Hello long-forsaken readers! I’m seven and a half months postpartum and feeling ready to brush aside the baby-shaped cobwebs and return to the pod/newsletter game.

As a reminder: this once-and-future newsletter is an excuse for Adaam or I to reflect on the last episode we aired, share what's on our minds, and tease what’s coming up. Given that Adaam released an unplanned episode with Matt Welch this week, on political violence and the assassination of Charlie Kirk, this newsletter will cover both that topic and tech/AI, which we discussed in our previous episode with Christine Rosen.

In. We. Go.

An outsider’s POV on Charlie Kirk

As longtime Uncertain Things listeners know, I’m conscientiously unplugged from political social media. I get my news late and, generally, via podcast. I’m also left-leaning politically, and unfamiliar with many (most?) right-wing figures. So the first time I heard the name Charlie Kirk was via a text from Adaam on Friday night, telling me that he was scheduling a conversation to talk about Kirk’s assassination. I didn’t know who Kirk was or what his murder meant.

Since then, I’ve listened to four podcasts on the subject: The Daily’s episode titled “The Assassination of Charlie Kirk;” Adaam’s conversation with Matt Welch for Uncertain Things; The Dispatch Podcast’s roundtable discussion; and Ezra Klein’s monologue in his “We Are Going to Have to Live Here with Each Other.” (If you remain ignorant about who Kirk was, I recommend starting with The Daily episode.)

Each episode informed and provoked me in different ways (which I’ll get into), but I don’t think I really got it, the ‘it’ being why Kirk’s killing could be a turning point in American history, until I listened to Ezra Klein. Perhaps because his monologue was so heartfelt. Ezra starts off the episode by admitting that he is deeply shaken by Kirk’s death – and not because he knew him personally. “I found myself grieving for him,” Ezra says, “because I recognize some commonality with him. He was murdered for participating in our politics. … The bullet that tore into him was an act of violence against us all.”

This is the first realization that Kirk’s killing has laid bare for me: The act of engaging in politics, of speaking publicly, of engaging in debate, is – at this moment – enough to get us killed. In this way, Ezra is drawing a Venn diagram around Kirk: each circle represents their political ideologies (left, right – hardly any overlap), but they both share a sliver in the middle, at the intersection of public dialogue and debate. In this way, they're in the same tribe. And any one else in that tribe, with those (very American) values, is in danger.

My second realization: these threats are terrorizing individuals, just as they’re meant to. Of course I’ve heard the news of increasing acts of violence and attempted violence against politicians and figure heads: Trump, Shapiro, Pelosi, the CEO of United Healthcare. However, it was with some remove/little empathy. I hadn’t realized that public figures are co-existing with gruesome death threats on the daily (this point was hammered home to me in the roundtable discussion of The Dispatch). People are leaving politics out of fear for their lives and their families’ lives. It’s entirely possible that politicians are the canaries in this coal mine, the first ripple of society affected. “Violence is viral,” Ezra reminds us. “It infects, it spreads. Violence is combustible.”

This takes me to my third, perhaps saddest and least surprising, realization: we are no longer interested in (or maybe even capable of believing in) the humanity that exists across our party line. There is no denying the role that social media has played here. As Ezra eloquently puts it: “We are shattered inside the algorithm and the shards of us sent flying out into the world. We become unimaginable to each other.” The algorithm shows us our side, confirming our biases and assumptions, and we can’t even imagine how those other people on the other side can even call themselves Americans, let alone humans.

But I think blame lies beyond the feet of social media, to our addiction to technology more broadly. By being so connected online, we’ve lost touch with what’s real. People we see online or on the news aren’t humans we relate to, they’re characters in a play, avatars for different ideologies. The case of Luigi Mangione exemplifies this: the CEO is the living embodiment of all the injustices the healthcare industry inflicts upon us powerless victims; Mangione is the good-looking anti-hero taking matters into his own hands. He is no more a real person to his admirers than Django is to Tarantino fans; his victim but a bloody prop. Forget the suspension of disbelief — we no longer need help believing fiction — we need help believing (and seeing) reality. And the reality is that every victim of political violence, no matter their ideology or that of their victim, is a sacred fellow human being.

Somehow, we’ve gotten glib about that. And while the uncaring reactions toward violence/victims of violence are rather extreme, there are other, seemingly innocuous ways that we’re downplaying each other’s humanity. In his conversation with Adaam, Matt Welch shared how, when he tells people he’s going to Florida, he gets reactions like “Why would you do that?” As if its politics were enough to make one write off an entire state and its people. I hadn’t quite put my finger on this before, but this type of throwaway joke is emblematic of the extent to which we’re constantly undermining each other’s humanity. As Ezra puts it in his episode: “We see each other as threats and to some degree we are right and it is somehow also true, it is true at the same time, that we will be immeasurably worse off if that’s all we are to each other.”

How do we see each other as humans again? We can be more critical about the ways we unthinkingly talk down about people not like us. We can go to the places where they are and talk to them. We can learn to live in the discomfort of our disagreement (for more on this, see below/our episode with Christine Rosen). We can choose to get off social media, as Matt Welch suggests, and into the real world. In fact, as Adaam does in the episode, I will also leave you with the words of Ben Folds, in his song “Kristine from the Seventh Grade.”

