Still free to subscribe to this nearly daily newsletter! Greg Mitchell is the author of fourteen books and director of five films for PBS since 2022. In a previous life, he was a longtime editor at the legendary Crawdaddy. His latest film “Woody Guthrie and The Ghost of Tom Joad Today” is now streaming everywhere via PBS.
Jon Stewart back on The Daily Show last night has some fun with, among other things, Old Man Trump crashing Spain’s World cup victory celebration.
Axios:
President Trump is nearing a decisive fork in the Iran war, with U.S. and Israeli officials envisioning only two viable endgames, Axios’ Barak Ravid reports:
Option 1: Pursue a new 10-day ceasefire to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
Option 2: Launch a massive joint military campaign with Israel to force Tehran’s capitulation.
Why it matters: Trump hasn’t decided yet. But officials believe the next few days will determine which path prevails — with little room left for the grinding, open-ended conflict paralyzing the Gulf.
Heather Cox Richardson:
The administration is renewing its visible and aggressive immigration policies. For months, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has not released data about arrests, but immigration enforcement scholar Austin Kocher noted that new records show arrests in early July hit 1,474 a day, a record high for the Trump administration.
In the past months, ICE has recruited thousands of new agents. As Maanvi Singh and Fabiola Cineas of The Guardian note, many of these new agents did not have the requisite qualifications and were not properly vetted.
Music Picks
Mavis Staples, on current tour, returned to doing the Staple Singers classic version of Talking Heads’ “Slippery People.” Here’s how they did it back in 1984.
And Mavis doing it with Arcade Fire years later.
Meanwhile, a couple of nights ago in Indiana, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings returned to one of my favorites, “Wrecking Ball” (no, not the Neil Young nor Bruce Springsteen tune).
From Tunes to Toons
Anderson
Wuerker:
Wexler:
Boris:
Photo Finish
From my wife, the writer and film producer Barbara Bedway:
Carlo, the observant young man helping with yard and garden, texted that there is incandescence in the form of the elusive “ghost pipe” plant in our very backyard. And there it is, a solitary Monotropa uniflora, whose “supernatural appearance” so enchanted the young Emily Dickinson. She collected them as a “wondering child” drawn to the absence of green.
Yes, we all know photosynthesis is supposed to be one of the “nonnegotiable features of planthood,” as Merlin Sheldrake wrote in his mind-bending book, “Entangled Life.” But the ghost pipe blooms to a different drummer—it gets the bulk of its carbon nutrients not from the sun but from reaching down into the earth’s network of roots and fungi, and taking up what it needs from neighboring plants and trees that ARE busily photosynthesizing, and willing to share.
A lesson for humanity surely lies in this discovery that most plant communities are likely not made up of individuals that only compete for resources. As English researcher David Read wrote in the journal Nature, the possibility that resources could pass between plants suggests “that we should place less emphasis on competition between plants, and more on distribution of resources within a community.”
Thanks for sharing the ghost plant story Greg. Wonderful!
I loved the plant picture and the concept that plants can share resources!