So much for factual accuracy, sound reasoning, moral clarity, and transparency, or any other value that academics aim to uphold. How quickly each principle was traded in by a handful of linguists who co-signed a factually flawed, short-sighted letter this week calling to rescind Steven Pinker’s fellowship at the Linguistics Society of America. The letter objected to six tweets he wrote over the years—tweets so politically radioactive that they should be piously disavowed by all liberal-minded linguists, the letter claims. Never mind that the tweets in question are fact-based, with links to sources and data. More salient is the fresh outrage by particular linguists with a talent for sniffing out the faintest illiberalism. The letter’s signatories said his tweets were insufficiently respectful of their politics. Imagine that. On Twitter. There’s a word for maneuvers like this: dishonesty. The letter is bad. Particularly from linguists who are loose with the very language they purport to think critically about. Those of us with any independence left in media and academics, and anywhere else, should see this dance from miles away.

The details are well-aired: No sooner did the cancellation letter circulate than a group of truly renowned linguists and journalists dismantled it. The letter was refuted in detail by Barbara Partee, one of the founders of contemporary formal semantics and an emeritus professor of linguistics and philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Michael Shermer, the respected publisher of Skeptic magazine; the entirety of MIT’s Language Lab; Jerry Coyne, the University of Chicago biologist who put the petition’s fallacies to rest (and did it best); John McWhorter, the Columbia linguist (one, two, and three); Joe Henrich, chair of Harvard’s Human Evolutionary Biology department; Noam Chomsky (say what you will about Chomsky today, but he’s correct here, upholding principle over bad-faith petitioners who are “pretending to be outraged as the wrong ox is gored”). Also dismantling the letter are Yale scientist Nicholas Christakis and countless others.

The cancellation letter is misguided, with half-quotes, miscitation, self-contradiction, and apparently false signature. But it follows a pattern. Notice the move: We all want to hold villains to account, and should, but we’ll cast anyone for the role, facts aside. Why stick to facts when you can gesture in the right direction? Why think critically when you can throw your lot in with the nearest and the loudest? This move doesn’t work. You could call it the “common cause” fallacy, or the “traveling companion” bias, the idea that if you appear adjacent to bad, you too are bad, you see. The virus is airborne. (Never mind that this bad-adjacent calculus applies to the very people who use it.)

If this is what linguistic letter-writing amounts to today—dishonest on facts, closed to counterevidence, masochistically cannibalizing—all our work is still ahead. But this is Recharge, a space for good news. The good is clear: There are those of us, on the left of the petition writers, who see right through it.

The family-run Piedmont Piano Company in Oakland just announced a weekly series of livestreams with some of the brightest and most innovative musicians in the Bay Area and beyond. Most recently, the Pit Orchestra playing Monk, with pianist Edward Simon, trumpeter Erik Jekabson, and bassist Peter Barshay. Down the calendar: Howard Wiley’s must-catch tribute to Sonny Rollins’ Freedom Suite. (Read my interview with Rollins about the pandemic, protests, and creative change, if you missed it.) Also in the mix: Stella Heath, Rob Reich, and Daniel Fabricant. Berkeley-born Wiley is especially energizing and inspiring. At age 12, he headlined the old Koncepts Cultural Gallery—founded by Edsel Matthews—then Festival by the Bay in Richmond, a historic cultural center, and two years later was headlining Yoshi’s.

Mark the calendar for Wiley’s spin on Thursday, July 16. More details here, and drop me a line at recharge@motherjones.com for deeper dives into the sounds of solidarity, stamina, and resilience—and send me your own tips for livestreams across the map.

You’ll be pleased to know that your favorite Better Call Saul actors livestreamed from their homes a few days ago, and it was a total joy (as each of them is). Giancarlo Esposito, Bob Odenkirk, Rhea Seehorn, Tony Dalton, Michael Mando, and Patrick Fabian chatted in support of COVID-19 fundraising by the SAG-AFTRA Foundation, the screen actors guild’s support wing, to help the wider community with medical bills, rent, and other essentials.

