Sign of the changing seasons: Today is the first day since the spring that I’ve had to turn on the lights in my home office before dinner.
Chris Arnade: China is "the US, circa 1955 or so, but with the benefit of modern tech"
Chris Arnade walks the city of Zhengzhou, China, and shares his self-described “oversimplified take on all of China, which is that it’s the US, circa 1955 or so, but with the benefit of modern tech.”
The analogy isn’t perfect given the fundamental differences on the essential question of “what is a good life, and how do you obtain it but China has the energy, optimism, and trajectory that the US had then. This isn’t confined to only the narrow minority of the exceptionally fortunate, but rather is manifest across the whole economic bell curve, because the entire population is getting richer at velocities approaching ten percent a year, levels of growth that tend to make everyone giddy and forgiving of other issues. I’m not a rigid ideological materialist, but having your economy double roughly every decade absolves a lot of other sins, and tends to put smiles on people’s faces.
When I was doing my work in the US Rust Belt, talking to the elderly in decaying cities, one of the common laments I heard over and over was some variation of, “Back then, you could walk straight out of high school onto the factory floor, and build a good life. If you worked hard enough, played by the rules, you could get married, buy a house, raise a family, go on a few vacations a year, and see your kids and grandkids do better than you did. You can’t do that now, not without going away to get some fancy college degree that puts you so far in debt you might as well be chained to the bank.”
While the Chinese version differs–“playing by the rules” is more stringent, home is a tiny apartment in a forty-story tower, vacations are to Shanghai’s Disney World rather than Orlando–the trajectory remains intact. They can walk out of high school into the iPhone factory and build themselves a good life, certainly as measured against what their parents had, which is how optimism is forged, through comparison to local expectations.
Last night I felt awful about Senate Democrats capitulating to Republicans, but on further reflection, I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Perhaps they looked at the harm that would be caused by a shutdown and decided to just kick the problem down the road. There were never going to be any good outcomes to this particular standoff.
The only good outcome is going to be voting the Trump government out of office and prosecuting its leaders to the fullest extent of the law. No clemency “for the good of national unity.” We did that with the Confederacy, Nixon and after Trump’s first term, and it has brought us 150 years of misery.
“Low skilled” workers are a myth. “[Minimum-wage jobs are] not low-skill. They simply require different skills, ones that not just anyone possesses.” The author, Rachel Moody, is half-right here. I’m not convinced that minimum-wage jobs are not low-skilled. But Moody is right that these jobs are important, and the workers are entitled to dignity and a living wage.
“Once I returned home, I realised the only things that had kept their value were the relationships and conversations I had had. Everything else seemed perishable.” I visited every country in the world without flying. Here are eight things I learned.
Chris Arnade walks Taipei and other parts of China, and reflects on the temples, materialism and pigeon keepers. “Six flights higher is where I found Mr. Li, an especially kind man, who like all pigeon keepers around the world, was giddy to meet someone else who loves the rats with wings.”
The Edmund Fitzgerald sank 50 years ago.
Gordon Lightfoot’s ballad, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” became one of the biggest hits of 1976, “less than a year after the disaster it commemorates.” writes Neda Ulaby for NPR:
The Canadian musician had agonized over writing the song in the first place.
“He feared being inaccurate, corny or worse, appearing to exploit a tragedy for profit,” writes John U. Bacon in his new bestseller, The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald. “But more than that, as a fellow sailor and a child of the Great Lakes … this song – whatever it was – was deeply personal.”
…
“From 1875 to 1975, there were at least 6,000 commercial shipwrecks on the bottom of the Great Lakes,” Bacon told NPR. “So that is one shipwreck a week every week for a century. That is one casualty every day for a century.”
The Trump government says it will use the military against American civilians and is openly preparing to do it. They’re getting ready to steal the 2026 election. This is not some bullshit TikTok conspiracy theory; it’s happening in the open.
Trump’s domestic militia is growing. “The President repeatedly says he’ll use the military against American civilians and is creating special units to do so.”
Trump Administration Demands States ‘Undo’ Work to Send Full Food Stamps — “They would rather go door to door, taking away people’s food, than do the right thing and fully fund SNAP for November so that struggling veterans, seniors, and children can keep food on the table."