Matt Weber's Blog, page 11

Leeks & lentils

The most recent episode of Maintenance Phase is a journey through a scandal I hadn’t heard of: the severe poisoning of dozens? hundreds? of people who’d eaten Daily Harvest’s leek and lentil crumbles. The episode is worth a listen end to end; Michael expands this one story out into a tour through recent changes in the US food system and its regulatory landscape. But he saves the worst for the end: Daily Harvest filed to move a class action suit to arbitration, because its terms and conditions included a waiver of the right to sue.

Apparently the lawyer representing the plaintiffs has pivoted to a different class action suit on behalf of children (who can’t consent to arbitration) and anyone who received the poison crumbles in a PR pack (who maybe didn’t sign the T&C before receiving them?). But hearing arbitration invoked on the podcast reminded me of this February report from Cory Doctorow on automated mass arbitration, which turns on the fact that each arbitration claim costs a fixed amount to process. Thousands of arbitration claims can set a company back millions; this doesn’t itself do anything for the plaintiffs, but it can give them leverage to extract a settlement.

Technical solutions to legal problems are easy to root for, but of course they’re just signs of a broken system. Whether it’s this or something else, hopefully the Daily Harvest plaintiffs will find their way to partial compensation for the pain and injury they’ve suffered.

The show notes also reminded me that Aubrey and Michael name-checked Marion Nestle’s SAFE FOOD: THE POLITICS OF FOOD SAFETY. I read WHAT TO EAT a while back and enjoyed it; Nestle’s writing is informative and very bullshit-free. Putting this one in the TBR.

Currently listening: THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE, by Shirley Jackson, narrated by David Warner.

If you’re enjoying my writing, you can get some of my short fiction on your e-reader for the low, low cost of $0. Remembered Air is a collection of six poems and short stories not available anywhere else. Download it here.

“A bridge too far”

The resolution approving Bridge Point 8 was “memorialized” tonight. This apparently means spending an hour and a half fixing typos, then opening the floor for 15 minutes of public comment. Both sides of the issue were vigorously represented HAHAHA JESUS ARE YOU KIDDING, literally no one who’s not (a) on the planning board or (b) getting paid for this project likes the idea. A woman who moved here in January was weeping because she felt like she’d been sold a bill of goods. If you read the article I linked in the first sentence of this post, our state Assembly rep is so freaked out by this he’s writing op-eds. A couple of people pointed out the infuriating irony of being forced to file inches of paperwork to make improvements to their houses while 80 variances get waved through for this massive black hole that will — assuming it works as designed — pull fully loaded 18-wheelers past schools.

But, hey, nothing’s guaranteed in this vale of tears. What if you built 5.5 million square feet of warehouses and nobody came? People are out of the house and inflation is through the roof; is the demand even there? Is it worse for West Windsor if it is or if it isn’t?

Currently reading: Doughnut Economics, Kate Raworth.

If you’re enjoying my writing, you can get some of my short fiction on your e-reader for the low, low cost of $0. Remembered Air is a collection of six poems and short stories not available anywhere else. Download it here.

$7.69

Matt Levine, Money Stuff 2022-11-01. We’re talking low prices.

Currently reading: London Rules, Mick Herron.

The ALLi sorting hat

Every so often I listen to the Alliance of Independent Authors’ podcasts. Tonight’s listen is the October 2 episode of the Creative Self-Publishing podcast, “How to Build Your Publishing Team,” wherein Orna Ross and Howard Lovy profile three types of author-publisher:

The lean publisher, who focuses on frequency, volume, ranking, and low cost;The engagement publisher, who focuses on connecting with their audience;The craft publisher, who focuses on creativity and production values.

The team-building aspect of the podcast is less interesting to me than this typology of independent publishing. I appreciate it because an awful lot of thinking proceeds from the assumption that there’s an optimal approach, maybe complicated slightly by genre. Different renditions of that optimal approach usually emphasize each of these three elements, usually loading more heavily on the “lean publisher” approach, but there’s not much consideration of the tradeoffs or how any given piece of it meshes with the individual writer’s strengths and priorities. It’s a nice idea.

Currently reading: SAGA Vol. 10, Brian K. Vaughan & Fiona Staples.

If you’re enjoying my writing, you can get some of my short fiction on your e-reader for the low, low cost of $0. Remembered Air is a collection of six poems and short stories not available anywhere else. Download it here.

King? Or jester?

