Art Culture Politics
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Orwell’s Roses
“It is only very rarely, when I make a definitive mental effort, that I connect this coal with that far-off labour in the mines,” wrote George Orwell of shoveling coal into the fire to keep warm in London. He wrote this The Road to Wigan Pier, his reporting on the horrific condition in northern England’s…
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A Sunday Sermon
Recently, a respected botanist we know and used to admire was photographed and quoted at a fascist anti-vax march against public health measures here in NYC. He wore a large yellow star on his clothes in a brazen attempt to align himself with Jewish victims of Christian European anti-Semitism over the centuries, but particularly in…
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Orwellian Toads
“But Persephone, like the toads, always rises from the dead at about the same moment.” George Orwell’s “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad,” first published in April, 1946, is a short introduction to spring. Good ol’ Bufo bufo; here’s one I saw in Sweden. Times change, we heat up the atmosphere, and the blackthorn was…
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Marsh
“Some enthusiastic entomologist will, perhaps, by and by discover that insects and worms are as essential as the larger organisms to the proper working of the great terraqueous machine […] The silkworm and the bee need no apologist; a gallnut produced by the puncture of an insect on a Syrian oak is a necessary ingredient…
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Journal of the Pandemic Year Just Passed But Hardly Over
The city is littered with used masks. I’ve worn a bandana or mask outside our apartment since March to protect myself, my loved ones, and my neighbors. I’ve also masked as a mark of community and solidarity. Alas, we have fuckers in our very building who don’t share this concern, so we have been forced…
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The Last Month
It’s one month before the election. The fascist Republican Party, uniting oligarchy, fundamentalism, and white supremacy, is attempting to lock its minority rule on the future. Here are some resources for defending our democracy. Voting early guide Get out the vote. Protect our vote. New Yorkers can register to vote until October 9th. Early voting…
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On Politics
I’m fascinated by the Republican-fascist rhetoric that attempts to paint Joe Biden, a loyal representative of corporate America over decades of service in the Senate, as a “Marxist” puppet and tool of “dark forces” like George Soros, a favored target of anti-Semitic conspiracy-thinking. (If “thinking” isn’t too strong a word.) As a person of the…
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Black Lives Matter
The very fact that it has to be said, for years, for decades, for fucking centuries. The very fact that some whites shriek “all lives matter” in response, as they also demand the right to risk infecting the people who do their hair, and miss the point entirely. It’s hard to put together a post…
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The Central Park Effect
The Rio Grande Valley is one of the great birding places in the U.S. Think Roger Tory Peterson’s “South Texas Specialities” in the back of his Eastern/Central field guide. It’s also the fraught border between two intimately connected nations. A few years ago, before Trump’s even more white supremacist approach to anti-immigration politics than the…
Backyard and Beyond 