#Joe Fassler

[tomorrowusa]

A lot of people won't like hearing this, but the meat industry is terrible for this planet.

Last weekend, Elon Musk posted one of his more outrageously false tweets to date: “Important to note that what happens on Earth’s surface (eg farming) has no meaningful impact on climate change.” Musk was, as he has been from time to time, wrong. As climate experts rushed to emphasize, farming actually accounts for around a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Musk spewing disinformation is not exactly news. But even by his standards, his contention regarding livestock agriculture and climate was on a par with George Santos's fantasies.

The tens of billions of chickens, pigs, cows, and other animals we raise and slaughter for food annually account for around 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, primarily from cow burps, animal manure, and the fertilizer used to grow the corn and soy they eat. More than one-third of the Earth’s habitable land is used for animal farming — much of it cleared for cattle grazing and growing all thatcorn and soy — making animal agriculture the leading cause of deforestation and biodiversity loss globally. Deforestation causes emissions itself, but it also represents a missed opportunity to sequester carbon. If that land were “rewilded,” or retired as farmland, it would act as a carbon sink, sucking massive amounts of climate-warming carbon out of the atmosphere. But we keep clearing more and more forestland, especially in the Amazon rainforest and elsewhere in the tropics, mostly for beef, pork, and poultry.

Yep, livestock grazing accounts for almost a third of our usable land.

The message regarding livestock agriculture just isn't getting out.

Madre Brava also conducted a media analysis that found that between 2020 and 2022, less than 0.5 percent of stories about climate change by leading news outlets in the US, the United Kingdom, and Europe mentioned meat or livestock. Last month, two groups that work on issues related to animal agriculture — Sentient Media and Faunalytics — published an analysis with similar findings. The organizations looked at the 100 most recent climate change stories from each of the top 10 US media outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and CNN, and found that 7 percent mentioned animal agriculture. Of that 7 percent, most only discussed how climate change-fueled weather events like droughts, floods, and heatwaves impact animal farmers. “Across the 1,000 articles we examined, only a handful of stories reported in depth on the connection between consuming animal products and climate change,” the researchers wrote. The media is an easy target, and some criticism is deserved — it’s a disservice to readers to largely ignore a leading cause of the climate crisis. Part of the problem is that the media, like everyone else, operates in an information environment in which the meat lobby downplays and in some cases suppresses the full extent to which burgers, ribs, and chicken nuggets pollute the planet. But journalists could be doing more to cut through the noise.

We need to speak up more ourselves. Entrenched interests and powerful lobbying groups are not shy about promoting livestock businesses which harm the planet.

The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the industry’s leading lobby group, runs a “climate messaging machine,” food journalist Joe Fassler recently wrote in the Guardian, that trains influencers to confuse the public and downplay beef’s emissions. The list goes on. Last year, leaked documents showed that delegates from Brazil and Argentina successfully lobbied the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to remove any mention of meat’s negative impact on the environment, or recommendations for people in rich countries to reduce their meat consumption, in its recent report. Meat giant Tyson Foods spends a much bigger share of its revenue than ExxonMobil lobbying Congress to stop climate policy. Outside the animal rights movement, there aren’t many voices pushing back against these narratives. The US environmental movement has largely shied away from campaigning to reduce meat and dairy production, with some leaders outright rejecting the notion that we need to eat fewer animals. Policymakers largely avoid the issue too.

We have a lot of catching up to do – and fast.

“The food conversation is probably about 20 years behind the energy conversation, and it is catching up, but it’s not visceral to people in the way energy is — that they immediately know energy is a climate issue,” said Michael Grunwald, a food and agriculture columnist for Canary Media, in the Sentient Media panel discussion. But time is in short supply. Experts say that if we don’t change what we eat — especially reducing beef and dairy — we can’t meet the Paris climate agreement of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius or less.

In addition to publicizing the issue, we can lead by example. Eating less meat or even no meat lets people know we're serious about what we're saying.

