In “Deep House,” Jeremy Atherton Lin uses the story of his own life as a catalyst for a kaleidoscopic survey of legal flash points regarding gay rights and immigration.

By Juan A. Ramírez

Juan A. Ramírez is a writer and critic who covers arts and culture. His work has appeared in The Times, Vogue, Vanity Fair, GQ, Theatrely and Interview magazine.

June 4, 2025 BUY BOOK ▾ ( NYTimes.com)

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DEEP HOUSE: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told, by Jeremy Atherton Lin

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As with his excellent debut, “Gay Bar: Why We Went Out,” Jeremy Atherton Lin’s sophomore book, “Deep House: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told,” is a fabulously riveting hybrid memoir and queer history lesson. In his first book, Atherton Lin mapped his coming-of-age onto a chronicle of disappearing gay bars around the world. In this new offering, the American writer shares the story of his relationship with his British partner, who remains unnamed, and uses it as a catalyst for a kaleidoscopic survey of legal flash points regarding gay rights and immigration.

“Deep House” focuses on the challenges faced by transnational queer couples before marriage equality. Not only were such couples denied the ability to wed, but with differing citizenships, they also lost a critical pathway to legally reside together in the same country. Atherton Lin situates these couples at the forefront of the fight for gay rights.

He and his partner became one such couple in 1999. The two had met in London three years prior, their immediate attraction intensifying into trans-Atlantic correspondence and eagerly awaited visits across England and Atherton Lin’s native California. During one of their stints in the United States, his partner began feeling, with his trip back to London imminent, that he had “nothing to return to, and everything to stay for,” so he overstayed his tourist visa, and the two began an illicit domesticity in San Francisco.

If the travelogue-style “Gay Bar” prowls through clubs and adventures with thrill-seeking horniness, “Deep House” is denser and written from a quieter space of contemplation. “I want to learn how we arrived here together and find out who traveled first,” Atherton Lin writes. “Allow me to shuffle the cards that were stacked against us.”

That shuffling is free-associative and anecdotal, and allows Atherton Lin a flexibility in his storytelling. He bounces between yarns from his own life, capturing his and his partner’s days living in basement apartments, working video-store jobs and flirting with polygamy, to surfacing tales of the queer people who came before him, including the committed, American-Mexican couple who had to cross the border to Mexico and back every three months to stay in the United States in the 1970s and the drunk Texas horndogs who accidentally toppled the country’s anti-sodomy laws in 2003.

Epochal legal decisions aren’t introduced from a detached, academic perspective, but arise in connection to Atherton Lin’s own life, shared like gossip through the community grapevine. “At the end of April 1997, just after I returned to the States, boyfriends Mark Watson and Ander Da Silva received surprising news,” is how he begins a passage about a British immigration officer who granted his Brazilian lover unauthorized permission to stay in the U.K.

The book juggles an impressive amount of material, though it can sometimes feel uneven, and the memoir passages can verge into indulgence. But that muchness is excused by what emerges to be the author’s larger project: Atherton Lin writes knowing that the history of queer people, as is the case for most marginalized groups, exists between the lines. That, because queerness has been so often and systematically criminalized, queer lives, queer struggles and queer culture are documented furtively or euphemistically, if at all. Backed by a formidable array of sources, he combines the rigorously researched and the deeply personal to implode that gap and fill it with as much detail as possible.

Though it foregrounds L.G.B.T.Q.+ issues in charting his and his partner’s journey, “Deep House” acknowledges that they’ve not been alone in the fight for domestic peace, finding kinship with those affected by interracial restrictions, and even with elders from his Chinese grandparents’ generation, who experienced arranged marriages. Submitting his story to this larger record, he elicits from these anecdotes a human element of randomness; none of these figures chose to make history, but were rather recruited into it.

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DEEP HOUSE: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told | By Jeremy Atherton Lin | Little, Brown | 401 pp. | $29

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The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder Jun 28, 2025

Are we on the road to Idiocracy?

