In early February, days after a Norfolk Southern freight train carrying toxic chemicals including vinyl chloride, butyl acrylate and isobutylene derailed in the town of East Palestine, Ohio, authorities opted to burn off the materials to avoid an explosion. This prompted an evacuation of residents close to the site and images seen around the world of thick black smoke rising over homes and farmland.

When residents in the town of 4,700 returned, many complained of headaches, skin irritation, and respiratory issues. More than 43,000 aquatic animals were found dead in creeks within five miles of the derailment. While officials maintain that the air, water, and soil is safe, residents fear what longterm effects might lay ahead.

One concern is that the burning vinyl chloride may have produced dioxins that could linger in and around local homes and farmland. The compounds, which can take decades to fully break down, can cause cancer, interfere with hormones, and cause damage to reproductive and immune systems. The EPA on Thursday ordered Norfolk Southern to test the area for dioxins.

Michelle Graef, who lives three miles from the derailment, saw her livelihood dry up overnight. Now, she fears, no one will want to stay at any of the five Airbnb listings on her property, where guests get to ride horses and eat fresh eggs and blueberries she grows. She dreads the delivery of a cabin she recently purchased for upwards of $80,000 to expand her short-term rental income—she can no longer afford the price.

Audrey DeSanzo lives paycheck-to-paycheck within one mile of the derailment with her 9- and 10-year-old daughters. She says she wants to leave as soon as possible, but with her $14-a-hour job, lacks sufficient resources to relocate. On a recent school night, she debated whether to send her 10-year-old daughter, Nevaeh, back to school after keeping her home for the day. Nevaeh has been suffering from headaches, stomachaches, and congestion, since they returned to East Palestine. Was the air safer at home—or at school?

In a scathing letter to Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Norfolk Southern worker and Teamsters union rep denounced the rail company’s cost-cutting business model, alleging that workers who were deployed to clean up February’s vinyl chloride spill have experienced adverse health effects.

“I am writing to share with you the level of disregard that Norfolk Southern has for the safety of the railroad’s Workers, its track structure, and East Palestine and other American communities where NS operates,” Jonathon Long, who said he had been employed with Norfolk Southern for 28 years, wrote. “I am also imploring you as the Governor of the State of Ohio to use your influence and power to stop NS’s reckless business practices that endanger the public and their Workers.”

Concerns about Norfolk Southern’s cost-cutting, anti-labor policies have been spreading for weeks, but Long’s letter paints the most vivid picture yet of the company’s apparent disregard for its workers’ safety. In the letter, Long identified the implementation of “precision scheduled railroading,” or PSR, a system that he says involves increasing the lengths of trains while slashing the number of employees, as one of the primary ways that the company has prioritized profit over the safety and well-being of its workers. “The new business model of PSR is implemented by freight rail carriers not to benefit America’s supply chain through the timely delivery of good,” he wrote, “but solely for the advancement of railroad executives, shareholders, and Wall Street hedge fund investors in the form of record profits, dividends, and stock buybacks.”

In addition to systemic issues, Long criticized Norfolk Southern’s immediate response to the spill of toxic chemicals in East Palestine, Ohio. Long wrote that workers assigned to clean up the spill were not provided personal protective equipment and that many “continue to experience migraines and nausea, days after the derailment, and they all suspect that they were willingly exposed to these chemicals at the direction of NS.” (Norfolk Southern insisted in a statement to CNBC that “hazardous material professionals…were on site continuously to ensure the work area was safe to enter and the required PPE was utilized.”)

Following the letter, leaders of 12 rail unions met with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Federal Railroad Administration administrator Amit Bose in Washington, DC, on Wednesday. In addition to paid sick leave, the unions are fighting for regulatory changes to ensure railroad safety.

Given a space to inhabit unobserved, I will immediately convert it into a physical representation of the inside of my brain. My annual trip to the old Zillow listing for the farm I bought eight years ago leaves me stunned every time: it was once the kind of house one could list on Zillow! Now it is mine; I have filled the walls with pictures,hung the surplus ones on the ceiling, crowded every surface with dioramas and precarious unidentifiable objects that look like chess pieces from outer space. There is nowhere to sit in the house except on the floor with the dogs (and, every hatching season, with the emu chicks who run figure eights around the obstacle art). Like my brain, it’s a fun place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.

My house, the physical building, is an arranged marriage of two old farmhouses that were dragged from different parts of the country and clumsily conjoined. I decline to speculate on which side is holding up the other. There is a secret spiral staircase, accessed through a cupboard door, with ludicrously uneven treads; the wavy glass windowpanes cast distorted shadows. The two halves of my house must have each accommodated entire families, but the current inhabitants between them, in descending order of population, are: eggs, birds, dogs, me. 