There will be pushback from the industry and also from populist blowhards. We can imagine at least one saying something like: "Hunter Biden wants to steal your double cheeseburger. SAD!"

But no discussion of carbon emissions is complete without talk of livestock agriculture and its effects.

#the environment #climate change #carbon emissions #meat #livestock agriculture #livestock grazing #deforestation #elon musk #disinformation #rewilding #vegetarian #vegan

[scribbleymark]

"Believing that everything containing a special, charged energy must be sexual is not only simplistic; it can also shift how a relationship is perceived in a harmful way. In an insightful essay for Catapult magazine, writer Joe Fassler responds to a Boston Review piece about the eroticism of teacher-student relationships by describing how his high school teacher coerced him into having sex and warning about the dangers of co-opting the language of sexuality.

'The authors [of the Boston Review article] are right to point out that passionate teaching can bring about a kind of heightened energy between people. In my work in the classroom, I’ve experienced that feeling too,' he writes. 'But falling back on a convenient shorthand—the language of romantic attraction—to describe that phenomenon seems to me, at best, misguided.' This is the same mistake that The Cut writer Kim Brooks makes when she uses the language of sexual infidelity to frame her intense friendships and calls them 'affairs', as if they must automatically be a betrayal, as if there are no other comparisons possible. This is the mistake all of us make when we casually sexualize language and forget that the sexualization is a lazy interpretation of a feeling and not the feeling itself.

Language betrays us by making sexual attraction the synonym for fulfillment and excitement itself. When describing different types of social energy and intimacy, like the mind-meld of creative collaborators or the trust between pastor and congregant, there are few metaphors that don’t resort to the sexual. Wanting to be 'intimate' with someone—even emotionally intimate—can seem lewd. Being in a 'relationship' with a friend sounds sort of odd. A thesaurus search for passionate offers as synonyms wanton, lascivious, libidinous, aroused, sultry, and, well, sexy.

'Isn’t what we need a better, more precise vocabulary to describe the intense bond between teachers and students—one set apart from the language of eros?' Fassler asks. With training, he continues, well-meaning educators would learn not to mistake the 'sparkle of mentorship' for something more, just as therapists learn to deal with the complicated emotions they can provoke in clients without assuming the relationship is romantic in nature...Developing and normalizing language that lets us talk frankly about emotional intimacy without it seeming like a come-on will help the world come into focus. Better language will protect us from confusing intention or misinterpreting emotion when that might be inappropriate, and it allows us to enhance the energy that is present without trying to turn it into something else. It will let us talk about relationships for what they are, not what they resemble."

-Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

#angela chen #ace

[delaimaginacion]

A book enables you to live that many more lifetimes, to try out that many more lives and ways of seeing the world. It’s like having your own time machine. What could be more magical than that?

Joe Fassler, “ Keeping Track of Every Book You’ve Ever Read”

[sorryunclejoe]

Light the Dark - Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process

Edited by Joe Fassler

#art #motivation #artistic process #writing

[strawberries-and-cr3am]

no such thing as just good writing

I loved the reading this week by Joe Fassler. It was interesting to see the differences in advice from the authors. One quote in particular caught my attention: "There is no good writing, only rewriting.” This quote from Robert Graves encapsulates a fundamental truth about the writing process. It emphasizes the importance of revision for every writer, not only beginners or seasoned professionals. Good writing is not just one flow of consciousness, but it is an art that takes many stages and thoughtfulness to create. The first draft is rarely the final one; it's more like the raw material from which the writer sculpts their masterpiece. It is not just something that effortlessly flows from the pen or keyboard in one single draft. As important as it is to get your ideas down on paper in that first draft, the true magic happens in the revision process. From my perspective, writing is about refining and perfecting one's ideas and words. The beauty of writing is this very thing. You can take however much time you wish to make it exactly how you want it and even learn more about yourself through the process. You can take your time to be perfect. The quote reminds us that the path to good writing is often paved with many revisions, rewrites, and edits. It's about the writer's willingness to revisit their work, even when it feels challenging or frustrating, in pursuit of excellence. Every round of writing is an opportunity to learn and grow. It's through rewriting that they refine their style, develop their voice, and become better communicators. It is the part of the process where you can truly grow and learn. This quote inspires writers to not only embrace the writing process, but to respect it. Creating something truly remarkable takes time, determination, patience, and perseverance.

