Climate talk, the death of insider journalism, and incels
Hello friends,
If you’re receiving this it’s because you opted into an email newsletter I set up a few years ago. I neglected to ever actually use it, but now that I’m freelancing for a bit — I left my job at Vox this summer — I think it’s finally time to use it to send out updates.
Climate talk
I recently wrote an article for VICE about how 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls are blowing what may be our last opportunity to forestall catastrophic climate change, and it got me thinking about our struggles with climate change communication.
The perennial explanation for why the political class and the media avoid prioritizing climate change is that it’s unsexy. MSNBC host Chris Hayes — who probably pays more attention to the issue than any other major cable news host — called it a “palpable ratings killer” in July. And politicians are aware that most voters don’t consider climate change a top tier issue even if most of them are concerned about it.
This poses a major predicament: even if you’re a journalist or a politician with deep convictions about tackling climate change, it seems risky to home in on the issue too aggressively. If journalists give up too many viewers and politicians jeopardize too many votes by fixating on the issue, they may lose their ability to address the issue at all.
I’m sympathetic to this concern, but I don’t quite buy it. First and foremost because we have a moral imperative to figure out a solution to this challenge, and secondly because there are good reasons to think that climate change can be made into a highly compelling story.
The first point is simple: Politicians, journalists and any other sector involved in informing and mobilizing people to address climate change have to take risks in making it a top tier issue because there is no other option. We are currently on course to making the planet uninhabitable — if we don’t take risks now, civilization as we know it will end. And the longer we take to get around to dealing with the issue, the hard it will be to manage it.
Secondly, I am highly skeptical of the idea that climate change is inherently too boring or abstract to capture the interest of the public. In the 2000s journalist Ezra Klein rose to fame by illustrating that no policy issue — health care, social security, tax policy — is intrinsically beyond the comprehension or interest of the average citizen. By using a highly conversational, non-jargony, context-focused style of writing and analysis, he garnered the kind of readership for wonky policy reportage that was up until that point typically associated with gossipy White House coverage. That’s a lesson I absorbed while at Vox (which he co-founded): it’s incumbent on the writer to make any subject approachable.
I don’t know what exact hacks are needed to make climate change a more salient story in the national conversation, but there is a ton to work with. Climate change touches on every element of human survival — food, water, shelter, health, mobility. It threatens so many things people hold dear — the security of their children, their property, the outdoors, wildlife. It's deeply political, posing a greater threat to the most vulnerable among us. And in American cultural life we’re already seeing that people do have a perverse kind of fascination with societal collapse: I suspect the superabundance of apocalyptic, zombie and dystopian films and shows we’re seeing these days reflects an ambient anxiety about our impending ecological catastrophe. There are so many ways to make the issue tangible and transform popular consciousness, we just need to experiment.
As for how politicians and policy players can mobilize voters — my article in VICE touches on a possible solution. Check out the article!
Some other new writing
I’ve been playing around on my blog recently, feel free to check it out.
Most recently I wrote a critique of of Ben Smith’s popular essay on the supposed death of insider journalism. I disagree with his assessment on its decline, and I also take issue with his reasoning for why it should be winding down. In particular, I was shocked by his claim that “in a normal country, nobody cares about politics." Seems like Smith thought the critique was fair enough to retweet it.
Other recent posts include some notes on "Sorry to Bother You" and a rant against the cancerous monomania that is Trump TV.
What I'm reading
Facebook's fact-checking operation is truly terrifying.
The Swedish right is ascendant.
Giving out cash in Uganda helped after 4 years. After 9 years, not so much.
The country's first climate change casualties.
MIIIIIIIIIIKE
Three long reads
Patrick Blanchfield's excoriating review of Bob Woodward's Trump book: "For page after dumbfounding page, Fear reproduces, with gobsmacking credulity, the self-aggrandizing narratives of factitious scoundrels. Didion was absolutely right to class Woodward’s work as fundamentally a kind of “political pornography.” But Fear is to Woodward’s previous oeuvre of political pornography what Fifty Shades of Grey is to Twilight: vampiric fan-fiction repackaged as middlebrow smut."
Pankaj Mishra on the religion of whiteness becoming a suicide cult: "To understand the rapid mainstreaming of white supremacism in English-speaking liberal democracies today, we must examine the experience of unprecedented global migration and racial mixing in the Anglosphere in the late 19th century: countries such as the United States and Australia where, as Roosevelt wrote admiringly in 1897, “democracy, with the clear instinct of race selfishness, saw the race foe, and kept out the dangerous alien.” It is in the motherlands of democracy rather than in fascist Europe that racial hierarchies first defined the modern world. It is also where a last-ditch and potentially calamitous battle to preserve them is being fought today."
ContraPoints' explainer on incels [video]. To me, ContraPoints represents political communication on the Internet at its best. Her videos are radically empathetic, rigorous yet widely accessible, aesthetically inventive and stylish, and packed with idiosyncratic analyses. In other words, the opposite of Twitter. I was disappointed there wasn't more talk of the phenomenon of incel violence, but it's useful (and quirky) commentary.
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Alright friends, I think that's it. If you are already filled with regret for signing up for this, I won't be offended if you unsubscribe. If you want to give me any feedback or just want to share some thoughts, you can actually reply directly to this email and I'll be able to read it.