The US Economic Policy Uncertainty Index is at its highest level since 2000 — higher than during 9/11, the 2007 financial crisis, and the pandemic. “It is a mystery as to why credit spreads and equities are still so well-behaved…”
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The MacArthur Foundation will increase its giving over the next two years in response to Trump’s actions illegally freezing aid. “This is a major crisis for our sector and it’s a time when those of us who can do more should do more.”
The United States has fallen to a score of 65 (on a scale of 0-100) on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (calculated before Trump’s 2nd term). It’s fallen steadily since 2013 (score of 76), esp. during Trump’s 1st term.
Legendary actor Gene Hackman has died at the age of 95. Hackman, his wife Betsy Arakawa, and their dog were found dead at their home yesterday. “Foul play was not suspected.”
A Son Tries to Rescue His Dad From Conspiracy Theories
NPR’s Embedded podcast has a three-episode series from reporter Zach Mack about a year-long effort to convince his dad that all the conspiracy theories he (his dad) believes are bogus, in an attempt to save his family.
Reporter Zach Mack thinks his dad has gone all in on conspiracy theories, while his father thinks that Zach is the one being brainwashed.
In 2024, after the latest round of circular arguments, they decided to try something new, an attempt to pull each other out of the spell each of them thinks the other is under.
Can one family live in two realities?
You can listen to all three episodes at the NPR website for Embedded or wherever you get your podcasts. This abridged companion article covers the same ground as the podcast.
When I asked my dad whether he feels like the odd man out, he answered somberly, “It’s painful at times. It’s very sad for me.”
So what happens when your family and your friends don’t respect your beliefs? Perhaps you reach for a higher purpose — something existential.
This came up in a conversation with Charlie Safford, a researcher who designs therapeutic techniques for people who believe in far-right conspiracy theories. He believes that conspiracy theories are fundamentally emotional coping mechanisms.
“Even if your father doesn’t put the pieces together, there is some awakening of his own mortality that might be contributing to all of this,” he told me. “One of the ways that you come to terms is to look back and say, ‘Did my life have meaning?’”
See also:
- QAmom (“Sean Donnelly’s mother got sucked into the world of QAnon conspiracy theories, so he made a little video about it”)
- QAnon, Conspiracy Theories, and the Rise of Magical Thinking
- Living in a Conspiracy Nation
- What Can You Do About QAnon?
- George Monbiot interviews a conspiracy theorist
- My Dad, the Facebook Addict
- In Search of a Flat Earth
- Sacha Baron Cohen Says Tech Companies Built the “Greatest Propaganda Machine in History”
Oh and me in a tweet from July 2020:
The appeal of QAnon & conspiracy theories is simple: they turn politics & public health (boring things that happen *to* you) into something active and engaging: your own personal Da Vinci Code hunt for a secret truth.
(thx, tra)
Pedro Pascal responding to transphobia on social media: “I can’t think of anything more vile and small and pathetic than terrorizing the smallest, most vulnerable community of people who want nothing from you, except the right to exist.”
Eyes on the Prize III: We Who Believe in Freedom Cannot Rest 1977-2015
Whoa, HBO has made a third installment of Eyes on the Prize, the landmark series on the American Civil Rights Movement. The trailer is above and you can watch the six-part series on HBO or Max right now.
The first two series, which are amongst the best television ever aired, covered events from 1954–1965 (part one) and 1965–1985 (part two). Eyes on the Prize III covers significant events from 1977-2015, including:
- Community activists in the South Bronx and Philadelphia fighting for fair housing and healthcare during the Carter administration
- Reaganomics and the AIDS crisis
- How the criminal justice system affected the Black community from 1989-1995 in Washington DC and South Central Los Angeles (the LA Uprising).
- The Million Man March in 1995.
- The environmental movement (1982-2011)
- “The complexities of affirmative action policies and how a changing demographic landscape affected school desegregation in new ways.”
- The soaring police brutality of the Obama years.
- The birth of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Featured participants include Angela Davis, Al Sharpton, congressman Kweisi Mfume, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Al Gore, Black Lives Matter co-founders Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors, and dozens of other activists, scholars, and politicians.
In a review for the Hollywood Reporter, Daniel Fienberg writes:
Eyes on the Prize III is, as the title suggests, a formal sequel to Eyes on the Prize II, a six-hour exploration of the “aftermath” of the Civil Rights Movement that makes it very clear that the movement has never ended, just as its real concerns were never fully resolved. It’s an emotional, inspiring and righteously angry series of vignettes that looks backward, while very clearly intending to reflect upon and instigate conversations about our fraught current moment.
