#7: As We Enter March
The cultural roundup for DCers for the week of March 3rd, 2025.
Hello everyone! This week, I spent a bunch of my week watching old fandom drama — specifically, watching David M on YouTube retell every single plot point of Cassandra Clare’s extremely popular Harry Potter fanfiction. I fear this is maybe one of the best things I’ve ever spent my time on. (In my defense I was using it as like, a podcast in back of work.) What was going on in the 2000s Harry Potter fandom, and can I have some of what they were having? Every single time I encounter new drama from this era of the internet it’s the greatest thing I’ve ever heard. I fear the desire to become an old Twitter drama recapper on YouTuber comes closer to drawing me in every day.
What I’m Bringing Up at Happy Hour
This week, I’m telling all of my friends about the politics of the Zizians, a vegan techbro-ish cult entirely run by a trans woman named Ziz. I swear to God I’m not kidding about this. I think there’s very little reason to post doomerism about the Zizians; they have no actual influence over technological policy or even over the Rationalist space. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be fascinating. If you like cults at all you should read this.
In the world of tech, we are increasingly losing ownership of our digital products. Under Amazon’s new TOS, we don’t actually own the books we buy on Kindle — just licenses to them. It’s a good thing I basically just use my Kindle for Libby checkouts nowadays. But it’s not just media that we’re losing, it’s internet history in general. An interview with the director of the Wayback Machine has some great information here.
I adored this piece on beginning essays from The Personal Canon.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this Anne Helen Peterson piece on college campus protests during the pandemic — and yes, it resonates. To protest in the last few years while a college student was to be used as a scapegoat, a symbol of the nastiness and lack of sensitivity by children. Never was it taken seriously as a political tool or political message at all. And it should have been:
“[College is] also an education, as Hamilton Nolan puts it, in bullshit: in how an institution, or a workplace, or a boss can profess one belief and govern in a way that utterly compromises it. I hope students see the headlines about their college experience and understand them for what they are: attempts to trivialize righteous anger and grief, of course, but also a displacement of shame. There is so much we older adults could’ve done to make these students’ lives more survivable — during the pandemic, sure, but also over the course of the last two decades. We did not. Blaming them comes so much easier than blaming ourselves.”
What I’m Bringing Up to My Political Friends
It has once more been an awful week in international news — particularly for Palestine and Ukraine. All power to Volodymyr Zelensky this week; to disrespect a man who has successfully protected his country against full-on occupation to this extent in a diplomatic meeting is unheard of and horrifically disturbing. In Jenin, the biggest displacement of West Bank Palestinians since 1967 is still under way. The Guardian’s Annie Kelly, Hoda Osman, and Farah Jallad reported that at least 160 medical workers from Gaza have been held without charge in Israeli prisons for months.
The New York Times put out an extremely interesting piece on Trump’s big moves — legal and illegal — and on which of his moves mirror project 2025. Elon Musk is earning money off his own work at DOGE. We absolutely cannot let this go — in political rhetoric or in ourselves!
Recently, I’ve been thinking very carefully about political progressivism, and how we can actually make it work. A story on how Denmark’s social democrats are succeeding — which in this case, involves leaning into stricter immigration policies, which are popular among the working class.
“The French economist Thomas Piketty has coined the term “Brahmin left” to describe this new version of progressivism. (Brahmins are the highest caste in India, and Protestant elites in Boston came to be known as Brahmins.) In Piketty’s telling, the term captures the shift of the political left away from its working-class roots toward a more affluent, academic version of progressivism that focuses on social issues and cultural identity rather than economic class. This shift helps explain why the Democratic Party and center-left parties in Europe once won voters without college degrees by wide margins and now lose this same group.”
But while I appreciate why the best way to appeal to a working class may be stricter immigration policies, I still think there’s room for nuance here. Let’s take a look at some recent American polling about deportation of undocumented immigrants:
Yes, it is true that a plurality of Americans support deporting undocumented migrants. But when we look at actual policies, it’s not clear most support what that looks like in reality. A majority of Americans oppose deporting people whose children are citizens. For the record, I think we should all oppose this. And a majority also oppose deporting immigrants who have not been convicted of a violent crime. Even in the fairly culturally conservative U.S., what people really feel strongly about isn’t deportations in general — it’s deportations of migrants who have committed violent crimes.
For the record, I doubt there are that many. The point is this: That even if Americans like the thought of mass deportations, they don’t like the reality.
But more importantly, maybe immigration just isn’t the cultural touchstone everyone thinks it is. On migration, here’s Lydia Polgreen’s “South Africa Is a Warning”:
“Orebo’s story illustrates an important but often occluded fact in this age of migration. Despite the panic in rich countries over the arrival of people fleeing poor, war-tossed nations, most people from the global south who migrate don’t head north. The majority who flee in haste end up quite near where they came from, hoping to go home as soon as possible. And even those who migrate farther afield — searching for work, fleeing political persecution or simply wanting a new life — tend to remain in their own region or continent. In our hyperconnected, jet-powered age, the median distance traveled by modern migrants is less than 400 miles.”
When I think about where progressivism is failed, I really don’t think immigration is the main issue for us (specifically in the U.S.). Our main issue is that progressivism isn’t doing a good job at acting. Marc J. Dunkelman’s “How Progressives Broke the Government”:
“The saga at Wollman Rink encapsulates the underlying dynamic. Wicks Law had been passed with good intentions—a Jeffersonian check on municipal corruption. Mayor Koch had wanted the Parks Department to restore the rink for good reason—here was a Hamiltonian bureaucracy endeavoring to serve the public. Combined, however, progressivism’s two impulses served to render government incompetent. And the resulting gridlock wasn’t just a black eye for public institutions. It cleaved an opening for a figure like Trump.