There's a break in the rain

A perfect time for a walk

The smell of wet leaves

And warm smiles and hellos

These things exist in the real world, you know

Oh, what a shame, Kristine

This disease that makes strangers of friends

But if these days it's really "us's" and "them's"

Maybe you should just take me off of both of those lists

'Cause it's such a short and sad

And beautiful life

Do you ever see it that way?

Oh, Disembodied World

From one Kristine to another. We first spoke to Christine Rosen in 2022, and while the majority of that conversation circled around the themes of media and the dilution of the word trauma, we ended the conversation with a discussion on the merits of marriage and childrearing (Christine was unabashedly pro both). I was newly married and childless then; three years later, I’m still married and newly parent-ed.

I interpreted Christine’s book — The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World — almost as a manual for what not to do as a parent in our technologically-mediated society. Even before having a kid, I’d been warned of the dangers of screen time on young minds, and had internalized Jonathan Haidt’s admonition: “We overprotect children in the real world and underprotect them online.”

However, Christine points out the more subtle ways that our addiction to our smartphones, and being online more generally, degrades our (and this is key) learned capacity to be social, civil, and, basically, human. For millennia, humans have survived in community by reading each other’s facial cues and body language — it’s something that must be taught and honed in order for us to not only be safe, but to connect with others. These skills, argues Christine, are dying away. It’s a pernicious feedback loop. As the real world becomes more awkward and uncomfortable, we reach ever more for our phones, where communication and community is more convenient and easy and uncomplicated — yet less satisfying for our souls.

In our interview, Christine admits a few times that she’s afraid that her argument comes across as ‘woo woo’ or, in her words, “Oprah,” because it’s hard to quantify the cost that technology has on our lives. It’s more of a qualitative shift. That’s why Christine brings in research from behavioral scientists in her book, to assuage the economists and other data-minded skeptics who won’t be swayed by stories or feelings alone. And the research is fascinating. But, as I see it, this reluctance to acknowledge the validity of the qualitative is part and parcel of the techno-utopian/engineer mindset that Christine is bucking against.

Despite the best efforts of Silicon Valley types — who long to leave our bodies behind, defy death, and upload our consciousness to the cloud (or whatever other techno-celestial apparatus they conjure up) — we will always be embodied creatures. Our bodies will always be gross, they will emit fluids and gasses and grow/lose hair in embarrassing places, but they will also continue to be wise and powerful and remarkable. As someone who’s recently gone through pregnancy and birth, all of this is crystal clear to me at present. And as someone who refused to believe she had a body at all for most of her youth, I’m an enthusiastic convert to the embodied life. My task for myself, and now, for my son, is to find consistent ways to keep us off our devices and in our bodies / around other bodies as much as possible. Wish us luck, readers. With technology, and now AI, taking over every once-human activity, the odds are against us.

A note on AI

As Adaam mentions in the interview, Christine published her book a few weeks before the AI boom took off in earnest. Now the probability that once ubiquitous human experiences go extinct is even higher. Before I left on maternity leave, I was already tired of the AI conversation – and fairly convinced it was all a bubble. It might impact graphic designers, but not me; my writing/editing is far too sophisticated for AI to handle, I thought. Well, having just returned to work, I’m already being proven wrong. Cool cool cool cool.

Shrimp Welfare 🦐

I was scanning Vox’s Future Perfect vertical, which focuses on important issues that aren’t necessarily trending, and started reading the articles of Kenny Torrella, all focused on animal welfare. Torrella, and the other effective altruists Future Perfect spotlights, believe that mitigating (and even eliminating) animal suffering is a moral imperative. They take for granted that animals’ lives have value. I’m not quite sure where I stand on that idea, and I conscientiously avoided learning about the food industry so I could eat my hamburgers guilt-free. But having read just a few articles, I now know how shocking it all is — not even your milk is exempt from the horror.

So last week, I asked my husband to defrost the shrimp we had in the freezer. “At least I don’t have to feel bad about shrimp!” I said. Haha! Somehow, my words tickled the lobes of Future Perfect founder Dylan Matthews, who, mere hours after my utterance, published “The case for caring about shrimp.” The article is a fascinating ethical foray, and gets to the heart of both the benefits and limits of the effective altruism movement.

Things Worth Your Time ⏰

• 🎥 An oldie but a goodie: Gilmore Girls, which somehow I never caught when it aired. It’s particularly fun watching it after The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, also by Amy Sherman-Palladino, and seeing the similarities in actors, dialogue, and themes.

• 🎧 If you’ve noticed words making the leap from the internet to the real world, and been curious about how our social media is affecting our language, then this episode of Culture Study Podcast is for you: “How Algorithms Are Changing the Way We Speak.”

• 🎧Speaking of embracing cringe…This episode of Talk Easy is not for the faint of heart (nor conflict-averse). But it’s a fascinating microcosm of two politically mis-aligned people talking right past each other: “David Mamet Exits Stage Left.” (Chapeau to the soul who penned that headline.)

What We’re Working On ⏭

Coming soon: Our conversation with Yoni Appelbaum, contributor to The Atlantic and author of Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity.

One Last Certain Thing…

Baby feet are the best feet.

