2024-04-22

This is the first time that I have been directly pandered to in a federal budget, and I must confess, that I can see at long last how one could come to take it for granted.

The counterintuitive truism of good governance, that displeasing everyone is a good indicator of having put the right foot forward, perhaps explains the mixed punditry.

Not to defend the government, I honestly can’t tell most of the time whether they maintain confidence of themselves to say nothing of the House, but I could do with hearing less from those who have been ambivalently navigating us to ruin all these years suddenly deciding take issue with their own complacency now.

If Andrew Cohen was right in While Canada Slept (2003), and I think most would now concede that he was, then those who have been comfortably asleep at the wheel can at least relax: all of this is now someone else’s problem.

We’ll handle it. You can go.

The best thing I heard all week belongs to gentleman historian Jon Meacham from his Friday appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher: “…patriotism is allegiance to an idea. It’s not just an allegiance to your own kind. That’s nationalism.”

2024-04-15

While the prospect of the looming US presidential election being anything other than a rematch is remote, and any discussion to the contrary a defeatist fantasy, I can’t help but read Doris Kearns Goodwin’s recent essay in the Wall Street Journal, about LBJ and his legacy (i.e. decision not to run again), in a cheeky “I’ll just leave this here” tone:

One newspaper editorial after another applauded the president’s renunciation. interpreting it as “a magnificent display of patriotism,” “putting principle above personal ambition,” “a stirring, galvanic example of answering JFK’s question: ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,” and “his most stunning move in a 37-year career in politics.”

2024-04-08

There’s no need to look up today (especially since you probably didn’t vet your eyewear after all) because the Planetary Society is streaming the total solar eclipse.

The Economist’s Lexington columnist asks this week: “Are American progressives making themselves sad?” Well, yeah—and, not just the American ones.

2024-04-01

Here’s a throwaway line from Robert Heinlein’s ambitious but runaway novel, Time Enough for Love (1973), that should capture the current mood, as we start a new week, a new month, a new quarter, and a new season:

Don’t ever become a pessimist… a pessimist is correct oftener than an optimist, but an optimist has more fun—and neither can stop the march of events.

2024-03-25

Do read Matt McDonald on TikTok in the Spectator, Molly Fischer’s profile of Quinta Brunson in the New Yorker, and the Economist’s Bagehot columnist on the veritable pandora’s box of potential parliamentary power available to the UK’s presumptive government in waiting.

The latter, incidentally, includes the best sentence that I read all week: “The principal check on the Tory government has been its own dysfunction: it has been too divided to put the powers it accumulated to effective use.”

2024-03-18

What if the polarization in our politics were driven not so much by tribalism but by perfectionism crowding out pragmatism? Think about it: when is the last time you heard a political position that focused on an actual problem without recourse to comparison or some ideal?

That is, the apparent solution to any given problem isn’t that we need to take these x-number of steps to achieve such-and-such a target, but that, say, so-and-so should have resigned before we lost the majority, or we wish that particular leader hadn’t won, or that the proposed legislation isn’t a complete and total victory—so forget it.

Is it tribalism what ails us or that we spend too much time wishing things were always otherwise? Here’s a clear and present example from the Atlantic’s Tom Nichols (“It’s Time to End the Election Wishcasting”):

…for months now, many voters, including both Democrats and dissident Republicans, have engaged in childlike wishcasting about how the 2024 election might be different.

To paraphrase an unpopular former defence minister: you have to solve the problems you’ve been handed, as you’ve been handed them, not the problems that you wish you’d been handed.

2024-03-11

I’ve been hoping someone might offer a clear thought about why the blind reverence for failure in tech has always felt so deeply suspicious. Here’s Kara Swisher, from her recent Burn Book (2024), an otherwise excellent personal and industry history:

I have never seen a more powerful and rich group of people who saw themselves as the victim so intensely. Which is why, by nature, they insisted on reframing every failure and mistake they made as an asset—even when it was a failure and, sometimes, a very damaging mistake. Of course, they loved quoting Edison’s quaint trope: “I have not failed. I’ve just found ten thousand ways that won’t work.” But this declaration leaves out a lot about who’s responsible when things go terribly awry and real people get hurt.

2024-03-04

Here’s an extraordinary passage from Martin MacInnes’s exceptional and recent novel, In Ascension (2023), that hopefully moves you to pay it the time it deserves:

So many times I had identified errors — in my work and in my relationships — stemming from the original mistake of too many assumptions, of predicting rather than perceiving the world and seeing something that wasn’t really there. I noticed this as I got older. Age was, among so many other things, the realisation that you couldn’t correct this, that the pursuit wasn’t meaningful, there was no perfect clean reality on either side. You’re flawed, and the world you see corresponds to these flaws. Weaknesses define you, drive new and original strategies to cover them, and they make you who you are. You don’t exist without them. Correcting the errors — seeing perfectly and objectively — is neither desirable nor possible.

