Look at all the white people

Once again, the timer has run out on the ongoing discussion of American racism, so here’s a fresh thread for you all. I thought you might appreciate the magnitude of the Black Problem: black people get gunned down by the police. The police are far less trigger-happy when it’s a mob of hundreds of heavily armed white people shooting each other.

A composite image of handout booking images made available on 19 May 2015 by the McLennan County Sheriff's Department showing scores of men and women arrested and charged with crimes stemming from a large shootout and fight between biker gangs outside the Twin Peaks bar and restaurant at the Central Texas Marketplace in Waco, Texas, USA, 17 May 2015. Reports indicate that nine bikers were shot and killed and 18 other wounded. Police have announced that 192 people face charges of engaging in organized crime.  EPA/MCLENNAN COUNTY SHERIFF  HANDOUT EDITORIAL USE ONLY

epa04757409 A composite image of handout booking images made available on 19 May 2015 by the McLennan County Sheriff’s Department showing scores of men and women arrested and charged with crimes stemming from a large shootout and fight between biker gangs outside the Twin Peaks bar and restaurant at the Central Texas Marketplace in Waco, Texas, USA, 17 May 2015. Reports indicate that nine bikers were shot and killed and 18 other wounded. Police have announced that 192 people face charges of engaging in organized crime.

I think this suggests an easy solution to the problem of police brutality. Instead of 40 acres and a mule, give every black person in the country a black leather jacket and a shotgun.

Don’t worry, though. The Waco incident was completely thug-free.

Every time the police are scrutinized, they look worse

I highly recommend this 3-part, thorough article about the police by Radley Balko. It’s central focus is on the Minneapolis Police Department (which is a horror) and on George Floyd, but it’s wide-ranging and indicts the corruption, racism, and brutality of police forces everywhere.

It’s a long series, and I can’t possibly do it justice, so I’ll just highlight one thing that leapt out at me. The police all around the country have resorted to a phony medical excuse for deaths in police custody. You’ll hardly believe it — it’s called excited delirium.

Excited delirium, on the other hand, posits that some people just spontaneously die during intense, high-stress interactions with police, through no fault of law enforcement. It’s also highly dubious and not supported by any major medical organization.

Over the last several decades, there’s been a concerted effort to pressure medical examiners to diagnose excited delirium when the real cause of death was positional asphyxia. This not only exonerates cops who kill, it encourages police practices that will lead to more deaths.

George Floyd’s death prompted renewed scrutiny of excited delirium and its origins. This was overdue.

The first reason to be skeptical of the condition is that it’s rarely if ever diagnosed outside a law enforcement context. If there really is a condition that causes people to die spontaneously during a mental health crisis, while under the influence of some drugs, or while panicked with no accompanying signs of medical distress, we ought to see it under other high-stress, volatile scenarios like street or bar brawls, or when people are forcibly admitted to psychiatric facilities. This just doesn’t happen.

The origin of excited delirium is shonky and steeped in bigotry. But it doesn’t involve police or police restraint. The condition was first described in the mid-1980s by Miami medical examiner Charles Wetli after a wave of black sex workers were found dead under mysterious circumstances. Because some of the women had cocaine in their system, Wetli theorized that there must be something about the physiology of black women that causes them to spontaneously die after mixing cocaine with sex.

The phrase “physiology of black women” ought to have set off alarms all over the place. Yeah, this swarm of dead black women whose bodies are littering the streets…nobody killed them. They just drop dead when mixing cocaine with sex. Yeah, that’s the ticket. File those corpses away under “natural causes”. No way they were murdered.

Except…

Despite the absurdity of Wetli’s theory, it precluded homicide as a manner of death, which made it much more difficult for police to investigate the possible murders. It wasn’t until a victim was found in a similar state as the other bodies, but had no cocaine in her system, that the city’s chief medical examiner reviewed the doctor’s work in the other cases. He found evidence of asphyxiation that Wetli had overlooked. Police eventually arrested a serial killer named Charles Henry Williams for the murders. Williams is now believed to have killed at least 32 black women through asphyxiation.

Wetli was promoted and became a medical examiner in New York, where he continued to promote ludicrous, racist theories.

You might be saying right now that George Floyd was not a woman and wasn’t having sex, so how does this relate? Well, fact-free explanations can expand without restraint.

