Category: essays

Essay: How To Think About Politics

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The full title of today’s essay is “How to Think About Politics Without Wanting to Kill Yourself,” which is…pretty apt these days. Hamilton Nolan lays out a case that, rather than treating a candidate as a hero, our job is to elect someone who can be pressured to do something right:

For the most part, it is wrong to think of elections as contests between “good” and “bad” candidates. With few exceptions, it is more accurate to divide most politicians into two broad categories: Enemies, and Cowards. The enemies are those politicians who are legitimately opposed to your policy goals. The cowards are those politicians who may agree with your policy goals, but will sell you out if they must in order to protect their own interests. Embrace the idea that we are simply pushing to elect the cowards, rather than the enemies. Why? Because the true work of political action is not to identify idealized superheroes to run for office. It is, instead, to create the conditions in the world that make it safe for the cowards to vote the right way.

That sounds kind of bleak! But it does make it possible to try to move forward.

You do not need to allow this glaring inconsistency in their approach to human rights to paralyze you, as you try to assess them. Nor do you need to deny that this contradiction exists. You just need to understand that they are cowards. The willingness to overlook certain morally indefensible things is something that most people accept, in their own hearts, when they go into electoral politics. … The cowards, unlike the enemies, can be moved into the right place. That is why we vote for them, when faced with the choice of the two.

Wednesday Essay: Future Medieval

Karen

This essay about the rise of the “Future Medieval” design trend probably explains why I’m seeing medieval games and beat machines popping up. It’s an interesting read, design-focused but accessible, with lots of examples (including the images I used here) and links to what the author is talking about. Check it out: Heralding the ancient and otherworldly charm of Future Medieval graphics

Future Medieval is a collective acknowledgment of the messiness of our current reality: an era marked by chaos, uncertainty and deep societal divides. It’s no surprise that the aesthetic language has shifted accordingly. The dense, esoteric forms of Future Medieval reflect a world grappling with upheaval, much like the original medieval period, a time of both the Black Plague and a stark divide between the haves and the have-nots (how different is a feudal landowner from a 21st-century tech billionaire, really?).

[…] When I asked illustrator Maddie Fischer why she’s so inspired by the Middle Ages, she agreed with this personal angle. “I think medieval art is a fascinating portal into an era of human history that sometimes seems so ancient and so distant, and yet is ultimately not that far in the past,” she said. “Life, alone, in that era is so wild to imagine — and how anyone managed to be an artist on top of it all blows my mind.”

F1 And Socialism

Karen

If you want to read an amazing take down/appreciation of Formula 1 racing, hurry to the Internet Archive and read cycling journalist Kate Wagner’s piece. It was published on Road and Track over the weekend, then was pulled down 24 hours later, and now even her writer bio is gone from the site.

Why? Oh, maybe because of the subhead: “If you wanted to turn someone into a socialist you could do it in about an hour by taking them for a spin around the paddock of a Formula 1 race. The kind of money I saw will haunt me forever.”

Or maybe because of the opening sentence: “Most of us have the distinct pleasure of going throughout our lives bereft of the physical presence of those who rule over us.”

Or maybe because of whole paragraphs like this:

Essays That Are Not About The Gym But Could Be

Karen

Heather Havrilesky shared a recent essay about her voice lessons and practicing a new thing even when it feels silly: “immersing yourself in borderline absurd practices, habits, and behaviors that don’t achieve much, that look laughable or foolish to others, that appear as a burden or an unnecessary hassle on the calendar…”

She goes on to talk about how we all talk about pursuing our passions but the reality of it is just a lot of unglamorous showing up, and wow did I feel that about going to the gym three times a week for five years and watching the weights move up glacially slowly:

Gaining mastery of a new skill is mostly drudgery. You sit down and do the hard work and you marvel at how bad you are, day after day. That’s the road, and there is no end point, there is just more road, endless road. Even though we talk about passion like it’s this heavenly blast of light and sound that drives you forward to greatness, real, genuine passion often feels more like some Cormac McCarthy novel where things go from bad to worse and you never arrive anywhere at all. But somehow (also like a Cormac McCarthy novel!) the bleak trees, the pavement, the bitter cold wind, all of these things are weighty, lustrous. You are almost dead of course, always almost dead, but somehow more alive than ever.

