Ever find yourself unable to look away from the horrors of the news cycle? The term of art these days is “doomscrolling” and it’s a bad habit. Our president is a huge fan of war crimes. He’s in a hole and just keeps digging. Oh look, a profile of those gun-waving jerkasses in St. Louis — perhaps unsurprisingly, they have a history of being jerkasses. Hey, the brain drain caused by immigration restrictionism is really kicking into high gear.
OK, here’s one optimistic take — Maeve Higgins writes about living in the US for the Irish Examiner.
Longer reads
Foreign Affairs has twin articles this month titled “How a Great Power Falls Apart” and “How Hegemony Ends.” The first begins with a short summary of the work of underappreciated Soviet dissident Andrei Amalrik and his insights into how impending collapse is invisible from the inside. The second is a rather more conventional geopolitical analysis:
Today, those same dynamics have turned against the United States: a vicious cycle that erodes U.S. power has replaced the virtuous cycles that once reinforced it. With the rise of great powers such as China and Russia, autocratic and illiberal projects rival the U.S.-led liberal international system. Developing countries—and even many developed ones—can seek alternative patrons rather than remain dependent on Western largess and support. And illiberal, often right-wing transnational networks are pressing against the norms and pieties of the liberal international order that once seemed so implacable. In short, U.S. global leadership is not simply in retreat; it is unraveling. And the decline is not cyclical but permanent.
The New York Review of Books is excellent on the topic of fascism’s resurgence here:
As militarized police in riot gear and armored vehicles barreled into peaceful protesters in cities across America, and its president emerged from a bunker to have citizens tear-gassed on his way to a church he’d never attended, holding a Bible he’d never read, many people recalled a famous saying often misattributed to Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here: “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” Because Lewis’s novel is the best remembered of the many warnings against American fascism in the interwar years, he has latterly been credited with the admonition, but they are not Lewis’s words.
Interview speaks with Jia Tolentino:
INTERVIEW: What has this pandemic confirmed or reinforced about your view of society?
TOLENTINO: That capitalist individualism has turned into a death cult; that the internet is a weak substitute for physical presence; that this country criminally undervalues its most important people and its most important forms of labor; that we’re incentivized through online mechanisms to value the representation of something (like justice) over the thing itself; that most of us hold more unknown potential, more negative capability, than we’re accustomed to accessing; that the material conditions of life in America are constructed and maintained by those best set up to exploit them; and that the way we live is not inevitable at all.
Cultivating Joy
Gibbons fascinated by hedgehogs
This dog doesn’t look real
This cat hasn’t quite got the hang of being a cat yet
This dog floating in a pool
Blep
Secretly Ironic 