Is there a better term than "normal" to describe people who don't read, don't care about politics, and aren't - what - in a bubble, or in a "normal" bubble? I am an elitist a-hole who is a clown, so there aren't any normal people are far as I'm concerned. They've all got their kinks, and are all uniquely imperfect and fascinating. How about "non-curious" or "normalized" or "conventional" even? Abnormality in this context Matt sets up, seems a vital quality for anyone who wants to read, know sh*t, question things, or avoid conventional people who use prejudice and intellectual autopilot as a reason not to practice a modicum of empathy or curiosity.
small addendum:
I don't judge the youth I collaborate with because they don't read. They are digitally/visually/asmr addicted, but they are also open to oral storytelling and analogue play. I love it.
It astonishes me that even at this very late date, too many outlets treat what happens on various social media platforms as the equivalent of a town meeting, and from there opinions and predictions and assessments proliferate.
How many people don’t have the time to reflect on what percentage of the electorate believes or feels? Who don’t have the time because they’re working so hard to make enough money to put food on the table or to make their mortgage payments or get their car repaired? The answer is a lot. And they don’t even exist as characters in movies anymore, except when they’re case studies.
"Why are you thinking about the common man? Bankson asked me the second night. What does he have to do with the nexus of thought and change? He turns his nose up at democracy."
I'm sorry, every time I hear "Costco" in anything other than a strictly shopping context I can't help but think of this mega-awkward Japanese reality TV moment:
Not to fanboy too much but this is why I think Matt is one of the best political journalists. Far too many have the capability to read and interpret stats (like those related to spanking) and either don't trust it or don't internalize it! Most people in the world are not like any of us here, and it takes real effort to digest that.
Also, most people don't want to be like us either! There's a sense among cosmopolitan liberals that with the right opportunity, wealth, and information, rust belt working class folks will become cosmopolitan liberals. That is just not the case. I have former classmates who had much better opportunities than their parents, but ended up OD'ing on opioids or getting convicted of domestic abuse or having heart attacks before age 40. Life is really messy for most people.
Matt seems to get the pulse of the average GM/Ford lifer family than almost anyone else I read. I think it would be valuable for Matt to share how he maintains this sense despite his very elite background.
“Jerusalem Demsas wrote a great piece recently about some classic flubs of journalists mistaking trends in their own lives — gentrification in historically Black neighborhoods, rising levels of union membership — for national trends.” Demsas said this and then hired exclusively Ivy League students for their first fellowship lmao
This is a great piece, especially how the subhed ("at least I know I'm a huge weirdo" -- a response to Zaid) is the whole point and the piece presents devastatingly thorough evidence of that.
So the piece sets out to do a job, and does it very well. It's not lacking anything. But still ... isn't there an elephant in the room? Is it really sustainable that the central decisions of our democracy (who's going to run it) are being made by people who are not just uninformed, but constitutionally incapable of ever being informed?
I dispute that people with less educational ability or attainment are constitutionally incapable of being informed. It was posted earlier that literacy is not the equivalent of either intelligence or wisdom. And I would now add that it's certainly not correlated with the ability to judge good and bad, right and wrong, virtue and corruption.
It's true that the majority of Americans have judged those things incorrectly, but we can distinguish mistake versus incapacity. Those same illiterate masses have had an imperfect but good record over the last 250 years.
"I dispute that people with less educational ability or attainment are constitutionally incapable of being informed"
oh that's interesting, I wonder what ML is going to say about how you can become informed about a modern government without reading anything
"It was posted earlier that literacy is not the equivalent of either intelligence or wisdom. And I would now add that it's certainly not correlated with the ability to judge good and bad, right and wrong, virtue and corruption."
...hmm, maybe ML will say something about being *informed* soon
"It's true that the majority of Americans have judged those things incorrectly, but we can distinguish mistake versus incapacity. Those same illiterate masses have had an imperfect but good record over the last 250 years."
...wow, setting aside the ways that our democracy has changed in 250 years, he still hasn't said a single word about *being informed*. Maybe he's about to -- wait -- no, that's the end of the post.
Reading is not the only way to become informed about anything, and never has been. It's nuts to think so.
For the easiest examples: I've sat through hundreds of hours of professorial lectures, and whether or not I supplemented my knowledge with reading material I was substantially informed about an array of subjects simply by virtue of sitting there listening. I rebuilt my car's anti-lock brake system this week by watching a You tube video. I listened to the Politix podcast this morning and while I didn't learn anything profound I was at least marginally more informed about our modern government at the end.
We live in an era of multiple media outlets than can inform people about what's going on in the world.
