Behind the Bastards

She was somewhat Afrofuturist, but she was also very much... A lot of her stories really blended. A lot of people have a lot of different backgrounds and histories.

The book is set in California, and they are struggling with pervasive water shortages, and masses of poor people will do basically anything to live to see another day.

She really gets you invested in the setting and in the character early on.

She really emphasizes that change is neither good or bad, but it is potential.

Her shit's all over the library.

She really gets you invested in the setting and in the character early on.

Because, I mean, to be fair, she knew America.

And so I think that as she's writing of this horrific future, she's drawing a lot from her horrific past, or rather America's horrific past, of which her history is a part.

And she has to figure out a way out of it, which she comes to believe in so much that in her own way, she becomes stuck in that new thing.

In her speech to the UN in 2001, that would be like five years before she passed away. I think she died in, like I said, 2006.

All these ideas helped transform a rich farming nation into one beset by permanent food shortages.

On the collectives, farmers could use neither chemical fertilizers nor the hybrid corn that America was using to boost yields by 30 percent. Lysenko didn't believe you should use fertilizers either at all.

Furthermore, the fields were left fallow most of the time. And when the crops were sown, the vernalized wheat did not sprout. Nor did Lysenko's frost-resistant wheat and rye seeds or the potatoes grown in summer or the sugar beets planted in the hot plains of Central Asia. They all rotted.

Another hero of the Lysenko school was the son of an American engineer, Facile Williams, who became a professor at the Moscow Agricultural Academy. Williams thought that capitalism and American-style commercial farming based on the application of chemical fertilizers were taking the world to the brink of catastrophe.

All these ideas helped transform a rich farming nation into one beset by permanent food shortages.

On the collectives, farmers could use neither chemical fertilizers nor the hybrid corn that America was using to boost yields by 30 percent.

Furthermore, their fields were left fallow most of the time. And when the crops were sown, the vernalized wheat did not sprout. Nor did Lysenko's frost resistant wheat and rye seeds or the potatoes grown in summer or the sugar beets planted in the hot plains of Central Asia. They all rotted.

Another hero of the Lysenko school was the son of an American engineer, Facile Williams, who became a professor at the Moscow Agricultural Academy. Williams thought that capitalism and American style commercial farming based on the application of chemical fertilizers were taking the world to the brink of catastrophe.

Unfortunately, ACAB includes the person who tried to get me to read Catcher in the Rye.

Catcher in the Rye was a good book.

Unfortunately. ACAB includes the person who tried to get me to read Catcher in the Rye.

Okay yeah it's definitely on my list That is a long one that's less of a read I think most People are gonna be less of a read in one sweep than like Maybe for over the course of the year like gradually yeah

