culture

NY Mag:

It gets worse. We now recognize that getting the lives we want depends on cultivating the right attitude, so we beat ourselves up every time our state of mind is less than 100 percent optimistic. If there’s a mass religion of global culture, it’s the high-capitalist belief, trumpeted at every turn by every single voice in the spotlight, that by believing in yourself (without fail!) you can get everything you’ve ever dreamed of. Everything depends on your faith and your ability to squelch the doubts in your head that arise when yet another glamorous on-brand winner pops up in your Instagram feed.

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry in The Week:

It wasn’t always this way. It used to be taken for granted that the best indicator of a nation’s health was its citizens’ desire and capacity to reproduce. And it should still seem self-evident that people’s willingness to have children is not only a sign of confidence in the future, but a sign of cultural health. It’s a signal that people are willing to commit to the most enduring responsibility on Earth, which is raising a child.

“Prison gerrymandering” is a thing too:

A U.S. District Judge ruled today that the City of Cranston violated the one person, one vote principle of the U.S. constitution when it counted people incarcerated at the Adult Correctional Institutions as “residents” of one Ward of the City.

Judith Shulevitz, “feminism, culture and science” columnist for the NYT:

But non-Republicans would be foolish to dismiss pornography as a non-issue. Internet pornography is a real problem for the 66 million American parents with children under 18. Parents don’t have to believe that such material is a direct cause of sexual violence to be driven a little crazy by it. It’s bad enough that it’s giving our sons and daughters some very creepy ideas about how they’re supposed to look and act.

Eric Zorn in the Tribune:

But fairness here is not only ethical, it also makes good strategic sense. Supporters undermine and discredit their causes with unfair distortions…

No need to warp [Clinton’s and Trump’s] words. The truth is bad enough.

Tim Keller and John Inazu in Christianity Today:

We can also learn from the biblical witness how to engage in the world around us. The book of Jeremiah tells the story of God using the prophet to instruct the Jews in Babylon not to hate or ignore the pagan city, but to become long-term residents, to exercise good will toward it through prayer, and to seek its peace and prosperity. They were to build up the social fabric for their common well-being (“if [Babylon] prospers, you too will prosper” Jer. 29:7). They were to be known as a people who served their neighbors and their city.

Excellent article.

(I wonder, however, if the “protestant” piece is slightly overstated. Isn’t the more fundamental issue provoking the “anxious age” the transition from a monolithic culture to pluralistic one, not from a protestant culture to a non-protestant one?)

Interview with Georgetown prof. Cal Newport:

There are two types of work: deep and shallow. Deep work is when you focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task and push yourself to create something new and valuable. Shallow work is everything else. Some amount of shallow work is unavoidable, but try to maximize the amount of time you spend doing the deep alternative. The market does not reward you for being busy. It rewards you for producing things that are rare and valuable. This requires depth.

Speaking of “shallow work,” I’m on a plane right now next to a guy with an iPad streaming HBO, while playing poker on an iPod, while scanning email on an iPhone.

Thabiti Anyabwile in The Atlantic:

I find [Ta-Nehisi Coates’] searing analysis compelling. I appreciate his attempt to put a face—a worn, mistreated, yet noble African American face—on the issues. His stripping away of euphemisms and niceties and political correctness lays bare the ugly truth about the U.S.—about Americans. The cuts could be healing.

But in one significant respect, I think Coates fails his readership and fails to represent something vital about African Americans—his writing lacks hope.

Like Anyabwile, I too have been moved by Coates’ writing. Yet, also like Anyabwile, I’ve found Coates’ essentially fatalistic. Here Anyabwile offers hope in addition to Coates’ excellent criticism.

Wikipedia:

The horseshoe theory in political science asserts that rather than the far left and the far right being at opposite and opposing ends of a linear political continuum, they in fact closely resemble one another, much like the ends of a horseshoe. The theory is attributed to French writer Jean-Pierre Faye.

h/t Andrew Wilson

Hint: It’s not what you think it is.

Joseph Lake for the Economist Intelligence Unit:

This is the most unpopular pair of candidates in history… The winner will be whoever is the least unpopular.¹

God has a kingdom. It’s made up of citizens. Some black, some white, some red, yellow, Spanish backgrounds. His intention was never that the individual uniqueness would cause them to lose sight of the flag flying over them. The flag of the cross …  America in particular is reaching an all-time low in this issue of race and culture and class. Just under the surface there is this ever-bubbling problem that has gone unresolved…

Benjamin Grant in SPUR:

At their best, cities bring us together across economic, social and racial divisions. If the anonymity of the Internet seems to breed trolls, the anonymity of the city mostly yields a decent civility. The public realm is where we safely mix across boundaries. Where we sometimes celebrate as one. Where, at the margins, norms of behavior are contested and enforced. Where protest calls us to account. Where the organs of the state translate white anxiety into violent control. Where symbolic acts of mass murder are performed. And where paroxysms of collective rage at times erupt. This is how much public space matters. It is where everything finds expression. It is where we face ourselves.

h/t Nick Parsons

Musk’s Central Park-sized factory is taking dogfooding to new a level:

Tesla cut and capped the natural gas line leading to the Gigafactory, so there’s no going back to on-site fossil fuels. There’s also no diesel generator for backup power. That means Tesla must rely on electricity for manufacturing processes that require heat, an unusual step for a major plant of any type.

Paul Barnwell in The Atlantic:

A few months ago, I presented the following scenario to my junior English students: Your boyfriend or girlfriend has committed a felony, during which other people were badly harmed. Should you or should you not turn him or her into the police?

The class immediately erupted with commentary. It was obvious, they said, that loyalty was paramount—not a single student said they’d “snitch.” They were unequivocally unconcerned about who was harmed in this hypothetical scenario. This troubled me.