We watched Hasan Minhaj’s new Netflix special, THE KING’S JESTER, this weekend; spoilers follow.

It makes for an interesting contrast with HOMECOMING KING. The overall structure is similar, an arc punctuated by digressions, and Minhaj is still very deft at circling the digressions back to the main arc in unexpected ways, usually embroidered with some kind of emotional whiplash. The engine for the overall arc in HOMECOMING KING is revenge on the girl who’d treated him so badly in high school; the engine in THE KING’S JESTER is the fame and recognition he gets from dunking on people like Jared Kushner, MBS, and Narendra Modi; in both cases the presentation makes it clear that it’s a flaw in his character that moves him in this way, and there’s some appreciation of the complexity in each case, that these impulses drive both great accomplishments and acts of dumbness and self-regard that hurt others.

But in THE KING’S JESTER his wife, Beena, provides sort of a Greek chorus, constantly reminding him and the audience of the cost of his actions. And in the end she and their children provide the resolution. After someone throws what turns out not to be anthrax at their daughter, Beena threatens the marriage if Minhaj continues to endanger their family, and Minhaj ends up sort of triumphantly chastened, declaring that he knows where “his line” is: He’ll take the joke as far as it can go until it hurts his family.

And this… kind of flattens the whole thing? There’s the trope of the woman as moderating influence on a genius man’s self-destructive impulses, which — it’s not awesome, it’s probably also fairly real in context, we can probably agree that #BeenaDeservesBetter but it’s also not her show. But the family also serves as spackle over the big hole in this resolution, which is: Minhaj manages by dint of fast talk, charisma, and genuinely hilarious humor to paint “I’m going easier on dictators and criminals so my loved ones don’t get killed” as an act of personal growth, when it is in fact an unbelievably grim concession to the state of the connected world.

The more I think about this, the more bizarre it gets, and maybe that’s a sign that my thinking : watching ratio is off. And you can find ways to paper over it if you look. Maybe Minhaj is perfectly aware of this fact — he’s obviously cognizant that the people he’s antagonizing are, in fact, horrible — and he just didn’t state it to my arbitrary standards of satisfaction; maybe he’s just attending to the balance of dark and light material, which is tricky in an act where he’s trying to hit a range of emotions and use comedy to say something real about something important.

But what makes me think that this runs a little deeper is the fact that the whole arc supports the personal-growth framing of what is, again, a move principally motivated by some deeply scary shit that should never happen to anyone. He talks earlier in the show about his personal reasons for doing something like PATRIOT ACT, and they’re come by honestly — the trauma and frustration of growing up brown in the peri-9/11 USA. That’s real! But when he talks about his viral moments, the emphasis is all on his own dopamine rush; he becomes a bug-eyed, lascivious caricature of himself, caressing an imaginary phone and gathering armfuls of likes to his chest. He calls himself out via Beena, and she’s the sharp-eyed audience surrogate once again: “It’s so interesting how you only care about these issues when there’s a camera on you.” He’s skewering himself, and we’re on board with it, because of course we like people who know their own flaws, who don’t take themselves seriously…

… and we like it so much, we forget that he is roasting himself for the narcissistic act of publicly calling out dictators and murderers. We’re watching him invalidate himself for speaking truth to bloody-handed power.

And there is just no acknowledgment of this. No nod, even, to the idea that it might be unfortunate that Internet mobs can silence a person by threatening their family; he treats the threat of random violence as an impersonal force of nature, some kind of autonomic social response to jokes that go “too far,” where “too far” is somehow something he’s able to assess in advance with high precision. He’s putting family first, achievement unlocked, curtain.

I don’t really know what to do with all this. But it’s hard not to set it against HOMECOMING KING, which (to my memory anyway) was more content to leave awkward and difficult matters unsettled.

After we’d finished THE KING’S JESTER, Shin-Yi mentioned that this show felt less true than HOMECOMING KING, but she wasn’t sure why. My gloss at the time was that HOMECOMING KING was about person problems and THE KING’S JESTER was about celebrity problems. But I think maybe this weird looking-away might be the reason.

Currently listening: OUR OPINIONS ARE CORRECT #117, “What Makes a Story Feel ‘Fast’ Or ‘Slow’?”, by Charlie Jane Anders and Annalee Newitz

If you’re enjoying my writing, you can get some of my short fiction on your e-reader for the low, low cost of $0. Remembered Air is a collection of six poems and short stories not available anywhere else. Download it here.

The Marriage at Cana (?)

