Escape From Down Bad Island

Editor’s Note: There is an ongoing campaign of deliberate starvation and forced famine of 2.1 million people in Gaza. Writers Against The War On Gaza launched a Flood the Newsrooms project that lets you send a letter to the editors of all of the major news outlets in the U.S. demanding that they cover the famine as a front page story. You can use their template email if you want or write your own. You can also donate to the Sameer Project. You can also call your dumb congressperson and tell them to do something. Suddenly they are being more talkative.

On to the newsletter:

Hello from Down Bad Island. I had a chaotic first few months of the year and while it’s not as chaotic feeling now I’ve come to accept the unsettled-ness. I am wrestling with the idea of disruption as something that can be healthy but ultimately I think this is an accelerationist fantasy. I like to have agency over my own disruption. This year I have been dealing with housing instability, the financial precarity of freelancing and a Nazi throwing the federal government into a woodchipper.

Congress shred $1 trillion off Medicaid. Medicaid is the best thing about the United States of America. I’ve never been to the Grand Canyon but I guarantee you it is better than that. I don’t think there is really a way for me or anyone else to be a freelance journalist without the Medicaid expansion in the Affordable Care Act. I’m currently on my state’s “Essential Plan,” the expansion of which was funded with American Rescue Plan dollars which were not renewed. This means I now make too much money for Medicaid but will likely not be able to afford a costlier ACA-subsidized plan.

In my more optimistic moments I think, maybe this is what will push people over the edge and embrace a single-payer system - but it turns out Americans can absorb an extraordinary amount of pain as long as it means someone else is hurting more ; )

I’ve been trying to think beyond right now to what’s next, what’ s possible, what could be planted from the chaos but it’s hard to do because I’m scrambling to confirm that I still exist and am not a ghost hallucinating the apocalypse.

I have casual conversations with people and they seem to acknowledge that we are spiraling into authoritarianism or that we are already there, for many people the horror is atmospheric, environmental, for others it is visceral and inescapable, and the space between the two is shrinking. It’s hard not to see any arena of American life where the engines of planet-annihilating extraction and consumption are not being unleashed. The things that make me the most depressed are things that are so pointless. The fact that we are shredding up the Earth, privatizing state and local and federal land and constructing brand new gas-powered turbines to power hundreds of largely pointless but extraordinarily resource-intensive data centers that provide no value to the human race but help students cheat on term papers, lonely people masturbate*, politicians write reams of incoherent and factually challenged policy and which flood the internet with shrimp Jesus slop. We’re burning lakes, driving up utility bills and essentially making every climate goal a fantasy so that instagram can create chatbots called John Pig Man that just say “oink” at you or you could have a therapist who is a blond white Muslim convert (two real chatbots I saw.)

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In May I took a trip to Detroit for the first time where I wrote part of this newsletter. I am struck by the contrast in land, how much of it there is and how many homes are in a state of disuse, in contrast to NYC, where there is a lack of a habitable parcels of land compared to people who wish to own or live in them. Many of the buildings bare the name of Henry Ford, the most famous antisemite in American history, whose namesake company also spent years making predatory second mortgages to Detroit residents.

The houses in Highland Park, where I was staying and which is technically not part of Detroit but a municipality surrounded by Detroit, are large and ostentatious. They don’t have a cookie-cutter design like the modular suburbs of Long Island. There are vacant and boarded-up homes threaded through it, often right next to ornate and occupied buildings with new cars on the sidewalk and neatly-trimmed shrubs. In some houses, kudzu vines crawl up the walls and trim and roof and front door. Some of the buildings are mansion-sized; the area was once tony and filled with the area’s wealthier residents.

Detroit has a lopsided property tax system, where lower-valued homes are assessed at a higher rate than higher value homes at the neighborhood level. The result is that homeowners in neighborhoods that have experienced deindustrialization, job loss, white flight and a depleted tax base over the course of decades now don’t have the financing to fix their homes, which face foreclosure, to be sold for a pittance or placed into the Detroit Land Bank. I wrote a bit about this here. This analysis is mainly based on the research of Bernadette Atuahene, who wrote a new book called Plundered about Detroit’s property tax assessments in which she likens it to the predatory regime of fines and fees in Ferguson, Missouri that the Department of Justice uncovered after Michael Brown was murdered in 2014. The county assesses poorer peoples’ homes at a higher rate for the same reason toxic manufacturing is often cited in poor neighborhoods: officials are less intimidated by the protest of poor and Black folks than they are of wealthy whiter neighbors.

