Obama Netflix doc | Life updates | Future of the newsletter
Hello friends,
In this week's newsletter:
(1) Some life updates and thoughts on the future of the newsletter.
(2) My new essay for VICE on American Factory, the new Obama-produced Netflix documentary.
(3) What I'm reading.
What's happening with the newsletter?
So as some of you may have noticed, I took an extended break from the newsletter this summer. At first it was just a vacation, but then I got tangled up in some time-consuming research projects. On top of that I began to prepare for a media course I'm teaching at the New School this fall as an adjunct professor. It gave me some time to reflect on the direction of the newsletter.
I've ended up entrenching myself in the life of freelancing more than I anticipated when I quit my job at Vox last year. And during this time it's become clear to me that in order to justify working on the newsletter on a weekly basis — and taking away time from pursuits for which I'm financially compensated — I need to monetize it in some fashion.
In the next month or two, I'm planning on moving this newsletter over from TinyLetter to a higher-end email service and using a program to put part of it behind a paywall. Most likely it would mean that every other newsletter would cost a very small sum of money, and there'd be an option to donate more. For those of you who have asked me how you can support the newsletter and help give it a bigger platform, this would be the opportunity.
Will it work? I have no idea. On one hand, it seems that at least some people quite like the newsletter. On the other hand, very few people like paying for journalism these days. (That reluctance is, ironically, very much tied to why I decided to freelance in the first place; journalism and its practitioners are degraded by its revenue crisis.) Ultimately I think it's worth an experiment. If revenue reaches a certain threshold, I'll continue with the newsletter. If it exceeds that threshold, I may very well be able to invest more time into it. And if it becomes evident that it won't come close to that threshold any time in the near future, I'll probably have to rethink how I approach this.
I greatly appreciate the support and encouragement I've gotten from many of you on the newsletter so far, and I'm excited to take a shot at seeing if I can make this thing sustainable.
Obama's New Documentary Is Great. It Also Reveals Why He's Out of Touch
Here's an excerpt of my latest piece for VICE:
Ever since leaving the White House, Barack Obama has kept a fairly low profile. But his latest venture suggests he’s interested in getting back into the fray. On Wednesday, Higher Ground, the new Netflix-partnered production company he founded with his wife Michelle, debuted its first project: a documentary called American Factory that’s aimed squarely at the heart of American political life.
The film is an understated yet riveting story of workers struggling to unionize an auto-glass factory in Dayton, Ohio. The plant has a peculiar history: General Motors once ran the factory but shut it down during the financial crisis in 2008. Then in 2015 the Chinese glass manufacturing giant Fuyao re-opened the factory and hired many of the laid-off GM workers, but they were paid less, forced to do more dangerous work, and supervised by an army of Chinese employees.
American Factory doesn’t mention Donald Trump by name, but its tales of Rust Belt gloom are intimately tied to the factors leading to his election — and his potential reelection. The documentary captures the bleakness of working in manufacturing in a global economy where capital flows freely, robots are ascendant, and laborers are as disposable as paper plates. Its portraits of alienation help explain why Dayton voted Republican in 2016 for the first time in decades.
American Factory tells us quite a bit about Obama’s next chapter and the shape of his future legacy. It seems apropos that a gifted writer who harnessed the power of his personal narrative to catapult himself from freshman senator of Illinois to President of the United States is using storytelling to influence the world politically. To his credit, he appears eager to engage with the Democrats’ inability to foresee Trump’s rise. But Obama’s attempts to encourage the public to see the documentary as a story of finding “common ground” suggests that he’s still out of touch with some of the underlying dynamics that gave rise to his successor.
The film begins on an optimistic note. Fuyao’s revival of the shuttered GM plant gives new life to a community that‘s long felt left behind and out of options. Many of the new employees haven’t had a job in years and had lost homes and cars; a steady income at a growing business seems to be a godsend.
The fact that the company is run from abroad by a dispassionate Chinese billionaire who has to speak to his American employees through a translator seems like a recipe for xenophobia. Instead, however, the American workers are grateful to have jobs, and some of them develop tight bonds with their Chinese supervisors and instructors despite huge language barriers. American Factory is at its most heart-warming and funniest when it depicts Chinese and American employees struggling earnestly to understand each other. (At one point an American worker squints at a text message that translates to “we are a warehouse to find” on his phone.)
But the good feelings don’t last.
Read the rest here.
Oh, and some writing odds and ends: I still write breaking news stories and rapid news analyses for Vox from time to time, here are some more recent ones: How the Hong kong protests are evolving; Trump's obsession with crowd sizes.
Far more importantly: a short story on my latest Popeyes saga.
What I'm reading
"When billionaire libertarian David Koch died this week following a decades-long battle with prostate cancer, the Arctic was rapidly melting. The Amazon rainforest was on fire. And the Earth had just experienced its hottest month in recorded human history. These planetary conditions mimicked closely what scientists had tried to warn the public about 30 years ago, when they first sounded the alarm on climate change. They were also the warnings Koch worked most of his career to make sure the American public never accepted, nor did anything about." How David Koch changed the world.
The Amazon fires are more dangerous than WMDs. [This article raises complicated questions of sovereignty that could have rather imperialistic implications, but it's an interesting read and a reminder of the danger posed by the spike in nationalism globally as we approach climate catastrophe.]
The radical plan for taming capitalism: Give everyone a share of Wall Street.
Do labor unions make white people less racist? [Academic paper]
The New York Times' 1619 Project isn't anti-American, it's anti-white identity politics.
We put a “sin tax” on cigarettes and alcohol. Why not meat?
Google’s 4,000-Word privacy policy is a secret history of the Internet.
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