blog-like substances

One of the unofficial rules for TOA is that I no longer post BLS - "blog-like substances". By this, I mean the kind of thing that pops to mind as soon as you find out someone writes their own blog (a reaction further exacerbated in my case because I can't offer anything resembling a focus, topic, or theme for TOA). One example of such a post would be the standard play-by-play account of recent life events ("I went to this thing over the weekend...") leading to some kind of epiphany ("...which made me realize that...") but of course plenty other things qualify as BLS.

Longtime readers will recall that this aversion to BLS was hardly the standard in the good old days. Who remembers the day I wrote about Ricky Rubio? I assume this detail surprises nobody. This type of writing is a natural entry point for any aspiring writer, who separates blog from personal diary by the razor-thin margin of an unregulated "publish" button. For me, the early days were always more about writing than the writing, or any notion of being a writer, so pretty much anything I finished got published. Those TOA posts were always a bit too chummy with the audience, detailing critical news such as my attendance at irrelevant local events or offering earnest "analysis" of books that no one outside the author's hostages had ever been motivated to finish. Like most bloggers, I slowly shifted away from these posts in a bid to demonstrate my increasing seriousness toward Writing. If I ever found myself wandering back toward BLS - notably with "Tales of Two Cities", also with "Proper Corona Admin" - then I built a framework I could use to connect the mundane to the significant.

And yet, why not get back to my roots every once in a while, maybe have a look around the old stomping grounds? I went to a standup show over the weekend where the comic talked about the strange realization that you could still be anonymous despite being on TV, then transitioned into a story about how he was anticipating a trip back to his hometown just for the recognition. I think we can all benefit from something like that every once in a while. They say not to forget where you came from but perhaps the better advice would be to remind yourself every once in a while. It might be especially important for those who can relate to my current state, where I am trying to write some challenging things yet finding the difficulty level discourages the consistent effort required of good writing. Over seven years ago, I posted something I wrote about tipping. If you'd told me then about some of the stuff I'd be trying to write now, I probably would have converted TOA to a podcast.

Endnotes

All that said, I suppose it's obvious by now that I'm currently working on a classic serving of BLS. Why else would I write this post now? The upcoming post, hopefully coming sometime this week to an email inbox near you, will fall neatly into the esteemed category "unnecessary analysis of recent sports news by an unqualified writer". In other words, for a day TOA will be twice as good as ESPN.

mission impossible

After a stretch of successfully churning out a reading review within three or four months of finishing a book, I've encountered a bit of a rut recently that's left some of my early reads from 2021 on a gradually expanding backburner. This happens to me from time to time, with the obvious reason being length - there's too much in the book to easily compress into a review. I offer this reasoning, for example, to explain why Thinking Without a Banister has sat on my to-do list for over six months - Hannah Arendt's essay collection is listed at 608 pages. If I could do it, it would be done, right? The problem is that this explanation demonstrates a common reasoning flaw as it relates to backlogs. If you think about it, all I'm doing by pointing out the length is describing an aspect of my process that should be accounted for in my turnaround time. After all, if I set three or four months as the deadline, it suggests that I've done so after factoring in the impact of long books.

The real explanation may have revealed itself over the weekend, when I tried to make progress on two such books - Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong and Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino. Both collections share a certain feature in the possibility that I might be better placed to relate to the work than the average reader - my experience as an Asian American could be reflected in Hong's work while Tolentino's age and background suggest I have more in common with her than I do any other writer on my 2021 reading list (so far). The issue that became so obvious over the weekend was the realization that although I wasn't necessarily wrong with my hunch, I definitely didn't get what I expected from these books, and perhaps I need to reset my thinking so that I can look at these books without the influence of my expectations before I can finish the posts.

One moment that sticks out when I think back a few days was the way a note from Trick Mirror seemed to be a better fit for my thinking about Minor Feelings - specifically, that the innocent question of "who would play you in a movie?" is a bit of a challenge given the lack of actors who look like me. I don't want to go back and dig out my "TOA Leadership Bias Test", but I think the same logic applies - if you put one minute on a timer and name as many actors as you can, I bet you won't have many Asians on that list. This example seemed to apply in reverse, as well - I felt that the basic theme of Tolentino's collection is scamming, and the way scams define the millennial experience of the system that dictates modern life, but when I look at the notes I took from Hong's work I understand that a book about race, the biggest scam of all-time, will have much more to say about the matter than a few essays with a broader focus.

