🍳 Family, cooking, organizing ✊

Hey! Thanks for reading! Just a reminder that I wrote this some years ago, and may have much more complicated feelings about this topic than I did when I wrote it. Happy to elaborate, feel free to reach out to me! 😄

🎵 The song for this post is Dung Defender, by Christopher Larkin for the soundtrack of Hollow Knight. 🎵

I loved this:

Also, my extended family (most in the DC area) had our first virtual Happy Hour. I wasn't prepared for how much it helped me. Try this! With your friends and/or workspaces!

Timeframes!

Kottke shared an article called We may be in this for the long haul, and the most interesting thing for me was the implication that people expect this disruption to last "a few weeks." I've never been under this impression, but seeing it written out, I wouldn't be surprised if other people (most?) are. Not through conscious calculation, just that most people only think a few weeks out, and are more focused on the present, especially with so much changing so quickly.

I suspect we'll be home quarantining for 1-3 months at least, social distancing/remote working/reduced hours for a good while longer, and over a year or two before institutions and markets restore to some semblance of rhythms and normalcy. We haven't begun to slow the inflection of the curve in the States yet, and "flattening the curve," as much as we can do it, flattens it against time. If we succeed, this will be a longer process!

It doesn't help at all that we can't get tested in large numbers and American healthcare is a barbaric hellscape, so we never know how well we're doing, or when we should go back to normal. Democrats need to be doing better pointing out Republican failures, but to quote Alex Pareene, the opposition party is seemingly afraid of politics.

But yeah, start soaking in this tub. It'll be a while.

Bailouts!

I really love Matt Levine's Money Stuff newsletter (usually don't read it to completion; there's often a lot of it). One thing I think he does well is putting something really meaty at the top of it, and the first section of today's newsletter (on shareholder interests, stock buybacks, corporate profits, and bailouts) is especially good. We'll probably capitulate and let the same crooks run everything, but goddammit we should bleed them dry.

Unsurprisingly, Elizabeth Warren has concrete suggestions on which conditions to put on those buybacks that align with worker interests and long-term better governance.

Power, anger, organizing

While cooking today, I listened to an episode of The Ezra Klein show, which is normally not my bag, but he had an accomplished labor organizer (Jane McAlevey) on to talk about the differences between activism, mobilizing, and organizing, with a focus on how the left approaches power. It was very enlightening! I've got more to listen to, but I often have a hard time getting my feelings out of the way when talking with people who disagree with me, and this offered a great framework for thinking about how to have those conversations more productively. A ton of anger between progressive camps, especially on Twitter, can get a lot from this.

I was cooking this, which is a favorite. It's super easy, and open to adjustment (subbed seitan for the chicken which was a mistake, and always add a fuckton more vegetables and mushrooms).

Blogging!

In a stray bullet point, John Scalzi mentioned he's posting more on his blog too! Add it to your RSS, he's been in the blogging game for decades and while he never stopped, it was obvious many "would-be" blog posts became Tweets.

Some of his biggest hits:

• Being poor
• What I think about Atlas Shrugged, which spawned When The Yogurt Came, which was animated in Netflix's Love, Death, and Robots.

Start a blog! Blog more! Share it! Let's make a webring!