Today's Water Cooler 2026-06-01

Birdsong of the Day

Moar mimidae:

Sandy Point State Reservation Essex, Massachusetts, United States.

“The Genius of the Barn Owl’s Feathers” [The MIT Press Reader]. • I can’t figure out how to excerpt any of this, but if any of you have barn owls, you’ll understand immediately.

In Case You Might Miss…

(1) “Kudlow: Mamdani a ‘throwback to Stalin’ ”

(2) “The Democrats Are Determined Not to Learn From Their Failure”

(3) “A mathematical proof that AI [unchecked] will destroy the economy.”

4) Ebola and airborne transmission.

Politics

Trump Administration

“CMS Drug Pricing Models Encounter Delays and Resistance” [Applied Policy]. “As Applied Policy has previously reported, in 2025, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced an ambitious suite of drug pricing models designed to align what Americans pay for prescription drugs with prices in other countries. In April, the agency announced delays and deadline extensions in two of the models as implementation challenges emerged.” Incroyable! More: “The models — the Better Approaches to Lifestyle and Nutrition for Comprehensive Health (BALANCE) model, the GENErating cost Reductions fOr U.S. Medicaid (GENEROUS) model, the proposed Guarding U.S. Medicare Against Rising Drug Costs (GUARD) model, and the Global Benchmark for Efficient Drug Pricing (GLOBE)— share a common premise: that the United States pays too much for prescription drugs relative to other developed nations. Each uses different mechanisms within federal health programs to align U.S. drug prices with those paid in economically comparable countries through most favored nation pricing. Participation in BALANCE and GENEROUS is voluntary for manufacturers, states, and health plans. If finalized, GUARD and GLOBE would be mandatory for manufacturers.” And: “Representatives of the Schaeffer Institute for Public Policy at USC called for both GUARD and GLOBE to be withdrawn. In a post explaining their reasoning, they argued, ‘The models’ reliance on international price benchmarks makes them vulnerable to gaming by foreign countries, fails to address the underlying economics of global pharmaceutical markets, and cedes pricing authority to foreign governments with different healthcare values.’” • Different healthcare values like what? Universal coverage?

Election 2024 Autopsy

“Jill Biden Believed Husband Was Having Stroke During Presidential Debate” [The Onion (American Voices)]. The survey: “Former first lady Jill Biden claimed that she thought her husband, former President Joe Biden, was having a stroke while watching his disastrous 2024 debate performance against President Trump that prompted him to drop out of the presidential race, insisting she had ‘never ever seen Joe like that before or since.’” Delaney Gostola, Oboe Tuner: ‘I still think he has better strokes than Trump.’” • A friend remarks: She thinks her husband is having a stroke, and just sits there? And afterwards, they go to Waffle House?

“‘Why are we talking about this?’: Democrats are furious that the Bidens won’t go away” [Politico]. “Jill Biden’s confession that she was “frightened” by her husband’s debate performance landed with a thud among former Biden White House and campaign staffers who were told in the moment to treat the then-president’s halting and haphazard debate performance as little more than a blip.” Then there’s this great quote: “ ‘Let everyone finish venting about ‘24 now and get it out of their systems,’ [said] former Rep. Susan Wild (D-Pa.)… But, she added, ‘I am a bit unhappy about the DNC’s delayed release of the autopsy of 2024. We don’t need those reminders in writing and we certainly don’t need to give the Republicans any more oppo to remind voters of everything we did wrong in 2024.’” • So how do you need those reminders? Texts? Signal? Out on the golf course where nobody can hear? Democrats. Dear Lord.

“The Democrats Are Determined Not to Learn From Their Failure” [Branko Marcetic, Jacobin]. Disappointing. Lots of liberal-inflected pearl-clutching on the draft nature of the deliverable, failure to mention Gaza, etc. I just don’t think Marcetic did a careful reading. “Beyond vague calls for ‘addressing cost-of-living concerns” and pabulum about proving to Americans that the Democrats ‘think like them, with similar passions and priorities, and politics,’ there is no real introspection about what exactly it was about Harris’s campaign that led Americans to reject her.” • I disagree. Je repete:

Summarizing Autopsy’s thesis:

The modern DNC is defined by a money flow. Money flows into the DNC from two sources: Oligarchs and the dull normal citizenry. Money flows out of the DNC through “payees” (vendors, consultants, “Democratic strategists”). These entities are highly concentrated. They control two outgoing flows. The smaller is for ground operations at the state level. The larger, even an order of magnitude larger, is for media buys. Ultimately, the money for media buys flows to the oligarchs who own the media. Thus, the DNC’s money flow reinforces the power of oligarchs, and disempowers non-oligarchs, as ground operations are chronically underfunded and a form of seasonal labor. The party is never ‘built,’ but the money flow remains, immutable. Unspoken but obvious is that the concentrated payees are doing very well for themselves, thank you.

