The benefits of reading aside, book clubs do something nearly impossible in modern secular adulthood: they enforce a structure of regular socializing and, if IRL, getting the f out of your house. In the context of a crisis of loneliness, this is massive. We need to create more such structures - though, in the absence of a fear of god’s wrath if you don’t attend, it requires a personal commitment of willpower to make such things work. Perhaps the Surgeon General could undertake to teach a lazy population busy entertaining itself to death the importance of just bloody showing up.
There are studies that indicate that reading fiction, specifically literary fiction, helps develop a Theory of Mind -- "As part of the adaptive response to ever-expanding social relationships, the ability to relate visible behavior to mental states, and thus to see ourselves from the outside and others from the inside, has evolved, and is called theory of mind (ToM; also known as mentalizing), the ability to represent the mental states of others (1). It helps us to recognize the meaning behind other people's sentences, explain actions, to understand irony and to predict their behavior." (from a random study: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10282181/)
Perhaps every political movement should be required to write novels so we better understand their mental state.
Interesting. You should read the Science of Story Telling by Will Storr. I would suggest that storytelling is a fundamentally human activity that reveals something fundamentally human.
I think reading the classics is great advice even without hagiography.
I recently read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, and was kind of surprised how antiquated and reactionary it was. Like within the genre of reactionary Christian moralism, I can see why it's the best, most interesting, more serious and high-minded. But also, at times so self-righteous, dogmatic, and even uncurious. You can really feel what is missing in Dostoevsky's worldview, and why society decided to largely leave it behind, at the same you can feel what is missing from contemporary right-ism, and why conservatives need to read more books.
Whereas reading Shakespeare (with annotations) is somehow much better, cleverer and insightful than I thought it'd be even accounting for the hype.
OT but if you haven't seen it yet, take some time and read the deeply reported story in the Times magazine today by Nick Confessore discussing the tragically misguided decisions by the ACLU, progressive LGQTQ advocates, and the Biden Justice Department that ultimately brought a Tennessee children's trans health case to the Supreme Court. The story is painfully emblematic of the groups' relentless rights-based obsessions and their wholesale indifference to the vagaries of politics or public opinion. The hard-won incrementalist lessons from the gay marriage debate weren't just ignored - they were openly spurned by a younger generation of advocates intent on 'deconstructing' bourgeois sex and gender norms they viewed as stultifying and archaic. The lamentable history also engages the ideological capture of major medical associations in the face of physician activism within their ranks that wielded the credibility of nationally prominent institutions on the basis of scientific and medical claims that couldn't bear the weight. It's quite a story - worth your time: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/19/magazine/scotus-transgender-care-tennessee-skrmetti.html
I’ve posted before about how pickleball, no joke, transformed my life. I urge anyone who wants to get into better shape and/or make more friends to try. It’s now one of those things where when I travel for work, I bring my paddle and research ahead of time where the local open play courts are.
I also got back into wall climbing after a twenty year hiatus. It’s fabulous exercise for nerds, because every climb is also a puzzle. They are literally called “problems.” Climbing skews young, male, and lean. I am none of those things. But I still love it and have made a lot of friends, albeit much younger than me.
Remind me, which part of the country are you in? I'm trying to gauge the interest level in a SoCal meetup, a couple of people indicated they're interested, it will probably be in either Long Beach or Irvine.
I love genre fiction but do not get the love for the Reacher and Connelly books. Connelly's writing isn't bad, but the characters and plots are meh.
The Mick Herron Slow Horses series is great. I just started a new series by a Ukranian author named Andrey Kurkov set in 1920 Kiev about a young detective that is good. Usually can't handle "cozy" mysteries, but the Richard Osman series is excellent. Lehane. S.A. Cosby. Jordan Harper. The Dervla McTiernan Cormac Reily series.
One thing I find helpful every once in a while is to take stock of my favorite memories. It helps guide me to what I actually enjoy in life. None of my favorite memories are doomscrolling, but many are really interacting with art like books, movies, music, etc, especially sharing it with another person.
"everyone in American politics is struggling with the mismatch between voters’ deeply felt desire to overthrow the system and their practical aversion to almost every kind of actual policy change"
I think the aversion to change comes from the fact that roughly 75% of Americans (maybe more) are doing fine in the current system and it's very hard to improve things for the remaining 25% without making things worse for the majority. There isn't a pressing problem that needs to be solved for a big majoritarian group (maybe in 5-10 years it'll be federal debt). People are not happy tinkering with something that mostly works. I believe that the focus on minoritarian issues has made politics so toxic in the US and that's why there's no enduring majority for either party. Doing nothing works because it's not disruptive but Presidents are egomaniacal arseholes who want their bust on Mount Rushmore, so they end up making (or try) big changes and become unpopular.