Yeah it's very very dense and very long but very readable Like not to say that it's like dense and the I got to like Slug through this textbook it's extremely readable it's Just like there's a lot in there and you're gonna want to Pause and think about shit yeah so so the thought of Everything is this is the last book David Graeber ever Wrote and it's David Wengro also they wrote it together And it's it's this basically an attempt to reassemble I Guess early human history and but the thing that they're Doing that that's that's really unique is that so they They're David Wengro's as archaeologist David Graeber's An anthropologist and they're going you know so they spend a Whole bunch of time going through the sort of early Archaeological records and what they find basically is that None of the things that you see make any sense at all unless You're willing to unless you're willing to accept that people You know twenty thirty fifty thousand years ago and then even You know people like four or five thousand years ago were as Smart as we are and have the have the capacity to recreate And redesign their own political arrangements Self-consciously which is something that doesn't sound that Weird except everyone assumes that they can't and that you Know everyone that's you know one of the other things they're Really sort of heavily doing here is trying to break this Idea that you know human society sort of evolves in these This linear progression you know you start out with like These small hunter-gatherer bands and they get more complex And more complex and eventually they develop farming Farming developed the state and the answer is just you know When you look through the actual archaeological record none of This is true you have you know they have a lot of very Interesting sort of historical examples of this looking at Like what looked like incredibly democratic and egalitarian Cities and then you know on the outskirts of those cities you Have the emergence of the states among things that look like States among barbarian groups and they have and what I think Is maybe the most interesting part of it is that they're Concerned with the question of human freedom but freedom in a Way that like we don't like freedom on a level fundamental Enough that like we can barely imagine it so they have these Things called the three freedoms which is one of them is so The first one is the freedom to just move to leave and to It's a freedom to you know be in a place and then leave and Know that you will be cared for when you get to wherever You're going yeah though these kind of networks that were set Up to travel that have like the descendant of those ideas is Sort of the way if you've ever if you've ever spent time in The Middle East not in like hotels and shit like it's that Same idea that kind of deeper than religious belief about The importance of that has gotten added to like Islam and To a number of other faiths in the area like but this idea That like there's nothing more sacred than taking care of A guest like and how that that existed to enable kind of a Sort of cross cultural contract and contact and like Recreational travel in a way that I think is would be deeply Surprising to people who just sort of assumed everyone before A certain age died within five miles of their house or was Yeah, you know yeah part of a band of wandering hunters Yeah, and it's interesting in that like like you like we in a Lot of ways travel less than early people did because you Know that people would just leave and people you know people Just didn't like their families and so they'd walk like 500 Miles and they'd come to a place and they'd be accepted and Yeah, yeah, it's you know the second one that I think The one that is the the one we have the least capacity I think To understand which is just the ability to disobey orders To just like anyone tells you do something you could just tell Them no at any time and it's not only can you just tell them No like the social expectation is that you is that you don't Act is that it's it's not just that you have the ability to Do it it's that someone giving you an order is treated as Weird and this is the thing that you know it But like this This is the thing this is a freedom that used to exist and No longer does and was sort of destroy in various ways along With sort of the third freedom they talk about which is about How people have the right to sort of just shift and recreate Their social political arrangements And yeah, and people used to do this sort of common people Yeah, a lot of the what their early part of the book is about Is about how societies use there's a lot of societies that Would you know flip seasonally right so what like one half of The year you have this just like absolute dictatorship the Other half of the year it's like well it looks like a hippie Commune and you know the fact that we do not like the fact That like we we just don't like it cannot conceive of Completely shifting our political arrangements like that Is it's also there's this fascinating discussion of like The the fact that and this is kind of counter to what I Always I had always kind of thought that like once you As a group groups of people when they when they made the Decision to like move to agriculture and like set Founded cities that it was kind of a one-way street you know You just keep going along that road and there's actually Multiple examples of people's like this is what happened to The British Isles or at least in what is currently Great Britain people's like developing agriculture settling Down and then being like oh you know what fuck this and like Going back like that that short it should happen all the time And and one of the things that's really kind of optimistic About the vision of the sweep of human history in the dawn Of everything is the idea that like no we don't have to keep Like it's not inevitable that we just keep doing more of what We're doing now all throughout history large groups of people Have been like it's time to let's do something else let's Make a radical change like it happens and it's probably more Normal to do that than it is to do what we've been doing and We've been doing it for a long time and I think that's Probably more normal to do that than it is to do what we've Been doing and when you I think one of the things that kind Of one of the things that leads to the sense of inevitability Of development along the lines that we have is the fact that We only really have about 10,000 years of even vaguely Reliable like data or vaguely comprehensive data on human History but people have been around for tens of thousands Of years longer than that and for most of it we've been a lot More experimental than we are now and it's it's always Possible for people to try different things in a way that Maybe seems impossible to us now but but necessarily won't For our kids

