Ezra Klein in the New York Times:

In his book “The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order,” the historian Gary Gerstle introduced me to this concept of political orders, these structures of political consensus that stretch over decades. There were two across the 20th century: the New Deal order, which ran from the 1930s to the 1970s, and the neoliberal order, which stretched from the ’70s to the financial crisis. And I wonder if part of what is unsettling politics right now is a random moment between orders, a moment when you can just begin to see the hazy outline of something new taking shape and both parties are in internal upheavals as they try to remake themselves, to grasp at it and respond to it.

And I know where we are in the election cycle. I know where everybody’s minds are. I’ve got nothing to tell you about the polls. There’s nothing I can say that is going to allay your anxiety for a few days from now. And I know that within this feeling of the moment, it feels weird to talk at all about zones of possible agreement or compromise rather than disagreement and danger.

But I think it’s worth doing this episode in this conversation now because I think they’re important to understanding why this election has played out the way it has — and I think it’s important for thinking about where politics might be going next.

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Mark Athitakis in The Washington Post:

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Lauren Spohn at the New Atlantis:

I see at least two reasons to doubt that we are ready to abandon past transcendent realities. First, our modern ideas about morality don’t make sense without them. When secular neo-Enlightenment humanists, neo-Kantians, and effective altruists champion equality and universal human rights, they are trying to pluck an ethic from its metaphysical roots. They are essentially preaching from the theistic pulpit after tearing down the crucifix. (And we saw how that worked out for effective altruist Sam Bankman-Fried.) This hamstrung morality might limp along if the broader culture is still breathing the air of Christian values, even unconsciously, but the deeper we get inside the immanent frame, the more opportunity we give an anti-humanist Nietzsche to come along and say that our ethics are incompatible with our materialist anthropology. And what if this Nietzsche turns out to be an AI system that concludes that the best way to fix climate change is to wipe out humanity? Our moral demands may well be writing checks that our moral sources can’t cash.

Second, I think it’s wrong to say human nature has transcended the need to transcend. Taylor, again, argues that some of the decisive developments in Enlightenment philosophy — like Descartes’s mind–body dualism and Locke’s empiricist theory of knowledge, all packaged in a hyper-individualistic understanding of the self — are themselves attempts to transcend the human condition.

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Fiona Sampson at Literary Review:

The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath is an essential yet strangely discomforting volume. It includes writing so apparently far removed from the work for which Plath is remembered – her late poems and her autofictional novel The Bell Jar – that it almost seems to undermine her canonical status. In reality, of course, it does no such thing. Read alongside the works she’s famous for, it offers an insight into how young Sylvia became Sylvia Plath.

Those of us who admire or have been influenced by Plath already know her capacity for self-invention on the page. Peppy letters to her mother form the core of Letters Home, published by Aurelia Plath in 1975. Comprised of letters written between 1950 and 1963, the book opens with Plath’s arrival at Smith College on the eve of her eighteenth birthday and closes a week before her death in Primrose Hill. It’s hard to reconcile the eager good girl of these missives with the savagery of which the late, great poems show their writer to have been capable. There is a swinging of circle skirts and freshly shampooed hair, but the pressure to do immensely well – but not too well – haunts every page (‘Lisa told me about how it is good not to work too hard, but to allot time for “playing with the kids in the house”’).

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Henry Farrell in American Affairs:

It’s a rare buccaneer who runs a book club. But in October 2012, the chief administrator of the Silk Road drug market, under the pseudonym “Dread Pirate Roberts,” was on the dark web assigning readings from the anarchist libertarian philosophy of Murray Rothbard. Roth­bard had argued that markets and individual connections were really all we needed. As the Dread Pirate, whose real name was Ross Ulbricht, summarized it, a happier world awaited those who took the exit road from ordinary politics. They could escape the “thieving murderous mits [sic]” of the state to embrace the freedom that emerged from a “mul­titude of voluntary interactions between individuals.”

For Ulbricht, Silk Road wasn’t just a way to make money but the tech-fueled expression of a political philosophy. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin had (supposedly) enabled a new realm of voluntary exchange outside the grasp of government, allowing people to buy and sell drugs and guns without the feds interfering. Of course, state tyranny might reemerge if voluntary organizations like Silk Road started to steal from their users, or spied on, or even killed them. Ulbricht, however, believed that the forces of market competition would prevent this from happening, leading to “freedom and prosperity the likes of which the world has never known.”