The series isn’t perfect, but it’s utterly essential, sometimes feeling disheartening for the immediacy of that necessity.
In a post on Bluesky, Fienberg says “nothing you could watch this week is better”.
Jeff Bezos declares opinions questioning “free markets” no longer welcome at The Washington Post. “Months after insisting he would never allow his personal interests to influence the Post’s content…” LOL, the underrepresented capitalist perspective…
A long but very interesting thread about how Trump & Russell Vought have started weaponizing the OMB to illegally impound funding appropriated by Congress (like he did in 2019, leading to his first impeachment).
Plan To Be More Positive Off To Shitty Fucking Start. “Well, I’m not even three days into giving optimism a shot, and it already sucks.” 🙃🫠😭
An unvaccinated child has died in the Texas measles outbreak. And before that, there had been only 2 measles deaths in the past 22 years: one in 2015 and one in 2003.
What do you do after you accidentally kill a child? This is wonderfully written….but also very hard to read.
The Great Resegregation
For the Atlantic, Adam Serwer writes about the Great Resegregation, the attempt by the Trump administration to reverse the civil rights movement.
If the Great Resegregation proves successful, it will restore an America past where racial and ethnic minorities were the occasional token presence in an otherwise white-dominated landscape. It would repeal the gains of the civil-rights era in their entirety. What its advocates want is not a restoration of explicit Jim Crow segregation—that would shatter the illusion that their own achievements are based in a color-blind meritocracy. They want an arrangement that perpetuates racial inequality indefinitely while retaining some plausible deniability, a rigged system that maintains a mirage of equal opportunity while maintaining an unofficial racial hierarchy. Like elections in authoritarian countries where the autocrat is always reelected in a landslide, they want a system in which they never risk losing but can still pretend they won fairly.
Like CRT before it, DEI has become conservatives’ go-to cover for their discriminatory actions:
The term DEI, frequently invoked by the Trump administration, functions as a smoke screen. It allows people to think that the Trump administration’s anti-DEI purge is about removing pointless corporate symbolism or sensitivity trainings. Although it is easy to find examples of DEI efforts that are ill-conceived or ill-applied, some conservatives have leveraged those criticisms to pursue a much broader agenda that is really about tearing anti-discrimination laws out at the roots, so that businesses and governments are free to extend or deny opportunities based on race, gender, and sexual orientation if they so choose.
Karen Attiah recently wrote about resegregation as well: The assault on DEI? It’s aimed at resegregation.
Across the United States, in government agencies and private corporations, leaders are scrambling to eliminate DEI programs. President Donald Trump is not only destroying any trace of diversity work within the government: He has ordered a review of federal contracts to identify any companies, nonprofits and foundations that do business with the government and keep their diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and he has warned that they could be the target of investigations.
Let’s call this what it really is: resegregation.
This Is Not a Drill: How Universities Can Save DEI. “This is not just about education. It is about who gets to participate in shaping the future of this country.”
Let This Radicalize You Workbook. “This workbook is intended as an extension of the book Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba.”
On the lessons of the rise & fall of the KKK. “Fascism always fails. It is destructive and it is awful and not everyone lives to see the other side, but it always, always fails. It takes work. It takes fighting back.”
The War on Cars debuts an ad that extolls the freedom of cycling. “Who’s really more free? People beholden to traffic, gas prices, and the high cost of owning and maintaining a car or those who are able to choose another way?”
Slow Start Today…
It turns out when you get a flat tire after hitting a pothole in the middle of nowhere late at night and you don’t have a spare1 in a state where everyone goes to bed at 9:15pm, you’re just kinda shit outta luck? Huge thanks to Caroline and her sleepy, confused dog for coming to retrieve me. 💞
So yeah anyway, things might be a little wonky around here today because I got very little sleep and I need to see about that flat. 🤷♂️
- I’m gonna head everyone off at the pass here and tell you that I had a portable air compressor and an emergency puncture kit with me that were both useless for this type of flat unfortunately.↩
This weekend, JD Vance is visiting a small VT town near where I live and plans to ski at Sugarbush. The locals are understandably pissed — both at our fascist VP and the local businesses extending their welcome to him. Protests to come, I’m sure.
Trump Administration Litigation Tracker. “The table below tracks legal challenges to the Trump administration’s executive orders, as well as cases on behalf of the Trump administration to enforce them.”