It's perhaps somewhat appropriate that I took a break from all of this on Saturday night to catch a movie. I worked hard all day, you know, trying to write these reading reviews, so it was time for a rest. This was the first time I recall seeing a film in close to a decade, which I suppose is a relevant detail given my earlier complaint - I stand by my quiz about Asian actors, but the fact is that I can't name many actors of any race. The thought occurred to me during a quiet moment of the movie, when I briefly reflected on my self-imposed exile - did I stay away from the cinema simply because there was never any representation of me in these scenes? The movies, so often aspiring to become enduring portraits of this American life, are perhaps just another scam, its mission made impossible without Asians. But maybe that was Tolentino's point, or was it Hong's? I guess for now it's mine, my point being that I walked away from movies ten years ago for no explainable reason, and that I'm now considering whether this had something to do with the people asked to star in these films.

I didn't linger on this thought, returning to it only just now, because I had to focus on the film, a spy thriller from a franchise I'd once followed with devotion. The movie turned out fine but it wasn't quite good enough to crack my long-forgotten top ten list. Wasn't there a movie called The Prestige on it? I think I did like The Shawshank Redemption, though maybe I'm just confused, having read the story. I do know for sure I loved The Last Samurai since I rewatched a few favorite scenes during those dark days of the pandemic, though the several Asian actors starring in the movie would throw a wrench into my snarky little quiz. But why worry? I have my answer for that stupid question, and besides I'd be stunned if anyone could name more than the star of the film. Wasn't he in a spy film, too, or did I just dream it? He doesn't exactly look like me, either, but hey, it's all a scam anyway, right, the movies, race, all of this? If he can at least speak some English and Japanese, then I say it's all you need to play the role, it's all I'm doing now, it's all I ever do, just go on long enough until the audience, all of us, are convinced I'm fit for the part, though we do have to go on longer than most. But anyway, the guy can play a samurai or some agent or even a secret agent, he can probably play me, I mean he has played me, he's played us all, but who can blame him since he's only being asked, since I'm asking? It's his mission if he wants it, should he choose to accept it.

leftovers - the united state of denial (protesting comparisons)

There seems to be an urge to compare the storming of the US capitol to this summer's Black Lives Matter protests. I can see the point - one is a protest, the other is a protest, so the common denominator is there - but I disagree with the connection. As I wrote on Sunday, the January 6 attack was based on a fiction, but the BLM protests were based on real crimes committed on America's streets.

the united state of denial

"Look where you are!"

I pointed at the pickup truck, which was doing its best monorail impression as it idled on the lane line that divided right from center. The driver, a white male in his forties or fifties, had one forearm on the wheel and the other resting on the open window. His gaze never wavered. He looked like someone who had a real job - if he finished the day in clean clothes, he'd probably get fired. He repeated my comment, though without incredulity, like it was just a statement about the weather.

"Look where you are."

I looked. My bike was on the inside of the lane line, closer to left than right but firmly in the center. It was legal. I must have had something to add but I never found out - the light turned green, and so it was that those words became the first and last of our interaction.

I hadn't thought about him for a few months, possibly a year, but I remembered him last Wednesday. I remembered that he was wearing glasses, though I'd never describe him as bespectacled. I remembered his nondescript hat, the kind you wear because the people you spend time with wear hats. I remembered thinking that the irony of him trying to run me off the road in my own neighborhood on Columbus Day would be lost on him, if not an outright provocation. I remember his seeming ignorance of his role in our little holiday parade down Charles Street, which had started a few blocks back at Revere Street with honking, then swerving, and finally tailgating, my fear at the front giving way to an appreciation of self-defense arguments. I remembered him speeding off, cutting across Beacon Street like a stock car driver exiting pit row; he'd get that reference. I remembered just enough to realize that my rough idea of what he looked like wouldn't help me recognize him anywhere - in his truck, on the street, or from FBI footage. But even as my wildest hypothesis threatened to derail the recollection, I remembered how we had arrived at a red light on Beacon Street and we'd both slowed, stopped, obeyed. I remembered a moment of equality between Americans (forgive my assumption) that had allowed us to demonstrate what must pass these days for the wisdom of common sense - agreeing to disagree.

