In writing these newsletters, I often get to the end of one week wondering what I’ll be writing about next.
To clear my head before brainstorming about it, I headed out for a mineral and fossil show last Sunday, a kind of destination I hadn’t sought out in years.
A lifetime ago, when Emily was little, I remembered my own small collection of minerals and fossils, including several nearly round, fist-sized stones that I’d retrieved from a dry riverbed near my home as a kid. The plan was to supplement my treasures with those we’d discover together. So to kick-start our enthusiasm, I introduced Emily to my collection by slowly giving her its contents, one at a time, as our Advent calendar’s “daily door prize” for 25 days one December—although (I have to admit) revealing it with this kind of fanfare hardly unleashed the explosion of interest that I’d imagined.
It did make her more willing to go with me to gem and fossil shows however, and it was our occasional excursions that I was thinking about when I headed out last weekend.
As with all gatherings of (let’s call them) “enthusiasts,” we quickly discovered that the denizens of mineral and fossil shows are their own peculiar breed, and that dropping in on them “from the world outside” can provide its own kind of adventure. Oftentimes, the specimens on display seemed an afterthought for fellow-travelers to revel in their peculiarities in what must seem to them like a kind of secret garden.
(It’s the same, I’ve found, at tattoo or comic conventions, and even at car or dog or flower shows. These gatherings tend to congregate people who easily have as much in common as whatever it is that has ostensibly brought them together.)
And the crowd didn’t disappoint last Sunday. Many of them were rock hounds (mostly men) with their trademark hats, tee shirts and tool belts, or spiritualists (mostly women) in search of crystals, healing stones and the occasional dream catcher. A lot of the adults might also have been librarians “in real life,” interested in cataloguing and organizing different kinds of specimens full-time. (For example, when I bought a partially polished branch of petrified wood, the man behind the table made sure to ask: “Did you take the label” (which provided a description and county of origin): a question I'm never asked in more mainstream venues. A crowd like this practically revels in specificity and the higher order of things.
With a small pod of on-lookers, I got to see how you “open” (or not, as it turned out) a geode, which is another kind of round rock that may or may not have crystals or a molten kind of marbling inside. In this instance, the geode that everyone was watching merely kept shedding its outer casing as it got smaller and smaller "under pressure," much to the chagrin of the showman conducting the big reveal.
There were kids too, lots of them, who could have been me once, with dads or grandfathers or adopted uncles in tow. While enjoying their interest, I didn’t discover anything more to take home until (like a child) the raffle ticket I'd been given upon entering was called as “the hour’s next winner” and I got to pick another rock from the donations on proud display near the front door. “Oh, that’s a particularly nice mica crystal” the greeter exclaimed when I’d made my pick to the smiles and nods of the ladies who were manning the cashbox.
With two new specimens of my own in hand, I was almost ready to enter the coming week’s fire hose of “news” to possibly write about And by somewhere around Thursday I realized that “what stood out the most to me" were the next chapters of stories that I’d already begun in previous posts.
1. THE NEXT CHAPTER ON DEEP-FAKE IMAGES.
In a viral explosion last week, millions fell for this deep-fake of Pope Francis.
Another kind of enthusiast, who was reportedly in the thrall of some magic mushrooms, created this spiffy portrait of the aging pontiff in, what he said was, “a couple of hours,” posting it to viral rapture world-wide. I never thought it was real because this pope seems to care very little about “how he looks” (no Prada shoes for him!), but millions of others apparently thought he was really “stepping out” on the slopes here. (If you know what to look for, I'm told you can tell from close examination of, say, Francis’s ill-formed left hand or the poorly drawn figure on his cross that this image does not fully hang together.)
But as noted here a couple of weeks ago, ChatGPT (and its successors and rivals) are making the rapid creation of nearly perfect fabricated images both possible and harder to expose, with regulators in America (in particular) being slow to react to their deceits. Still, our governors, both here and abroad, got an additionalprod this week from a host of experts in artificial intelligence (including Elon Musk, of all people) who urged a 6-month moratorium on the introduction of any new AI-driven products (like the aforementioned “chat-bot”) until some guardrails can be put into place to protect us from their known and less-well-known harms.
The Pope Francis deep-fake is another chapter in a story begun here in two prior postings. The first—called Four Different Reactions to the Deep-Fake—was about how these image fabrication tools can be used to trick viewers or to stimulate their imaginations. (On the latter, I’m still in mild awe of the deeply-faked ad campaign promoting travel to the cooler-than-cool ”Icelandverse” that I discovered while writing this one.)
The other post not only resonates with the deep-fake phenomenon generally but also with news about Jimmy Carter, who (as you probably know) recently went into hospice care. What We See and Don’t See in a Disturbing Picture of the Carters, examined a clearly distorted but also highly manipulating image of Jimmy and Rosalynn and how nearly all viewers could see whatever they want to see in that image. If you want additional context for the Pope Francis chapter about deep-fakes, these posts can provide one.
2. THE NEXT CHAPTER ON MOBS ATTACKING SOMEBODY WHO WAS ONLY TRYING TO HELP.
The attacks on “our helpers” get more personal.
I was alarmed enough to write about this growing phenomenon when the school superintendent in Joplin Missouri was attacked by those who challenged his integrity after he attempted, with considerable success, to rebuild schools that had nearly been destroyed by deadly tornados in order to minimize community disruption and rekindle hope. This school administrator suffered debilitating health problems and was pushed to contemplate suicide by a merciless band of local detractors who challenged both his character and intentions. He now counsels former public servants like himself who were hounded out of office. That post was called: Turning On the Rescuers.