And none of this is particularly new. Most Americans learned most of what they knew about the Vietnam War not by reading the paper but by watching Walter Cronkite et al. Americans in 1940 understood The Blitz by listening to Edward R. Murrow and the Depression by listening to FDR.
Now and forever people have informed themselves about the world through thought leaders in their community, be they pastors, priests, union leaders, local politicians, etc.
I haven't tried this, but it wouldn't surprise me if taking out a phone and saying "hey Alexa, what happened in the Iran War today" didn't return at least a modicum of information.
I grew up in a purple town in a blue state, and it'd be easy to mistake the fact that half my hometown voted for Trump for an understanding of purple state politics.. But I'm actually someone who LEFT, and that alone makes me unusual, and the circumstances of why I left move me even further out of normie.
I think this is generally a great piece - most Americans dont care about politics as much as the people who write or even read about politics. That makes sense.
One gentle pushback tho - most Americans DO live in metro areas, specifically pretty large ones. From the 2020 census, about half of Americans lived in metros with 2.25M people or more - so Austin-sized or larger. These are generally metro areas that have a major pro sports team from the big 4 leagues, with the exceptions being the Inland Empire, San Diego and Austin (all but the inland empire do have an MLS team). In short, half of Americans lived in "major league" metros. This country is more big city (or at least suburbs of moderately sized cities) than it is small town.
(The eleven metros immediately smaller than Austin all have a team in the four major sports leagues as well, and their populations as a whole makes up for the three bigger metros that dont have such a team).
Caveat to the caveat - most Americans certainly live in places outside of the Acela corridor and the big, blue west coast metros in California and the Pacific Northwest. But now with a triple caveat, something like 100M people did live in those places at the last census - so while it isnt most of the country that is there, it is more than a quarter and less than a third.
Us reading this article are out of touch, for sure. Whether or not you read this article, you likely could get to a big league ballgame this weekend without much planning or having to pay for a flight or a hotel, and have to deal with traffic on your way to work and your experience with rural hospitals is probably minimal.
Just looked it up and in addition to the SoCal metros, metros larger than Austin that lack an NFL team also include Orlando (near the Bucs and kinda near the Dolphins), StL (Rams fans in both locales have been screwed), and SanAntonio (really close to Austin).
I kinda dont expect the NFL to expand any time soon, if they did theyd probably add more than one team, so Austin or San Antonio may be likely but Im not sure theyd be the first option.
This sounds like a great mailbag question, lol. I imagine it is part Longhorns, part the Cowboys dominate much of Texas and while Austin isnt small it also isnt big enough that youd want to put a team so close to the Cowboys. So kinda similar to why San Diego and Riverside dont have teams - it is more lucrative to be in LA. Im not sports media expert tho just guy on the internet commenting about sports on a blog about politics.
People underestimate what a 6th grade reading level actually is. Look at a 6th grade Language Arts curriculum. They are analyzing texts, comparing arguments etc. It's much more complex than people think. Also, beyond the really early levels, sorting reading difficulty by lexile level has some real drawbacks. Recommended reading for 6th graders include the Hobbit, The Giver, The Secret Garden etc. These all have lexile levels at or below the recommended range for 6th graders of 925L to 1070L.
But here's the thing. The Grapes of Wrath has a lexile score of 680L, Crime and Punishment is 790-900L and Jane Eyre is 890L.
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone is 880L.
I'd argue that the average NYT article complaining about "whatever Trump got up to today" is easier to read and understand than The Grapes of Wrath.
I actually think if you made a bunch of Americans reading at a 6th grade level read the New York Times, the The Economist and the Free Press for 6 months, they'd struggle at first but then do okay, and become dramatically better informed.
The problem is, after a long day at work, television and social media is more entertaining for most people. Everyone reading Slow Boring is weird because of some combination of 1. They think it is more entertaining than television 2. They feel like they SHOULD read it, whether or not it is more entertaining 3. They have a job where they can read it at work and decide it's okay to do this but somehow not okay to watch The Pitt.
According to sold a story, reading levels are bullshit anyway. But seriously, I peg less than half the country as being functionally illiterate. There are lots of folks that understand what they read but suck at standardized tests and standardized test questions (or apathetically Christmas-tree them) though which are going to make the numbers look worse than they are
> One result is that you often meet people who went to the flagship campuses of state universities and are walking around with a chip on their shoulder.
I would say your problem, Matt, isn’t that you’re “out of touch”.
It’s that since Trump’s second victory, you’ve overcompensated for being consciously “out of touch”.
Which isn’t a mortal sin; in that, you’re a dime-a-dozen. But still.