I enjoyed visiting all the community gardens while I was in Detroit; the city has a booming urban agriculture scene. I was particularly impressed with Keep Growing Detroit, a 1.38 acre farm open to volunteers near the Detroit River and the Eastern Market, where it funnels some of its food. I also volunteered at Farm City Detroit and was charmed by the neighborliness of this small garden, everyone who volunteered with me was from the neighborhood and included 10 year old boys and septuagenarian white women. One person I spoke to had just moved into an affordable housing complex on the same street brought to the neighborhood by the same nonprofit that owns the farm. That organization, Blight Busters, also owns a nearby coffee shop and art space. I planted some tubers.

Here is a great piece in the Detroit Free Press about the urban agriculture boom and also the mixed feelings it spurs among longtime Black residents descended from people who fled up north during the Great migration. The article is mainly about the tension between the trauma of the Jim Crow south, a nostalgia for an industrial-era Detroit and the language of revitalization used by newcomers.

With the caveat that I would probably be the type of outsider spurring skepticism in this article, I will admit to finding the idea of rewilding urban ecosystems romantic:

“The population decline and subsequent land vacancy has led to a natural rewilding of Detroit. Sprawling fields have become habitats for native plant life and wild animals: beavers, coyotes and various bird species. Growers planting pollinator gardens and trees have contributed their share to urban rewilding, drawing bees and butterflies to the city and adding to its pastoral charm.”

I’m reading a great book called Assembling a Black Counterculture by Deforrest Brown Jr. which is about how techno music emerged in Detroit as a response to the loss of manufacturing jobs, a longing for futurity, the ideas in Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock, the void left after the relocation of Motown Records in 1972, the popularization of MIDI keyboards, the influence of Kraftwerk and Giorgio Moroder. I also appreciate that Cybotron founder Juan Atkins’ explanation for techno is essentially “I thought it sounded cool.” (I am paraphrasing.)

Reading a book about music for the first time in a while feels nice. Most of the nonfiction I read these days is about colonialism or genocide. And, somehow, Brown Jr.’s history of Detroit also begins with an overview of the colonization of the Americas and the Industrial Revolution and the enclosure of the commons and forced conscription into the concept of private property but also, it’s about techno! And soul and funk and the blues, but mostly techno. (Also, I was ostensibly in Detroit for Movement, a huge house music festival, but I only attended a few day parties.)

adrienne marie brown was on the Between the Covers podcast speaking about, among other things, the sense of possibility in Detroit, which is the setting for her trilogy of sci fi novels which I have not read.

Before I left Detroit I also visited John K. King Used and Rare Books where I picked up a first edition of Michael Moorcock’s A Cure For Cancer, the first book in the Jerry Cornelius cycle.

They also had a shelf of every book from Doris Lessing’s science fiction era. I picked up a copy of The Making of the Representative For Planet 8. I’m fascinated by Lessing having a sci fi era though I have not read any of the books from this era yet. Planet 8 was adapted into an opera by Philip Glass which as far as I can tell is not available to listen to anywhere online. Let me know if you find it?

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February - Love Letters Volume 6

With my friend Mon, I hosted the sixth volume of Love Letters, our annual Valentine’s Day reading of letters and writing of letters to incarcerated folks. This year’s reading was at The Word is Change, a wonderful radical bookstore in Bed-Stuy, and featured *takes breath* Madison Jamar, Tal Mancini, Aristilde Kirby, Fabliha Yeaqub, Aishwarya Arora and Danialle Fertile. Together we wrote 22? letters of solidarity and support to incarcerated women.

