Why not some compendium of good news posts? Sure it might not pull numbers but you can document the good news and share it with tour readers. The mailbag are fun but a monthly "what's good?" Roundup would also be a nice break from the normal pieces.
You could also start throwing in some 'human interest' filler about how some family adopted a cat from a shelter & now it won't stop purring, or whatever. Lol
I came into the comments to post a similar sentiment. Another option would be to begin (or end) each mailbag column with a good news item that may not warrant a full daily post.
It has a certain ideological slant - socially left but without the anti-capitalism or anti-technologism - and is run out of Australia. But I think the Slow Boring audience will agree that 80% of the stories it highlights are in fact good news. I'm pretty self-conscious about consuming so much negative media and it helps me feel better about that (while also being short and infrequent enough not to interfere with the negative media addiction).
Of course Matt doing something similar for this audience would be much better yet!
Agree with this! No point in fighting the fact that "things going well is generally less interesting than things going poorly" but regular quick hits would be welcome and build up a good habit of mind to remember that some things are actually going well.
I’d like this. Does anyone remember the John Krasinski SGN (Some Good News) during the pandemic? Similar idea and seemed so necessary during those early months. He stopped doing it after Floyd and I vaguely remember it being because it seemed tasteless during a time of racial reckoning.
The NYT had a great “Fixes” column for years that highlighted innovative solutions to problems, it was very positive, and sadly it recently folded - I’m guessing due to the lack of interest?
Co-signed. No need to go to far in the other direction. Puff pieces about why America is perfect in all ways" is probably worse a solution worse than the problem. But some "hey here are some things that have gotten much better or good policies that were passed" is a good "change up" once in a while.
Small one and probably not that important one, but one near and dear to my heart; how soccer has continued to explode in popularity in this country (see TV ratings for the WC final. A game that started at 7:00 AM for extremely large portions of the country). I can't begin to tell you how much things have changed in my lifetime. For one, we are finally free of sports columnists writing cranky old man columns about how "soccer sucks" or is "Un American" or is "Communist". I remember these (very ubiquitous) columns as a kid. And no they were not just from right wing cranks but very mainstream or even left leaning sports reporters. https://vault.si.com/vault/2001/07/02/not-our-cup-of-tea-soccer-will-never-thrive-here-the-author-opines-because-its-simply-un-american
I remember as a kid telling people about this guy David Beckham is new superstar and getting blank looks (more girls who knew who we was because he started dating Posh spice). Remember in college asking if they could play the US world cup qualifier...and being shunted into the back corner with like three other people.
There's actually a real public policy story to tell here too. I think Tom Friedman get's a lot deserved pushback to his cheerleading for globalization/World is Flat sermonizing in the late 90s (criticism that I feel like he's taken at least a bit to heart if his NYTimes column about what he got wrong about China is anything to go by). But there really was a lot of positives to post Cold-War globalization. And one of them is proliferation of entertainment options from different corners of the globe. Rising popularity of soccer in this country is one manifestation of this, but you could add stuff like rise in popularity of Japanese anime or K-Pop. Heck food is another one to add in; go back to mid 90s and see how easy (or difficult) it was to find a Thai restaurant outside of NYC or D.C.
I find soccer is about a kajillion times more entertaining to watch than American Football, but I'd love it we had a better way to keep the twin evils of diving and FIFA at bay.
Good news posts are public. Bad news requires a subscription.
Incentives aligned. (Joking aside, I also cosign some sort of good news roundup, even though Matt is better than most at incorporating it in his writing even when not headlined.)
Are there any 'good news article aggregator' services?
If something(s) like that existed, and had a decent number of subscribers, maybe it could signal to journalists and media companies that there is at least some public demand for positive news.
It would still be swimming against the pessimistic current, but maybe it would balance things a bit.
With apologies in advance for exercising what I absolutely acknowledge is one of my primary letters-to-the-editor-guy crank opinions and one which I’ve flogged here in the SB comments before…
I really do think that an underrated consequence of relentless eco-doomerism has been the rise of the neo-nativist movements. If you tell people, over and over again, that catastrophe is imminent and that all efforts thus far to head it off have been laughably insufficient, it is an entirely normal human reaction to say “well, I guess we’d better just pull up the drawbridge and hope for the best.”
