EPISODE 234: SOME DAY WE'LL FIND IT
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
Hello from the land where our biggest environmental concern right now is “Am I going to need a sweater or shorts today, make up your mind, climate!”
(I admit, there are probably very few jobs where the top of mind question involves whether or not one wears shorts on a weekday. Writing screenplays in coffee shops and interviewing people on the phone is awesome.)
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I had an idea to write about the upcoming TV season this week, but for a variety of reasons that definitely does not include I am afraid of the wig Edie Falco is wearing in her new Law & Order show, that kind of fell through time and space into next week. So expect lots of stuff on that next week (including top five fall shows we should all try and maybe a few I hope none of us do).
Seriously, that wig has got to have its own Twitter account, doesn’t it? Every time I see it I am more sure that it is alive and has taken over one of our most talented actresses.
#SaveEdie
As for the here and now, long before all the hurricanes and earthquakes and the eclipses and the threat of nuclear war and the obviously soon to be joining us enormous locust-spiders that are going to eat all our crops and abduct our children and teach them to speak only in locust-spider and forget/hate us, I’d been reading a bunch of really great pieces about other potentially terrifying disasters.
Michael Lewis (he of Moneyball, The Big Short and other great books and movies) did a long profile on the current state of the Energy Department for Vanity Fair. In part it’s super disturbing simply for the fact that it reports how the current administration has so far more or less ignored the fact that it has this whole group of people and projects taking care of little things like radioactive waste that really really need its politically-appointed staff to actually read their reports (including their ongoing list of things to be worried about right now), and also has fired non-political staff who have been there for decades because it thinks everyone and everything is political.
But politics aside I found it fascinating and terrifying (Fascifying? More like terrinating) for the actual disasters it’s constantly trying to prevent and/or almost creating. Take, for instance, this story of the improper kitty litter (yes, you read that right):
According to former Associate Deputy Energy Secretary John MacWilliams, there is a project
to carve football-field-length caverns inside New Mexico salt beds to store radioactive waste, at the so-called WIPP (Waste Isolation Pilot Plant) facility. The waste would go into barrels and the barrels would go into the caverns, where the salt would eventually entomb them. The contents of the barrels were volatile and so needed to be seasoned with, believe it or not, kitty litter. Three years ago, according to a former D.O.E. official, a federal contractor in Los Alamos, having been told to pack the barrels with ‘inorganic kitty litter,’ had scribbled down ‘an organic kitty litter.’ The barrel with organic kitty litter in it had burst and spread waste inside the cavern. The site was closed for three years, significantly backing up nuclear-waste disposal in the United States and costing $500 million to clean, while the contractor claimed the company was merely following procedures given to it by Los Alamos.
My Question: How did they discover that the thing they needed to keep the radioactive waste stable was kitty litter?
Top Theory: The Department of Energy has over the course of decades of work with radioactive waste has secretly mutated and is now run by Princess Carolyn and BoJack Horseman is real, but in a Planet of the Apes sort of way.
(Also, I know it’s a cartoon about a talking horse who is a washed up 70s family sitcom star but I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, you should definitely try BoJack Horseman. )
Or there’s the story of the medical facility that “ordered a speck of plutonium for research, and a weapons-lab clerk misplaced a decimal point and FedExed the researchers a chunk of the stuff so big it should have been under armed guard—whereupon horrified medical researchers tried to FedEx it back.”
Says former DOE Chief of staff, “At D.O.E. even the regular scheduled meetings started with ‘You’re not going to believe this.’”
You know, exactly how we hoped things would be going there.
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New York Magazine also recently did a piece on the environment and the future of life on planet Earth that makes An Inconvenient Truth read like Goodnight Moon. (Goodnight Earth, For Ever?)
The article, which posits five very possible extinction scenarios, includes passages like this:
In a six-degree-warmer world, the Earth’s ecosystem will boil with so many natural disasters that we will just start calling them ‘weather’: a constant swarm of out-of-control typhoons and tornadoes and floods and droughts, the planet assaulted regularly with climate events that not so long ago destroyed whole civilizations. The strongest hurricanes will come more often, and we’ll have to invent new categories with which to describe them; tornadoes will grow longer and wider and strike much more frequently, and hail rocks will quadruple in size. Humans used to watch the weather to prophesy the future; going forward, we will see in its wrath the vengeance of the past. Early naturalists talked often about ‘deep time’ — the perception they had, contemplating the grandeur of this valley or that rock basin, of the profound slowness of nature. What lies in store for us is more like what the Victorian anthropologists identified as ‘dreamtime,’ or ‘everywhen’: the semi-mythical experience, described by Aboriginal Australians, of encountering, in the present moment, an out-of-time past, when ancestors, heroes, and demigods crowded an epic stage. You can find it already watching footage of an iceberg collapsing into the sea — a feeling of history happening all at once.
