What's Good: May 21, 2021

Good kids, a mad city, and cicada fungus.

May 21, 2021

Hello, good morning, happy Friday. It has been kind of a whirlwind week! Shortly after I posted the newsletter last week, my Peloton was delivered. And then on Tuesday I got woken up by a call that the sectional I bought last month would be delivered Thursday, a full month earlier than the earliest projected delivery date. It’s here, I love it. And the weather will be, allegedly, extremely nice this weekend! So, I am having some fully-vaccinated friends over, and I am quite looking forward to it.

Also this week we have a lot of fucking content to cover (don’t miss the addendums either), so let’s just get into it. (Weekly Minecraft post.)

Election-Girl: Into the Markey-verse1

I remember, vividly, what it was like to be into politics when I was 16. It was 2009, social media was still very new, conceptually, and if you were Extremely Online you maybe got your politics from Something Awful or Reddit or 4Chan. Twitter wasn’t really a force in politics yet, and getting good information about politics was, believe it or not, far more difficult than it is now. Sure, you’ve got misinformation now, so it’s also easier to get bad information about politics, but there should be little dispute that our online presences have become increasingly intertwined with the political arena.

The other thing about being 16 in 2009 was that it was easy to feel like nobody really gave a shit about your opinions, because they mostly didn’t. Teenagers were mostly disorganized, the youth vote for Obama was fairly strong but did not result in any kind of lasting movement, and any organization that did exist was mostly at the behest of the parties or the candidates, and it was mostly insular. (Again, we’re talking about the organizing of teenagers - I know there was some more open organizing of adults.)

If you are 16 in 2021, you have access to political information, and platforms, and organizing tools. You have a voice, and you can use it, and you can do so in a way that will require people to listen to you. Personally, I think that fucking rules. And, specifically, it’s stories like this that make me hopeful for the future:

The effect of this attack, he said, was lightning-fast and pervasive. The morning after he announced his candidacy on Twitter, he showed up at his local barbershop and, while staring at himself in the mirror, overheard a customer describing his views as white supremacist.
“I’m thinking, ‘Man, politics is dirty,’” recalled Mr. Depelteau. He rushed home to fire back at his critic, a sharp-edged progressive who had dug up some of Mr. Depelteau’s old social media posts and was recirculating them online. But that, he discovered, was a big mistake.
“I didn’t know how old she was,” he explained. “I just knew she was a prominent person.”
That is how he became aware of Calla Walsh, a leader in the group of activists known here as the Markeyverse. Ms. Walsh, a 16-year-old high school junior, has many of the attributes of Generation Z: She likes to refer to people (like the president) as “bestie.” She occasionally gets called away from political events to babysit her little brother. She is slightly in the doghouse, parent-wise, for getting a C+ in precalculus.

Fit for duty

Do you think you could get away with pranking the military? I don’t think I could, which is why I find this story so delightful:

A group of more than 100 retired generals and admirals who have accused President Joe Biden of being a communist have been pranked by a faux flag officer going by the nom de guerre “Rear Adm. Jack Meehoff.”
If you don’t get the joke, just say the name “Jack Meehoff” aloud. That’s right. You understand now.
Earlier this month, the group Flag Officers 4 America posted an open letter that repeated lies spread by former President Donald Trump and the elected leaders who support his claims that the FBI and Supreme Court ignored “election irregularities” in 2020.

Picking scabs

Amazon is evil, part whatever:

Testimony that Amazon.com Inc. had access to a mailbox installed for workers to vote in a recent union election could prompt the National Labor Relations Board to overturn the results, according to the agency’s former chair.
During an NLRB hearing on Friday, employee Kevin Jackson said Amazon security guards used keys to open the mailbox, which was located near the entrance of the facility in Bessemer, Alabama.
The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, which lost the election last month, has accused Amazon of having the mailbox installed so it could spy on workers. Even just the impression of election surveillance by an employer can influence the vote’s outcome, so the hearing is focusing largely on what workers witnessed during the election.

I am not a labor attorney, but it seems to me that there is a mountain of evidence that Amazon illegally interfered with the Bessemer election. Probably nothing will happen. It fucking sucks. This newsletter supports unions and you should too.

Elsewhere: “an earnestly conducted, data-driven vetting process gave way to what search team members saw as ‘the arbitrary personal preferences of senior executives.’” Sounds about right.