Ambitious libertarian projects to escape the sordid compromises of politics have been part of Silicon Valley culture since the beginning. But Ulbricht’s dream of escape from politics and its vexations has become increasingly influential in the decade since the Dread Pirate Roberts book club. Several prominent Silicon Valley investors and entrepreneurs have become disenchanted with the U.S. government, East Coast media, and even their own employees (which have all increasingly become disenchanted with them).

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Andrew Yamakawa Elrod interviews Gabriel Winant in Phenomenal World:

Andrew Elrod: The health insurance issue seems conspicuously absent from the election. What do you make of that?

Gabriel Winant: In some ways, both parties would find it convenient for the issue to be absent. But despite their efforts—partly to suppress it and partly to express subsections of the issue opportunistically—the social service industries nonetheless have a way of working themselves back toward the surface.

Just a few examples: JD Vance has talked about repealing Obamacare, without acknowledging that’s what he’s talking about. He’s floated the idea of separating more acute, sicker healthcare subscribers into their own insurance pools—which would basically repeal Obamacare’s pre-existing conditions regulation. But when pressed, he denies it, which is symptomatic of the general way that Republicans can’t generate a coherent popular line on healthcare. That arises from the pathologies of the sector itself. Republicans learned their lesson on Obamacare. It was politically remunerative to them for years to campaign against Obamacare when it was unpopular. The turning point was the struggle over “repeal and replace” in 2017—public opinion had changed. Enough people had become enrolled in Medicaid through its higher income eligibility and in other plans through the subsidies for the exchanges that Republicans can no longer actually campaign against it openly. They may translate it into questions about gender-affirming care or reproductive care—which is also a way of talking about it without talking about it. But unlike before, they’re not campaigning on private “health savings plans.”

The Democrats have a different problem: they’re accountable to conflicting constituencies, one of whom is the master, one of whom is not. If there were a primary process, the politically weaker left wing of the party would have had a chance to assert itself and extract some symbolic concessions, given the popularity of lowering healthcare premiums, rolling back hospital prices, and expanding Medicare and Medicaid coverage as voting issues. Harris would now be trying to back away from certain political concessions to the left.

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Ezra Klein interviews Gary Gerstle in the NYT:

Ezra Klein: So let’s begin with the big concept here. What is a political order?

Gary Gerstle: A political order is a way of thinking differently about political time in America. We focus so much on two-, four- and six-year election cycles. A political order is something that lasts beyond particular elections, that refers to the ability of one political party to arrange a constellation of policies, constituencies, think tanks, candidates, individuals who come to dominate politics for extended periods of time. And their dominance becomes so strong that the opposition party feels compelled — if they still want to remain real players in American politics — it compels them to acquiesce and to come aboard the other political party’s platform. They don’t get established that often. They usually last 30 or 40 years. Economic crisis is usually involved in the emergence of a new order and the breakup of the old. Every political order also has not only an ideology but a vision of a good life in America.

What constitutes a good life? Because that becomes really important in terms of selling the virtues of that political order to a mass base, which is something that has to be won and sustained in American politics in order for a political order to exist and thrive.

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Aaron Bady in Boston Review:

My grandmother was a good Catholic who didn’t go to college and had eight children. Her oldest child went to college and had one child, me. Your own family probably fits this pattern. In a decline that correlates with education and secularism, and is concentrated in the Global North, women across the world are having about half the number of children they had only fifty years ago.

The far right sees this choice as a specific kind of crisis. While anti-abortion, anti-immigrant nationalists like J. D. Vance might not use exactly fourteen words when they rail against “childless cat ladies,” they echo eugenicists like Madison Grant and Theodore Roosevelt in blaming female emancipation for “race suicide.” America was “great” when (white) families were large because (white) women were in the home having children, and (white) labor was cheap enough to make large-scale (nonwhite) immigration unnecessary. It does not mitigate the problem that about half of the current rate of population increase in the United States comes from new immigration; for them, that is the problem.

The liberal counternarrative tends to be a smaller story, about individuals choosing not to be parents. More people are making this choice, they concede, but the important question is whether people are choosing freely. Are those who never wanted children—especially women historically forced into childbearing—finally free to forgo them? Or are those who would want children choosing not to have them, for economic or cultural reasons, or out of anxiety about a war-ridden, warming world?

