Here are links to my latest work, Daily Posts from the archives (March 31-April 4) in case you missed them, and some interesting articles from around the internet. You can follow me on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
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Hello, hello, the tariffs are here, the tariffs are here!
Did you know that the word “tariff” has its origins in Arabic? Why, yes, it does. We darkies, man, we just get into everything. Anyway, Donald Trump is dead serious, okay? He’s blanketing the globe with tariffs, blanketing it, I tell you. Included in his targets are Heard Island and McDonald Islands, “which form an external territory of Australia,” and are home to a rich, prosperous population of penguins who spend all day sliding around on giant glaciers with no worries about human predators, because it takes a two-week boat trip just to get there. The Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese mused that “No place on earth is safe.”
But perhaps all that ice and guano will prove to be priceless commodities, so penguins may soon have the upper flipper. The islands’ inhabitants are hashing it out right now. I do wonder, if, among King Penguins, there is a hierarchy of any kind. What happens when one of them declares that he (patriarchy persists) will be the one to issue a stern rebuke to Trump because, “I am King, after all.” Does another, perhaps slightly shorter penguin mutter under his breath, “As are we all, motherfucker, as are we all”?
Europe—still a wee sliver that insists on calling itself a continent—is reeling, at the time of this writing, with a 20% tariff. The UK, facing 10%, hasn’t been hit quite so hard as other places, yet, but PM Keir Starmer—or Evil Dilbert, as I like to call him—is wondering how long the effects of his toadying up to Trump, who adores his accent, will last. You may recall that Starmer humbly offered an invitation from King Charles to the president, extravagantly pulling it out of his coat pocket with the most cringe-inducing description of it as “really special” and “unprecedented” and, oh, I can’t go on because I’m so embarrassed for him. China got hit with 34%, and there are hints the world is not going to take all of this lying down. Soon, the New World Order may end up looking a lot like Firefly, a show that should never have been cancelled and, oh, please, do not even get me started on how angry I still am about that. But that aesthetic rocks so, whatever?
And you thought the price of eggs was a problem.
Anyway, onwards. Lots of links this week because, well, look around.
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NEW WORK!
I think John Mulaney is a frigging genius, and I wrote about his latest Netflix show (can we call it that?), Everybody’s Live. Here’s “John Mulaney: Everyone’s Phoning It In.”
FROM THE ARCHIVES!
“Should You March Against Trump?”, I asked in 2017 and, oh, look, here we are again, and everyone’s carrying the exact same signs. I have the same damn advice (and you really ought to take it this time).
“March As Feminists, Not As Women,” also 2017.
“Missing: On Terror and Kidnappings.” Bring them all back.
“On Malayalam and Melancholia”
ELSEWHERE ON THE WEB!
A few of us were talking about Stuart Hall this past week, in the context of the current protests and more, and my friend J. brought up the fact that mobilising people is very different from organising. Arun Gupta, in his latest for Yes magazine, says the same thing in “10 Organizing Principles for Defeating Trumpism 2.0.”
Cory Booker stood for 25 hours, and did nothing. Suchitra Vijayan writes about it in “The Longest Speech Says the Least: Cory Booker’s Fake Filibuster,” available on It’s Not You, It’s the Media:
Booker, like so many other liberals, can never resist quoting John Lewis on “good trouble.” For Protean Mag, Abraham Ratner, in “Radicalism Restrained: The Political Legacy of John Lewis,” (2021) gives us a more complex history of the politician.
Oh, no! The White Male Author is being doomed to extinction, says Jason Savage, along with other White Men. Whatever shall we do? Relax, says Alex Skopic, in Current Affairs: “The White Male Writer is Fine, I Promise.” The essay has a brilliant line: “The pallid, I assure you, are still valid.”
The Loch Ness Monster is still nowhere to be found, but the Chicago Sun-Times reports that the camera belonging to a much-mocked man who spent his life trying to find it (the monster) has been recovered. That’s something.
Speaking of the Sun-Times, here’s an explanation of the recent buyouts, from Block Club.
I have long written against the demand made of people of colour in every field, and especially art and writing: that their work should always only be about their identities. Damisola Sulaiman presents a critique of those limitations on The Polis Project, with “The Unfinished Revolution of Black Artists in Post-BLM London.
Shuli Branson asks, in CAW, “Should We Care About the Universities?”
And Xian Franzinger Barrett writes a poignant essay about “The Myth of a Safe Classroom,” in The Progressive.
ProPublica, which you should read and support, has an investigative piece by McKenzie Funk, “Inside ICE Air: Flight Attendants on Deportation Planes Say Disaster Is ‘Only a Matter of Time.”
In Truthout, Derek Seidman writes that, “With Detention of Beloved Farmworker Organizer, ICE Comes for the Labor Movement.”
“We Need Healthcare, Not Policing, For Immigrant Patients,” write Mark G. Kuczewski, PhD, and Altaf Saadi, MD, MSc, in Medpage Today.
USA Today reports on the “hell on earth” in which immigrant women find themselves once placed in detention by ICE.
Caitlin Johnston writes that “Liberals Believe in Nothing and Remember Even Less.”
Christopher Arsenault, the beloved owner of a cat sanctuary, is dead in a fire, along with many of the cats in his care.
And at Columbia, which is seeing its enrollments drop, Jewish students chained themselves to fences, demanding the release of Mahmoud Khalil.
Things are not great, and it feels like everything is breaking all around us. But this recording of a meeting on Antarctica reassures us that King Penguins are busy at work, and will save us all.
Here’s John Cale, reminding us of “The Thoughtless Kind.”
Life sucks, a lot. Get your naps. Eat what your body craves. Keep talking to friends, and check in on them: you never know what the silence might mean.
Here’s last week’s Update. And you can find all my previous Updates here.
I’ll see you next week.
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Image: Creator unknown.
