The Militia and the Mole. “A wilderness survival trainer spent years undercover, climbing the ranks of right-wing militias. He didn’t tell police or the FBI. He didn’t tell his family or friends.” He returned with a trove of documents.
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Entries for January 2025
DOOM: The Gallery Experience
Have you ever wanted to browse art from the Metropolitan Museum in a first-person shooter interface? You are in luck because DOOM: The Gallery Experience exists.
DOOM: The Gallery Experience was created as an art piece designed to parody the wonderfully pretentious world of gallery openings.
In this experience, you will be able to walk around and appreciate some fine art while sipping some wine and enjoying the complimentary hors d’oeuvres in the beautifully renovated and re-imagined E1M1 of id Software’s DOOM (1993).
They sourced the art from the Met’s Open Access collection and in the game you can click through to see each piece on the Met’s website. Here’s a video of the gameplay:
And of course people are speedrunning it. (via waxy.org)
My friends Matt & Kay have written a book about travelling to all 14 National Women’s Soccer League stadiums in the US, documenting the highs and lows of each stadium. This is extremely niche and I love it.
Do You Enjoy This Amazing Newsletter? Here’s How You Can Help.
Every month, my friend Jodi Ettenberg sends out one of the best links roundups around, her *free* Curious About Everything newsletter. This month’s issue came out yesterday and there’s really so much good stuff in there — Spotify’s ghost artists, biofarming animals for live-saving chemicals, the history of risotto, and a look at how the Vatican picks saints.
This issue also includes a sad update on her health:
After two years of slowly making progress on my ‘uptime’ from my spinal CSF leak, I slid in the shower on Christmas Day when, unknown to me, my body scrub tipped over and oil dripped down onto the floor. The shower was very slippery even with shower slippers on — they’re no match for body scrub, apparently. I felt my the tearing at my leak site as my leg shot forward, and my heart sunk.
It’s now January, and many symptoms that had disappeared have come rushing back. The screeching tinnitus, the nausea, dizziness, and shakiness upright, the ‘brain sag’ at the back of my head yanking my skull downward the minute I stand, and the searing pain at my leak sites. Before I slid, I was averaging 7-8 non-consecutive hours upright a day. Now, I’m back to being almost entirely bedbound.
You can read more about Jodi’s disability in a piece she wrote for CNN.
As I mentioned above, the Curious About Everything (CAE) newsletter is completely free and Jodi relies on financial support from her Patreon members to fund her activities, which includes not only the newsletter but her work as the president of board of directors of the Spinal CSF Leak Foundation (I’m assuming not a paid position) and other projects as well (you might know her from Legal Nomads). And this is where you come in. If you enjoy Jodi’s newsletter, consider supporting her on Patreon today.
Jodi acknowledges that until she gets better, the CAE newsletter might be a lot shorter or might not be sent out at all. To which you might say, well why should I support now when I might not get anything from it? My response to that is that we need to stop thinking transactionally and in the short term about our support of the things and people we love. Jodi is a freelance creator, writer, artist, and activist and if we want her to be in the best possible position to produce work that enriches our lives and helps other people for years to come, we need to support her now. We’re her social safety net — our investment in times of rebuilding, regeneration, and rebirth can make a huge difference. Here’s that link to Jodi’s Patreon again if you’d like to help out. Thank you.
Director Steven Soderbergh’s annual list of everything he watched and read in 2024. (I would love to read little media diet-style reviews of all this from him.)
“I will never understand how Jan. 6 was not the end of Trump. So, what happened? The blame largely lies with Republican political leaders.” Remember: Mitch McConnell plainly stated that Trump incited the attack…then voted not to impeach him.
The Truth About January 6th
Today is the fourth anniversary of the attack on Congress and attempted coup of the United States government and the man who incited it will be sworn in as President of the United States later this month. On this dark day, it is important to remember what happened and why, so I went back and looked at some of what I posted in the aftermath of the attack. Here are a few of the videos, articles, and thoughts worth a second look.
This video investigation by the NY Times (YouTube video) lays out what happened that day very clearly:
Most of the videos we analyzed were filmed by the rioters. By carefully listening to the unfiltered chatter within the crowd, we found a clear feedback loop between President Trump and his supporters.
