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.

2023-11-20

David Cameron returns to politics, to take up the foreign secretary portfolio from a seat in the Lords, and the Economist’s Bagehot columnist isn’t having any of it:

A man who deserted his office is now painted as an example of duty. In British politics, the appearance of competence is more important than the evidence of it. Aesthetics trump achievement. Nothing demonstrates this more than the renaissance of Mr Cameron.

The contempt is amusing, of course, but I have to confess that the real view from across the Atlantic is that of envy: no Canadian columnist, in a comparable political situation, would assume such a tone.

I spent the past few weeks taking in Martin Amis’s as yet appreciated final novel, Inside Story (2020). It’s many things—it includes some of the clearest and most thoughtful practical advice about writing, for example—but it also doesn’t have to be anything more than a story about a man who misses his friend.

Here’s a beautiful passage that I keep thinking about:

Martin was eighteen, and he was walking just after dark through a distant and neglected suburb of North London when he saw a lit window on the second-lowest floor of a council medium-rise. All it showed were the dark-blue shoulders of an unoccupied armchair. And he thought (this is word for word), That would be enough. Even if I never write, complete, publish anything at all, ever, that would be enough. A padded seat and a standard lamp (and of course an open book). That would be enough. Then I'd be a part of it.

2023-11-13

“I look at you as an exquisite poet of self-hatred,” says filmmaker Errol Morris to David Cornwell (that’s John le Carré to your bookshelf), the subject of his excellent new documentary, The Pigeon Tunnel (2023). “Yeah,” laughs the subject, “I would go with that.” If you’ve seen the film, but are new to the author, you’ll enjoy Larry Wilmore’s recent podcast chat with Morris.

The current edition of the Economist has two smart pieces on government. The first, looks as prospective reform in Italy (“Italian politicians cannot resist changing the rules.”). The second, takes a deep look at why the crafting of legislation in the UK has gotten wobbly: it’s not the process, it’s the people.

2023-11-06

“In response to growing concern over Canada’s capacity to welcome more newcomers,” the Toronto Star reported last week, “the federal government says it will incorporate housing, health care and infrastructure planning with provinces and municipalities when setting the country’s annual immigration targets.”

We’re in annual performance review season so this is a great opportunity to return to the basics—like, for example, how it’s generally not ideal to volunteer that you haven’t been doing your job, by suggesting that you’re going to start doing your job.

This is either a communications blooper or a confession from a country that’s hitched both it’s economic well-being and feel-good national identity to something it hasn’t put even an idle thought toward. This is serious: failing to set those who want, or need, to come here up for success, while undermining the hard work of those who’ve come before, can only feed a populist backlash. I’m reduced to quoting, out of context, an enduring meme from the otherwise excellent animated series Archer (2009-2023): “Do you want ants? Because that’s how you get ants.”

Here’s a thoughtful definition of creativity from John Cleese’s wonderful book, Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide (2020), which I re-read last week: “Wherever you can find a way of doing things that is better than what has been done before, you are being creative.”

2023-10-30

Here’s an observation about centrism, from Bari Weiss’s excellent book, How to Fight Anti-Semitism (2019), which I read last week, and find myself still thinking about:

…in the absence of healthy centrism, many progressive politicians practice avoidance. They ignore real social tensions associated with mass immigration, unsure how to acknowledge those tensions without stoking xenophobia, alienating their perceived base, or being smeared as bigots. They downplay patriotism, afraid of stoking jingoism or of being accused of it. They ignore the need for a return to a common culture or even a set of civic values, lest they be accused of promoting cultural intolerance. […] In the absence of serious liberal answers to these significant questions, the bluntness of authoritarian populists becomes that much more seductive to the average voter, who comes to see liberals as evasive and out of touch.

There’s a third, lesser observed problem in all the tragedy of recent weeks: there are few, if any, adults in any room right now. To lift a phrase from P.J. O’Rourke, we need a cry from the far middle.

Inkoo Kang’s reflection in the New Yorker on the end of the FX series, Reservation Dogs (2021-2023), which I also finished last week and recommend, captures something I’ve been trying to describe about the network’s artistic approach for years:

The showrunner, Sterlin Harjo, who created the series with Taika Waititi, continued expanding this mosaic for the next two seasons, in a mode spearheaded by Louis C.K.’s “Louie” and brought to its apex by Donald Glover’s “Atlanta”: the formally and tonally mercurial, auteur-driven, detour-prone, impressionistic half-hour dramedy. (Call it “the FX mood piece.”) The result can be easier to admire than to get lost in.

If you’ve also finished the show, I recommend listening to Marc Bernardin’s recent thoughts on the Fatman Beyond podcast.

Speaking of podcasts, Halloween is tomorrow, and that means there’s still time to listen to the Dana Gould Hour’s annual special.

2023-10-23

Your homework this week is to read Lionel Shriver’s latest Spectator column (“Keep your politics à la carte”) and then go for a long walk. While you’re on that walk throw on Scott Galloway’s latest No Mercy / No Malice post (“Listen”) as read by George Hahn. If you should happen to come by any strangers, be nice to them.

I’m not sure what we did to deserve Maria Bamford or her recent memoir, Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult: A Memoir of Mental Illness and the Quest to Belong Anywhere (2023). She reviews in passing, for example, a self-help book by using the framework of that self-help book against itself, and it’s not only unspeakably hilarious it also qualifies as high art.

2023-10-16

I find it endearing that the least interesting thing about Sir Patrick Stewart’s recent memoir, Making It So (2023), are the Hollywood anecdotes. His origin story, of finding an interest and then being encouraged to develop that interest to the best of his ability, should be a path offered to every youth. As he observes: “I was fortunate to grow up in a time when there was a compact between the government and the people dictating that the arts were a necessity of life, not a frivolity.”

Speaking of adults doing the right thing, you must listen to Arnold Schwarzenegger explain why he refuses to describe himself as “self-made man” on Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend. It’s too bad he can’t run for president. I’m serious. We’re already through the looking-glass, friends.

Speaking of podcasts, if my notes from last week about Timothy Garton Ash’s memoir, Homelands, failed to entice your curiosity, perhaps his recent chat with Paul Wells will.

2023-10-09

Book blurbs are notoriously cliché and vacuous. Here’s an exception from Mark Lilla:

We know there are Germans, Italians, Spaniards, and Poles—but are there Europeans? Yes, at least one: Timothy Garton Ash. Homelands is the brilliant, captivating story of how he became one.

I find that impossible to improve upon and all that need suffice as a review, too.

Is the United Kingdom in Europe? How much of Europe is even in Europe? As Ash notes in Homelands (2023), his recent memoir: “…European countries have a long history of existential uncertainty about their full belonging to Europe.” Europe may not be certain of itself but Ash definitely is—at least in a way that I cannot imagine an American or a Canadian attempting about their respective federations, as that would ultimately require an effort to tread and take in the whole of the place.

Here’s a stand-alone thought we ought to keep in mind: “The gamble of civilisation is that we can learn from the past without having to go through it all again ourselves.”