestinian writer and academic Dana El Kurd on different types of silence, following the revelation that she has a Jewish Israeli great-grandmother.
Rachel’s story sparked many questions. I wondered if I had lost anyone close to me in the Holocaust. I must have: Rachel’s family was still in Poland in 1935. I wondered if there were any survivors, if they had ended up in Israel. They probably served in the military, if that’s the case. Did they kill Palestinians? Did they end up in Gaza?
Right now, I would rather not know the answers to these questions, not while I continue to watch a genocide unfold. I doubt Rachel’s descendants want anything to do with me either. She hid the identities of her Israeli children during the interview, saying there were “sensitivities” around the issue. Obviously, their past is a secret that they also keep to themselves.
What would Rachel’s life have been like if it hadn’t been disrupted by Israel’s state-building project? His story addresses thornier issues that Palestinians constantly face in their struggle for self-determination. What do you do when your colonizer has no home country to return to? How did my grandfather, a devout Palestinian, make peace with his Israeli mother, and what does that say about coexistence? Is there a way to reform Israeli society, however twisted it is by ethnonationalism?
For the London Review of Books blog, Iza Ding compares Wen Muye’s film Once Upon a Time in the Middle East to Hollywood re-enactments of the US wars in Iraqidentifying another strain of interventionist mythmaking.
Chinese state media has hailed Once Upon a Time in the Middle East as a new type of anti-war film, comparing it to All Quiet on the Western Front and Schindler’s List. Criticism of the American invasion is merciless (there are many lines like “You Americans think everyone is a terrorist”), but most of the American characters are humanized. Tony Wang (Aarif Lee), a Chinese-American soldier from California, is tough until, after a few glasses of whiskey, all he can say is that he wants to go home. The Iraqis start out as innocent victims, but the film shows how ordinary, honest people can be gradually pushed toward extremism under unbearable circumstances. Moral ambiguity is characteristic of Wen Muye. There are good guys – the Chinese – but no bad guys: the Americans are homesick and afraid; Iraqis are in mourning and enraged.
While we’re at the movies, here’s John WM Thompson on Mike Flanagan’s adaptation of Carrie and the Bowdlerization of horrorwith some notes on the “comfortable horror” that has crept into video games of late.
Here in America, it’s the market players, not the people, who really can’t stand tragic narratives, who resist linear franchises, four-quadrant reboots, children’s toy merchandising, etc. I believe that ordinary people, if you pushed them, would appreciate and embrace tragic narratives – no one actually wants to eat candy all day, and few people are content with endless complacency. But if they only see comedy, they will only expect comedy. If they are told that art should make them feel good and reflect an optimistic world, they will be dismayed and confused when offered sour or bitter, no matter how enriching they may be. They may seek to escape tragedy. And so we would see representations of complexity, of complication, of reality in its least friendly form, all feared and reviled. This is already happening. In Flanagan’s own words, Carrie is part of this action.
NHS England has trans women were banned from female-only hospital wardsthe latest stunt in a campaign of institutional cruelty that will make it harder for trans people to access health care, while also increasing the burden on space- and resource-strapped facilities. While reading about it, I came across this essay on “why trans people deserve to be boring” by Ash Lazarus Orr – the named plaintiff in a federal lawsuit over the Trump administration’s passport policy for trans people in the United States.
Marginalized people are often easier to defend when we are sympathetic, and there is something deeply unfair about requiring someone to be sympathetic before we decide they deserve their dignity. The trans person whose story is meant to change someone’s mind is asked to be vulnerable enough to create empathy, but calm enough to remain believable, angry enough to make the hurt seem real, but not so angry that someone stops listening. After years of preparing for interviews and thinking about how something would resonate with audiences, I became very familiar with these calculations.
Sometimes these calculations are necessary. They are also exhausting when you realize how free you are to be able to disappoint others just as yourself. A cisgender person can be an asshole without anyone seeing their behavior as meaningful evidence of who cisgender people are as a population. Trans people deserve the same freedom to be mediocre, boring, bad, or unpleasant without someone deciding that our individual failures reveal something bigger about whether people like us deserve to exist comfortably in the world.
For EcuadorArundhati Roy speaks at length about the North American tech billionaire class and generative AI, focusing on calls for regulation of the self-serving industry and the ramifications for Indian workers in particular. We publish or share a lot of apocalyptic articles about generative AI on these pages, and there’s always a risk of falling into misery while generating negative publicity for chatbot moguls, but Roy is a great rhetorician and this essay covers a lot of ground.
In her incisive and cutting book, Empire of AI, Karen Hao describes the continued and widespread plunder of land and resources, as well as the transportation of workers to poor countries working for poverty wages to become “data collectors” to keep the Cyclops’ dreams afloat. Since there is unlikely to be enough water or electricity to feed the enormous energy appetite of his $100 billion corporations and supercomputers, Cyclops is aggressively lobbying for private nuclear power plants and abandoning security protocols. As a backup, billions of dollars are being invested in the development of non-perishable sources of fusion energy, so that data centers can be moved into space or to the Moon.
Meanwhile, on our dear, pathetic old Earth, the Indian government has stepped up to welcome the establishment of even more energy-intensive data centers. Six in Visakhapatnam alone, including a $15 billion hub for Google. They receive authorization with virtually no environmental monitoring, as if they were simple buildings, warehouses. It’s an old tradition between India and the United States: give us your waste, your toxic industries, your poisoned chalice. We will cherish it. And like in the United States, activists in India are putting their bodies on the line to end the poisoning of the water and air of the tens of thousands of people who live near the proposed “warehouses.”
This week’s music is by Gordon Lightfoot To sleepwhich appears in the OST of the Jawsalike miniseries quite nicely below. Have a great weekend, wherever you are. Please share any really interesting string games and bulk cooked tomato recipes you’ve discovered.