By Lucas Ropek Published June 26, 2025 | (gizmodo.com)

For the second time in two weeks, a study has been published that suggests that people who use AI regularly may display significantly less cognitive ability than those who don’t rely on it. The studies have bolstered critics’ accusations that AI makes you stupid.

The most recent study was conducted by the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and looked at a sample size of over 4,500 participants. The study, which looked at the cognitive differences between people who used LLMs like ChatGPT to do research and those who used Google Search, found that the people who used chatbots tended “to develop shallower knowledge” of the subjects they were researching. Both groups were asked to research how to start a vegetable garden, with some participants randomly selected to use AI, while others were asked to use a search engine. According to the study’s findings, those who used ChatGPT gave much worse advice about how to plant a vegetable garden than those who used the search engine. Researchers write:

The shallower knowledge accrues from an inherent feature of LLMs—the presentation of results as syntheses of information rather than individual search links—which makes learning more passive than in standard web search, where users actively discover and synthesize information sources themselves. In turn, when subsequently forming advice on the topic based on what they learned, those who learned from LLM syntheses (vs. standard search results) feel less invested in forming their advice and, more importantly, create advice that is sparser, less original—and ultimately less likely to be adopted by recipients.

The study concludes that this occurred ironically because of ChatGPT’s advertised benefit—”sparing users the need to browse through results and synthesize information themselves.” Because researchers did not have to hunt for information themselves, their “depth of knowledge” was markedly lower than those who did. “In this sense, one might view learning through LLMs rather than web search as analogous to being shown the solution to a math problem rather than trying to solve it oneself,” the research concludes.

The UPenn study follows on the heels of research produced by MIT, published earlier this month, that showed a similarly problematic cognitive impact produced by AI. That study, which observed the neural activity of college students who were using ChatGPT to study, found that increased AI use resulted in reduced brain activity, or what the researchers termed “cognitive debt.” The study used an EEG machine to measure the neural activity of three different groups of students—one that used ChatGPT to study, one that used Google Search, and one that used neither. The study showed that ChatGPT users displayed markedly less cognitive activity than even those who were using Google Search to find information.

The methodology of the MIT article has since been called into question by AI enthusiasts. Critics have noted that the study in question was not peer reviewed and that a small sample size of participants makes it hardly exhaustive. Similarly, critics have argued that while the EEG measurements show certain decreases in specific forms of brain activity, that doesn’t necessarily mean that participants are “dumber” as a result. Indeed, less mental exertion (and, thus, less activity) can be a sign that a person is actually more competent at a task and doesn’t have to expend as much energy as a result. From a certain perspective, these recent assessments of AI’s cerebral impact reek of a moral panic about a new and not altogether well-understood phenomenon.

On the other hand, the conclusion that using an app to complete a homework assignment makes you less capable of thinking for yourself would appear to be self-evident. Outsourcing mental duties to a software program means you’re not performing those duties yourself, and, as is pretty well established, doing something yourself is often the best way to learn. Of course, the internet has been curtailing human mental activity since it first went online. When was the last time you had to remember how to get somewhere? It really seems like Google Maps collectively robbed us of that ability over a decade ago.

Other evidence for AI’s stupidification effect is even more obvious: the maelstrom of cheating that’s been happening in America’s educational system means that students are making their way through high school and college without learning how to write an essay or interpret a book. While there is clearly still a lot to learn about how AI impacts us, some of its side-effects seem obvious. If a student can’t write an essay without the help of a chatbot, they probably don’t have a particularly bright academic future ahead of them.

Chloé Hayden | TEDxSydney Youth

• August 2024

Actress Chloé Hayden is best known for her role as Quinnie on the popular TV show “Heartbreak High” — one of the first-ever autistic characters to actually be played by an autistic person. Now, she’s inviting us to imagine a world where seeing autistic people in any role isn’t groundbreaking, it’s simply expected.