I use equality here in the sense I noted a few years ago when I read Simone Weil's First and Last Notebooks - equality means obeying and commanding one's equals. It was a fresh insight, and the definition has clearly stuck with me, perhaps because thanks to the fluke timing of my reading habit I came across it at just the right time - it's as if fate itself knew I required the definition of equality to help me navigate the next chapter of my life. I encounter the word with increasing regularity these days, whether it be on the pavement, in conversation, or in print, but in these interactions I sometimes suspect that equality is being used by people who have not made much additional effort to define the concept beyond the parameters of its most common applications; the insight from reading Weil has been a foundation in my mind for more challenging thinking on the matter beyond trumpeting equality for equality's sake.

But what does it mean to obey and command one's equals? In surface terms it implies a world where I tell you what to do, and you tell me what to do, and compliance is the secret to happiness, which is shared equally among all. Of course, I don't need to waste your time, reader, explaining why this doesn't quite work - nobody likes being bossed around. What's less obvious is that in modern society the basic structure forces us all to hold up our end of this bargain in one way or another, with the necessity of obedience implied by an escalating chain of command that forever lurks in the shadows of everyday life; they say that everyone is equal before the law. Most Americans, or I should say most combinations of Americans, have no issue respecting the equality of their fellow citizens, and trivial disputes rarely boil over to the extent that the courts must intervene in the situation. It's why every morning we can make the trip from one end of Charles Street to the other using all the hidden examples of obey and command necessary in making modern life possible - we excuse ourselves as we brush past, we drive or bike or walk in compliance with the rules of the road, we cede our claim to the right of way if it spares another from harm. And in those rare incidents when two idiots - yes, that's right, two idiots - can't get down the street without all the honking and fuss, the mutually acknowledged fact of the traffic light is a great equalizer, and everyone stops in respectful obedience of a collective's command.

It's this line of thinking, perhaps, that's made an aspect of the past week and a half difficult for me to understand, or even accept - the catalyst for the storming of the US Capitol was a fiction. I know this because the notion that the election was in some way rigged, compromised, or stolen has come up in courtroom after courtroom all over the country, and the cases have been thrown out one after the other; I'm told judges appointed by President Trump himself have sometimes presided over such proceedings. It's vital to recognize that a persistent myth is at the core of this attack because a society incapable of separating fact from fiction is unable to enforce the obey and command social contract that defines equality within modern civilization, which means that the event was an indirect attack against the institutions that protect, preserve, and promote equality; the fact that no power higher than our courtrooms exist to end such myths is what elevates the current situation from a tragic incident to an urgent crisis. I don't bring up this point as a way to dismiss the real concerns of anyone who openly supported President Trump over the past four years, or voted for him in November, or even showed up in DC on January 6 with only good intentions. I bring it up because it's extraordinary - the spark that formed the violent mob, the cause of what is being called a riot or insurrection, the first domino to fall in the build up to January 6, was a fictional idea about the legitimacy of the election, decisively refuted, and you would know this is a new level of crisis if you thought for three seconds about why we have the judiciary at all; you would know that when the wisdom of common sense eludes us commoners, the courts exist to reinforce the command and obedience of equality.

A country where the people cannot agree on the established facts has no future. This is the missing piece of the commentary since January 6 - which is so fundamental, so obvious to the core of the violence, that it's shocking I haven't heard more about it, though perhaps it bores those who write about this stuff for a living and tempts them to explore far more complex or tangentially related implications; it may indeed be too simple for our heady, hyperlinked times. But the simplicity of the statement belies the complexity of the reality I am trying to describe, which has been looming on the horizon for my entire adulthood - when the facts do not fit our worldview, we discard them for more convenient or consistent interpretations. I don't mean to generalize as a precursor to including other arguments, events, or examples - certain decisions made in isolation by one courtroom should be disputed and appealed if the circumstances allow for it, and my assertion that the rule of law plays an indispensable role in preserving the democracy isn't to be confused with the "law and order" trope that serves as code for excusing extrajudicial or vigilante justice. What I mean is this specific case as it relates to last Wednesday - an allegation of election fraud, a series of court cases, and the unanimous conclusion that should have established, for a change, a set of clear facts from which we can move forward rather than more of the paralyzing nonsense that has proved the immovable obstacle on the path to meaningful progress.