Is there a better term than "normal" to describe people who don't read, don't care about politics, and aren't - what - in a bubble, or in a "normal" bubble? I am an elitist a-hole who is a clown, so there aren't any normal people are far as I'm concerned. They've all got their kinks, and are all uniquely imperfect and fascinating. How about "non-curious" or "normalized" or "conventional" even? Abnormality in this context Matt sets up, seems a vital quality for anyone who wants to read, know sh*t, question things, or avoid conventional people who use prejudice and intellectual autopilot as a reason not to practice a modicum of empathy or curiosity.
small addendum:
I don't judge the youth I collaborate with because they don't read. They are digitally/visually/asmr addicted, but they are also open to oral storytelling and analogue play. I love it.
Yes.
It astonishes me that even at this very late date, too many outlets treat what happens on various social media platforms as the equivalent of a town meeting, and from there opinions and predictions and assessments proliferate.
How many people don’t have the time to reflect on what percentage of the electorate believes or feels? Who don’t have the time because they’re working so hard to make enough money to put food on the table or to make their mortgage payments or get their car repaired? The answer is a lot. And they don’t even exist as characters in movies anymore, except when they’re case studies.
"Why are you thinking about the common man? Bankson asked me the second night. What does he have to do with the nexus of thought and change? He turns his nose up at democracy."
Gonna put "Sacramento: Above Average" on our water tower.
Welcome to Costco, I love you
I'm sorry, every time I hear "Costco" in anything other than a strictly shopping context I can't help but think of this mega-awkward Japanese reality TV moment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cylHUrl24zE
Not to fanboy too much but this is why I think Matt is one of the best political journalists. Far too many have the capability to read and interpret stats (like those related to spanking) and either don't trust it or don't internalize it! Most people in the world are not like any of us here, and it takes real effort to digest that.
Also, most people don't want to be like us either! There's a sense among cosmopolitan liberals that with the right opportunity, wealth, and information, rust belt working class folks will become cosmopolitan liberals. That is just not the case. I have former classmates who had much better opportunities than their parents, but ended up OD'ing on opioids or getting convicted of domestic abuse or having heart attacks before age 40. Life is really messy for most people.
Matt seems to get the pulse of the average GM/Ford lifer family than almost anyone else I read. I think it would be valuable for Matt to share how he maintains this sense despite his very elite background.
“Jerusalem Demsas wrote a great piece recently about some classic flubs of journalists mistaking trends in their own lives — gentrification in historically Black neighborhoods, rising levels of union membership — for national trends.” Demsas said this and then hired exclusively Ivy League students for their first fellowship lmao
Who else is likely to want the job?
This is a great piece, especially how the subhed ("at least I know I'm a huge weirdo" -- a response to Zaid) is the whole point and the piece presents devastatingly thorough evidence of that.
So the piece sets out to do a job, and does it very well. It's not lacking anything. But still ... isn't there an elephant in the room? Is it really sustainable that the central decisions of our democracy (who's going to run it) are being made by people who are not just uninformed, but constitutionally incapable of ever being informed?
I dispute that people with less educational ability or attainment are constitutionally incapable of being informed. It was posted earlier that literacy is not the equivalent of either intelligence or wisdom. And I would now add that it's certainly not correlated with the ability to judge good and bad, right and wrong, virtue and corruption.
It's true that the majority of Americans have judged those things incorrectly, but we can distinguish mistake versus incapacity. Those same illiterate masses have had an imperfect but good record over the last 250 years.
"I dispute that people with less educational ability or attainment are constitutionally incapable of being informed"
oh that's interesting, I wonder what ML is going to say about how you can become informed about a modern government without reading anything
"It was posted earlier that literacy is not the equivalent of either intelligence or wisdom. And I would now add that it's certainly not correlated with the ability to judge good and bad, right and wrong, virtue and corruption."
...hmm, maybe ML will say something about being *informed* soon
"It's true that the majority of Americans have judged those things incorrectly, but we can distinguish mistake versus incapacity. Those same illiterate masses have had an imperfect but good record over the last 250 years."
...wow, setting aside the ways that our democracy has changed in 250 years, he still hasn't said a single word about *being informed*. Maybe he's about to -- wait -- no, that's the end of the post.
Weird.
Reading is not the only way to become informed about anything, and never has been. It's nuts to think so.
For the easiest examples: I've sat through hundreds of hours of professorial lectures, and whether or not I supplemented my knowledge with reading material I was substantially informed about an array of subjects simply by virtue of sitting there listening. I rebuilt my car's anti-lock brake system this week by watching a You tube video. I listened to the Politix podcast this morning and while I didn't learn anything profound I was at least marginally more informed about our modern government at the end.
We live in an era of multiple media outlets than can inform people about what's going on in the world.