[U is 11.]

U: *squints at my sweet Locked Tomb enamel pin*

U: what does “one fish, one end” mean?

Currently reading: THE INHERITANCE OF ORQUÍDEA DIVINA, Zoraida Córdova

If you’re enjoying my writing, you can get some of my short fiction on your e-reader for the low, low cost of $0. Remembered Air is a collection of six poems and short stories not available anywhere else. Download it here.

“We all try to give gifts to the future,”

said Carol. “It doesn’t mean they’ll use them the way we envision, or even in ways we’d approve of. You have to give gifts lightly — that’s one of my values. I’m going to tell you something.”

“You’ve been telling us things already,” said Phosphorus, I thought a bit sharply.

“Something new. We haven’t talked about it yet, because we didn’t want you to think that our genders work exactly like either plains-folk or tree-folk. Humans are kind of like your species, in that our genders aren’t set at birth. But it’s not completely uncertain, either. Parents can guess, and be right most of the time. Some choose to guess, and some don’t.

“My parents guessed. They gave me a male name, instead of one that could fit anyone, and when I realized they’d been wrong I had to change it. But it was okay, because the name was a gift given lightly. Because my parents loved what I was more than they loved their guess about what I’d be, they picked backup names in case I needed them, including one that fit my true self. And so I was still able to have that gift from them, and the relationship that goes with it, because they were willing to let me use it in a way they didn’t expect.”

A HALF-BUILT GARDEN, by Ruthanna Emrys.

Even this long quote doesn’t communicate how well the passage works in context, and I don’t want to share too much context. Suffice it to say that this isn’t only, or even principally, about gender; you can imagine any number of things that a human might need to talk about in early conversations with a technologically superior alien species, and this gets to the root of a lot of them.

I mentioned Cory Doctorow’s review of this book and noted something I liked that I thought the review had missed. It’s been enlightening, as I finished the book, to notice all the other genius things that Emrys has done to set this book apart from the tradition of first-contact literature and make it into a genuinely contemporary story. Doctorow of course has no obligation to mention every single thing I appreciated; the point is that there are a lot of reasons to love this book even if the idea of AI-mediated collaborative decision making, planet-breaking aliens living on Dyson spheres, and the other more classically science-fictional Big Ideas aren’t the kind of thing that lights your fire.

Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber has a nice review of A HALF-BUILT GARDEN (more thoughtful than anything I’ve written) where they compare it to Malka Older’s Centenal Cycle, which is a book about a world split into 100,000-person “centenals” who affiliate into worldwide political parties, with the winner of the plurality of centenals taking a leading role in world government. It’s a parallel that I’m sort of embarrassed not to have noticed, especially given the primacy of machine learning in monitoring and maintaining both Older’s worldwide elections and Emrys’ dandelion networks. But one thing that’s always bugged me a little bit about the Centenal Cycle is the hand-waving around how it came to be. INFOMOCRACY focuses on I believe the third worldwide election under the centenal system, so the old world existed in living memory of most adults… but it’s never too clear how or why the old system ended and the new one began. Farrell draws an implicit contrast with A HALF-BUILT GARDEN: The rise of the dandelion networks is maybe a little less recent, but the motivations for it are much clearer, because they are a response to the legacy power structure’s failure to respond to the existential threat of climate change:

[D]emocracy should be linked to practical problem solving. Social scientists and theorists may fall in love with decision making systems for their own sake, but ordinary people very rarely do. If you want people to engage, they need to have practical consequences and benefits.

Currently reading: THE LIBRARY AT MOUNT CHAR, Scott Hawkins

If you’re enjoying my writing, you can get some of my short fiction on your e-reader for the low, low cost of $0. Remembered Air is a collection of six poems and short stories not available anywhere else. Download it here.

The coffee’s old. Tastes like tin.

I hoovered up Tom King and Greg Smallwood’s HUMAN TARGET in an afternoon. I’ve been a fan of everything King’s written since I read THE VISION last year… but I wasn’t really aware of Smallwood at all, and the art in HUMAN TARGET just floored me on every page. Stephanie Hans’ work in DIE is the only comic I can think of that might compete, on color or on the unity of color and art or the sheer density and consistency of innovation.

I could have chosen one image and you’d see how great it is, but the variety is kind of the point. I took these screenshots for this post, but I also just sometimes go back and stare at them because, well.