A green movement that was a little more focused on touting its successes (“hey, air that doesn’t cause asthma and rivers that don’t catch on fire and give you tetanus are pretty great, right? We brought you that and we’d like more of it!”) and less on screaming that the sky was falling would be a much more effective one, and importantly would be so _even if the sky really is falling_.
(There’s a longer rant here about how a certain strain of eliminationist thinking has been entwined in the “ecological” movement from Muir onwards and how neofascist stroke-material book “The Camp of the Saints” was just Erlich’s “The Population Bomb” rewritten as explicit rather than implicit, but I’ll forbear…)
Have you written about that anywhere? If not, my mailbag question is: What did you learn about the nexus of eco-doomerism and nativism from marketing One Billion Americans?
Well, it's nice to know that our host shares my crank opinions!
I'd actually be very curious to hear your observations on this and the feedback you got on the book -- definitely every conversation I saw online about 1BA had a nontrivial amount of "but isn't overpopulation a huge problem???" nattering going on it it.
> If you tell people, over and over again, that catastrophe is imminent and that all efforts thus far to head it off have been laughably insufficient, it is an entirely normal human reaction to say “well, I guess we’d better just pull up the drawbridge and hope for the best.”
The other entirely normal human reaction is to sigh, shrug, and say "...aw, well, fuckit", which is maybe even more unproductive.
The podcast "If Books could Kill" had a recent episode about "The Population Bomb" and just ripped it apart. That the background of Paul Erlich was not exactly one suited for writing such a book. And that kind of hilariously (in a depressing sort of way) it seems pretty clear his warnings about overpopulation seem to be driven by his annoyance that traffic appeared to be getting worse and that this personally annoyed him. Or that his "inspiration" was going to India, seeing tons of poor people and then concluding there are too many people (instead of asking whether the extreme poverty of India was at all related to being a colony of Britain only 30 years early and absolute basket case economic policy).
The two hosts are probably to the left of Matt and most the subcribers of this substack, but they don't hold back punches and basically note how this book has been enormously influential to things like left wing environmentalism and NIMBY.
This is such a great point - and the environmental movement has many such successes to tout!! There is a great story to tell about how the movements for conservation and pollution control have done a lot to improve our longevity and quality of life going back to the Progessive Era. This is both a more appealing story and a bigger substantive deal than Paul freakin' Ehrlich.
"My girlfriend and I were noticing you across the bar, and we really dig your cheery, optimistic vibe – want to come home with us to the Potomac for a swim?"
I’ve tried to cultivate positivity in my news consumption and one thing that has helped is being into discovery based academic fields. In particular I follow news on biology and about archeology and new things are being discovered all the time. It’s great!
I don’t really have one source. I read the major scientific journals for professional reasons but due to paywalls that is not necessarily practical for everyone. NY Times has a good science section. The guardian has a decent archeology section.
Patrick Wyman has a podcast called “tides of history” that was focused on prehistory this season and had some great interviews.
"...measuring people’s skin conductivity as an index of emotional response..."
The thing that really makes my blood boil about these skin-conductivity tests is that they really amount to nothing more than measuring the flow of electrons. Talk about your negativity bias!
Reminds me of the time some right-wing culture warrior complained on Twitter about how the “hole in the Ozone layer” hype was all BS because why does no one talk about it anymore? And I believe Matt said something like, “who’s going to tell him....?”
I think one reason previous attempts to address pollution have been so successful is that it was literally so visible. I know we see images of polar ice caps melting, but that's very different from seeing your city just enveloped in smog ("Fun" example of this is Mary Poppins. If you re-watch this movie again, you realize a huge part of the plot of this movie revolves around London being chocked by soot and smog. Like there is a whole dance number of cockney chimney sweeps dancing on huge black clouds of coal induced smoke).
I theorize that one reason for American reluctance to engage with global warming is that too few Americans live in the liminal spaces in which warmer winters actually have extremely visible and essentially binary effects on winter conditions — White Christmases and frozen lakes were the norm in the parts of New England I grew up in, now they’re increasingly unusual.
Live in Nassau County now but grew up in western Mass. My understanding is that global warming has played havoc with fall colors which is a big source of tourist dollars in Berkshires and Vermont.
Yes, a very pertinent example. The protection of the ozone layer was a huge triumph for pro-active environmental intervention. But the fact that catastrophe was averted, combined with negativity bias, meant that it was soon forgotten. So soon, that morons on the right could remember it as a case of a false alarm. When in fact it was a true alarm, to which we responded effectively by putting out the fire.