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• Media
• Social Change
• Personal Growth
• Identity
• Autism Spectrum Disorder
• Diversity
• Inclusion
• TV

About the speaker

Chloé Hayden

Actor, author, advocate

Published: October 30, 2017 (TheOnion.com)

With One Collective Voice, Business Owners Could Change the National Conversation. They’ve Done It Before

By Julie M. Weise June 26, 2025 (ZocaloPublicSquare.org)

This month’s coast-to-coast protests against immigration raids seem to display a country more divided than ever over the place of immigrants in American life. Yet recent history shows one group that, speaking collectively, often bridged the divide between conservatives and pro-immigrant activists: employers.

Since Trump’s reelection last fall, I’ve been curious: what will they do now—and could they reframe the immigration debate away from criminality and toward a broader understanding of economy, community, and America?

The federal immigration raids that began a few months ago appeared at first to stick to a familiar, predictable script. First, raids on agriculture and other industries dependent on immigrants detained many workers and sent the rest into hiding. Then, employers and their professional associations such as the American Farm Bureau and the American Business Immigration Coalition raised hell with their representatives in Washington, D.C., pleading their cases—that their crops would rot in the fields and their businesses grind to a halt. Next, President Donald Trump did what other administrations of both political parties have always done: carved out a little exception so certain industries could return to their “normal” dependence on undocumented workers.

But the difference this time is that under pressure from the hardline anti-immigrant wing of his party, Trump reversed course. The raids will proceed, allowing him to rack up deportation numbers to meet his campaign promises.

Employers have been trying to script their desired, usual ending in meetings with lawmakers and public statements. California farmer Ronnie Leimgruber expressed unfounded confidence that his industry’s support of Trump will spare it in the end. “The only change that we have to make,” said racehorse caretaking industry association director Eric J. Hamelback after a devastating immigration raid on a racetrack last week, “is to get even more aggressive with both the administration and Congress.”

I beg to differ. The only way for employers to have a chance at winning this battle is to speak loudly on the issue in the public square, as they did from the 1990s until Trump’s complete takeover of the GOP in 2020. In those decades, employers could often be found countering this threat to their livelihood not just in congressional offices, but in the national media and their communities.

In my historical research on Mexican migration to the U.S. South, I saw that many employers and their allies in the early 2000s spoke openly and proudly about immigrant workers, even when they faced public blowback. In the conservative farming community of Tifton, Georgia, the mayor, who was also a technical advisor to local farmers, flew the Mexican flag outside city hall for six days in 2005 to mourn the deaths of six local Mexican men who had been killed in a robbery. He kept the flag up despite some complaints on local talk radio. And when state-level anti-immigrant legislation threatened immigrants in Uvalda, Georgia, in 2011, farmers there attended a public meeting where they decried the law’s effects on immigrant children and compared immigration enforcement to the Nazis. Uvalda Mayor Paul Bridges, a dairy farmer and Republican, ended up challenging the law in court with the American Civil Liberties Union. He argued not just for immigrants’ essential role in harvesting his town’s Vidalia onions, but for their value as human beings in his community. “When the Latino community first started coming in,” he explained in a video, “they would meet someone and fall in love and have families. So they became a part of our societal network.”

These very employers have a unique ability to help tell a more inclusive story not just about who does America’s work, but about whose presence and humanity enrich the country rather than threaten it.

Like Bridges, many employers advocated publicly for undocumented immigrants to receive consideration as indispensable workers, but also full human beings and valued members of the community. In my home state of Oregon, for example, agricultural and hospitality employer groups worked side-by-side with pro-immigrant activists from 2013-’19 to make all residents of the state eligible for driver’s licenses, regardless of immigration status. The same coalition worked together in 2016 to preserve Oregon’s status as a “sanctuary” state that prohibits the use of state and local police officers for immigration enforcement. Both efforts succeeded. Jeff Stone, CEO of the Oregon Association of Nurseries, told me his group supported sanctuary status to create a welcoming environment in Oregon, not one based on “fear and racial profiling.” His members need workers above all, but they did not shy away from defending immigrants as people, too.