Giancarlo is starting a podcast while growing radish and lettuce. He waters them every day (with razor-sharp precision). Rhea is brushing off her paint brushes after 20 years. Patrick adopted a dog. Michael recorded his first song (“My first love has always been music”). Actors who play criminal moonlighters and crime-adjacent “good people” are people too. Journalist Daniel Fienberg did a nice job moderating the chat. If you missed it, here you go, and more info on COVID-19 relief efforts is here. Jonathan Banks was missed; he was busy practicing his stink eye while debugging gas caps.

What better occasion than the Fourth of July, nominally about freedom and independence, to welcome the good news of a truly ambitious publication’s launch in the name of open debate, rigorous critical thinking, and human rights? The arrival of Persuasion is an inspiring addition to public dialogue at a time of heightened false equivalencies, hidden biases, unhidden biases, and the bullying and bigotry particularly pungent on the far right (but not limited to it). The new site aims to persuade. Whatever you think of its full list of core contributors, there are brilliant treasures, namely Sarah Haider, John McWhorter, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Jonathan Haidt, and Garry Kasparov. And the outstanding Maajid Nawaz gives a ringing early endorsement.

Haider is especially thoughtful at challenging ideas, institutions, fallacies, and pathologies that harm human rights. Read her. McWhorter is profoundly insightful as a linguist and cultural critic, with no aversion to hard debate. Persuasion hopes to avoid the trappings of mere point-scoring, and the decoys of the day, by engaging with bedrock questions about what can produce the most justice and equality.

Speaking of justice, David Frum, another Persuasion contributor, is long overdue for history’s judgment. Or did I miss his mea culpa for the harm he helped cause as George W. Bush’s speechwriter? Frum is long on criticism of Trump but short on accountability for Bush. Doesn’t it matter? I’d like to persuade at recharge@motherjones.com, if Frum is open to discussing it, but on balance, Persuasion deserves support for trying to change minds, including those of some of its contributors. The project’s pledge is inspiring. All manifestations of illiberalism, injustice, illogic, and inequality need contesting.

Here’s a challenge: Persuasion should offer to waive subscription fees for anyone who asks. Why not? If money shouldn’t be the sole obstacle for those who can’t afford it, how persuasive can the project be? Here’s rooting, but offer it? It’s worked before. Above all, let Kasparov know that his 1996 blunder against Vishy Anand is forgiven and forgotten. (How could you miss Qxg4? We all slip up, Garry. You are still king, capable of crushing even the great Hikaru and Fabiano.)

Think back to when you were 4, 5, and 7. You were a renowned artist. Top talent. Your drawings won national contests and were prominently displayed on Times Square billboards. No? Don’t be shy: You were limitlessly artistic, so find it in your heart to applaud and retweet the news of 4-year-old Amarry London Alhassan, 5-year-old Xavier Garcia, and 7-year-old Kelli-Rose Simpson Forde. Their drawings were selected from more than 450 kids’ entries in a national campaign, “Honor Our Everyday Heroes,” to thank essential workers during the pandemic.

Kelli-Rose’s grandfather, a New York City transit worker, inspired her art: “Thank you for keeping us safe!” she drew. “Thank You SUPERHEROES” was Xavier’s appreciation for doctors and nurses, with special recognition of his aunt, a nurse’s assistant. Amarry, the 4-year-old, fashioned “a heart and a helping hand” to thank his mom, who works in the medical field. Their winning drawings also appear at Grand Central station and Port Authority. You may now retweet with #Recharge and send your own (or your kids’) drawings to recharge@motherjones.com if you’d like them featured in Recharge, which today wishes a happy birthday to J “The Microphone” W and Brooke “The Producer” M, artistic inspirations across mediums and media.

Where to begin? Percussionists first. On National Postal Worker Day, a round of recognition for all the mail carriers who deliver our birthday wishes to Ndugu Chancler, Sameer Gupta, and Rashied Ali. Chancler’s energizing fireworks and climactic beats lit up Yoshi’s in Oakland, in 2002, in a historic rebirth of Miles Davis’ On the Corner, with four other Miles veterans. Chancler was also Michael Jackson’s drummer on “Billie Jean”—and played his final drums in 2018, after battling prostate cancer. Happy birthday, and rest in rhythm and power, to Chancler.

