I enjoyed this recent column from the Globe and Mail’s Robyn Urback, it cuts to the problem at the heart of the forthcoming federal election.

Happy hundredth anniversary to the New Yorker. Lots of great pieces to celebrate, Jill Lepore’s editorial history of the magazine chief among them. Come for the breaking of rules, stay for the John Updike anecdote.

I’ve now finished Chris Hayes’s excellent new book, The Siren’s Call (2025). As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I think incorporating his insight—like it or not (we obviously like it not)—is critical to updating your political operating system for the new era we’ve blundered into. Here’s an excerpt that serves as a proverbial “you are here” pin in the map:

The reality of the attention age is that everywhere you look, both formal and substantive attentional regimes have collapsed. And where there is no attentional regime, no formal set of institutions to force public attention on a topic, no basic rules for who will speak when and who will listen, the need for attention becomes exclusive; it swallows debate, it swallows persuasion, it swallows discourse whole. Attention ascends from a means to an end to the end itself. If you can’t be heard, it doesn’t matter what you say. And right now it’s both easier than ever to shout and harder than ever to be heard. The incentives of the attention age create a new model for public debate in which attention is its own end, to be grabbed by any means necessary.

If you didn’t catch his chat with Ezra Klein that I mentioned a few weeks back, consider this another opportunity to do so. For all of the press has done for the book, I think their combined appreciation for defining the problem together lends to getting a firmer grip on what’s happened and what’s at stake.

Getting to a film is pretty rare but I had occasion this week to watch Richard Curtis’s About Time (2013). No, not that time-travel themed movie with one of the same actors, the other one. It’s delightful and Tom Hollander’s broken man deadpan steals the show, out of an incredible cast, which is saying something.