Once again the clocks have sprung forward to a more-than-hundred-year-old electricity-conserving wartime measure made a permanent part of the national calendar in my mother's lifetime and extended twice within mine and I still hate it, thanks. Nothing about my body's ambivalent relationship to circadian rhythms has ever been improved by disconnecting it further from things like solar noon. Had the current administration in its cartoonish awfulness actually gone ahead and abolished daylight saving in favor of standard time, however, it would still not have rated the lucky strike of a stopped clock. It would just have been breaking something else and expecting to be thanked for it.
(Shockingly, as an American Jew I do not feel safer being shoved out as a straw man for authoritarian abuses. Of course, as an American Jew I am not really supposed to feel safer. I am supposed to be a universally applicable scapegoat and ideally, so that no one has to hear me object to this perverted weaponization of my existence, dead. It should not require some watered-down Niemöller meme to prompt the thought that the disappearing of protesters is perhaps—as if more were needed—a bad sign about the state of a country.)
I was fascinated to read Michael Luo's "Tragedy at Rock Springs" because I learned about the 1885 anti-Chinese massacre not from any classes I had taken at any point in my intermittent education in American history, but from Laurence Yep's The Traitor (2003), one of the later novels in his Golden Mountain Chronicles. Odds are better than not that I encountered most of my non-classical history first in one form of fiction or another. It is something I always think of around book bans.
It has actually been a quiet day, which I needed after more than a week non-stop. I went for a short walk in the new late afternoon. Further adventures in college radio have furnished me with Oh Pep!'s "What's the Deal with David?" (2018), Gigi Perez's "Chemistry" (2025), Tunde Adebimpe's "Magnetic" (2024), and Chloe Slater's "Fig Tree" (2024). I have seen a lot of miscellaneous graffiti in this city, most famously the NOT ART stencil, but the onions were a new one on me.
(Shockingly, as an American Jew I do not feel safer being shoved out as a straw man for authoritarian abuses. Of course, as an American Jew I am not really supposed to feel safer. I am supposed to be a universally applicable scapegoat and ideally, so that no one has to hear me object to this perverted weaponization of my existence, dead. It should not require some watered-down Niemöller meme to prompt the thought that the disappearing of protesters is perhaps—as if more were needed—a bad sign about the state of a country.)
I was fascinated to read Michael Luo's "Tragedy at Rock Springs" because I learned about the 1885 anti-Chinese massacre not from any classes I had taken at any point in my intermittent education in American history, but from Laurence Yep's The Traitor (2003), one of the later novels in his Golden Mountain Chronicles. Odds are better than not that I encountered most of my non-classical history first in one form of fiction or another. It is something I always think of around book bans.
It has actually been a quiet day, which I needed after more than a week non-stop. I went for a short walk in the new late afternoon. Further adventures in college radio have furnished me with Oh Pep!'s "What's the Deal with David?" (2018), Gigi Perez's "Chemistry" (2025), Tunde Adebimpe's "Magnetic" (2024), and Chloe Slater's "Fig Tree" (2024). I have seen a lot of miscellaneous graffiti in this city, most famously the NOT ART stencil, but the onions were a new one on me.
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