As Facebook Abandons Fact-Checking, It’s Also Offering Bonuses for Viral Content. “The upshot: a likely resurgence of incendiary false stories on Facebook, some of them funded by Meta.”
Actress Hunter Schafer’s gender marker was changed to “male” on her US passport due to Trump’s anti-trans passport rules. “This is real…and no one, no matter their circumstance, no matter how wealthy or white or pretty or whatever, is excluded.”
Inalienable Rights vs. Conditional Privileges
From @existennialmemes on Tumblr:
Listen, if a Bad President can come in and take away our rights and we’re dependent on a Good President replacing them in four years to give us back our rights, then we do not have any rights.
If politicians can take or distribute them, then they’re not “inalienable” and they’re not “rights.”
We don’t have inalienable rights we have conditional privileges, divvied out according to the whims of whoever currently holds the reins.
And if we want to have actual rights, then we must build a system in which no one has the power to take them away to begin with.
I am wondering what a system like that would actually look like… (via @halaylah.bsky.social)
AOC Shows How to Fight Back and Stand Strong. “AOC’s stand for her constituents, and her public refusal to be intimidated, are models of resistance that other Democrats would do well to imitate.”
Andor Season Two Trailer
I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to watch an earnest show about an ultimately successful revolution against a fascist government. It will be interesting to see in this political climate whether Disney+ is the place to watch such a thing.
This website is tracking how many people have lost their jobs because of the USAID Stop-Work Order (55K confirmed, 100K+ estimated globally) and documenting other effects (people dying around the world).
From Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, a list of instructions on “how to change your settings to make yourself less valuable to Meta”.
A collection of videos of people fighting back against the Trump administration, incl. Maine governor Janet Mills, former NFL player Chris Kluwe, and AOC. It’s good to see this stuff and to take inspiration from it.
Fired NPS, USFS, BLM Employees Share Their Stories
The Guardian profiled a number of people fired from the agencies that manage federal lands - the US Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, etc. — purged from their jobs by the Trump/Musk administration.
Victoria Winch, US Forest Service wilderness forestry technician, Flathead national forest, Spotted Bear ranger district, adjacent to Glacier national park, Montana:
People come on to these lands to hunt, to feed their families. People are allowed to get firewood. Outfitters, who are a big part of the local economy, use these trails.
But every single field person at Spotted Bear was terminated. Those trails won’t get cleared this year. And it takes less than one season for them to be totally impassable.
Nick Massey, USFS wilderness Ranger, Pisgah national forest, North Carolina:
We were very, very busy with public interaction, conversations, giving directions, educating. I would come up on folks quite often who were either lost or having some sort of emergency, and I’m also a member of two mountain rescue teams in the area.
I really loved seeing so many different people from different walks of life. Being able to be a part of that wilderness experience that people are having was really, truly magical.
Other fired federal land and National Park employees have been sharing their stories with media and on social media, highlighting how little these purges are about saving money and much more about all the services and benefits that Americans will be losing that we paid for. (Their stories also highlight the lies about employees not being fit for their jobs being used as the pretext to fire them. And the lack of due process. And, and, and…) Here are a few of those stories.
Brian Gibbs, Educational Park Ranger at Effigy Mounds National Monument:
I am a father, a loving husband, & dedicated civil servant.
I am an oath of office to defend and protect the constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic.
I am a work evaluation that reads “exceeds expectations.”
I am the “fat on the bone.”
I am being trimmed as the consequence of the popular vote
I am the United States flag raiser & folder
I am my son’s “Junior Ranger” idol
I am a college kid’s dream job
Today I lost my dream job as a permanent park ranger in the NPS. I’m still in shock, and completely devastated. I have dedicated my life to being a public servant, teacher, and advocate for places that we ALL cherish. I have saved lives and put my own life at risk to serve my community.
I honestly can’t imagine how the parks will operate without my position. I mean, they just can’t. I am the only EMT at my park and the first responder for any emergency. This is flat-out reckless.
The NY Times published an overview of the firings and their effect on federal land management, including interviews with purged employees:
Arianna Knight, 29, of Bozeman, Mont., the wilderness trails supervisor for the Yellowstone District of the Custer Gallatin National Forest, was let go on Feb. 14 along with more than 30 other Custer Gallatin employees. Ms. Knight said she and two workers under her supervision typically cleared 4,000 downed trees and logs from hundreds of miles of trails each year, often hiking and using hand tools for a week at a time in wilderness areas, where federal law prohibits motorized vehicles and mechanized tools like chain saws.
