In the latest example of two things being true at the same time, last week offered the contrast of Bari Weiss’s resignation letter from the New York Times and the administration’s totally out-of-line words and actions about the Portland protests (and more).

The letter is worth reading for at least two reasons: first, because it didn’t reach all the people it probably should have; second, it’s a well-written account of just how much our theoretically mainstream/objective/fact-based media have been warped by social media. (For what it’s worth, I generally agree with her conclusions about social media at face value — and I also believe that Twitter has become the world’s de facto editorial board. As a cultural institution, we can hope for better from the paper of record, but as a newspaper business, it’s hard to see how the NYT could avoid getting swept up in and along by larger digital-cultural trends.)

And as for Portland? Debating whether or not this is fascism is a little like debating collusion: we can argue the legal points as long and hard as we want, but the bigger point is that actions like this are typical of how this government behaves. If those aren’t the actions you want from government, it’s time to pick a new one.

In anticipation of this summer’s place issue from the Oxford American, I re-read a 2017 essay that dances with the idea that just about everybody wants to enjoy Southern culture, but not too many people are so eager to claim all of Southern heritage. And isn’t that — “the duality of the Southern thing,” as Patterson Hood called it — how we deal with so much of our culture in this country? Without further ado, Zandria F. Robinson’s “Border Wars.”

I did plenty of other reading this week, too, including my first real deep dive back into the always-excellent historical-cultural-international writing at the Scholar’s Stage in a few years, but the words that probably moved me most this week were from two relatively recent records: Willie Nelson’s First Rose of Spring and Brandy Clark’s Your Life is a Record. Enjoy.

There have always been “it” companies. Of course.

But the relative balance of power and wealth and coolness changes over time, and it’s really out of whack now. (That was true before the pandemic, and it’s accelerated more than you can easily believe since.)

There’s a great study to be done on what “winners take all” looks like in the context of the so-called war for talent. It’s easy to see returns to scale in terms of money, but we probably underrate them in terms of how much they distort the labor market.

Lots of people got really focused on the revolving door between Goldman (and other banks) after 2008, and Goldman still hasn’t totally recovered its cachet. (I’d argue that’s more to do with regulation than with any lingering qualms about the “vampire squid.”)

Facebook, along with a handful of arguably lesser evils, is still cool. And if that’s the only — or the best, or the coolest — way to pay your student loans or rebuild your balance sheet after some public service, we’re going to be living with this distortion for a very long time.

***

HT Scott Galloway [very much worth a read]

It’s comparatively easy to argue about the past, and we’re spending an awful lot of time doing that just now. (We have been for a while, really.)

It’s much harder to contemplate an uncomfortable or unacceptable present, or to dream up a new way forward.

(It’s worth remembering, too, that it’s really bad history to pretend that we can be free of our past whenever we choose or that the past is a perfect guide to the future. Good luck electing George Washington today, never mind what he’d do about any of our major policy challenges.)

The uncomfortable fact is that too many people can’t or won’t accept what our culture offers for the present or the future right now, and not without reason. And in the context of the United States, that might be a genuinely new feeling: some level of cynicism or woe-is-us is normal, but a widespread sense that there’s nowhere to go but down — a sense that’s backed up by the math, which is reinforced by policy choices — is new, at least in living memory.

If we were able to step outside of history for a moment, I don’t think too many people would choose the “freedom” to live lives nastier, poorer, more solitary, more brutish, and shorter than those lived by citizens of other leading economies.

The challenge — and, likely, the once-in-a-lifetime invitation — is to step back into our history and choose a future that more people can really live with.

During the reign of the evil White Witch, Narnia’s curse is that Christmas is always coming but never arrives.

The metaphor is instantly understandable, especially from a young person’s perspective: imagine that sense of immense anticipation without the handy countdown of an advent calendar or the certainty that Santa Claus is coming to town.

It’s not such a stretch to apply that metaphor to the world’s current situation, is it? As we all await the development and distribution of a vaccine and some sort of transition to some kind of new life, there’s fervent anticipation but no clear timeline.

The spell is lifted in Narnia, of course, just as it ultimately will be in this case. But, between now and then, we all have an opportunity to re-learn how to wait, and how to deal with our expectations in the meantime.

And that situation describes an awful lot more of the history of human experience than a tidy 24-day march to a pile of new toys.

Everything is, well, a lot.

How much do you need to slow down, take or make space, and acknowledge the bigger reality?

