We talked about New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn’s weird take on the NYT’s coverage of Donald Trump on this week’s episode of Politix, but I also recommend Daniel Drezner’s post on the same interview, which raised an angle we didn’t pay much attention to.
If you look back at the coverage of the 2016 campaign, one big problem with it in retrospect is that it just didn’t take the odds of Trump winning seriously enough. He was covered, very extensively, but as a kind of sociocultural phenomenon rather than as a potential president. There was a decent amount of scrutiny of Trump the man, but very little scrutiny of Trump as a potential president and policymaker. Now, in 2024, everyone is of course aware that he might win — but that calls for more reporting on what he’s going to do if he wins. Not just, like, doomsday porn based on rumors emanating from his inner circle. What are Republican senators thinking about in terms of Medicaid cuts? What’s happening with mifepristone? I feel like the conventional wisdom is that Trump is favored to win and Republicans are favored to pick up three Senate seats, maybe more. So what happens if that occurs? If you think apocalyptic liberal doomsday scenarios are wrong or overstated, that’s fine. But you should be telling us something. Instead, we got an eight-byline liveblog of a House hearing on anti-Israel sentiment in three K-12 public school systems.
Other recommendations:
John Halpin on the energy divide.
Jennifer Pahlka on FAFSA.
Eli Dourado on civilizational collapse.
Brian Potter on building semiconductor fabs.
We had some good land use news this week out of Colorado where housing package passed the senate. Meanwhile, my sense is that Birmingham, AL is not a particularly high-demand city but I’m glad to see they did comprehensive parking reform anyway — parking mandates are bad in any kind of community. They discovered an alphabet for whales. AlphaFold3 seems like a great example of AI doing something useful. It looks like the “child care cliff” that there were a lot of scare stories about didn’t happen.
I like the new Dua Lipa album and the “Radical Optimism” title fits the theme of this section!
Comment of the week from Bob M on misperceptions about the status quo:
One common (it seems almost universal) fallacy is the conflation of marginal tax rates with average tax rates. I hear people worrying that a salary increase might push them into a higher tax bracket (as if that might cause them to lose money on net). And, when I explained how the Federal income tax works in a gradaute-level public financial management class, not one of the 30 students (mostly young, working health sector professionals) had previously understood that a household that moves from a top rate of 32% to the top rate of 35% will only pay the 35% on the portion above the top of the 32% bracket ($231,000 for a single person in 2023).
And now our question from StrangePolyhedrons: Sometimes people call you out for having been raised in a pretty wealthy childhood, gone to an elite college, gone from there to a successful career as a journalist and essayist and generally not having had any periods in your life where you were dealing with serious economic hardship. I don’t think you need to apologize for that at all, but real talk do you think that’s left you with blind spots? How do you work to mitigate them, and do you have specific friends you can lean on who can give you reality checks about living in poverty? This is one of those topics I’ve seen you touch on in twitter, but I’d be interested to see the expanded version of your thoughts.
I’m honestly a little puzzled by the popularity of this question (Kate was rooting for it, too), because what am I supposed to say — like, yes, obviously, I do not have personal experience with economic deprivation.
But I don’t think I’m doing the kind of work that involves the pretense that I do.
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