The power imbalance between employers and their workers often coexists with mutually caring relationships and interconnectedness through churches, schools, and marriages. Today’s agriculture also often requires skills built over years; many employers cultivate decades-long relationships with their employees. These very employers have a unique ability to help tell a more inclusive story not just about who does America’s work, but about whose presence and humanity enrich the country rather than threaten it. That some employers continue to advocate for comprehensive immigration reform and a path to permanent legal status for their workers shows that the potential overlap of interest between employers and immigrants remains real.

But there are also new challenges. In liberal states, clashes between employer and activist groups over wages and unionization have driven a wedge between groups that once collaborated on certain immigrants’ rights issues. In conservative states, speaking in measured tones about undocumented immigrants has become politically perilous. Since January, red- and blue-state farmers alike may fear that speaking out too loudly could invite retaliatory enforcement. Their pleas to Congress and the White House to back off workplace raids remain vigorous, but are mostly confined to closed-door lobbying that centers on economics.

Economic arguments are essential to the conversation, but employers’ recent reticence to move beyond them has ceded the deeper question about who belongs in America to activists on one side and anti-immigrant ideologues on the other.

It is not too late to change course, as a few brave exceptions show. Idaho farmer and Tik-Tok influencer Shay Myers gets thousands of views on his videos decrying heavy-handed immigration enforcement. He speaks both to the fact that he can’t find other workers in a moment of low unemployment and to the “ethical” implications of ripping apart families and causing them to live in fear. Georgia Republican State Representative Kasey Carpenter, a restaurant owner whose district is powered by the carpet manufacturing industry, explained on national news that immigrants were essential to that industry. He also said, “These are kids, that have gone to high school, that we’ve educated, that everybody else’s kids know, that play sports with them.” Though they may disagree on much else, pro-immigrant activists should recognize the value of these voices.

Employers are not wrong in perceiving that defending immigrants broadly and publicly would provoke more drama than it might have a decade ago. But the risk of inaction is magnified as never before: the continued depletion of their workforce and deportation of their neighbors.

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Julie M. Weise is a historian at the University of Oregon and author of Corazón de Dixie: Mexicanos in the U.S. South since 1910. Her next book, currently titled Guest Worker: Lives across Borders in an Age of Prosperity, is forthcoming.

Guardian News Jun 28, 2025 Tens of thousands of people gathered for Budapest Pride march despite the government’s threat of ‘legal consequences’. The country’s main Pride march was cast into doubt earlier this year after the country’s ruling Fidesz party – led by the rightwing populist Viktor Orbán – backed legislation that created a legal basis for Pride to be banned, citing a widely criticised need to protect children. The move caused outrage from within Hungary and beyond, turning Budapest Pride into a rallying cry against a government that has long faced criticism for weakening democratic institutions and gradually undermining the rule of law. Crowds gather for Budapest Pride march despite Orbán’s threat of ‘legal consequences’ – Europe live Budapest Pride expected to be a rallying cry against Orbán’s rollback of rights

New Thinking Jun 27, 2025 This video is a special release from the original Thinking Allowed series that ran on public television from 1986 until 2002. It was recorded in about 1991. It will remain public for only one week. Jeanne Achterberg, former President of the Association for Transpersonal Psychology, was author of Imagery in Healing and Woman As Healer. She discusses the holographic model of the brain and suggests that mental images mediate between the conscious intentions and the physiology of the body. She points out that imagery has been used in healing since ancient times, and cites a considerable body of research indicating that the use of mental imagery can effect body functioning — including the immune system. Now you can watch all of the programs from the original Thinking Allowed Video Collection, hosted by Jeffrey Mishlove. Subscribe to the new Streaming Channel (https://thinkingallowed.vhx.tv/) and watch more than 350 programs now, with more, previously unreleased titles added weekly. Free month of the classic Thinking Allowed streaming channel for New Thinking Allowed subscribers only. Use code THINKFREELY.

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