That is a long one that's less of a read I think most People are gonna be less of a read in one sweep than like Maybe for over the course of the year like gradually yeah Yeah it's very very dense and very long but very readable Like not to say that it's like dense and the I got to like Slug through this textbook it's extremely readable it's Just like there's a lot in there and you're gonna want to Pause and think about shit yeah so so the thought of Everything is this is the last book David Graeber ever Wrote and it's David Wengro also they wrote it together And it's it's this basically an attempt to reassemble I Guess early human history and but the thing that they're Doing that that's that's really unique is that so they They're David Wengro's as archaeologist David Graeber's An anthropologist and they're going you know so they spend a Whole bunch of time going through the sort of early Archaeological records and what they find basically is that None of the things that you see make any sense at all unless You're willing to unless you're willing to accept that people You know twenty thirty fifty thousand years ago and then even You know people like four or five thousand years ago were as Smart as we are and have the have the capacity to recreate And redesign their own political arrangements Self-consciously which is something that doesn't sound that Weird except everyone assumes that they can't and that you Know everyone that's you know one of the other things they're Really sort of heavily doing here is trying to break this Idea that you know human society sort of evolves in these This linear progression you know you start out with like These small hunter-gatherer bands and they get more complex And more complex and eventually they develop farming Farming developed the state and the answer is just you know When you look through the actual archaeological record none of This is true you have you know they have a lot of very Interesting sort of historical examples of this looking at Like what looked like incredibly democratic and egalitarian Cities and then you know on the outskirts of those cities you Have the emergence of the states among things that look like States among barbarian groups and they have and what I think Is maybe the most interesting part of it is that they're Concerned with the question of human freedom but freedom in a Way that like we don't like freedom on a level fundamental Enough that like we can barely imagine it so they have these Things called the three freedoms which is one of them is so The first one is the freedom to just move to leave and to It's a freedom to you know be in a place and then leave and Know that you will be cared for when you get to wherever You're going yeah though these kind of networks that were set Up to travel that have like the descendant of those ideas is Sort of the way if you've ever if you've ever spent time in The Middle East not in like hotels and shit like it's that Same idea that kind of deeper than religious belief about The importance of that has gotten added to like Islam and To a number of other faiths in the area like but this idea That like there's nothing more sacred than taking care of A guest like and how that that existed to enable kind of a Sort of cross cultural contract and contact and like Recreational travel in a way that I think is would be deeply Surprising to people who just sort of assumed everyone before A certain age died within five miles of their house or was Yeah, you know yeah part of a band of wandering hunters Yeah, and it's interesting in that like like you like we in a Lot of ways travel less than early people did because you Know that people would just leave and people you know people Just didn't like their families and so they'd walk like 500 Miles and they'd come to a place and they'd be accepted and Yeah, yeah, it's you know the second one that I think The one that is the the one we have the least capacity I think To understand which is just the ability to disobey orders To just like anyone tells you do something you could just tell Them no at any time and it's not only can you just tell them No like the social expectation is that you is that you don't Act is that it's it's not just that you have the ability to Do it it's that someone giving you an order is treated as Weird and this is the thing that you know it But like this This is the thing this is a freedom that used to exist and No longer does and was sort of destroy in various ways along With sort of the third freedom they talk about which is about How people have the right to sort of just shift and recreate Their social political arrangements And yeah, and people used to do this sort of common people Yeah, a lot of the what their early part of the book is about Is about how societies use there's a lot of societies that Would you know flip seasonally right so what like one half of The year you have this just like absolute dictatorship the Other half of the year it's like well it looks like a hippie Commune and you know the fact that we do not like the fact That like we we just don't like it cannot conceive of Completely shifting our political arrangements like that Is it's also there's this fascinating discussion of like The the fact that and this is kind of counter to what I Always I had always kind of thought that like once you As a group groups of people when they when they made the Decision to like move to agriculture and like set Founded cities that it was kind of a one-way street you know You just keep going along that road and there's actually Multiple examples of people's like this is what happened to The British Isles or at least in what is currently Great Britain people's like developing agriculture settling Down and then being like oh you know what fuck this and like Going back like that that short it should happen all the time And and one of the things that's really kind of optimistic About the vision of the sweep of human history in the dawn Of everything is the idea that like no we don't have to keep Like it's not inevitable that we just keep doing more of what We're doing now all throughout history large groups of people Have been like it's time to let's do something else let's Make a radical change like it happens and it's probably more Normal to do that than it is to do what we've been doing and We've been doing it for a long time and I think that's Probably more normal to do that than it is to do what we've Been doing and when you I think one of the things that kind Of one of the things that leads to the sense of inevitability Of development along the lines that we have is the fact that We only really have about 10,000 years of even vaguely Reliable like data or vaguely comprehensive data on human History but people have been around for tens of thousands Of years longer than that and for most of it we've been a lot More experimental than we are now and it's it's always Possible for people to try different things in a way that Maybe seems impossible to us now but but necessarily won't For our kids.

Starting in like 2021, kind of late, you know, early pandemic period, I started chatting with a good friend of mine, Cormac McCarthy, about bringing one of his books to life in the way he'd always intended, which was by having me read Blood Meridian in my award-winning Boston accent in its entirety.

We finished, you know, kind of our discussions right before he tragically passed earlier this year.

Sophie and I recorded the whole thing. We were about to release it as a surprise, but we've, as a result of the writers and now the actors strike, in solidarity decided to delete the entirety of Boston Blood Meridian.