And how much do you need to keep doing what you can do, in spite of it all?

When you think of the word “insurance,” what do you think of?

Strictly, to insure is a financial transaction: a cost paid to another party to bear the risk of a loss.

In its common-sensical application, this makes a lot of sense: if 10 merchants, each owning a ship, are sending cargoes across seas that routinely claim one in 10 ships, they should all happily pay someone about 10 percent of the value of a ship and cargo to carry the risk for them.

But then there’s health insurance, where the little-understood distinction between “insure” and “ensure” gets especially devilish.

Health insurance doesn’t ensure our health any more than Lloyd’s keeps ships afloat. What we really want from it, though, is to receive the care that we need, when we need it, without going bankrupt.

And so, in the United States, we end up in this situation (as reported by the FT’s Lex columnist last week): “hospitals haemorrhaging money — to the tune of $50bn a month according to one industry study,” while “The country’s biggest listed health insurers — UnitedHealth Group, Cigna, Anthem, and Humana, have collectively added about $160.5bn to their values since the pandemic began in earnest in late March.”

Why? Because everyone who can possibly avoid going to hospitals for what used to pay their bills — routine, elective, and even some formerly emergency procedures — is doing so, while the insurers are still collecting premiums apace.

This is totally perverse, and it beggars the common-sense understanding of insurance. (If all shipping stopped, you can bet the merchants would be doing their damnedest not to keep paying 10 percent on cargoes languishing safely in port.)

If we really want to ensure that Americans can afford to get sick and have a chance of getting well again, we’re going to have to think hard about what role — if any — todays insurers have to play.

How much news do you really need? How fast?

Among those of us for whom “well-informed” is a badge of honor, news consumption scratches the itch that other people satisfy with social media or sports.

But here’s the thing: in an always-on, omnichannel, infinite-scroll world, more news does not necessarily make us better informed. “Keeping up” no longer serves as a valid goal, status, or excuse.

What can we do instead?

First, get clear on principles. There are more details than anyone can read in a lifetime about the specifics of how and where and to whom our systems are unfair, cruel, and violent. Most of us pick several issues to care about specially, but almost all of us need to stop being shocked at another ICE outrage and start wrestling with the overarching facts of being ICE’s customers, bosses, and paymasters. Do you really need to watch another wildfire unfold in real time to take climate change seriously, or is that just a distraction?

Second, read history. It makes unfairness, cruelty, and violence a little less surprising when we’re finally forced to confront them, and it offers better guides for what might be done about them.

Third and perhaps above all, slow down. In the 1989 manifesto that kicked off the international Slow Food movement, Folco Portinari wrote:

We are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life, which disrupts our habits, pervades the privacy of our homes and forces us to eat Fast Foods.

To be worthy of the name, Homo Sapiens should rid ourselves of speed before it reduces us to a species in danger of extinction. […]

In the name of productivity, Fast Life has changed our way of being and threatens our environment and our landscapes. So Slow Food is now the only truly progressive answer.

That is what real culture is all about: developing taste rather than demeaning it. And what better way to set about this than an international exchange of experiences, knowledge, projects?

Try reading these lines with “news” substituted for “food” — and consider whether homo sapiens (the knowing, the wise) might do well to slow down and develop taste in this way, too.

***

Dan Carlin’s latest episode of Common Sense — released after a three-year hiatus — is the most important 90 minutes of audio you can listen to this week (or month, or possibly year). The hidden-in-plain-sight answer to the question of how we got this way is media — and the money behind it.

Slow down and trade some of this week’s mindless scrolling for some provocative listening.

Two readings this week, both unmissable.

The first — longer and darker — is an extraordinary exposé by New Yorker D.C. correspondent Jane Meyer on “How Trump is Helping Tycoons Exploit the Pandemic.”

From industrial agriculture to exploitation of ever-more-marginalized workers to the mighty rivers of corporate money keeping politics nice and swampy to breathtaking deregulation happening behind the screen of coronavirus to an absolutely real gajillionaires-for-Jesus club (seriously), it’s all here. Strap in — and keep your barf bag handy.

