System response

"No, it's the children who are wrong"

Les Escoumins, Québec, Canada

1. I heard about Nancy Reddy’s essay “Making Space for Doing Nothing Helps my Artistic Practice,” via the poet Keith Leonard, who’s quoted in the essay. In the essay, Reddy discusses Jenny Odell’s two books, How to Do Nothing and Saving Time, and the trap of productivity. She also talks about how time and attention, for writers, “are the most basic materials of our art.”

2. This week former Texas lt. Governor Ben Barnes revealed that republicans worked to delay the release of hostages during the Iran hostage crisis in order to sabotage Carter’s reelection in 1980.

3. Protests and strikes are escalating across France after the pension age was raised. Large protests have included blocking traffic and ferries, shutting down a port, bonfires, and burning an effigy of Macron. Julian Akil Rose, an organizer from Atlanta, tweeted “If folks are looking at France like “why don’t we protest like that,” feel free to consider the fact that our police forces are standing armies.” In January, a protestor in Atlanta, Georgia, was shot 14 times by police. An autopsy revealed the protestor was sitting cross-legged with their hands up when killed.

4. There continues to be a lot of weird and terrifying shit going on in Florida.

5. In “BookTok is Good, Actually: On the Undersung Joys of a Vast and Multifarious Platform,” Leigh Stein explains the sectors of TikTok devoted to readers and a love of reading. (I also enjoyed reading the comments, which include reasonable, measured responses such as: “This is pure misinformation. Booktok is a cancer.”)

6. For The Atlantic, Katherine J. Wu explores what tattoos are doing to our immune systems, including a fascinating dive into how ink gums up in macrophages.

7. I have a new poem in the recently released Ocean issue of Ecotone. The poem was partially inspired by an NPR article from 2018 about the elusive red handfish and the difficulty of data collection. The poem is currently available to read online here.

Thanks for reading,

Kate