I think like Blood Meridian is, is challenging in some ways that aren't different.

Cause like so much of reading Blood Meridian is like, what the fuck did he mean by that?

Like what was the action? Like what was going on here?

Blood Meridian is a lot, is, is much more closer to like a normal novel than, than Finnegan's Wake is though.

But like they're both interesting.

A witty German social Democrat of the 1870s called the postal service an example of the socialist economic system.

To organize the whole national economy on the lines of the postal service, so that technicians, foremen, bookkeepers, as well as all officials that receive no salaries higher than a workman's wage, all under the control and leadership of the armed proletariat.

This is our immediate aim.

A witty German social Democrat of the 1870s called the postal service an example of the socialist economic system. This is very true. At present, the postal service is a business organized along the lines of a state capital of monopoly, imperialism, this whole thing, but like imperialism is making everything also this. But so to organize the whole national economy on the lines of the postal service, so that technicians, foremen, bookkeepers, as well as all officials that receive no salaries higher than a workman's wage, all under the control and leadership of the armed proletariat. This is our immediate aim.

I think I've ever read called Hitler's willing executioners.

He hits the Nazis with their own race science.

I think I've ever read called Hitler's willing executioners.

He hits the Nazis with their own race science.

Zuck loved the classics, The Odyssey and the like.

I can't believe that Hitler's literally, like, reciting from Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals, and like, at the same time-- Dude, you know how strong elephants are? They don't eat meat. They're just like me! I'm like an elephant!

I can't believe that Hitler's literally, like, reciting from Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals, and like, at the same time-- Dude, you know how strong elephants are? They don't eat meat. They're just like me! I'm like an elephant!

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in a democratic society Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government Which is the true ruling power of our country?

We are governed our minds are molded our tastes formed and our ideas suggested largely by men We have never heard of it is they who pull the wires that control the public mind

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in a democratic society

Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government Which is the true ruling power of our country?

We are governed our minds are molded our tastes formed and our ideas suggested largely by men We have never heard of it is they who pull the wires that control the public mind

But his greatest contribution, to me at least and to most people, is his book, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

He says that humankind's central problem is how we affirm our identity as human beings.

Oppressors, they tend to treat people as objects to be possessed. They see freedom as threatening. And in turn, oppressed people end up becoming alienated from each other through oppression and begin to see the oppressors as something to strive towards.

He talks about the banking model of education that traditional pedagogy espouses because it treats the student as like this bank, this empty vessel to be filled with knowledge.

He, the teacher, talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalized and predictable, or else he expounds upon a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students.

But his greatest contribution, to me at least and to most people, is his book, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

In the book, he sort of explores a detailed Marxist class analysis in the relationship between like the colonizer and colonized, the oppressor and the oppressed.

he, the teacher, talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalized and predictable, or else he expounds upon a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students.

His task is to fill the students with the contents of his narration, contents which are detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give them significance.

Words are emptied of their concreteness and become a hollow, alienated and alienating verbosity.

According to Haudenosaunee mythology, as recounted by Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braden's Sweetgrass,

the mother goddess Sky Woman came to the land as an immigrant from the heavens, but became indigenous by listening to the land, learning from other species to understand how to live on it, giving as she received, and caring for the earth and its keepers for the sake

of those who would inherit it when she passed on. In their view, the land is identity. It is ancestral connection. It is pharmacy, it is library, and it is home, the source of all that sustains, and the sacred

ground upon which those would observe their responsibility to the world.

According to Haudenosaunee mythology, as recounted by Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiden's Sweetgrass,

The mother goddess Sky Woman came to the land as an immigrant from the heavens, but became indigenous by listening to the land, learning from other species to understand how to live on it, giving as she received, and caring for the earth and its keepers for the sake of those who would inherit it when she passed on.

As a young man, Roosevelt had been ridiculed for his high voice, tight pants and fancy clothing, and derided as a weakling and a pumpkin lily. But Roosevelt wanted power, determined to reinvent himself.

He went west, rechristening himself the cowboy of the Dakotas. It was on the frontier that a new masculinity would be forged, a place where white men brought order to savagery, where men served as armed protectors and providers, where violence achieved a greater good.

If the Wild West could mold the exquisite Mr. Roosevelt into a rugged, masculine specimen, perhaps it could do the same for American manhood generally.

