Short List

• Eric Jacobsen in conversation with Chuck Marohn, How Car Culture is Making Us Lonelier

Prior to the rise of car culture, we could expect to regularly interact with friends, neighbors, and strangers as we made our way through cities developed with walkability and multimodal transportation in mind. Especially since World War II, we still encounter those folks…but many of those encounters are “mediated by the automobile windshield.” Not only did car culture change how we build cities, it changed how (and how often) we encounter other people: “When we encounter someone [as a driver],” writes Jacobsen, “we don’t encounter another human being with whom we might connect. We as a driver meeting another driver encounter a competitor—a competitor for lane space and parking spaces.”

• Asad Haider, Social Media’s Sad Passions

The more acceptable it is to denounce people because of their speech, the more likely it is that it will eventually happen to you.

Haider’s argument is far more nuanced than that, so much so that I couldn’t pick a paragraph-long excerpt that made sense out of context.

• John Ganz, Feb 6 1934/Jan 6 2021:  What Do The Two Events Really Have in Common?

Shortly after January 6, I exchanged a few emails with Robert Paxton, author of The Anatomy of Fascism, asking him his opinion about what happened. A long time skeptic of the idea that Trump was a fascist phenomenon, the events of January 6 appeared to have changed his mind. In particular, he made the comparison—made by others in subsequent days—between the January 6 riots and the attempt by far-right leagues and military veterans to storm the Chamber of Deputies in Paris on February 6 1934.

This comparison appealed to me immediately, because I’ve thought for a long time the French Third Republic was a more interesting and productive place to look for parallels to the present than the Weimar Republic or post-World War I Italy.

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Short List

• Heather McGhee in conversation with Ezra Klein, What ‘Drained-Pool’ Politics Costs America

Drained-pool politics — if “they” can also have it, then no one can — helps explain why America still doesn’t have a truly universal health care system, a child care system, a decent social safety net. McGhee, the former president of the think tank Demos, offers a devastating tour of American public policy, and she shows how drained-pool politics have led to less for everyone, not just their intended targets.

• Miriam Pawel, California Wakes Up From Its Dream

California is facing limits, and the wrenching process of learning to live within them will test its leaders and redefine the state. The staggering reality of 2020 has demanded a reckoning: to ignore the urgency will condemn Californians to decades of pain, a burden that will fall most heavily on those least equipped to cope.

• New York Times, Inside the Capitol Riot: An Exclusive Video Investigation

What we have come up with is a 40-minute panoramic take on Jan. 6, the most complete visual depiction of the Capitol riot to date. In putting it together, we gained critical insights into the character and motivation of rioters by experiencing the events of the day often through their own words and video recordings. We found evidence of members of extremist groups inciting others to riot and assault police officers. And we learned how Donald J. Trump’s own words resonated with the mob in real time as they staged the attack.

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Short List

• Somini Sengupta, It’s Some of America’s Richest Farmland. But What Is It Without Water?

By 2040, the San Joaquin Valley is projected to lose at least 535,000 acres of agricultural production. That’s more than a tenth of the area farmed.

And if the drought perseveres and no new water can be found, nearly double that amount of land is projected to go idle, with potentially dire consequences for the nation’s food supply. California’s $50 billion agricultural sector supplies two-thirds of the country’s fruits and nuts and more than a third of America’s vegetables

• Ezra Klein, Saul Griffith, Rhiana Gunn-Wright, Sheila Jasanoff, Kim Stanley Robinson, What if American Democracy Fails the Climate Crisis?

Klein:  Of late, I’ve been obsessing over a single question: What if political systems, in the United States and internationally, fail to curb climate change?… That is not to say there is no reason for optimism or hope… And so we convened this panel of climate experts with different backgrounds — technological, literary, political, academic — to try to reconcile the reality of our political progress with the scale of the emergency.

• Natalie Blais, Joanne Comerford, and Daniel Sosland, Stop sweetheart deals with state utilities

Today, utilities earn income based not on how well they serve residents, but on how expensive it is to run their companies. As expenses for maintaining the grid go up, utilities regularly ask the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities (DPU) for approval to increase customer rates to help cover costs. Regulators usually approve these requests…  Since 2018, Eversource has received an additional $95 million in revenue from cost increases to Massachusetts residents – without any requirement that the utility give them any additional benefits in return.

• Dan Drezner, My one column about Critical Race Theory

• John Ganz, The 1619 Project Revisited

Covenant nationalism comes from the self-consciousness of the Northeastern Calvinists: “Emerging from New England, it ultimately sought to constitute all of America as an offshoot of the Puritan experience…”… What I find so interesting about the Hannah-Jones essay, and why I think it was so upsetting to many, was its implicit participation and reversal of this Covenant tradition of American nationalism…. I think the issue for so many people is that [Nikole Hannah-Jones’ essay] cleaves so closely the sources of American political imagination but just inverts them.

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Top of the List

• Sen. Bernie Sanders, Washington’s Dangerous New Consensus on China

The administration of U.S. President Joe Biden has rightly recognized the rise of authoritarianism as a major threat to democracy. The primary conflict between democracy and authoritarianism, however, is taking place not between countries but within them—including in the United States. And if democracy is going to win out, it will do so not on a traditional battlefield but by demonstrating that democracy can actually deliver a better quality of life for people than authoritarianism can.

• Russell Arben Fox, Regarding Mutualism, Cooperativism, and Other (Interstitially) Anti-Capitalist Alternative

What is meant by mutualism and cooperativism, and why should they be understood as standing distinct from the usual capitalist routines of our economy? The simplest answer is that any organization of economic activity that has woven egalitarian and communitarian practices into their daily operations—whether in terms of ownership, production, decision-making, pricing, wage scales, distribution, or anything else—is, to one degree or another, pursuing a path which gives place to something other than profit-maximization and consumer-individuation, and thus is departing from the ideal capitalist form. That doesn’t mean that profit and consumption never matter to communes or co-ops or credit unions or anything else crowd-sourced; the human desires and pressures that give rise to markets can’t ever, and shouldn’t ever, be ignored… “Private property is an aberration, though under the conditions of fallen human society…a necessary arrangement.”

• Maanvi Singh, ‘Potentially the worst drought in 1,200 years’: scientists on the scorching US heatwave

It’s surreal to see your models become real life.

Also Worth Reading

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Short list

• Noam Chomsky on postmodernism
• Peter Sutoris, The climate crisis requires a new culture and politics, not just new tech
• Timothy Snyder, 9/11 and 1/6
• Angie Schmitt, How Fire Departments Stopped Worrying and Embraced Safer Street Design

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