That could have been a pattern for our response to global warming, except that it has been much harder to find a substitute for fossil fuels than it was to find a substitute for CFC refrigerants.
I’ve been reading a lot of good things about the omnibus bill, but that’s because I’ve been seeing right wing organizations and media outlets reporting about all of the things they find objectionable about it. Just look at these screenshots:
"Sometimes the quickest way to get some good news is to listen to really reprehensible organizations delivering what they consider to be bad news."
There's an old joke about this:
Two Jews are riding a train in 1930’s Germany, one of them reading the Jewish newspaper The Forward and the other reading the Nazi paper, Der Sturmer. The Jew reading the Jewish paper asks the other how he can read the Nazi newspaper given their antipathy toward the Jews.
He replies: “In your newspaper, things are awful for us. The Nazis are in power, we are losing our jobs, our civil rights, and even our families. So depressing! In my newspaper, we own all the banks, we run the governments, and we secretly control the entire world. It cheers me right up!”
Incidentally, Ed Miliband's podcast (yes if you fail to become PM in the UK you start a podcast) is called reasons to be cheerful and ia dedicated to a more optimistic take on what's happening.
Sure, but he is still very influential. He is basically the author of a lot of their agenda now and has Starmer’s ear if I understand correctly. My understanding is he is well liked and appreciated as a team player but just wasn’t a good fit for a leader. I think it’s a positive mark on British politics that ex-leaders don’t consider it beneath them to return to the back benches.
The fact that you can’t bring any example later than Taft speaks volumes. Britains *three* most recent former pms and 2 most recent former heads of opposition are still mps.
I guess Hoover technically worked for the Truman administration, but that was only for a special project.
I think a lot of it has to do with age. Our presidents tend to be older than British PMs and party leaders. Milliband stepped down from leadership in his mid 40s. Our youngest presidents as of late (Carter, Clinton, Obama) all left office in their mid to late 50s.
The bounce back of the whales will also be useful for when that probe shows up in 2286 looking to chat with them. It'll save Kirk and crew the trouble of going back to the 1990s to bring some whales back
Weirdly, one of the bits of negative coverage I saw about this bill mentions that it blocks a rule that would have made it harder to kill whales while trying to kill lobsters.
I was listening to the most recent Bad Takes this morning and since my husband grew up in the San Fernando Valley, the part about Smog Alerts peaked my interest. I realized that it would be hard to convince most young people that the air they breathe is cleaner than the air we breathed as children because the narrative of environmental change is one of progressive decline. I am not suggesting that the greenhouse gas emissions problem isn't enormous and terrible, it just struck me that it would be cognitively challenging to persuade them that some things have improved because of government actions taken to limit emissions.
"...suddenly “holy shit, they’re trying to take all this stuff away” became a gripping negative story."
Loss-aversion pushes in the same direction as negativity bias, though it's a distinct phenomenon (or at least, not all negativity-bias is loss-aversion).
I suspect that "negativity bias" may be the name for a group of separate factors that are loosely related, and only seem like one thing because they all point in the same direction. There may be no unified explanation of negativity -bias anymore than there is a unified cause of "disease" (as opposed to many distinct causes of distinct diseases).
Our species’s general negativity bias is why I recommend “Factfulness” by Hans Rosling to basically anyone who will listen. When you remember that the broad, underlying trends of the world bend toward progress, it’s remarkably easier to digest each day’s scorched-Earth headlines.
I really enjoyed this post. In general, I love secret congress posts. The idea that our government works much better than it appears to (and chooses to appear to) is really fascinating.
Two more things I would love to hear from Matt on:
I read this morning that the Omnibus has a bunch of buried good provisions on election reform/response to Jan 6, thoughts?
I wonder to what extent members of congress are explicitly aware of the notion of a secret congress passing substantive legislation underneath the veneer of unreasonableness. Are there any members who present as extremely unreasonable while in fact they participate actively in this secret congress activity? Which members of leadership are active in or opposed to these type of secret congress activites?
Why not some compendium of good news posts? Sure it might not pull numbers but you can document the good news and share it with tour readers. The mailbag are fun but a monthly "what's good?" Roundup would also be a nice break from the normal pieces.
Good idea!