In the absence of any accountability, Wetli continued to develop his theory in ways that proved convenient for law enforcement. He expanded excited delirium to also include black men, particularly those who die in police custody. “Seventy percent of people dying of coke-induced delirium are black males, even though most users are white,” he once said. Instead of concluding that perhaps this was because police were more likely to use excessive force against black men, Wetli added, “It may be genetic.” The diagnosis has since expanded to include “exhaustive mania,” a form of excited delirium that, conveniently, occurs in people who haven’t ingested drugs or alcohol.

If I had a nickel for every instance of a racist saying “it’s genetic”, I’d be able to buy back Twitter from Elon Musk.

Excited delirium is even more useful for the cops. In addition to making their victims conveniently drop dead while leaving the police blameless, it has several other symptoms that play into the cop’s battery of excuses.

There is no diagnostic test for excited delirium. Instead, it’s become a catch-all diagnosis based on a broad range of symptoms and behavior that could be attributed to any number of conditions — symptoms like erratic behavior, psychosis, public nudity, and, weirdly, a tendency to propel oneself through glass.

But the most absurd supposed symptoms are an imperviousness to pain and “superhuman strength.”

There are obviously some drugs that can dull a user’s sensitivity to pain. And a rush of adrenaline can prompt a person to run faster or lift more weight than they otherwise might. But the idea that excited delirium can give people near-superpowers has been incredibly harmful. The claim doesn’t merely excuse brutality, it practically demands it. It also reinforces racist tropes about the brutishness of black men.

This isn’t merely old racist nonsense from the 1980s, it was part of the MPD’s training materials at least as recently as 2021.

You know, maybe it’s not true that all cops are bad. I think you could make a good case that many of them are racist, gullible, and not very bright. They’re not intentionally evil, they’re just so damned stupid that they stumble into badness.

The zeitgeist is white and male, I guess

It’s rather discouraging to wake up every morning to the news that old white men are pieces of shit, since that’s my demographic. I’ve been trying desperately to convince the universe that I belong to an entirely different clade, the spider kind, but so far medical science has failed to provide a mechanism to make my transformation at all convincing.

So, Jann Wenner. That piggy-eyed asshole is looking at me this morning.

He has a new book out, The Masters, a collection of interviews with famous musicians who are all “masters,” however that is defined, and who, coincidentally, are all white men. An interviewer noticed that peculiar distribution and asked about it.

Asked by The Times how he chose the musicians to feature, Wenner replied: When I was referring to the zeitgeist, I was referring to Black performers, not to the female performers, OK? Just to get that accurate. The selection was not a deliberate selection. It was kind of intuitive over the years; it just fell together that way. The people had to meet a couple criteria, but it was just kind of my personal interest and love of them. Insofar as the women, just none of them were as articulate enough on this intellectual level, he said.

The Times reporter David Marchese, a onetime online editor at Rolling Stone, pushed back on that claim by citing Joni Mitchell.

It’s not that they’re not creative geniuses,” Wenner replied. It’s not that they’re inarticulate, although, go have a deep conversation with Grace Slick or Janis Joplin. Please, be my guest. You know, Joni was not a philosopher of rock ’n’ roll. She didn’t, in my mind, meet that test. Not by her work, not by other interviews she did. The people I interviewed were the kind of philosophers of rock. Of Black artists — you know, Stevie Wonder, genius, right? I suppose when you use a word as broad as ‘masters,’ the fault is using that word. Maybe Marvin Gaye, or Curtis Mayfield? I mean, they just didn’t articulate at that level.

I appreciate that it was kind of intuitive, not based on reason or evidence, he’s just a racist sexist ass deeply at a gut level. I mean, how can you write about the inspiration and founding figures of rock ‘n’ roll and forget to include black people and women?

I think back to my early years, and who got me excited about music, and it was Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin — who I had a crush on in 8th grade, and would love to meet and talk to, but hey, Jann, she died of a heroin overdose in 1970. I’m pretty sure she’s deeply inarticulate now.

Isn’t the whole thing about rock is the passion? If you’re looking for articulate philosophers you’re going to miss the majority of the people who made the genre work. He disregarded Joplin and Joni Mitchell and Nina Simone and Bob Marley and James Brown and Aretha Franklin and Prince because he thought only people like Mick Jagger were smart and philosophical enough to meet his standards. You know, the guy who said this:

You start out playing rock ‘n’ roll so you can have sex and do drugs, but you end up doing drugs so you can still play rock ‘n’ roll and have sex.

