Top of My Reading List

This list covers two weeks so is longer than most.

• David Ignatius, Biden is picking a Cabinet built for comfort. What he needs is vision.

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 →

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.

Continue reading →

An opening thought:

[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.

Continue reading →

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 →

Must Read

• Ben Ehrenreich, How Do You Know When Society Is About to Fall Apart?

Barring a cataclysmic event, societal collapse isn’t sudden.  It happens over generations if not hundreds of years.  Joseph Tainter has an interesting hypothesis re the root cause of societal collapse.  It feels relevant to our time.  That stated, there are counterarguments that what might feel like collapse – of democratic institutions, of post-WWII America – is just people adapting to the world changing around them as they always have.  To wit, “The end of the world as we know it isn’t the end of the world full stop.”  Ehrenreich presents Tainter’s ideas and some counterarguments:

Only complexity, [Joseph] Tainter argues, provides an explanation that applies in every instance of [societal] collapse. We go about our lives, addressing problems as they arise. Complexity builds and builds, usually incrementally, without anyone noticing how brittle it has all become. Then some little push arrives, and the society begins to fracture. The result is a “rapid, significant loss of an established level of sociopolitical complexity.” In human terms, that means central governments disintegrating and empires fracturing into “small, petty states,” often in conflict with one another. Trade routes seize up, and cities are abandoned. Literacy falls off, technological knowledge is lost and populations decline sharply. “The world,” Tainter writes, “perceptibly shrinks, and over the horizon lies the unknown.”

• E. J. Dionne, Jr., Radical, Moderate, and Necessary

I’m a UU and a Jesuit sympathizer.  Dionne captures what draws me to both.  The values he speaks to are indeed radical, moderate and necessary:

Those inspired by Catholic thinking have always been alive to the importance of balance—between personal responsibility and a concern for community, between individual rights and the common good. This sense of equilibrium could be an antidote to much that is wrong in our public life….

The Church’s teachings about politics represent a radical brand of moderation that is missing in our discourse—radical, because they offer a sharp critique of the status quo and its assumptions; moderate, because they understand the imperative of weighing competing goods and seeing human beings as fallen but also capable of transcendence and redemption.

• Environmental League of Massachusetts, Green Budget

The Baker administration continues to passive-aggressively inhibit and undermine progress on environmental issues in MA:

Severe cuts to environmental agency budgets and staff reductions are preventing Massachusetts from living up to its potential. Currently, only 0.6% of the state operating budget supports environmental agencies. In our annual Green Budget report we set forth funding recommendations that put us on the right track toward achieving the Governor’s commitment of 1% for the environment. The last time Massachusetts allocated 1% of its budget to environmental programs was in the early 2000’s.

Examples of Need and Impact [for FY2021]

• More than 100 MassDEP employees took advantage of the Early Retirement Incentive Program in 2015 but the agency faces additional responsibilities to comply with Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decisions (like the 2018 decision to uphold the state’s ability to cut emissions from power plants,) and to implement new laws and regulations.
• $1.1M of H2’s $1.5M increase is already specified for PFAS efforts
• Deep budget cuts have jeopardized the ability of MassDEP to do its work. The agency is extremely limited in its ability to issue permits in a timely fashion, provide technical assistance, and enforce state law.
• An addition of $1 million for the MassDEP Administration line-item would enable the agency to hire back approximately 10-12 staff.
• With an additional $2.17 million in funding, MassDEP could hire back more than 10 enforcement and compliance officers, five permit officers, and five monitoring and assessment staff.
• DEP will be expanding the waste ban program, yet 40% of loads at the current waste levels contain banned materials.

Worth Reading Continue reading →

Must Read

• Alex Pareene, What If Democrats’ Message Just Doesn’t Matter?

Joe Biden supports raising the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour. I know this because I follow political news for a living, but also because he said so, on television, in one of his two nationally televised debates with President Donald Trump. In fact, the two men argued about it, making it clear that one person on that stage wished to raise the minimum wage and the other didn’t.

In Florida, on Tuesday, 60 percent of voters overwhelmingly voted to raise the state’s minimum wage to $15 per hour. And on the same day, in Florida, Joe Biden won around 48 percent of the vote and lost decisively to Donald Trump.

It was a long and often brutal slog to get Democrats on board with a $15 minimum wage… but tireless organizing finally convinced Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee for president, to support the proposal. It was not a centerpiece of his platform, but it was something he talked about and campaigned on. Joe Biden was the candidate of a $15 minimum wage. And it simply didn’t matter… When a ballot measure that is ostensibly a central part of a candidate’s economic agenda runs 12 points ahead of the candidate, something is screwy in the electoral process.

