2024-11-04

The government of Ontario recently confirmed its intention to send each taxpayer a $200 refund cheque early next year. It’s probably safe to assume, with this comment, that the editorial board of the Globe and Mail aren’t looking forward to spending that on alcohol at their respective corner stores:

…a true fiscally conservative government would at least ensure that it eliminated its budget deficit before handing out billions of dollars in electoral bribes.

According to some back-of-the-napkin fiscal responsibility from the Frasier Institute Blog, Ontario’s debt will rise by $21 billion this year to $429 billion. The rebate scheme will cost $3 billion. Like the kids say: that math’s not math-ing.

Speaking of leadership, here’s former US Navy admiral William McRaven in the Wall Street Journal reflecting on civility and the week ahead:

Being a person of good character matters. Doing what is right matters because when a leader exhibits honor, integrity and decency, it instills those qualities in the culture of the institution and in the next generation of leaders.

To quote a former president: Don’t boo. Vote.

Here’s a passage that I enjoyed from Anil Gomes’s review of Daniel Dennett’s memoir, I’ve Been Thinking (2023), in the London Review of Books:

Dennett’s stories have a dialogical function: they’re a way to get you to see the truth, but not by means of argument. This also explains the variety of intuition pumps one finds in his writings. Some philosophers offer multiple arguments for a view, as if stacking them up somehow made for a more convincing case. But if you have just one good argument, nothing more is necessary; and if your arguments are bad, it doesn’t matter if they are one or many. Stories, by contrast, can strike different people at different times in different ways.

2024-10-28

“According to the Liberal [Party of Canada’s] constitution,” writes Tristan Hopper in his First Reading National Post newsletter:

…the only time party members get to vote on their leader is if a leader dies, resigns or contests an election in which they fail to “become or continue to be the Prime Minister.”

The same parliamentary principle that requires a government to maintain the confidence of the House also extends to the leader of each party and their caucus. Leadership changes between elections (or “spills” as Australia charmingly calls them) are never elegant—recall, for example, that the UK most recently had three different Conservative leaders (and, therefore, prime ministers) between elections—but, they’re a feature and not a bug. Caucus leverage over leader is an important convention, one to which the LPC (and all parties, for that matter) should adhere.

Trick or treat? Well, we won’t know the answer to that until after Halloween. With just seven days to go before the US presidential election, keeping perspective, like the Wall Street Journal’s Gerard Baker, is critical:

One thing we desperately need to get away from is the silly idea that our country's greatness is a partisan achievement, one that can be eviscerated by a few thousand voters going the wrong way in a swing state next month. Merely to articulate the thought is to show how stupid it is.

I cannot recommend Charles C.W. Cooke’s most recent National Review article (on the future of conservatism) enough. First, it reads like a devastatingly blunt but fair report card on both presidential candidates. Second, it reminds us that a healthy political spectrum should be the goal of our politics more generally. That is, you don’t have to be a member of the opposing tribe to have a vested interest in their continued coherence and clarity.

Dana Gould has released his annual Halloween podcast special. Don’t miss the middle feature about film adaptations of Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula (1897). The book-based-on-the-movie-based-on-the-book point of order alone is both terrifying and hilarious.

2024-10-21

For all the international commentary regarding the apparent plot within the prime minister’s own party to politely push him out, let’s not overlook his government’s continued flirtation with being held in contempt of Parliament. As a Globe and Mail quite rightly reminds us:

There is no precedent that allows the government to weasel its way out of a House production order; its only alternatives are to prorogue Parliament, a doubling down on disdain that the Harper government resorted to in a similar case in 2009, or simply refuse to comply and be found in contempt of Parliament, an extremely rare occurrence that the Harper government inflicted upon itself in 2011, and which can lead to a non-confidence motion.

It’s not over until it’s over—and, even then, it may still not be over until the very last vote is counted (and recounted). The only thing pundits and polls will do in the meantime is feed your anxiety. If you absolutely must engage in idle speculation about the forthcoming US election, better to aim for thoughtful fare like Gerald F. Seib’s “bright spots” essay in the Wall Street Journal, or Adam Gopnik’s reflection on the worst case in the New Yorker, which includes this anchoring observation:

To grasp what is at stake in this strangest of political seasons, it helps to define the space in which the contest is taking place. We may be standing on the edge of an abyss, and yet nothing is wrong, in the expected way of countries on the brink of apocalypse. The country is not convulsed with riots, hyperinflation, or mass immiseration. What we have is a sort of phony war—a drôle de guerre, a sitzkrieg—with the vehemence of conflict mainly confined to what we might call the cultural space.