We know the money flow is immutable because Howard Dean tried to change it with the 50-state strategy (ground operations, state level). He failed. Obama changed it temporarily in 2008 with Obama for America (ground operations, state level) but then for whatever reason folded OFA into the DNC, where it withered. Sanders tried to change it, twice, in 2016 and 2020 (ground operations, state level, small donors). The party threw him under the bus in 2016, and then drove the bus back over him in 2020. Fetterman (bless his heart) ran a brilliant ground operation in 2022 — “Every county, every vote” — beating Amos Oz even after he had a stroke, but he was never emulated (save perhaps this year by the reviled Platner).

What, you ask, happens with the lesser money flow that goes to operations at the State level? Recall that the only real distinctive competence of the modern political party is the control over the ballot. Control over the ballot does not happen at the national level; it happens in the states and localities, which is why party apparatus at that level must be kept alive, even if on life support. Not so much money goes into that flow because not much money is needed; IIRC, the price for a voting machine contract was a steak dinner. Of course, some small fry operate on principle; others are loyalists; the transaction is not always mediated by cash.

Marcetic seems to think that “following the money” is not introspection. An odd position for a leftist! Of course, you could argue that Rivera (the autopsy’s author) didn’t understand the assignment: Rather than finding scapegoats for the failure of Harris’s campaign, Rivera anatomized the Party itself, and who wants that? Democrats like having the spotlight turned on them about as much as the press does.

Election 2026

“Graham Platner’s Wife Flagged Sexually Explicit Texts to His Senate Campaign” [Wall Street Journal]. “Days after Graham Platner announced his Maine Senate bid, his wife informed the campaign about a potential political problem she had previously discovered on the oyster farmer’s phone: sexually explicit texts with several women, according to people familiar with the matter. Amy Gertner, who married Platner in 2023, told the campaign about messages she had found early in their marriage in the spring of 2025. In late August, as some aides were conducting opposition research on their own candidate, Gertner disclosed the texts to a campaign aide to make sure they didn’t pose a risk to her husband’s nascent campaign, those people said. The campaign had been preparing for a major rally over Labor Day weekend last year with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who was set to officially endorse Platner at the event.

Aides ultimately decided the texts were a private matter that was being handled by the couple in marriage counseling, a campaign official said. The rally proceeded as planned, with thousands in attendance. In a statement provided by Platner’s campaign, Gertner said she believed she was confiding in an aide she considered a friend.” • I do wonder how much of this oppo is being fed to Republicans by the Democrats. Sure looks like this story was.

“Becerra’s Nonprofit Network and the Deportation Debate” [RealClearPolitics]. “Becerra, the son of Mexican-American immigrants who became a member of Congress, state attorney general, and secretary of Health and Human Services in the Biden administration, has avoided taking a position on whether taxpayer-funded nonprofits should be shielding serious criminals from deportation… A recent investigation by the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal found that California Democrats have steered at least $1 billion in taxpayer-funded grants and contracts to more than 80 nonprofits that provide myriad services to illegal immigrants during Gavin Newsom’s time as governor.” • So far as I can tell, the Democrats don’t support open borders. But what they do support is not clear to me, and I don’t thiink they can clarify it. “We want enough undocument immigrants to make business happy and keep wages low, plus our nannies and yard men, but not so many that they spill out of their enclaves. And let’s not talk about California farmworkers.” Is that basically it?