Coincidentally, I picked up Ender's Game from the public library this week because it's one of the books recommended by my son's school for summer reading.
I’m trying to remember if there was more to the putative cancellation than just that he was expressing some views that you expect from a Mormon who wrote slightly creepy sci fi about talented children.
He really put his back into his campaign against marriage equality and "homosexual activity." Like, he talked about it all the time. It wasn't just something that he believed but mostly kept quiet about. Tracing Woodgrains, also Mormon, has a really anguished essay about how much he loved Ender's Game and Card, and how brutal it was for him to learn how anti-gay Card was.
He's a great-great-grandson of Brigham Young. For several years he made it his life's mission to lobby against "homosexual activity" and marriage equality. The Wikipedia article about him goes into some of the controversies. There was much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments among his fans, many of whom absolutely loved his books but hated his politics.
Look, I support logging off and improving your life.
But your read on the disparity between people's desire to overthrow the system and their aversion to policy change is off. This is pretty easy to explain: people want change in general, but once you start talking specifics, the pro-change coalition falls apart because specific policies and policy tradeoffs impact people differently. There is no contradiction between wanting change and resisting a particular change.
"...everyone in American politics is struggling with the mismatch between voters’ deeply felt desire to overthrow the system and their practical aversion to almost every kind of actual policy change."
Noun-pronoun association question: does the "they" in this sentence represent the voters or everyone in American politics? I'm trying to figure out if the disconnect is between politicians and voters, or between voters dissatisfaction with the status quo and the same voters aversion to change.
I believe that very few voters are politically informed enough to actually make smart choices when they vote, which is why Congress has an abysmal approval rating among voters yet 94% of incumbents get re-elected each cycle. It boggles my mind how so many people can say, "Congress is an absolute shitshow, but obviously MY Representative/Senator isn't part of the problem," but it makes sense that unengaged voters would continually re-elect cowardly politicians who are terrified of actually getting anything done.
What a delightful read on a Thursday morning. I've also found reading fiction to be very restorative the last few months, both in terms of focusing on a single text for sustained periods of time, but also being taken out of my normal world, my normal thought processes and into whatever's in the book at hand.
The observation “people are disgruntled and risk-averse at the same time, and they want government to provide things higher up Maslow’s Hierarchy than the government is equipped or meant to provide” is very insightful, but what do we DO about it?
Individually, sure, we can each resolve to join a book club or play pickleball or whatever, but how does it scale across the whole society? What to do about the NEET twenty-something dude who has no close friends or girlfriend, feels angry and lonely, and feels validated when MAGA influencers tell him “this is all the evil liberals’ fault, trust in Trump, he is your True Savior”?
I was that 20-something (never fell for Trump's shtick, but I was not too happy on a personal level), coming off a breakup and the pandemic, and unironically pickleball and other pickup sports groups were what led me to great lifelong friends and more happiness.
I think there is a younger male audience out there that you actually have a lot of influence on, and this kind of post is really valuable for them. They--and my 33-year old self, to an extent-- really benefit from seeing the smart guy having normal social needs.
A lot of smart people became that way because being the smartest person in the room buffered against some underlying social anxiety. I saw this happen with my brother, who is now an astrophysicist. It happened to me too, as a flutist, which is how I make money now. I guess we picked the appropriate gender-coded avenue to feeling good about ourselves. He's been much more successful than me though. 😒
“What you don’t see is many people articulating risk-aversion and comfort with the status quo as an overt political identity.”
Interestingly, this is a great statement of my politics. I oppose radical change, and loathe the idea of The Revolution™. I want everything to be just like it is, only maybe 5-10 percent better.
“Touch grass”
The benefits of reading aside, book clubs do something nearly impossible in modern secular adulthood: they enforce a structure of regular socializing and, if IRL, getting the f out of your house. In the context of a crisis of loneliness, this is massive. We need to create more such structures - though, in the absence of a fear of god’s wrath if you don’t attend, it requires a personal commitment of willpower to make such things work. Perhaps the Surgeon General could undertake to teach a lazy population busy entertaining itself to death the importance of just bloody showing up.