You could also start throwing in some 'human interest' filler about how some family adopted a cat from a shelter & now it won't stop purring, or whatever. Lol
I came into the comments to post a similar sentiment. Another option would be to begin (or end) each mailbag column with a good news item that may not warrant a full daily post.
I endorse this and will also recommend the "Future Crunch" weekly newsletter for a summary of good news stories.
https://futurecrunch.com/
It has a certain ideological slant - socially left but without the anti-capitalism or anti-technologism - and is run out of Australia. But I think the Slow Boring audience will agree that 80% of the stories it highlights are in fact good news. I'm pretty self-conscious about consuming so much negative media and it helps me feel better about that (while also being short and infrequent enough not to interfere with the negative media addiction).
Of course Matt doing something similar for this audience would be much better yet!
Co-sign on Future Crunch. A well-written, technologically-positive antidote to your news diet.
My favorite comment of the month.
Agree with this! No point in fighting the fact that "things going well is generally less interesting than things going poorly" but regular quick hits would be welcome and build up a good habit of mind to remember that some things are actually going well.
Co-signed!
I’d like this. Does anyone remember the John Krasinski SGN (Some Good News) during the pandemic? Similar idea and seemed so necessary during those early months. He stopped doing it after Floyd and I vaguely remember it being because it seemed tasteless during a time of racial reckoning.
Superlike (c)!
The NYT had a great “Fixes” column for years that highlighted innovative solutions to problems, it was very positive, and sadly it recently folded - I’m guessing due to the lack of interest?
Agreed!
This one is always a pretty amazing read. https://futurecrunch.com/goodnews2022/
Co-signed. No need to go to far in the other direction. Puff pieces about why America is perfect in all ways" is probably worse a solution worse than the problem. But some "hey here are some things that have gotten much better or good policies that were passed" is a good "change up" once in a while.
Small one and probably not that important one, but one near and dear to my heart; how soccer has continued to explode in popularity in this country (see TV ratings for the WC final. A game that started at 7:00 AM for extremely large portions of the country). I can't begin to tell you how much things have changed in my lifetime. For one, we are finally free of sports columnists writing cranky old man columns about how "soccer sucks" or is "Un American" or is "Communist". I remember these (very ubiquitous) columns as a kid. And no they were not just from right wing cranks but very mainstream or even left leaning sports reporters. https://vault.si.com/vault/2001/07/02/not-our-cup-of-tea-soccer-will-never-thrive-here-the-author-opines-because-its-simply-un-american
I remember as a kid telling people about this guy David Beckham is new superstar and getting blank looks (more girls who knew who we was because he started dating Posh spice). Remember in college asking if they could play the US world cup qualifier...and being shunted into the back corner with like three other people.
There's actually a real public policy story to tell here too. I think Tom Friedman get's a lot deserved pushback to his cheerleading for globalization/World is Flat sermonizing in the late 90s (criticism that I feel like he's taken at least a bit to heart if his NYTimes column about what he got wrong about China is anything to go by). But there really was a lot of positives to post Cold-War globalization. And one of them is proliferation of entertainment options from different corners of the globe. Rising popularity of soccer in this country is one manifestation of this, but you could add stuff like rise in popularity of Japanese anime or K-Pop. Heck food is another one to add in; go back to mid 90s and see how easy (or difficult) it was to find a Thai restaurant outside of NYC or D.C.
I find soccer is about a kajillion times more entertaining to watch than American Football, but I'd love it we had a better way to keep the twin evils of diving and FIFA at bay.
Good news posts are public. Bad news requires a subscription.
Incentives aligned. (Joking aside, I also cosign some sort of good news roundup, even though Matt is better than most at incorporating it in his writing even when not headlined.)
I n-th this comment!
Milan and Matt Y. can come up with a catchy title and image for such column, Dark Brandon Mailman-style.
Agreed. I came here to say this. I also made sure to click on the links to good news so they got the traffic they deserved.
Are there any 'good news article aggregator' services?
If something(s) like that existed, and had a decent number of subscribers, maybe it could signal to journalists and media companies that there is at least some public demand for positive news.
It would still be swimming against the pessimistic current, but maybe it would balance things a bit.
David Byrne's Reasons to be Cheerful site sort of functions like that. Infrequent articles / updates but it's been active for a couple years now
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/
There's one or two that have been around for years. Name(s) escape me at the moment.