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May: A Reading Fundraiser for Palestinian Journalists Syndicate

With my friend Rider Alsop, I curated and hosted a reading to raise funds for the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate. It was held at Starr Bar on May 22 and included readings by Lena Afridi, Dina Abdulhadi, Tanvi Misra, Ed Ongweso Jr. and Nora Treatbaby. We raised $1400 for PJS, thanks in part to raffle donations from the publications Hell Gate, Jewish Currents and In These Times, so please support all those publications if you can. Also thank you to the person who donated the signed Nikki Giovanni book! You can donate to PJS directly here by putting “Palestine Journalists Syndicate” in the comments when you make a donation.

The real star of my summer so far is this tomato plant. On my birthday my dear friend Aisha Mirza (author of the Off-Grid Baby substack that has led some of you to this newsletter) gifted me a bunch of tomato seeds from Haiti?? (I think, i disposed of the packaging)

This is them when I put all the seeds in one pot:

These are the plants when I actually separated them so they can get some breathing room!

I know there aren’t any tomatoes yet but listen! Patience is a thing! Possibly even a virtue!!!

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This 1 Thing Has Got Me Tripping

One thing about being an artist or a writer or whatever it is is that you have to enjoy being alive. You have to enjoy being alive whoever you are, but if you are a creative person you have to enjoy being alive whether you are successful by whatever your definition of being success is, which is also true whoever you are or what you do. But also you have to enjoy being alive while constantly comparing yourself to other people who seem to be more successful than you and who appear to be enjoying their lives more or as much as you, but that’s also true whoever you are and whatever you do. So I guess the only difference between an artist and writer and anyone else is you have less money, and in lieu of payments you have chosen to receive adulation, attention or social credibility, all of which are in short supply despite being theoretically an infinite resource.

What I mean to say is that you should enjoy being alive because it is good to enjoy being alive, and writing and making art are just parts of being alive, and having them mediated to others in a way that you find satisfying is just another way to be alive, and there are many things that happen to alive people that have nothing to do with these things. I’m still finding ways to enjoy being alive, and some of the time I feel pretty successful! and other times I’m like oh no.

*To be clear I think anyone who wants to masturbate should masturbate, i am just old-fashioned and think planet-destroying probability machines that plagiarize every word and image known to humankind while siphoning lakewater through a straw should not be involved.

Things I’ve published lately:

This article for 404 Media about Meta’s obnoxiously large AI data center in Louisiana, which will increase utility bills.

This article about the politics of rent and Zohran Mamdani’s win in the NYC primary.

Here’s some stuff that’s been keeping my brain active:

Books I’m Reading:

Assembling a Black Counter Culture - DeForrest Brown Jr.

Black Marxism - Cedric Robinson

Our History is the Future - Nick Estes

Late Victorian Holocausts - Mike Davis

Some books I read this Year and Liked:

Palestine Walks - Raja Shehadeh

Theft is Property! - Robert Nichols

This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed - Charles Cobb

Music I’ve been listening to:

Bad Bunny - Debi Tirar Mas Fotos

Masayoshi Fujita - Migratory

Nala Sinephro - Endlessness

JPEGMAFIA - I Lay Down My Life For You

Evelyn “Champagne” King - I’m In Love

Evelyn “Champagne” King - Smooth Talk

Yellow Magic Orchestra - Solid State Survivor

Cybotron - Enter

Lorde - Virgin

Gelli Haha - Switcheroo

Future Things:

On August 5th I’ll be hosting a talk with Lara Witt, editor in chief of Prism, Mazin Sidahmed, co-founder and co-director of Documented, and Alicia Bell, director of the Racial Equity in Journalism Fund. The talk is about the financial precarity of the news industry, threats to the nonprofit model of news and threats to communities of color and outlets that cover them under fascism. You can register for the Zoom here. This talk is organized by the Media Economy working group within my union, Freelance Solidarity Project at the National Writers Union. It’s called "Journalism Futures: Funding Under Fascism” and is a sequel to a panel we organized last year called “Journalism Futures: The Fight Ahead.”

I’m also hosting another season of “Open World,” the writing workshop series I hosted last Fall. (Which is maybe the last time I updated this substack??") I’m still finalizing that but if you’re in NYC keep your eyes on your inbox.

okay yes,

Roshan