Now those trails won’t be cleared, Ms. Knight said, adding, “People are going to suffer.”
And:
While it may seem as if the cuts will mean fewer people trampling through the parks, allowing ecosystems to regenerate, some fear the opposite: that less oversight and control over huge crowds may damage the parks for seasons to come.
Adam Auerbach, 32, a former park ranger at Rocky Mountain National Park, said visitor numbers at the park has been climbing consistently for decades, to more than four million in 2023 from 2.6 million in 1990. The park has had to institute a timed-entry permit system to control the numbers.
With the new cuts, he said, “There will be fewer rangers on the ground to enforce regulations and fewer public educators to help the public even understand the regulations and the reasons for them in the first place.”
From a news release by the Association of National Park Rangers:
Rick Mossman, president of the Association of National Park Rangers (ANPR) said, “These actions will hurt visitors and the parks they travelled to see across the United States. If a visitor is involved in an automobile accident in Badlands National Park in South Dakota, or has their car broken into at a trailhead in Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, there will be a delay in the response by a ranger to investigate — or perhaps no response at all. If a visitor suffers a medical emergency while hiking in Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona, ranger response could be delayed.”
Mossman went on to say that visitors are likely to experience reduced hours or days — and even closures — of visitor centers and other public-use facilities. Ranger-led educational programs will be reduced or eliminated. Trash and litter may accumulate, and restrooms will be dirtier because of reduced maintenance and fewer custodial workers. There could even be complete closures of some parts of parks to protect visitors and those park resources.
From the National Parks Conservation Association:
In a phone interview, Moxley said she had to walk away from a year’s worth of research and work on wetland restoration, invasive plant documentation and funding efforts to save Harper Ferry’s remaining hemlock trees from a devastating invasive insect called a woolly adelgid.
Adding that she speaks on behalf of herself and not Harpers Ferry or the National Park Service, Moxley said parks — large and small — have behind-the-scenes staff who work to protect natural habitats, historic structures and museum objects and exhibits.
“Visitors don’t usually encounter us, but without us, there would not be sites to enjoy,” Moxley said. “Without staff, the National Park Service will be unable to carry out its 100+ year mission to leave the parks unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations. This is a mission my colleagues and I take seriously.”
Following a public uproar, the Trump administration is walking back some of the purges of National Park Service employees.
From Eater, What Should You Do if ICE Comes to Your Restaurant? “We spoke to legal experts about what restaurant owners and workers can do to protect themselves from immigration raids.”
We the Builders is a site run by current and former federal employees about how “DOGE” is destroying the government. “They are destroyers. We are the builders. We don’t work for DOGE. We have always worked for you.”
When Your Only Job Is to Cuddle. “On that day, I rocked him for three hours. My left shoulder ached, my arm went numb, but I would not let go, for he and I had work to do, trust to build.”
Running Pong in 240 Browser Tabs. “That’s 240 browser tabs in a tight 8x30 grid. And they’re running pong!”
Speaking of Amy Sherald, she’s got an exhibition at The Whitney that opens on April 9th! “This exhibition includes a billboard across from the Museum’s entrance on Gansevoort Street.”
Roxane Gay’s lovely obituary for her mother Nicole: It Was Always Going to be Too Soon. “She had an unwavering moral code, a profound inclination toward justice, and her standards were exacting.”
A Quick Anniversary Note
Today somehow marks 20 years of writing/editing/designing/producing kottke.org as my full-time job (and almost 27 years in total).1 Here’s part of what I wrote five years ago to mark the 15th anniversary:
It seemed like madness at the time — I’d quit my web design job a few months earlier in preparation, pro blogs existed (Gawker was on its 3rd editor) but very few were personal, general, and non-topical like mine, and I was attempting to fund it via a then-largely-unproven method: crowdfunding. As I wrote on Twitter the other day, attempting this is “still the most bonkers I-don’t-know-if-this-is-going-to-work thing I’ve ever done”.
Thanks to everyone for reading and for all the support over the years.
Severance: Music To Refine To
Apple TV+ is streaming an 8-hour remix of the Severance theme by ODESZA that is perfect music for your innie to refine macrodata to. The workday-long video is a 23-minute mix that’s looped and set to footage from the show. Legit adding this to the work music rotation. (via @margarita.bsky.social)
A Robert Frost poem from 1918, ironically entitled “Nothing New”, has been published for the first time in the New Yorker’s 100th anniversary issue.
