Good morning!
This is Issue 75.3 of Digestable, your thrice-weekly mouthful of things happening in the world.
Today’s news, fermented:
Decades ago, ExxonMobil’s negligence yielded one of the biggest, slowest, oil spills ever. First made public by an explosion of manhole covers, then further examined 18 years later, the edges of the oil spill became clearer…
“at between 17 and 30 million gallons (an amount at least 50% bigger than the infamous 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill) several feet thick in some places, and just a few feet below the surface in others…Research has determined that ExxonMobil, Chevron/Texaco, and BP refining operations leaked the oil and refining products into the soils and aquifers of Greenpoint over the course of decades.
The oil spill is not the result of one distinct event but the toxic culmination of 140 years of spillage. Since 1978, approximately 12.9 million gallons of oil and oil products have been recovered from the soils beneath Greenpoint and the waters of Newtown Creek.”
There have been a few oil spills this week, from beach-slicking in California to berm-busting in Texas, not to mention Ida’s damage last month in the Gulf South.
Theoretically, this could be a death knell for offshore drilling; it’s certainly a cry for help from the ocean, one of the largest carbon sinks on earth.
Oil in the water is bad. That’s the headline! But back to Newtown Creek for a moment: This is where I first got a taste of what it’s like to sue the fossil fuel industry for screwing up, and getting some traction.
You can read a lot more about the spill, the early aughts lawsuit, and the cleanup of this 3.8 mile waterway that used to be as busy a shipping channel as the Mississippi here. But here, I’ll just skip to the happy ending.
Although cleanup is long and complex, one of the beautiful things that emerged from this lawsuit was a chunk of money to be allocated by community members to environmental education efforts. Their biggest grant went to the Greenpoint Library and Environmental Education Center. You can read about the spectacular new building (with rainwater catchment, solar windows that act like sun dials, and more) here.
~Caro’s Tarot~
Good morning and happy Friday Digestable readers. In a moment of pure transparency and honesty, your tarot guide did not get very good sleep last night. You might blame it on the intense documentary I decided to watch RIGHT before bed...haters will say it’s insomnia...anyways all jokes aside, my battery is feeling a bit low today. I tell you this because in recent days I have been attempting to practice just being, and accepting where I am at without judgement. Accepting uncomfortable feelings, moments of low energy, both physically and spiritually, is something we are not really taught to embrace in this capitalistic world. Our emphasis is always on our output rather than care for the self in moments of need. This morning I will attempt to model rest and centering myself and what my body feels in this moment.
So readers, we are keeping it short and sweet today. For those of you that perhaps woke up with a low battery level too, I recommend doing a little reset meditation before starting your day, you can find that here. We will be focusing on asking the cards, the universe, or whatever spiritual being you tune into, how we can best take care of ourselves and embrace rest this upcoming long weekend (don’t worry, I will most certainly be going into nap mode after work today).
….so how can we take care of ourselves and embrace rest this weekend?....ok and got Four of Wands this morning!
The Four of Wands tells us:
“The garden is growing luxuriously, and these two have wandered away from their stress, planning to have a little fun. It might be a surprise, but you’ve got some good times on the horizon! Take a break from your hard work and put all your energy into treating yourself.”
No interpretation needed here,take a load off, take that nap, and as two of my favorite TV characters like to say...
*Hot Goss*
Brought to you by the superb Latifah Azlan.
I... don't even know where to start with this story because I wasn't about to cover it for ~*Hot Goss*~ at all. But then I saw the most ridiculous headline relating to the unfolding saga of Katie Couric's soon-to-be-released memoir and I just had to include it in today's column.
I know. There is a lot to unpack here. If you haven't kept up to date, excerpts from Katie's upcoming memoir were published this week and they were not good. I think the intention behind this book was that it would be a fun and quirky insider look at Katie's career as one of the most prominent journalists and news anchors in the United States. Instead, what the excerpts revealed is that Katie was an extremely toxic person to work with who may or may not have derailed other women's careers. So Katie's been burning a lot of bridges this week and that's where the above-quoted story about her boogers comes in.
One of the stories Katie included in her memoir was about a woman, Nancy Poznek, who formerly worked for Katie as a nanny. Katie didn't portray Nancy in a flattering light and made it seem like her nanny was not only mentally unstable, but also out to destroy her marriage. And Nancy did not take that lying down. She's gone to The Daily Mail to talk and boy, did she talk. Basically, Nancy said Katie was a mess not only in her personal relationships, but also in the way she maintained her hygiene (or did not). Nancy alleges that Katie would go for days without showering or even changing her underwear. The booger thing was something that Katie's husband at the time showed Nancy, who described working for Katie as akin to "nannying a teenage boy."
Given the recent debate over showering habits, Katie has good company in some of her fellow famous folk. But the booger thing is truly something else. I keep going back and forth between whether or not I believe it but it seems like such an oddly specific tidbit to offer up that I don't think anyone would have the thought to lie about something like that? Also, I tried giving Katie the benefit of the doubt by rationalizing the nose-picking as a subconscious thing she was doing while asleep but the whole lining up the boogers detail kind of debunks my reasoning. So now I'm left wondering if this was a ritual she habitually engaged in or did she just wake up that one morning and decide to arrange her boogers for fun? I simply cannot wrap my mind around it!