Republican Funhouse

“How Trump hacked the presidency” [WaPo]. The deck: “Like Anthropic’s Mythos AI model, the president has a supercharged ability to find a system’s weaknesses.” That Trump has a genius for finding weakness in people has long been known. This is first time I’ve seen it urged that Trump is also a genius at finding weakness in systems. So, interesting. “[T]rump can look at a system coldly, without regard for moral judgments. If a vulnerability exists, then it can be exploited to benefit morally deserving and undeserving groups alike.” And: “The Constitution intended for Congress to play a key role in decisions to award government payouts and launch wars. That role has been eroding for some time, but Trump has been particularly cunning about finding vulnerabilities. Want a taxpayer fund for allies? Just sue the government in your private capacity and order your Justice Department to settle. Want to send U.S. forces to a foreign capital to kill its security forces and seize its ruler? Just get a grand jury in New York to rubber-stamp an indictment of the tyrant. Mythos’s hyper-competence at finding software weaknesses has prompted a frenzy of bug-patching in the software that makes the world run. The executive branch needs some bug-patching, too.”

Democrats en Déshabillé

“Gavin Newsom Wants an AI New Deal’ [Wall Street Journal]. “As for wage replacement, if workers can make nearly as much unemployed as they do working, many will stay home. That was one lesson from the pandemic when Congress juiced unemployment benefits and transfer payments. Unemployment stayed higher for longer, and businesses struggled to find workers.” • Somebody call a wh-a-a-a-a-m-bulance!

“The Los Angeles Left Is at War With Itself Over the Mayor’s Race” [The Intercept]. “The most recent poll in the race, released from the Los Angeles Times and University of California, Berkeley on Thursday, has only increased the stakes. It shows Raman in striking distance of Bass, with 25 percent support to the incumbent’s 26, and ahead of Pratt, at 22.” • A very interesting article. Well worth a read.

“Socialism’s next test: Swing states” [Politico]. “In the crowded Democratic field running to replace Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, there’s a surprising frontrunner for a battleground state: a democratic-socialist line cook who has called to abolish the police. Francesca Hong, a 37-year-old restaurant owner and single mother who became the state’s first Asian-American assembly member in 2021, has surged to the lead in several early polls after launching a long-shot bid on a deeply progressive platform. Hong is part of an array of lefty candidates with working-class credentials running in competitive states and districts up and down the ballot in this year’s midterm elections — a crop emboldened by the popularity of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and a turn toward economic populism amid widespread cost-of-living concerns.” • I remember years ago I made a database of Democrat midterm candidates and flagged those who were on the left. I tracked them for the entire campaign, and it turned out that the candidates were quite weak; the left had no bench at all. Things seem different today, and I guess — I should do some research on this — I have to credit Sanders and the DSA (and sadly, not unions).

“He calls himself the Rush Limbaugh for Zoomers.”

“Democrats need Hasan Piker” [The New Statesman]. Hmm:

Now, an analogous debate is going on inside the Democratic establishment, if only in terms of the question: what disqualifies someone from the political arena? Democrats cannot decide whether to “platform” the streamer Hasan Piker, a socialist commentator who says that Hamas is a thousand times better than Israel. He calls himself the Rush Limbaugh for Zoomers. And he has clout. At Zohran Mamdani’s victory party last autumn, I watched the crowds move magnetically towards Piker. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Mehdi Hasan and the other socialist high-fliers in the room couldn’t compete with the tall, well-built streamer.

Piker achieved new levels of prominence in the past fortnight with a New York Times interview in which he endorsed stealing from corporate giants such as Whole Foods as a way to fight the extraction of surplus value. But he has been around for a while: since 2018, he has been streaming on politics for about seven hours a day, gathering around four million subscribers across his platforms. Now this populous online realm is entering the mainstream. The Maga movement includes worldviews that are often articulated on Reddit and 4Chan. One Maga figure told me the administration’s fiercest intellects had a prior life as ‘online trolls’. Piker is a rare competitor from the left.

He is already building connections with the Democratic Party. He supports those candidates he calls the ‘Bernie-crats’. The rising star of the Michigan Senate primary Abdul el-Sayed has had Piker speak on stage with him. Mamdani has been on his show. The streamer had a soft reception on the popular Pod Save America, which is hosted by former Obama staffers. An article in the New York Times – a good barometer for acceptable liberal opinion – called Piker a ‘progressive mind in a Maga body’ (which was later amended to a ‘progressive mind in a body made for the ‘manosphere”). In other words, here is a man who lifts weights and shoots guns – but calls Israel’s destruction of Gaza a genocide.

Festival of Mamdani

“This kid’s coming in and just … taking the assets and changing ownership.”