Profound, man. A true intellectual.

The people who have all the money have no art

I have fond memories of taking my newly wed wife on a date to see Raiders of the Lost Ark at the theater in downtown Eugene, back in the day. I also have fond memories of putting my toddler son Alaric in a little red wagon and trundling him over the Willamette River pedestrian bridge to the Valley River Center mall to see the next Indiana Jones movie…and also the Star War with all the Ewoks in it. These were movies made for entertaining fun, and were the background of my young adulthood. I think they also made my kids happy.

This past week, the latest Indiana Jones movie, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, is playing here in Morris, and it’ll probably be playing next week as well. I haven’t felt even the most subtle stirrings of sentimentality to motivate me to go. The movie studios have milked me dry.

Also playing: Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. I hope the theater is cleaning up — it’s a co-op, and I’m a member, but here I am, a guy who loves going to the movies, and I’m not at all interested. I’ve even got a free ticket tacked to the refrigerator, and the impulse just isn’t there any more.

One reason is that I’m aware that Indiana Jones is a terrible role model and a very bad scientist built on colonialist preconceptions, part of trope that has been thriving since H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs.

The basic outlines of the adventure genre will be familiar to Indy fans, though its structure is heavily beholden to the colonialist politics of Haggard’s era: A brilliant White man, very often a professor, deploys personal reserves of cleverness, resilience and unrelenting determination in the service of exploration, discovery and resource extraction. That narrative template guides these stories even when the author attempts to push back on their ideological implications. Think, for example, about how the Indiana Jones films use the Nazi menace to distract from the fact that our hero is almost always appropriating the treasures of Indigenous or pre-colonial peoples. It’s as if they felt obliged to remind us that there’s always a worse White man, as a sort of alibi. It makes perfect sense, from this perspective, that Indiana Jones’s least-successful films are the ones that, like “Temple of Doom,” leave the Nazis out.

That contributes to my lack of interest, for sure. I feel a little bit guilty for enjoying a tale of a swashbuckling college professor fighting Nazis and also, unfortunately, looting non-white people’s history. Unfortunately, the pleasure part of “guilty pleasure” started to fizzle out as I also realized that every single movie is centered on garbage pseudoscience/pseudoarchaeology — the Ark of the Covenant with its vengeful ghosts, an evil Hindu priest who can magic hearts out of his victims, a goblet that grants eternal life, the crystal skulls of telepathic space aliens, and now in the latest, an ancient widget that allows one to travel in time. When you lay it bare like that, stripped of its gallant romanticized hero, they just look stupid. Maybe I can suspend disbelief once or twice, but not for 42 years. The well has gone dry.

I can’t help but feel that Hollywood has lost the script. It’s no longer about creativity and leaps of imagination — it’s about franchises, and repeating the same thing over and over again to wring out every last drop of profit. Indiana Jones should have been retired after the third one, going out on a high note — you could even argue that the first one was enough, time to move on. Star Wars, the same story: wasn’t the first trilogy more than enough, take a break and develop some new “intellectual properties”. Don’t get me started on superhero movies. I am so over the endless permutations of Batman. And now they’ve got this “multiverse” nonsense as an excuse to slap new costumes on tired old musclebound heroes.

It’s not just me, either. I was shocked to discover that the ever-optimistic Mikey Neumann, of Movies with Mikey, failed to find a single moment of joy in his review of Space Jam 2 (a movie that was completely off my radar, admittedly, and would actively avert any interest I might have in going to the movies). This was entirely out of character for him, but I think I share his despair at the ongoing corporatization of art. Neumann can usually find something worthy in even the most dreadful dreck, but Space Jam 2 is the product of a soulless corporate beancounter who saw the entire legacy of Warner Bros. as a fantastic collection of assets, a pile of stuff he couldn’t appreciate but could sell at an ungodly profit.

There are still a few movies I look forward to seeing, but none of them are attached to a “franchise.” That word is killing movies, just as “franchise” has killed so many small, unique, interesting diners around the country. It’s a word that makes profit-seeking landlords and accountants drool, though — too bad it has the opposite effect on consumers.

“That’s not how white men fight”

One of the texts that led to Tucker Carlson’s firing has been revealed. It’s surprising.