There is not, it seems, much hope for common ground in a situation devoid of common sense, where verdicts only reinforce worldview - either you are proven correct, or you have proof of a vast conspiracy against you. It's the real world governed by the logic of social media, where the only currency is the digital nicotine of approval - facts remain unpopular, and outright disapproval is the impetus to seek a more like-minded crowd. Those who've ignored all this to make a call for unity in this chaotic time have my respect, but also my skepticism - where is unity possible when established facts come under such fire that it sparks riots in the nation's capital? It seems that the only way to get all Americans to agree on the fact of the election might be to have every voter stand in a line, Biden on the left and Trump on the right, with each participant holding proofs of citizenship and residency in clear sight, so that the skeptics can personally count each legal head until all suspicions are put to rest. But then new allegations of forged papers, or of confusion regarding where to stand for third-party candidates, or of voters sprinting ahead of the counters to be tallied again! It will never end.

I must acknowledge, however, that no matter how bleak the prospects of unity under the current circumstances, there are scattered examples of unity in the national history, and this offers hope in the sense that history is alleged to repeat itself. The past examples of national unity seem to rely heavily on some outside scourge toward which we can direct our collective spirit, though my definition of "outside scourge" may be wider than the standard - the response to the pandemic represents a missed opportunity to me, but perhaps it reflects a difference in the way I define external threats. There are other such challenges on the American doorstep if you follow my thinking - the refugee crisis, the climate emergency, the ongoing question of extreme global poverty - but we can't pretend this nation in its current state has the prerequisite unity to effectively contribute to solutions, in the present or the future, for problems domestic or global. The only shared perspective I see at the moment is that of denial - there is no recognition from either side that the way political views are being expressed these days demonstrates not just disagreement, but a hostility that is reserved for when you think an opponent's view simply should not exist. I fear that the mentality is on the cup of a twisted logical leap - if the opponent's view should not exist, then why should the opponent exist?

This isn't us, we're told, by those who insist on expressing their denial with eloquence, insight, and optimism. But look where we are. The sense of compromise that defines common sense of the highest order - agreeing to disagree, no matter how grudgingly - has been replaced by a conviction that agreement is possible only among the like-minded; we are in denial of the fact that we only meet someone in the middle so that we can drive them off the road. We have an incoming President who calls for unity as if it will happen by decree, in denial of the fact that unity is about as elusive to the American experiment as resting a boulder at the summit was to Sisyphus, and in denial of the fact that the best way to reach his goal of unity is to create, explain, and execute a plan for improving the lives of his opponent's supporters. We are in denial of our refusal to listen to someone with a different perspective to our own, political or otherwise, and we are in denial that we lack the skills to do so in the unlikely event that someday we were to change this attitude. We are in denial that our reactive nature means we create, encourage, and enable the worst of our opponents. This isn't us, we say, but look where we are. This isn't us, we repeat, like the green leaves who watch their neighbors turn into foliage, united by a state of denial that seems to be the only thing we all have in common. This isn't us? It's not you and it's not me, but it's definitely us.

the lesson of becoming bad luck

The most surprising lesson I've ever learned is that people become their bad luck. I mean this lesson literally, in the sense that at some point the outcome of chance defines you better than the trajectory forever altered by unseen circumstance. There is a point in the aftermath of any unfortunate moment where everyone comes together and laments the bad luck, but at some point this detail fades from the memory and the victim is recast into the script of a rewritten life. I thought I'd have a lot more to say about this but it's actually quite straightforward. If you break your leg in a fluke moment on Tuesday, by Friday those circumstances don't really matter anymore; life confronts you with the reality of a staircase, and God knows if you'll make it to the top.

the challenge of real thinking

There's an unquestioned agreement that reading books is a productive way to spend time, which you notice in the peculiar criticism adults sometimes make of children - if a kid is called a couch potato, you can bet he's holding a remote control, not a book. This specific example goes away as you get older but we don't seem to overturn the conviction that reading a book is a smart activity - when I tell people I've almost read one thousand books since 2010, they assume it's reflective of a productive habit; nobody asks if I've just been rereading the Goosebumps series over and over. I don't raise this point to suggest I feel any differently, though, about the association of reading books to better intelligence. The other day, an innocent reference to reading books led me into an unplanned rant about bad thinking, a frothing tirade I capped off by declaring I couldn't trust anybody's judgment unless that person read at least one book per month. I've taken a few days to calm down, and now I'm ready to state TOA's official position on the matter - although the exact count of books is irrelevant, anyone interested in becoming a better thinker should be reading at least one page of a book every day.