I’m not totally sure what that “dreamtime” part is all about (but Cool, dude), but “Humans used to watch the weather to prophesy the future; going forward, we will see in its wrath the vengeance of the past” has got to be one of the great and awful sentences.
That piece is the most read article ever for New York Magazine. (Fun fact: Rolling Stone’s most read piece is also about climate change.) After some complained that it was both wrong and outrageous for how bad it imagined things could get, the magazine produced a second, annotated version where you could see where its claims came from.
The unexpectedly scariest part: everything to do with the melting of the icebergs. Like, not only will they cause the seas to rise and the waters to warm, but that warmth will also through a rippling series of effects release hydrogen sulfide, the gas that was once responsible for wiping out 97% of life.
Also, for John Carpenter fans, there’s this: “There are now, trapped in Arctic ice, diseases that have not circulated in the air for millions of years — in some cases, since before humans were around to encounter them. Which means our immune systems would have no idea how to fight back when those prehistoric plagues emerge from the ice.
“The Arctic also stores terrifying bugs from more recent times. In Alaska, already, researchers have discovered remnants of the 1918 flu that infected as many as 500 million and killed as many as 100 million — about 5 percent of the world’s population and almost six times as many as had died in the world war for which the pandemic served as a kind of gruesome capstone. As the BBC reported in May, scientists suspect smallpox and the bubonic plague are trapped in Siberian ice, too — an abridged history of devastating human sickness, left out like egg salad in the Arctic sun.“
I'm telling you, the until now frozen locust spiders -- this is what we're facing.
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Two other great end of the world-y pieces from the last few years: this New Yorker story on how the earthquake we all should be worried about is not the next one in California but the massive one that’s due in the Pacific Northwest. I think I’ve mentioned here before. It’s impossible to put down, just tremendous writing, and also scary as IT.
New IT scary – which by the way, is really scary, unlike old IT scary, which now is kind of sad drunk old man scary.
(Random aside: I've decided that any time I get frustrated with someone on social media I'm just going to post this gif from IT:
With the kid's line -- which he shouts over and over -- "YOU'LL FLOAT TOO."
I have no idea why this seems to make sense to me, but it does. It really does.)
And this, also, in the New Yorker, a book review of Command and Control, which describes all the times we’ve almost had a nuclear disaster or started a nuclear war by accident – like the time a nuclear-armed missile accidentally fell into a backyard in South Carolina. It’s a funny story, actually.
(No it isn’t.)
The author of C&C also wrote his own piece for the New Yorker in December about how our current “launch on warning” policy is a nuclear nightmare waiting to happen, and lots of past presidents have said so, and still we have it.
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The piece that has troubled me the most is also about nuclear war, but from a very different point of view.
In August, the day after the President told North Korea it would be met “with fire and fury like the world has never seen” if it didn’t stop its nuclear tests, a local LA paper published a piece entitled: “The Five Best Last Meals to Eat in L.A. Before a Nuclear Attack”.
It included comments like this:
Since the end is nigh and your credit card bill may never arrive, go for the omakase menu, or chef's choice, which starts at $100...but you might as well get the $200 option, because #YOLO.
The ‘Mom's Minestra Nel Sacco,’ made of perfect parmigiano reggiano dumplings in brodo, will make you believe in God one last time before humans destroy each other.
Order some double-doubles because life is short (literally). Take your burgers and fries and shakes and park somewhere with a view (we personally like the Sherman Oaks In-N-Out for proximity to Mulholland). Eat, talk, and look out at the perfect city below you. We sure had it good for a while, didn't we?
On the one hand, I like it for its hutzpah. We laugh in the face of existential danger. More wine and sushi!
But I grew up with the threat of nuclear war. I can remember as a kid wondering if the northwest suburb where we lived was far enough from downtown Chicago that we might survive. And if so, would we still get sick. And if so, what would that mean? How long would we still live?
I also used to imagine moving to Australia (a place at the time I knew absolutely nothing about other than it was far from everywhere else) just so we could survive.
There were movies about nuclear war while I was a kid, and they really frightened me. Everyone talks about The Day After, but the one that really wrecked me was the TV movie Special Bulletin, a War of the Worlds-styled piece where you’re watching a news program supposedly reporting on terrorists who seem to have a nuclear device in the Charleston harbor. Suffice to say, it does not end well. And it was really really upsetting.
As an adult I’ve kind of resented being put through that sort of fear – I honestly don’t think I could watch Special Bulletin again (though apparently you can here). But the upside is the possibility of nuclear war still feels real. And I’m not sure that’s true for younger people. Although maybe it is and this is just the onset of my “these kids today don’t understand” phase, in which case a) I’m kind of excited, cranky feels super fun; and b) it’s time to get me some ill-fitting irritated old man glasses or some fantastic eye wear like this:
Is it me, or would we all be happier if we dressed like this?