“That’s not how white men fight”

It’s not surprising because it’s a mild statement — it’s not. It’s deeply, implicitly racist. What’s surprising is that Fox News executives cared. Racism is what Fox News does. It’s just that Carlson plainly spoke out the words of white supremacy, and they knew this was going to be news…even if the Fox News audience would have agreed with the sentiment, and even now are probably looking at each other quizzically, wondering what’s wrong with the comment.

Me, I’m just wondering…how do white men fight? Have I been doing it wrong?

I think the way we’re supposed to do it is take advantage of any good fortune to oppress other people, make them weaker, and then exploit the hell out of them. Then there’s all the lying and cheating and stealing we do to maintain any advantage, all while declaiming that we are obviously superior and meritorious because we’ve got our boot on your neck and aren’t going to let you up. Yeah, that’s how white men fight. Then we live in terror that someone else might manage to do the same thing to us.

Why would Tim White and UC Berkeley hoard old bones?

I organize spiders better than this

Berkeley has a bit of an unsavory reputation as the premiere grave-robbing institution in the US. They’ve got an impressive collection of looted remains.

More than three decades ago, Congress ordered museums, universities and government agencies that receive federal funding to publicly report any human remains in their collections that they believed to be Native American and then return them to tribal nations.

UC Berkeley has been slow to do so. The university estimates that it still holds the remains of 9,000 Indigenous people in the campus’ Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology — more than any other U.S. institution bound by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, according to a ProPublica analysis of federal data.

Tim White, the esteemed anthropologist, was in charge of repatriation decisions for many years, and basically stonewalled the process.

White said the collection did not need to be reported under NAGPRA because there is no way to determine the origin of the bones — and therefore the law does not apply.

The collection has exposed deep rifts at UC Berkeley, pitting a prominent professor who said he’s done nothing wrong against university administrators who have apologized to tribes for not sharing information about the remains sooner.

I’m looking at this as someone who is sympathetic to both educational and research needs, and I have to ask: why do you want these old bones anyway, Berkeley? They’re used to teach anthropology students, and I can understand why you want variations represented — one old mounted skeleton is not enough — but why do you need thousands of specimens for teaching the basics, and why do you need Native American skeletons shoveled out of their graves by the thousands? This makes no sense. It’s more like maintaining a dragon’s hoard then an actual, useful teaching collection. That’s especially clear when the collection is described.

By then, the teaching collection that anthropology professors used had grown to thousands of bones and teeth that White said in his report to university administrators had been commingled with others donated by amateur gravediggers, dentists, anatomists, physicians, law enforcement and biological supply companies.

The remains were unceremoniously sorted by body part so students could study them. A jumble of teeth. A drawer of clavicles. Separate bins for skulls. For decades, anthropologists added to the collection, used it in their classes and then passed it along to the professors who came after them, White said.

What use is an old bone if you know nothing of its provenance? What can you learn from a bucket of teeth?

For a moment I assumed that this would have been a massive, well-curated collection, where scientists can do research on comparative anatomy and variation. But no? This collection is just a pile of bones that professors have been letting students play with for decades. This is particularly appalling when various cultures have been begging to have the bones returned, and when the law is telling UC Berkeley to return them.

Recourse under the law was limited, leaving tribal nations to file formal challenges with the federal NAGPRA Review Committee, an advisory group whose members represent tribal, scientific and museum organizations. It can only offer recommendations in response to disputes.

In the first challenge following the passage of the law, in February 1993 the Hui Mālama I Nā Kūpuna O Hawai’i Nei, a Native Hawaiian organization, took a dispute over repatriation of two ancestral remains before the federal committee. The remains had been donated to UC Berkeley in 1935, at which time a museum curator classified them as Polynesian. White disagreed.

Addressing the committee, White introduced himself as “the individual who is responsible for the skeletal collections at Berkeley.” He argued the remains might not be Native Hawaiian and could belong to victims of shipwrecks, drownings or crimes. They should be preserved for study, he added, making an analogy to UC Berkeley’s library book collection, where historians access volumes for years as their understanding evolves.

White is admitting that they don’t know whose bones they have…then what use are they? His excuse for keeping them is that they might not be Polynesian, but could be from shipwreck victims. That is not a defense. That’s an admission that they have a hodge-podge, a confusing grab-bag of bones scooped up off of Pacific islands, and they don’t know what they’ve got…except that they’re going to keep them.

