[A monthly curated link list of recommended articles, videos, podcasts, photos, toots … you name it]
[Videos]
Master Builders of the Wild: Beavers at Work
The Bibi Files – Die Akte Netanjahu [ardmediathek] – “Als erster amtierender Ministerpräsident Israels steht Benjamin Netanjahu vor Gericht. Die Staatsanwaltschaft wirft ihm Korruption im Amt vor. “Die Akte Netanjahu” beleuchtet das Korruptionsverfahren gegen Israels Premierminister – mit bislang unveröffentlichten Verhörvideos der wichtigsten Belastungszeugen.” Might be worth it to boot up your VPN for this. It’s in German though.
[Music]
Joey Glüten & Graphy-T – Harder Daddy (Prod. Dudu, Graphy-T, Joey Glüten)
Aphex Twin – Korg Funk 5 (Directed by Nadia Lee Cohen) – Older song, new video in the spirit of Cunningham.
[Podcasts]
Podcast “Tech Bro Topia” (1/6) – “Sommer 2025: Die USA vollziehen den Schwenk zum Autoritarismus. Mittendrin die Tech-Bros aus dem Silicon Valley. Sie wollen den Staat abschaffen und den Weltraum kolonisieren. Aber wie kommen sie auf solche Ideen?” My theory, they take too much ketamine after growing up white in apartheid South Africa.
IQ Fetishism with Quinn Slobodian – “How did [an obsession with IQ] bring together the nationalist right and self-described libertarians? How did it become a load bearing self-identifier for many a “gifted” kid of the 1990s? And how did it take hold so thoroughly among the Silicon Valley elite?” I am not a huge Slobodian fan, and it would take too long to explain why, but this is a useful dialogue.
The Revolution Will Be Incremental with Rebecca Solnit – “They talk about how solidarity is always across difference and about the things we have in common mattering more then the things we don’t, how liberation is contagious, prioritizing where to pour our energy, a politics of inseparability vs. the politics of division.” I have moments when Solnit’s optimism gets on my nerves, but you gotta love her.
[Toot Threads]
[Pandemic Roundup]
Covid: August 28, 2025
Covid: August 21, 2025
Covid: August 14, 2025
Covid: August 7, 2025
Thanks to Violet 💜💜💜!!!
[The Must Read[s] This Month]
An Iron Sky Pressing Down | Beatrice Adler-Bolton [substack] – “From the moment you are born, the great machine begins to notch its teeth into you, measuring the span of your usefulness against the curve of your eventual collapse. Every breath you draw is already accounted for, pre-claimed by capital: the system does not passively wait for bodies to fail. It anticipates their wear and tear, budgets for their breakdown, insures against the inevitable collapse, then commodifies the stabilization, healing, and recovery. Your very survival is mapped, monetized, and managed before you even feel the strain.” Another fantastic essay by Beatrice Adler-Bolton.
Sophie Lewis on Enemy Feminisms – “Feminist writer Sophie Lewis speaks about why it’s important to identify anti-liberatory forms of feminism throughout history. She argues that feminism is capacious and fascist forms of feminism have long existed. And she calls attention to many international anti-fascist feminist formations that can inspire activists today.” Lewis has convinced me that it is no use to ever say “that’s not real feminism”, instead we have to try to steer feminism into an anti-capitalist, mutual aid etc. direction.
Conflict is not betrayal. [substack]
“But the truth is: conflict is part of being in relationship. Especially in movements.
Especially in chosen families.
Especially in oppressed communities doing survival work under pressure.
Conflict is not the problem.
Lack of accountability is.
Disposability is.
Pretending we’re above harm is.”
This reminds of the time, when our “radical communal care” group fell apart because of the very first and very mild disagreement. I still suffer from that experience. Not so radical after all.
