Just a list this week, no excerpts and in no particular order:

• Paul Burton, Boston’s too expensive, so “alarming” number of young adults plan to leave, survey says
• Jim Sciutto, US prepared ‘rigorously’ for potential Russian nuclear strike in Ukraine in late 2022, officials say
• Tom Nichols, Putin’s Nuclear Theatrics
• Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov
• Keegan Justis, Book Review The Innovation Delusion  [Ed.: I just finished the book and recommend it highly.]
• Helen Lewis, The Worst Argument for Youth Transition
• Luke Goldstein, Attempt to Offload Shady For-Profit College Runs Into Trouble:  The University of Idaho wants to buy the University of Phoenix for $685 million. Some Idaho lawmakers are starting to sour on the deal.
• Trevor Jones, Same Nebula from the City vs. Dark Sky

Ross Douthat, Where Should Agnostics Go on Sundays?

For [Perry] Bacon himself, the key obstacle to a return to churchgoing seems to be the fear of a kind of intellectual inconsistency or hypocrisy, for himself but especially as a parent. “I don’t want to take her to a place that has a specific view of the world,” he writes of his daughter, “as well as answers to the big questions and then have to explain to Charlotte that some people agree with all of the church’s ideas, Dad agrees with only some and many other people don’t agree with any.”

To which I might respond: Why not? The desire to bring up your child inside a coherent world picture that parents and schools and churches all mutually reinforce is an admirable one; it speaks to the natural human desire for wholeness and integration. But if that kind of environment doesn’t exist for you, if you yourself don’t have a world picture that fully integrates the political and the moral with the metaphysical, then introducing your kids to a multiplicity of experiences and values and acknowledging upfront that people have different answers to the big questions and you can value institutions without fully agreeing with them — all this seems like an entirely responsible way to parent.

Aaron Lake Smith, Finding God in Punk Anarchism

I wanted to be working for the spirit and the common good, but as with all compromised positions in life, didn’t know how to extract myself from the mire or start over.

Ed Lyons, Why is Mass. always in a state of emergency?:

The migrant shelter crisis has brought our state’s problematic emergency law back into public view. Our Legislature somehow shrugged in response to an unprecedented flow of migrants and asked Gov. Maura Healey to change — all by herself —  a marvelous law it once passed with pride.

Healey cannot change our first-in-the-nation “Right to Shelter” legal guarantee all by herself, without invoking a formal emergency under the 1950 Civil Defense Act. House Speaker Ron Mariano advised her to do just that in October…

The primary reason we will see more unnecessary use of these emergency powers is that Massachusetts politics has problems that will increase demands for executive actions. We have a Legislature that is popular, unproductive, and invincible. [Ed. note:  I believe that their popularity is due in part to the fact that they are unproductive.  See also former-Gov. Baker.]

We have chronic policy problems, such as housing, climate, transit, and childcare— that we are not making much progress on.

We have a Commonwealth of cities and towns that often undermines solutions to those chronic problems at the local level, and they send legislators to Beacon Hill who do not want to contradict officials back home…

Dan Drezner, Useless Partisanship Weakens Necessary Partisanship: Continue reading →

Ken White, Stop Demanding Dumb Answers To Hard Questions:

America faces many problems. The easy ones we solve or ignore. We struggle with the hard ones. Hard problems raise complex questions that lack glib, one-word answers. The stubborn thirst for simple answers to hard questions is bad for America. It’s anti-intellectual, pro-ignorance, pro-stupidity, pro-bigotry, pro-reactionary, pro-totalitarianism, pro-tyranny, pro-mob.

Take this week’s Congressional hearing about antisemitism on college campuses, titled “Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism.” A generous interpretation — a credulous one — would be that the hearing was designed to inquire why colleges aren’t protecting Jewish students from antisemitic harassment. A more realistic interpretation is that the hearing was a crass show trial…

Chris Arnade, Why Sneer at Wetherspoons? Society needs sources of cheap comfort:

The first Wetherspoon I went into was The Cherry Tree in Huddersfield, to hide from a morning rain shower. Even at 10.30am, it was buzzing. At first glance, it appeared to be filled with more outwardly broken people per square foot than almost anywhere I’ve been in the world: alcoholics (functioning and not), people with disabilities (mental or physical), and the very poor. If I were that way inclined, I could easily paint it as a scene to be gawked at, mocked, pitied, or all three. I could make a clown of the perfectly and precisely dressed bald gentleman who sat four tables down from me, alone, staring straight ahead, sipping his pints and periodically lifting up his tie to lick off the drops that fell on it. Yet as I sheltered in The Cherry Tree, what I saw in him, and beyond him, were hundreds of warm, human and moving scenes of otherwise lonely people not being alone.

Teetering Between Joy and Terror: Extreme Sledding in the Swiss Alps

I tend to think suggestions of widespread trauma are overdone but maybe I’m too skeptical.  Ana Marie Cox makes sense in “We Are Not Just Polarized. We Are Traumatized.“:

What if our entire national character is a trauma response?

Before you say “bullshit,” remember: Cynicism is a trauma response…

Collective trauma, [Kai Ericson] wrote, means “a blow to the basic tissues of social life that damages the bonds attaching people together and impairs the prevailing sense of communality.” Collective trauma happens in slow motion, “A form of shock all the same…. ‘I’ continue to exist, though damaged and maybe even permanently changed. ‘You’ continue to exist, though distant and hard to relate to. But ‘we’ no longer exist as a connected pair or as linked cells in a larger communal body.”

