Mitch's Blog

Barr Threatens Legal Action Against Governors Over Lockdowns [Chris Strohm/Bloomberg]

Even before the coronavirus crisis began, I thought of the Republican Party as a criminal racist death cult. Really looking to be proven wrong on that one.

McConnell slams brakes on next round of coronavirus aid [Burgess Everett/Politico]

Captain of the “Titanic” says he will not begin lowering the lifeboats until all the deck chairs are arranged just so.

Whole lotta love: Robert Plant gave a big donation to a company that makes PPE [Erica Banas/WMMR]

Today on Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic

• Beware of fake “Someone you came in contact with tested positive for COVID-19” warnings. They’re scams.

• Investors that own doctors' groups blew millions on ads to promote “surprise billing” even as they were denying access to PPE, cutting wages and firing doctors.

• Every Covid commercial is exactly the same.

• The Texas AG threatens to imprison people for warning about the risk of getting Covid while voting.

• Covid didn’t escape from a Chinese lab.

• Whole Foods is making heatmaps to detect union activity – cheaper than paying people a good wage.

• Amazon workers are planning a strike.

How Coffee Became a Modern Necessity [Augustine Sedgewick/WSJ]: “For much of its 500-year history, the drink was viewed with confusion, suspicion and disgust.”

Vintage Season: C.L. Moore and the “Golden Age” of Science Fiction [Eric Rosenfield/Literate Machine]

C.L. Moore was a talented science fiction and fantasy writer whose career spanned the Golden Age of pulp magazines, from the 1930s, and briefly into television. She wrote both under her own byline and in collaboration with her husband, Henry Kuttner. She retired from writing in 1963, and died a quarter-century later. The ferocious demands of making a living writing at cheap pulp rates had burned out her talent and used her up.

Her most famous story is probably “Vintage Season.” Set in the present day, it’s about a man who rents out a house to a group of strange but congenial people who, the man learns, are from the future. The mystery of the story is what these people are doing there, at that time: the man thinks there is absolutely nothing remarkable about himself, his house, his city or that moment. He soon learns differently.

Moore’s husband, Kuttner, died of a stroke in his sleep at age 44 in 1958. A month earlier, a talented writer named Cyril Kornbluth died of a heart attack at age 34 “and there was a palpable feeling among their fellows in the trenches that these men had died from the constant need to produce in the pay-per-word mills, especially through the long crunch of the mid-to-late 50s.

Rosenfield writes:

“I was only twenty-three, then,” writer Robert Silverberg would say later, “but I somehow realized right away that these two men had literally died from writing science fiction and I was afraid that I was going to die too. I had some bad months.”

More writers would fall away over the next few years; Mark Clifton dead of a heart attack in 1963 at 57, H. Beam Piper a suicide in 1960 at 60. Still others quit prose fiction altogether. Isaac Asimov, for example, turned to cranking out nonfiction books at his customary breakneck pace and wouldn’t come back to fiction until the ’70s. Leigh Brackett took up a noted film career, including scripts for Rio Bravo (1958), The Long Goodbye (1973), and The Empire Strikes Back (1980), among many others.

Moore for her part completed the transition to television, writing for Maverick, Sugarfoot, 77 Sunset Strip, and other shows under the name Catherine Kuttner. But in 1963 she remarried a physician and quit writing altogether.

It’d be easy to speculate that her new husband didn’t want his wife writing, but she herself said in a later interview, “Since I don’t have to write for a living anymore, I just don’t have the motivation to resume writing, although I wish I did.” There’s a sense in this sentence that the pressures of commercial fiction had sucked out whatever passion Moore had once had for writing–all that giddy glee in which she’d typed out that first story for fun back in 1933–transforming it into just another job. And when the need for that job evaporated so did the desire to do it.

The Woman Who Might Find Us Another Earth

Sara Seager is a tenured professor of physics and planetary science who won a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation in 2013. Her area of expertise is exoplanets – planets that orbit stars other than our son – specifically the search for a planet that might contain life.

Chris Jones profiles Seagar for the New York Times. She emerges as the very picture of the obsessed scientist: She speaks in an unmodulated breathless tone, never learned to manage money, doesn’t celebrate birthdays, Christmas or holidays, never learned to cook.

It would be easy to pigeonhole someone like Seagar as a soulless human computer. But this profile is only half-focused on her work; the other half deals with her immense grief over becoming a young widow, struggling to raise children alone, and eventually finding friends and connection with people.

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vintagegeekculture:

Star Trek art designer Matt Jeffries, with one of his most famous creations: the Klingon battlecruiser.

Bonus: his original, and in my view, far better, design for the shuttlecraft.

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KOOL cigarette ad from the 1960s. via

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The temperature will probably get up past 90 by Saturday. I am looking forward to complaining about the heat as a break from complaining about the cold.

Today on Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic.net:

• Denmark is denying bailouts to companies headquartered in tax havens: If you don’t pay taxes, you don’t get to enjoy tax benefits.

• Zoom claims it uses AI to stop sexytimes. Zoom won’t let you zoom anybody on Zoom. Or so it says – AI has been terrible at detecting nudity, there’s no reason to think it’s gotten better. And why does Zoom believe it has the right to be sex police?

• Cars, not public transit, are correlated with contagion in NYC. I need to look into this further; it doesn’t make sense. I am 100% pro-public-transit, and it absolutely can be made to work even here in suburbanized Southern California. But public transit, like sporting events, religious services, Comic-Con, and other wonderful things, seems like contagion vectors.

• 94.5% of “small business” money went to giant corporations. Because Trump’s only skill is grifting.

• Also, while every President since Reagan has had a terrible record on anti-trust, Trump is the worst. He’s not even trying.