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Heather Cox Richardson, author of the excellent Letters from an American newsletter, has a new book out today about the health of American democracy: Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America. From Virginia Heffernan's review of the book in the Washington Post:
She has an intriguing origin point for today's afflictions: the New Deal. The first third of the book, which hurtles toward Donald Trump's election, is as bingeable as anything on Netflix. "Democracy Awakening" starts in the 1930s, when Americans who'd been wiped out in the 1929 stock market crash were not about to let the rich demolish the economy again. New Deal programs designed to benefit ordinary people and prevent future crises were so popular that by 1960 candidates of both parties were advised to simply "nail together" coalitions and promise them federal funding. From 1946 to 1964, the liberal consensus — with its commitments to equality, the separation of church and state, and the freedoms of speech, press and religion — held sway.
But Republican businessmen, who had caused the crash, despised the consensus. Richardson's account of how right-wingers appropriated the word "socialism" from the unrelated international movement is astute. When invoked to malign all government investment, "socialism" served to recruit segregationist Democrats, who could be convinced that the word meant Black people would take their money, and Western Democrats, who resented government protections on land and water. This new Republican Party created an ideology that coalesced around White Christianity and free markets.
Heffernan calls this first part of Richardson's book "the most lucid just-so story for Trump's rise I've ever heard". I'm in the midst of two other books right now (The Vaster Wilds & The Mountain in the Sea) but I might have to make room for a third.
You just have to admire a chart that casually purports to show every single thing in the Universe in one simple 2D plot. The chart in question is from a piece in the most recent issue of the American Journal of Physics with the understated title of "All objects and some questions".
In Fig. 2, we plot all the composite objects in the Universe: protons, atoms, life forms, asteroids, moons, planets, stars, galaxies, galaxy clusters, giant voids, and the Universe itself. Humans are represented by a mass of 70 kg and a radius of 50 cm (we assume sphericity), while whales are represented by a mass of 10^5 kg and a radius of 7 m.
The "sub-Planckian unknown" and "forbidden by gravity" sections of the chart makes the "quantum uncertainty" section seem downright normal — the paper collectively calls these "unphysical regions". Lovely turns of phrase all.
But what does it all mean? My physics is too rusty to say, but I thought one of the authors' conjectures was particularly intriguing: "Our plot of all objects also seems to suggest that the Universe is a black hole." Huh, cool.
There I Ruined It is fast becoming one of my favorite web delights — musician Dustin Ballard remixes and mashes beloved songs in an attempt to ruin them. The video embedded above features Eminem's Lose Yourself sung to the tune of the Super Mario Bros theme song...and it makes me laugh every time I watch it.
You can check out more of There I Ruined It on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram.
P.S. My idea for a song to ruin: the Happy Days theme song, but it just keeps repeating the days of the week ("Sunday Monday happy days / Tuesday Wednesday happy days...") in a loop, using the Shepard tone to (seemingly) keep the pitch ever-rising.
I don't know about you, but the title "The Blood Collages of John Bingley Garland (ca. 1850–60)" made me click pretty damn fast to see what sort of Victorian age shenanigans this dude was up to. From the Public Domain Review:
The Blood Book is handmade, folio-sized, with a handsome marbled endpaper and forty-three pages of exquisitely crafted decoupage. John Bingley Garland, the manuscript's creator, used collage techniques, excising illustrations from other books to assemble elegant, balanced compositions. Most of the source material is Romantic engravings by William Blake and his ilk, but there are also brilliantly colored flowers and fruits. Snakes are a favorite motif, butterflies another. A small bird is centered on every page. The space between the images is filled with tiny hand-written script that reads like a staccato sermon. "One! yet has larger bounties! to bestow! Joys! Powers! untasted! In a World like this, Powers!" etc.
The book's reputation, however, rests on a decorative detail that overwhelms: To each page, Garland added languid, crimson drops in red India ink, hanging from the cut-out images like pendalogues from a chandelier. Blood drips from platters of grapes and tree boughs, statuaries and skeletons. Crosses seep, a cheetah drools, angels dangle bloody sashes. A bouquet of white chrysanthemums is spritzed.
To be clear, Garland's blood is not that of surgery or crime or menses, but of religious iconography. He obviously intended the blood to represent Christ's own.
The Blood Book are strikingly modern; as PDR states, Garland uses "techniques usually dated to Cubism in the early twentieth century" to make his collages. I love running across seemingly out-of-time objects like this.
From XKCD, the progression of people's opinions about cars & urban planning, from "I wish there wasn't so much traffic to get into the city. They should put in more lanes." to "Anything that makes a city a worse place to drive makes it a better place to live." As The War on Cars said on Bluesky, "Randall Munroe, welcome to The War on Cars."
P.S. Re: putting in more lanes, read up on induced demand and road dieting for why that's often not a great idea.
Elizabeth Spiers for the NY Times on how to apologize (given the recent spate of celebrity non-apologies): I Have a Question for the Famous People Who Have Tried to Apologize.
The first step in a good apology is acknowledging harm. The second is expressing genuine regret, and where possible, acknowledging our shortcoming. Our intentions are not always good. Sometimes we're selfish. Sometimes we don't know what we're doing, and sometimes we fail to consider the consequences. If we can admit these things, it helps repair trust.
Then we vow, in good faith, to not perpetuate the same harm again.
The last step is repair. This means directly addressing the harm done — not via self-flagellation on YouTube nor with any expectation of forgiveness.
I posted about how to apologize a few years ago after reading Katie Heaney's piece on, wait for it, celebrity non-apologies:
Here are the six components of an apology from Beth Polin:
1. An expression of regret — this, usually, is the actual "I'm sorry."
2. An explanation (but, importantly, not a justification).
3. An acknowledgment of responsibility.
4. A declaration of repentance.
5. An offer of repair.
6. A request for forgiveness.
I think about these components whenever giving or receiving apologies — it's a great framework to keep in mind.
And much more in the archives...