When the war came to a close, no amount of patriotism could obscure the fact that it had been fought at great cost and with little apparent gain. Roosevelt's model of masculinity had been found wanting.

The war, it seemed, had presented Americans with the horror of having myths about blood and fire and mutilation and blindness come true.

As a young man, Roosevelt had been ridiculed for his high voice, tight pants and fancy clothing, and derided as a weakling and a pumpkin lily.

But Roosevelt wanted power, determined to reinvent himself. He went west, rechristening himself the cowboy of the Dakotas.

It was on the frontier that a new masculinity would be forged, a place where white men brought order to savagery, where men served as armed protectors and providers, where violence achieved a greater good.

If the Wild West could mold the exquisite Mr. Roosevelt into a rugged, masculine specimen, perhaps it could do the same for American manhood generally.

When the war came to a close, no amount of patriotism could obscure the fact that it had been fought at great cost and with little apparent gain.

Barbara Tuckman, who is a historian, who wrote a book called "The Guns Of August," that's a history of World War One, that describes kind of the machinery that got set up and marched everybody into that situation exploding like sleepwalkers, right. Like this system has been set up and the people are kind of so unwilling to see where it's leading that everything's just kind of marching with a sense of inevitability towards a worse and a worse end point.

The Guns Of August is a history of World War I...that describes kind of the machinery that got set up and marched everybody into that situation exploding like sleepwalkers right...like this system has been set up and the people are kind of so unwilling to see where it's leading that everything's just kind of marching with a with a sense of inevitability towards a worse and a worse end point and that's that's what scares me most about this.

My favorite was The Velveteen Rabbit.

My favorite was The Velveteen Rabbit.

Author Adrian Raffel, who wrote the book Thinking Inside the Box, Adventures with Crosswords of the Puzzling People Who Can't Live Without Them, wrote in the Paris Review in 2020, quote, If you're a piece of artificial intelligence software, you might have a hard time solving a crossword.

You'd have to separate the puzzle into two separate strands of problems to tackle the issue. How to figure out what a clue is saying, or rather, what it's precisely not saying, and how to fill the letters in the grid in the way that makes the most sense.

Crosswords force the brain to cross wires and solve both these problems at once, balancing the visual spatial part of the brain with the logic run part of the brain.

This is part of the reason why even the best crossword solving AI in the world isn't yet better than the best human. The AI can fill in the grid pretty quickly, but in terms of resolving that grid through riddle logic, humans are still a step ahead.

The most innovative aspect of the crossword is that, through braiding together tasks the mind already wanted to do, it created an itch we didn't know we had. And yet, we've always been primed to solve them.

Author Adrian Raffel, who wrote the book Thinking Inside the Box Adventures with Crosswords of the Puzzling People Who Can't Live Without Them, wrote in the Paris Review in 2020, quote, If you're a piece of artificial intelligence software, you might have a hard time solving a crossword.

Crosswords force the brain to cross wires and solve both these problems at once, balancing the visual spatial part of the brain with the logic run part of the brain.

The most innovative aspect of the crossword is that, through braiding together tasks the mind already wanted to do, it created an itch we didn't know we had. And yet, we've always been primed to solve them.

In her 1861 book, Victorian Enigmas, author Charlotte Eliza Capple attributes the Windsor Enigma puzzle to Queen Victoria.

In her 1861 book, Victorian Enigmas, author Charlotte Eliza Capple attributes the Windsor Enigma puzzle to Queen Victoria.

From a passage from The Private Life of the Queen by quote one of Her Majesty's servants written in 1897, quote, Her Majesty Queen Victoria takes delight in a clever riddle or rebus.

From a passage from The Private Life of the Queen by quote one of Her Majesty's servants written in 1897, quote, Her Majesty Queen Victoria takes delight in a clever riddle or rebus.

In Charles Dobson's or Lewis Carroll's 1880 book, Doublets, a Word Puzzle, there are examples of this, where he says to quote, drive pig into stye, raise four to five, make wheat into bread.

In Charles Doxon's or Lewis Carroll's 1880 book Doublets, A Word Puzzle, there are examples of this, where he says to quote drive pig into stye, raise four to five, make wheat into bread.

It's by Isa Blumi called Destroying Yemen, which is about like a lot of the factors that start the war in Yemen.

There's a very good book about this. It's by Isa Blumi called Destroying Yemen, which is about, like, a lot of the factors that start the war in Yemen.