I feel like I’m slighting King in all this fanpersoning about the art in HUMAN TARGET; he is writing at the top of his game as well, every bit as tricky and heart-grabbing as THE VISION and MISTER MIRACLE. It’s absolutely worth picking up HUMAN TARGET for the story as well as the art.

Currently reading: THE LIBRARY AT MOUNT CHAR, Scott Hawkins.

If you’re enjoying my writing, you can get some of my short fiction on your e-reader for the low, low cost of $0. Remembered Air is a collection of six poems and short stories not available anywhere else. Download it here.

“a warm, funny and quirky renaissance man in an office whose walls he kept perfectly bare”

“Legendary” cognitive scientist Daniel Osherson, “scientist of rare talent” and “excellent and caring mentor,” dies at 73

Written, through a series of coincidences, by my friend Liz Fuller-Wright. I am the least impressive person quoted (Noam Chomsky’s in there), but I’m glad I got to say my bit.

We’re talking low prices.

Curated by a friend, some of the highlights of the #NonaTheNinthSpoilers hashtag and adjacent territories. (Warning: spoilers for NONA THE NINTH (look, it never hurts to be clear)).

you can't tell me this isn't exactly what happened. #ntnspoilers #NonaTheNinthSpoilers pic.twitter.com/T8P4pdFL70

— Pearl (@pearl127) September 18, 2022

[#nonatheninthspoilers / #ntnspoilers] pyrrha could make it go to stations where they still played music pic.twitter.com/1tzIqVC3Sv

— ama (@souralibi) September 23, 2022

cam and pal #NonaTheNinthSpoilers #NonaTheNinth #gideontheninth #HarrowtheNinth #camandpal #camillahect #palamedessextus pic.twitter.com/m5L5c22dfD

— soleil (@theonlysei) September 20, 2022

#NonaTheNinthSpoilers #NonaTheNinth
"We're talking low prices." pic.twitter.com/T7zWU3eut9

— ding dong dyke (@betwixtify) September 18, 2022

*ZeFrank voice* "fun facts about the cow"#TheLockedTomb #NonaTheNinthSpoilers #NonaTheNinth #fanart #johngaius pic.twitter.com/MFzT6N6qNV

— derek (@DrawsDerek) September 25, 2022

#NonaTheNinthSpoilers John uploading an apology video about the cow barrier and it's the horrible apologies all YouTubers do. "I'm really sorry about the cows, I promise I will learn from this mistake, I'm trying to be better, but, would it have been better if I had used people?" https://t.co/a8tBN0J9UU

— AJ/KIT ✿ NONA SPOILERS (@catrasadoras) September 25, 2022

I guess Ill post again with some new stuff #NonaTheNinthSpoilers #TheLockedTomb pic.twitter.com/eUGvpt8Hxa

— antu in the locked tomb (@antumakes) September 21, 2022

it was definitely the cancel culture that did him in, for sure#TheLockedTomb #NonaTheNinthSpoilers #NonaTheNinth #johngaius pic.twitter.com/8qjlvRRpfc

— derek (@DrawsDerek) September 26, 2022

Idk if non NZ/Australian's know that Hairy Maclary isn't just a cute nickname Pyrrha made up, he's the dog from a series of kid's books. And if he's not the most Nona/Harrow coded animal around. Messy black hair, loves bones, little weenie <3 #NonaTheNinthSpoilers #nonatheninth pic.twitter.com/5YbJOME3Lc

— Firlex (@Firlexx) September 23, 2022

// #ntnspoilers

on my knees crying. this is art pic.twitter.com/mxv64fqFuX

— thou | nona the ninth spoilers (@griddletheninth) September 25, 2022

the book cover was right i would give a lung for her #ntn #NonaTheNinth pic.twitter.com/tAsVK5yK5Z

— pau (@sunflowerpau_) September 23, 2022

Just finished Nona. #thelockedtomb #NonaTheNinth pic.twitter.com/QNhTl8VKnC

— Steph Comstock (@runonmusic) September 21, 2022

I’m not as funny or artistic as any of these people, so I’m mulling over the idea that the Locked Tomb is what happens when you decide to write a story about love and take every facet of it to its logical or at least metaphorical extreme, to the point where it all kind of wraps around and becomes a story about death.

Currently reading: Monstress, Volume 7: Devourer, Marjorie Liu & Sana Takeda.

If you’re enjoying my writing, you can get some of my short fiction on your e-reader for the low, low cost of $0. Remembered Air is a collection of six poems and short stories not available anywhere else. Download it here.