If you can’t spare 30 minutes to read all about it, don’t neglect to consider and connect these dots:

(1) [T]he pandemic has offered Trump an opportunity: now that he can invoke an economic emergency, he can relax, rescind, or suspend federal regulations by fiat. In May and June, Trump issued a pair of executive orders directing national agencies to ignore federal regulations and environmental laws if they burdened the economy — again, in many instances, the companies were told that they just had to act “in good faith.” As the Times and the Washington Post have reported, these moves have weakened regulations on all kinds of businesses, from trucking companies to oil and gas pipelines. In [Food and Water Watch lobbyist Tony] Corbo’s view, many in the media have missed one of the biggest aspects of the COVID-19 story. “Everyone is looking at the shiny object — the pandemic,” he said. “Meanwhile, the government is deregulating everything. It’s unreal.”

—

(2) “She [a poultry worker employed by Mountaire Corp., the subject of the article] asked to speak anonymously, because she feared retribution both from Mountaire and from local racists, who, she said, seemed more aggressive recently toward African-Americans like her; when out shopping, she had noticed more Confederate-flag paraphernalia on public display. But she was eager to describe working conditions so exploitative that, as she put it, ‘it’s slavery, baby.'”

—

(3) “By 2014, [Mountaire CEO Ronald] Cameron’s name was appearing on lists of the nation’s largest campaign contributors. He and his company spent $4.8 million on Republican candidates and groups that year. He was the biggest corporate donor to the Freedom Partners Action Fund, a Koch political-action committee. […] And, according to the Wall Street Journal, Cameron helped Republicans get around campaign-finance restrictions in Maryland, where Larry Hogan, the Republican candidate for governor, appeared to be in trouble. The State of Maryland limits direct campaign contributions to candidates. The Republican Governors Association, which can spend as much as it wants, asked Mountaire for money. Late in the race, the company donated a quarter of a million dollars. The R.G.A. claims that it didn’t solicit the funds specifically for Maryland, but it went on to spend lavishly there. Hogan won, and on his inauguration day he blocked a proposal opposed by the poultry industry.”

[As if “Freedom Partners” weren’t Orwellian enough, the story also details how Cameron directs his money. Most of the dollars flow through a foundation he established in 2004 that shares an address — and a secretary — with his corporation. The foundation last reported assets valued at $327 million, and its only donors are Cameron and his corporation — which pays employees about $14 an hour and is alleged to have made illegal payroll deductions for personal protective equipment during the Covid crisis. The foundation, apparently without irony, is called the Jesus Fund.]

***

This is enough to make you wonder if anyone’s doing it better. As Simon Kuper writes in the FT Magazine, they certainly are.

It’s time, he says, for the United States to “lear[n] how modern democracy works” — and the examples he suggests chiefly include countries whose constitutions were written and imposed by young Americans after World War II. We had learned by then (or at least some 20-somethings in the right places at the right times had) how to go beyond the aspirations, constraints, and oversights of our founding document, and bequeathed defeated enemies constitutions perhaps more perfect than our own.

It might be time to return the favor, he argues — and it’s getting pretty hard to argue with that.

Unless, of course, you’re a billionaire with your banker, your governor, and your savior on retainer.

Way back when I started my first blog, as an undergrad, I did a series based around a number of TED talks.

The one I used for the punchline was by the author and philosopher Robert Wright, and his punchline was that our world was moving — inexorably, it seemed — toward a sort of business-class morality: it’s hard to hate the people you’re jet-setting with, no matter where you’re coming from, headed to, or choosing to eat/drink/wear/believe along the way.

Back in 2008–09 (before my prefrontal cortex had really firmed up), that seemed pretty reasonable.

Fast-forward a dozen years, and business-class morality seems a pretty flimsy teleology indeed: everyone “knows” that the left-out and left-behinds are having their revenge, globalization is over, and we’re on the verge of the next Cold War.

But.

There is always a “but.” And in this case, it’s this: in spite of all the decoupling, deglobalizing, and denying, it’s never been clearer that we’re all traveling on spaceship earth.

First class, business class, or “economy” class — it doesn’t matter. To paraphrase one of my grandmother’s favorite jokes, it turns out that all parts of this plane are headed for the same destination.

Where does that look like it’s going to be? Where do we want it to be? And how are we going to learn to put up with the other people strapped in for this crazy ride?

Business-class morality — “I don’t care who you pray to as long as we’re all serving in the temple of money” — won’t cut it. It’s going to take a new level of social and planetary and — yes — economic empathy. Some of that might come from direct experience, but a lot of it’s going to have to come from the ever-less-difficult effort of imagining that if our cities, countries, and planet keep going this way, nobody’s going to like where we land.

I don’t know when we’ll board planes again. But some none-too-fanciful flights of empathetic imagination between now and then might be the best investment this species ever makes.