[glorioustidalwavedefendor]

How Doctors Take Women’s Pain Less Seriously

When my wife was struck by mysterious, debilitating symptoms, our trip to the ER revealed the sexism inherent in emergency treatment.

By

Joe Fassler

(...)

This is called ovarian torsion, and it creates the kind of organ-failure pain few people experience and live to tell about.

(...)

“My wife,” I said. “I’ve never seen her like this. Something’s wrong; you have to see her.”

“She’ll have to wait her turn,” she said. Other nurses’ reactions ranged from dismissive to condescending. “You’re just feeling a little pain, honey,” one of them told Rachel, all but patting her head.

We didn’t know her ovary was dying, calling out in the starkest language the body has. I saw only the way Rachel’s whole face twisted with the pain.

(...)

And every nurse’s shrug seemed to say, “Women cry—what can you do?”

Nationwide, men wait an average of 49 minutes before receiving an analgesic for acute abdominal pain. Women wait an average of 65 minutes for the same thing. Rachel waited somewhere between 90 minutes and two hours.

(...)

When she pulled up Rachel’s file, her eyes widened.

“What is this mess?” she said. Her pupils flicked as she scanned the page, the screen reflected in her eyes.

“Oh my God,” she murmured, as though I wasn’t standing there to hear. “He never did an exam.”

The male doctor had prescribed the standard treatment for kidney stones—Dilaudid for the pain, a CT scan to confirm the presence of the stones. In all the hours Rachel spent under his care, he’d never checked back after his initial visit. He was that sure. As far as he was concerned, his job was done.

If Rachel had been alone, with no one to agitate for her care, there’s no telling how long she might have waited.

(...)

Rachel’s physical scars are healing, and she can go on the long runs she loves, but she’s still grappling with the psychic toll—what she calls “the trauma of not being seen.” She has nightmares, some nights. I wake her up when her limbs start twitching.

Sometimes we inspect the scars on her body together, looking at the way the pink, raised skin starts blending into ordinary flesh. Maybe one day, they’ll become invisible. Maybe they never will.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/10/emergency-room-wait-times-sexism/410515/

#women #sexism #mysogyny #violence against women #medical malpractice #neglect #medical trauma

[tastefulcutefriends23]

Carmen Maria Machado view on The Haunting of Hill House

Author of In the Dream House; Carmen Maria Machado made a lot of really good points that I agree on for The Haunting of Hill House. When Machado was reading the book she said  "It scared the shit out of me. Even though the events that appear to be supernatural activity are few and far between, those scenes are so chillingly written—as if Jackson was describing a phenomenon she’d seen before and really understood." I believe the reason Jackson was able to make the anxiety driven plot so powerful was because people in society can relate to this. Due to being a woman, person of color or a part of the LGBTQ+ there is always this fear that can engulf a person and this is what Jackson writes.  Machado than goes on to say that "The book’s particular brand of surreality felt, to me, like that experience of walking home from a party a little bit drunk, when the world somehow seems sharper and clearer and weirder." There's this feeling of uneasiness one gets when walking home drunk. If we set the scene we can see a girl (in this case Machado) walking home alone (1st red flag) drunk (second red flag) and we can also assume since she is walking home from a party that it is night time or close to dusk (red flag 3). These are all red flags because it can leave a person valuable and for a woman it can be very dangerous. We see this with Eleanor; she is "drunk" on the idea of freedom drinking from her own cup of stars. And the house is feeding off of that. It knows that Eleanor is valuable and takes advantage of that. Which is something that Jackson makes the reader feel in this story. We have this surreal feeling of this house as does Eleanor but we are still intrigued to go inside. And then when we are in it preys on those thoughts we have in the back of our heads.