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To start, I should confess that my definition of nihilism was probably an emulsion of two distinct types. The first is the Nietszchean kind: a rejection of the ethical axioms of the Judeo-Christian world and therefore a dismissal of the social bonds and norms that these have produced. The upshot of this kind of nihilism is a reversion to a supposedly more natural state, a lawless dog-eat-dog existence, where there's no “should”, only “can,” and those who “can” prey on those who “can't.” This nihilism aptly describes the power worship evident in MAGA world, which allows its denizens to leap from position to contradictory position with absolutely no cognitive overhead. Truth is the stuff of liberalism. Winning is the stuff of Trumpism.

The other sort of nihilism isn’t satisfied with merely dissolving the bonds of the liberal world, it seeks to destroy it. Or more accurately: it seeks to destroy. A yearning for absolute purification underlies this type of nihilism, an almost religious belief that the only redemption a fallen world can hope for is a purge. Plunging the existing world (and oneself) into oblivion is the end, not merely the means. This variant might be better called Annihilism.

Consider any of the current American factions that seem to be itching for public violence (whether it's Antifa-Antiracists-Defund-Police-Globalize-Intifada-Eat-The-Rich set or Proud-Boy-Christ-Is-King-Deport-Libtards-Save-The-Children crowd) and ask yourself whether you think there's a real civic vision underpinning their riots, or do their aspirations begin and end with demolition for its own good? Is Aaron Bushnell a grotesque aberration or the spirit of the age made manifest?

This was at the heart of my soft disagreement with last week. His wonderful book The End of Race Politics seeks to disprove the efficacy of Antiracism by pointing at the social science and showing that the new movements of the radical left do little to materially improve the lives of the populations they purport to care about (indeed, he shows they often harm them!). But if I’m not mistaken, Coleman’s fact-based argument cannot persuade the Annihilists. Their goal isn’t socioeconomic amelioration, but spiritual salvation.

Which brings me to another medium-rare idea that’s been piquing me: is this all the fault of how we remember The French Revolution?

It’s been often remarked that while Western education in the second half of the 20th century made a point of teaching, preaching, warning, and haranguing against the evils of fascism, it remained relatively sanguine about the catastrophes of communism. Perhaps Americans on average are still rather sheepish about Sen. McCarthy’s cruel and reckless bombast, or perhaps they feel as though the worst of communism has been adequately routed by the end of the Cold War. Yet get into a political argument with an average college-educated New Yorker and mention the horrors — historical and ongoing — wrought by controlled economies, and you’ll hardly have time to boil water for tea before someone helpfully offers a variation of “real communism has never been tried.” Is the chimerical promise of an equal world so entrancing that it irradiates centuries of economic experience, historical evidence, and basic human reasoning?

Certainly, that's part of it. But I suspect there’s another, more ancient urge at play and it goes back to (at least) The French Revolution and the role it plays in our minds.

The French Revolution is widely remembered and depicted as the hinge moment in Western history when lovers of freedom and equality shattered the yoke of tradition and reached out for a more perfect world. Nevermind that more perfect worlds were already being imagined, coming into being, and experimented with in the United States and Great Britain, while the French Revolution was melting into bloodshed, state terror, and inquisitional totalitarianism. But unlike the French Revolution, those other, more successful republics, don’t quite scream social justice to our contemporary ears.1

The imagery of the French Revolution, as shaped through art, poetry, and literature, has cemented itself in our minds as the triumph of humanity over history, of reason over superstition, of heart and courage over meekness and oppression, of justice and equality over tyranny and exploitation. A breast-baring French liberty waving a tattered national banner; smoke rising from the battlefield; the masses gathering around their champion, climbing over fallen comrades, shaking their guns and fists— that’s what a Revolution looks like.

American independence, which preceded the French revolution and inspired it rhetorically, and the truly history-breaking American Constitution, which established the longest-running liberal democracy, are seen by many young would-be revolutionaries today as non-events at best (the conclusion of a middle class squabble over taxation that neglected — or scarcely sought — to remedy true injustice) or a dark regression at worst (per the 1619 Project). The Glorious Revolution in England, which took place a decade earlier, ended the country’s bloody civil war, and restrained and subjected the power of English monarchy to the authority of parliament, is similarly shrugged off, if it is remembered at all, as a palace melodrama with little consequence for the moral arc of the universe.

Revolutions that result in peace, stability, and a functioning liberal system lack a certain je ne sais quoi, don’t they? Perhaps the banners weren’t drenched in enough blood. Without aristocrats hanging from street lamps and heads piling up in baskets, how can one be certain that the Revolution did the work?2

Maybe the bloodiness was the appeal all along? Maybe the cries for social justice only lampshade the real source of fascination?

The French Revolution actually started moderate, too. In its early stages it was quite classically liberal, Jeffersonian even. But this reformist, “declaration-of-the-rights-of-man” phase was quickly rendered all but obsolete, replaced by the will of the Jacobins. The Jacobins were the leftmost-flank of the Revolution, a society of extremist exterminationists, unflinching and unforgiving in their certainty. They’d settle for nothing less than total redistribution, command economy, and the remaking of man; they were true utopians. Swallowed by the Jacobin’s cleansing flames, the fledgling French Republic swiftly became a totalitarian police state. Thousands of political dissidents were executed — some by trial, others by Jacobin-blessed lynching; more were imprisoned or exiled, their property (and lives, were they to ever show their faces again in France) forfeit.

