Beauty, ugliness and equality | Talking Nomadland
Writing and talking about politics and movies.
Hello friends,
This week’s newsletters are over at my Patreon page. One of them requires a subscription, the other is unlocked for the public this time around.
What beauty and ugliness tell us about political possibility
The first one is a blog post which discusses how hotness and high school social hierarchies can help us think through some political philosophy riddles:
“Some people are widely seen as beautiful, while others are not; in fact, some are widely seen as ugly. This seems like a purely aesthetic matter, but in fact it has some serious implications for the way we think about political possibility — and the obstacles to achieving equality in society. … Beauty is both a stark reminder that dumb luck plays a substantial role in the human experience, and that totally doing away with hierarchy between people is not possible. Those realities are flies in the ointment both for partisans of meritocracy and also for quarters of the left who think every form of hierarchy must be considered unjust and abolished, such as anarchists.”
There’s also a recommended reading section. It’s available to Patrons at the $3 tier here. (If you’re subscribed you should’ve received it in your inbox on Wednesday! If you didn’t, check your promotions/spam or drop me a line.)
What kind of movie is Nomadland?
The second one is a podcast-style discussion. I invited director and co-host of "The Only Podcast About Movies" Shahir Daud to have a conversation with me about NOMADLAND, which has gotten a ton of buzz both as a frontrunner for Best Picture at the Oscars and as a political text whose depictions of Amazon and the American social safety net have received praise and criticism.
This interview is an example of the audio/video offerings at the $6 tier at the Patreon page, but I’ve left this one unlocked. If you give it a listen, I’d been keen to get constructive feedback, since it was my first time doing something like this, and I was figuring it out on the fly. Check out the publicly available conversation and show notes here.
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