The Walkman is 41 years old.  I must have gotten my first Walkman by about 1982 or 83, I think.  It’s an amazing artifact, and as this piece makes clear, came on the scene just at a moment when people turned inward, toward more social isolation especially in large urban settings—and perhaps in part caused that inward turn.  Really worth reading.

This is depressing, if—given human nature—unsurprising: a powerful, meticulous, and long-developed academic article about the backlash in the 1960s against racial-justice protests, got weaponized in the moment of the George Floyd protests, and people got hurt.  (Also, Nathan Robinson is not one of my favorite mini-public intellectuals these days.)

A good account of “woke capitalism” and the difference between “socially” and “economically” radical challenges to racism.  I’d frame that as expressive and substantive, but ok.  

Kind of counter-intuitive but interesting: 

Writing in 2018, the psychologists Keltner, Sara Gottlieb and Tania Lombrozo found that the tendency to feel awe (dispositional awe) is positively associated with scientific thinking in non-scientists.

Hmm.  I would have thought psychologists would find that awe was not a good thing for scientific reasoning—at least, that’s what a self-congratulatory rationalist bias would make one think.  This finding strikes me as quite thought-provoking.  Much more in this piece, on the import of awe in scientific reasoning (with a dollop of Heschel!), is also good.  She suggests:

Awe increases our tolerance for uncertainty and opens our receptivity to new and unusual ideas, which are crucial for paradigm change.

So happy to see a serious review (and one that’s deflationary, too, though that’s not the same thing) in the New York Times Book Review, which has recently struck me as tepidly boosterish.  It's by Daniel Mendelsohn, which makes it even better.

A serious engagement with Frank B. Wilderson’s Afropessimism that raises some very real concerns about it.

Black thought at its best has been a vehicle for and a product of analogy. Black Christians saw the liberatory potential in the story of the Hebrews rescued by God from beneath Pharaoh’s thumb and, still more, in the life of the Jewish Palestinian preacher Jesus, put to death by the colonizers of his homeland. Some of them looked to Latin America, where liberation theology blossomed; they created Black liberation theology, and forever transformed the flavor of American religion. A feeling of kinship with the colonized people of India, and with Gandhi in particular, helped make nonviolence a core practice of the civil-rights movement. A study of the revolutionary struggles in Algeria, Fanon’s great subject, helped to make the case—argued most famously by the Black Liberation Army, an influence on Wilderson—for the occasional necessity of violence. None of this is incidental: the impulse toward freedom is always seeking friends.

COVID-19 comes for Red America, just in time for the summer party conventions.  I predict that, over the rest of July and August, as infections continue to mount and deaths start to rise again, this will cause harm to Trump’s base of support. But you know, it may not: as he noted long ago, evidence of his murderousness is unlikely to sway people convinced of the potential murderousness of the “other side”.