Fellow birthday-haver Gupta is a tabla legend who co-founded Brooklyn Raga Massive and supercharges the Supplicants and VidyA, saxophonist Prasant Radhakrishnan’s project. Every band Gupta joins is stronger and steadier for it, with a syncopating pulse that grounds the music. Happy 44th. And happy 87th to Rashied Ali, who gave John Coltrane’s final years their signature sound, thanks to Ali’s kinetic, expressive style, famously on their Interstellar Space duet.

You may also know July 1 as the day ice-vending machines were introduced in Los Angeles, and as Canada Day, but most importantly, it marks the greatest of them all: The happiest birthday in human history to the singularly creative, infinitely inspiring, always-celebrated Rita King, this Recharge writer’s mom and muse.

Like clockwork, a customer walked into a Starbucks without a mask and loudly refused the barista’s request that she wear one (on order of county officials). A more authoritarian overreach, the customer had never seen, so this principled, in-the-right customer—who was denied service—took a photo of the barista, posted it on Facebook, and wrote, with exquisite moral clarity: “Meet lenen from Starbucks who refused to serve me cause I’m not wearing a mask. Next time I will wait for cops…”

Also like clockwork, Facebook users realized that the customer is not always right, masks can save lives, and this barista was unfairly maligned. The customer’s post backfired. Tens of thousands of people defended the worker, and a virtual tip jar was started on GoFundMe. More than $32,000 in tips rolled in.

Clocks are these mechanisms with springs and toothed gearwheels, and sometimes a dial. A working one measures time. It can be a synchronizing device, producing pulses at regular intervals. It can also tell you precisely when a maskless customer will call a barista “lenen.”

More tip stories please: recharge@motherjones.com.

Diane Guerrero and Mother Jones immigration reporter Fernanda EchavarriMother Jones

In case you missed the insightful and timely conversation Thursday with actor, activist, and author Diane Guerrero and Mother Jones immigration reporter Fernanda Echavarri, catch it here, a highlight of our “In Conversation” series, which has adapted creatively to the pandemic’s preempting of in-person gatherings with a move to remote livestreams. The star of Jane the Virgin and Orange Is the New Black amplified the experiences and impact of COVID-19 and Trump administration assaults on asylum seekers and explored how the media portrays immigrants—along with ways to strengthen communities and support families and individuals facing crises. Catch the conversation and share your ideas under the video or at recharge@motherjones.com.

You can also listen to MoJo’s Fernanda Echavarri interview Guerrero about her own childhood experience of forced family separation, and how it drove her to demand a better future, on this episode of the Mother Jones Podcast:

LeBron James has been dunking on Donald Trump for years now, posterizing the president in a kingly pose of majesty and strength and style, with tweets and press statements like this one and this one. The NBA star isn’t about to let up on the windbag occupant of the highest office: James just scored $100 million in backing to build a media empire, a new company that “gives a voice to creators and consumers who’ve been pandered to, ignored, or underserved,” in the words of Jason Kelly, who interviewed James in a video chat for Bloomberg. The new company’s staff is 64 percent people of color and 40 percent women. Now let’s see if James has it in the tank to run one-on-three with Nat Johnson, Thumper DeShields, and J. Barron. Taking bets at recharge@motherjones.com.

Thanks largely to the hard-hitting reporting by Mother Jones contributors Esther Honig and Ted Genoways in their exclusive investigation of how meatpacking plants let workers get sick and die, Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker are opening an investigation of their own. Citing our piece “The Workers Are Being Sacrificed,” the senators announced a new study of meatpacking companies’ treatment of workers during the pandemic—at a time when these companies threatened a local meat shortage while sending massive amounts of pork abroad. Catch the investigation in our July-August issue or online, and join us in congratulating Esther and Ted, senior editor Maddie Oatman, and our partners at the Food and Environment Reporting Network for essential work with potentially life-saving results. And for those of you who can, consider pitching in to support more high-impact reporting like it. (Mother Jones’ Monika Bauerlein describes what the pandemic has meant for our reporting here.)