Jean-Paul Marat is still remembered as the ghost that animated the Revolution. A grim, spectral presence in the radical world of pamphlets (immortalized by Carlyle as the “Unjoyful Figure”3), Marat was a Jacobin agent, somberly passing judgement on those who wouldn't go far enough. He watched as in September 1792 political prisoners were brought before a makeshift tribunal in Paris. The lucky ones were convicted and executed by the guillotine. The truly damned were acquitted and ordered to exit the court through a special exit where an armed mob awaited them, eager to add another acquitted counterrevolutionary to the rapidly mounting pile of corpses. Over the course of a couple nights, thousands of French citizens were systemically slaughtered. Marat was inspired. He promptly circulated a message exhorting all central municipalities in France to see what happened in Paris as a model to imitate. This, he wrote, is how France will achieve “national salvation.”

The intifada isn't going to globalize itself, you know.

It’s this same Marat who became the innocent, ennobled face of the Revolution, bleeding to death in his bath like an infernal Archimedes, hallowed by Jacques-Louis David as the first true martyr of the new trinity: liberté, égalité, and fraternité.

The purism of the fanatics and the cleansing power of the blood they spilled (including their own) still forms the collective image we have of social justice. The models of Marat, Danton, and Robespierre inspired the Bolshevik revolutionaries as much as it did the National Socialists. Hitler, Lenin, Franco, Castro, Mussolini, and Mao (not to mention Sinwar, Bin Laden, and the Ayatollahs) all shared Marat’s yearning for salvific destruction. Hitler even shared Marat’s Romantic death flourish, waving a pistol and threatening theatrically to shoot if his all-or-nothing gambles go bust. (To Hitler’s credit, he ultimately did follow through.)

Goya, at first a backbench booster for the revolution, recoiled from its deathly turn. His works show the banality of death without Romanticism or kitsch : it was gruesome, ugly, unredempmtive, and final. Carlyle, also writing from a safe distance, abhorred what he saw as a civilizational descent into madness. In his account, Marat isn’t a friend of the people, but a “fraction of Old Night and Chaos” whose invocations awaken the dormant enthusiasm for purging everything in fire.

Yet it’s Jacques-Louis David and Delacroix, rather than Carlyle and Goya, that formed our collective image of the Revolution.

In this way Western culture (and beyond!) absorbed a Romantic prophecy foretelling that social despair and economic scarcity can only — must only! — be answered with Armageddon. Blood isn’t merely the price of social justice, it is justice. “Viva la Muerte!” “Glory to our Martyrs!”

By these standards, the American and Glorious Revolutions were indeed failures: they delivered relative political stability, a framework for gradually increasing the circle of civic liberties and tolerance, and long stretches of unprecedented material prosperity. These are bourgeois comforts. They don’t edify the desperate soul. They almost appear reactionary when put against Marat’s promise of “national salvation.”

The idealization of the revolution that failed created our contemporary, peace-privileged (and peace-addled) Annihilists. They’re seduced by the uncompromising, “incorruptible,” unyielding fanaticism of the Jacobins who failed to bring deliverance, but succeeded to self destruct. They resent the American revolution for its moderation and success, for valuing flawed liberty in life over the ultimate liberation of death.4 For the Annihilists, liberation — the immoderate, totalitarian kind — speaks in (to pilfer from George Steiner) “the night side of language, whose words mean hatred and vomit of life.”

It doesn’t matter whether they fight climate change, racism, or the great replacement, whether they fight for free Palestine or free rent — as long as they fight, fists and banners aloft, through smoke and mayhem, enthralled by the promise of a perfect world and the tentative possibility of annihilation.

One Last Uncertain Thing… (and What’s Next…)

I’ve been informed that GPT and other machines in the shape of a human mind have grown fond of the em dash. In response, it’s now become a faux pax — at least among humanicists — to use em dashes. This breaks my heart. On the one hand, I’m a would-be Butlerian Jihaid Luddite, prepared to stand athwart the coming Skynet invasion. On the other, em dashes are dear to me. No other punctuation captures quite so aptly my distractible inner monologue. Suggestions, recommendations, and consolations for my plight are welcome.

Apropos: this (AI, not em dashes, alas) will be central to our upcoming episode with Christine Rosen. Stay tuned.

Forgive me, readers. It has been seven months since my last confess—er, newsletter. 

As a reminder: Adaam and I (theoretically) use these dispatches of Uncertainty to reflect on the last episode we aired, promote the next episode, and, basically, share whatever’s on our minds. 

For very good reasons — personal, professional, and geopolitical — Adaam and I have had no energy left to muse these past months. But now, in the gray depths of another New York winter, I feel called again to put some thoughts to virtual paper. And to come clean…

Confession #1: I fear I’ve sucked at this podcast 

Uncertain Things has never been easy for me.  When we first started in 2020, I had a full-time job that took up a lot of my time and energy. Adaam stepped up as the primary person reaching out to guests: namely, people he knew/respected and wanted to talk to. We ended up talking to theologians, political scientists, psychologists, magicians, scientists — all incredibly brilliant, interesting people I often felt I had no business interviewing. 