Fassler, Joe. “How Surrealism Enriches Storytelling about Women.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 12 Oct. 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/10/how-surrealism-enriches-storytelling-about-women/542496/.

[devonellington]

What I'm reading: LIGHT THE DARK edited by Joe Fassler. Inspiring! #reading https://www.instagram.com/p/CjOOsSVLPGD/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

#reading

[wyrdwordsandeffigies]

Reading In The Dark - The Books I Read In January

Reading In The Dark – The Books I Read In January

January was a really good month for reading. While the stack I made my way through wasn’t towering, the several books I did read (mostly) satisfied my crazily curious soul, delighted my heart and invigorated my creativity. I really couldn’t have hoped for more. The Books I Read In January The Art Of The Occult: A Visual Sourcebook For The Modern Mystic By S. Elizabeth Mystical beliefs and…

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#Austin Kleon #Creativity #Foxfire Wolfskin #January Reading #Jim Crumley #Joe Fassler #Katie Metcalfe #Light The Dark #Matt Gaw #Nigel Slater #Reading #Reading In The Dark #S Elizabeth #Sharon Blackie #Steal Like An Artist #The Art Of The Occult #The Christmas Chronicles #The Nature Of Winter #Under the Stars #Wyrd Words & Effigies

[karmaalwayswins]

Now Reading:

Joe Fassler and Laura van den Berg for The Atlantic “The Powerful Practice of Writing by Hand” (2018)

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/08/laura-van-den-berg-by-heart/567964/

#joe fassler #laura van den berg #the atlantic #creative process #writing #2018 #now reading #my stuff

[kulturado]

The Story: A Writer’s Fixation on Sound

The Writer: Joe Fassler

R. O. Kwon reflects on the relationship of rhythm to writing.

#r.o. kwon #writers #sound #rhythm #atlantic #joe fassler

[wyrdwordsandeffigieshaunt]

Reading In The Dark - The Books I Read In January

Reading In The Dark – The Books I Read In January

January was a really good month for reading. While the stack I made my way through wasn’t towering, the several books I did read (mostly) satisfied my crazily curious soul, delighted my heart and invigorated my creativity. I really couldn’t have hoped for more. The Books I Read In January The Art Of The Occult: A Visual Sourcebook For The Modern Mystic By S. Elizabeth Mystical beliefs and…

View On WordPress

#Austin Kleon #Creativity #Foxfire Wolfskin #January Reading #Jim Crumley #Joe Fassler #Katie Metcalfe #Light The Dark #Matt Gaw #Nigel Slater #Reading #Reading In The Dark #S Elizabeth #Sharon Blackie #Steal Like An Artist #The Art Of The Occult #The Christmas Chronicles #The Nature Of Winter #Under the Stars #Wyrd Words & Effigies

[delaimaginacion]

It’s depressing to contemplate the fact that I won’t get to read everything I want to read. So depressing that I sometimes slip into a kind of delusional thinking: “Well, if I read an extra hour every day, maybe I will get to read it all.” Which, of course, is nonsense.

Joe Fassler, “ Keeping Track of Every Book You’ve Ever Read”

[dontdenymeshakespeare]

Christmas & Birthday Book Haul

My birthday is two days after Christmas, so I’ve gotten in the habit of writing one combined list and sending that out. It usually culminates in me having masses of new books by the end of December.   The first book was one that wasn’t on the list, but Mum got for me because of my travel blog (there’s a link to it on the home page of this one.) It’s The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2008. I’ve read…

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#Alcott Sisters #Alison Weir #Birthday #Book Haul #Books #British History #Christmas #David Bellos #Elise Hooper #England #English History #Eric Rusmussen #Fantasy #First Folio #Harold Bloom #History #Jessica Strawser #Joe Fassler #Lancaster #Leigh Bardugo #Les Miserables #Patrick Rothfuss #Paul Collins #Reader #S.J. Kincaid #Sarah Gristwood #Travel Writing #Victor Hugo #W.H. Auden #Wars of the Roses

