Micah's Read of the Week, Vol. 50
Procrastination, QAnon now, Recipe Corner, and more.
Hello, and welcome to Micah’s Read of the Week.
This is a newsletter filled with things Micah Wiener finds interesting.
Check out the introduction post here and the entire archive of previous newsletters here.
Please, subscribe and share with a friend.
Why do we procrastinate, and how can we stop? Experts have answers.
If you’re reading this newsletter instead of tackling one of the many projects you meant to do during the pandemic, or before starting the report due tomorrow at work, or as an alternative to changing your car’s year-old oil, feel no shame: This is a safe space, procrastinators, and you’re among friends.
So why do we procrastinate?
To understand what causes procrastination (outside of conditions such as ADHD, where executive functioning issues might interfere with completing tasks), it’s important to be clear about what it is — and isn’t. Procrastination is different from delaying a task because you need to talk to someone who isn’t available. Fuschia Sirois, a professor of psychology at the University of Sheffield in England, defines procrastination this way: “The voluntary, unnecessary delay of an important task, despite knowing you’ll be worse off for doing so.”
The reason, she said, has to do with emotional self-regulation — and, in particular, an inability to manage negative moods around a certain task. We don’t typically procrastinate on fun things, she said. We procrastinate on tasks we find “difficult, unpleasant, aversive or just plain boring or stressful.” If a task feels especially overwhelming, or provokes significant anxiety, it’s often easiest to avoid it.
Another reason people procrastinate, Sirois said, is because of low self-esteem. One might think: “I’m never going to do this right” or “What will my boss think if I screw up?”
Ferrari theorizes that there are three types of procrastinators: thrill-seekers, who crave the rush of putting off tasks until the last minute and believe they work best under pressure; avoiders, who procrastinate to avoid being judged for how they perform on a project; and indecisives, who have difficulty making important or stressful decisions, often because they’re ruminating over several choices.
Which one are you?
Whatever type of procrastinator you are, pushing off tasks over and over again is a risk factor for poor mental and physical health, experts say. Chronic procrastinators have higher levels of stress and a greater number of acute health problems than other people, Sirois has found.
Those who procrastinate are also more likely to experience headaches, insomnia and digestive issues, and they’re more susceptible to the flu and colds. The association with health problems is best explained by stress, but another factor is that procrastinators often delay preventive treatment, such as regular checkups.
So, of course, the question is, how do I overcome procrastination?
Practice self-compassion. Procrastinators are often hard on themselves. To counter that, treat yourself with kindness and understanding. “Just sort of recognizing that, yeah, maybe I screwed up and maybe I could have gotten started earlier, but I don’t need to beat myself up,” she said. Tell yourself: “I’m not the first person to procrastinate, and I won’t be the last.” Sirois notes that self-compassion doesn’t make people lazy. On the contrary, “research has shown that it actually increases people’s motivation to improve themselves,” she said.
Attach meaning to the task. One of the best ways to stop procrastinating, Sirois said, is to find meaning in the task in question. Write down why it’s important to you: It could be because getting it done on time is helpful to other people, or because it will help you avoid negative repercussions such as a late fee or bad grade. Think about how completing it will be valuable to your personal growth or happiness. Doing so will help you feel more connected to the task and less likely to procrastinate, Sirois said.
Start small. Ferrari likes to reference the expression, “Cannot see the forest for the trees.” The problem of procrastinators is the opposite: All they can see is forest. And they become so overwhelmed by the size of the forest — or project — that they’re paralyzed into inactivity.
“I tell them to cut down one tree at a time,” he said. “You can’t do one tree? Give me three branches.” Once you’ve gotten started, and made even a small bit of progress on your task, there’s a good chance you’ll keep going, he said. This can be particularly helpful to indecisive procrastinators, or “procs,” as Ferrari calls them. These people, who are often perfectionists, do best when they split up a task into manageable parts, rather than feeling pressure to perform perfectly on a big, daunting project.
Another tip, he said, is to set deadlines for yourself for all those small steps. If you’re someone who thrives under pressure, doing so can help replicate the adrenaline rush you get when you wait until the last minute.