A drumroll of quick ones:

• The Village Vanguard is up and running with a powerful livestream series that continues Saturday night and Sunday afternoon, featuring the exhilarating sounds of bassist Joe Martin, saxophonist Mark Turner, pianist Kevin Hays, and drummer Nasheet Waits. Visit VillageVanguard.com for tickets and teasers.

• Louis Armstrong, as Gary Giddins said, did “what only the greatest artists are prepared to do—show the world to itself in a new light.” And the photographer Chris Barham did likewise, showing Armstrong to the world in a set of iconic photos of the jazz legend on the front steps of his Queens home with kids in the neighborhood 50 years ago this week. Barham died Monday at the age of 87, but his inspiring images live on.

• Saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa, whose music I can’t stop boasting about—for god’s sake listen to his tensely erupting, lucidly floating sound on “Aftermath” and “Threnody” with Vijay Iyer—is on a hot streak. Mahanthappa’s latest, Hero Trio, is bound to be album of the year. If I were still organizing the old Pazz & Jop poll at the Village Voice (you reading this, Bob and Chuck? Send a flare to recharge@motherjones.com), Hero Trio would be runaway first, and I’d ballot-stuff, electioneer, whatever it took. Sample and sample, with Charlie Parker darting in.

• In case you missed Arturo O’Farrill’s good news, his Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra’s Four Questions features Cornel West’s narration and poetic justice on the title track, with a “caravan of love—or what Coltrane called A Love Supreme.” Dr. West, you are supremely welcome at recharge@motherjones.com.

• Additional stamina from the exceptional tenor saxophonist Jorge Continentino on “De Volta à Festa (Back to the Party),” from drummer Vanderlei Pereira’s new Vision for Rhythm. “Party” indeed, if you can, pandemic and all.

“Pandemic of Love” might be the least-subtle name for a volunteer website of its kind, but you can’t argue with $25 million in contributions and 187,000-plus success stories since the site’s launch a few months ago. As the pandemic stretches on, a wave of generosity is growing, thanks to the site, which connects people who need help with those who can give help. The idea was born when Shelly Tygielski of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, decided “to create connection [and] community and strengthen the bonds of love between us.” She posted a launch video and signup links, and when she “woke up the next morning, there were already 400 requests to get help and 500 to give help,” Tygielski said.

A hashtag spread the word—wouldn’t you notice #PandemicofLove?—and “within the first 24 hours I received an email offering to start a Pandemic of Love community for San Francisco, and within two to three days I got messages to create communities in Portugal and Barcelona,” she said. “Now I get at least 20 emails a day from folks who want to create micro-communities from all over the world.”

People have signed up in more than a dozen countries, including Chile, Australia, Mexico, and Iceland, mainly in search of help with food and supplies for children.

If you’ve volunteered or appreciated the help of people who have, send your stories to recharge@motherjones.com.

This article has been updated to reflect the quickly growing number of volunteers and contributions.

Artists are doing their best in Detroit, and around the country, to celebrate the progress and inspire more like it as the protests against police violence and racial injustice continue. Dozens of teens are using paint rollers to create a massive mural on the city’s main avenue, reading “Power to the People,” with the “o” in “Power” filled in with a raised fist of solidarity. “And we’re looking to do more around the city,” said Rochelle Riley, director of Detroit’s art and culture department. “This is permanent. It’s not just for a holiday or an action this week.”

A look at the mural and the creative teens behind it. If you see or are helping to paint murals in your city or town, send photos and a description to recharge@motherjones.com.