Why specifically a book, though? Why not just words, organized into sentences and paragraphs, regardless of whether they form part of a book? It's all reading, which I've heard (or is it read?) that we collectively do more of than any other cohort of people that's ever lived on this planet. The internet enabled the creation of an effectively infinite supply of reading material, some of it good (and the rest found on TOA); technologies such as the smart phone have unlocked, accelerated, and simplified access to these sources. People today also communicate far more frequently in print, using texts and emails to create a constant stream of reading material for and about each other; we are all readers, whether we crack open a book or not. But in my mind, these other reading materials are not appropriate substitutes for a book, at least in the sense of their capacity to improve thinking.

The book's biggest advantage for cultivating thinking is the way it empowers a reader to ignore certain impulses encouraged by other mediums. This may sound like a direct shot at the hyperlink, and it's certainly in mind - if I start to disagree (or simply become bored) with a digital article, I can just click to something else. But without intending to invite a relative comparison, this was also true of the newspaper age, when a reader could always switch to one of the other columns, or learn to skip troublesome sections (1) (2). The book solves for this issue by committing the reader to battle through distractions, and the reader becomes more likely to reap the rewards for sticking to the task. This may also make for better listeners, and more patient ones, because books condition readers to slog through the conversational torrent of related but uninteresting remarks, which seems to seek out good listeners like a mosquito picks out sweaty forearms. If people asked me for advice about how to have better conversations with those holding different views from them, I'd start by recommending a book or two that their opponents might agree with as preparation for enduring the task, because in the midst of a conversation there is no option to click over to a more agreeable person.

The way a book disarms weapons of mass distraction is central to the way I think about thinking. Despite the various expressions attesting to the phenomenon, I'm not so sure it's possible to interrupt a thought - it's either completed, or it dies on the spot. Even if I'm wrong about this detail, I know I find nothing more destructive to my thought process than a series of stops and starts; May Sarton thought the surest way ruin a productive morning was to make lunch plans. The problem with thinking, I think, is that it doesn't timebox, which means it can't be slotted neatly into a half-hour on a calendar; thinking rarely stops at a convenient place to pick up later just to accommodate a demand on your time. It seems to me that the only way to have a valuable thought is to make as much time as life allows for thinking, with the dedicated portions of the day being as distraction-free as possible.

The points I've made so far - minimizing distractions, committing to the task, staying patient, and protecting blocks of unbroken time - are starting to look like a list of necessary ingredients for clear thinking. The way a book engages with a reader unintentionally emphasizes these qualities, which is partly why I champion the book as a tool for improving thinking. But it's also true that this isn't a quality exclusive to books - hyperlinked articles can be printed on paper, sterilizing the viral quality of internet reading, while intentional choices can expose anyone to new perspectives or competing points of view. This is why I think the next feature might be the most relevant, as it's almost unique to the form - reading a book teaches the reader to assess information in the context of the issue at its core.

A book, in other words, is a multi-faceted explanation of a central concept. This isn't something readers will understand if most of their information about a topic comes from scattered sources, who will at best produce tangentially related reading materials; the worst-case scenario for these readers is a series of non-sequiturs as the browser moves from link to link, opening one short work after another. The challenge created by this structure is the lack of direction regarding the hierarchy of information - is the current idea a fundamental concept, or merely a supporting player? A report describing the isolated side effects experienced by one among many thousand vaccine volunteers could be a warning alarm for skeptics, or a triumphant data point for those who expected many more problems; the referral, whether via hyperlink or otherwise, often offers little context for the fact and even less clarity regarding its overall relevance to any number of ongoing discussions. The same detail presented in a book, whether it be in support or opposition to a vaccine, would show in plain terms how the fact stitches itself into a broader pattern of observations that support a conclusion, and this gives the reader the tools for reaching an appropriate interpretation. Without these tools, the result is the commonly observed occurrence of people trying to fit each and every new piece of information into an existing worldview, which is often centered around an arbitrarily chosen foundational concept that might never be more than a supporting footnote in a meticulously crafted book.