The entire article is worth a read. The author goes on to list several other strategies, including:
Carefully choose which task you do first
Situate yourself in a spot that’s interruption-free
Be aware of the “procrasticlearing” trap
Reward yourself
Enlist external help
So which kind of procrastinator are you? Let me know in the comments.
Most Important Reads of the Week
We spent a lot of time in this space talking about QAnon in the lead-up to the election, but the conspiracy theorists and their believers aren’t going anywhere. It’s been six months since the insurrection of January 6th and it seems as though conspiracy merchants are back in a big way.
From Texas Monthly: The QAnon Movement Isn’t Dead. From What I Saw in Dallas, It’s Just Evolving. The outlandish conspiracy theory has made legions of believers into political activists. And the Texas GOP benefits from that.
Woah buddy is this a wild read. The writing by Christopher hooks is excellent.
It’s late May, Memorial Day weekend, and Sidney Powell, crusading lawyer of Dallas, is speaking to a crowd of nearly a thousand self-described truth seekers. “Truth is the armor of God,” she tells the rapt audience at Eddie Deen’s Ranch, a kitschy wedding and event venue in an awkward corner of the city’s gargantuan convention-center complex. “Deception is destroying this country,” she says. Heathens and unbelievers are “terrified, absolutely terrified of the truth.”
Powell is one of the stars of the “For God & Country Patriot Roundup,” a three-day conference with ties to QAnon where the followers of Q will ponder, among other weighty subjects, the dangerous infiltration of Jews and members of the Chinese Communist party into American institutions; the nation’s secret space program; the growing number of karate dojos owned by child-traffickers; and the possibility of kickstarting a military coup to remove Satan-worshipping pedophiles from government. In between, they’ll hear from prominent figures in the Texas GOP. Boxed lunches will be provided.Of the tens of speakers, though, only Powell is in a position to deliver the catharsis the crowd needs. She won fame as the most animated member of former president Donald Trump’s legal team during the interregnum between the 2020 election and Joe Biden’s inauguration—so animated that Trump eventually disavowed her.
She tells the audience of QAnon adherents, there might be no “storm” coming. “There are no military tribunals that are going to solve this problem for us,” she says. “It’s going to take every one of us rolling up their sleeves.” Be the Q you want to see in the world, in other words.
Of course, a grift to take the hard-earned money of the true believers is never too far away from people gullible enough to believe this nonsense.
Then she exits the room, leaving only her well-staffed merch table, which, in Eddie Deen’s Western-themed space, sits in front of two large, light-up cacti. Copies of Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice are going for $50. Signed copies are $100, with a “personalized message” for a mere $50 more. The real steal, though, are the “Release the Kraken”–themed tote bags and T-shirts, which go for $30 and $35, respectively. Powell’s table sits next to another for a company called Patriotic Strong, which promises to cure chronic pain with things it calls “quantum energy patches.”
Hooks also does a great job painting the scene:
The emcee bounds onto the stage after Powell departs. “Are you guys ready to party?” he shouts. “Do patriots know how to party?”
With our new boring-ass president in the White House and the disappearance of Q, this conspiracy menace must be over, right?
When Biden was inaugurated, part of the palpable sense of relief among his half of the country was that they would no longer have to think about guys with names like “the Q Shaman.” Surely, their time had passed.
Maybe not. “What we’re seeing now is a kind of second iteration of the movement, under Biden. It looks and sounds slightly different, but the energy and larger worldview is still there,” says Jared Holt, a fellow at the Digital Forensic Research Lab of the Atlantic Council, who has spent much of the last few years following the QAnon movement. It might be less prominent in the discourse since its peak after the election, Holt says, but there’s “no shortage of individuals radicalized by QAnon floating in the political atmosphere, and some of them have expressed aspirations for cementing influence in the broader GOP.” That means running for party positions, school boards, and other local offices—the same play enacted successfully by the tea party a decade ago. The left-wing watchdog group Media Matters for America recently tallied 38 Q-friendly candidates running (most as Republicans) for congressional seats. Three of them are in Texas.