I’m trying hard to view this mess from the perspective of a college professor, but I’m not seeing it, and Tim White’s arguments for hanging on to these bones reads like a confession that Berkeley has been careless and sloppy. And White keeps stuffing his foot in his mouth!

In August 2020, White reported the contents of the collection he taught with to university administrators.

White told ProPublica and NBC News that given the lack of documentation, it would be impossible to determine if they were Native American, much less say which tribe they should be returned to.

“There’s nobody on this planet who can sit down and tell you what the cultural affiliation of this lower jaw is, or that lower jaw is. Nobody can do that,” he said.

It’s just the weirdest defense: our bookkeeping is so bad and ignorance is so great that we have no idea whose remains these are, therefore we ought to be allowed to keep them. To me, this is an argument that the whole collection ought to be shoveled out and given to people who would treat the bones with real respect. Berkeley seems to have a history of disgraceful disrespect and exploitation, and doesn’t deserve to be custodians of those dead people.

Rich white man…guilty? Unbelievable!

I was living in Philadelphia during the OJ Simpson trial, and every day on my commute I’d pick up a copy of the Daily News, the city’s tabloid paper, and it was pretty much non-stop OJ coverage. It was weirdly fascinating, since OJ was that terrible combination of rich, famous, and obviously guilty. The trial was a prolonged spectacle of justice twisted to support a joyful media that knew a cash cow when they saw it, and a team of showboating lawyers who were more about putting on a show than practicing law. And then OJ was acquitted! The rich guy got off (although that was complicated by the fact that it was the rich black guy who escaped justice — there were a lot of people cheering for him, too.)

The latest law event comparable was the Alex Murdaugh trial. It was inescapable! It was unbelievable! It was a string of crimes where the culprit was clearly the corrupt Southern lawyer who seemed to think he could distract the law as it came crashing down on him by committing yet another clumsily executed murder, butchering his own family members. He was so obviously guilty that every death of everyone with any connection to the family began to look like another victim of a Murdaugh conspiracy.

I am so cynical that as the evidence piled up, I was convinced that Murdaugh was also going to be acquitted. The more damning the evidence became, the more certain I was that he was going to walk, because justice in America is synonymous with money. I was surprised when the jury adjurned and came back with a guilty verdict in only 45 minutes!

Amanda Marcotte has been reading my mind all this time.

Ah yes, why would cable news fixate on this truly bonkerballs string of crimes — corruption, fraud, drug abuse, and of course, murder — that would put any Southern gothic novel to shame? It hardly seems a mystery, especially when it seems that time spent not on this murder is instead dedicated to endless speculation about presidential primaries that are a year away and already have painfully predictable outcomes. (It’s Donald Trump and Joe Biden again, folks. Sorry to spoil the surprise.) And it’s not like they’re going to suddenly start having fruitful discussions on policy that will no doubt invite viewers to turn the channel.

Accusations of frivolity are something true crime fans have had to deal with for roughly forever. It’s a charge that has more than an air of sexism to it, as most such enthusiasts are women. But the Murdaugh case thoroughly exposes how wrong the “crime stories don’t matter” talking point is. The case cuts straight to the heart of so much of what is driving our current social-political climate, and in a more insightful way than most of the content the Beltway press is producing. (Oh boy, another interview with weaselly Trump voters in diners!) We’re in the midst of what is likely a decade, if not longer, of American crisis over exactly how much impunity we’ve allowed white men, especially those with money.

I think I’ve adopted a bleak mindset in which I’m helpless as rotten, stupid, rich men are going to trample all over the country with impunity. We can think of a few, I’m sure.

Donald Trump attempted a coup that led to a violent insurrection and he is not in prison yet. (And may be president again!) Social media owners like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are profiting off the destruction of democracy, and there seems to be no check on their power. Sure, Harvey Weinstein finally went to prison, but the powers that protect pampered white men have come roaring back, shielding other accused abusers like Johnny Depp and Kevin Spacey from consequences. Endless whining about “cancel culture” and “wokeness” is the battle cry of white male privilege — they will never fold to the forces demanding accountability!

The Murdaugh family story resonates because it’s so in tune with these societal concerns.

I’m still in disbelief that Trump is campaigning for president right now. The most corrupt and incompetent president in my lifetime, and he gets a free pass because he’s rich.

