"He starts way back at the very beginning—Episode 164, on the Velvet Underground, for instance, opens with John Cage going door to door in Santa Monica..."

"... offering to sell housewives lessons in music and art appreciation. Hickey plays no interviews—it’s just his research, painstakingly arranged to make a point. At first, these essays were of manageable length—half an hour for Episode 4, discussing 'Choo Choo Ch’Boogie,' by Louis Jordan. ('In the nineteen-forties and early fifties, the train still meant freedom, still meant escape, and even once that had vanished from people’s minds it was still enshrined in the chug of the backbeat, in the choo choo ch’boogie.') But the transcript of even that episode is four thousand words long, which, multiplied by five hundred, would give you two million words of content, and would best Gibbon by half a million. (Winston Churchill’s six-volume history of the Second World War clocks in at around 1.25 million words; the Bible barely hits three quarters of a million.) And, in any event, Hickey’s ability to control his material has begun to gloriously unravel as he has proceeded. A recent episode—No. 165—is devoted to 'Dark Star,' by the Grateful Dead, and it clocks in at well over four hours and 38,458 words. At this pace, Hickey will eclipse every literary project in history; the current plan is to reach the five hundredth song sometime late in this decade, but that presupposes he can keep writing what amounts to a book every fortnight or so. We shall see."

Writes Bill McKibben, in "A Music Podcast Unlike Any Other/Andrew Hickey has embarked on a heroic and wild effort to tell the history of rock music in five hundred songs" (The New Yorker). Much more at the link.

I'm thrilled to see a New Yorker article on "The History of Rock Music in 500 Songs," which I've been recommending to you since September 2021, with this post. There are 8 more posts of mine, just click on the "Andrew Hickey" tag.

"For the whole time I’ve worked on this, it’s been like nuclear fusion—always a few decades away no matter when you ask."

"But there are going to be events in the next decade or so that will sharpen people’s minds. When temperatures approach and then cross 1.5 centigrade, that will be a non-arbitrary moment. That’s the first globally agreed climate target we’re on course to break. Unless we find a way to remove carbon in quantities not imaginable presently, this would be the only way to stop or reverse rapidly rising temperature.... The idea is outlandish." 

Said climate researcher Andy Parker, quoted in "Dimming the Sun to Cool the Planet Is a Desperate Idea, Yet We’re Inching Toward It/The scientists who study solar geoengineering don’t want anyone to try it. But climate inaction is making it more likely," by Bill McKibben (The New Yorker).

Strange gesture suggested — "If Biden were willing to grasp the nettle..."

I'm just glancing at the New Yorker... erstwhile home of Jeffrey Toobin, who made a strange gesture the other day — grasping and getting stung. I think I would have laughed at that headline in any case — "Joe Biden and the Possibility of a Remarkable Presidency/If Biden were willing to grasp the nettle, the sting would be real, but history would judge him well for trying." 

 

What is this stinging nettle? 

"[W]hen Hurricane Irene devastated my state, Vermont, in 2011, people turned out within hours, bringing tools from backhoes to brooms."

"They mucked out basements and rebuilt driveways, and they kept coming back for weeks, until the job was done. They did it for strangers, mostly—although they didn’t remain strangers for long. But, with coronavirus, none of that is possible. There’s little way to be of use except to disappear inside your home, so that you can’t infect anyone. Indeed, even the places we gather for solace are increasingly off limits. Churches.... Schools....  sports...  We should use the quiet of these suddenly uncrowded days to think a little about how much we’ve allowed social isolation to grow in our society, even without illness as an excuse.... If we pay attention, we may value more fully the moment we’re released from our detention, and we may even make some changes in our lives as a result. It will be a relief, above all, when we’re allowed to get back to caring for one another, which is what socially evolved primates do best."

From "With the Coronavirus, Hell Is No Other People" by Bill McKibben (in The New Yorker).

There is the forced isolation of social distancing, and there is the isolation we choose for ourselves. During the forced isolation, we can reflect on the good and the bad of our chosen isolation. I don't agree with the implication that because we are "socially evolved primates," the meaning of life is to socialize. There is great value in solitude and in life within marriage and within a family. But this is a time to reflect on what really matters, and in addition to the trouble and pain, we may experience deeper benefits.

As we protect ourselves and others through this isolation, we should be thinking about how we can help. We can't help but going about ministering to others. And we need to help by doing what we can to avoid being among those who need medical care or cause anyone else to need medical care. Don't be part of the physical problem. But we can also help by using this time not to agonize and stir each other up but to preserve and refine our mind and our soul.

"The kids whom Feinstein was talking to are going to be dealing with climate chaos for the rest of their lives.... This means that youth carry the moral authority here..."