As Mr. Trump spoke near the White House, supporters who had already gathered at the Capitol building hoping to disrupt the certification responded. Hearing his message to “walk down to the Capitol,” they interpreted it as the president sending reinforcements. “There’s about a million people on their way now,” we heard a man in the crowd say, as Mr. Trump’s speech played from a loudspeaker.
Another excellent video of Jan 6 footage was taken by Luke Mogelson, a war reporter for The New Yorker:
Mogelson’s accompanying article, Among the Insurrectionists, is a must-read:
The America Firsters and other invaders fanned out in search of lawmakers, breaking into offices and revelling in their own astounding impunity. “Nancy, I’m ho-ome! ” a man taunted, mimicking Jack Nicholson’s character in “The Shining.” Someone else yelled, “1776 — it’s now or never.” Around this time, Trump tweeted, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country. … USA demands the truth!” Twenty minutes later, Ashli Babbitt, a thirty-five-year-old woman from California, was fatally shot while climbing through a barricaded door that led to the Speaker’s lobby in the House chamber, where representatives were sheltering. The congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, later said that she’d had a “close encounter” with rioters during which she thought she “was going to die.” Earlier that morning, another representative, Lauren Boebert — a newly elected Republican, from Colorado, who has praised QAnon and promised to wear her Glock in the Capitol — had tweeted, “Today is 1776.”
Importantly, Mogelson’s piece connects Jan 6th to other right-wing militant actions incited by Republicans and Trump:
In April, in response to Whitmer’s aggressive public-health measures, Trump had tweeted, “Liberate Michigan!” Two weeks later, heavily armed militia members entered the state capitol, terrifying lawmakers.
In an Instagram video and a Buzzfeed news interview a few days after the insurrection attempt, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was quoted as saying:
Wednesday was an extremely traumatizing event. And it was not an exaggeration to say that many members of the House were nearly assassinated.
And:
The Democrat said that she worried during the storming of the Capitol about other members of Congress knowing her location and did not feel safe going to the same secure location as her colleagues because of members who believe in the QAnon collective delusion and “frankly, white supremacist members of Congress … who I know and who I have felt would disclose my location,” saying she was concerned there were colleagues “who would create opportunities to allow me to be hurt, kidnapped, etc.” She said that she “didn’t feel safe around other members of Congress.”
AOC’s comments and concerns highlight something I’ve been trying to be clear about in my own writing here: this was not an attack on the Capitol Building. This was an attack on Congress, the United States Government, and elected members of our government. It was a coup attempt. Can you imagine what the mob in those videos would have done had they found Nancy Pelosi? Kidnapping or a hostage situation at the very least, assassination in the worst case. Saying that this was an “attack on the Capitol” is such an anodyne way of describing what happened on January 6th that it’s misleading. Words matter and we should use the correct ones when describing this consequential event.
From the Washington Post, an account of the attack from the perspective of the DC police:
“We weren’t battling 50 or 60 rioters in this tunnel,” he said in the first public account from D.C. police officers who fought to protect the Capitol during last week’s siege. “We were battling 15,000 people. It looked like a medieval battle scene.”
Someone in the crowd grabbed Fanone’s helmet, pulled him to the ground and dragged him on his stomach down a set of steps. At around the same time, police said, the crowd pulled a second officer down the stairs. Police said that chaotic and violent scene was captured in a video that would later spread widely on the Internet.
Rioters swarmed, battering the officers with metal pipes peeled from scaffolding and a pole with an American flag attached, police said. Both were struck with stun guns. Fanone suffered a mild heart attack and drifted in and out of consciousness.
All the while, the mob was chanting “U.S.A.” over and over and over again.
“We got one! We got one!” Fanone said he heard rioters shout. “Kill him with his own gun!”
Here are two of those DC police officers speaking to CNN:
For This American Life, Emmanuel Felton interviewed “several Black Capitol Police officers in the days after the attack on the Capitol on January 6th to find out what it was like for them to face off with this mostly white mob”:
Emmanuel Felton: Have you ever been in a fight like that?
Officer Jones: No, not like that. No way. These people were deranged, and they were determined. I’ve played video games before. Well, you know, zombie games — Resident Evil, Call of Duty. And the zombies are just coming after you, and you’re just out there. I guess that’s what I could relate it to — Call of Duty zombies. And the further you go, the more and more zombies just coming. You’re just running, running, running. And they wouldn’t stop. You’re seeing they’re getting their heads cracked with these batons, and we’re spraying them, and they don’t care! It was insane.