August 7: Since I published this piece about Stern’s latest and greatest, he’s released a new latest and greatest—his second quarantine song, which is exceptionally good, the poppiest Stern gets. Today we get “Concord Grapes on the Skyline.” It’s also Bandcamp Friday, so get on it if you want the rollercoaster of Stern’s soundscape, with postproduction magic by Caley Monahon-Ward. “It’s about everything breaking down around me,” Stern tells me. At least the music, and the original imagination behind it, is strongly resilient, a cause for continued celebration and inspiration. —DK

Adapting creatively in quarantine is a challenge for artists everywhere, but today brings good news: the release of music and the birthday of its composer. Happy release day and birthday to the relentlessly imaginative New York musician Stern. His new track lays bare the “psychological effects of the pandemic” on his memory, mental health, and family, he tells me. The title’s inspiration came from his mother, whose care and support gave Stern the idea. “She’s my muse,” he says, crediting her with the impressive word “peregrinations,” meaning sojourn or journey, in “Peregrinations of a Rueful Mind.” (The rueful mind is Stern’s, not his mother’s.) The music is both disorienting and reorienting: an epic exploration, with a slow-motion collapse of space and time; a brilliantly layered implosion of guitar, synth, horns, percussion, and strings; real-life barn noises (don’t ask); aqua smudge (do ask); and harmonically open frontiers. Some is digital; some is acoustic. “The fake and the real. It’s hard to tell them apart,” he says.

You’ll know right away, within the first three dreamlike seconds, if the sound suits you or sends you screaming for the hills. The vocal tracks multiply and merge beautifully halfway through, thanks to the postproduction of K.M. Abrams. What else would you expect from the Sphyoibian synapses of Stern, who previously fronted Time of Orchids and released an album on John Zorn’s legendary Tzadik label? Stern has also been rewatching “Tales From the Crypt” with his mom for inspiration, mining the show’s score for ideas. “I’ve arrived at this kind of ooze, this distilled ooze,” he tells me. “A lot of people feel they’re forced to be creative but they’re not making music, and they resent themselves for it. Me too, even before the pandemic. The process takes a little while.”

Exile, isolation, and feeling alone are the themes of Stern’s soundscape, but if his music is any indication, alone he definitely is not. Celebrated—on his birthday and always—he is.

In Ralph Ellison’s famous unfinished novel Juneteenth, the Rev. Alonzo Hickman, a Southern Black church leader, has to explain to a dying white senator that the eponymous holiday is still celebrated: “We haven’t forgotten what it means,” he says. “Even if sometimes folks try to make us believe it never happened or that it was a mistake it ever did…”

Ellison’s novel uses the holiday to ask questions about what freedom means. And it swirls around how the forgetting of history, of the past, gets us to that place. Juneteenth itself is a potent example of this. States, and businesses, are increasingly recognizing it is a holiday celebrating the end of slavery. But it honors the date—June 19, 1865—when Union Gen. Gordon Granger read federal orders in Galveston, Texas, announcing the freedom of enslaved Americans in Texas, even though President Abraham Lincoln had signed the final version of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. The point is that the proclamation did too little to change the lives of many Black people enslaved in the United States. This has an unfortunate rhyme with the way the holiday has been untaught and unheralded by white institutions.

Ellison was often interested in the history of forgetting. How does the United States hide itself from the past? And what does that mean for Black Americans whose past has been hidden? In one essay, he finds particular power in art that can combat American myths: music.

“Perhaps in the swift change of American society in which meanings of one’s origin are so quickly lost, one of the chief values of living with music lies in its power to give us an orientation in time,” he writes.

Here’s a list in that spirit. If you’re looking for Juneteenth-specific music, others have collected music about the holiday and I highly recommend collections from the Library of Congress on the holiday, including interviews conducted by Zora Neale Hurston. This is a shortlist of music, instead, that orients us in time. Much of it is on Bandcamp, which is celebrating the holiday by donating shares of purchases to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

Sonny Sharrock, Ask the Ages

The last album from legendary jazz guitarist Sharrock before his death, in 1994, Ask the Ages is not background music or casual listening—it is foregrounded and loud. It asks you to engage. In fact, it demands it. As Marcus J. Moore notes in the New York Times, Sharrock was part of a broader movement of black liberation jazz. The experimental nature here is a probing of what is possible. Sharrock is a bit more obscure than the names from the genre you’ve likely heard: Ornette Coleman, Pharoah Sanders, Alice Coltrane. But as one reviewer noted: With his guitar, he could “hold lightning in his bare hands.” He sought to traverse out to where free jazz went with horns and saxophones, notes exploding and overflowing. Of course, it helps on this record to have support from Sanders on saxophone and Elvin Jones on drums. I particularly like the track “Once Upon a Time.” But the record is best enjoyed in totality. —JR

