We Get Letters
New mid-week edition includes your emails, bonus clips and what I'm watching
Lots of you had reactions to last Sunday’s email about the benefit of ignoring the President, so I thought I’d collect them all in a mid-week missive. Y’all are a smart bunch of folks.
Responding to the news that YouTube can make you believe the world is flat, K.B. offers a link to her own story about a different varietal of morons, as well as insight into her state of mind Sunday morning.
hahaha relevant: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/article/Spheres-of-influence-Houston-woman-shares-her-13066738.php
oh and also don't send ppl shit about 2020 trump predictions when it's like 8 am and your readers are still hungover and not properly caffeinated that's just mean of you jason
D.G., offers this take on the news that Twitter makes you dumber:
I find it interesting that people keep sharing that Italian study and saying its conclusion is ‘Twitter makes us less intelligent’ or some variation thereof… the paper doesn’t say that at all… it says that Twitter is a poor tool for teaching…or at least it was the way they employed it in the study. Of course, the fact that the study has been widely mischaracterized on Twitter is a kind of Freudian self-fulfilling prophecy — i.e., Twitter makes us less intelligent precisely because we see something being presented as accurate and therefore are left less intelligent on a subject… lol. At any rate, the clickbait headlines on that have carried the day and ‘Twitter makes us dumb’ will now be the conventional wisdom despite the fact that I’m often much smarter because of the Twitter and the people I follow on the platform. C’est la vie!
Point well-made and taken as such.
S.O., whose recent academic achievement makes me feel better about our future, has this to say:
Another terrific email. Thank you. I look forward to these every Sunday.
I always try to avoid the tweets of the president and focus instead on the policies. The things we care about (be they child protection, human rights, abortion, mass incarceration, climate change, racism, or any of the myriad salient issues affecting our world) were issues before Trump came into office and will be issues after he leaves office (unfortunately, probably in 2024). We have to stay vigilant and fight policies that hurt and oppress, but paying so much attention to his tweets is just distracting from that work, and we owe it to everyone coming after us to do that work.
Also, paying attention to his tweets is depressing as fuck.
R.R. checks in to solve the mystery of “a” or “an” before words starting with “h,” the plural of which I maintain should be “aiches.”
“An” when the h is silent, “a” when the h is pronounced. An heir with a history. This fucked me over for years. Still haven’t solved lay lie lain. I only write about sitting and standing.
A.T. demonstrates his superior taste and discernment:
Great stuff as always!
I meant to ask you if you were watching Chernobyl. Just read your answer. I think of you when I watch it and keep meaning to get your thoughts on it.
E.J. offers a helpful link if you’d like to unfollow the President.
Meant to send this yesterday... friend of mine created this a few years back.
M.G. gets the last word.
I continue to love every thing about these.
And I continue to love everything about all of you.
What I’m reading
Can you explain what an idea is?
“Advantages beget advantages,” write four social scientists, who did a study that proved “the overconfidence of higher class individuals can help perpetuate the existing class hierarchy: It can provide them a path to social advantage by making them appear more competent in the eyes of others.” Basically, overconfidence is a scientifically proven way to appear more capable than you are. The New York Times did a thing about it if you don’t want to read the study.
Innovating new ways to communicate to your audience is “a continuing process of gradual improvement and assessment that every institution and business experiences in some way,” writes David Sax in the Times, but you’re reading a newsletter, so you knew that what’s old will be new again.
Speaking of what’s old being new again, this month our economy officially becomes the longest period of growth ever, so why are we back at an unacknowledged risk of zero interest-rate policy again?
Charging companies to use your data is gaining currency as a policy proposal, but one big problem is that people wildly overestimate how much that data is worth. Meanwhile, political ad spending is slated to increase about 36 percent over 2016.
Concern for “women’s issues” is surging among Democratic Primary voters, and Elizabeth Warren is now in a solid third place. Whether you think The Handmaid’s Tale is grounded in reality and could actually happen or “capitalizes on people’s irrational fears and won’t become a reality” depends more on your partisanship than your sex.
Grilling with gas is objectively better than with charcoal, argues science.
What happens if social media networks removes indicators of social status?
Drinking how many cups of coffee a day is safe?
Growing rice is as bad for the climate as 1,200 coal plants, according to those radical, muckraking bastards at Bloomberg.
You know what else is bad for the environment? Tourism.
Apropos of last week’s newsletter, Stephen Colbert describes how he constantly pays attention to Trump and turns it into laughs.
What people die from isn’t what they Google and certainly isn’t what the media covers, especially when it comes to heart disease, suicide, homicide, and terrorism.
What I’m watching
Donald Trump should win an Emmy for Best Supporting Actor in a Drama for his portrayal of a racist demagogue in Netflix’s When They See Us. Hear me out: Director Ana DuVernay could have hired an actor to play Trump or devoted more screen time to contemporary video of his belief, reached before the trials, that the Central Park Five should be put to death. But he’s part of the atmosphere, a thing reacting to and being reacted to, and by placing him in his proper context for that time DeVernay buries a time bomb into her story of racial injustice. What happened to those boys is not something we can celebrate as all turning out well in the end, because the worst racist in the story ended up the President of the United States of America.
The oldest, who was born before all the boys were released from prison, turned this on one night this week. He’d heard about it, but he didn’t know anything about the story, only that there was chatter on social media about this show. I was treating When They See Us as I treated Schindler’s List in the ‘90s — important, but too harrowing to endure. I remember telling an actor friend of mine why I had chosen not to see List — I do not want to endure the experience of witnessing this injustice and terror — and he told me that was exactly why I should see it. I’m not telling you that’s why you should see it. I’m telling you that this is made by a more confident hand than Spielberg’s, and it will help you see your world more clearly.
What do you think of today's email? I'd love to hear your thoughts, questions and feedback. I might even put ‘em in the newsletter if I don’t steal it outright: jason31170@gmail.com
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