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A lot of these articles make the point that the key is the imagination. Here’s Michael Lewis talking about MacWilliams, who was the chief risk officer for the Energy Department:
His more general point was that managing risks was an act of the imagination. And the human imagination is a poor tool for judging risk. People are really good at responding to the crisis that just happened, as they naturally imagine that whatever just happened is most likely to happen again. They are less good at imagining a crisis before it happens—and taking action to prevent it. For just this reason the D.O.E. under Secretary Moniz had set out to imagine disasters that had never happened before. One scenario was a massive attack on the grid on the Eastern Seaboard that forced millions of Americans to be relocated to the Midwest. Another was a Category Three hurricane hitting Galveston, Texas; a third was a major earthquake in the Pacific Northwest that, among other things, shut off the power.
How to imagine a crisis that has never happened... That’s basically what the New York Magazine piece tried to do. Some blasted it as scare-mongering (as they had An Inconvenient Truth); but others thought it was really useful precisely because it explored the extremes. Climate scientist Joseph Majkut wrote on Twitter: “This isn’t about scaring people into action or not but thinking hard about what climate change might look like and who it might hurt.”
“Keeping multiple versions of the future world in your head is hard, but wisdom comes from considering them all.”
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This week one of my newsletter favorites, comic book writer Kieron Gillen, picked up this same idea. “The problem with our world is that we have an experimental dataset of one,” he writes.
I wish we could study alternate timelines, and see how many Earths are just burned husks. Perhaps it was a one in a hundred chance we didn't dance our way off that cliff? We'll never know. Neither would any of those people in those other timelines – if anyone has a (lucky) Mad Maxian life there, they'd be saying nuclear war was inevitable. What happens is inevitable, and thinking so is a trick of our existence. We have no idea how lucky we are on the largest existential level, because by our simple existence we've always passed through the filter.”
The problem with dancing on a cliff for nearly 70 years is that we're used to the cliff. The cliff is simply there. It is not a real threat, because if it was a threat, something would have happened by now. It's easy to say that nuclear war was a paper tiger.
However, this is the key thing: those who think Nuclear War is a real and present danger need only to be right once, and it's all over. The people who think Nuclear War will never happen need to be right until the end of time.
Many argue that end of the world disaster movies actually keep us from seeing we’re responsible for the events of the world around us. Something external to us happens and we just have to react. In this way they encourage us to believe there’s nothing we can do about anything anyway, so really we might as well just get sushi and go to Griffith Park and recreate scenes from La La Land while the waters rise.
And maybe they’re right. I mean, I’m not sure many people walked away from The Day After Tomorrow saying we better get our act together on climate change. Probably more than a few were like, Fighting packs of wolves with Jake Gyllenhaal in Manhattan, cool!
But for the moment we still read journalism different (no matter all the current hysteria about fake news). So as much as entertainment seems to have absorbed everything in some latter day secret version of the Blob (or maybe the 28 Days Later virus), and online writing has been forced to get shorter and shorter (every Axios piece tells you exactly how many words it is), maybe it’s the longform think pieces that will save us.
Gillen: “... I will bet that the chance of nuclear war is considerably higher than amino acids getting it on in some pool in the distant past. This is why we have to be careful, and not to be complacent. The last seventy years have shown it possible for us to dance at the edge of the cliff.
"But the cliff awaits.”
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Speaking of scary apocalypses, you have to watch this ice cream commercial.
Then you have to ask yourself, how did someone ever sell an ice cream company on this idea? And follow up: Is it possible that it actually works? (I kind of think it does.)
Other things that have been a big hit this week: nuns with chainsaws; the Muppets singing at the Hollywood Bowl; and the super creepiness of facial recognition software.
In this regard, this tweet and all like it win everything:
(Dear Apple, You doing okay? Because you’re now trying to sell us phones that we know are probably going to break because we literally store them in our pockets or on our belts for prices more expensive than a computer. (And I'm talking about an Apple computer here, so yeah. Expensive.)
And you’re trying to make them sound more attractive by saying they’ll be constantly scanning your face, which is basically like saying "Wears this shirt, it sends out constant data about your heart rate and your location". Yeah, it's futuristic, I guess, but nobody wants that future.
So we’re just a little worried about you, Apple. Here, here’s $20; take a break, see a movie, okay?)
Lastly, I don’t know about you, but I’m finding this whole Cassini spacecraft about to crash into Saturn thing weirdly sad and moving. Here’s a great article about it.
Hang in there. Life may feel like you, too, are being forced to crash into the very thing you spent thirteen years trying to get to, but autumn's coming, and with it a slowly unfolding symphony of color, just for me and you.