[hannamarni]

Ezra Pound famously urged poets to “make it new,” but that doesn’t mean artists should forget about the past. In our conversation for this series, the English folk singer-songwriter Laura Marling explained why she’s inspired by the ancient, the outdated, and the disappearing, citing how a Robertson Davies passage that suggests vanishing cultures and abandoned ideas may still have something urgent to teach us. For Marling, the lines help explain what she tends to do by instinct: embrace chance, limit choices, and find new directions inside of old ones. Short Movie, Marling's newest record, is her most expansive-sounding effort yet. The sound pays tribute to the vast size and endless noise of Los Angeles, where much of the record was written: Songs typically begin with guitar and voice floating alone in a pool of reverb, but gradually, more instruments break in, as if trying to conquer all that emptiness. Short Movie is Marling’s fifth album, and the follow-up to 2013’s critically acclaimed Once I Was an Eagle. She spoke to me by phone from London. Laura Marling: I was visiting my family over Christmas one year, and my father was reading The Rebel Angels by Robertson Davies. My godfather had given him a copy—I remember him sitting with it in the corner of the room, laughing loudly by the fire as he read. Later, my father gave me my own copy of the book, and it arrived in my life at exactly the right time. I was just getting interested in two things that are spoken a lot about in Robertson Davies’ novels: mysticism and classic books. The novel’s central character, Maria, is a young postgraduate researching Rabelais at a university in Toronto. She’s invited her professor, Hollier (whom she is in love with, but who isn't interested in her), to dinner at her mother’s house. Her mother is Romani and holds onto the secrets and eccentricities of her culture strongly, much to the embarrassment of Maria. But Hollier takes a strong fascination, despite her hostility to his interest. When asked by her mother why he wants to know more, Hollier gives a short speech about the importance of historical knowledge, especially knowledge in danger of being trivialized by a rational, godless society: The recognition of oneself as a part of nature, and reliance on natural things, is disappearing for hundreds of millions of people who do not know that anything is being lost. I am not digging into such things because I think the old ways are necessarily better than the new ways, but I think there may be some of the old ways that we would be wise to look into before all knowledge of them disappears from the earth—the knowledge and the kind of thinking that lay behind it. To have the ability to throw away sentences like these from a non-central character in a novel is amazing. I love the way this passage highlights the importance of retaining earlier forms of knowledge—the way that certain ideas and ways of thinking may prove to be useful, even if they seem to have no relevance to the way we live now. Quite a lot of my life is spent trying to figure out why I always want to go backwards—when the majority of the world seems to want to build more construction on top of the construction. This passage helps me account for my impulse to do that. “The recognition of oneself as a part of nature,” as Hollier puts it, is one attitude that’s disappearing. Access to nature is almost a privilege now. And though I believe that technology may one day catch up and help us go back to a pre-Industrial Revolution style of living, we miss out on a great deal by being so cut off from the natural world. Wildness in nature is irrational in a way that’s comforting. Without that, you lose your connection to instinct, and your ability to deduce natural morality from what’s around you. I think the more that people feel disconnected from this aspect of their humanity, the more they seek to avoid punishment and live in a state of permanent contentment. But that form of experience, in my opinion, isn’t truly human. RELATED STORY What Writers Can Gain From Seeing the World Through Different Eyes We live in a very fast-moving—and sometimes quite bland and rational—time.  I think that’s why I’m interested in the history of mysticism and the occult, ways of thinking that push back against rationality. You don’t need to really believe that magical things are “real” to appreciate them. As Hollier explains earlier in this scene, people “may believe what is untrue, but they have a need to believe the untruth—it fills a gap in the fabric of what they want to know, or think they ought to know.” I’d rather live in a world injected with fantastical possibility. I’m very lucky in that my job is a creative one, but in the times that I haven’t been doing the creative side of the job I find it necessary to be involved in fantasy in some way. My interest in earlier ways of doing things also extends to my approach to making and recording