“Kudlow: Mamdani a ‘throwback to Stalin’ ” [The Hill]. “ ‘He’s a throwback to Stalin in the ’20s and ’30s and ’40s, when the Soviet Union would confiscate the means of production,’ Kudlow said on Fox Business’s ‘The Big Money Show,’ … ‘They would take out the steel mills and the iron mills and the railroads from any private-sector hands,’ he added. ‘You know, this stupid kid is doing the same thing because it’s what he thinks is the right thing to do. I mean — it’s real— it’s a throwback. I mean, nowadays, the modern socialist Democratic Party uses regulatory apparatus to do this kind of thing. This kid’s coming in and just … taking the assets and changing ownership.’” • Kudlow’s a knuckledragger who thinks that taxation and confiscating the means of production are the same, but he’s focused on the right question. Horrified liberals: “No no, that’s not what it’s all about.” Yes it is. Anyhow, the oligarchs have nothing to say about “confiscation,” after sucking up the entire Internet for their training sets, without compensating anyone. Anyhow, is there something wrong with having defeated Hitler?

“Among Mamdani’s Priorities, Economic Development Seems Low on the List” [New York Times]. “Over the course of his early tenure as mayor, Zohran Mamdani has filled out City Hall’s upper ranks with people he trusts to implement his democratic socialist-inflected agenda in New York City, the nation’s financial capital. But one arm of city government continues to bedevil him: the Economic Development Corporation, whose mission is to leverage city real estate and tax incentives to attract private capital and drive job growth across the five boroughs.” “Drive” is one of those words. More: “Five months into the mayor’s tenure, the nonprofit corporation remains officially rudderless, with City Hall officials considering at least 10 candidates for E.D.C. president, including a consumer protection advocate and pro-business types.” And: “ ‘Why don’t you just stop for a second and focus on keeping the good things going?’ said Matthew Hiltzik, a publicist who was appointed by Mr. de Blasio to the board of the E.D.C. and has felt confused by the organization’s lack of direction and by the emphasis placed on city-run grocery stores.” • City-run grocery stores are, in fact, economic development. I wouild need to know more about the real estate angle. This is, after all, Manhattan.

“Mamdani’s ‘COGE’ rollout gets DOGE’s attention after critics say he ripped off Elon Musk” [FOX]. “New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani introduced the Commission on Government Efficiency, or COGE, on Thursday in New York, saying the panel would find ways to make city government ‘work smarter, faster, and more effectively’ for working people.” And: “Mamdani said rebuilding public trust requires demonstrating that the government can produce results.” • And Republicans rush in with the “waste, fraud, and abuse” claim, with DOGE did not solve because it’s not soluble; as it turns out, the numbers were so small that DOGE fell short of its target by at least an order of magniture. But “waste, fraud, and abuse” is the tricolon that refuses to die.

“Triumph of the underdogs: New Yorkers are reveling in the Knicks and Mamdani” [Guardian]. “ ‘I think there’s something about this year in New York that feels grassroots, feels authentic. [The Knicks] feel gritty in the sense that they didn’t go out and get polished stars for the team, or get all the celebrities to try to win a championship. Everybody’s low-key a bit of an underdog,’ [David Hamilton, a military veteran-turned-comedian and producer] said. ‘And it’s the same thing with Mamdani. He was this underdog who came out of nowhere, but has a ‘for the people of the city’ type of vibe. This team has the everyday, lunchpail, hard-working-type of feel, so you feel it top to bottom, and then the mayor, with his seats way up in the nosebleeds – it’s this humanizing factor, and I think everybody feels better when we all feel like we’re on the same plane.’” • Good!

“With Mamdani’s Rise, Muslim Democrats Become Power Players” [New York Times] and “ ‘This is not the New York City I knew’: Jews, Muslims and Christians unite at anti-Mamdani rally” [FOX]. • You will pry identity politics from their cold, dead hands.

“Israeli ministers who backed ethnic cleansing of Palestinians join New York parade” [Middle East Eye]. “Among the delegation was Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, alongside Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu and 13 members of the Knesset…. MEE understands that the charges against Smotrich include forced displacement as a crime against humanity and war crime, the transfer of Israel’s own population as a war crime, and persecution and apartheid as crimes against humanity.” The usual. More: “The Israel Day Parade has long been a fixture of New York’s political calendar and is often viewed as a test of political loyalty to Israel among elected officials.” And: “New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the city’s first Muslim mayor and a long-time critic of Israel, boycotted the parade, becoming the first mayor in the event’s history not to attend.” • However, “NYPD commissioner ‘proudly’ leads Israel parade as grand marshal.” Very natural, considering that the NYPD maintains a liaison office in Tel Aviv.

