Weekly Digest – November 1, 2020

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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.

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.

Also Worth Reading

Twenty-four years ago, the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty was adopted and opened for signature. Despite 71 signatures that day and 168 ratifications since, the treaty still has not entered into force. Now frustration grows over the lack of progress while whispers about possible new nuclear tests circle the globe. Decades of work and two solid years of negotiations went into creating the CTBT, and those efforts — and the security that would come from a global ban on all explosive testing — are now at risk.

Aggressive masculine politics can fuel political dysfunction, says Kristin Kobes Du Mez, author of Jesus and John Wayne, a book about white evangelicals and masculinity.

“Militancy is at the heart of [Trump’s] identity, and militancy requires enemies, and so his enemies are both foreign and domestic,” she said.

Beyond picking fights with foreign leaders, Trump does so with domestic politicians and the news media. The clear idea that comes across, Du Mez says, is that “compromise is a sign of weakness.”

“What we lose here is a sense of a larger common good,” she said. “And this militant masculine identity really does drive our political polarization.”

On My Reading List

In his new book Technologies of Speculation: The Limits of Knowledge in a Data-Driven Society, out this summer from New York University Press, Sun-ha Hong probes how we’ve come to put so much faith in graphs and numbers. Data is often gathered in messy ways and held to arbitrary standards; it often privileges quantifiable aspects over qualities that matter more. Still, we are taught to trust information gathered by a machine, which promises to be free from human error: an attitude that Hong says has led to both increased surveillance and datafication. “There’s this widespread fantasy that more data equals more information equals better judgment,” Hong told me, a fantasy whose flaws are becoming painfully obvious in real time. Technologies of Speculation is a book about how recent technologies both reflect, and work to perpetuate, the supremacy of quantitative knowledge, which is always less neat and less complete than we’d like to think.

The Supreme Court is supposed to be a counterweight to the will of the majority. But it may need constraints. Here are six ways to reform the courts — and one argument that we shouldn’t change a thing.

The American present regularly inspires the feeling that it is totally, horribly new. Just as often, it seems to give evidence that it is just the latest recrudescence of perennial American curses. In fact, our moment is deeply continuous with and shaped by something more specific: the collapse and revival of political possibility in roughly the last thirty years, from the end of the Cold War to today.

In those decades, three modes of politics gathered the energies of discontent. All began as rejections of the default mode of those decades: consultant-heavy, marketing-driven, all-tactics politics that assumed nothing ever really changed except the identity of the party in power (with some incremental gains for its constituents and some losses for the other side). All try to grasp something more from politics. But all remain deeply shaped by the premise they reacted against: that nothing really changes. All are, in some ways, evasions of politics more than renewals.

Ending on a Positive Note

The series begins with ten experienced glassblowers arriving at a warehouse in Hamilton, Ontario. The show’s host, Nick Uhas, a science YouTuber and a former “Big Brother” cast member, informs the contestants that they have arrived at the “hot shop,” where they will labor to create works of stunning, breakable art. Uhas describes the process of blowing glass using a slew of industry lingo. Each contestant first has to melt a mixture of sand and minerals to a taffy-like consistency in a oven heated to more than two thousand degrees. They then add color, and pick up a glob of melted glass with a blower, which they breathe through to enlarge the material into a shape. They then use a long iron rod called a “punty” to grab hold of the molten glass so they can manipulate it. As they work, they “flash” the glass into what’s known as a “glory hole,” a small personal oven that keeps the glass from cooling or cracking. Once finished, they place their work into an “annealer,” another, cooler oven that slowly returns the glass to room temperature. At the end of each challenge, the regular judge (Katherine Gray, a coolheaded glass artist and a professor) and a guest judge evaluate the contestants’ work. One person goes home in each episode; at the end of the season, the winner earns a prize of sixty thousand dollars and a residency at the Corning Museum of Glass.