And none of this is particularly new. Most Americans learned most of what they knew about the Vietnam War not by reading the paper but by watching Walter Cronkite et al. Americans in 1940 understood The Blitz by listening to Edward R. Murrow and the Depression by listening to FDR.
Now and forever people have informed themselves about the world through thought leaders in their community, be they pastors, priests, union leaders, local politicians, etc.
I haven't tried this, but it wouldn't surprise me if taking out a phone and saying "hey Alexa, what happened in the Iran War today" didn't return at least a modicum of information.
That was unnecessarily bitchy.
I grew up in a purple town in a blue state, and it'd be easy to mistake the fact that half my hometown voted for Trump for an understanding of purple state politics.. But I'm actually someone who LEFT, and that alone makes me unusual, and the circumstances of why I left move me even further out of normie.
I guess this is useful for self-reflection but not really useful for policy purposes
I think this is generally a great piece - most Americans dont care about politics as much as the people who write or even read about politics. That makes sense.
One gentle pushback tho - most Americans DO live in metro areas, specifically pretty large ones. From the 2020 census, about half of Americans lived in metros with 2.25M people or more - so Austin-sized or larger. These are generally metro areas that have a major pro sports team from the big 4 leagues, with the exceptions being the Inland Empire, San Diego and Austin (all but the inland empire do have an MLS team). In short, half of Americans lived in "major league" metros. This country is more big city (or at least suburbs of moderately sized cities) than it is small town.
(The eleven metros immediately smaller than Austin all have a team in the four major sports leagues as well, and their populations as a whole makes up for the three bigger metros that dont have such a team).
Caveat to the caveat - most Americans certainly live in places outside of the Acela corridor and the big, blue west coast metros in California and the Pacific Northwest. But now with a triple caveat, something like 100M people did live in those places at the last census - so while it isnt most of the country that is there, it is more than a quarter and less than a third.
Us reading this article are out of touch, for sure. Whether or not you read this article, you likely could get to a big league ballgame this weekend without much planning or having to pay for a flight or a hotel, and have to deal with traffic on your way to work and your experience with rural hospitals is probably minimal.
Why doesn’t Austin have at the very least an NFL team, I wonder? Texans like their football. Is it all Longhorns fans there?
Just looked it up and in addition to the SoCal metros, metros larger than Austin that lack an NFL team also include Orlando (near the Bucs and kinda near the Dolphins), StL (Rams fans in both locales have been screwed), and SanAntonio (really close to Austin).
I kinda dont expect the NFL to expand any time soon, if they did theyd probably add more than one team, so Austin or San Antonio may be likely but Im not sure theyd be the first option.
This sounds like a great mailbag question, lol. I imagine it is part Longhorns, part the Cowboys dominate much of Texas and while Austin isnt small it also isnt big enough that youd want to put a team so close to the Cowboys. So kinda similar to why San Diego and Riverside dont have teams - it is more lucrative to be in LA. Im not sports media expert tho just guy on the internet commenting about sports on a blog about politics.
Thank you, Matt for telling people things they most likely don’t want to know.
People underestimate what a 6th grade reading level actually is. Look at a 6th grade Language Arts curriculum. They are analyzing texts, comparing arguments etc. It's much more complex than people think. Also, beyond the really early levels, sorting reading difficulty by lexile level has some real drawbacks. Recommended reading for 6th graders include the Hobbit, The Giver, The Secret Garden etc. These all have lexile levels at or below the recommended range for 6th graders of 925L to 1070L.
But here's the thing. The Grapes of Wrath has a lexile score of 680L, Crime and Punishment is 790-900L and Jane Eyre is 890L.
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone is 880L.
I'd argue that the average NYT article complaining about "whatever Trump got up to today" is easier to read and understand than The Grapes of Wrath.
I actually think if you made a bunch of Americans reading at a 6th grade level read the New York Times, the The Economist and the Free Press for 6 months, they'd struggle at first but then do okay, and become dramatically better informed.
The problem is, after a long day at work, television and social media is more entertaining for most people. Everyone reading Slow Boring is weird because of some combination of 1. They think it is more entertaining than television 2. They feel like they SHOULD read it, whether or not it is more entertaining 3. They have a job where they can read it at work and decide it's okay to do this but somehow not okay to watch The Pitt.
According to sold a story, reading levels are bullshit anyway. But seriously, I peg less than half the country as being functionally illiterate. There are lots of folks that understand what they read but suck at standardized tests and standardized test questions (or apathetically Christmas-tree them) though which are going to make the numbers look worse than they are
As a real American from salt of the earth central Pennsylvania, I enjoy your takes.
> One result is that you often meet people who went to the flagship campuses of state universities and are walking around with a chip on their shoulder.
I feel seen. I-L-L-