There are more.

Clearly, however, Murdaugh and his lawyer hoped he could bullshit his way out of this situation. It wasn’t a baseless belief. Murdaugh has a long history of evading justice that suggests he could pull it off. So it wasn’t hard to draw the connection between Murdaugh and the endless stream of glib rich white guy liars we’re subjected to on a daily basis: Trump. Tucker Carlson. Steve Bannon. Ben Shapiro. Ron DeSantis. I could go on forever. Men are always pissing on our legs and telling us it’s raining. We’re drowning in it.

What the Alex Murdaugh conviction tells us, though, is that there’s hope. Maybe, sometimes, we’ll see the wealthy and their puppets get their comeuppance.

Dallas Humber, American terrorist

Another vile human being has been dragged into the light. This woman has been promoting terrorism and encouraging mass murderers for decades, while hiding behind online anonymity. Left Coast Right Watch has done an amazingly thorough job of tracking her down — online anonymity isn’t as safe as she thought.

Over the past few years, she was simply known as “the narrator”—the disembodied voice that reads mass murderer manifestos, how-to guides on attacking critical infrastructure and collections of short essays written by an anonymous collective of white supremacists and accelerationists—the people hell-bent on causing the collapse of society.

Her name is Dallas Erin Humber, and she’s deeply involved with the online network of violent, militant bigots known as Terrorgram.

Here she is with her Nazi pedophile (why do those two words go together so often?) boyfriend, Jason Gant.

This is a doxxing I fully support. She’s the voice behind this thing called the Terrorgram Collective, an online group for the cheering fans of terrorism, murder, and mass destruction which has inspired at least one mass killing. Humber is a cheerleader for the worst, most contemptible people on the planet. I won’t quote her screeds — they make me sick, and probably would nauseate you, too — but if you must, the link above includes many excerpts from her sordid history, and there’s more here.

It’s not clear what more can be done about her, though. She’s a 33 year old woman living a normal public life in Sacramento, California, while inciting international violence under a cowardly pseudonym. Will exposing her have any discouraging effect at all? It’s not at all clear what it will do, other than give CPAC an opportunity to invite her to next year’s conference, and it looks like the law isn’t rushing forward to shut her down.

It’s also unclear whether Humber — now that her role in Terrorgram has been exposed — could or would be prosecuted. In the landmark Supreme Court ruling Brandenberg vs. Ohio, the court ruled that advocacy of violence could be punished only “where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.”

Arusha Gordon — associate director of the James Byrd Jr. Center to Stop Hate at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law — told HuffPost that it can be a high hurdle for prosecutors to jump to prove that certain incitements are “likely” to produce “imminent” violence.

It might be tough, for example, to demonstrate that Humber encouraging her followers to commit acts of terror amounts to an “imminent” threat in court. The Terrorgram Collective’s propaganda doesn’t always declare a specific, upcoming date for its followers to do terror.

So far, we’ll just have to settle for the fact that the world knows her name, where she lives, and what she looks like, and that her hatred will be scrutinized.

I’d include a photo of a spider, but I’ve learned how that usually ends

Stupid bird. No one is afraid of you.

Someone understands! Here’s an article by a man who discovered the joys of spidering. They’re beautiful and exotic and weird! How can anyone settle for mere bird-watching once you’ve seen a few spiders?

My first spider—the one that started all this—was black, with a head like a garden shovel’s blade and eight beady eyes that all but disappeared against the velvet of its upper body. At the end of its abdomen, two fat spinnerets poked out like the notched tail of a fish; on its back, a cream-colored strip stood in contrast to the black. As spiders go, it was unremarkable. And as I watched it scuttle across the carpeted floor of my in-laws’ basement, I had no idea that it was about to send me down the deepest rabbit hole of my life.

It was September 2021, and I was having some trouble adjusting. My wife, our one-year-old son, and I had temporarily relocated from Colorado to her parents’ house in Lincoln, Nebraska, after my wife’s mother was diagnosed with cancer. I occupied my free time as best I could, but within a couple of months I had hiked all of the few local trails. After a decade in the Front Range, where I could explore somewhere different every week, it felt claustrophobic.

