There are 7 posts from July 2024.
Heather Cox Richardson on how like bankruptcy, even democracy happens gradually and then suddenly:
Every time we expand democracy, it seems we get complacent, thinking it’s a done deal. We forget that democracy is a process and that it’s never finished.
And when we get complacent, people who want power use our system to take over the government. They get control of the Senate, the White House, and the Supreme Court, and they begin to undermine the principle that we should be treated equally before the law and to chip away at the idea that we have a right to a say in our government. And it starts to seem like we have lost our democracy.
But all the while, there are people who keep the faith. Lawmakers, of course, but also teachers and journalists and the musicians who push back against the fear by reminding us of love and family and community. And in those communities, people begin to organize—the marginalized people who are the first to feel the bite of reaction, and grassroots groups. They keep the embers of democracy alive.
And then something fans them into flame.
Emphasis mine. And sort of related, today’s Red Hand Files from Nick Cave, answering a question about loneliness:
Philosopher, neuroscientist and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist says we require three things to attain a meaningful life. The first is feeling part of a wider community – family, friends, and society in general. Second is an understanding of nature and a connection to the natural order of things, which McGilchrist feels we have largely lost. Finally, we need to form a relationship with the sacred or divine – this can be found in art, music, poetry and religion, where we acknowledge the ineffable and all-encompassing force that holds the world together.
Barack Obama, Our Endorsement:
But Kamala has more than a resume. She has the vision, the character, and the strength that this critical moment demands. There is no doubt in our mind that Kamala Harris has exactly what it takes to win this election and deliver for the American people. At a time when the stakes have never been higher, she gives us all reason to hope.
Rebecca Traister, The Case for Being Unburdened by What Has Been:
I felt excited not in spite of my uncertainty, but because of it. I felt that our national political narrative was finally accurately mirroring our national reality: Everything is scary, we have never been here before, we don’t know if we can do this, and precisely because these stakes are so high, we are at last going to act like it, by taking unprecedented, untested, underpolled, creative measures to change, grow, and fight at a pitch that meets the gravity of the urgent, existentially important task in front of us. No more clinging to the walls of the past for safety, no more adhering to models or traditions or assumptions that the autocratic opposition has shown itself willing to explode over the past two decades in its own efforts to win.
Within 36 hours of Biden’s announcement on July 21, Harris raised more than $100 million, according to her campaign, including $81 million in the first 24 hours. The $100 million cash infusion would more than double the $96 million the Biden-Harris campaign had in cash on hand at the end of June. Harris’ team said the massive haul, which includes money raised across the campaign, Democratic National Committee and joint fundraising committees, represents the largest 24-hour total in U.S. history.
Let’s fucking go.
M.G. Siegler at Spyglass (my favorite tech blog right now, bar none), writing about the newly released video of Steve Jobs speaking at the Aspen Design Conference in 1983:
Everyone knows the famous/infamous “reality distortion field”, but it really undersells Jobs’ ability to command a room by speaking in a way that’s intensely human.
Too many of our current crop of entrepreneurs and CEOs just cannot do this for whatever reason. So many over the years have tried to emulated such abilities for obvious reasons, but they may mimic the look and feel of such a talk, but can’t copy the underlying empathy that seems to exist within Jobs in these settings. You can say it’s an act, but it works. Over every talk. Over years and years. Time and time again. It’s both a command of what he’s talking about and an ability to convey true belief in what he’s talking about. Mixed with a way to make it all relatable to seemingly every person in the room.
Emphasis mine. The talk itself is absolutely worth watching, and it’s wild trying to imagine a time when most of the audience present didn’t yet own personal computer, Apple or otherwise. I love this bit (especially because I’m currently reading the early chapters of Chris Miller’s Chip War):
Third thing about computers: they’re really dumb. They’re exceptionally simple. But they’re really fast.
Linus Lee implores us to create things that come alive.
Within my little corner of the world, I think we’re often victim to an even more myopic pathology of this kind: we think that technology involves a computer, or spacecraft, or a microscope, or some other fragile thing cursed to be beholden to software. But writing is technology. Oral tradition is technology. Farming is technology. Roads are technology.
Technology exists woven into the physics and politics and romance of the world, and to disentangle it is to suck the life out of it, to sterilize it to the point of exterminating its reason for existence. to condemn it to another piece of junk.
If you consider yourself a technologist, here’s your imperative: build things that are unabashedly, beautifully tangled into all else in life — people and relationships, politics, emotion and pain, understanding or the lack thereof, being alone, being together, homesickness, adventure, victory, loss. Build things that come alive, and drag everything they touch into the realm of the living. And once in a while, if you are so lucky, may you create not just technology, but art — not only giving us life, but elevating us beyond.
Emphasis mine.
Poet Diana Garza Islas, in the Paris Review, Rorschach:
Two monkeys with wings defecate suspending a ballerina whose skull is split. Her tutu reveals thighs from the fifties, toned. Their hands are on her poor wounded head; she has no feet. One of the monkeys, the one on the left, has a badly defined jawline. The woman has a perforated abdomen.