Pandemics and Public Health

Stay safe out there!

Ebola

“What it will take to stop the spiralling Ebola outbreak” [Nature]. “The tally of people with suspected and confirmed cases of Ebola in central Africa is rocketing upwards with shocking speed — from 256 cases on 16 May to roughly 1,000 as of 27 May. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), some 240 people have died — and the outbreak shows no signs of slowing down (see ‘Ebola’s surge continues’).” And: “[S[pecialists say that they have tools to help to control the outbreak, which is for now confined to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Uganda, thanks to hard-won expertise gained during previous Ebola epidemics.” For example: “Even in the absence of specific drugs for the Bundibugyo species, adequate supportive care can drastically increase the survival chances of infected people, specialists say. During the West Africa Ebola epidemic in 2014–16, the risk of death within a month of symptom onset was 74% lower for people who had been hospitalized with Ebola than for those who did not receive any medical treatment, according to an analysis of around 600 cases reported in Liberia in 2014.”

It’s Airborne

A long thread from old friend Lazarus long on Ebola and airborne transmission. Worth reading in full; it starts here:

A thread on airborne Ebola - the rest is accurate.

Let me emphasize that I agree far more than disagree with her, in general.

Declaring a thing debunked without actually debunking it, with facts, is not debunking.

So, let me debunk this. https://t.co/asxvtRxStY pic.twitter.com/28KseMzcOR

— Lazarus Long (@LazarusLong13) June 1, 2026

I think this is the key point:

infection by Ebola.https://t.co/4JzFfckL8d

Here is a video of 10-20 microns floating out to 12 feet.https://t.co/0TNQQrwtLA

During late stage - could be be a cough, vomit, skin flaking, diarrhea, bleeding, doffing PPE with bodily fluids…etc, could generate those size pic.twitter.com/sqGJHnk2pM

— Lazarus Long (@LazarusLong13) June 1, 2026

Microns floating out twelve feet sounds pretty airborne to me. (That said, there doesn’t seem to be airborne community around Ebola as there was for Covid. That’s a shame, because for whatever reason, Twitter is still the best platform for stories like this — and I’d love to be proved wrong!).

Business Sentiment

Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 60 Greed (previous close: 58 Greed) [CNN]. One week ago: 61 (Greed). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). • What is this? Son of Great Moderation?

Rapture Index: Closes unchanged [Rapture Ready]. Record High, October 10, 2016: 189. Current: 184. (Remember that bringing on the Rapture is good.) • I’d never checked the FAQ for this site. It’s everything I expected, and more.

Business: AI

“The AI Layoff Trap” [Brett Hemenway Falk, Gerry Tsoukalas (PDF)]. From the Abstract: “If AI displaces human workers faster than the economy can reabsorb them, it risks eroding the very consumer demand firms depend on. We show that knowing this is not enough for firms to stop it. In a competitive task-based model, demand externalities trap rational firms in an automation arms race, displacing workers well beyond what is collectively optimal. The resulting loss harms both workers and firm owners. More competition and ‘better’ AI amplify the excess; wage adjustments and free entry cannot eliminate it. Neither can capital income taxes, worker equity participation, universal basic income, upskilling, or Coasian bargaining. Only a Pigouvian automation tax can. The results suggest that policy should address not only the aftermath of AI labor displacement but also the competitive incentives that drive it.” • Sin taxes are an example of Pigouvian taxes; fitting, in AI’s case, given its origins in expropriation and fraud. Here is a Twitter thread on the paper:

