| Serious question: Has this newsletter gone downhill? Sometimes readers will send me feedback and say my daily missives are USELESS & POINTLESS (yes, Rosemary M., I do read your emails) but I take it in stride, since a lot of you say otherwise. Yet after reading Lara Williams’ latest column, I’m not so sure. Maybe my writing is getting worse! And maybe it’s because my brain is slowly but surely turning into a big ball of plastic: On the bright side, at least I now have a credible excuse for my midyear evaluation: “Global annual plastic production has soared to 475 million metric tons in 2022 from just 2 million tons in 1950. Half of all the plastic ever made has been produced since 2010 and, without intervention, we’re likely to be making 1.2 billion tons of the stuff every year by 2060,” Lara writes. “Because plastics don’t break down – they simply fragment into smaller and smaller particles – that’s billions of tons we’ll be adding to our ecosystems, waters and bodies.” It’s difficult to count all the ways that plastic is a secret killer, since 16,000 chemicals could weasel their way into our brains at any given time — flame retardants, PFAS, phthalates, you name it. “Health impacts from exposure to such chemicals are wide-ranging and occur at every age, from miscarriages and reduced birthweight to cardiovascular disease and cancer. What’s worse is that hazard data isn’t available publicly for more than two-thirds of known plastic chemicals, meaning we have no idea how they could be harming us,” Lara notes. Naturally, companies are doing their darnedest to profit off the unease. Orlando Bloom threw $13,000 down the drain for an experimental blood-cleansing treatment that Lara calls “futile,” given all the plastic we encounter on a daily basis. It’s in your workout clothes. Your sneakers. Your toothpaste. And don’t even get Lara started on meals: Takeout dinners are packaged in single-use plastic. Tea is encased in a bag containing plastic. Not even ice cream is safe anymore. “Living a truly plastic-free life in our modern world is impossible,” she admits. Still, that’s not stopping the United Nations from trying to curb usage at this week’s plastic treaty talks. “Is there any hope that the officials meeting in Switzerland will be able to rein in our addiction?” David Fickling asks. The 234 oil, petrochemical and plastic lobbyists who attended the talks don’t inspire much confidence. And even if the UN were able to hammer out a treaty, there’d still be an elephant — or should I say, Labubu — in the room: China. David says the country is embarking on “a massive expansion as the country rushes for self-sufficiency in chemicals it previously imported.” In turn, those chemicals are feeding America’s unrelenting appetite for sharp-toothed, fur-covered plastic dolls. Dolls, mind you, that people are encasing in — you guessed it! — even more plastic:  Labubuception. Photo: Jessica Karl Ugh. I’ll leave you with this quote from Finneas, who you may know as Billie Eilish’s brother: Do you think, in 50 years time when the AI robots explain evolution to their young AI robots, they’re gonna say, “yeah, well, we started to form consciousness at the same time as people started to evolve to become plastic … so the event horizon was just humans becoming more plastic and plastic robots becoming more human.” I dunno. I’m not even stoned right now. I’m totally sober.
If it isn’t drugs or alcohol, it must be the microplastics in his brain at work, no?? Hmmm. Something tells me this isn’t a good use of federal resources: How do you think an FBI agent would go about locating a runaway government official? Would they ask their children to access Find My Friends? Might there be a hidden AirTag compartment sown into every government-issued laptop case? Or would they just, like, scroll through Instagram and see they were tagged at a brunch spot in Chicago? In case you’ve been living under a rock, a bunch of state Democratic lawmakers “fled” Texas last week to block a redistricting vote. Ronald Brownstein says the feud could ignite a national fire: “Red and blue states are already hurtling in opposite directions on the basic rights,” and now Trump is pressuring them to “perpetuate the national power he needs to sustain that coercive agenda, even at the price of disenfranchising their own voters through patently unrepresentative maps.” US House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has called the Republican effort “unacceptable, unconscionable and un-American,” yet there’s a bit of hypocrisy at play here: As the Bloomberg Editorial Board notes, he’s pushing Democrats to adapt the very same the strategy. “Democrats in California and New York are threatening to negate any Texas gains by redrawing their own maps. And that’s not the end of it. Republicans in Indiana, Florida, Missouri and other states — and Democrats in Illinois and Maryland — are talking of joining the fray.” Still, the fact that blue states are showing signs of life marks a change of pace for the party, says Erika D. Smith. As Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin has said, “This is not the Democratic Party of your grandfather, which would bring a pencil to a knife fight. This is a new Democratic Party. We’re bringing a knife to a knife fight.” Whether that knife will stay sharp for long is an open question, Erika says. “The party is betting that voters will like its combative new tone — but probably hoping they don’t actually have to draw new districts,” she writes. “As many good-government types have pointed out, Democrats likely won’t win an advantage in the House if there is a full-blown, tit-for-tat, national redistricting fight. Republicans control 23 states, compared with only 15 for Democrats.” Nobody can be sure who will win America’s Great Gerrymander Competition, “there is no mistaking who will lose: voters.” | 
