To the Year Ahead and Year Behind

The time between Christmas and New Year’s is precious and underappreciated. There’s time to visit with family. The businesses and activities that remain open feel like they’re set to glide mode. All the homies that teach are on break and can meet up–it’s a good time to champagne & campaign.

On the other hand, as someone who consumes a lot of podcasts and blogs, this week is also kinda meh. Year in review episodes, best ofs, reruns, etc. are hit or miss. An exception to this rule is the Stadios, the end of the year award show on the Stadio soccer podcast. It rules, if you like soccer you should go listen to it right now. On my own show, after the trash-fire of 2020, I swore off year-in-reviews. 

So instead of recounting 2022, here are some things I’m looking forward to in 2023.

Football in February - In May, Hope and I flew home to visit family during Eid Al Fitr, the festival that marks the end of Ramadan in Islamic culture. Coincidentally (I swear), the Seattle Sounders were playing that week in the CONCACAF Champions League Final at Lumen Field. It was possibly the greatest live sporting experience of my life. Seattle won the continental title for North America and qualified for the Club World Cup, which will be played in February in Morocco. At one point, the tournament was rumored to be hosted in Abu Dhabi but alas it wasn't meant to be. In the tournament, Seattle will be competing against the best teams from each continent, including Real Madrid and  Brazil's CR Flamengo. 

Travel in February - In the fall, we  visited Tbilisi, the capital of the Republic of Georgia for the first time. We enjoyed our time and I fell in love with the region. The Caucuses remind me of Central America and Southeast Asia–criminally under-traveled places that are accessible and deeply affordable. During the trip, we made plans to revisit the region—this time we’re headed to Baku, Azerbaijan. Unlike Georgia, which is majority Orthodox, Azeris are majority Muslim and their state feels a bit more off the beaten path. Dumplings and wine aplenty await.

Reading in June - One of my greatest discoveries of 2022 was the author S.A. Cosby (no relation). He writes Southern noir novels. They’re engrossing crime and heist tales, as if Elmore Leonard could write credible Black characters (yes, that’s shade). I devoured his prior books Razorblade Tears and Blacktop Wasteland last year. Someone who recommended Razorblade Tears compared it to Lethal Weapon or 48 Hours but following the story of the crooks. He writes deep, complex characters and amazing tension filled narratives. His next book comes out in June, All the Sinners Bleed. Here’s the slug: 

“After years of working as an FBI agent, Titus Crown returns home to Charon County, land of moonshine and cornbread, fist fights and honeysuckle. Seeing his hometown struggling with a bigoted police force inspires him to run for sheriff. He wins, and becomes the first Black sheriff in the history of the county.

Then a year to the day after his election, a young Black man is fatally shot by Titus’s deputies.”

Football in July - The Women’s World Cup will be in Australia and New Zealand this year. This will be our third WWC. We will be attending the tournament’s opening match, NZ versus Norway, and all the US’ matches in the group stage. All the US matches will be played in New Zealand, so we’ll also make some time for some Lord of the Rings related sight-seeing.

Justice in September - the Tacoma police officers that killed Manuel Ellis are scheduled to go to trial. The case, a shameful travesty of justice, has been repeatedly delayed due to law enforcement obstruction, false statements by police spokespeople, and complicit cowardice by local elected officials. 

Dune in November - I recently wrote about my admiration for the book Dune and excitement about the upcoming movie sequel. Shooting wrapped in Abu Dhabi over the break. Part 1 ended right at the point the book gets very, very weird. I’m excited to see how Villeneuve navigates the tail end of the book, the uprising on Arrakis, and the all-knowing-talking-babies.

Recommendations for this Week 2022: After talking smack about year end lists, it’s silly to turn around a do end of year recommendations, but I’m a silly person so here goes:

• Best TV show of 2022 - The Bear, FX

• Best movie of 2022 - Athena, Netflix

• Best podcast I discovered in 2022 - If Books Could Kill

• Best thing I ate in 2020 - Khinkali, Georgian dumplings

• Best book, fiction - Razorblade Tears

• Best book, non-fiction - The Afrominimalist's Guide to Living with Less

See you next week!

When Censorship Backfires and the Toll of Opiates

I have reflected here and elsewhere about my recent-ish turn away from social media. I didn’t like the way it was warping my brain; I didn’t like how much time I spent on it; I didn’t like how often it made me angry about the state of the world. Algorithmic social media feeds are designed to keep you (doom-)scrolling. At some point I had enough: first of FB, then of Insta, and most recently of Twitter. If you care to hear more, I talked about this with Alyson Klein in a recent pair of pieces from Education Week, here and here.

Instead, I have subscribed to a handful of blogs by writers I trust. In some ways, I have gone back in time and am now experiencing the internet 2013 style, largely via RSS feeds on Feedly (RIP Google reader). I feel more in control of what I'm consuming and less like I'm being manipulated algorithmically.

Today, I wanted to share a few things that I think are worth reading. I may do this on a regular basis, I may not. One thing I like about this period of my life is that I am genuinely doing what I want and creating new habits and patterns. It’s like a good midlife crisis. Instead of buying a dumb sportscar or motorcycle, I am changing my information and news consumption habits.