The way a book can narrow its many pages down to a central focus is reminiscent of a distinction made in leadership thinking - is something urgent or important (3)? The book, by encouraging a hierarchy of ideas to form naturally around the main pillar, reinforces the role of weight, nuance, and relevance in terms of understanding the world; a book is, in other words, capable of making a distinction between what's important and what's not. On the other hand, the reading that happens outside the book is rarely positioned for this task because it must always present itself as urgent - URGENT - in order to attract enough notice to ensure its own survival, which is threatened by the daily avalanche of new content generated in the digital age; the rare news that's (merely) important might fall to the wayside if it does not attract fresh attention. A person who can't make the time for reading books seems to drift toward becoming interruption-driven, forever pulled downstream by the relentless undertow of urgency, and I fear in the long-term this has a corrosive effect on the capacity for making the distinction between urgent and important. The interruption-driven live on the fuel of urgency, but with each shared link or recounted tale they move imperceptibly closer to the fate of the malfunctioning smoke detector, whose constant urgency renders its dependents incapable of divining the life-saving alarm.

If these complaints sound vaguely familiar to you, reader, I can offer a potentially clarifying analogy - what I'm getting at is the equivalent of how a real conversation differs from small talk. The disorienting effect of jumping back and forth from one short article to another is a lot like that mental exhaustion you get at the end of a day consumed by small talk; good luck synthesizing all the chatter into a common theme. Small talk is an easy target - I don't know anyone who claims to enjoy it (though I can think of one or two who, with a dash of honesty, might sing a different tune). And yet, despite a generally low approval rating, small talk seems a permanent feature of the human experience, and one of many explanations for this is safety - in small talk, nobody gets hurt. This is because small talk is unchallenging, which means there is no possibility of harm; a real conversation means a challenge, particularly in the sense of someone's beliefs or assumptions, and this leaves one or both parties exposed to harm in a way that's not possible when commenting on the weather.

This criteria of challenge is why my comparison to small talk might be more appropriate than initially meets the eye. The challenge presented by all forms of reading share a surface similarity because any sentence or paragraph has the capacity to challenge a reader, but unlike with the short form a book challenges thinking in a way that is almost impossible to dismiss out of hand - it's the difference between the deliberation and the verdict. An article, study, or video only has enough time to suggest a different outcome (and can therefore be conveniently forgotten if another piece with a more agreeable conclusion is located) but the questions raised in a book can dig into the full thought process, which invite serious grappling before a reader can consider moving on. This is especially true for me when I object to something in a book that I've entirely agreed with up to that point, or from an author with whom I generally share a perspective - the process of comprehending and sorting out the contradiction can help me reach a new understanding, but if I remain in flat opposition I've likely done so having seen the author's full reasoning, which protects me from a knee-jerk reaction to something presented out of context. It's always good to have a starting point, but for me real thinking starts at the challenge, which I use in a way familiar to those who have some experience writing - the challenge of real writing is rewriting, and the challenge of real thinking is rethinking.

This is why I felt compelled to revisit my rant from a few days ago and attempt to work out exactly what I meant when I made my arbitrary proclamation. I knew I was broadly in agreement with my idea, but it seemed like there were some little contradictions and blind spots I needed to review before I could proceed with something as strong as "I can't trust thinking from a non-reader". As you know, I've scaled down my original stance to reach a more moderate position - always read a little bit from a book every day - but this doesn't mean I've tossed aside the question of trust that was at the heart of the initial outburst. Trust, I think, is the unacknowledged engine that powers the way we share, accept, and expand new thinking - if we trust someone, we give more value to their thinking - but it's unclear how the way someone thinks should influence the amount of trust we place in that person. When I work through the steps I've outlined for clear thinking - minimizing distractions, committing to the task, staying patient, and protecting blocks of unbroken time; evaluating information around a core idea; challenging yourself to rethink - I see a framework for the kind of thinking I trust, and as I've described I feel that reading books is a sure way to build these skills. The shared quality among these steps is that there is no room anywhere for the chattering masses, which makes sense because thinking is an individual's responsibility; groupthink is a marketing label for not thinking, and what I can't trust is someone who thinks not thinking is thinking just because someone else thinks the same thing.