The best thing I read all week was Giles Coren’s response in the Times to the news about Christopher Columbus’s apparent DNA analysis. It’s precisely what I thought when the evidently breaking news alert rudely arrived on my phone.

Over on his excellent podcast, Lexicon Valley, John McWhorter takes a fun look at the word busy.

2024-10-14

I admire anyone who can capture the prevailing mood—read the room—in any given situation, with as few words as possible. Here’s a first rate example from Lance Morrow, in the Wall Street Journal, on the final days of the US presidential campaign: “Rarely has history seemed so silly and so ominous at the same time.”

Here’s a great line from Randall Denley, in his open letter to the Ontario Liberal Party in the National Post, on their obvious struggle to score on an open net: “Democracy doesn’t work well unless there are at least two parties offering credible alternatives on important issues.”

This year’s Massey Lecture, by Ian Williams, entitled What I Mean to Say (2024), explores the theme of conversation. It meanders, like a conversation, but charmingly so. I hope the subtle effort to engage some of the previous lectures in the series during the final chapter in, well, conversation, does not go unappreciated.

Here are the two respective passages that I appreciated most:

There is a greater danger in not having the conversation about the state of our world, by which I mean the state of our lives, than in having it. If we don't talk, we risk imagining each other in ways that are self-serving; we use each other as props to confirm our treasured biases, to invent malice, and to scapegoat for social problems. Conversations act as a corrective to our assumptions and delusions.

Our insistence on shoring up identities is constantly setting us in opposition to other identities and turning them to strangers, most neutrally, or enemies, more typically. The psychic exhaustion of carrying identities is pressing us down, depressing us.

2024-10-07

If you read only one thing this week, make it Adam Gopnik’s guest article in the Globe and Mail about antisemitism on right and the left.

Speaking of the Globe and Mail, let’s hope that Andrew Coyne’s recent column about the potential fault line in national unity following the forthcoming federal election remains merely a comprehensive exercise in applied anxiety.

I was distressed to learn that even students fortunate enough to be admitted to elite colleges, as Rose Horowitch reports in the latest edition of the Atlantic, not only typically have no formal reading practice, but struggle to complete even a single volume. Remember, it’s not what you read (or how) so much as keeping at it.

Speaking of the Atlantic, Ross Andersen’s report about a little corner of Wikipedia confirms that not all catastrophizing need be defeatist and boring.

“In adapting to changing technology,” writes Fraser Nelson in his retrospective on fifteen years at the editorial helm of the Spectator, “a 196-year-old magazine, developed the culture of a start-up. With the introduction of blogs, podcasts, videos, newsletters, events and all else, we were able to bring The Spectator to people not in the habit of reading magazines.” In so doing, he grew the value of the magazine by £80 million. That’s not only one hell of a run, it’s also proof that news of the death of the media business model (and product audience) has been greatly exaggerated. Congradulations, Mr. Nelson.

I’ve been enjoying Alan Alda’s podcast, Clear and Vivid, for some time. The recent Steven Martin episode is a great place to pick it up.

Farewell to both Maggie Smith and John Amos.

2024-09-30

The end of a month is a fitting opportunity to take stock of things.

Here’s a smart summary on the state of media, borrowed the Economist’s Bagehot columnist, in a broader view of the still new UK government’s struggle between chaos and calm:

Declining circulations mean newspapers today offer only a pastiche of popular opinion; broadcasters reach far fewer people than they once did; deranged TikTok videos will determine the next election as much as what leads the evening news. Where there was once a discernible set of narratives, whether positive or negative, there is now chaos.

And, here’s the Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein, commenting on the most important group of eligible voters in the forthcoming US election (that may as well sum up the state of the entire contest):

In the end, however, neither party expects too many of the voters who are telling pollsters today that they might switch to the other candidate to actually do so. The bigger prize for the two campaigns is the irregular voters who are, as [Sarah] Longwell put it, deciding “whether they are going to get off the couch” to vote at all.