"... and, at the very least, should be treated with the solicitousness due a generation that older ones have managed to screw over. Feinstein’s condescension, though it’s less jarring in the video of the full encounter, which also shows gracious moments—including one when she offers a young person an internship—echoed that of Nancy Pelosi, from earlier this month, when the Speaker of the House talked about 'the green dream, or whatever they call it. Nobody knows what it is, but they’re for it, right?'... The irony is that, when Feinstein said she’s been 'doing this for thirty years,' she described the precise time period during which we could have acted... If we’d moved thirty years ago, moderate steps of the kind that Feinstein proposes would have been enough to change our trajectory.... Given the failure of old-style politics on this issue, it is no surprise that youth are taking the initiative. Ocasio-Cortez is the youngest congresswoman in American history. The Green New Deal was hatched by the Sunrise Movement, which is composed of recent college graduates. And they are ancient compared with the sixteen-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, who was in Paris last week to watch thousands of French youths join her in spreading the Friday for Future strikes, in which students skip school to demonstrate for climate action."

From "The Hard Lessons of Dianne Feinstein’s Encounter with the Young Green New Deal Activists" by Bill McKibben (in The New Yorker).

There's a mysterious drop in malaria-carrying mosquitoes in some parts of Africa, and some say maybe it's because of climate change.

Oh, no! Global warming is bad bad bad! Maybe it's causing Hurricane Irene!

“Irene’s got a middle name, and it’s Global Warming,” environmental activist Bill McKibben wrote Thursday night in The Daily Beast. He argued that this year’s hot Atlantic Ocean temperatures and active spree of hurricanes — coupled with droughts, floods and melting sea ice elsewhere on the globe — are “what climate change looks like in its early stages.”

But what if it's doing something fabulously good?

Patterns of rainfall in these years were more chaotic in these regions of Tanzania and often fell outside the rainy season. The scientists say this may have disturbed the natural cycle of mosquito development.

But the lead author of the study, Professor Dan Meyrowitsch from the University of Copenhagen, says that he is not convinced that it is just the changing climate.

"It could be partly due to this chaotic rainfall, but personally I don't think it can explain such a dramatic decline in mosquitoes, to the extent we can say that the malaria mosquitoes are almost eradicated in these communities."

Global warming — or, as they say, "climate change" (for maximum coverage of any possible condition) — is probably not the cause of the hurricane or the big mosquito drop-off, but those who like to wring their hands about the connection between global warming climate change and anything bad that happens must apply the same kind of reasoning to anything good that happens. Otherwise they won't be able to maintain the pretense that they're all about the science.

"Just remember, amid all these new calls for civility, no one on the left thought this ad was over the top — even though it advocated murdering global warming skeptics."

Bryan Preston (via Instapundit).

I remember a lot of criticism of that ad though, and I'm skeptical of the assertion that "no one on the left thought this ad was over the top." Anyone who liked the ad, I assume, would say that because it's so exaggerated, everyone understands that it's a joke. If that's true, then it's wrong to assert that it "advocated murdering" anybody. But I think some people on the left did criticize it:

[The ad] elicited a furious reaction from some environmentalists. Bill McKibben of 350.org felt moved to write on the popular Climate Progress blog that the film was "noxious":

The climate skeptics can crow. It's the kind of stupidity that hurts our side, reinforcing in people's minds a series of preconceived notions, not the least of which is that we're out-of-control and out of touch — not to mention off the wall, and also with completely misplaced sense of humor.

Under a blogpost titled 'That 10:10 video... not in my name', Rob Hopkins of the Transition Town movement for more sustainble communities, wrote:

I have to say I am shocked, and appalled by this, and I'm on their side!...
More at the link.

Nevertheless, it's still fair to say that there are a lot of extreme and uncivil graphic depictions and statements that come from the left. The existence of that ad shows that it was believed — by people with the resources to make a very high-quality short film — that they could reach the general public with communication like that. I don't think a right-wing group with a serious intention to reach ordinary people would concoct such a thing.

Maybe I'm wrong about that. I don't like to see the power of violence exploited to sell political messages, but it is an easy way to get people's attention. That ad became viral — and I'm carrying the virus now — because it was so extreme. At some point, extremism backfires, but it's natural for the manufacturers of advertising to push it as far as they can.

What are the other ways to get our attention? Sex? It's hard to get that just right in a political setting. You'll irritate too many women before you do anything interesting. So, you can see why they go for violence. It's a psychological button just waiting to be pushed, and they've got to push something.

Try making ads that sell candidates or policies using the "civility" theme. I mean... try convincing your political opponents that they ought to try to sell their candidates and policies using the "civility" theme.