Janna Levin talking with Natalie Priebe Frank in Quanta, What Can Tiling Patterns Teach Us?:
FRANK: [David Smith] was part of an online community of tiling enthusiasts that stretches across the world. And he was looking for interesting tiles in the following way that’s commonly practiced. So what you do, you can start with a hexagonal tiling of the plane. So it’s just all hexagons. And then put a dot in the center of the hexagon. And draw a line from that dot in the center to the middle of each edge. Not the vertices, but the middle of each edge. And so you end up making the hexagon look like six little kite-shaped things stuck together — they’re called polykites.
And so what you do is you take those little kite-shaped things and you just simply regroup them. And you just say, “OK, now that set of eight of them that are all stuck together, that’s my tile. Let me see if I can tile with it.” And so, people have categorically gone through the low levels of all the possible combinations of those things. Someone in the literature a few years prior had pointed out a tile with a very large corona or possibly a tile that didn’t tile. And so David started playing with this particular version.
LEVIN: Yes, and he called his “the hat” because it vaguely sort of looked like a big top hat.
FRANK: They decided it looked like a hat.
LEVIN: Some people called it a T-shirt.
FRANK: Yeah. But it got called the hat and that’s fine.
Finally, Noah Kalina on fireworks:
I used to be obsessed with fireworks. Fountains specifically. You know, the kind that only go about ten feet high. Was it because I was born on the fourth of July? Probably not. I liked fireworks for the same reason most people like them. I enjoyed fireworks for their hypnotic visual displays and their captivating booms and crackles. They have an undeniably mesmerizing effect. Also, fireworks are often associated with celebrations and communal gatherings, evoking feelings of nostalgia, joy, and togetherness. I think those are the normal and healthy reasons to like fireworks.
I’m a couple of weeks behind on this one, but this letter from Donald Sutherland to Hunger Games director Gary Ross about the character of President Coriolanus Snow is pitch perfect.
Power. That’s what this is about? Yes? Power and the forces that are manipulated by the powerful men and bureaucracies trying to maintain control and possession of that power? Power perpetrates war and oppression to maintain itself until it finally topples over with the bureaucratic weight of itself and sinks into the pages of history (except in Texas), leaving lessons that need to be learned unlearned.
Heather Cox Richardson, July 1, 2024:
Today the United States Supreme Court overthrew the central premise of American democracy: that no one is above the law. It decided that the president of the United States, possibly the most powerful person on earth, has “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution for crimes committed as part of the official acts at the core of presidential powers. The court also said it should be presumed that the president also has immunity for other official acts as well, unless that prosecution would not intrude on the authority of the executive branch.
Mara Quint, Supreme Court-Approved Ways to Celebrate the Fourth of July:
Representational democracy had a good run, but the Supreme Court has finally rediscovered the founders’ original intent. Sure, they were against kings, but it turns out, after 248 years, we had completely misunderstood that they actually liked when someone has the powers of a king; they just didn’t like the word “king.” It rhymes with too many other words and leaves the nation open to getting absolutely destroyed in a rap battle. With “president,” you just have “resident,” “hesitant,” and maybe “negligent,” but that’s sort of a stretch.
Anne Helen Petersen interviews Soraya Chemaly, author of The Resilience Myth: New Thinking on Grit, Strength, and Growth After Trauma, about the importance of nurturing relationships in getting through hard times:
I think my idea of resilience was a pretty common one in that I thought of resilience in almost entirely personal terms, as an individual characteristic or trait. Over years I had really absorbed the idea that resilience was 9/10th the ability to persevere, be gritty, try to stay optimistic, etc. and 1/10th having a supportive social circle. When my family was thrown into the deep end of a crisis, it became clear that nothing I could do as an individual could compare to what we all needed, which was a combination of love, friendship, compassionate listeners, and actual material resources, such as access to good health care and medicine.
What I concluded, after that experience and through writing this book, is that that our individual/collective resilience ratios should really be reversed or, a better formulation, that the more accurate and helpful way to think of “supportive social circles” is broadly: as the connections, material resources, and political entitlements that serve as the foundation for our individual strengths and capacities.
Cody Delistraty in The Paris Review, on Agnes Martin and Grief:
Combining linear rigidity and spatial abstraction, in Martin’s works I saw an idea of the world that is guided by plans and sure outcomes—a world made whole again. Martin’s own life was imperfect and traumatic (though she’d likely bristle at the word): she said she was raped as a girl on four occasions, dissociating each time; she lived a seemingly lonely existence, chafing against middle-class sensibilities. I figured she desired, like me, exactness and rightness, apparent salves for the broken. I supposed this aspiration was a core reason for her grids and lines. In fact, she suggested something of the opposite: to view the world as though it were perfect but to understand that it is not – and to see that perfection need not be pursued. “Perfection is not necessary. Perfection you cannot have,” she once said. “If you do what you want to do and what you can do and if you can then recognize it you will be contented.”