Wisdom often gets by on a quip or a rhyme—an inwardly revolving cute and all too neat parable—but this, this is a complete thought. It’s devastating—and, it’s true.

2024-02-26

Here’s a remarkable passage from David Guterson’s novel, Snow Falling on Cedars (1994):

He had indeed achieved a kind of wisdom—if you wanted to call it that—though at the same time he knew that most elderly people were not wise at all but only wore a thin veneer of cheap wisdom as a sort of armor against the world. Anyway, the kind of wisdom younger people sought from old age was not to be acquired in this life no matter how many years they lived. He wished he could tell them this without inviting their mockery or pity.

2024-02-19

Welcome back to the Daily Show, Mr. Stewart. Meet met at camera three, everyone, and let’s make a point of taking this, from his first show, to heart:

I’ve learned one thing over these last nine years. And, I was glib at best, and probably dismissive at worst, about this: The work of making this world resemble the one that you would prefer to live in is a lunch pail fucking job, day in and day out… So, the good news is, I’m not saying you don’t have to worry about who wins the election. I’m saying you have to worry about every day before it, and every day after, forever.

2024-02-12

The Economist reports on a new research paper highlighting the negative productivity feedback loop between private enterprise and the ivory tower:

Why do companies struggle to use ideas produced by universities? The loss of the corporate lab is one part of the answer. […] That cross-cutting expertise is now largely gone. Another part of the answer concerns universities. Free from the demands of corporate overlords, research focuses more on satisfying geeks’ curiosity or boosting citation counts than it does on finding breakthroughs that will change the world or make money. In moderation, research for research’s sake is no bad thing; some breakthrough technologies, such as penicillin, were discovered almost by accident. But if everyone is arguing over how many angels dance on the head of a pin, the economy suffers.

While we’re on campus, here’s Adam Kotsko in Slate on his students’ increasing struggle to engage with even a moderate volume of weekly reading:

Large-scale prose writing is the best medium we have for capturing that complexity, and the education system should not be in the business of keeping students from learning how to engage effectively with it.

And, from Katy Balls’s latest Spectator dispatch about the omnishambles leadership change-curious Tory caucus, here’s the funniest paragraph that I read all week:

To many watching, the whole thing looks very amateurish. ‘If you are working on a plot, you don’t go around telling everyone,’ ventures a Conservative insider. ‘That’s plotting 101.’ Some former party strategists have been approached and said no. Tory MPs – including many Trussites – are making it known they aren’t on board with the plan. But the plotters think time could change that.

2024-02-05

The more that I think about a recent Globe and Mail editorial (“Dear Liberals: It’s never too late to start governing”), and it is difficult not to think about it, for the flood of pre-campaign announcements in the past few weeks, the more I find myself inclined to disagree: actually, it is too late to start governing.

That is, not for the government to save itself—rather, that it’s bad enough for citizens to become cynical about their political process, but the government needs to at least maintain the pretence that it’s operating full-time and doing more than simply hoarding up transactional giveaways right before election day.

I don’t care what your polling says, build a narrative of competence by solving one problem at a time. That’s the way to deliver and win.

2024-01-29

Here’s a lesson on the perils of reflexive reform, in the American federal context, from the Economist’s Lexington columnist last week:

But in taking power from the party establishment [after 1968], reformers unintentionally handed it to activists, who tend to be more extreme than other partisans, let alone the rest of the country. This is particularly true of the Republican Party. Now, relatively small numbers of impassioned voters can end up choosing nominees.

Say what you will about smoke-filled backrooms of party elites and insiders, they’re not much for a circus.

I was surprised to see a profile of Iain M. Banks’s recently published posthumous collection, The Culture: The Drawings (2023), which I was recently gifted, in the Wall Street Journal of all places. It’s nice to see him enjoy continued appreciation.

Speaking of continued appreciation, farewell to Peter H. Russell, Canada’s ranking public constitutional adult-in-the-room. It’s a challenge to imagine the road ahead this year without his reasonable voice.

2024-01-22

Film and television history are all too prone to pop culture distraction. What I most enjoyed about James Meek’s LRB review of Peter Biskind’s recent book, Pandora’s Box: The Greed, Lust and Lies that Broke Television (2023), is how deliberately he avoids that trap.