Continue reading →

Some weeks it feels like there’s a coherent theme to things, other weeks not.  This week has been one of the latter.  The two pieces on my ‘must read’ list this week are one’s which help me stay focused in a chaotic time.

• Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, October 31, 2020

The next three days will bring the culmination of the 2020 election season, as those of us who have not already cast our ballots will show up on Tuesday to vote in our local, state, and national elections around the country.

Lots of us are exhausted and discouraged, and after the chaos of the past four years, it seems entirely fair to be exhausted. As civil rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer said, we’re “sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

But on this night of calm before the storm, I am the opposite of discouraged.

I am excited about our democracy and our future.

Our nation faces headwinds, for sure. We simply must get the coronavirus pandemic under control, and then address the extremes of wealth and poverty in this country. Fixing healthcare, systemic racism and sexism, climate change, and education all must be on the table as we move firmly into the twenty-first century. It sounds like a daunting list, but after years of apathy while a few wealthy Americans tightened their grip on the nation, Americans have woken up to the fact that democracy is not a spectator sport.

We are taking back our country, and once we have done so, we will find that no problem is insurmountable.

Democracy is rising. It might not win on Tuesday—no jinxing here!—but if not then, the week after that, or the month after, or the year after.

Continue reading →

Too much work last week to pull together a Weekly Digest so this week is a double edition.

Worth reading

• Clifford Thompon, Roots & Reality

Being rooted in something – whether a community, a faith, a set of traditions, a philosophy, or a devotion to a particular activity – is a way of forming an identity, of telling others, but mostly ourselves, who we are. Rootedness gives us a way of orienting ourselves in the world, of navigating our way through the challenges we face by locating ourselves vis-à-vis the phenomena we encounter… Rootedness, then, is a good thing. However, it comes with some drawbacks. Chief among those is that when we must decide either to hold tight to the ways we are rooted or to believe the reality in front of our faces…

• Zachery Tyson Brown, Unmasking War’s Changing Character

To be useful, paradigms must accurately reflect reality. When they cease to do so, they must be replaced, or the institutions that rely upon them will inevitably fail.

Continue reading →

Worth Reading

• WBUR, Housing Advocates, Landlords Vie For Funds To Cover Rents And Head Off Evictions In Mass.

Housing groups, tenant advocates and landlords are working to hash out a deal with the Baker administration to deploy more federal money for people struggling to pay rent amid the coronavirus recession.

At the same time, the state’s housing courts are planning furiously to add resources to handle an expected flood of eviction filings that could come soon after the commonwealth’s eviction moratorium ends on Oct. 17.

[Ed.:  Please contact your State Rep and ask them to support H.5018, An Act to guarantee housing stability during the COVID-19 emergency and recovery.]

• Mary McCord, The Plot Against Gretchen Whitmer Shows the Danger of Private Militias (These groups have no constitutional right to exist.)

Emerging from the American Revolution, the founders reasonably were wary of insurgencies that could threaten the stability of the new Union. Shays’ Rebellion and other early armed uprisings against the states only solidified those fears. Thus, the “well regulated militia” in the Constitution’s Second Amendment refers to the militia that were once called forth by the government, not by private vigilante organizations deciding when and under what circumstances to organize and self-deploy.

The federal and state government control of the militia has also been confirmed by the Supreme Court. In 1886, the court upheld the constitutionality of a state criminal law that made it unlawful for “any body of men” outside state or federal governmental authority to “associate themselves together as a military company or organization, or to drill or parade with arms in any city or town of the state.”

• Jamelle Bouie, Court Packing Can Be an Instrument of Justice

To allow the American people to govern themselves, to rein in the judiciary and break a would-be reactionary super-legislature — to show Republicans that they cannot keep the ill-gotten gains of the Trump years — Democrats will need to expand the courts.

• Joe Klein, Does an Intellectual History of the Trump Era Exist? It Does Now

[In his book “What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era, Carlos] Lozada finds subtleties in areas we’ve assumed clear-cut. Take the president’s mind-numbing spew of lies. Lozada praises the former New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani for lambasting “lefty academics who … argued that truth is not universal but malleable, a reflection of economic, political and cultural forces.” Or, as the philosopher Lee McIntyre put it, postmodernism is “the godfather of post-truth.”

And here Lozada comes close to the core of the matter: Messing around with the notion of truth is a luxury that comes with affluence. We have spent the past 50 years undermining the basic institutions of society — not just our sense of common purpose and identity, but also normative values like truth and duty and expertise. The politics of consumerism — and grievance — have overwhelmed the politics of unity and responsibility.

Continue reading →