Beauty Pill, Please Advise

Music is just one dimension of Beauty Pill’s art. And Please Advise, the Washington, DC–based band’s latest offering, shows there’s as much measured intention behind every note and lyric as there is for how it’s consumed. Named after a throwaway sentence in Teo Macero’s infamous 1969 memo to Columbia Records about Miles Davis’ new record (“Miles just called and said he wants this album to be titled BITCHES BREW. Please advise.”), Please Advise is pure kaleidoscopic art-pop; layers of dense melodies expand into new rhythmic fractals with each listen. Beauty Pill is no stranger to turning music into art—literally—and this album is as much physical art as it is musical: each format (CD, LP, cassette) is thoughtfully packaged with its own unique art and music. It might be old-fashioned to obsess over packaging and design but, like Beauty Pill bandleader Chad Clark, I’m also a firm believer that “the whole of the record is art.”  (And if you somehow needed another reason to buy this album, Clark’s late father was the general counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Synergy, y’all.) —MC

Brother Ah

Brother Ah communicated with the world, and I don’t just mean that in the spiritual sense. I once interviewed the renowned jazz musician—who had played with all the greats, from Sun Ra to Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane—and he told me a story about how he once played flute for a blue crane, at the National Zoo, that was struggling to lay its eggs. He told me how he had studied the musical language of birds and was able to imitate their language to get the crane to lay eggs. You can hear how Brother Ah—whose given name was Robert Northern III—communicated with nature on his six solo albums, originally released in the ’70s and ’80s but given new life when reissued by the New York label Manufactured Recordings a few years back. Guided by Ah’s philosophy of “sound awareness” (the practice of understanding the world by listening for the music in nature) these albums are a deeply spiritual meditation. Brother Ah died on June 1 at the age of 86. But I believe that you can still hear his music in the sounds that surround you. You just have to listen. —MC

If you haven’t read much, or any, of Stanley Crouch’s brilliantly constructed and historically informed writing on music and politics, let me know at recharge@motherjones.com and we can deep-dive the language, the love, the muscle, and the memory of his writing and thinking. Wherever you land on the continuum of cultural criticism, genre, and race, Crouch’s ideas have to be engaged with if we’re to understand the fuller picture of America. Congratulations to Crouch for winning this year’s Lifetime Achievement in Jazz Journalism award from the Jazz Journalists Association. A prerecorded statement from Crouch, who is 74, will be played during a livestream at 8 p.m. ET tonight on Hot House Global and the Jazz Journalist Association’s Facebook page. Also at the party: Terri Lyne Carrington (Musician of the Year and Drummer of the Year), bassist Linda May Han Oh, saxophonist Miguel Zenón, and many others.

Some mayors dance around the core challenges of the moment, while other mayors dance and sing and rally to meet them. Mayor Ras Baraka of Newark, New Jersey, released a video for “What We Want,” his recent EP’s title track. He appears onstage with dancers and musicians as he performs his poem outlining change. “Quality education” and “free housing” are written across dancers’ cheeks, and the mayor demands freedom: “Not just the bill of rights / But rights to build our own lives.”

“We need more than justice…We need an overhaul of our systems,” Baraka says. It’s the theme song of the upcoming documentary Why Is We Americans?, about his famed family’s history of social activism and art. His father, Amiri Baraka, initiated the powerful Black Arts Movement in the mid-1960s, after the assassination of Malcom X, and Ras’ mother, Amina Baraka, is a community-building poet, dancer, and singer. Catch the mayor’s video.

Jubilation doesn’t arise in spite of protest—it’s present at the root. Coverage of this year’s uprisings has rightfully focused on the torrent of police brutality against protesters. But rebellion is also festive. It can be beautiful, joyful, and catchy. As Jewish anarchist Emma Goldman famously wrote about dancing in a revolution, freedom fighters shouldn’t “demand the denial of life and joy.” And as one organizer in Lexington, Kentucky, put it recently, “Black joy is a state of resistance.”

