The Economic Theory That Explains Why Americans Are So Mad — The economy is great, so why are Americans angry? The answer is inflation, particularly essentials like housing, healthcare and education, says Annie Lowrey, economics reporter for The Atlantic, appearing on The Ezra Klein Show. (Klein is her husband.)
📷🐈⬛🏳️🌈Here’s something I saw while walking the dog. Happy Pride!
Dave Winer @davew@mastodon.social says that “there’s a new interest in linkblogs." I was intrigued by that comment because linkblogging and sharing memes seem to be my primary blogging activities, and sometimes, well, it seems like it might be a waste of time. I was unable to find evidence of renewed linkblog interest (hopefully that link will point to my search on Perplexity). Dave, please provide pointers? Where are you seeing this interest?
The Breslin Era: The end of the big-city columnist.
Jimmy Breslin was and is one of my heroes.
Ross Barkan at The Point:
” J.B. Number One," as he affectionately called himself, never graduated college. Why bother with classrooms when the barrooms, pool halls, police precincts and political clubhouses had far more to teach? His father had abandoned the family and his mother was distant, rarely hugging young Jimmy. Once, he caught her holding a pistol to her head. Around age ten, he was publishing his own neighborhood newspaper, The Flash, and he had a headline ready: “Mother Tried Suicide.”
Breslin was one of an era of powerful big-city newspaper columnists that hardly exist anymore, including Mike Royko of Chicago, Herb Caen of San Francisco, Carl Hiaasen of Miami and Steve Lopez of Philadelphia and later Los Angeles. Today, we have a lot of pundits—everybody’s got an opinion—but few combine reporting with opinion as Breslin did, and nobody has his stature.
The death of Breslin’s kind of journalism is part of the death of local journalism.
Breslin was a liberal without being subsumed into the party structure; he didn’t canonize the people he wrote about even when he admired them.
I haven’t thought about Breslin in years. I need to re-read his work, and internalize it.
Glyph: A Grand Unified Theory of the AI Hype Cycle: — “I’m sorry, but as an AI language model, I cannot repeat history exactly. However, I can rhyme with it.”
My hour of memoryless lucidity — For Eric Neyman, the hour after being sedated for oral surgery “turned out to be a fascinating experience because I was completely lucid but had almost zero short-term memory." He used the time to do simple experiments on the links between memory, consciousness and free will, with the aid of his girlfriend.
Conspiracy theories and the people who love them: What QAnon supporters, butthole sunners and New Age spiritualists have in common.
A 2021 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute found that 23% of Republicans believe that “the government, media and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles … 8% of self-identified Democrats and 14% of independents also agreed with that statement."
Those people are batshit crazy.
A Republican Election Clerk vs. Trump Die-Hards in a World of Lies [NYTimes] — Cindy Elgan has overseen elections in rural Nevada without incident for 20 years, but now even her neighbors wonder if she’s part of “the deep state cabal.”
Elgan is a Republican Trump supporter—or former Trump supporter—who flew a Trump campaign flag at her house in the 2020 election. The county went 85% for Trump. And yet Elgan’s MAGA neighbors, some of whom used to be her friends, are convinced she’s part of the Deep State conspiracy and are seeking to recall her.
There’s something deeper going on here than just “MAGAs be stupid.” Americans have lost faith in their institutions, because their institutions have betrayed them over and over, and so Americans lash out at the nearest target.