Handbook for Exposing an Undercover Cop [no trace project] – “Ironically, a well-conducted investigation can be inspiring and empowering, even though discovering an infiltrator is, at the very least, unpleasant. The material in this manual has been drawn from several such processes and from their participants. In some cases, the groups emerged stronger, although the road we have travelled, and are still travelling, is often rocky.” This is how you expose undercover agents with all the required care and due diligence (for lack of a better word). As someone who has been wrongfully accused of being undercover, in the most lazy, sloppy manner, i can tell you how much it fucking hurts. I am still devastated and as a consequence never go near any demonstrations any longer. It small-t traumatized me and made me suicidal. Do expose the undercover agents, but be very careful never to wrongfully accuse people. We also can’t allow ourselves to get too paranoid. That is the actual point, why they work with undercover agents.
[Articles English]
Take a Soak, and Soak It In: The Best Natural Spas and Springs [atlas obscura lists] – “From hot springs to high falls, these pools offer unbeatable views.” I think we have been to Goldbug (or a very similar hot spring in Idaho), and it was excellent. The best natural hot spring ever. But now that it made it into this list?! Hmm!?
“ChatGPT killed my son”: Parents’ lawsuit describes suicide notes in chat logs [ars technica] – “In a lawsuit filed Tuesday, mourning parents Matt and Maria Raine alleged that the chatbot offered to draft their 16-year-old son Adam a suicide note after teaching the teen how to subvert safety features and generate technical instructions to help Adam follow through on what ChatGPT claimed would be a “beautiful suicide.” This is tragic. But also: This kid asked AI for help in writing a suicide note?!
Why Did Eco-Activists Get Years in Prison for Only $588 in Damages? [hyperallergic] – “This case highlights the debate over what counts as peaceful protest versus violent crime. According to Tyagi, “Judge Hehir classified the activists’ actions as violent, equating throwing soup at a protected painting with physically assaulting a person. This characterization enabled the judge to disregard the protections for peaceful protest under the European Convention on Human Rights, bypassing Articles 10 and 11, which protect freedom of expression and assembly.”” The endless violence “debate” is so fucking boring. When no humans or animals get harmed, it’s not violence. So simple. These days only cops are actually violent. The continued ecocide is violence. Some soup on some old painting protected by plexiglas is not violence.
Israel’s Genocide, Trump’s Gestapo and Us—With A Technology Addendum [znet] – “No Ice Agent or National Guard member headed to Washington DC, no IDF assassin shooting kids who seek food, no media person, politician, or at this point all but an incredibly disconnected subset of people in the U.S. or Israel will have even tenuous legitimacy to later claim that in 2025 they didn’t know, much less that they couldn’t know what was going on.” We all know and all are complicit. The war on Gaza must stop! Yesterday.
New Fascisms and the Reconfiguration of the Global Counterrevolution [ill will] – I’ll be honest, i thought this article was a bit of a language wank. Language is power. I am with Popper here. If you can’t say it in easily understandable language, then don’t say it at all. But hey, the essay does contain some interesting distinctions in regards to the newer forms of fascism. Make up your own mind.
The “Careless People” Who Make Up Elite Institutions [currentaffairs] – “Wynn-Williams’ involvement with Myanmar is an example of the central contradiction of the book. The novel is highly critical of Facebook’s overseas development, but Wynn-Williams oversaw much of that development. How, then, is she not culpable in the very corporate greed and amorality she criticizes? Wynn-Williams addresses this by either playing naive or portraying herself as the foiled heroine.” Yeah, stop celebrating Wynn-Williams for her book, she was instrumental in many of the horrendous Facebook policies.
Study: Social media probably can’t be fixed [ars technica] – “It’s no secret that much of social media has become profoundly dysfunctional. Rather than bringing us together into one utopian public square and fostering a healthy exchange of ideas, these platforms too often create filter bubbles or echo chambers. A small number of high-profile users garner the lion’s share of attention and influence, and the algorithms designed to maximize engagement end up merely amplifying outrage and conflict, ensuring the dominance of the loudest and most extreme users—thereby increasing polarization even more.” Sadly i think that the filter bubble/echo chamber problem has only gotten worse since people left X for Mastodon and Bsky.