Delighting In Things

Karen

This Heather Havrilesky essay came through my inbox about the same time I started the current book/box hobby, and this definition of “dilettante” in it floored me:

“Did you know the word dilettante comes from the verb ‘to delight’?” my friend asked. “As in, to delight in many things at once.”

“Wow, really?”

“Yeah! People get so hung up on mastery, when all that really matters is delight.”

“People get so hung up on mastery, when all that really matters is delight.” You don’t have to be good at your hobbies. You don’t need to gain all the knowledge on every subject. Just do them and be delighted.

(The rest of the essay is pretty great, too–less about hobbies than about staying open to delight, which pretty much translates to noticing and showing up. Yes.)

 

Wednesday Essay

Karen

This was Heather Havrilesky’s newsletter for Ask Polly this week, and there was so much that I recognized in it: the conflicting goals among family, the effort it takes, the shame and regret always under the surface. I had a hard time pulling my favorite quote so just go read it:  Why It’s the Hardest to Show Up For the People You Love the Most.

And ironically, the more someone matters to you, the more difficult it can be to stay close to them. Your shame and guilt and regret are activated by how much you care. Your differences feel more painful and aggravating than they would otherwise. Your flaws feel more embarrassing. Your sadness feels more real, more palpable, more like a personal failure.

Merely recognizing all of these difficulties is enough. Most people feel guilty and confused instead. And many people distance themselves from the people they love the most, just to avoid these unpleasant emotions.

Don’t protect yourself from the most important people in your life. Show up in spite of everything. This could be the last time. Notice the heaviness in your bones. Notice the afternoon sun on the grass. Notice the heavy sighs, the darting eyes, the efforts to be understood. Notice the dark clouds in the south at dusk, the dirty plates, the nervous laughter. Let it all in.

Thursday Read

Karen

I found novelist Catherynne Valente’s newsletter from another newsletter and oh my god this essay about fascism. The title pretty much sums it up—“There’s No Such Thing As a Smart Fascist”–but the points she makes explain everything about how we got here and how Trump is probably going to get reelected. Is it depressing as hell? Yeah. Is it an essential read so your brain can finally stop protesting, “But they can’t DO that!” Oh yeah. Because they can. That’s the point.

But none of them are smart or capable or gifted with understanding and foresight. That’s not the great talent of fascists. They don’t need—or want—to be those things or have those talents. They only need one… Fascists, and their larval form, conservatives, simply do not give one single lonely fuck for rules or conventions or the system in which they flourish.

That’s it! I read that and everything made so much sense.

Definitely read the whole thing, though, because it’s enlightening but also grimly funny [emphasis mine throughout]:

McConnell never had to have a strategy. He just had to not give a fuck. Denying Obama a Supreme Court nominee and then shoving every blogger with a reasonable facsimile of a law degree onto the bench wasn’t strategy. It was just not giving a fuck about the rules, sitting on his hands like a smug little frog-goblin, and saying no. McCarthy is doing the same thing, risking the entire world’s stability because it makes the zombie hyena brigade laugh. Just sticking out that pugnacious Mussolini-chin and donkey-barking: no no no.

That’s it. There’s no clever handling of the system, no scrying out of loopholes, no incisive interpretation of the law. There’s just ignoring it and daring someone to do something about it. SCOTUS’s new motto is basically Lol What Are You Gonna Do About It? in Latin. We all know precedent, standing, ethics and arguments mean nothing anymore. Six of them are just going to chortle and preen and smoke each other’s farts in the finest of pipes and pull the big novelty rope for whatever hurts people the most for the foreseeable future.

I mean, this!