There are studies that indicate that reading fiction, specifically literary fiction, helps develop a Theory of Mind -- "As part of the adaptive response to ever-expanding social relationships, the ability to relate visible behavior to mental states, and thus to see ourselves from the outside and others from the inside, has evolved, and is called theory of mind (ToM; also known as mentalizing), the ability to represent the mental states of others (1). It helps us to recognize the meaning behind other people's sentences, explain actions, to understand irony and to predict their behavior." (from a random study: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10282181/)
Perhaps every political movement should be required to write novels so we better understand their mental state.
I read an interestingly skeptical take on that the other day by Dan Greco: https://grecowansley.substack.com/p/fiction-and-empathy-a-tempting-story
Interesting. You should read the Science of Story Telling by Will Storr. I would suggest that storytelling is a fundamentally human activity that reveals something fundamentally human.
I think reading the classics is great advice even without hagiography.
I recently read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, and was kind of surprised how antiquated and reactionary it was. Like within the genre of reactionary Christian moralism, I can see why it's the best, most interesting, more serious and high-minded. But also, at times so self-righteous, dogmatic, and even uncurious. You can really feel what is missing in Dostoevsky's worldview, and why society decided to largely leave it behind, at the same you can feel what is missing from contemporary right-ism, and why conservatives need to read more books.
Whereas reading Shakespeare (with annotations) is somehow much better, cleverer and insightful than I thought it'd be even accounting for the hype.
OT but if you haven't seen it yet, take some time and read the deeply reported story in the Times magazine today by Nick Confessore discussing the tragically misguided decisions by the ACLU, progressive LGQTQ advocates, and the Biden Justice Department that ultimately brought a Tennessee children's trans health case to the Supreme Court. The story is painfully emblematic of the groups' relentless rights-based obsessions and their wholesale indifference to the vagaries of politics or public opinion. The hard-won incrementalist lessons from the gay marriage debate weren't just ignored - they were openly spurned by a younger generation of advocates intent on 'deconstructing' bourgeois sex and gender norms they viewed as stultifying and archaic. The lamentable history also engages the ideological capture of major medical associations in the face of physician activism within their ranks that wielded the credibility of nationally prominent institutions on the basis of scientific and medical claims that couldn't bear the weight. It's quite a story - worth your time: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/19/magazine/scotus-transgender-care-tennessee-skrmetti.html
I’ve posted before about how pickleball, no joke, transformed my life. I urge anyone who wants to get into better shape and/or make more friends to try. It’s now one of those things where when I travel for work, I bring my paddle and research ahead of time where the local open play courts are.
I also got back into wall climbing after a twenty year hiatus. It’s fabulous exercise for nerds, because every climb is also a puzzle. They are literally called “problems.” Climbing skews young, male, and lean. I am none of those things. But I still love it and have made a lot of friends, albeit much younger than me.
I’d love to do another Slow Boring meetup, btw!
Remind me, which part of the country are you in? I'm trying to gauge the interest level in a SoCal meetup, a couple of people indicated they're interested, it will probably be in either Long Beach or Irvine.
NoCal, unfortunately. Michael Sullivan arranged it. It was great, highly recommend!
I love genre fiction but do not get the love for the Reacher and Connelly books. Connelly's writing isn't bad, but the characters and plots are meh.
The Mick Herron Slow Horses series is great. I just started a new series by a Ukranian author named Andrey Kurkov set in 1920 Kiev about a young detective that is good. Usually can't handle "cozy" mysteries, but the Richard Osman series is excellent. Lehane. S.A. Cosby. Jordan Harper. The Dervla McTiernan Cormac Reily series.
Reacher is easy to explain. It's basically an updated and more action filled version of noir detective and cowboy books.
What else is currently being published that does that better in your opinion?
One thing I find helpful every once in a while is to take stock of my favorite memories. It helps guide me to what I actually enjoy in life. None of my favorite memories are doomscrolling, but many are really interacting with art like books, movies, music, etc, especially sharing it with another person.
"everyone in American politics is struggling with the mismatch between voters’ deeply felt desire to overthrow the system and their practical aversion to almost every kind of actual policy change"
I think the aversion to change comes from the fact that roughly 75% of Americans (maybe more) are doing fine in the current system and it's very hard to improve things for the remaining 25% without making things worse for the majority. There isn't a pressing problem that needs to be solved for a big majoritarian group (maybe in 5-10 years it'll be federal debt). People are not happy tinkering with something that mostly works. I believe that the focus on minoritarian issues has made politics so toxic in the US and that's why there's no enduring majority for either party. Doing nothing works because it's not disruptive but Presidents are egomaniacal arseholes who want their bust on Mount Rushmore, so they end up making (or try) big changes and become unpopular.