Amy Sherald and Michelle Obama
I don’t think I’ve ever seen this photo before, of artist Amy Sherald and former First Lady Michelle Obama sharing a hug during a session for Sherald’s iconic portrait of Obama. What a different time that was, huh?
“Egyptologists have discovered the first tomb of a pharaoh since Tutankhamun’s was uncovered over a century ago.”
The Sutro Tower in 3D
This is an amazingly realistic 3D model of San Francisco’s Sutro Tower that you can zoom, pan, fly through, and interact with. This model was made using a technique called Gaussian splatting; creator Vincent Woo explains:
This scan is made possible by recent advances in Gaussian Splatting. This is an emerging technology that lets us quickly create very detailed models just from photographs. For this model (or splat, as we call them), my friend Daylen and I flew our drones around Sutro Tower at a respectful distance for an afternoon until we had collected a few thousand photographs.
I then aligned these pictures in free software called RealityCapture. Alignment is the process that teaches the computer that a bunch of points in different images all actually correspond with the same point in real life. Then I used another piece of free software called gsplat to produce the 3D model itself.
The model looks amazing…I can’t believe it’s just stitched-together photos. (via @biddul.ph)
Craig Mod on how “leave no trace” and “pack it in, pack it out” is not just for campers and backpackers in Japan. “The Japanese way is the correct way. Be an adult. Own your garbage.”
Here’s what it’s like watching all 24 hours of Christian Marclay’s The Clock at MoMA. “Although I’m literally sitting in a clock, time is meaningless. One hour flies by and the next is like spending an afternoon at the DMV.”
ANXIETY: Doechii Raps Over Gotye’s Somebody That I Used To Know (2019)
I can already tell this is going to be my favorite thing of the day: Doechii singing and rapping about anxiety over Gotye’s Somebody That I Used To Know from 2019. If you didn’t know she could sing, well you do now.
If my math is right, Doechii was 21 in this video, living in NYC, vlogging about going to thrift stores (on her old YouTube channel that only has a little over 9,000 subscribers), and working hard on her music. I think it paid off?
P.S. This video from 2015 of Doechii in high school singing Do You Want to Build a Snowman? with her friends is super sweet.
Betty White is getting a stamp from the USPS that commemorates her “warmth, wit and charisma”. The first-day-of-issue event is being held at the LA Zoo on March 27 and is open to the public (RSVP info here).
I saw Paddington in Peru last weekend and so it’s been difficult to take Ben Whishaw seriously as a hitman in Black Doves.
Edith Zimmerman imagines books written by fairy tale and Disney princesses in their 40s, incl. “A Whole New World: Life With Bifocals” by Jasmine & “Where’s That Sea Witch When You Need Her? Turning Back Into a Mermaid Once the Kids Are Grown” by Ariel.
Reflections on 25 years of Interconnected. Big congratulations to Matt Webb on his blogging silver jubilee. His is one of the most active & creative minds on the internet.
Wind It Back
Hi. I’ve gotten a few notes recently about the shift in direction here at KDO, so I wanted to quickly point back to this post from a few weeks ago that explains what’s going on with the site:
As you might have noticed (and if my inbox is any indication, you have), I have pivoted to posting almost exclusively about the coup happening in the United States right now. My focus will be on this crisis for the foreseeable future. I don’t yet know to what extent other things will make it back into the mix. I still very much believe that we need art and beauty and laughter and distraction and all of that, but I also believe very strongly that this situation is too important and potentially dangerous to ignore.
And again, no hard feelings if that’s not what you’re here for and you need to step away or cancel your membership. Thank you to those of you who have written in with support, including folks who work for the government or for companies & organizations who are already being affected by the purges and illegal funding cuts. Hearing that my efforts here are useful in some way keeps me going.
That said, we’re doing Foolishness Friday again today. I miss this place as a source of creativity, a chronicle of the best that humanity is capable of, and somewhere folks can come to have a bit of a laugh. I don’t know if this is going to be a weekly thing or if some of this is going to be working its way back into the site on a regular basis — I guess we’ll find out together!
Anyway, how are things going with you all? I’ve grown tired of winter. We have so much snow here…last weekend it took me an hour and 15 min to shovel a path to my car and then to dig the car out. I’m reading Timothy Ryback’s book about Hitler’s rise to power (no reason), watching Black Doves on Amazon, and playing a lot of Fortnite (I think the new season is out soon/today?). This weekend, I’m hoping to spend some time with my daughter and going wild ice skating again.
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