Everything I share — writing, short curated lists, and links. You can also find me on Threads.
When the pressure mounts to be productive every minute of the day, we have much to gain from doing all we can to carve out time to play. Take away prescriptions and obligations, and we gravitate towards whatever interests us the most. Just like children and baby elephants, we can learn important lessons through play. It can also give us a new perspective on topics we take for granted—such as the way we represent numbers.
The book points out that the major value in a flying car (as with supersonic) would not be in taking the same trips you do now, only a bit faster. Instead, it would be in taking the trips you don’t take now, because they’re too inconvenient. A flying car would shrink your world, expanding the radius of what you would consider for a commute, a shopping trip, a visit to friends, a business meeting, or a weekend vacation. Indeed, Hall cites literature from travel studies finding that people in all societies travel on average about an hour a day, whether walking barefoot or driving on the highway. And he points out that increasing the effective radius for each of those trips increases the effective area open to you quadratically (doubling your travel radius means four times as many destinations).
I started to outline the idea that Trump is both a symptom and an accelerant of a trend that started as the Cold War ended. To put a tidy date on it, I chose August 17, 1992, the day Patrick Buchanan delivered his famous “Culture War” speech at the Republican National Convention. Nut graf from said speech:
In a strange way, liberals needed to believe this, too. The shock of Trump’s election provoked a crisis of self-confidence for his opponents. Humans have an innate need to believe events with profound importance must have profound causes. Trump’s success must reveal some vast and terrible secret. They — Trump’s America — must be, if not more numerous, then at least more authentic, bound together by a secret bond inaccessible to the rest of us. Trump benefitted from polling errors both in 2016 and 2020 that imbued him with a mystical aura, a wizard possessing a secret connection to the heartland that was invisible to the elite.
Given that more than a dozen investigations and civil suits involving Trump are currently under way, he could be looking at an endgame even more perilous than the one confronted by Nixon. The Presidential historian Michael Beschloss said of Trump, “If he loses, you have a situation that’s not dissimilar to that of Nixon when he resigned. Nixon spoke of the cell door clanging shut.” Trump has famously survived one impeachment, two divorces, six bankruptcies, twenty-six accusations of sexual misconduct, and an estimated four thousand lawsuits. Few people have evaded consequences more cunningly. That run of good luck may well end, perhaps brutally, if he loses to Joe Biden. Even if Trump wins, grave legal and financial threats will loom over his second term.
It is also one that we’ve asked enough these past few years to be able to parrot back a familiar litany of answers. We tell ourselves that it is because white America is racist and male America is sexist and rural voters are fearful and we actually don’t know anything about Latino voters because that’s a socially constructed category into which we’ve stuffed a whole bunch of different people of Iberian and African and Indigenous descent and also because there is so much disinformation and there is Fox News and Facebook and the Boomers are weird. We tell ourselves that if this particular candidate had run a more effective campaign or had policies that better align with the policies we personally like that it would have been different. We correctly identify that the Electoral College is a big dumb racist albatross.
It doesn’t feel like shock, like 2016. It doesn’t really feel like rage. It feels like exhaustion soaked in national and personal grief, which is also a fitting description for the last eight months. “My head knew it would go like this,” the writer Seyward Darby tweeted this morning. “My heart—apparently—wanted something different. I am trying today to bridge the gap between those parts of myself.”
With nearly every tweet, Trump gave us a new 10-car pileup from which we couldn’t look away. But in the process of making us look at him, Trump forced many of us to actually look for the first time. By turning us into a nation of rubbernecks, he has pushed us to reckon with why things are crashing in the first place and to examine the faulty infrastructure of our democracy.
What changed? The continued spread of Wifi, but also the mass adoption of laptops — from work, or, in my case, for grad school — and then, of course, the smartphone. Gmail happened. Your email became a repository for bills, for endless advertisements, for eCards and alumni news. Very occasionally, there might be something interesting or novel, but most of actual, valuable interactions had been siphoned off elsewhere: to Facebook, at least at first, and then to text and Instagram.
But the lessons that ought to have followed the election—lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society—have not been learned. Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.