The political effect of the ensuing paralysis has been profound. In the early 1960s, nearly four in five Americans professed trust in Washington to “do what’s right.” By 2022, that figure had fallen to one in five. Progressives have been arguing for decades that power can’t be trusted—that government is captured by moneyed interests; that it lines the pockets of the powerful few; that it is a tool of white supremacists, xenophobes, sexists, and worse. No one can deny that centralized power can be used for ill. But even given that reality, attacking government turns out to be, for progressives, a ham-handed way of convincing ordinary people that government should be empowered to do more to pursue the public interest.”
It may go against progressive instincts, but it’s true; in order to create a general movement towards progressive programs (including universal health care), we need to be able to focus on what government can do — and demonstrate it.
The other news of the week continues to revolve around the continued semiauthoritarian power grab occurring here. Jeff Bezos has taken control of the WaPo opinion section. Zack Beauchamps has written a piece on how the government can stop Trump’s power grab. Not everyone is going along — 21 DOGE members quit this week. Emily Amick puts out another great list of actions each of us can take.
And one more piece: Recycling isn’t what we think it is.
What I’m Bringing Up On My Reviewer Platforms
I read two great short stories this week:
→ “Endlings” by Carmen Maria Machado, ★★★½☆ — one of Machado’s newest stories on parenthood.
→ “Variations on an Apple” by Yoon Ha Lee, ★★★★☆ — a retelling of the Trojan War with a personified Troy and exceptional writing.
I also watched:
Minority Report (2002) dir. Steven Spielberg — ★★★½☆
This was solid but not life changing; good reveals. The Wikipedia paragraph listing the cast of this spoils a really major plot reveal, just as a heads up. Agatha you are my babygirl for real. Ending felt pretty simplistic; would this one plot point really overtake the entire system? I’m not entirely sure. The eye horror bit was too much – I just think the three full scenes entirely based around eye horror were so not worth my time. Kind of a classic ‘dystopia that looks so much like our world as to be hyperrealistic’ movie.
Misery (1990) dir. Rob Reiner — ★★★★
what if I told you my main association with James Caan before this was "Elf". Kathy Bates is unbelievable in this thing, and Caan is also excellent – though it's a very funny choice that in a few of his earlier scenes he kind of just gives 'annoyed'. It's a very fucking claustrophobic movie! Absolutely terrifying.
Kurt Schiller’s piece on Omelas did an excellent job on talking about the excellent “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”. I do now want to read N.K. Jemisin’s “The Ones Who Stay And Fight” to see if I agree with this criticism.
What I’m Bringing Up To My Nerd Friends
Huge news, y’all. I am now the proud mother of a stuffed dimetrodon! I purchased this beautiful beautiful creature from the Paleontological Research Institute, which sells a variety of gorgeous plushies — and is in danger of foreclosure due to a major donor pulling out last-minute. I ordered this beautiful plushie due to a major gift campaign and I just have to say that this is one of the most high-quality stuffed animals I have ever seen.
For the unaware, a dimetrodon is not a dinosaur. She’s actually a Synapsid, the group that also contains modern-day mammals — as opposed to the Sauropsids, the group containing all extant reptiles and birds. Basically, she’s more related to us than she is to dinosaurs! She lived in the early Permian period, around 295-272 million years ago, before going extinct during Olson’s Extinction (a smaller extinction occurring between the early and middle Permian.)
Since we’re on the topic — how many of you know that the extinction of the dinosaurs was not actually prehistory’s biggest extinction? That honor actually goes to the Permian-Triassic extinction event approximately 252 million years ago, which wiped out a staggering 70% of terrestrial vertebrates and 81% of marine species. The extinction was probably caused by the explosion of the Siberian Traps leading to widespread climate change.
And this is why I will always be pro Wikipedia at the function. Should I explain the history of every supercontinent in this Substack, or will absolutely no one care about this but me?
What I’m Bringing Up To My DC Friends
Lots of DC-related news this week. The 51st writes about reintroduced legislation to shut down district self-governance. The Washington Informer put out a piece on some of the 15 candidates who have filed to fill Trayon White’s seat after he was expelled for corruption. In fun news: Now that the STEER Act has given DC the power to enforce its tickets against out-of-state drivers, DC is suing three Maryland drivers who owe a total of about $95,000 in unpaid parking and speeding tickets. One of the three hit 12-year-old girl last year — before racking up a staggering additional $14,000 in tickets.
We’re all continuing to stress about federal layoffs. To live in DC right now is to know several people who have been fired and several more who are about to be. It’s frightening, and deeply depressing.
Back in 2019, Charlotte Shane wrote a piece called “Eyes Wide Shut” on political power that I wanted to highlight just a bit of here:
“PEOPLE WITH INSTITUTIONAL POWER ARE PATHETIC. We are not supposed to say it; the official story is that political power, in men at least, is glamorous, alluring, thrilling—the ultimate aphrodisiac. Yet anyone who cares to look will see the truth hanging out as plainly as an unclothed emperor’s . . . belly.”
Politics is a dark underbelly of society for a reason, and never has it been darker than it is now.
Until next time,
So well written and researched as always
LOVE the dimetrodon