2024-01-15

Here’s a remarkable observation from the New Yorker’s Amy Davidson Sorkin:

Thanks to an alignment of calendars, 2024 will set a record for the greatest number of people living in countries that are holding nationwide elections: more than four billion, or just over half of humanity.

Remember: Don’t boo, vote.

2024-01-08

Happy New Year! We already have a sense of what 2024 may have in store for us, so let’s set the right tone with this observation from David Brooks, in his recent and excellent book, How to Know a Person (2023):

The thing we need most is relationships. The thing we seem to suck at most is relationships. The effects of this are ruinous and self-reinforcing. Social disconnection warps the mind. When people feel unseen, they tend to shut down socially. People who are lonely and unseen become suspicious. They start to take offense where none is intended. They become afraid of the very thing they need most, which is intimate contact with other humans.

[…]

The crisis in our personal lives eventually shows up in our politics. According to research by Ryan Streeter of the American Enterprise Institute, lonely people are seven times more likely than non-lonely people to say they are active in politics. For people who feel disrespected and unseen, politics is a seductive form of social therapy.

Call your mom. Pick up where you left off with an old friend. Make a new friend. The purpose of civilization isn’t to host some zero-sum argument until one side is exhausted and vanquished. In fact, playing only to win the argument does more harm than good. If you feel compelled to get involved in some hip new cause, consider building a relationship instead.

Many thanks to a friend for drawing my attention to Julie Schumacher’s hilarious novel, Dear Committee Members (2014), which unfolds exclusively through a series of academic letters of recommendation.

2023-12-18

Pay no attention to those year-in-review pieces. You don’t need any reminder about what happened. You were there.

Getting the first sentence right is always trouble, and so we must stop to admire a perfect opener wherever we encounter one, like Stefan Collini’s recent essay in the London Review of Books: “A tax system is a political philosophy expressed in numbers.” Read on, it’s a great piece.

The Spectator gets it right in their final editorial of the year: distribution remains the challenge, but there’s never been a better time to be alive.

It was an unexpected joy to listen to these two nerds talk about rockets.

2023-12-11

Larry Wilmore has republished the inaugural episode of his podcast, Black on the Air, to mark the passing of his first guest, Norman Lear. It’s a great interview. Thanks for leaving the world a better place, Norman.

John Lanchester’s multi-book tour of the misuses and abuses of data in the London Review of Books is magnificent.

The Atlantic’s Annie Lowrey says “Inflation Is Your Fault” and she’s right—well, you and all those federal governments for printing a lot of money during the pandemic.

2023-12-04

Oxford’s word of the year gives me the ick—even our oldest educational institutions apparently cannot resist the lure of clickbait.

Let us offer our condolences to the premier of Ontario, who will not get to enjoy running unopposed a third time in the next provincial election (sometime in 2026).

Rob Reiner’s documentary about his friend, Albert Brooks: Defending My Life (2023), was a delight—as was Brooks’s inevitable chat on the WTF podcast.

I am catching up on the London Review of Books. Here’s a thoughtful passage from Geoff Mann’s recent essay regarding climate catastrophizing:

The resources people have to manage this uncertainty remain largely the same as in the past: a mixture of information and doubt, faith and fatalism. What is different is the vast expansion in the range of what is now thought possible, which is no longer bound to the patterns of the past. Communities all over the planet are falling forwards into a future for which history is probably not a useful guide. If there are limits on the range of possible futures, they will become clear only after we, or a substantial proportion of us, are gone.

As a result, the words we use to calibrate our reality seem less and less like accurate descriptions of the conditions they are supposed to name. If ‘crisis’ is so continuous a state as to be ‘normal’, what help is either term?

Lastly, and certainly apropos of nothing, may I randomly remind everyone of Christopher Hitchens’s excellent book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger (2001).

2023-11-27

Amid all of the crash punditry about the now resolved Open AI “leadership spill” last week, it was disappointing to see an all-too familiar reflexive veneration of a young technologist. It’s more than trying to restore investor confidence: we’re looking for someone to save us.

I thought Slate’s Political Gabfest podcast rose above the fray with one of the more grounded discussions.

Speaking of salvation, here’s a cheeky passage from philosopher John Gray’s new book, The New Leviathans (2023):

Hyper-liberal ideology plays a number of roles. It operates as a rationale for a failing variety of capitalism, and a vehicle through which surplus elites struggle to secure a position of power in society. Insofar as it expresses a coherent system of ideas, it is the anti-Western creed of an antinomian intelligentsia that is ineffably Western. Psychologically, it provides an ersatz faith for those who cannot live without the hope of universal salvation inculcated by Christianity.