July 12 2022 Journal + Rachel Swirsky's January Fifteenth mini-review (Patreon)

Sorry for running late. There's been some difficult personal stuff going on behind the scenes, and reporting has kept me busy.

Genealogy research has been productive. This has been my summer project, and I've cracked some decades-long mysteries that you may never hear about. Currently I'm entrenched in the history of Czech Cleveland, which I'll probably put into some future writing. John T. Sabol and Lisa A. Alzo's Cleveland Czechs is a terrific source.

This week I read Rachel Swirsky's novella January Fifteenth, a near-future sci-fi novella about a post-climate disaster United States where UBI has been implemented. The book follows four characters from different cultural and economic backgrounds as they collect their UBI checks in one day.

It's a good read. Swirsky avoids proselytizing about UBI, instead showing a United States which is noticeably but only moderately changed by the policy. It's a fun read, if depressing in spots, taking a look at our imminent doomed future and going "how can I be honest about this without being cynical?"

The final Mirkwood post should be out on Friday. It's different from the others: part psychogeography, part literary criticism, part journalism. Nowhere and Back Again hasn't gotten personal very often, so you can look forward to that happening this week.

And now, the headlines:

The great Peter Brook passed earlier this month. He was a giant of 20th and 21st century theater, transforming Shakespeare in a way few artists have managed. Brook is largely remembered for his trailblazing experimental production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, but check out his cinematic work too, King Lear and Meetings with Remarkable Men.

ProPublica reports that Public Idaho university Boise State is caving to CRT-scaremongering, blocking an Indigenous doctoral student from delivering a speech about Boise valley tribes and settler colonialism.

My friend Chris O'Leary on his Patreon recently unpacked the myths of David Bowie's Top of the Pops performance of "Starman," showing how collective memory can lie and form powerful stories. You should really back Chris, who's doing better work than ever now.

Speaking of Cleveland, Ohio lawmakers want schools to teach kids both sides of the Holocaust. 

The people of Sri Lanka have ousted the Rajapaksas. Praise be.

Ohio's up to some bullshit at the moment, like arresting a trans man for getting assaulted.

VFX artists are outing Marvel as their worst client ever, demanding constant labor on short deadlines.

The Gothamist reports the closure of half of New York City's PCR test sites as the city's Covid levels rise exorbitantly.

Abigail Nussbaum just tore into Steven Moffat's atrocious The Time Traveler's Wife, a show that has the line "you don't admit that a monster was the first person inside you when you're talking to the man it should have been."

The ACLU's Hector Villagra has written a solid piece for The Nation on how the Supreme Court's recent decisions are rapidly transforming the United States into a Christian theocracy.