In need of a new, Midwest-friendly way to get outside, I decided to try birding. I spent hours watching my in-laws’ bird feeders through binoculars, jotting down sightings of house finches and northern flickers. But when I tried to branch out and cover more ground, I ran into a roadblock: my toddler son, who came along on most of my outdoor adventures and was constitutionally incapable of sitting still. On our first trip to a local wildlife refuge, I raised binocs to my face and immediately heard him beating feet down the trail. After spending 30 minutes trying in vain to corral the giggling imp, I gave up and headed home.

One night after putting him to bed, I was sitting on the couch when I spotted something dark moving across the off-white carpet: that little black spider. Inside my brain, something clicked. There were spiders living inside the house. If I could bird-watch, why couldn’t I spider-watch. too? Ignoring the crawling sensation on my skin, I took out my phone, got down on my hands and knees, and snapped a photo.

Unfortunate side-effect, though: way too many people are arachnophobic, and very few people want to talk about spiders with you.

Sharing my new hobby was turning out to be difficult, however. If you think people tune out when birders start talking, try telling them about the wolfie you saw walking around with several dozen spiderlings clinging to her abdomen, or the fishing spider you watched shish-kebab a moth. My wife tried to be supportive, even though spiders make her hair stand on end. When I asked friends if they wanted to see pictures of my most recent find, their mouths said, Sure!, while their eyes said, Please don’t. For every new spider appreciator I converted, a dozen people told me about their spider bites, asked me if I was afraid of black widows, or just warned me to be careful.

They’re almost never spider bites. But try telling them that? That’s not what they want to hear.

The good thought here is that love of spiders can be infectious — if you can get anyone to really look, they can learn to appreciate them.

If the human fear of spiders is indeed genetic, you wouldn’t have known it watching my son. In the months after my spider-wakening, I took my new obsession from the backyard to the trail, mostly with Rhys in tow. Maybe it was because he could look at them face to face, but spiders fascinated him in a way that birds hadn’t. I remember the hikes we did together mainly in connection with the new species we saw. One time we spotted an enormous banded garden spider hanging upside down in the reeds at Lincoln’s Pioneers Park Nature Center, its body like a wasp-striped football and its legs in a perfect X. Later, at Colorado’s North Table Mountain, a rust-red Apache jumping spider climbed onto a tree root and looked at us, cocking its head as Rhys knelt down and did the same. Sometimes he spotted them before me, pointing at an orb web or a wolf spider blending in against a rock. Once or twice, perhaps possessed by the spirit of John Crompton, he tried to lick them.

You’ll have to let me know if my obsession has positively or negatively affected your opinion of arachnids. I will say it’s probably not a good idea to start licking them.

The curse of the middle-aged white man

Pity me! I’m part of the most oppressed demographic in the world! I know because my fellow middle-aged white men tell me they’re suffering.

Look! Here’s James Patterson!

James Patterson, a best-selling author with an estimated net worth of $800 million, opened up about how difficult it is for white men to find work in publishing and Hollywood.

The thriller novelist said white male writers experience “another form of racism” in an interview with The Times published Sunday, lamenting the plight of older white males. “What’s that all about?” Patterson mused. “Can you get a job? Yes. Is it harder? Yes. It’s even harder for older writers. You don’t meet many 52-year-old white males.”

It’s so hard to be a mystery writer who churns out formulaic pot-boilers that grace the shelves of every airport bookstore in the country.

And what about Christopher Eccleston?

Christopher Eccleston, star of Doctor Who, Thor: The Dark World, and The Leftovers, said in a new interview that straight white males are “the new pariahs of the industry,” though he also acknowledged that more diversity in film and television is a good thing.

In a conversation with Times Radio (via Deadline), Eccleston noted, “Quite rightly I’m a dinosaur now. I’m white, I’m middle-aged, I’m male, and I’m straight. We are all seen through the lens of Harvey Weinstein et al. And I can feel that the opportunities are shrinking, as they should do.”

I love how these articles always set the stage by first telling us how many hundreds of millions of dollars they have or what movies and TV shows they starred in, before quoting their sad little whimpers. You know, this isn’t a case where these people have lost opportunities or are making less money — they’re just finding that now they might have to rub elbows with people who are not middle-aged straight white men. Patterson is correct, it is another form of racism…it’s just that the racist here is himself. Maybe it’s just the same old racism?

If we’re seen through the lens of Harvey Weinstein, though, you have to recognize that one reason is that a lot of straight white men enabled him and profited from him and tolerated his behavior.