DL Open Thread Sunday Magazine: May 3, 2026

How The Tech World Turned Evil.  Some pieces lend themselves to judicious excerpting.  This is not such a piece.  It’s a perfect long-form Sunday morning read.  Read it, you’ll learn a lot.  BTW, this was recommended by one of our favorite readers.  Feel free to make similar recommendations.

The NYTimes ’30 Greatest Living American Songwriters’ piece really sucks.  Any piece that relegates Randy Newman and Tom Waits to also-ran status while singing the praises of, oh, Diane Warren. Lionel Ritchie, Young Thug, Stephin Merritt, Mariah Carey, and The-Dream (whoever that is), among others, is a joke.  Here’s the write-up on The-Dream:

Name a post-aughts R&B smash, and his imprint is probably on it: Rihanna’s “Umbrella,” Ciara’s gyrating “Ride,” Justin Bieber’s prepubescent arrival “Baby” and Mariah Carey’s plinky “Touch My Body” and “Obsessed.” And then there’s Beyoncé, who essentially claimed The-Dream as her secret bazooka after he helped craft the hits that turned her untouchable, like “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It),” “Run the World (Girls),” “Flawless,” “1+1” and “XO.”

Ho-kay.  That illustrates one of the main problems with the NYTimes list–equating ‘pop success’ with being a great songwriter.

Yet another Grateful Dead ‘Tribute’ band will be appearing soon in Arden.  I got to wondering–just how many Grateful Dead tribute bands are there in the US?  Somewhere around 800, it appears.  Got me to thinking–how to promote the one coming to Arden?  Came up with ‘Featuring the 17th Highest-Rated Dead Tribute Band in the Tri-State Area’.  I laughed anyway…

Tribe From Washington State Reclaims Land–Floods It:

Scott Boyd walks through deep mud where the Stillaguamish River empties into Puget Sound, an arm of the Pacific Ocean.

This flood-prone river mouth north of Seattle changed dramatically in October when the Stillaguamish Tribe removed two miles of earthen levee. The ridge of dirt kept the river and the tides from spreading onto nearby farmland. Once a giant excavator bit into the levee to breach it, the tribe welcomed tidewater onto the land for the first time in over a century.

“Before, it was a dairy operation, and now it’s a big tidal marsh,” Boyd, a Stillaguamish tribal member and fisheries manager, says while looking out at the new 230-acre wetland.

Tidal marshes are crucial nurseries for young Chinook salmon and a focal point for efforts to bring these fish back from the brink of extinction. The Stillaguamish Tribe has been buying riverfront land in its traditional territory and removing levees to turn farmland into wetland with the hope of restoring Chinook.

Over the past 15 years, the Stillaguamish Tribe has purchased 2,000 acres of land for fish and wildlife habitat.

Under the 1855 treaty, the Stillaguamish and other Puget Sound tribes gave up almost all of their land but kept their rights to fish and hunt.

“It is a bit of a bitter pill to swallow to buy back the land that we essentially traded for the resource, the fish, but it’s what we have to do to get things back on track,” Boyd says.

What the tribe wants to get back on track is salmon.

Decades of environmental damage have left many West Coast salmon runs on the brink of extinction. Chinook salmon, the largest and most prized of salmon, is a federally threatened species in Puget Sound.

In 2025, so few Chinook salmon returned to the Stillaguamish River that the entire tribe was only allowed to catch 26 fish.

“The salmon, it has always been important to our people, to the tribe, to our way of life,” Boyd says. “These habitat projects are the best bang for our buck right now.”

50 Years Of Labor Union Documentaries:

“We better start pulling together or, by God, they’re going to bury us,” says a meat packer during a union meeting in Barbara Kopple’s 1990 documentary American Dream. It’s a desperate plea for survival; “they” are the Hormel Foods Corporation, who took advantage of union disorder to replace a huge portion of their workforce during a costly strike. American Dream sees the 1985-86 labor crisis in Austin, Minnesota, as symbolic of the state of organized labor in the United States – call it an alternative State of the Union address.

American Dream takes place in the Reagan years, characterized by an uncompromising approach to union power: in 1981, the president threatened striking air traffic controllers with termination if they didn’t return to work in 48 hours; private companies like Hormel, Phelps Dodge, and International Paper increasingly replaced striking workers; and unions lost 2.7 million members from 1980 to 1984.

The film, which has been restored and is re-released this week by Janus Films, was Kopple’s follow-up to Harlan County, USA, about the 1973 Brookside strike in a Kentucky coalmine. The film, which celebrates its 50th anniversary later this year, is a more empowering watch than American Dream. In both works, Kopple uses roving, cinema vérité camerawork to capture the standoffs in all their frustration and perseverance, an extended, condensed timeline encapsulating the pressure that emboldens workers together in solidarity, even as some grow weary of union stubbornness.

American Dream contains all the seeds for the corporate makeovers that altered the discourse surrounding unions. In Harlan County, USA, the gun thugs and mining company representatives cast their eyes downward around Kopple’s camera, bullish and resistant to the lens of the free press. By the mid-1980s, the executives are far more smiley and camera-ready, brazenly dismissing the union’s newly devised campaign against them. By the 2020s, any C-suite discussion of unions is sophisticated in its condescension; in Who Moves America, the UPS CEO Carol Tomé placates shareholders by comparing Teamster negotiations to arguing with her husband about getting a puppy. In Union, union-busting is the remit of PowerPoint-wielding consultants, like those hired to sequester Amazon employees in conference rooms and convince them not to organize. It’s a far cry from the armed posse who guard the mine in Harlan County, USA, who assaulted picketers and ultimately killed miner Lawrence Jones.

It’s harder to critique a union’s political value in a documentary full of real, impassioned voices, especially as modern films increasingly include the perspectives of immigrant and undocumented workers who receive the brunt of scapegoating and demonization. But Hollywood is not a saviour for unions. Despite the existence of guilds like Sag-Aftra, WGA and Iatse, the politics of business mostly remain. Even after it was praised on the festival circuit, Union was forced to self-distribute when buyers decided not to jeopardise a working relationship with Amazon MGM Studios. It didn’t bury the film exactly, but it certainly made things more difficult, denying it the publicity earned by a best documentary Oscar, like the two awarded to Kopple. But watching a half-century of these films, showcasing the tenacity and doggedness of organizers, you’re convinced that the union documentary is an ongoing, collaborative project – capable of being both an archive and a manual.

Only one way to sing us out: