Growing

When I was small, my father told me that his mother — Grandma Weir — had a green thumb. (I looked but couldn’t see one.) She’d grown up on small farms in Ontario, and was widely believed to be able to get anything to grow.

My father tried to teach me gardening techniques when I was a bit older, but like with almost everything else he taught me, he ended up doing all the work while I watched.

At the very back of our large backyard on the edge of town in Bay City, we had a vegetable garden, which if memory serves, was extremely productive. The soil had until recently been farmland and it was rich and black.

Behind that, at the property line was one of a series of ditches carrying water from Saginaw Bay. There were fish, frogs and turtles and the occasional snake. Beyond the ditch were cornfields stretching to the horizon.

Growing up in a family that grew vegetables and was one generation removed from the farm shaped my values in many ways. I’m sure it helped me become an environmentalist and choose the subjects I pursued as a journalist, particularly Circle of Poison.

As I’ve aged, on occasion I’ve done a little urban gardening, mostly growing herbs and lettuce, tomatoes, squash, onions and other vegetables. Anyway, all of this is leading up to my latest news, which is a little experiment — planting a few small items and several rows of seeds in a raised wooden box out front.

It is a simple project but one that reaches far back in my memory, connecting me with my roots.

LINKS:

• ‘You don’t have another option’: Inside the Biden, McCarthy debt ceiling deal (WP)

• The Debt-Limit Deal Suggests Debt Will Keep Growing, Fast (NYT)

• McCarthy impresses Senate GOP with surprise wins in debt ceiling battle (The Hill)

• May jobs report shocks economists: 'The strangest employment report for some time' (Yahoo)

• The baby-bust economy: How declining birth rates will change the world (Economist)

• Trump-appointed judge rejects Tennessee’s anti-drag law as too broad, too vague (AP)

• Trump and DeSantis trade insults (Reuters)

• AI Is About to Turn Book Publishing Upside-Down (Publishers Weekly)

• Robot takeover? Not quite. Here’s what AI doomsday would look like (Guardian)

• They plugged GPT-4 into Minecraft—and unearthed new potential for AI (ArsTechnica)

• Artificial Intelligence Series 2 Of 5: AI’s Influence On The Workforce (Forbes)

• Should We, and Can We, Put the Brakes on Artificial Intelligence? (New Yorker)

• Texas judge bans filings solely created by AI after ChatGPT made up cases (CBS)

• The Upper Atmosphere Is Cooling, Prompting New Climate Concerns (Wired)

• Prigozhin says Kremlin factions are destroying the Russian state (Reuters)

• ‘We will succeed’: Zelenskiy says Ukraine ready to launch counteroffensive (Guardian)

• The curious case of Yevgeny Prigozhin (Reuters)

• Defense Secretary Austin says U.S. won't stand for 'coercion and bullying' from China (NPR)

• There may be hundreds of millions of habitable planets in the Milky Way, new study suggests (LiveScience)

• Wildfires spread in eastern Canada (Reuters)

• Close Friends More Tolerable After A Few Drinks (The Onion)