“Our tech overlords are planning for conscious AI to conquer the cosmos. What could go wrong?” [Guardian]. “The notion that we are approaching the end of the homo sapiens, as defined since Darwin’s day, is coalescing into a durable body of belief among the elites at the helm of our technological future. Their dreams are not all perfectly aligned. But like the folk stories and superstitions that have for ever revolved around more established religious traditions, the collection of far-fetched scenarios valley oligarchs are writing into our future exhibits the hallmarks of a religion in the making, a body of belief to confer a sense of cosmic transcendence and inevitability to their hi-tech project. In their minds, they are on their way to build the next phase of humanity, a ‘transhuman’ future. In this future, they can satisfy their desire for immortality and assert power over the cosmos as transhumans multiply and expand across the galaxy. Their ultimate goal: to execute on a techno-mystical dream to distill the essence of what it is to be human, consciousness and all, into bits of information to be downloaded as binary code on to some non-biological substrate such as a silicon chip, or beamed through space as electromagnetic waves. The mythopoeic infrastructure assembled in and around San Francisco carries risk for humanity as we know it. It justifies steering technology along a path that is, at best, indifferent to the needs, hopes and aspirations of everyday humans in a quest to deliver a future that only looks like utopia to these masters of the universe. Who cares if artificial intelligence obliterates humdrum human labor when it offers us the opportunity to transcend our body and conquer the galaxy? The fantasy directs the technology: rather than building economically useful tools that can help humans expand their capabilities, the overlords of AI are sinking vast resources into a dream of building superhumans.” • Why are these tween boy nutjobs in charge of capital allocation?

“Uber’s finance team overtaken by engineering in AI use” [CFO Dive]. The deck: “The company’s rapid adoption of agentic AI coding tools has reportedly consumed its 2026 AI budget, while also raising return-on-investment questions.” • Sounds liike AI is even more addictive than social media.

Zeitgeist Watch

“The new bibliomaniacs” [Engelsberg Ideas]. “Increasingly, younger people – especially those under 35 – are becoming a visible part of the rare book trade. Buyers and sellers alike pointed to the same reason: growing up in the digital age has intensified the desire for analogue objects and tangible connections to the past. There is something special about holding history in your hands.” • [musical interlude].

Guillotine Watch

“AI billionaires brace for pitchforks” [Axios]:

Some of the richest men in tech have warned for years AI could destabilize the economy. Many suggest the answer is not deceleration or wealth taxes, but shared abundance.

1. Jeff Bezos, the world’s fourth-richest man, said on CNBC last week that the bottom 50% of earners should pay zero federal income tax. “You could double the taxes I pay and it’s not going to help that teacher in Queens,” the Amazon founder argued.
2. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI and a longtime proponent of universal basic income, now favors “universal basic compute” — giving people access to AI’s productive power instead of a fixed cash payment. OpenAI went further in April with a New Deal-style social contract that proposed a public wealth fund, taxes on AI-driven returns and automated labor, and a four-day workweek.
3. Elon Musk, whose SpaceX IPO could help make him the world’s first trillionaire, has called for “universal HIGH INCOME” checks from the federal government — arguing robots will drive so much growth that inflation won’t follow.

The billionaires and AI leaders floating these ideas are keenly aware that the politics of extreme wealth could turn dangerous fast.

I can’t find an copy, but back in the days when newspapers were paper, there was a full-page ad whose headline was “Lucky Millionaire Wants To Share the Wealth.” So, trust me, I’m a billionaire! (In any case, they miss the key question.)

“Fear and Algae in the Hamptons: How Flesh-Eating Bacteria Is Invading the East Coast’s Swankiest Waterways” [Vanity Fair]. • “The Hamptons are not a defensible position.” —Mark Blyth

Class Warfare

“The Conscience of the City” [Harpers]. “I’m a garbageman. Day after day, I heave and haul the detritus of the most polluting civilization in history. In two decades, I’ve handled tens of thousands of tons of trash, and the looks I get along my route suggest that people sometimes mistake me for the garbage I handle. The way I see it, though, my job is of great consequence. My fellow garbagemen and I scrub clean the stains of our consumer society. Our work behind the scenes keeps the whole edifice from crumbling—at least for now.”

News of the Wired

I am not feeling wired today.

Plantidote of the Day

Via Sub-Boreal:

Sub-Boreal writes: “From an alpine hike in the British Columbia interior near Tatloyoko Lake almost 15 years ago. is a close-up of a Western Springbeauty (Claytonia lanceolata) showing its starchy corm which was an important food resource for the local Chilcotin people.”

Send your plantidotes as attachments to lambert [UNDERSCORE] strether [AT] protonmail [DOT] com. And if you put “Plant” or “Plantidote” in the subject line, I’ll be less likely to lose it. Gardens are fine. Gardening season approaches, at least in the Northeast! Fungi are honorary plants.