I wrote again about a suburban pastor in upstate New York who repeatedly attempted to maintain his congregation as it became more politically polarized, ultimately feeling abandoned by even his supporters and slipping into despondency because he could no longer fulfill his life-long mission of bringing people of faith together. That post was called Too Many Whose Jobs Aim to Hold Us Together Are Being Torn Apart, and today this former pastor provides a retreat for other pastors who suffer from "moral injuries" when their work has prevented them from acting in accordance with their most deeply-held beliefs.
These stories revealed the human costs that detractors can exact upon those “with a healing mindset” when they step up to do what needs to be done to serve their communities. They made me wonder where we'll end up as a people if capable and well-meaning individuals are no longer willing to lead in these ways out of concern for themselves and their families.
So this week, it was disheartening to read a New York Times story called: He Wanted to Unclog Cities, Now He’s Public Enemy No.1. It was about the academic who had proposed “the 15-minute city.” He offered a perspective to guide urban development which argues that “everything you need” should be no farther than 15 minutes from where you live and work for both personal convenience and environmental sustainability. “A terrific, non-controversial idea” you’d think—and the sort of proposal about improving the quality of life in our sprawling cities that we should be encouraging—but Carlos Morreno (who teaches at the Sorbonne in Paris) now finds himself “a poster child” for a kind of bureaucratic oppression:
- the 15-minute city is a ruse to ghetto-ize certain kinds of people in circumscribed areas, some argue;
- the 15-minute city unacceptably restricts people’s freedom of movement, effectively imprisoning them in the places where they live and work, others contend.
Of course, the fact that arguments like these from the Left (first) and the Right (second) are baseless hasn’t stopped them from being turned on this 64-year old in the span of little more that a week:
“He faced harassment in online forums and over email. He was accused without evidence of being an agent of an invisible totalitarian world government. He was likened to criminals and dictators.
“For the first time in his career, he started receiving death threats. People said they wished he and his family had been killed by drug lords, told him that ‘sooner or later your punishment will arrive’ and proposed that he be nailed into a coffin or run over by a cement roller.
“I wasn’t a researcher anymore, I was Pol Pot, Stalin, Hitler,’ Mr. Moreno said. ‘I have become, in one week, Public Enemy No. 1.’”
And to add some froth to the poison:
“A member of Britain’s Parliament said that 15-minute cities were ‘an international socialist concept’ that would ‘cost us our personal freedoms.’ QAnon supporters said the derailment of a train carrying hazardous chemicals in Ohio was an intentional move meant to push rural residents into 15-minute cities.
“‘Conspiracy-mongers have built a complete story: climate denialism, Covid-19, anti-vax, 5G controlling the brains of citizens, and the 15-minute city for introducing a perimeter for day-to-day life,’ Mr. Moreno said. ‘This storytelling is totally insane, totally irrational for us, but it makes sense for them.’”
As somebody with opinions who posts regularly on social media, who writes a newsletter like this one (in what I hope is a strong and clear voice), and who will one day be bringing out my book-length perspective on work and other things, the crazies were already on my mind every time “I put myself out there” or plan to. But I have to say, Moreno’s story brings “the stifling of ideas threat" even closer to home, and, it’s alarming, particularly when all you’re trying to do is offer something helpful that has a chance to rise or fall in what we used to call (somewhat benignly) “the marketplace of ideas.”
3. (BUT ON A MARKEDLY BRIGHTER NOTE) THE NEXT CHAPTER IN THIS STORY IS ABOUT THE DELIGHTFUL BOOST THAT THE NEW YORK TIMES GAVE TO A GROUND-BREAKING REPORT THAT'S AIMING TO STEER OUR FUTURE CONVERATIONS ABOUT BIODIVERSITY.
Cambridge University professor emeritus Partha Dasgupta.
The New York Times ran a short story this week that was teed-up by a funny, bold and timely video clip that the newspaper initially called “The Most Important Person You’ve Never Heard of Has the Answer to Everything” but that I now see has now been re-titled, for some unfathomable reason, as “[Actor] Alexander Scarsgard Explains the Answer to Everything (It Involves Doing Some Math.)”
Whatever it’s called (and that last bit about math is also not true) the video amusingly picks up where I left off in a post from two years ago called Economics Takes a Leading Role in the Biodiversity Story. It was about a kindly British thinker named Partha Dasgupta (“the most important person you never heard of”) and his world-shaking “Dasgupta Report.” The Times video, which is viewable here without interference from the newspaper’s paywall, is simply an engaging reminder that we all need to be paying attention to this man and his breath-taking proposals.
These were my observations about the Dasgupta Report and the ideas that animate it when it first came out.
“[The Report] wonders out loud—in a flight of real-world imagination—about what might happen if we treated Nature’s systems and productive capacity not as 'free' for the taking (as we still do almost everywhere today) but as 'economic assets' that we must start 'investing in' (like we invest in the homes where we live) and managing, as we would any 'portfolio,' with concepts like 'asset value' that acknowledge not only an investment’s price in the marketplace or so-called 'use value,' but also its 'intrinsic value' as part of an ecosystem 'that is greater than the sum of its productivities' and contributions. Similarly, we’d account for the 'depreciation' of these assets so we could better understand their diminishing value to us and to others.
“It’s story begins to tie 'the regeneration of the biosphere…to the sustainability of the human enterprise' (or our economic activities on this planet) in a way that’s never been told before.”
And the Times new, high-production video uses humor and an additional dose of irreverence to get more of us to pay attention to the brilliant opportunities that Dasgupta presents. I hope you enjoy it, and that one day you'll also get the chance to apply its wisdom in your thinking about the biodiversity of this planet.
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Have a good week at work and outside of it. I’ll see you next Sunday.
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