With apologies in advance for exercising what I absolutely acknowledge is one of my primary letters-to-the-editor-guy crank opinions and one which I’ve flogged here in the SB comments before…
I really do think that an underrated consequence of relentless eco-doomerism has been the rise of the neo-nativist movements. If you tell people, over and over again, that catastrophe is imminent and that all efforts thus far to head it off have been laughably insufficient, it is an entirely normal human reaction to say “well, I guess we’d better just pull up the drawbridge and hope for the best.”
A green movement that was a little more focused on touting its successes (“hey, air that doesn’t cause asthma and rivers that don’t catch on fire and give you tetanus are pretty great, right? We brought you that and we’d like more of it!”) and less on screaming that the sky was falling would be a much more effective one, and importantly would be so _even if the sky really is falling_.
(There’s a longer rant here about how a certain strain of eliminationist thinking has been entwined in the “ecological” movement from Muir onwards and how neofascist stroke-material book “The Camp of the Saints” was just Erlich’s “The Population Bomb” rewritten as explicit rather than implicit, but I’ll forbear…)
I agree with this, learned a lot about the nexus of eco-doomerism and nativism from marketing One Billion Americans.
Have you written about that anywhere? If not, my mailbag question is: What did you learn about the nexus of eco-doomerism and nativism from marketing One Billion Americans?
Well, it's nice to know that our host shares my crank opinions!
I'd actually be very curious to hear your observations on this and the feedback you got on the book -- definitely every conversation I saw online about 1BA had a nontrivial amount of "but isn't overpopulation a huge problem???" nattering going on it it.
> If you tell people, over and over again, that catastrophe is imminent and that all efforts thus far to head it off have been laughably insufficient, it is an entirely normal human reaction to say “well, I guess we’d better just pull up the drawbridge and hope for the best.”
The other entirely normal human reaction is to sigh, shrug, and say "...aw, well, fuckit", which is maybe even more unproductive.
The podcast "If Books could Kill" had a recent episode about "The Population Bomb" and just ripped it apart. That the background of Paul Erlich was not exactly one suited for writing such a book. And that kind of hilariously (in a depressing sort of way) it seems pretty clear his warnings about overpopulation seem to be driven by his annoyance that traffic appeared to be getting worse and that this personally annoyed him. Or that his "inspiration" was going to India, seeing tons of poor people and then concluding there are too many people (instead of asking whether the extreme poverty of India was at all related to being a colony of Britain only 30 years early and absolute basket case economic policy).
The two hosts are probably to the left of Matt and most the subcribers of this substack, but they don't hold back punches and basically note how this book has been enormously influential to things like left wing environmentalism and NIMBY.
This is such a great point - and the environmental movement has many such successes to tout!! There is a great story to tell about how the movements for conservation and pollution control have done a lot to improve our longevity and quality of life going back to the Progessive Era. This is both a more appealing story and a bigger substantive deal than Paul freakin' Ehrlich.
No need to engage in too much hippie-bashing, some of us read Slow Boring ;)
People may be reluctant to advertise their love of good news for fear of being smeared as pollyannamorous.
"My girlfriend and I were noticing you across the bar, and we really dig your cheery, optimistic vibe – want to come home with us to the Potomac for a swim?"
Tobias Fünke on open relationships:
https://youtu.be/Po4adxJxqZk
Also:
https://ifunny.co/picture/when-you-see-two-people-in-an-open-relationship-it-oZQjVlac8
Also applies to Republicans talking about running Trumpy candidates in general elections.
As a Gen Xer I very much appreciate that. However I do like how the "abundance agenda" is actually really optimistic and fuels itself on good news.
I’ve tried to cultivate positivity in my news consumption and one thing that has helped is being into discovery based academic fields. In particular I follow news on biology and about archeology and new things are being discovered all the time. It’s great!
If new things are being discovered all the time in archeology, that would suggest a serious problem in that line of work.
Aren't they supposed to be finding old things?
:-)
Have any links or newsletters you could share?
I don’t really have one source. I read the major scientific journals for professional reasons but due to paywalls that is not necessarily practical for everyone. NY Times has a good science section. The guardian has a decent archeology section.
Patrick Wyman has a podcast called “tides of history” that was focused on prehistory this season and had some great interviews.
Thumbs up on "The Tides of History." Strong recommendation.