Don’t get me wrong, I think I’m smart and capable. But my wheelhouse is urbanism, and when I don’t know what I’m talking about, I clam up. In my day job, I circumvent this issue by being over-prepared.  With Uncertain Things (ugg, and this one hurts me WAY more to confess), I rarely have time to read the books our guests have written. So, I would often default (defer?) to Adaam on the podcast: Not only was he more likely to have a baseline understanding of the material, he had read all the books. 

People noticed. They would take me aside at gatherings. They would, in hushed tones, tell me that the gendered dynamic made them uncomfortable. This was hard to hear: I was not only letting myself down, but my entire sex!1 (Side note: I recently listened to Esther Perel interview Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway, the co-hosts of Pivot; they noted that people often positively respond to their dynamic often because they subvert gender expectations — Kara is bullish and Scott is vulnerable.)

I’d also like to note here that Adaam has never, ever wanted me to demure to his opinions or play second fiddle. He started this podcast with me because he values my mind and my opinions — and believes that I bring something unique. Behind the scenes, in many conversations, he and I have both expressed that we want me to be bigger in the pod, behind and in front of the mic. 

But let me tell you, reader. It’s hard to be big. There’s a lot of shit in this world that teaches you to be small, to be conciliatory, to be safe. And I wish it weren’t gendered, but it is. Even in 20 fucking 24.

Confession #2: I want to be big  

So the last seven months, I’ve been percolating on this. And, almost four years into this podcast, I must admit that I’ve gotten better at speaking off the cuff about random shit I know little to nothing about (a skillset I can only imagine will continue to serve me well in corporate America). I’ve come to the realization — also a little embarrassing — that I do want to be big, to take up space, to let my personality expand to reach the corners of the pod. 

And my way of being big will be my own. It will not look like an intimidating bald eagle, spreading its span and squawking loudly — it will be more like a wide-winged goshawk, maneuvering through a forest.

And to toot my own horn for a moment, I think I’m getting there. When we spoke to Dr. Einat Wilf about Zionism, I owned my ignorance and navigated the conversation with curiosity and, I think, some good common sense. When we spoke to Charles Love and Wilfred Reilly about Black history — granted, something I know a thing or two about — I was happy to push back, in my own polite way. 

Confession #3: I’m afraid to talk about Uncertain Things in my lefty circles

To transition to my next confession (my, I’ve been racking them up these last few months), here’s a quote from a friend, listener, and former guest, Misha Thomas, about our episode with Charles Love and Wilfred Reilly — What the Left Gets Wrong about Black History:

“The wonderful thing about these two gentlemen — they are just interested in ideas and the truth. Whatever you say, they listen and process … I loved everybody. Because everyone’s listening and participating, because they want to get somewhere.” 

Unfortunately, I find that these qualities are not common among people in lefty circles these days. Which is why this episode, in particular, was fraught for me. 

When I’m not making Uncertain Things, I spend a lot of my time working on a non-profit (Urbanist Media) and making a podcast called Urban Roots, which uplifts marginalized voices and preserves places through story. It’s a very lefty project, and a noble one, in my estimation. But as someone steeped in this DEI world, particularly a White person in it, I’m very aware that I have to be mindful about what I say. I don’t know if they’re imagined or not, but I see the guardrails — Oh, JK Rowling, steering clear! Oh, decolonization, staying quiet! Oh, Israel, definitely moving on. I worry that if I say the wrong thing to the wrong person, I’ll be written off completely — or worse, I won’t get hired/won’t get funding/could get fired from a job. 

So making Uncertain Things — where we engage in debate and question conventional lefty talking points — is all kinds of complicated for me. (Paid members can revisit this locked episode where I first unpacked this realization.) When I meet an American I haven’t met before, and they ask me what I do, I will explain Urban Roots first and then Uncertain Things vaguely, say something like: “A longform interview show where we talk to folks willing to criticize their own side.” It’s my litmus test: if they express interest, I’ll go on. If they grab on to Urban Roots, I avoid all discussion of Uncertain Things. 

This, of course, is partly why we started Uncertain Things in the first place. It’s crazy that I have to be afraid to have opposing ideas to the people in my political and social orbit.  Which brings me to another confession. 

Confession #4: I’m afraid I rep “my side” poorly

Here’s the thing. I’m not Kara Swisher. I’m not a bulldog. I generally don’t debate. And I don’t have pre-prepared arguments. So, when someone pushes me on a Lefty ideal I’ve held, probably since I was in college (for example, why I like the word “queer”), I don’t always have a good response. 

It’s very de-stabilizing. Yes, it could be that the Lefty ideal was a castle of sand all along, and, in conversation with someone from a different perspective, I now see it for what it is.  I should be glad to be so enlightened. 

But instead, I often wonder, with some sense of shame: Would someone else have had a better push-back? By backing down, perhaps out of ignorance, am I betraying my tribe? Would someone else be a better advocate for “my” side?  (And it’s a full circle to confession #1…)

Confession #5: I’m afraid to change my mind

Which takes me to my last confession. Something else I’m embarrassed to admit — but I want to share because I suspect I’m not alone. And I wonder if this characteristic is at least partly to blame for our societal divisions and inability to debate ideas across sides.  