Every morning around eleven, having done the farm rounds and broadcast feed to the loyal birds, I commence with the small-scale batch production of objects that promise but do not fulfill utility. I tend to work compulsively and repetitively, making hundreds of variations of the same thing until I exhaust my supply of the necessary materials or my own fascination with it. There are blown-out, intact eggshells equipped with antennae or working motion sensors; eggshells hinged to open like boxes, or with latched hatches, lined with poppy red flocking; emu egg dirigibles rigged with ball chains, hanging from the kitchen rafters. Over the  past six months, I’ve manufactured thousands of one-inch hollow resin spheres, each kitted out with some combination of magnets, O-rings, and fishing tackle and beads. Each one of them is perfect, and the only people who see them are the bewildered tradesmen who need access to the circuit breaker in my kitchen.

I love birds most for the combination of complexity and stupidity they exhibit: their deep-seated, unplumbable impulse to perform elaborate, apparently pointless procedures. The contents of my house demonstrate that it is an impulse I share.

This is a section of the diary I kept while writing my forthcoming novel, Enter Ghost, about a performance of Hamlet in the West Bank.

Wednesday, May 20, 2020

My world has shrunk dramatically. The benefit of lockdown for me is learning to live day in day out without constant change. This is life, time passing. This is how I imagine most people live.

I looked at the objects in the house

How Native American activist Sacheen Littlefeather divided Hollywood

After 315 days on the sidelines, Paul Pogba is back on the pitch for Juventus. And from the reception he got last night, he’s back in his spiritual home.

Can he change the mood in Turin? Dotun, Andy and David discuss that after putting Barcelona under the microscope. How have they struggled so much in Europe while dominating in La Liga? And why are some Barcelona fans calling for Xavi’s dismissal?

Plus, Milan’s secret weapon against Spurs and celebrating 40 years of Pepe.

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WARNING: Southampton fans, look away now. Luke’s rolling his sleeves up for this one.

Marcus and Luke convene for a full Prem and FA Cup round-up after a packed night of football, where Roy Keane chose violence, Ally McCoist had the best time of his life, and Marcus exposes himself as a fickle b*****d. 

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Why King Kong still terrifies, 90 years on

A Republican lawmaker has filed a bill that, if passed, would, apparently, eliminate Florida’s Democratic Party.

On Tuesday, Florida state Sen. Blaise Ingoglia filed the “Ultimate Cancel Act“—a bill that doesn’t mention the Democrats by name but would require the state’s Division of Elections to “immediately cancel” the filings and official status of any political party whose platform had “previously advocated for, or been in support of, slavery or involuntary servitude.”

Democrats, especially in the South, supported slavery up to and then during the Civil War. The Democrat party backed Jim Crow laws for decades following emancipation. Famously, the so-called “Southern strategy” saw whites in the South, aggrieved by the Civil Rights Movement, courted by the Republican party.

Hey @NikkiFried…Florida Dems should be thankful I’m not asking them to return all the money they’ve raised previously from their Jefferson/Jackson Dinners. @BrendonLeslie @PeterSchorschFL @Mdixon55 @fineout @NEWSMAX @FoxNews

— Blaise Ingoglia (@GovGoneWild) February 28, 2023

Editor’s note: The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter is written by David twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories about politics and media; his unvarnished take on the events of the day; film, book, television, podcast, and music recommendations; interactive audience features; and more. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial of Our Land here. Please check it out. And please also check out David’s new New York Times bestseller, American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy.

Freedom—it’s what Republicans and conservatives have long insisted they care most about. At campaign rallies and conservative shindigs, they get all weepy when Lee Greenwood sings, “I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free.” For decades, they have accused their political foes of seeking to destroy freedom by imposing socialism, communism, Bolshevism, collectivism, or whatever upon the US of A. This has been a ruse. The right has often been an enemy of freedom. For instance, conservatives have sought to limit the reproductive choices of women and prevent Americans from marrying the people they love. In recent weeks, we have seen a very specific assault on freedom in Florida waged by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is not yet a 2024 presidential candidate but who already seems to be competing with Donald Trump for the GOP leader most committed to authoritarianism—and who yesterday released a book with a highly ironic title: The Courage to Be Free.

Last week, two bills were introduced in the Florida legislature that would advance DeSantis’ crusade and limit important freedoms for Floridians. The first continues DeSantis’ long-running attack on the Sunshine State’s education system, which has included banning math textbooks that he claimed included “woke” ideology, prohibiting classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity, thwarting the introduction of an AP African American studies course (and threatening to kill all AP courses), and deriding “liberal indoctrination” in the school system. The laws he has already passed have led to book banning in some school districts.

This new measure would block public colleges and universities from offering major or minor degrees in gender studies, intersectionality, or critical race studies. (Several Florida schools offer gender studies majors; it’s unclear whether any does so for critical race theory.) The measure also would compel colleges to offer general education classes that do not “suppress or distort significant historical events or include a curriculum that teaches identity politics.” These courses must “promote the philosophical underpinnings of Western civilization.”

This legislation, filed by GOP state Rep. Alex Andrade, a DeSantis ally, establishes the state government as an education censor, preventing schools, faculty, and students from determining the contours of college education. Andrew Gothard, president of United Faculty of Florida, the union representing instructors at Florida schools, described the bill to Higher Ed Dive as a state-sponsored form of indoctrination. He called it “fascism in its purest form.”