My favourite tell in a review is an early pivot, from the subject or product at hand, to something either more personal to the reviewer or tangentially related, like an earlier work by the same artist. Sometime’s it’s less a pivot than a whole platform, like this review from the Telegraph’s Robbie Collin, who has used the occasion of a new George Clooney vehicle to remind us of perhaps the greatest of all: Tony Gilroy’s film Michael Clayton (2007).

Here’s wishing the Spectator’s Lionel Shriver a swift and full recovery.

2024-09-23

“It is incomprehensible that a country would learn that there may be foreign government collaborators walking its halls of power,” writes the Globe and Mail editorial board, “and then take no discernible action. Ottawa’s lack of urgency in so serious a matter is corrosive to voters’ trust in democracy, and raises questions about Canada's willingness to defend itself.”

Quite right.

Speaking of taking things seriously, here is the definitive line (by Jen Gerson) from the multi-contributor feature collection, in the November edition of the Walrus, speculating at life under the presumptive winner of the next federal election:

“My concern with [Pierre] Poilievre isn't that he's polarizing but, rather, like [Justin] Trudeau before him, that he's unserious.”

Reports about the death of Moore’s law may well be greatly exaggerated, but they do seem to double every two years.

2024-09-16

Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Robert Caro’s The Power Broker (1974). New York magazine’s own city editor Christopher Bonanos has the interview and retrospective that you didn’t know you needed.

With political polling in disrepute, we may as well let the the astrologists in on the guessing—hey, at least they can plainly explain their methodology.

Canada also holds a by-election in two federal ridings today. Once the ensuing wave of urgent punditry subsides, critical attention should be paid to the activists who worked to bloat the ballot in at least one of those ridings, by signing up as many candidates as possible, in the hope of persuading voters to embrace electoral reform (not actually on the ballot). I wonder how many candidates they expect to see on the ballot under a more proportional system, but I digress. The point is this: if you want change, get the votes; don’t undermine faith in our political institutions with a cheap stunt. Elections Canada has earned our pride and deserves our respect. We should be so lucky.

Speaking of respect and federal politics, let’s appreciate Navneet Alang’s recent article in the Toronto Star, which bravely reminds us that two things can be true.

I was grateful for friends with great taste also in possession of surplus Toronto International Film Festival tickets last weekend. I had the chance to see Seth Worley’s wonderous film feature debut, Sketch (2024). Do enjoy at least the first two spoiler-free paragraphs of Variety’s review until you can see it for yourself.

2024-09-09

In his latest New Yorker feature, Dhruv Khullar discovers a real use case for artificial intelligence that you’ll find interesting even if you’re well over the hype.

Over in Politico, Justin Grimmer reminds us that not only are polls not to be trusted, they can actually depress voter participation.

Lastly, read this report from the Economist, about last week’s regional election in Germany, and tell me again why proportional representation is superior.

2024-09-02

For a culture that spends most of its free time arguing about progress, you’d assume we’d be a little more sentimental about Labour Day—now that, for example, we’ve all generally agreed to frown upon child labour and all.

The Economist’s latest feature series on Sudan is very much worth your time.

Here’s a passage from Egypt’s own Yusuf Idris, in a short story entitled, “All on a Summer’s Night,” that I found in Penguin’s somewhat recent english collection, The Cheapest Nights (2020), that gives Gatsby a great run for his new money:

Once more we found ourselves roaming, back on the same road that saw us coming, driven in spite of ourselves. We were limping and groaning and leaning on one another. Our thoughts were dwelling on the coming dawn, rising suddenly, giving shape to the earth, with grief and care in its folds. And the harsh inexorable day loomed ahead like a huge monster, bigger than the sun.

2024-08-19

The World Health Organization declared a “public health emergency of international concern” over the potential spread of mpox last week. Should that escalate, especially as media report domestic cases, I think we’re going to discover one of the darker realities of the post-pandemic: You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to have trust issues with governmental failure to lead, set meaningful metrics, or even clearly narrate in a crisis.

Let us praise Annie Hylton for reminding us, with her recent profile of premier Scott Moe in the Walrus, that we ignore Saskatchewan provincial politics at our peril. The anecdote about the text from his brother-in-law, following his successful leadership bid, is worth the price of admission alone.

