Further Reading & Listening #10
Substack explained, Brezhnev returns, breaking the Trump spell, viral weirdness, Web3, White House tunes, old age, New York culture wars and psychological operations.
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I hope you enjoy the week’s most diverting and thought-provoking articles.
Substack on Substack
Is it still the last best hope for independent journalism?
It’s become a haven for writers who find, for one reason or another, that traditional media no longer works for them. Substack will never be able to offer the deep institutional backing and editorial muscle that comes with working at a place like The New York Times. But it’s able to provide limited assistance with editing, legal, design, photo subscriptions, and health coverage, never mind back-end functions like a content management system and tech support. “This late in my career—I’m 44 now—being a freelancer is like, no matter how many times you prove you can do it, you feel like you’re going around with your hat in your hand every day, reapplying for a job you’ve already had,” says Luke O’Neil, who mostly wrote for mainstream outlets until McKenzie recruited him in 2018 to Substack. He made as much as $120,000 a year publishing Welcome to Hell World. Emily Nunn, a veteran food journalist and former New Yorker arts editor who writes a popular newsletter about salad, echoed those sentiments when Substack invited her to speak at a company Zoom session. Nunn told the group that, as a woman in her early 60s, her career options had become limited, but Substack gave her a second act. “I’m working harder than I’ve ever worked at any job, and yet it’s a complete pleasure,” she said. “I just feel like Substack is filling this gap in journalism that the right people are taking advantage of.”
The New Brezhnev
The Soviet leader who Putin most resembles is not the obvious choice.
Yakov Feygin: Putin's Return? To What?
What can we do to predict Putin’s behavior? I still believe that the answer is to ask “what would Brezhnev do?” The invasion of Ukraine has probably shocked Putin back into political action. Russia is in a long bloody war of attrition. Instead of being weak and indecisive, Europe, the United States, and even many Asian high-tech quickly placed debilitating sanctions on Russia – sanctions that Russia’s technocrats could neither predict nor prepare for due to the secrecy surrounding the invasion. For Putin, who has seemingly withdrawn from domestic politics in the past three years, domestic politics has become part in parcel of Russia’s military effort.
This means paying attention to the political economy of Russian elites again. And Putin is paying attention. Very credible rumors indicate that technocrats, who might be personally opposed to the war are being kept in their positions through personal and political threats. Most prominently Russia’s celebrated and brilliant Central Bank head, Elvira Nabuillina – who apparently had an unusually close relationship with Putin for a technocrat – offered her resignation which was not accepted. Russia’s economy now needs all hands on deck to try to survive sanctions and prosecute the war. Therefore, Putin needs to at least talk to the technocrats and let them try their best to not reform the economy but at least let it run as well as they can.
Trumpism Without Trump?
His grip on the GOP is loosening, but his ideology persists.
But there’s another, larger mood shift going on, and to me it’s the real headline. Something is changing among Trump supporters. It’s a kind of psychological moving forward that is not quite a break, not an abandonment but an acknowledgment of a new era. In Florida recently, talking with Trump supporters, what I picked up is a new distance. They won’t tell pollsters, they may not even tell neighbors, but there was a real sense of: We need Trump’s policies, but we don’t need him. They expressed affection for him, and when not defensive about him they were protective. But as a major backer and donor told me, it’s time to think of the future. Mr. Trump brings “chaos.” They don’t want him to run again. If he does, they’ll vote for him against a Democrat. But as one said, wouldn’t it be good to have someone like Ron DeSantis ?
I stress: These are passionate Trump supporters.
Here’s a sign of the evolution, the most important words spoken in the 2022 election cycle. When Ms. Barnette was asked in debate why, if she’s so Trumpy, Mr. Trump endorsed one of her competitors, she said, “MAGA does not belong to President Trump. . . . Our values never, never shifted to President Trump’s values. It was President Trump who shifted and aligned with our values.”
That was more than a clever response, it was a declaration of autonomy.
It’s not the viruses, it’s us
Weird things are happening after two years of social distancing.
Stat: Viruses that were on hiatus during Covid are back — and behaving in unexpected ways
David Heymann, who chairs an expert committee that advises the Health Emergencies Program at the World Health Organization, said the lifting of pandemic control measures could have helped fuel the spread of monkeypox in the current outbreak in Europe, North America, and beyond. Many of the monkeypox cases have been diagnosed in men who have sex with men.
After two years of limited travel, social distancing and public gatherings, people are throwing off the shackles of Covid control measures and embracing a return to pre-pandemic life. Media reports have suggested recent raves in Spain and Belgium have led to the transmission of the virus among some attendees.
Heymann, who is a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, mused that the monkeypox outbreak could have been smouldering at low levels in the United Kingdom or somewhere else outside of Africa for quite a while, but may have only come to public attention when international travel picked up again.