Footnotes

1) By "relative comparison", I mean the kind of objection that would compare the newspaper to the hyperlink as a way of dispelling the idea that a newspaper is an example of distracted reading. I don't think for a second that the newspaper is more (or equally) distracting as a hyperlink, but that doesn't mean it joins the book among the ranks of undistracted reading materials. Imagine if the opening paragraph of a book ended with "continued on PAGE 37", which you'd find after flipping through scores of advertisements, photos, and opening paragraphs for other books? The newspaper, much like a hyperlinked article, creates an illusion of distraction-free reading, but this doesn't become clear until you think about how a book would need to be redesigned in order to resemble the newspaper.

2) This may have also had an effect on the decisions made by writers and editors. Imagine if you knew readers always had the option to flip to the comics the second they became disinterested in finishing your column? I would tone it down, at least a little bit, if I understood that the sanctuary of some orange rodent armed with thought bubbles was always ready to welcome those offended anytime I challenged their assumptions.

But it could go the other way as well - I know my readers on TOA can always jump ship, so maybe I compensate by coming in stronger with my point. Who knows? If I knew, this thought wouldn't be tucked into a footnote.

3) Of course, as it is with many examples of "leadership thinking", the adjective is hardly necessary - finding this difference is an important result of thinking, whether it be in a leadership context or not.

Endnote

Here's an "alternate" ending - it was actually the last paragraph through all the drafts - that I ended up removing in the final revision because I liked the ending of (what was then) the penultimate paragraph:

"When I share ideas with someone who doesn't have the skills gained from reading books (which is the assumption I'll make anytime I share ideas with someone who doesn't read books) it's not a question of whether I can trust that person's thinking, since it's impossible when someone gets their reading material through a daily gatekeeper, or from the top rankings of a popularity algorithm - it's a question of when I can trust, because the moment is surely in the future, which will come not after someone's started thinking, but after they've returned to think again. Trusting someone's thinking when that person doesn't read is like trying to offer revisions for an absent student's writing assignment - if the thinking process hasn't even started, then surely there isn't much opportunity for rethinking, as you would expect from a mind that's never been made up."

leftovers - moneyball joe flacco (businessman sense)

If I were forced to write a column in the style of "Donald Trump's election revealed ___ about the American electorate", I would most likely fill in the blank with something like "an inability to identify a good businessman" (1). I drifted toward this idea at the end of "Moneyball Joe Flacco", wondering if the efficiency fetish that is built into free-market thinking has come at this irretrievable cost, but I stayed away from it after deciding that, much like my other Big Ideas, this one likely applied to few rather than most, at best.

Still, there is something to think about in the discarded idea. If a big chain moves into a community and wipes out a few of the smaller businesses, those business owners move on to something else. Even if the new businesses create enough new jobs to offset the first-order economic effect - perhaps they are able to employ some of those aforementioned (now former) owners - the result of centralizing the economy around the big-money winners surely has some slow-moving, long-lasting consequence. At the very least, it decreases the diversity of business owners from a strictly mathematical perspective - instead of a cohort of small business owners who are embedded in the local community, there is the one person in charge of the big business who often sits in some far-flung headquarters; the neighbor who might have otherwise been an entrepreneur becomes a middle manager. Over time, the average American - who makes up a majority of the electorate - is going to reinforce a certain idea of what a successful business person looks like, acts like, talks like, simply by association with the sort of person who they see "succeeding" in their own community, who they never actually see in the community; he's on TV.

Footnotes

1) I generally disagree out of hand with this type of statement - I tend to think most of these so-called "revelations" were obvious to anyone who thought carefully about the issue prior to the "revealing" event; I include the thought presented in this essay among them.

proper corona admin, vol 88 - mailing it in

I suspect the following fits squarely into the category of "plausible BS", though I'll hold my final verdict until someone far smarter than me to fails to prove it (yet still writes an eventual bestseller based on the theory). But doesn't it seem like the pandemic response was the decisive factor in the election?

Here's the chain of my thinking - the response was mailed in from the start, which increased the appetite for safe voting options, such as the mail-in ballot; states that have used mail-in voting in the past have seen major increases in voter turnout, which was a significant factor in tipping the final result. Don't they always say a higher turnout would favor the left? Your move, talking head.