Super interesting archaeology-earth science one from NYT from yesterday: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/20/science/archaeology-bible-geomagnetism.html
(Bonus : buried within is a chillingly original powerful - and very surprising- argument in the debate for “why we need to study history”)
"...measuring people’s skin conductivity as an index of emotional response..."
The thing that really makes my blood boil about these skin-conductivity tests is that they really amount to nothing more than measuring the flow of electrons. Talk about your negativity bias!
“…measuring the flow of electrons”
The test subjects were responding to current events. How else could that be measured?
DT, what did you put in your coffee this morning?
"...what did you put in your coffee this morning?"
Pure positivity. Good news, and nothing but good news.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qSuA181JaU
I like the way you keep your ion the ball.
If I were to point to one major shortcoming of this blog, it’s the stunning lack of week-by-week updates on good news about clean water.
This is what Upworthy aimed to fix, but you’ll never guess what happened to them.
Fake news — I had to take a dip in the Charles last night because I lost a bet and it was as filthy as ever.
But don't you love that dirty water?
What? Boston's not your home?
Oh man that song may be older than Milan's parents.
It was brick out so no not at that particular moment.
Looks like the ongoing Charles River Initiative has made a lot of progress in the last 25 years: https://www.epa.gov/charlesriver/charles-river-initiative#ReportCards
Should have used a wading pool as a boat like I did in college
Reminds me of the time some right-wing culture warrior complained on Twitter about how the “hole in the Ozone layer” hype was all BS because why does no one talk about it anymore? And I believe Matt said something like, “who’s going to tell him....?”
Edit to add: Found it! https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1549745002246508544
You can add in acid rain to that one as well.
I think one reason previous attempts to address pollution have been so successful is that it was literally so visible. I know we see images of polar ice caps melting, but that's very different from seeing your city just enveloped in smog ("Fun" example of this is Mary Poppins. If you re-watch this movie again, you realize a huge part of the plot of this movie revolves around London being chocked by soot and smog. Like there is a whole dance number of cockney chimney sweeps dancing on huge black clouds of coal induced smoke).
For a real life version of what I'm talking about
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/12/smog-photos-1970s-america/
I theorize that one reason for American reluctance to engage with global warming is that too few Americans live in the liminal spaces in which warmer winters actually have extremely visible and essentially binary effects on winter conditions — White Christmases and frozen lakes were the norm in the parts of New England I grew up in, now they’re increasingly unusual.
Live in Nassau County now but grew up in western Mass. My understanding is that global warming has played havoc with fall colors which is a big source of tourist dollars in Berkshires and Vermont.
Yes, a very pertinent example. The protection of the ozone layer was a huge triumph for pro-active environmental intervention. But the fact that catastrophe was averted, combined with negativity bias, meant that it was soon forgotten. So soon, that morons on the right could remember it as a case of a false alarm. When in fact it was a true alarm, to which we responded effectively by putting out the fire.
That could have been a pattern for our response to global warming, except that it has been much harder to find a substitute for fossil fuels than it was to find a substitute for CFC refrigerants.
The Y2K scare is a very similar example.
I’ve been reading a lot of good things about the omnibus bill, but that’s because I’ve been seeing right wing organizations and media outlets reporting about all of the things they find objectionable about it. Just look at these screenshots:
https://i.imgur.com/OXADHwR.png
https://i.imgur.com/9ubw6T2.jpg
Sometimes the quickest way to get some good news is to listen to really reprehensible organizations delivering what they consider to be bad news.
"Sometimes the quickest way to get some good news is to listen to really reprehensible organizations delivering what they consider to be bad news."
There's an old joke about this:
Two Jews are riding a train in 1930’s Germany, one of them reading the Jewish newspaper The Forward and the other reading the Nazi paper, Der Sturmer. The Jew reading the Jewish paper asks the other how he can read the Nazi newspaper given their antipathy toward the Jews.
He replies: “In your newspaper, things are awful for us. The Nazis are in power, we are losing our jobs, our civil rights, and even our families. So depressing! In my newspaper, we own all the banks, we run the governments, and we secretly control the entire world. It cheers me right up!”
Reminded me of the comedy classic "To Be or Not to Be".
Based
Those are clearly “partisan” however and culture-war tinged. You still don’t get MY’s clean water type good news this way.
Incidentally, Ed Miliband's podcast (yes if you fail to become PM in the UK you start a podcast) is called reasons to be cheerful and ia dedicated to a more optimistic take on what's happening.