music. I only work with analog gear, because that’s all I know how to do. I grew up in a recording studio. My dad ran a recording studio. I always grew up with the idea—in fact I didn’t ever really know there was another option—that you rehearse with a band for a week, and then you go in and record all together in one room. So that’s how I’ve always done it, even though many recordings today are built one track at a time. We do overdub—on the first track of the record, we went back in again and picked up a different percussion instrument and made weird noises into the mic. But that’s as far as we take it. Most of the songs are based around capturing a live recording. I like to keep things simple because it means you can’t lose yourself in the complications. I’m such a passionate person, but when things get too complicated I lose interest. So I’m very careful about containing my passion so that I can follow it through.  I feel that in all aspects of my life: I can’t have more than three outfits in my wardrobe or I can’t get dressed in the morning. I like things to not be too full of decisions. I think that’s one reason why I’ve always liked music made in the year 1969. For a long time, I would go into record shops and look for records—any records—made in 1969. That was a time in music when things were starting to become stereo and recording equipment was moving in a direction that’s closer to what we have now. I’ve always liked that tone and that sound: Technology allowed for new forms of experimentation, but things hadn’t gotten too complicated. You don’t need to really believe that magical things are “real” to appreciate them. It’s not that I don’t like music that uses new techniques. I listen to a lot of electronic artists—I think Autechre is someone who perfectly manages to express an extremely industrial sound, a sound that is very of our time, or beyond our time. People who know the present very well can sometimes show us what the future will look like, and that’s exciting. There’s Phillip K. Dick, writing [the novel that became] Blade Runner—when I moved to L.A. I thought, Holy fuck, he had it completely right! But sometimes you need the past to make the new. One example is John Luther Adams, a composer I really like. (Radiolab did a podcast about him.) He did an album that captures ocean sounds and the sound of storms—it’s not abstract, it’s very classical in style and instrumentation. He’s so competent as a musician and a composer that he’s completely managed to perfectly express those sounds from nature and translate them to music. I see that as a forward-thinking use of ancient skills. Not that classical music is ancient, by any means—but he used centuries-old instruments to create a completely modern statement. In my own songwriting process, I often find myself reappropriating older works to write new songs. There are maybe ten lines from The Rebel Angels, for example, that I’ve regurgitated into three or four different songs—it’s a form of regeneration. At one point in the book, Maria’s Greek professor—who is madly in love with her—goes on a long monologue about how she’s like the Greek god Sophia, the masculine god’s female counterpart. I ended up using this idea, in a way that wasn’t fully conscious, to create a song called “Sophia.” It was about the praying to a feminine god, what kind of power that is. What a different idea to a masculine god that is. Things are always getting lost as times change. One thing that’s disappearing from recorded music is the element of chance. Since a lot of the takes on my records are first or second takes, there’s sometimes some minor fluff in them—the sound of someone dropping a drumstick, or me dropping my pick. And yet the song goes on, and these little accidents become part of the character. As the recording process gets more sophisticated and controlled, these imperfections start to disappear. But maybe technology will find a way to help us find them again.

Laura Marling, on Why Writers Should Look Back for Inspiration.. By Joe Fassler.

#Laura Marling #Joe Fassler #the atlantic

[probablyasocialecologist]

In an illuminating analysis, Portland State University scholars Megan Horst and Amy Marion synthesize years of academic research, showing how federal programs focused on the overproduction of commodities mostly benefited wealthy landowners—who were, and still are, mostly white men. These landowners had the resources to compete in the race for larger and larger farms, while less-well-off farmers, tenants, and laborers—disproportionately people of color—were, as one Farm Security Administration official put it in 1938, “shoved aside in the rush toward bigger units, more tractors, and less men per acre.”

Between 1910 and 1997, Black farmers lost around 90 percent of the land they owned. White farmers lost only about 2 percent over the same period.

Joe Fassler, Regenerative agriculture needs a reckoning

#usa #farming #agriculture