I’ve realized that, unlike Adaam, who revels in the experience of having his opinions shifted, I’m afraid to change my mind. I’m afraid to give someone else that power over me. Me being mutable, in a way, means that there’s nothing sacred about me at all.  I could be washed away by the power of other people’s opinions. 

Of course this is bull shit. I am not my opinions. If I changed all of them tomorrow, there would still be a me underneath. But the fear is real. 

Which takes me back to what Misha said about our last episode. “I loved everyone. Because everyone’s listening and participating, because they want to get somewhere.” That’s my task - despite the fears - to keep listening and participating. And maybe I’ll get somewhere. At the very least, the conversations should be interesting.  

Things Worth Your Time ⏰ — 

• 🎥 American Fiction - I want to do a subscribers-only podcast about this beautiful little film with Adaam and Misha (and maybe even Charles and Wilfred, if they’d be willing to come back so soon). It lured me in with the promise of woke parody, but stayed with me because of the funny, poignant family at the film’s heart.  

• 🎧 The Ezra Klein Show - I really loved this episode with Rhaina Cohen, author of The Other Significant Others. Adaam and I have just such an indefinable relationship (I’ve written about it before), and it was really lovely to hear about others in the same boat. Plus, something Ezra said (quoting a friend of his) has stuck with me: “I’d rather have the problems of living in community than the problems of living without it.”  

• 🎧 Blocked & Reported: Mills Spills - Really enjoyed this episode with Andrew Mills, former producer at RadioLab and The New York Times, about the trials and tribulations he’s experienced in media (culminating in his being asked to leave the NYT). Mills seems like a really sweet guy — we have a similar podcast origin story (aka podcasts helping you survive a menial job) and questioning spirit. Remarkably, he tells his story without much bitterness and with more fairness than perhaps the people in it deserve.  

• 🎧 The Love Department: “The Language of Us” - A friend of mine has just started a heartfelt podcast about love, and my unique parents — and their cross-cultural romance — are the subject of the first episode. 

What We’re Working On ⏭

Coming next: our interview with our former J-School Dean, Steve Coll, about his meticulously researched and beautifully crafted new book, The Achilles Trap, about Saddam Hussein and the origins of the Iraq War. 

One Last Certain Thing…

This song never gets old. 

😇 Like Uncertain Things? Share us with your friends — and enemies. 😈

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Except that there is an answer. It’s not complicated. It’s an unequivocal call for the eradication of Jews from the land between the river and the sea. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free…from Jews. It’s that simple. The faux intellectual search for non-existing nuances is a deliberate attempt by the cadre of apologists to muddle the phrase’s original meaning. It wishes (or washes) away an inconvenient brutality that lies in the hearts of the allies they dare not disavow.

The truth of this phrase is so obvious that getting into an argument about it might be the only thing more drearily pointless than debating creationists. Yet two friends (one of whom may or may not be my partner in this blog) cruelly goaded me over drinks (birthday drinks, I might add) by intimating that my own reluctance to debate the palpably true with the pathologically dishonest2 is veritably tantamount to the aggressive debate-aversion of the illiberal left. That’s low. The lowest. But you know what? FINE, YOU WIN!

(The following is the text chain I sent in response to said goading.)

1. Israel is founded in '48, with UN support, following the UN partition plan. Its territory is small and Arab countries object — ie. try to destroy it immediately. Israel wins that war and survives, its territory expands a bit beyond the partition plan. There is no occupation at this point.3

2. In 1967 Arab countries led by Egypt try to destroy Israel again (I mean literally destroy) and lose. Israel wins this war so resoundingly it ends up taking over Arab territories: the West Bank and Jerusalem from Jordan, the Golan from Syria. (The Sinai peninsula is also a source of recurring tensions with Egypt and is occupied earlier during the Suez crisis.)

3. West Bank, Gaza, and Sinai go under "occupation" — which is a legal term under international law, not a moral judgement. It refers to a territory that isn't fully annexed by the triumphant state in a land dispute, but is kept under military rule for (1) tactical considerations, like security buffers, or (2) future negotiation leverage.

4. With the exception of religious settler zealots, most Israelis agree that these territories would be ceded to Palestinian rule under peace agreements. Indeed, they have been!

5. Sinai is ceded to Egypt as part of a peace agreement in 1979.

6. Most of the West Bank is given to semi-autonomous Palestinian rule in the 1993 Oslo accords, in preparation for full statehood (once a full peace agreement is reached).

7. Gaza is unilaterally returned to Palestinian autonomous rule in 2005, with the Israeli military uprooting all Jewish settlements from the area (at great domestic cost, risking a civil war). Within about a year, in Gaza’s first and only election, Hamas wins an electoral victory, followed by a violent coup. Members of Hamas’ opponents, the Fatah party, are thrown off buildings.

8. So what is the "occupation" at this point? Legally, it only -- only! -- applies to the buffer zone between the autonomous Palestinian Authority territory in the West Bank and the Israeli border.

In other words, Gaza is under Palestinian rule, not occupied. The West Bank is partly under Palestinian rule and partly under Israeli occupation.

