Just some stuff.

Matt Levine writes a newsletter entitled Morey Stuff, and it sounds pretty terrific; I’m subscribing, maybe you should too.  “He makes readers feel in on the savage joke that is late capitalism.”

Good review of Robert Putnam’s new book, though I get nervous when he sounds deliberately optimistic.

A profile of Helena Norberg-Hodge, a localism activist in Australia.  I’m ambivalent about the uninterrogated Romanticism of her apparent assumptions .

A review of a book about how fortunate children are to be born today, as opposed to any time in the past. Worth thinking about.

More info on why professors seem more liberal: because “liberal“ is relative to the rest of the political spectrum, and the right has gone but so over the past few decades.  

When it comes to the alienation of educated Americans from conservative ideas, conservatives have only themselves to blame. By rejecting facts instead of adapting to new information — by refusing to budge from the same free-market dogmas they have been pushing since the 1930s — conservatives have created the wedge between educated Americans and conservative thinking that they now hypocritically lament. The anthropologist Ashley Montagu famously said that reality has a well-known liberal bias. Present circumstances support a slightly different formulation: Conservatives have become biased against reality. Until the right faces reality, it will have trouble winning over anyone who pays attention to evidence — as, of course, all good professors do.

The “hedonometer”!  An interesting story about measuring emotions via Twitter.  (Seriously—who thinks Twitter is a good place for anyone’s emotions??)   

The Middle class is growing all around the world; China’s middle class is getting bigger, too.

An excerpt, on W. G. Sebald, from Daniel Mendelsohn’s just-published book Three Rings.

A really good piece by Sarah Ellison about the controversy surrounding the New York Times 1619 project.

A very funny article about PBS pledge drives. Elmo does indeed know where you live, motherf@#er.

Now don't you forget that.