Jay Owens

@jayowens.bsky.social

2857 Followers 1031 Following

I’m Head of Audience at @lrb.co.uk and I wrote a book, ‘Dust: The Modern World in a Trillion Particles’ (2023). I post about media and environment in approximately equal parts. 🔗 https://JayOwens.me

Alysa Liu Teen Vogue cover
Yet ‘Legal metamorphoses between persons/things have been recurrent in history,’ as the legal scholar Alexis Alvarez-Nakagawa says, giving the examples of human rights trials in Argentina, which gave retrospective rights to people who had been disappeared by the junta, and cases where orangutans, chimpanzees and elephants have been legally declared persons. If ‘persons can become things, animals can turn into persons, and even ghosts can obtain personhood in the legal domain,’ the ‘law would work then as a form of magic, a powerful instrument to create realities that, although fictional, have very real effects.’
If some version of the Nature’s Rights Bill becomes law, then this may change. Whether it will alter Britain’s relationship with nature is another question. The Green Party hopes it will. Robert Macfarlane, for one, has doubts. ‘I wonder heretically,’ he writes in Is a River Alive?, looking at the laws passed by countries such as Ecuador, if so many people are drawn to the notion of nature’s rights because they are longing for something like transcendence from the law; beckoned by an overenchanted dream in which judicial language acts with a moral lucidity as clear as the waters of the Río Los Cedros. Perhaps, though, there is no good reason to believe that this new framing will get us out of our old conflicts, or slough off the confusion, bad faith and apathy that bedevil any attempt at betterment.
This forced the leaders of Greenland and Denmark to grapple with the tired axiom “Take Trump seriously, not literally” and to contend with the previously unimaginable. Friis Bach, who was then chairman of the Folketing’s secretive Foreign Policy Committee, was asked in early January to begin considering the obscene logistics of a mass evacuation of Greenland. “My Greenlandic colleagues called me and asked how many we could evacuate, if we could take 5,000, and of course the reply was we could save all of them because they are Danish citizens,” Friis Bach says. “But then the next question came: Do you have enough planes? There was even discussion between Greenland, the Faroe Islands, and Iceland: How many can you take if these events suddenly escalate?”
A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating IPO That Rules from the Centre of the Elonverse Also: Libor redux, Russian banknotes, coppernose stablecoins, quantitative Aristotle, orbital antiperspirant, space strawberries, and selling out
There is a flatness or evenness to AI-generated texts: Wikipedia’s guide to detecting AI says that LLMs ‘tend to omit specific, unusual, nuanced facts’ and ‘replace them with more generic, positive descriptions’. The strange thing about this evenness is that it isn’t usually couched in neutral language: ‘a flood that chokes but insists upon being swallowed’ is violent, but not vivid. Even if you had your face shoved into a cake, it wouldn’t ‘flood’ your mouth. The prosody is so smooth that you feel a lack of pressure despite the description of gross or vile acts; it rings hollow. It fills you with its nothing.
'Last summer, I received my first payment from an American magazine for documenting what we were going through. It was $150, though after transfer fees were deducted I got $135. It was near the end of the month, and my father, who is employed by the Palestinian Authority, only gets paid every fifty days. I went to a cash broker to convert the digital currency into money that I could spend. The commission was nearly 40 per cent. I came away with less than $84 in cash. We were living through the hardest days of war and famine, down to our last bag of flour and some lentil soup. The air in our small tent felt heavy, as if hunger were sitting with us. Converting my $150 payment into ready money had already reduced it nearly by half, but on my way to the market I imagined all the food I could buy for my family with the $84 I had in my pocket. When I got there, the market was almost empty. The cheapest flour I could find was $55 per kilo. I couldn’t refuse. My family was starving. I had to buy whatever I could.'
One of last year’s barn owl chicks is ringed at the Kelly family’s farm in Co Down, UK.