Historian Heather Cox Richardson placed January 6th within the context of the history of right-wing terrorism in the US, setting it alongside Ruby Ridge, Waco, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the Bundys:
Right-wing terrorism in American has very deep roots, and those roots have grown since the 1990s as Republican rhetorical attacks on the federal government have fed them. The January 6 assault on the Capitol is not an aberration. It has been coming for a very long time.
Gigantic SUVs are a public health threat. Why don’t we treat them like one? “Like tobacco, its use can — and often does — kill innocent bystanders. I’m talking about oversized cars.”
Clip is a “plug & play” unit that upgrades almost any bike to an e-bike. The “no-tools” gadget clips onto to the front forks of a bike and provides up to 12 miles of range.
I loved the first volume of this, so I’m pleased to see that David Whyte is back with Consolations II. “To become intimate is to become vulnerable not only to what I want and desire in my life, but to the fear I have of my desire being met.”
Male college enrollment could be dropping because of male flight. “Male flight describes a similar phenomenon when large numbers of females enter a profession, group, hobby or industry—the men leave. That industry is then devalued.”
Man-Made Structures Now Outweigh the Mass of the Living World
Biocubes is a visualization comparing the mass of the living world (biomass) to the mass that’s been generated by humans (technomass). From a piece in the Times about the visualization:
“The website enables many comparisons that, once seen, can no longer be unseen,” he said. For instance, humans outweigh wild animals 10 to 1, a fact that surprised Dr. Ménard. (“In my experience, most people expect the opposite.”) But we weigh only half as much as the livestock herds we maintain to eat. Perhaps more ominously, humans use 100 times their own mass in plastic.
Update: As noted in the comments and in my inbox, it should probably be “humans outweigh wild mammals 10 to 1”.
A list of advice for defeating the authoritarian threat. “Authoritarians want you to feel powerless because it makes their work easier. Courage, faith, and optimism are essential. Fascism feeds on cynicism and pessimism. Starve it.”
Depictions of children dying were rife in 19th century literature, mirroring high child mortality levels in real life. “People who want to dismantle a century of resolute public health measures, like vaccination, invite those horrors to return.”
An online-only conversation from the British Library with Lauren Groff about her novel Matrix, Marie de France, and “violence, sensuality, and religious ecstasy in the medieval world”. Jan 14, £10.
Fact-Checking the Spiciness of ‘Hot Ones’ Sauces
The team at Howtown closed out 2024 by investigating the spice level (i.e. the Scoville ratings) of the lineup of hot sauces on the popular YouTube interview series Hot Ones while also teaching us about how hot peppers evolved and how pepper spininess is measured. (Spoiler: the sauces are not as hot as advertised.)
Cheers to Adam Cole for Peter Pipering this particular passage:
By picking peppers, they could pinpoint the precise percentage of each patch that was pungent, and some patches were more pungent than others.
Perfect.
Huh, there’s going to be a Blade Runner 2099 TV series. It stars Michelle Yeoh & Hunter Schafer and will premiere at some point on Amazon Prime.
Say Nothing TV Series
Somehow I missed that Patrick Radden Keefe’s excellent book on The Troubles, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, has been turned into a 9-part TV series (now available on Hulu in the US & on Disney+ elsewhere).
Spanning four decades, the series opens with the shocking disappearance of Jean McConville, a single mother of ten who was abducted from her home in 1972 and never seen alive again.
Telling the story of various Irish Republican Army (IRA) members, Say Nothing explores the extremes some people will go to in the name of their beliefs, the way a deeply divided society can suddenly tip over into armed conflict, the long shadow of radical violence for all affected, and the emotional and psychological costs of a code of silence.
It’s gotten good reviews and has also attracted at least one lawsuit from one of the people depicted in it.
Veteran Republican Marian Price intends to sue Disney+ after she was depicted shooting Jean McConville in one of the most notorious murders of the Troubles, a law firm has said.
Mrs McConville was abducted, murdered and secretly buried by the IRA in 1972, becoming one of the disappeared.
Her body was eventually found more than 30 years later at a beach in County Louth in the Republic of Ireland.
Ms Price, 70, also known by her married name Marian McGlinchey, has denied any involvement.
The 20 Best Podcasts of 2024, including podcasts about the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, Stevie Wonder, the NYPD, and guns.
Last week, Alessandro Slebir rode one of the largest waves ever surfed, a 100-ft monster at Mavericks.
Embroidery Journaling
Since January 2020, Sophie O’Neill has been keeping an embroidery journal. Each day, she sews an “icon” to represent that day’s events and memories.
“I embroider an icon every day,” Sophie says. “So at the end of this year, I’ll have 366 icons.”
The 29-year-old has now embroidered more than 1,800 one-pence-coin-sized symbols to represent every stage of her life over the past five years.
A self-taught sewer, she picked up the craft in 2019 when looking for a new hobby.
But as for her embroidery journal, Sophie said: “I had just started a new job and I thought it would be a really cool way to track everything I learned throughout the year.”
Little did she know, several years later, she would have embroidered icons to document moving from California to Glasgow, starting her business and buying a house, among others.
O’Neill also keeps track of the books she reads by filling in an embroidered bookshelf. You can keep up with her activities on The Stir-Crazy Crafter and Instagram. If you’d like to try your hand at embroidery journaling, O’Neill sells a kit on Etsy.
Mapping Police Violence: “Police killed more people in 2024 than any year in more than a decade.” And: “Black people were 30% of those killed by police in 2024 despite being only 13% of the population.”
The top 10 videos shared by The Kid Should See This in 2024. Includes how wire photos worked in 1937 and “living in a tree for 3 weeks to film 10 million bats”.
Happy Public Domain Day!
Yesterday was Public Domain Day and Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain has the scoop on what works entered the public domain in the US on January 1, 2025. They include:
- William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
- Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
- Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
- Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (as serialized in Black Mask magazine)
- Agatha Christie, Seven Dials Mystery
- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (only the original German version, Briefe an einen jungen Dichter)
- A dozen more Mickey Mouse animations (including Mickey’s first talking appearance in The Karnival Kid)
- The Cocoanuts, directed by Robert Florey and Joseph Santley (the first Marx Brothers feature film)
- The Skeleton Dance, directed by Walt Disney and animated by Ub Iwerks (the first Silly Symphony short from Disney)
- Spite Marriage, directed by Edward Sedgwick and Buster Keaton (Keaton’s final silent feature)
- E. C. Segar, Popeye (in “Gobs of Work” from the Thimble Theatre comic strip)
- Hergé (Georges Remi), Tintin (in “Les Aventures de Tintin” from the magazine Le Petit Vingtième)
- Singin’ in the Rain, lyrics by Arthur Freed, music by Nacio Herb Brown
- Ain’t Misbehavin’, lyrics by Andy Paul Razaf, music by Thomas W. (“Fats”) Waller & Harry Brooks (from the musical Hot Chocolates)
- An American in Paris, George Gershwin
- Rhapsody in Blue, recorded by George Gershwin
The Internet Archive is hosting several of the newly sprung works, free for you to remix, reuse, misuse, and generally do whatever you would like with. Huzzah!
Oh, and here’s why the public domain matters:
The public domain is also a wellspring for creativity. You could think of it as the yin to copyright’s yang. Copyright law gives authors important rights that encourage creativity and distribution — this is a very good thing. But the United States Constitution requires that those rights last only for a “limited time,” so that when they expire, works go into the public domain, where future authors can legally build on the past — reimagining the books, making them into films, adapting the songs and movies. That’s a good thing too! It is part of copyright’s ecosystem. The point of copyright is to promote creativity, and the public domain plays a central role in doing so.
How does the public domain feed creativity? Here are just two examples from 2024. You may have enjoyed the film Wicked in 2024. Like many of its predecessors, it is based on L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz books, and it offers origin stories for the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good. From the literary realm, Percival Everett’s 2024 novel James reimagines Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, Huckleberry’s friend who is an escaped slave. The novel won the 2024 National Book Award and Kirkus Prize and was a finalist for the Booker Prize. As summed up by a New York Times review: “‘Huck Finn’ Is a Masterpiece. This Retelling Just Might Be, Too.” Mark Twain famously wanted copyright to last forever — if he had his wish, would his heirs have sued Everett? Thankfully, we did not have to find out, and Everett could publish James without such litigation.
Apple TV+ is going to be free this weekend for non-subscribers. You can stream Silo, Severance, Ted Lasso, Slow Horses, For All Mankind, etc. to your heart’s content.
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