"Conversation about the weather," Oscar Wilde purportedly said, "is the last refuge of the unimaginative." But let's be real: Weather was different for him. Wilde died more than a century before temperatures and rainfall became a portent of our collective doom—or a brief respite from it. Here in the 21st century, how you talk about the weather says a lot about your imagination. The forecast holds our worst fears and our whispered hopes.

This week in Southern California, I am delighted to tell you, we hit a glorious weather window when the heat of summer and the threat of fire season are subsiding, but we haven't yet begun to fret about what another bone-dry winter means for the emptying reservoirs. For now, the gloomy mornings and chilly nights are cause for exhalation. Farewell, thigh chafe and air-quality app! Hello, turtlenecks and afternoon hikes! The weather is all I want to talk about. It takes imagination to revel in the moments when the air feels right, because truly appreciating them means anticipating a future in which even these brief windows no longer exist. 

Untangling the complex knot of problems behind supply-chain issues. What happens to the stuff you order online after you send it back? Making a physical archive the climate crisis. Heat waves are deadlier than you think. The lucrative future of weather forecasting as the climate collapses. How the gutting of a small-town paper—which just happens to be the one my grandma subscribes to in southeast Iowa—affected the whole community. How Biden is carrying on Trump's legacy of cruelty at the US-Mexico border. The elaborate police cover-up of the brutal crackdown on Colorado activists who wanted justice for Elijah McClain. What it's like inside Rikers. The battle to unionize Planned Parenthood in Texas. On forgetting your first language, and how knowing multiple languages makes you a better writer. The myth of Asian American identity. Latina immigrant housekeepers on how the pandemic has impacted their lives. How Robinhood's design gets inside your brain, and Slack documents the banality of our working lives. WhatsApp is critical infrastructure. I can't wait to read these new biographies of Fannie Lou Hamer. The tearjerking story of an interracial romance, rekindled after 42 years. The 1950s book club that quietly connected gay people. A retrospective of Gregg Bordowitz's art about AIDS, queerness, Judaism, and overlapping crises. The Renaissance and Baroque women artists who painted themselves. The US is a cruel outlier when it comes to subsidizing childcare. What we don't talk about when it comes to ADHD. What's worse: Robot or human drivers? What's wrong with Kyrsten Sinema? The elegant science of turning cadavers into compost. The Museum of Imagined Orientalism.

If you read this newsletter every Friday, consider putting your money where your clicks are and becoming a paying member for just $15/year. If you're already a member, I salute you!

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Aminatou and I are on Brené Brown's podcast talking about friendship, vulnerability and, of course, shame. The last fluent speaker of Wukchumni. OMG, skoilets.

It's Elvira season! "When they say life begins at 30, they're not kidding. I mean, I think before 30 years old, you're just testing the water."

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This is the third in a series of micro-essays on the meeting of culture and climate by Shanti Escalante-De Mattei. Shanti is one of two inaugural AF WKLY writing fellows whose work is supported by paying members of this newsletter. -Ann

By Shanti Escalante-De Mattei

I was introduced to the concept of climate change through the ambient lexicon of “awareness” campaigns. Polar bears, plastic bottles, and bleached coral making anthropomorphized calls for help. Gentle voices narrating the science of collapse. “Reduce, reuse, recycle.” These campaigns could never explain how things had come to be this way and why they couldn’t change. Government corruption and profit motives were not on the pamphlet.  

Now that we know there is a multi-billion dollar industry dedicated to manipulating the messaging and cutting resistance at the knees, I thought we were beyond such platitudes. The public, educated in fires, floods, and courageous examples of activism, is not just ready but eager to understand ecological collapse in complex, thought provoking ways. Not so, apparently, if we are to judge by Undercurrent, a climate-themed “art event” staged in a Brooklyn warehouse.

A set of 11 audiovisual installations by musical artists like Bon Iver, Grimes, the 1975 (along with some “creatives”), the event is billed as a cutting-edge collaboration designed to “challenge inaction through inspiration.” I expected something artsy if not art world, a contemporary perspective geared towards millennials but catching savvy boomers and some zoomers too. Walking through the exhibits, I felt I had been catapulted 15 years into the past, back into the confusing chamber of polite neutrality.

Take, for example, the first installation. Under the Kitchen Sink, “a nod to where Caribbean homes in the UK often keep plastic bags” (but doesn’t everybody do that?), is credited to Jorja Smith and introduced with a placard that reads, “The installation is designed to inspire and provoke thinking about creative solutions to address systems of inequality that perpetuate plastic pollution.” As audience members proceed through a tunnel made of wire crates filled with plastic bottles, the heat lamps above are turned to a higher temperature, and soon the plastic is no longer neatly stacked but overspilling from its confines. Finally, one reaches a small dome made of disposable cups and bottles which surround a screen showing a Caribbean shore with audio of gentle waves lapping the beach. I already know plastic is bad. There was supposed to be a message about how inequalities lead to pollution. Was it hidden in the audio, which was difficult to hear? Had I missed something? 

The rest of the show continued to walk the line between the obvious and the surreal, with the “challenging inaction” piece always out of reach. There was a canvas structure that you poked your head through (it smelled faintly of piss…) where you could watch an animated video about algae. Another installation, a mirrored black box with some illustrations on it, was so mysterious I thought maybe the tech behind the piece had broken. All that I could glean was that it had been commissioned by “Deep Ear Ocean Fisheries,” but neither Google nor my press contact could tell me what this institution was. In a video installation by The 1975, I sat in the dark as stock footage of moving clouds, growing flowers, and the path of the sun flashed by, narrated by Greta Thunberg’s speech about civil disobedience. Its captions dissolved into glitter. Even this invigorating speech had been turned into a neutral, narcotic experience.

I asked a young woman what she thought of the show. “Seeing all of this I’m just like, yeah I really have to commit to stop eating meat and like...going outside,” she said. The event offers so little in the way of solutions that the audience is prompted to give the answers we’ve been fed in other contexts. Recycle and maybe choose Beyond burgers over beef. In the end that’s all Undercurrent is. The Beyond burger of art: mere consumption that feels as if you’ve ticked off some obligation. There was nothing here, no rage, no love, no knowledge, just more “awareness.” 
 

Find more of Shanti's work here, and follow her on Twitter.