This is a map of the West Bank divided into A, B, C territories:

A (bright red) = full Palestinian Authority control.

B (dark red) = cooperative rule as buffer.

C (ugly yellow) = occupied territory with some Jewish settlements.

Territorially speaking, the peace talks are almost entirely about the exact way in which the C land mass is going to be divided. (And both sides largely agree on most details.)

Onward:

9. In the 2000 Camp David summit, Israel (under PM Ehud Barak) offers to cede most C territories and the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem to the Palestinians. They reject the offer.

10. In 2008 Israel offers even more territory to the Palestinians (under PM Ehud Olmert). Palestinians reject this offer.

11. In the years after Hamas takes over Gaza, the Palestinian Authority ruling the West Bank (led by Mahmoud Abbas) refuses any attempts to gain more independence. Why? Because the Israeli army was the only force keeping Hamas at bay in the West Bank. (Reminder: when Hamas took over Gaza, they slaughtered members of Abbas' party, Fatah/PLO).

12. So where does that leave us? The occupation that Israel is actually responsible for is only half of only the West Bank. Multiple Israeli governments (not all!) have tried to cede that territory back to Palestinians. The Palestinian government refuses time after time after time. (We can get to why later.)

13. Serious peace seekers understand that the only relevant area of dispute is the actual occupation, which is C territories, which Israel wants to cede.

14. So finally we get to the point: propaganda.

15. In rejection of the 1993 Oslo peace accords, part of the Palestinian movement, the part that didn't want an agreement, but wanted the full eradication of Israel, adopts "from the river [West Bank] to the sea [Gaza]" as a call to action. The original context of this phrase was not liberation of occupied territories, but rejection of the legitimacy of Israel at large. The state shouldn't exist, period.

16. If you listen to Palestinian and Arab media, they make it explicit: the goal isn't peace, but the extirpation of the colonizing Jewish state. And the “Jewish” part isn’t tangential, but overt and central. Again, it's not about the C territories, which is the actual occupation, it's about the whole damn country.

17. Similarly,  the Palestinian movement and the Arab world use the words "occupation" and "colonialism" in  intentionally slippery ways. On the one hand we all agree that there is an occupation (C territories). On the other, activists will start talking about Haifa, Tel Aviv, Be'er Seba and Eilat as part of that occupation.

They aren't talking about the actual occupation, they mean all of Israel.

Here's Hamas-run kindergarten kids putting on a play celebrating the day Palestine is liberated from the river to the sea:

Notice the cities that are "free and Arab":

18. Similarly, all pro Palestinian spokesfolk and representatives, as well as many prominent media people, have referred to the people who were slaughtered on the 10/7 Holocaust as "settlers" and "colonizers."

The people slaughtered were all from the Gaza Envelope, which is 100 percent part of Israel by any understanding of international law. Not part of Gaza. Certainly not part of the West Bank settlements (on the other side of the country).

The only reason they refer to them as colonizers is by the logic that all of Israel is a colonial settlement that needs to be abolished.

Which, again, they say openly in all Arab media. Which, again, is the intended meaning of "from the river to the sea."

19. Another smuggler's trick you'll encounter is the mention of the "1948 occupation." There was no occupation in 1948. There was the founding of the state of Israel under the authorization and legitimization of the United Nations. The only occupation began in 1967, and the scope of that occupation has been reduced significantly by Israel (see points 3-8).

(Another version of this is "70 years of Israeli occupation." 70 = Israel itself is an illegitimate occupation. I.e. Israel itself should be abolished.)

20. This is how you get the line that "there are no civilians in Israel." It's a very, very, very common line in Arab and "Pro-Palestinian" scholarship and media.

(I use scare quotes because I think actual Palestinians are deeply harmed by this precept, but we can discuss this question separately.)

These screenshots are from this week. But this is old, standard stuff going back decades.

21. So to conclude, "from the river to the sea" has always been used in Palestinian context (for years and years) to mean "no two states," just one. One Palestinian rule from the river to the sea. No Israel, because all Israelis are occupiers who should be banished or killed.

Again, just one recent example. This is a Fatah/PLO council member (not Hamas!) using “from the river to the sea” to mean the full eradication of Israel (which is, again, the way it's always been understood in Arab media). He also adds that he wishes that the same slaughter that happened on 10/7 takes place around the West Bank.

From Hamas' leadership declarations in 2021:

"the conflict can end only with the implementation of the promise of victory and control that Allah gave us [...] The full liberation from the sea to the river. [...]"

"Our disagreement with [the peace plans] is that they are settling for the Western side of Palestine being for Jews and the Eastern side for the Palestinians -- what is known as the two state solution.. we must not relinquish a single inch of our land."

And bonus from the same conference:

"We have a registry of Israeli apartments and institutions, educational institutions and schools, gas stations, power stations, sewage systems, and we have no choice but to get ready to manage them. [We believe that] the disappearance of Israel [will come within a few years] and will be an unprecedented historic event."

Here’s Hamas’ head of international relations Mousa Abu Marzouk:

Here’s Khaled Meshaal, one of Hamas’ founding leaders from 2023.

But sure, it’s about colonization, right?

Should I go on?

