This is funny. And sad.
NY Times, 11 Jul 2026 (though in today’s print paper): Non-Disclosure: In Roswell, New U.F.O. Docs Are a Declassified Bummer [gift link]
Subtitled: Roswell’s annual U.F.O. festival was supposed to be full of triumphant “told you so’s” after the Trump administration declassified its alien files. Instead, apparently, the coverup continues.
Long essay.
The Atlantic, Yair Lapid, today: American Loneliness, subtitled “It’s not an epidemic—it’s an immune system.”
He begins:
Driving on I-79 south from Pittsburgh toward Charlottesville, I started composing this birthday card in my head—a love letter to America on its 250th birthday. The hills of Pennsylvania were blanketed in glittering white snow from which bare-armed trees rose like the locals: lean, weathered, lined and stained like the earth. In a frozen sales lot beside the road, 50 John Deere tractors stood in formation, their booms raised toward the sky like eaglets waiting to be fed. At the crest of one hill, someone had planted an old shipping container painted with large letters: TRUMP. I drew closer, and more words appeared: GUNS. LIFE. JESUS. LOVE.
The writer talks about making random car trips a couple times a year. He gives examples. This is what caught my eye: Continue reading
So what is this?
NY Times, The Morning newsletter, Melissa Kirsch, today: Gravitational Pull, subtitled: “We think and dream and fuss and project entire worlds into existence. Meanwhile, the earth’s orbit continues and the sun goes on shining.”
Rethinking again the categories of posts I do here, while working on a new set of overview pages to supplement or replace my decade-old Provisional Conclusions. I tend to collect links about reality illiteracy (e.g. flat-earthers) and tribalistic morality (conservative yearning to retreat to a simpler past), but also about modernity and secularism, and about reality.
Let’s do a couple three on the last theme. But I only have a few minutes…
Here’s one that explores the idea of scale. A key component of ‘reality illiteracy’ is that humans evolved in an ancient environment where, over hundreds of thousands of years, human nature developed intuitions at local scales. We’re intuitive about distances of a few miles or down to an inch; we’re intuitive about time scales from moments to a generation. But the real world is vastly greater, in all dimensions, as humans have been able to deduce from the evidence of the physical world around us.
Here’s an example. We think of things as deep, or high, without really being aware of relative depth or height.
XKCD, from a couple days ago: Holes
Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, yesterday: Dale Partridge Calls For The Return Of ‘European Christian Colonization Of African Nations’
For the last several weeks, far-right Christian nationalist pastor Dale Partridge has been preaching on the Curse of Ham, a controversial theological theory long used to justify slavery and racism.
Originating in Genesis 9, the theory posits that black people were perpetually cursed by God to serve and be ruled by white people because Ham, one of the sons of Noah, looked upon his father when he was passed out drunk and naked in his tent.
Partridge claimed that “the African peoples … and some of the people from India” are the modern-day descendants of Ham and that they have been assigned by God to be ruled over and dependent upon whites, Europeans, Asians, Jews, and Arabs, who are allegedly the descendants of Ham’s brothers, Shem and Japheth.
Things that generations take for granted can change and be gone.
The Atlantic, Rose Horowitch, today: The End of Reading Is Here, subtitled: Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history. [gift link]
The article begins by recalling the Library of Alexandria.
Continue reading
So what is this about? Anything new here? This issue has been discussed before.
Slate, Jill Filipovic, yesterday: We Need More Good Men, subtitled: Conservatives often lay the blame for declining fertility at women’s feet. They’re wrong.
The writer begins with a personal anecdote about her decision, married and 39 and living in a small upstate New York town, not to have a child. Continue reading
Anything more about the 250th? Or about Trump? Of course there is!
Robert Reich, today: Why Is He Using the Communist Trump Card?, subtitled “He’s run out of other cards.”
(The image is of an anti-communist comic book published in 1947.)
Trump has run out of cards to play in the midterm elections, which is why he’s now talking about the “communist menace.”
Subtitled: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity
(Hachette, 2020, 468pp, including 225pp of resources, acknowledgements, appendices, further reading, notes, bibliography, and index.)
Here is book about existential risks, a topic on which I have several books, though this one and a couple other recent ones address the subject in the context of Effective Altruism. That is, part of EA would be to decide how to direct resources to avoid future calamities, with the usual cost/benefit considerations. Ord, along with MacAskill and Singer and many others, were mentioned in the Rutger Bregman book I read recently (review here). This one seems more specifically focused on risks.
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Key Points
Last night, the DC fireworks being delayed, and the SF fireworks obscured, we were left watching Trump’s July 4th speech.
The fireworks shot off the Golden Gate Bridge were yet again shrouded by Pacific fog, as they are almost every year, from our viewpoint in the Oakland hills. (Actually, the SF fireworks are usually shot off from the Marina area; this was only the third time in history that the Golden Gate Bridge was shut down for a couple of hours, for this reason.)
We thought we might walk down to a prime viewing site, on a street below us, but by 9:15 it was clear that the fog would block all views. So we just sat at home and watched TV. At the same time, while there’s no official fireworks in Oakland, there have always been dozens or hundreds of local, likely illegal, fireworks, seen from our vantage out along the flats of Oakland.
As for Trump’s speech.