Coincidentally, I picked up Ender's Game from the public library this week because it's one of the books recommended by my son's school for summer reading.
Really? I thought Card was too cancelled to be recommended by schools anymore.
I’m trying to remember if there was more to the putative cancellation than just that he was expressing some views that you expect from a Mormon who wrote slightly creepy sci fi about talented children.
He really put his back into his campaign against marriage equality and "homosexual activity." Like, he talked about it all the time. It wasn't just something that he believed but mostly kept quiet about. Tracing Woodgrains, also Mormon, has a really anguished essay about how much he loved Ender's Game and Card, and how brutal it was for him to learn how anti-gay Card was.
It’s a Jesuit school so maybe they have different rules. I don’t know much about the author.
He's a great-great-grandson of Brigham Young. For several years he made it his life's mission to lobby against "homosexual activity" and marriage equality. The Wikipedia article about him goes into some of the controversies. There was much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments among his fans, many of whom absolutely loved his books but hated his politics.
If you son likes it, the "sequel" Ender's Shadow is also good, other sequels vary in quality but some are worthwhile. I read a lot of them as a kid.
Look, I support logging off and improving your life.
But your read on the disparity between people's desire to overthrow the system and their aversion to policy change is off. This is pretty easy to explain: people want change in general, but once you start talking specifics, the pro-change coalition falls apart because specific policies and policy tradeoffs impact people differently. There is no contradiction between wanting change and resisting a particular change.
"...everyone in American politics is struggling with the mismatch between voters’ deeply felt desire to overthrow the system and their practical aversion to almost every kind of actual policy change."
Noun-pronoun association question: does the "they" in this sentence represent the voters or everyone in American politics? I'm trying to figure out if the disconnect is between politicians and voters, or between voters dissatisfaction with the status quo and the same voters aversion to change.
I believe that very few voters are politically informed enough to actually make smart choices when they vote, which is why Congress has an abysmal approval rating among voters yet 94% of incumbents get re-elected each cycle. It boggles my mind how so many people can say, "Congress is an absolute shitshow, but obviously MY Representative/Senator isn't part of the problem," but it makes sense that unengaged voters would continually re-elect cowardly politicians who are terrified of actually getting anything done.
What a delightful read on a Thursday morning. I've also found reading fiction to be very restorative the last few months, both in terms of focusing on a single text for sustained periods of time, but also being taken out of my normal world, my normal thought processes and into whatever's in the book at hand.
Looking forward to updates on your book club!
The observation “people are disgruntled and risk-averse at the same time, and they want government to provide things higher up Maslow’s Hierarchy than the government is equipped or meant to provide” is very insightful, but what do we DO about it?
Individually, sure, we can each resolve to join a book club or play pickleball or whatever, but how does it scale across the whole society? What to do about the NEET twenty-something dude who has no close friends or girlfriend, feels angry and lonely, and feels validated when MAGA influencers tell him “this is all the evil liberals’ fault, trust in Trump, he is your True Savior”?
I was that 20-something (never fell for Trump's shtick, but I was not too happy on a personal level), coming off a breakup and the pandemic, and unironically pickleball and other pickup sports groups were what led me to great lifelong friends and more happiness.
It’s great that you found friends!
Where in California are you, and would you attend a SoCal Slow Boring meetup in LA/Long Beach/OC?
I'm in Sacramento so unfortunately no, a bit far
Matt!! I LOVE this one! ❤️❤️❤️😍!!
I think there is a younger male audience out there that you actually have a lot of influence on, and this kind of post is really valuable for them. They--and my 33-year old self, to an extent-- really benefit from seeing the smart guy having normal social needs.
A lot of smart people became that way because being the smartest person in the room buffered against some underlying social anxiety. I saw this happen with my brother, who is now an astrophysicist. It happened to me too, as a flutist, which is how I make money now. I guess we picked the appropriate gender-coded avenue to feeling good about ourselves. He's been much more successful than me though. 😒
“What you don’t see is many people articulating risk-aversion and comfort with the status quo as an overt political identity.”
Interestingly, this is a great statement of my politics. I oppose radical change, and loathe the idea of The Revolution™. I want everything to be just like it is, only maybe 5-10 percent better.
We all probably want housing to be more than 10 percent abundant, to the consternation of NIMBYs out there who very much want 0% change.
True, and also, Matt Y wants One Billion Americans, which is >10% increase in the US population 😊
What do we want? Incremental change!
When do we want it? In due course!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=um32CrYKvQY