Clive Thompson on how a Chinese streamer was censored for showing a cupcake that looked kinda like a tank. I’ve always been fascinated by how much Americans are obsessed with China’s censorship of discussions of the Tiananmen Square protests (and state suppression that followed). What China did was clearly terrible. It’s also morally indistinguishable from the National Guard’s murder of students at Kent State or the assault on Black Wall Street in Tulsa. Notably, the discussion of these and other incidents of state violence (like the Wilmington Coup) are often suppressed or unwelcome in US schools. It’s obviously not the same level of censorship as China but the intention of the regime in both cases is the same. The Tiananmen Square massacre is just out of living memory for Chinese millennials but the state’s dramatic efforts to suppress knowledge of the events has led to people accidentally discovering the protests, the so-called Streisand Effect. I hope that recent teacher censorship laws passed in many US states will backfire in the same way. 

The scope of the opiate crisis is insane and it has killed an unfathomable amount of people over my adult lifetime. I am in the final pages of Beth Macy’s Dopesick. It is a Michael Lewis-esque work of narrative nonfiction about the US opiate crisis and the extent to which it was foreseeable, preventable, and driven by corporate greed. The data Macy brings to the table is staggering: 

• Over 100,000 people per year overdose in the US; that’s over 2,700 people (or a 9/11 every day);

• We are less than 5% of the global population and consume over 30% of the world’s opioids; 

• In 2010, enough opioids were prescribed in the US to medicate every man, woman, and child in America—24 hours a day—for a month;

• As early as the year 2000, pharmaceutical companies were spending $4,000,000,000 on direct marketing to doctors to induce the doctors to write more prescriptions for drugs, in particular opioids.

Like gun violence, for reasons of general dysfunction, campaign contributions by industry, and regulatory capture, the US is largely alone in struggling with this issue. These are self-inflicted societal wounds. The book is enraging because warnings from clinicians and advocates as early as the 1990s were ignored by regulators and pharmaceutical companies.

Lastly, Melissa Santos on the State Democratic Party Chair bullying State House members for supporting a more experienced and progressive candidate. For my people in Washington, in the aftermath of the recent midterms the tea is coming out about the State Democratic Party Chair, Tina Podlodowski. The short of it is that Podlodowski is deeply pissed that some progressives were supporting non-partisan candidate Julie Anderson for Secretary of State. We discussed this issue on a recent episode of my podcast and Santos covered it in Axios, including screenshots of texts where Podlodowski threatened to cut off house members who didn’t toe the line.  Saying to one, "this is bullshit — apparently the House thinks so little of the Democratic Party … we can spend our resources elsewhere." We all understand the nature of political parties but it’s really dumb to see someone go to the mattresses against fellow progressives, especially in defense of Steve Hobbs, who is less progressive than Anderson and was basically the Joe Manchin of the State Senate.

On a more personal note, we are well over here. This weekend Hope and I are in Al Ain visiting her sister Faith. We stumbled on a local Emirati handicraft festival, had some great Ethiopian and Moroccan food, and I’m looking forward to the opening of the World Cup this weekend. 

See you next week.

A Little Solidarity

Colin Kaepernick is no longer playing in the NFL because wealthy team owners decided collectively to silence his protest. Merrick Garland remains on the DC Circuit Court because millions of Republicans, who can't stand Donald Trump, voted for him anyway to get tax cuts and more conservative federal judges.

A little solidarity goes a long way.

The federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour, unchanged since 2009, largely because middle-class folks won't fight for low-wage workers. As Michelle Alexander laid out in The New Jim Crow, one of the reasons mass incarceration became national policy is because leaders of legacy civil rights groups were focused on issues that impacted their children, like affirmative action in college admissions. Police killings continue unabated, at over 1000 per year, because polite white folks don't think it's their problem.

A little solidarity goes a long way.

I tend to avoid Wiemar Germany comparisons, but if you want to sell to me that we're living through pre-Franco Madrid or pre-Mussolini Rome, you'll have my attention. What is happening today is not normal. Separating kids from their parents as a form of political brinkmanship is not normal. Revoking citizenship from naturalized citizens is not normal. Equivocating between violent white-supremacists and the people who rally to oppose them is not normal. Ethnic paramilitary forces euphemistically calling themselves “Western chauvinists” and holding rallies is not normal. We can't become numb to it.

Earlier this week, my dude James Ford shared a video of Latinx factory workers walking off the job en masse in support of two colleagues. They shut their entire factory down because they were united, in solidarity. I often think about the Spanish Civil War. When Franco rose to power, he did so largely because the political left in Spain was divided over how to oppose him, until it was too late.

The aforementioned video, there’s some NSFW language here, just warning you

It's easy for us to get tunnel vision around our own issues. It would frankly be easier for me to stick to class size, teacher salaries, and school funding. But now more than ever, people who desire a more just and equitable society must show solidarity. I'm not a Marxist, but I speak the language. Capital and power seek to distract and divide us, but we're often too willing to do that work for them. Our lives are all improved by the contributions of immigrants to the cultural milieu. We were all birthed by mothers who deserve equal rights, pay, and treatment. We're all threatened when law enforcement operates unchecked in our communities. We're all harmed when the LGBTQ+ population has their humanity questioned or lives threatened. We're all worse off when Black lives don't matter. But, none of these struggles is more important than the other.

A little solidarity goes a long way.