You Must Protect Anyone Chased by the Fascists | Kelly Hayes [ghost] – “During the German occupation of Denmark, for example, a teenager named Arne Sejr created a flyer called “Ten Commandments for Danes.” At first, Sejr produced 25 copies for influential people in his small town. Soon, the document had made its way across the country, and became a template for Danish resistance. A number of the commandments don’t translate well to our current situation, given that Denmark was being occupied by a foreign force, while we are living under consolidating authoritarianism here in our own country. However, one of the edicts on Sejr’s list applies perfectly to this moment: “You shall protect anyone chased by the [fascists].” I didn’t know the “commandments”. Bookmarked.
Global Climate Report July 2025 [ncei] – “July 2025 recorded a global surface temperature 1.00°C (1.80°F) higher than the 20th-century average, making it the third-warmest July since records began in 1850. Only July of 2024 (warmest) and July 2023 were warmer. All ten warmest Julys on record have occurred since 2016. July 2025 also marks the 49th consecutive July with above-average global temperatures.” At this point, i am a doomer. You?
The Rest Is History | Mary Turfah [larb] – “A photograph has the power to induce a private transformation. It happens in an instant: you find before you a human being you may never meet—and you don’t need to, to recognize that everything in you refuses what you see. The change is constitutional; there’s the world before what you saw, and the one after. This feeling of rupture leaves a person with one of two options, really: either you leave the world as you know it, or you put the image away, so incommensurate is it with everything, everyone, around you. The transformation happens in an instant—or it doesn’t. There are many ways of seeing.” Isn’t it wild how none of the shocking images that circulate from the brutal war in Gaza seem to have any effect?
War, Revolution, and the Future of Hope — Part 1 [z-net] – “Both war and revolution are extreme forms of class struggle, constituting an open struggle between life and death. But while war involves the death of the majority to defend the life of the minority, revolution involves the death of the minority to defend the life of the majority. The social and political forces that promote war are the same ones that promote counterrevolution. On the contrary, the social and political forces that promote revolution also promote peace, even if this may imply war against minorities (the so-called revolutionary war that marks many of the political trajectories of liberation in the global South).” The future of hope? Hope is often the problem.
I spent decades at Columbia. I’m withdrawing my fall course due to its deal with Trump | Rashid Khalidi [the guardian] – “Specifically, it is impossible to teach this course (and much else) in light of Columbia’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. The IHRA definition deliberately, mendaciously and disingenuously conflates Jewishness with Israel, so that any criticism of Israel, or indeed description of Israeli policies, becomes a criticism of Jews. Citing its potential chilling effect, a co-author of the IHRA definition, Professor Kenneth Stern, has repudiated its current uses. Yet Columbia has announced that it will serve as a guide in disciplinary proceedings.” How is this not a free speech issue?!
As a linguist, I want to find the words to measure chronic illness [the sick times] – “While measuring traits like biomarkers provides doctors and patients with quantitative information, it still does not fully account for this huge linguistic gap. In an ideal world, scientists find a single indicator of a given condition or disease. But finding biomarkers is a long, complicated process — and even if we get that perfect, singular biomarker to diagnose Long COVID or MCAS, it fundamentally still would not capture the experience of the illness.” In my personal opinion we can look to TCM and to other systems where energetic and/or emotional factors have always been in play. In order combine the data-driven accuracy of clinical medicine with areas in our bodily experience that can’t be measured. Or maybe not yet.
[Articles German/French]
Bitte, schliesst mich aus! [daslamm] – “Bitte, schliesst mich aus! Nichts käme mir gelegener als der Rauswurf aus eurer heiligen «Linken», die im Grunde nur durch die selbstzufriedene Vorstellung zusammengehalten wird, für «Gerechtigkeit» oder «das Gute» zu streiten. Beides ist eh nicht so mein Ding. Wer künftig mit mir diskutieren will, lasse bitte jedes Seitenverhältnis aussen vor. Nimm mich für das, was ich sage – oder lass es komplett.” Yes, please exclude me as well from a strange pseudo-monolithic “left”, that does not even seem willing to argue its divergent points of view.