Everyone who's avoided becoming UK prime minister should start a podcast about how happy they are
I would subscribe to a podcast by that lettuce that outlasted Liz.
"(yes I know that the PM isn't directly elected)."
That's okay, lettuce isn't either. Instead, it's a head-to-head contest.
Booooo
I can't imagine a Jeremy Corbyn podcast that touches on anything that makes himself or anybody around them happy.
This is the kind of un-normie-inflected joke that I think was nurtured by the bird app, and I hope its development continues.
I also hope our cousins across the pond can get their shit together.
One wonders what will become of the poor Scaramucci as the tenure of a British Tory PM converges asymptotically to zero over the coming two years.
Will it still hold weight as a pithy unit of measure for time/scorn simultaneously?
Won't somebody please think of the American dialect of English?
I don't think we can top "Moochspan" for pithiness. Sorry, Liz. Sad!
I dunno, "Gone-so-Sunak?" could work. Let's see how long until the tiger bucks him off.
Old Chaos Ed and his bacon sandwich. UK sure dodged a bullet there.
To be clear, Miliband is still an MP and a major force in the Labour Party, in addition to being a podcaster…
Sure, but he is still very influential. He is basically the author of a lot of their agenda now and has Starmer’s ear if I understand correctly. My understanding is he is well liked and appreciated as a team player but just wasn’t a good fit for a leader. I think it’s a positive mark on British politics that ex-leaders don’t consider it beneath them to return to the back benches.
John Quincy Adams and William Taft had political careers after being president.
The fact that you can’t bring any example later than Taft speaks volumes. Britains *three* most recent former pms and 2 most recent former heads of opposition are still mps.
I guess Hoover technically worked for the Truman administration, but that was only for a special project.
I think a lot of it has to do with age. Our presidents tend to be older than British PMs and party leaders. Milliband stepped down from leadership in his mid 40s. Our youngest presidents as of late (Carter, Clinton, Obama) all left office in their mid to late 50s.
This sounds good but to be fair he really missed an opportunity by not naming the podcast "Chaos"
The bounce back of the whales will also be useful for when that probe shows up in 2286 looking to chat with them. It'll save Kirk and crew the trouble of going back to the 1990s to bring some whales back
Weirdly, one of the bits of negative coverage I saw about this bill mentions that it blocks a rule that would have made it harder to kill whales while trying to kill lobsters.
I was listening to the most recent Bad Takes this morning and since my husband grew up in the San Fernando Valley, the part about Smog Alerts peaked my interest. I realized that it would be hard to convince most young people that the air they breathe is cleaner than the air we breathed as children because the narrative of environmental change is one of progressive decline. I am not suggesting that the greenhouse gas emissions problem isn't enormous and terrible, it just struck me that it would be cognitively challenging to persuade them that some things have improved because of government actions taken to limit emissions.
Loved running around in PE in a toxic cloud because smog alerts only got released the hour after.
"...suddenly “holy shit, they’re trying to take all this stuff away” became a gripping negative story."
Loss-aversion pushes in the same direction as negativity bias, though it's a distinct phenomenon (or at least, not all negativity-bias is loss-aversion).
Isn’t negativity bias basically a consequence of the fact that it only takes one predator, pathogen or accident to kill you?
I suspect that "negativity bias" may be the name for a group of separate factors that are loosely related, and only seem like one thing because they all point in the same direction. There may be no unified explanation of negativity -bias anymore than there is a unified cause of "disease" (as opposed to many distinct causes of distinct diseases).
Our species’s general negativity bias is why I recommend “Factfulness” by Hans Rosling to basically anyone who will listen. When you remember that the broad, underlying trends of the world bend toward progress, it’s remarkably easier to digest each day’s scorched-Earth headlines.
I really enjoyed this post. In general, I love secret congress posts. The idea that our government works much better than it appears to (and chooses to appear to) is really fascinating.
Two more things I would love to hear from Matt on:
I read this morning that the Omnibus has a bunch of buried good provisions on election reform/response to Jan 6, thoughts?
I wonder to what extent members of congress are explicitly aware of the notion of a secret congress passing substantive legislation underneath the veneer of unreasonableness. Are there any members who present as extremely unreasonable while in fact they participate actively in this secret congress activity? Which members of leadership are active in or opposed to these type of secret congress activites?
I think Lindsey graham would probably fit into your publicly unreasonable, privately reasonable category