Sorry for my delay.  Nothing big--just change of station, getting settled in, etc..  All hale & hearty, safe & sound, hunky & dory.  

Now we return to our regularly scheduled programming.

Jamelle Bouie’s newsletter this week—it’s always good—has a nice little intro on his writing process.  Check it out!  And subscribe to the newsletter, too.

Great piece by Norm Ornstein who, as he says, has watched over the past five decades as the GOP has devolved into something more akin to ISIS’s ideological wing than a workable political party.  

A fun reading list from the Brookings “Africa Growth Initiative” team.   

…“On one hand, satires called out an indiscriminate, essentially passive fascination with “news” of any kind. On the other, they reflected dismay at a world where traditional social order really was coming apart, where the discussion of ideas in coffeehouses eventually contributed to new, revolutionary politics. It might not be a stretch to see both strains in critiques of social media power-users today.”

Interesting piece comparing discussions of coffee-houses in the 17th and 18th century with discussions of social media today.  Comparisons are often illuminating; this one seems fairly so.  

Some good stuff in here, on "doom scrolling." Don't do that too much--don't read and re-read obsessively. Do limit scrolling time with timers, do get away from all screens, do connect with friends in non-screen ways.  And yet more on doom scrolling, and how the bottomless nature of the technology mimics the bottomless nature of our fears.  

As we who are in academia gear up for another academic year, even one as strange as this one will undoubtedly be, part of my mind turns to advising.  This article has really interesting things to say about how to do advising well.  A basic question to ask: what do you want to do with your life?  (Sometimes I’m struck by how widely applicable Clausewitz’s dictum is: “in war everything is simple; but the simplest things are very hard to do.”)

A fascinating, and disturbing, look at Chinese intellectuals who are deeply pro-nationalist.  Or pro-statist, is more accurate.  Sound like our Trumpist "intellectuals."  (Who are not really intellectuals, but ideologues.)  Worrying.  

Nice brief piece about the Catholic anti-modernist (but not reactionary) Charles Péguy, by a friend of mine, Jay Tolson.   

Interesting study that suggests that humans seem to stay optimistic, more or less, at least into their 60s.

This is a sobering look at what is behind the struggles over the app Tik-Tok.  

More to come--stay safe--mask up--