Minority investors

Finance bros are heralding this as good and cool, I am not so sure:

Fidelity Investments Inc. plans to open the door to a new generation of investors who will be able to trade stocks even before they learn how to drive or head to college.
Fidelity said Tuesday it will issue debit cards and offer investing and savings accounts to 13- to 17-year-olds whose parents or guardians also invest with the firm. The accounts will let teens buy and sell U.S. stocks, Fidelity mutual funds and many exchange-traded funds.
Similar to how it works for adults, the service won’t charge account fees or commissions for online trading.

Three weeks ago I shared the story of the Robinhood trader who took his own life because of a bad trade. I cannot imagine how you can be a finance executive following the news of all the self-harm surrounding amateur traders getting taken to the cleaners and thinking “actually, what we need is to expose an even more vulnerable population to that kind of risk.” That seems bad and evil, to me.

Bound by wild desire

Speaking of young people and capitalism:

It’s noon in Los Angeles toward the end of the Plague Year, and I’m lounging on the patio of a swanky three-floor mansion, watching a scrum of teenage boys perform trending TikTok dances. Arranged in a tidy delta formation near the jacuzzi and pool, the five boys smile into the glare of a ring light, at the center of which is affixed a smartphone recording their moves. These boys possess a teenybopper cuteness and, because they’re between the ages of eighteen and twenty, they have noisomely strong metabolisms and thus go shirtless pretty much all of the time, displaying either the ectomorphic thinness of trees or greyhounds or, in one boy’s case especially, the sharply delineated musculature of a really big insect. They bite their lower lips, and their expressions are—I’m sorry, there’s no other way to describe them—precoital.

If you only read one story from this newsletter this week, make it this one.

Abortion is healthcare, period

Just a heads up if you’re not closely following Supreme Court news - now that the conservatives have a 6-3 majority, shit is about to get very fucked:

The Supreme Court’s decision Monday to hear a case about a Mississippi law that would ban most abortions after 15 weeks could end up weakening or even overturning Roe v. Wade. Depending on the ruling, legal abortion access could effectively end for those living in much of the American South and Midwest, especially those who are poor, according to an analysis updated this week.
In more than half of states, though, legal abortion access would be unchanged, according to the analysis, a version of which we first covered in 2019. (We've updated our reporting along with the analysis.)
“A post-Roe United States isn’t one in which abortion isn’t legal at all,” Caitlin Knowles Myers, an economist at Middlebury College and a co-author of the research, said in our earlier report. She obtained and analyzed the new data for The New York Times recently. “It’s one in which there’s tremendous inequality in abortion access.”
Today there is at least one abortion clinic in every state, and most women of childbearing age live within an hour’s drive or so of one, the analysis found. If Roe were overturned, abortion would be likely to quickly become illegal in 22 states. Forty-one percent of women of childbearing age would see the nearest abortion clinic close, and the average distance they would have to travel to reach one would be 279 miles, up from 35 miles now.

This newsletter supports abortion rights for everyone, everywhere, no questions asked. Conservatives are moral cowards. The cruelty is the point. You know the drill.

Away down south in the land of traitors

This is a “clap harder if you want Tinkerbell to live” kind of story. The south is absolutely chock full of people who support a defeated and traitorous history, as I’m sure you all know. But it’s not just that - many of their stories are downright lies:

Most of the people who come to Blandford Cemetery, in Petersburg, Virginia, come for the windows—masterpieces of Tiffany glass in the cemetery’s deconsecrated church. One morning before the pandemic, I took a tour of the church along with two other visitors and our tour guide, Ken. When my eyes adjusted to the hazy darkness inside, I could see that in each window stood a saint, surrounded by dazzling bursts of blues and greens and violets. Below these explosions of color were words that I couldn’t quite make out. I stepped closer to one of the windows, and the language became clearer. Beneath the saint was an inscription honoring the men “who died for the Confederacy.”

The last of us

Self-explanatory lede here:

After 17 years underground, the Brood X periodical cicadas are slowly emerging in 15 states across the East Coast and Midwest.
They'll shed their skins and spend four to six weeks mating before the females lay eggs and they all die.
But some of them are getting wilder in their short lives above ground.
A fungus called Massospora, which can produce compounds of cathinone — an amphetamine — infects a small number of them and makes them lose control.
The fungus takes over their bodies, causing them to lose their lower abdomen and genitals. And it pushes their mating into hyperdrive.