“Today, therefore, neither party represents the same types of places it did just 10 years ago. As such, the Democratic Party is now anchored in the nation’s booming, but highly unequal, metro areas, while the GOP relies on aging and economically stagnant manufacturing-reliant rural and exurban communities.
What might these divides look like in the future? It’s hard to imagine the current extreme shifts going much farther. The concentration of more than 70% of the nation’s professional and digital services economy in the territory of one party would seem to register an almost unsustainable degree of polarization.
At the same time, there are few signs of any coming reversal of the decade’s divergence. Instead, the current economic trends underlie the current party divide and reinforce it. For at least the foreseeable future, therefore, the nation seems destined to struggle with extreme economic, territorial, and political divides in which the two parties talk almost entirely past each other on the most important economic and social issues, like innovation, immigration, and education because they represent starkly separate and diverging worlds. Not only do the two parties adhere to very different views, but they inhabit increasingly different economies and environments.”
A nice interview of Zadie Smith about some of her favorite recent book reads.
A piece about a "quartet" of philosophers who all were women and who reshaped Anglophone philosophy in the mid-century. Personally, I think it's a trio and Midgley is second-rank, but I guess that's just what makes horse races work.
Have the last few decades been an Engels Pause in Advanced Industrial Economies, or maybe only the US? I had never heard of this but it's provocative: “it's interesting that the original Engels' pause led to calls for socialism, and that socialism as a broad idea, if not necessarily a well-defined policy program, has re-entered the public discussion today. Historical parallels offer a reminder that when sustained shifts in an economy occur over several decades--a rise in inequality, wages rising more slowly than output, sustained high profit levels--the causes are more likely to involve shifts in economic output and organization driven by underlying factors like technology or demographics, not by factors like selfishness, conspiracies, or malevolence (whose prevalence does not shift as much, and are always with us). Finally, the theory of the Engels' pause suggests that underlying economic forces can drive patterns rising inequality, high profits, and stagnant wages can persist for decades, but nonetheless can have a momentum that leads to their eventual reversal, although my crystal ball is not telling me when or how that will happen.”
Here's a far-too charitable look, from 40,000 feet, at a certain kind of noisy anti-liberalism abroad in American political life today. (It's not having much impact on American intellectual life.) The author mentions the advocates' affection for Poland and Hungary, and the more you know about the current state of things in Poland and Hungary, the more alarming that affection will be. They are, as Orwell would say, objectively Trumpists, and--I think, though they would deny it--subjectively, at least semi-self-consciously, mostly white nationalists. "As with some of the movements to supplant liberalism on the left, the radical Catholic critics have an easier time imagining laying waste to the current system than they do laying out a plausible vision of what might replace it.
The decline of monasteries--charted in Germany in this article, but I believe a wider phenomenon. What does it portend for the future of religious institutions in our world? Will there be another model of monastic life? Monasticism has reinvented itself before, I think--in the west, with Benedict, then the Cicertcians, and beyond. But will it again?