De-Fi-ant
It’s still early days for the true Web3 believers.
Wired: Paradise at the Crypto Arcade: Inside the Web3 Revolution
The real fun of BUIDLing lies in the problem-solving. How will we get people to join, for example? Nathan, one of my devs, comes up with an idea: He can scrape every crypto wallet that holds either a Bufficorn NFT or ETHDenver meal tokens, and use that as a proxy for people who attended the conference. Then we can “airdrop” our custom token to everyone on that list. Most intoxicatingly, this all takes place in a relatively closed system. Very few of these decisions require us to think much about the messy world outside the confines of our DAO. It all helps me understand the draw of Web3. The sense of moral valor that once accompanied working in Web 2.0 is harder to find these days. Whatever else Web3 is, it’s a realm where coders and technologists can reconnect with the joy of hacking, where they can feel good again about working in tech. Jacksón, who in fact builds elaborate board games as a hobby, tells me that escapism is part of Web3’s appeal. The question is whether the escape hatch leads to a real place or a fantasyland.
Presidential Vinyl
A music collection that is frozen in time.
Washingtonian: The Untold Story of the White House’s Weirdly Hip Record Collection
Things kicked off with a celebratory lunch at the White House hosted by Rosalynn Carter. Blumenthal recalls that he took the opportunity to feel out the President’s staff. “I remember having visions of putting some fairly transgressive stuff on the list,” he says. “There was an album by Randy Newman at the time called Good Old Boys, and there’s a song on there, ‘Rednecks,’ which is one of the greatest critiques of both Southern and Northern racism. I wanted to put that in. His staff person said, ‘Oh, the President loves that album.’ I thought, Okay! That sort of gave me license to make choices I thought would be a good, representative sampling rather than having to censor myself.”
There were also plenty of left-field LPs—music whose inclusion, Rachlis says, offered “a certain kind of subversive joy.” Funkadelic’s Hardcore Jollies made the cut, as did Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols and Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica. A Gil Scott-Heron compilation. Talking Heads’ More Songs About Buildings and Food. The Ramones’ Rocket to Russia. And this time around, there were no selections from Don Ho, although Barry Manilow’s Greatest Hits did lend an easy-listening note to the proceedings. (“I don’t know whether I would have included that if I were doing it today,” says Blumenthal.)
Ninetysomething
The very best of Roger Angell, the poet laureate of baseball, who died last week at 101.
On the other hand, I’ve not yet forgotten Keats or Dick Cheney or what’s waiting for me at the dry cleaner’s today. As of right now, I’m not Christopher Hitchens or Tony Judt or Nora Ephron; I’m not dead and not yet mindless in a reliable upstate facility. Decline and disaster impend, but my thoughts don’t linger there. It shouldn’t surprise me if at this time next week I’m surrounded by family, gathered on short notice—they’re sad and shocked but also a little pissed off to be here—to help decide, after what’s happened, what’s to be done with me now. It must be this hovering knowledge, that two-ton safe swaying on a frayed rope just over my head, that makes everyone so glad to see me again. “How great you’re looking! Wow, tell me your secret!” they kindly cry when they happen upon me crossing the street or exiting a dinghy or departing an X-ray room, while the little balloon over their heads reads, “Holy shit—he’s still vertical!”
Twin Vales of Conceit
Brooklyn battles Manhattan for cultural domination.
In Brooklyn, the borough associated with the “hipster” revolution from the late 2000s, writers energised by the Bernie Sanders campaigns in 2016 and 2020 retain their faith in left-wing politics through new “small” magazines. But on the island of Manhattan, a self-consciously transgressive artistic and literary scene is brewing downtown. In podcasts, plays and literary journals, a different sensibility is being elaborated. Scornful of the “woke” sanctimony of Brooklyn-based media, some flirt with alternative ideologies, while others claim not to be interested in politics at all.
Who wins in New York’s clash of cultures is high-stakes for the future of American political culture. One does not have to go far back to see how scenes deemed cool in New York often become political reality. During the Trump years, college students and struggling young professionals across the country looked to Brooklyn for the podcasts, publications and organising models of a new democratic socialism. This cultural energy soon took broad-based political form with electoral victories in major primaries for figures such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Then came the pandemic. The Brooklyn-based cultural scene took the pandemic seriously, and in-person parties and events largely ground to a halt. Not so across the East River in Manhattan. Filling this sudden void in the city’s culture was a nascent, mostly younger, twenty-something crowd centred on a gentrifying area of Chinatown sometimes known as “Dimes Square” (a portmanteau of Times Square and the name of one of the scene’s preferred restaurants). The defining ethos was scorn for the hyper-cautiousness that reigned in Brooklyn – and more generally for the sanctimony of the “woke” left.
Psy-Ops
The US military 4th Psychological Operations Group’s spooky recruitment video.