The story continues with a lot more from the largest Q-Convention since January 6th. I would encourage you to read the whole thing.
As if that wasn’t enough, check out these other pieces from this week:
QAnon's new 'plan'? Run for school board. In the wake of Donald Trump's 2020 election defeat, many QAnon followers have hatched a plan: run for school board or local office, spread the gospel of Q, but don’t call it QAnon.
FBI infiltrates group whose members wanted to test homemade bombs, surveil Capitol, secede from US, court records show. The FBI has infiltrated a "Bible study" group in Virginia that after the January 6 riot had members discussing surveilling the US Capitol and their wish for secession from the US, and investigators closely followed one member's plans to build and test Molotov cocktails, according to recently unsealed court records.
Sean G. Turnbull displays many of the hallmarks of a successful upper-middle-class family man, a former film producer and marketing manager for one of the country’s largest retail corporations who lives in a well-appointed home in this Minneapolis-St. Paul suburb. Former colleagues describe him as smart, affable and family-oriented.
But for more than a decade, the 53-year-old has also pursued a less conventional path: anonymously promoting conspiracy theories about dark forces in American politics on websitesand social media accounts in a business he runs out of his home. His audience numbers are respectable and his ad base is resilient, according to corporate records and interviews.
Turnbull has identified himself online for 11 years only as “Sean from SGT Reports.” He has amassed a substantial following while producing videos and podcasts claiming that the 9/11 attacks were a “false flag” event, that a “Zionist banker international cabal” is plotting to destroy Western nations, that coronavirus vaccines are an “experimental, biological kill shot” and that the 2020 election was “rigged” against President Donald Trump, according to a Washington Post review.
Many forces contributed to the attack on the Capitol, including Trump’s false claims of electoral victory and American anger with institutions. But part of the mix, say experts on American religion, is the fact that the country is in a period when institutional religion is breaking apart, becoming more individualized and more disconnected from denominations, theological credentials and oversight.
That has created room for what Yale University sociologist Phil Gorski calls a religious “melee, a free for all.”
“There have been these periods of breakdowns and ferment and reinvention in the past, and every indication is we’re in the middle of one of those now,” he said. “Such moments are periods of opportunity and creativity but also of danger and violence.”
Some scholars see this era as a spiritually fertile period, like the ones that produced Pentecostalism or Mormonism. Others worry about religious illiteracy and the lack of supervision over everything from theological pronouncements to financial practices.
Podcast Promotion of the Week
This week on Mind of Micah, we’re back with a long piece about something very important: coffee.
The invisible addiction: is it time to give up caffeine? Caffeine makes us more energetic, efficient, and faster. But we have become so dependent that we need it just to get to our baseline.
Subscribe to Mind of Micah now and get new episodes as soon as they are released.
Recipe Corner
Spicy Citrus Skirt Steak
I told you last week we’d be back to continue celebrating the Summer of Skirt Steak.
1 ½ pounds skirt steak
8tangerines, satsumas or mandarin oranges, washed and halved horizontally
6tablespoons unseasoned rice wine vinegar
6tablespoons low-sodium soy sauce
1tablespoon sambal oelek or Sriracha, plus more as needed
1(1-inch) piece ginger, peeled and finely grated (about 1 tablespoon)
1garlic clove, finely grated
Kosher salt and black pepper
Neutral oil, such as grapeseed
Prepare a charcoal or gas grill for two-zone cooking over high heat: For a charcoal grill, pour the coals onto one half of the grill.
While the grill is heating, pat the steak dry and cut into 5- to 6-inch pieces with the grain. (This makes it easier to fit on the grill.) Set aside to air-dry while you make the sauce: Squeeze 1 cup of juice from about 6 tangerines into a bowl or rimmed dish large enough to hold the steak after it’s grilled. (Set aside the remaining unjuiced halves on a sheet pan.) Add the spent tangerine halves to the juice. Smash the halves with a spoon to release the rind’s oils (as if you’re muddling a cocktail). To the juice and spent tangerine halves, add the rice vinegar, soy sauce, sambal oelek, ginger and garlic, and season with salt and pepper. Stir to combine.