The two minds behind the “Expanse” science fiction franchise have returned with the first work in a new universe entitled, The Mercy of Gods (2024). I’m already looking forward to the next one.

2024-08-12

If Parliament have the time to investigate the (alleged) unbecoming behaviour of the coaching staff of the national women’s soccer team at the Olympics in Paris, then they obviously also have time to investigate the (alleged) unbecoming behaviour of their own number, with the foreign agents—or, am I the only who remembers that as-yet addressed disgrace? The t-word was used, after all.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has won the so-called “veepstakes” to round-out the Democratic presidential nomination ticket, but allow me to nominate Charles P. Pierce for rising about the morass of punditry with this in Esquire: “Personally, I approve of the selection of anyone who once supervised a lunchroom.” Seriously, anyone who can hold their own in that context obviously has real transferable skills.

Here’s a profound observation from Ezra Klein, in the form of a question to his podcast guest last week, former US Speaker Nancy Pelosi:

You have a sort of tendency when a thing is beginning to fall apart to simply assert that it isn't and to sort of reopen people's imagination about the options. You talked about that in terms of intuition. But how do you know when something is breaking and how do you know when it can actually be held together in those two cases maybe?

What I appreciate most about this is that it sheds light on a frustrating undercurrent in our political culture: we all too often given up ground for no reason. Western civilization, democracy, even the planet itself—if you judged purely from how we talk about these things, you’d have no choice but to conclude they’re each a firm breeze from folding. As I’ve observed here before, I see a perfectionist trend in our politics that suggests if we can’t solve a problem, completely, immediately, then we conclude that there’s no hope and we’re doomed. Instead, as Pelosi suggests, there’s always a pragmatic path forward—even if you don’t personally like or prefer it.

Lastly, here’s a stray thought from Haruki Murakami’s Killing Commendatore (2017): “Ideas take their energy from the perceptions of others.”

2024-08-05

Well, that was a weird week.

Here’s a lesson in politics from Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, the man who led that one word tone-shift, from helpless catastrophizing to the personal, in his recent appearance on Ezra Klein’s podcast:

What I see is that that kind of stuff is overwhelming for people. It's like other big issues, like climate change. If you can't tackle it one piece at a time, it just seems, why should I do anything about it? And for me as a teacher, you couldn't make your case while people were in that mindset. When they're in a fear mindset, it's very difficult for them to listen. And they kept hearing that.

I hope your decision not to adopt the federal electoral boundary changes for the next provincial election, as reported this week by the Toronto Star, is in the public interest, Premier Ford.

Not to be outdone by the New York Times’s list of the (alleged and, frankly, rather topical) one hundred best books of the century, the Economist has published an interactive calculator to help you assess how long it will take you to read the greatest five hundred books of all time. It’s fun to play with—and, actually, a great reminder that many of these so-called classics are not worth your time.

2024-07-29

Cheating at the world’s sport. Not a good look, Canada.

It’s the middle of the summer and I’m delving deeper into the civics library. Here’s a prescient thought from C.E.S. Franks in his book, The Parliament of Canada (1987):

Reforms that are not solidly grounded in reality are not likely to succeed. Quite the reverse, they are likely to create unreasonable and unreal expectations which cannot be met. The resulting failures lead to disillusionment, pessimism, and a loss of legitimacy for the public and participants. Constant reform can become as much a habit as immobility and can be as inappropriate a response to problems.

2024-07-22

With the Democratic National Convention just a month away, it felt like the right time to finally read Lawrence O’Donnell’s compelling book, Playing with Fire: The 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics (2017).

They’re back in Chicago, after all (though, not for the first time since 1968). History doesn’t repeat—it rarely, if ever, rhymes—but, it sure can get weird. Here are three relevant anecdotes from the book that should help ground things going in.

The first, and my favourite, not least for its brevity, is not something that I can recall having heard before, but is certainly something we ought to adopt as one of those immutable laws of political physics: “The establishment is always the last to know it is wrong.”