In other words, the defining characteristic of collective trauma—and what makes it almost impossible to self-diagnose—is that people who have been through it no longer believe in the integrity of their community.

Paul Schofield, Liberals shouldn’t scoff at people’s fears of homelessness and crime:

Many cities around the United States with significant homeless populations also have large numbers of low-income renters, people of color and immigrants. Because these groups are less likely to have resources to buy their way out of a troubled neighborhood, they end up being the people whose kids are harassed by people under the influence of drugs on the way to school, the ones whose doorsteps are defecated on and the ones whose sidewalks are made impassible by tents and trash. They are the ones whose stores close early to avoid being stolen from, and whose eateries move to the other side of town. To shrug this off, or to dismiss it as mere conservative propaganda, is profoundly unprogressive.

Continue reading →

Lee Vinsel’s Peoples and Things podcast, Episode 61, Twenty Years After “The New Economy”: A Conversation with Doug Henwood:

“The New Economy” was a catchphrase that became extremely popular with economists, politicians, pundits, and many others during Bill Clinton’s presidency. The phrase was thought to describe a new economic reality rooted in information and computing technologies that would give rise to an extended period of abundance and prosperity that Clinton compared to the industrial revolution. But the phrase became unpopular after the dot com bust of 2000-2002, which also marked the end of the 1990s economic expansion. Henwood and Vinsel discuss Henwood’s long career as an economic journalist and how he came to write the book as well as how studying “the New Economy” makes the technology bubbles of the 2010s feel like deja vu.

[Ed.:  Henwood’s “overproduction of elites” comment ~2/3 of the way in made me wince.  Painful.  True.  I won’t try to provide context here.  Listen to their whole conversation.]

Justin E. H. Smith in conversation with Christopher Beha on the Harper’s Magazine podcast, Generation X:

Smith argues that Gen X, having come of age before the erosion of fixtures like liberal democracy and rock and roll, failed to protect postwar counterculture from commercialism and corporatization. As debates about art and politics loom large today, Smith affirms the essential link between the two while championing what he identifies as his generation’s core pursuit of artistic autonomy and human liberation. Editor of Harper’s and fellow Gen Xer Christopher Beha sat down with Smith to discuss intergenerational relations, how Smith’s essay evolved over the editorial process, and how art at its best interrogates the arguable and not the obvious.

[Ed.:  Their discussion of intergenerational relations is what got my attention.  Also, Smith’s distinction between “uncontested evil” and “contested evil” sticks in my mind.]

Continue reading →

Jerusalem Demsas, Why America Doesn’t Build:

Local American environmentalists have developed tools to help citizens delay or block development. These tools are now being used against clean-energy projects, hampering a green transition. The legal tactics that allow someone to challenge a pipeline can also help them fight a solar farm; the political rhetoric deployed against the siting of toxic-waste dumps can be redeployed against transmission lines. And the whole concept that regular people can and should act as a private attorneys general has, in practice, put the green transition at the mercy of people with access, money, and time, while diluting the influence of those without…

The problem with bad projects isn’t the local opposition; the problem is that they are bad. Opposition can be a sign of that, but it can also just be a sign that people fear change. The green-energy transition rests on our ability to distinguish between the two. Right now, we can’t.

Julian Sanchez on Twitter:

People often fret about the dangers of entertainment media in terms of things like desensitizing people to violence. But people are mostly pretty good about distinguishing fantasy from reality on that score. I think a less-appreciated harm is cultivating main character syndrome.

As in: Most of life for most people is a little boring. You try to do your work well and love your family. But probably you never become president or thwart a terrorist plot or discover a lost city full of booby traps and treasure.

We’ve been inundated for the last 50 years, to an extent prior generations haven’t really experienced, with visions of life as Epic in a way it just isn’t for most people. And I think that leaves a lot of folks with an itch video games won’t scratch.

Continue reading →

David Von Drehle, A memorial restores humanity to the 146 ghosts of the Triangle Fire:

The Triangle Fire Memorial, a project years in the making, will be dedicated on Wednesday at the corner of Washington Place and Greene Street near Washington Square in the heart of Manhattan.

The 146 fire victims — most of them immigrant women from Italy and Eastern Europe — will be restored as actual names of actual people, at the very spot where they passed into history. Their names are cut into the flowing steel of the monument, which… will stretch like ribbon to ninth-floor windows, then tumble back toward street level, where it will spread its arms to embrace the building where history happened. Light shining through the incised names will reflect on a polished surface, where they will appear as if glowing.

Continue reading →

COVID:  Zero stars.  Not recommended.

Foreign policy and politics:  Read Dan Drezner’s Substack.  Read Heather Cox Richardson’s on domestic politics.

Dan Drezner, America Has Changed Since “NYPD Blue” Aired:

In today’s more polarized environment, I don’t know if a mainstream audience can buy a character who starts out bigoted and ends up being a more constructive member of society. For progressives, the initial racism would be too much; for conservatives, it would be viewed as woke culture run amok. Which is a shame — because the United States could use more characters like Andy Sipowicz. The country is littered with flawed human beings trying to be better. However the show has aged, NYPD Blue understood that compelling point.

Andrew Spencer, Hope for a Humane Agricultural Future: A Review of Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future:

Once someone accepts the significant human contribution to climate change, there are two possible options. The first option is to assume that things are too far gone so that exercising restraint is pointless. Based on this defeatist thinking we should either ride out the coming storm, hoping for the best, or accept that human extinction would be the best thing for the planet. The second option for those who recognize that the current form of human civilization is damaging the environment is to do something about it. What that something should be, however, is the subject of fierce debate.

Continue reading →