When you're ready to grill, add the steak to the sheet pan of unjuiced tangerine halves and lightly coat everything with neutral oil. Season generously with salt. Bring the sheet pan of tangerine halves and steak, sauce, a tightly folded paper towel soaked with oil, and tongs to the grill. Clean the grates with a grill brush, then oil the grates with the paper towel. Grill the steak over direct heat, flipping halfway through, until well browned, 2 to 3 minutes per side. Grill the tangerines over direct heat, flipping halfway through, until blackened, 4 to 5 minutes per side.
As the steak and tangerine halves finish, add them to the sauce and turn to coat. Squeeze the charred citrus with your tongs to release the juice and the peels into the dish. Let rest for at least 5 minutes and up to 30. Slice the steak against the grain and serve with the sauce. Season to taste with salt, pepper and sambal oelek.
Smashed Cucumber Salad with Hot Vinegar
I can’t imagine there’s anything more perfect with grilled meat than this.
5 mini seedless or Persian cucumbers or 1 small English hothouse cucumber (about 12 oz.)
Kosher salt
4 red or green Thai chiles, halved lengthwise keeping stem end intact, or 1 serrano chile, thinly sliced
2 garlic cloves, lightly smashed
½ cup unseasoned rice vinegar
2 Tbsp. fish sauce
1 Tbsp. sugar
Chopped unsalted or salted roasted peanuts (for serving)
Gently smash cucumbers with a rolling pin or the back of a heavy knife just to break open. Tear into irregular 2" pieces and place in a medium bowl; season lightly with salt. Let sit at least 5 minutes and up to 1 hour.
Meanwhile, whisk chiles, garlic, vinegar, fish sauce, and sugar in a medium bowl until sugar dissolves. Let sit while cucumbers macerate.
Drain cucumbers, discarding any liquid they have released. Add to bowl with dressing and toss several times to coat. Top with peanuts.
Cold Tahini Noodles With Vegetables
This cold noodle salad is easy to put together and is a more interesting starch side than potato salad. This is also another way to use up that jar of tahini you bought last month.
Kosher salt
1 pound dried udon noodles (may substitute Chinese egg noodles or whole-wheat linguine)
2 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon sesame oil
2 tablespoons unseasoned rice vinegar
2 tablespoons tahini
1 tablespoon smooth peanut butter
3 1/2 teaspoons low-sodium soy sauce
1 tablespoon sugar
1 tablespoon peeled fresh ginger root, finely grated
2 to 3 teaspoons chili-garlic sauce
1 large carrot, scrubbed well and cut into 2-inch long matchsticks
1/2 English cucumber, seeded and cut into 2-inch long matchsticks
1 medium red bell pepper, seeded and cut into thin 2-inch-long strips
2 scallions, thinly sliced
1/4 cup chopped roasted unsalted peanuts (or 1 teaspoon toasted sesame seeds)
Bring a large pot of lightly salted water to a boil over high heat. Add the noodles and cook for 8 minutes, or until just tender. Drain the noodles, rinse with cold water, drain again and transfer to a large bowl. Add 1 teaspoon of the sesame oil and toss to coat.
In a medium bowl, whisk the remaining 2 tablespoons sesame oil, the rice vinegar, tahini, peanut butter, soy sauce, sugar, ginger and chili-garlic sauce.
Pour the sauce over the noodles and toss to coat. Add the carrot, cucumber and bell pepper and toss to mix it together.
Sprinkle the scallions and peanuts (or toasted sesame seeds) on top before serving.
Where else can I find Micah content?
Podcasts: Mind of Micah, Back Door Cover, Too Much Dip
Twitter: @micahwiener & @producermicah (Why two twitters? It’s a long story)
Instagram: @micahwiener
LinkedIn: @micahwiener
Peloton: #badboysofpelly@micahwiener
Email: micahwiener@me.com