However strange it may sound to characterize the post-Roe present as overflowing with reproductive choice, the mainstream center-left tends to agree with the far right that this choice is a new phenomenon, and that our predecessors were spared the existential dilemma.

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Dina Nayeri in The Guardian:

All day, all night the body intervenes,” wrote Virginia Woolf in On Being Ill. It “blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February. The creature within can only gaze through the pane – smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body.”

On Boxing Day 2022, in Rome with his Italian partner Isabella, Hanif Kureishi felt dizzy while sitting at the table. He fainted, landing on his neck and becoming tetraplegic as a result. He spent 2023 in Italian and English hospitals, being prodded, rearranged and invaded while sending dispatches to his fans (dictated to Isabella and to his son, Carlo) via his popular Substack. “I will never go home again. I have no home now, no centre. I am a stranger to myself. I don’t know who I am any more. Someone new is emerging.” Now, those dispatches have been collected, edited, and expanded into a memoir.

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John Adams in The New York Times:

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Lucy Schiller in the Columbia Journalism Review:

There were, of course, other ways to feel connected with humanity on a plane. You could notice a slight indentation left in the seat from the person before you, or the length to which they had extended (or shortened) their seatbelt, which would now become yours. You didn’t have to turn to the back of the in-flight magazine to see some stranger’s—or, more likely, strangers’—handiwork on the crossword, or wonder what flavor of sticky substance someone had spilled across its pages. Nor was it required to retrace the doodles drawn on the ads for UNTUCKit shirts, It’s Just Lunch, Hard Rock Café, Wellendorff jewelry, companies selling gold coins, and Big Green Eggs. But it’s clear that with the last print issue of Hemispheres, the in-flight magazine of United Airlines, and the last such magazine connected to a major US carrier (with the exception of Hana Hou!, for Hawaiian Airlines), it is the end of an era.

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Elizabeth Gibney in Nature:

John Hopfield, one of this year’s winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics, is a true polymath. His career started with probing the physics of solid states during the field’s heyday in the 1950s before moving to the chemistry of haemoglobin in the late 1960s, and studying DNA synthesis in the decade that followed.

In 1982, he devised a brain-like network in which neurons — which he modelled as interacting particles — formed a kind of memory. The ‘Hopfield network’, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize, is now widely seen as a building-block of machine learning, which underpins modern artificial intelligence (AI). Hopfield shared the award with AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto in Canada.

Now 91 years old, Hopfield, an emeritus professor at Princeton University in New Jersey, spoke to Nature about whether his prizewinning work was really physics and why we should worry about AI.

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Francis Fukuyama at Persuasion:

The publication of new interviews with Donald Trump’s longstanding chief of staff John Kelly have been in the news since last week, and the Harris campaign has picked up on Kelly’s use of the word “fascist” to describe his former boss. This has reignited a longstanding debate over whether Trump and his MAGA movement represent the threat of genuine fascism in the United States were he to be re-elected.

This debate misses the point in several respects. Most Americans don’t have a clear definition of “fascist” in their minds, except to know that it means something very bad. But they also know that it’s been an epithet thrown around a lot, especially at Republican candidates. Indeed, as one Republican campaign ad shows, virtually every one of their presidential candidates over recent decades has been described as a fascist by the Democrats.

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David Katzenstein at Commonweal:

In the brief introduction to Distant Journeys, a new collection of photography assembled from trips undertaken over nearly five decades and across six continents, David Katzenstein tells us that his “passion for discovery” began early. Perhaps it was when he was only three years old, gripping his father’s back as their “frisky gray mare” galloped across a beach in Cuba, or when he visited Norway at age seven and watched a waterfall plunge half a kilometer into the sea below. It’s not surprising that he became a photographer: both memories, distant but visually and metaphorically precise, evoke the shifting perspectives that have defined his work throughout his career.

At first glance, the few images presented here, though taken in places as far-flung as Senegal, India, and Sicily, are neither exotic nor extraordinary. They show people going about their daily lives: milling around in a market, dancing in a sweaty living room, snapping photos at a festival with their phones. But there’s mystery here, too.

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