It’s not a coherent belief system, it’s just government by narcissistic personality disorder. A narcissist is never wrong, never a hypocrite, never at fault. A narcissist changes reality around them and bulldozes others into agreeing with it to save their sanity and their skin and then turns around and changes that reality on a whim to avoid ever having to feel anything at all, least of all the dreaded responsibility. There’s no such thing as a smart fascist because smart people, by definition, think about things and fascism is terrified of letting anyone think about what’s happening for more than a second. Just throw up some new pain porn on the captive media and give it bright colors until people are so angry they can’t think, not even about what they’re angry about.

This!!

Evil doesn’t win because good is dumb. Evil wins because evil is easy. It’s so damnably easy to be stupid and hateful and ignorant and mean. It’s effortless. It’s easy not to regulate your behavior or your emotions because fuck everyone else that’s why. It’s easy to just go through life the way your parents told you to and hate anyone who lives differently. It’s easy to fear and lash out and buy a bunch of guns and puff up your chest on the internet and just shriek a tantrum into your phone’s camera that amounts to nothing more complicated than waaaaa but I’m supposed to get everything I want all the time! It’s easy to vote for a guy you’ve seen on TV for 30 years because you think it’s funny when he says things you think but your kids get super mad at you for saying. It’s easy to hurt others from a safe position. It’s easy to be a sack of shit. It just is. All you have to do is never think of anyone or anything but yourself.

 

Eeesh. Definitely read it. I think I have to subscribe so I can read her follow-up.

Today’s Essay

Karen

It’s by Patricia Lockwood in the London Review of Books and despite that august publisher it is both hilarious and horrifying: She describes her husband getting sick with a mystery gut illness in a London hospital, and wow does it capture a lot of what I felt last year during Doc’s own gut illness (“the body simply goes away when you are trying so intensely to project yourself into someone else, blinking in and out, in pain and on morphine, on the verge of being wheeled back”).

Also, I mentioned hilarity, and oh my god I couldn’t stop laughing at parts of this:

“‘Something is very wrong inside me,’ Jason said on his way back from the bathroom, bending over my row with his face white and his arm held rigid over his lower abdomen. Secretly I thought it might be the world’s hardest fart.”

“Emergency surgery was the only option. (‘Oh my God,’ I thought when I heard, ‘but he’s completely full of Lebanese food.’)”

“All of the people who had been told, in the direst terms, that my husband’s asshole was going to be directly connected to his mouth, and that we would live in England for ever, now had to be told something else.”

 

 

 

Do I Need A New Hobby?

Karen

I’m still thinking of what I could try for New Things January and this essay about winter swimming got some gears turning. Am I a strong swimmer? No! Do I live conveniently near a body of water? Not really! But did I enjoy the single cold plunge I did last year on a hot springs trip? Strangely, yes. The adrenaline jolt after you get out of the water is really something.

I probably won’t take up winter lake swimming, but it caught my interest this week. As the essay says, there’s “joy and discipline in embracing what was once unthinkable […] Cold forces a focus.”

Giving Help, Accepting Help

Karen

If you’ve been around here for a bit, you know that I subscribe to the Culture Study newsletter from Anne Helen Petersen. I think I started for her commentary on toxic jobs (heh) but the stuff she writes about communities of care is what I can’t get enough of lately.

I could pull quote just about the entire newsletter from last week, about why it’s hard to accept help:

You haven’t been around examples of healthy community or dependence — particularly within your family — and don’t have models of what it means to safely ask for help. This is particularly true for people whose independence is, in some way, a trauma response, but I also think it’s true of people who grew up in homes where the adults were solitary or isolated, or where everyone in the family talked shit about other members of the family who asked for help.

But the meat of the article is a document template for outlining what help you would need and want most (food, errands, a walk, etc.). Then you can send your answers to your friends and family and they can fill theirs out and suddenly you’re not in the loop of “What can I do?” “Oh nothing, it’s ok.”

In summation, THIS:

It’s wrong to think of community as tit-for-tat, I-give-so-I-get, but offering care invites engagement….and accepting care models vulnerability. We cannot assume that others don’t have space to care for us, just as we cannot convince ourselves that we do not have space for others. You are not a burden; you are beloved.