The second is that, while the 1968 convention led to significant reform in the party’s nomination process, we forget that primaries are a both a relatively recent, and previously inconsistent, convention (no pun intended):

In 1968, fewer than a third of U.S. states held presidential primary elections. That's not because the primary system was new. It was in decline. Primaries began as the idea of the early twentieth-century political reformers. Wisconsin held the first primary election in 1905. By 1920, about half of the states were holding primaries. Before that, party bosses got together in the fabled smoke-filled rooms to select nominees based on considerations kept hidden from the electorate. Because the nominees weren't democratically selected, reformers asked, how could presidents be said to be democratically elected? Hence primaries. State delegates would still choose the nominee at conventions, but primary elections would guide, and sometimes bind, delegates in that choice.

The third is that, where the sharp exchanges between William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal are now legend, what I hadn’t realized is that they’d set the template for televised punditry that endures today and, more amazingly, the reason that came to be in the first place:

Every angry political argument you've seen on television since [1968], every conservative trying to shout over every liberal and vice versa, owes its origin to the simple budgetary fact that ABC couldn't afford major-league convention coverage.

We appreciate WTF with Marc Maron as one of the original podcasts, but I am not sure we’ve properly acknowledged it’s service to history. Marc’s reposted both of his podcast chats with Bob Newhart, on the occasion of his passing. Thank you, Marc. Farewell, Mr. Newhart.

2024-07-15

The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal are right to admonish Canada for failing to meet the minimum defence expenditure required of NATO members. This shouldn’t be about the money, or even the military, but about pulling our weight and being able to support others—both of which are foundational Canadian values.

The failure of our imagination on this question is perhaps most disappointing. I see an opportunity to address a number of problems at once: put graduates to work by challenging them to design and patent versatile hardware (as useful in combat as, say, fighting forest fires), bring manufacturing to economically marginalized areas, all while diversifying the economy with new trade potential. That’s innovation, job-creation, investing in future business leaders, and military spending that isn’t limited to crates of arms piled in a warehouse. We’ll need those, too, but we needn’t be so literal about meeting our obligation here. We could lead.

The three best things that I read last week about—uh, let’s call it “the decision”—were David Frum’s (post-press conference) lament in the Atlantic, Stephen M. Walt’s rather reassuring review of the logical extension of the current problem in Foreign Policy (I didn’t know the anecdote about Nixon!), and the Economist’s gentle attempt to best-case the worst-case, at least on the economy.

Speaking of economic analyses, but back home, let’s appreciate Tony Keller’s review of “all-government budget deficit (the combined budgets of federal, provincial and local governments)” in the Globe and Mail, for rising above the idle catastrophizing we’ve been force-fed these past few months with actual facts—and, also, because it includes this devastating line about current leadership trends:

Ontario Premier Doug Ford this week rolled out an online tool to help people quickly find a place to buy booze. No word on an app to find a family doctor for the millions of Canadians without one.

Here’s a passage from Rebecca Solnit’s latest book, Orwell’s Roses (2021), which is perhaps the most precise summary of her subject’s enduring legacy:

Orwell stood apart from his peers in his capacity to critique the sector of the left that had drifted toward authoritarianism and dishonesty without joining other leftists who became conservatives tolerating other forms of brutality and deception. Doing so meant charting his own path across the uneven ground of midcentury politics, and it made him after his death a totemic figure claimed by people across the political spectrum.

2024-07-08

The United Kingdom has a new prime minister following an orderly general election. Let’s commend the outgoing one for honouring the peaceful transition of power and for playing a bad hand mostly well. Delaying the inevitable would have only invited another “spill” (leadership change via caucus revolt, as the Australians have it) and prolonged the stale status quo. Holding 121 seats is humbling but hardly a wipeout, à la Canada’s 1993 general election, the spectre of which more than a few on both sides of the pond invoked during the campaign. Besides, the outcome has had the added benefit of pruning the list of potential leadership candidates and that will be the key to renewal.

For all the post-election punditry, Robert Tombs’s retrospective on the past fourteen years of Conservative rule, in the Spectator, stands out as perhaps the most immediately thoughtful epilogue to the era.

Should he stay or should he go? Stuart Stevens makes a compelling case for staying the course in the Atlantic. On the other hand, as Lionel Shriver writes in the Spectator, that’s well beside the point (and you know it) and also deeply hypocritical. Meanwhile, Ezra Klein has gone ahead and answered everyone’s questions about the vice-president, in a podcast discussion with the last journalist to do a serious profile of her. Perhaps the most sobering commentary comes from a USA Today interview with Allan Lichtman “the historian who has correctly forecast the results of nine out of the 10 most recent presidential elections” using a set of key historical factors.