People claiming their power have marched to brass bands in New Orleans, danced after curfew in Oakland, and chanted “fuck these racist-ass police” over techno beats in Detroit. We’re watching in real time as each city shows how it demands and celebrates the movement’s growing triumphs. Here are a few of our favorites.

Nate Luebbe

What stands out most about Nate Luebbe’s exceptionally shot and hauntingly paced YouTube video Seattle Abandoned, a four-minute aerial glide over his hometown, is what doesn’t stand out at all: no people, no cars, no bikes, no signs of life or activity. It’s a deceptively quiet landscape that betrays the fact that, just a few months earlier, thousands of people jammed downtown on the very day, February 29, that America’s first-known case of COVID-19 was announced. Seattle had become the US epicenter of the coronavirus crisis.

Seattle Abandoned shows a city in lockdown, as disorienting as it is reorienting—an illustration of how to remake crisis into creativity, reflection, and resilience. It was filmed in the brief period between the pandemic’s onset and the protests, when the country was hit by one reckoning and at the doorstep of another. We’re treated to a time-lapse of sunrises and sunsets, with playgrounds draped in “Do Not Enter” tape—a cinematic view of a ghosted city. In Luebbe’s eyes, Seattle is both nature scene and crime scene: Just beyond the frame are the headlines and news cycles, but we don’t see the pandemic’s human toll. What we see is raw nature. To watch this footage is to come closer to the line between civilization and its undoing, between human order and disorder:

Before the pandemic, Luebbe was fleeing Seattle as often as possible for faraway destinations as a travel-adventure and wildlife photographer, on assignments and tours. When the coronavirus swept the country, he sheltered in place, but he adapted creatively by mapping Seattle using a drone and two Kodak cameras. “I started the project in late March or early April, so it was very chilling and haunting, like, man, is everybody gonna die or is this temporary? We were ground zero in the US. It was intense for quite a while,” he tells me.

Luebbe flew over the city after securing FAA flight waivers and permits in compliance with regulations allowing drones downtown only if they don’t fly over vehicles or people. “Not a single car. It’s surreal. I’m not a people photographer. I love nature, silence, and solitude, so on the one hand I found it beautiful and enjoyable” to film—but also devastating, weighted by the knowledge of isolation and grief beyond the frame. “I haven’t left Seattle in months. I’ve been trying to find a nature release by going to a park with a mask on, keeping my distance, getting fresh air, taking photos of flowering trees.”

Luebbe became a professional photographer after working as an environmental scientist and a craft brewer, switching to photography full-time to reframe what a “frontier” could mean. A sample of his striking photos:

Before the lockdown, Luebbe led group trips abroad to teach photography techniques and strategies, and he continues to offer Zoom tutorials and seminars on editing and compositional work.

“The travel industry is pretty decimated,” he says, “but there is an unprecedented appetite for ‘content consumption’ right now because so many people are home. My advice to photographers: Look to fill that gap creatively. I have friends shooting really cool outside-inside photos with tiny figurines they’ll stage with a brown paper bag to make it look like someone’s hiking through a canyon—or using a plate covered in water to get a sunset reflection in their apartment. There are always ways to be creative.”

“I don’t think any photographer should see the pandemic as limiting to your career,” he says. “Just unique restrictions. You have the most captive audience that anybody has had in human history. Get creative.”

For more of Luebbe’s work and workshops, visit NateLuebbe.com.

Energy to enter the week: the signature sounds of music grounded in freedom movements, perfectly timed for the monumental victory announced today by the Supreme Court in the fight for human rights. And the community-building of Suleika Jaouad, a leukemia survivor and Emmy-winning writer who created “The Isolation Journals,” a global project of portraiture and resilience in the face of distance during the pandemic. Catch Jaouad’s moving, candid conversation with the interviewer Nelufar Hedayat in a recent episode of #DearWorld Live, about coping constructively with mental and physical health challenges in isolation.

Collecting boosts of your own, if you’d like to share them, at recharge@motherjones.com.