Autorin Jessica Jurassica: “Unsere Generation ist sehr unfeministisch sozialisiert worden” [annabelle] – “Ich wollte ein Buch schreiben, in dem die politische Dimension von Traumata zum Tragen kommt. Sexualisierte, partnerschaftliche und allgemein jede Art von Gewalt, die zwischen einzelnen Menschen passiert, wird oft individualisiert und ins Private abgeschoben. Man lässt die Betroffenen mit ihren Traumata allein. Das ist gefährlich. Und es ist der Grund, weshalb ich dieses Buch geschrieben habe: Ich möchte, dass die Gesellschaft Verantwortung übernimmt für die Gewalt, die sie mitträgt.” The masked author strikes again.
Sexarbeit: «Das Geglotze nach Schweden regt mich auf» [woz] – “In der Haltung, dass Sexarbeiter:innen zu Recht aus der Gesellschaft ausgegrenzt werden und dass es «das» nicht geben darf, kommt eine Vorstellung von Ungleichwertigkeit zum Ausdruck, wie sie auch in der extremen Rechten vertreten wird. Darüber sind sich die Antisexarbeitsallianzen nicht im Klaren. Es ist aber wichtig, solche Muster im Blick zu behalten, denn die Faschisierung der Gesellschaft ist kein Problem der Ränder, es ist eins der Mitte.” Interview with a nuanced sex worker. Another much too polarized discourse.
Die perfekte Waffe des Faschismus [daslamm] – “Faschist*innen ersetzen die verlorene Aura durch neue Rituale: Führerkult, Massenaufmärsche, Militärparaden oder grössenwahnsinnige Architektur. Alles wird sorgfältig inszeniert, um ein überwältigendes Gemeinschaftsgefühl zu erzeugen. Die Massen werden mobilisiert, bestehende Machtverhältnisse bleiben aber erhalten. Politik wird ästhetisiert. Das heisst: Sie wird selbst zur Kunstform, zum Spektakel, das gleichzeitig fasziniert und diszipliniert.” Ergo: Trump and MAGA are fascistic.
Chronisch krank und permanent angezweifelt [daslamm] – “In der Schweiz leben rund eine halbe Million Menschen mit Long Covid und ME. Doch sie kämpfen nicht nur gegen eine unheilbare Krankheit – sondern auch gegen Stigma, Fehldiagnosen und lebensbedrohliche Behandlungen.” This is a decent article about Long COVID. The fact that various phenotypes exist in this disease, would be the main thing that is missing from it.
Haïr le monde pour le changer [lundi.am] – “J’en ai marre de haïr cet air que l’on respire. Le capitalisme nécrophile autoritaire ; agent suprême, ordonnateur, il détruit savamment la vie et cette destruction s’institue. Cette destruction s’appelle le monde ; elle s’apprend dans les livres d’histoire, se glorifie. Face à ce rapt, à cette arnaque – à cet assassinat sordide qui continue à se déguiser en « résilience », en « management » et en énergie renouvelable – il est tout à fait prévisible que des émotions collectives renversent la table.” I love their radical poetry, and featured it in my mixes before.
[Older articles, still great]
THE INVISIBLE – MODERN SLAVERY IN EUROPE – “According to estimates by the International Labour Organization, around 28 million people worldwide live in working conditions that are considered modern slavery.” Sent to me by Regine, thank you!
Gil Scott-Heron: A New Popular Musician with Less Glitter, More Politics [in these times] – “I’m not a protest singer,” protests Gil Scott-Heron. Sometimes “the songs that people want to talk about are the ones that are more personal than political, more private than public, more of an emotion than an issue. I like the fact that my mother is one of my biggest fans. It’s important to me that she understands what my songs are about, because it proves to me that what I’m talking about ain’t crazy.” His lasting influence on hip hop and radical black music cannot be overstated.
R.I.P.
Marvin MNS
And way too many in Gaza, the Ukraine and all the other wars
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Header Photo: It feels too much like fall already