Overall, the Wall Street Journal’s Matthew Hennessy reminds us that, whatever happens, we would do well to be less dramatic about the health of democracy. Ceding ground before it’s contested is a sign of weakness, just not institutional one.

Lastly, I remain suspicious about the “polarization thesis” and so it was a joy to read Karl Vick’s article in Time pulling at the threads of the consensus view:

So, yes, American politics has grown more divided—but largely among people who live and breathe politics. And these people exaggerate their own polarity to win the approval of other people who also live and breathe politics.

This is good news. Our political institutions are not broken. More, we’re at the movies, caught between talkers and shushers, trying to follow an increasingly complicated plot, with our already algorithmically-sapped attention span.

2024-07-01

Happy Canada Day. There are more Canadians than ever, and that’s something to celebrate, even though a recent policy shift has stressed the limit of our capacity to accomodate. Make sure your holiday reading list includes Stephen Maher’s excellent feature in Maclean’s on that very subject.

The presumption that the result of last week’s federal by-election in the riding of Toronto-St. Paul’s is some bellwether for the forthcoming general election is a case study in the intellectual laziness of our chattering classes. First, the Conservatives flipped the seat by only 633 votes. Second, the vote took place the day before the government’s signature budget measure, a capital gains tax increase, in a riding that includes one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods in the country. We’re supposed to believe fewer than a thousand votes is a referendum on that policy and captures the mood of the land more generally? Come off it.

Many people are saying the quiet part louder and louder after the first presidential debate last week. Over in the Atlantic, Peter Wehner says it kindly and clearly.

We focus far too much on what leaders say they will do, and less so on what they’ve already done or how they make decisions in general—which is why it was nice to read a profile in the Economist from precisely that perspective regarding the presumptive next prime minister of the UK.

The world will be less funny without Martin Mull. Revisit his WTF with Marc Maron appearance from 2018.

2024-06-24

“Maybe Don’t Spray-Paint Stonehenge,” writes Tyler Austin Harper in the Atlantic, in response to “yet another example of environmental activism that produces more rancor over its means than focus on its message.”

Like Harper, I was also moved by the selflessness of a “…bystander who ran toward the protesters and tried to stop them, not knowing whether the canisters loosing orange haze were filled with something innocuous or sinister.”

It’s a blunt metaphor for what ails us more generally: the bystander is the middle, trying to hold the line, while extremists monopolize the conversation.

I can’t see the appeal of acting out. Legislation remains the means of change in our civilization, and the key to that is getting the votes—which, of course, requires presenting the middle with a clear and compelling call to action, preying on their own obvious self-interest. Ironically, while acting out might feel like the best way to preserve the fragile balance of life on this planet, the most effective means might just be building a better business.

Don’t take my word for it, consider this summary from the essay on solar power in the latest edition of the Economist:

According to the International Solar Energy Society, solar power is on track to generate more electricity than all the world's nuclear power plants in 2026, than its wind turbines in 2027, than its dams in 2028, its gas-fired power plants in 2030 and its coal-fired ones in 2032. In an IEA scenario which provides net-zero carbon-dioxide emissions by the middle of the century, solar energy becomes humankind's largest source of primary energy-not just electricity-by the 2040s.

The third season of Hacks (2021-present) was wonderful. May I recommend Hannah Einbinder’s comedy special, Everything Must Go (2024), as a delightful chaser. It is an absolute joy to watch people get better at what they do.

2024-06-17

Our dependency on opinion-polling is a poor and reckless substitute for actual democracy, but that did not stop me from enjoying Tristin Hopper’s exceptional summary of “What Canada's 'silent majority' believes” in the Thursday edition of his First Reading National Post newsletter. The middle is quiet but sensible, as ever.

“In the end,” writes Justin Ling in the Toronto Star about the foreign interference crisis, “the only institution that can fix these problems is Parliament.” He’s right, and he gets bonus points for a very subtle Arrested Development reference.

Anne Applebaum joined Slate’s Political Gabfest to talk about the recent European Parliament elections and offered a very sensible take that’s a better use of your time than all that other catastrophizing punditry.