Weekly Digest – December 20, 2020
Top of My Reading List
This list covers two weeks so is longer than most.
Biden needs to help the United States take a deep breath, without presidential appointees sniping at each other and jostling for position. He’s gathering a Cabinet that mirrors his own strengths — sane men and women, each one likable and competent. Like Biden, they can play the old tunes so well that maybe Americans will begin to forget what they’re so angry about. But the virtues of calm and collegiality can be overstated. A team of elbows-in former colleagues and aides may end up looking more like a Senate staff than a dynamic Cabinet… Biden’s challenge is that after cooling the national fever, literally and figuratively, he needs to shake things up.
Biden is a decent man. Attempting to restore an Obama- or Clinton-esque government will fail. The salad days of corporate centrism are long gone and will not return. Biden needs to lead with an acknowledgment of what hasn’t worked – which he was intimately involved with – as well as a vision for where we want to be as a country in a generation. Haaland for Interior Secretary is an excellent nomination.
- Hari Kunzru, Complexity
Our desire for simplicity is understandable. We like our stories to have plots, for life’s messiness to form a neat arc. In reality, we don’t get to start at the beginning. We’re thrown into the middle of things, into the chaos of history…
Yet we all have to face the question of how best to act within the world’s complexity, and the way “normies” cope isn’t ultimately so different from the conspiracists’ reductionism. We tend to steer away from complex explanations, to make things easier for ourselves.
What is simplicity? It’s a quality we feel we can intuitively identify. Simplicity is minimal and elegant. A simple object has no ornament. Everything that is not essential has been refined away. Simplicity is, in most of the ways we commonly talk about it, an aesthetic criterion, something to do with Platonic forms or a white canvas. But it turns up at the foundations of scientific thinking too…
The German theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder has interviewed colleagues about how beauty influences the way they judge their theories, and how it shapes the avenues they choose to pursue. Her book Lost in Math (published in German under the more informative title The Ugly Universe) makes the startling claim that not only do aesthetic notions of beauty have no necessary basis in physical fact, but they might be responsible for the failure of fundamental physics to progress substantially since the Seventies.
Sabine Hossenfelder is always thoughtful and thought-provoking. As well as the book Kunzru cites, she has a blog and a YouTube channel. Continue reading
Thought for the Day – December 14, 2020
The pro-democracy forces in the US are at least a two-thirds majority. We need to act like one.
Thought for the Day – December 12, 2020
Foreign policy pro tip: Ultimatums to capitulate don’t work. (Carrot + stick >> stick.)
On Willful Ignorance
Rumsfeld’s notorious epistemological categories (“known knowns”, “known unknowns,” “unknown-unknowns”) missed the most important category: “unknown knowns” – the things we already know but choose to “unknow” because we don’t want to deal with the consequences of that knowledge.
Weekly Digest – December 6, 2020
I didn’t find the time I’d hoped to pick a few good paragraphs from most these pieces. Where I didn’t just a sentence or two about why each is worth your time:
- P. Sainath interviewed by Amy Goodman, Indian Farmers Lead Historic Strike & Protests Against Narendra Modi, Neoliberalism & Inequality. An estimated 250 million people went on strike, probably the largest strike in history. Modi is bad news more power to the strikers.
- Eduardo Porter, Reinventing Workers for the Post-Covid Economy. No surprised that high-skill workers have the easiest time finding new work and/or changing fields. Porter provides quantitative data on people finding new work.
Thought for the Day – December 4, 2020
Cribbed from an astute observer on the internet:
The crux of the problem with MBTA’s proposed service cuts is that they come from an assumption that transit is a commodity that can be cut to match market demand rather than a public good. We don’t treat water, electricity or roads this way. Why transit?
The proposed cuts are unpopular but I don’t have a lot of confidence that will prevent them from happening. Are the proposed cuts unpopular enough that people will vote their elected representatives out if they don’t act to stop them? Probably not and, more importantly for the near-term, not enough our legislators are concerned that failing to stand up for public transportation will cost them re-election.
Politics is what it is but cutting public transportation will increase traffic congestion, increase air pollution and be a drag on our economy as we recover from the COVID pandemic. Bad decisions about public transportation now will pay toxic dividends for years to come. Please urge the MBTA, the MA Legislature, and Gov. Baker to strengthen public transportation not weaken it.
Weekly Digest – November 29, 2020
[Liminal] is a term that comes from the study of ritual, given to the middle phase of a right of passage: the preliminaries are over, you have shed the skin of an old reality, but not yet acquired the new skin that would allow you to return to the everyday world. The liminal is the space of the threshold, with all the vulnerability and potential of transition: the costliness of letting go, with no guarantee of what will come after. The liminal phase of a ritual is the moment of greatest danger – or rather, ritual is a safety apparatus built around the liminal. Whichever, the liminal is where the work gets done, where the change happens.
Top of my reading list from this week:
- Pope Francis, A Crisis Reveals What Is in Our Hearts
- Olúfémi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference
- Elizabeth Bruenig, Forgive Us Our Debts
Excerpts from those three pieces plus a few others worth reading follow below.
Weekly Digest – November 22, 2020
I read many pieces on creeping authoritarianism this week. Most of them captured the (rather depressing) state of the world accurately enough but they didn’t suggest a path forward. Lack of a path forward is why none made my ‘recommended reading’ list for the week. That stated, there are four essays at the top of my list: one which addresses in big picture historical terms how we got here and three which suggest how we might engage constructively with others in order to find common ground or, at a minimum, de-escalate conflict. We need common ground if we’re to create a better path forward. The three essays which speak to resolving conflict and finding common ground:
- Jay Caspian King, ‘People of Color’ Do Not Belong to the Democratic Party
- Jessica Bennett, What if Instead of Calling People Out, We Called Them In?
- Molly Fischer, Sarah Schulman’s Good Conflict
and the one which paints a picture of how we got here and the challenges we face going forward:
- Rana Dasgupta, The Silenced Majority
Excerpts from each as well as a few others worth reading follow below. Continue reading
Thought for the Day – November 20, 2020
The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one. Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty; and precisely the same difference prevails to-day among us human creatures, even in the North, and all professing to love liberty.
-Abraham Lincoln