Bon jour, Uncertainteurs! Adaam and I have returned from our European vacation, yet the heavenly scent of lavender still lingers in my mind.

The memory of writing newsletters, alas, is far fainter. So as I recalibrate, a quick reminder of what this newsletter is all about: each Uncertainty Adaam or I (we take turns) reflect on the last episode we aired, muse on whatever’s our minds, and tease the next episode.

In my last newsletter, inspired by our conversation with William Deresiewicz, I penned some thoughts on the dialectical relationship between solitude and friendship. Today, for our follow-up with Peter Turchin, I’m bringing you a short rumination on America’s selfish culture — the very thing that, if Turchin’s research is to be believed and my interpretation holds true,  could bring our Western world crashing down.

New Deal, Same Problem

Turchin’s new book, End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration, is a great read but also a doomy affair. He states quite plainly that we’re in a state of crisis (to understand why, check out of our first conversation with Peter). Most societies that get to the point where we are end up with elites’ heads on pitchforks (societies generally collapse soon after). BUT, he is also keen to point out a not-so-long-ago example of when America was on the brink — and managed to get herself back on solid ground: the New Deal. 

Nowadays, the utterance of these three little words can make a lefty misty-eyed and weak at the knees. Ah, the good old days, when liberals got things done. I, too, generally think about the New Deal as a landmark piece of policy, one which helped change the economic fates and psychological landscapes of many Americans for the better. That said, I would love to have a scholar on the podcast to talk about this era of our history1 (suggestions welcome). Judging only by the sheer breadth of the New Deal, I can only imagine it could not have been solely positive — I’m sure it was both good and bad, changing our economy in ways that impacted different swathes of Americans differently. 2

But, this caveat aside, Peter sees the New Deal as pivotal because it put in place economic reforms that, broadly speaking, re-directed the flow of wealth away from elites back to the majority of Americans. 

Why did these political elites pass a reform that went against their own self-interest for the betterment of their working class countrymen? Peter points out that, for one, they were scared. These elites had lived through race riots, violent labor strikes, the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. They could see the glimmer of pitchforks reflected in their champagne flutes. 

But beyond this fear for their heads, these elites likely also feared for their country. These were men who believed in the American experiment, who had been taught to put country first.

And so, in our conversation with Peter, we ended up circling around this question again and again: We can have all the data in the world, all the information telling us exactly what will happen if we don’t act, all the evidence that we must reform our economic system immediately — and yet, if we don’t have a culture among our elites that incentivizes them to act for the greater good above their own self-interest, why would they do anything differently? 

I think about this cultural atrophy often. Growing up in suburban America, I was often creeped out by the showy nationalism of the pledge of allegiance. Perhaps because I don’t think nationalism is expressed in words, but in acts of service. And in many parts of this country, the cache of service has diminished — and our culture has diminished for it. It’s why I think a mandatory volunteer service for youth, like a Peace Corps-esque (or heck New Deal-esque) deployment of youth across our country, could be transformational for our country’s culture. In a nutshell, I long for the day when Americans can stop being so damned selfish. And, having read Peter’s book, the stakes of that evolution may be higher than I ever thought.

In Case You Missed It

Keen listeners and fans of The Wire may have noticed that during our Turchin conversation I threw out a quick reference to the sixth episode of season five “The Dickensian Aspect.” Adaam is a longtime fan of the show, and I just finished the series for the first time, and, yeah, I get what all the hype was about. That episode came out fifteen years ago, and it’s as relevant now as it was then. David Simon/Ed Burns, if you’re reading, let’s talk.

Things Worth Your Time - The France Edition

What We’re Working On ⏭

If you got to the end of our conversation with Eli Lake about art and offense, you may remember that we tip-toed briefly into a conversation about sexuality, gender, and the word “queer.” I defended the use of the word, as well as the embrace of non-binary genders (which I see as a natural evolution, given our loosening social mores); Eli disagreed, and suggested we reach out to his friend Jamie Kirchick if we really wanted to get into the nuances of why the queer movement has been pernicious to gays and lesbians. Well, we did. And we did indeed have a very spicy debate. To prepare to listen to that conversation, I highly recommend you read Jamie’s article “From Queer to Gay to Queer.” If you’re not ready to commit to the Liberties paywall (although, if you’re an Uncertain Things fan, you really shouldn’t hesitate), then you can find a truncated version of the argument in his article for The Atlantic, “The Struggle for Gay Rights Is Over.”

One Last Certain Thing…

Don’t Drive Trucks (in Paris).

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Hello, followers of Uncertainty. Our talk with David Krakauer started me thinking about the tug and pull of expertise. 

When I first heard him make the case for the anti-disciplinary Santa Fe Institute, which he leads, I thought nothing can be more Uncertain Thingsy. The current overspecialization of academic disciplines, it seems to me, has done a lot to damage the ethos and creativity of higher education. The hedgehog approach to learning certainly produces expertise, but can also blind the highly professionalized academic to the matter-of-fact wisdoms of other fields. Synthesized knowledge, tying together seemingly unrelated threads of study, can not only energize discovery, it also helps expose bullshit (or if you prefer it put more mildly: accumulated detritus). The issue of bullshit becomes especially acute when disciplines don't come in contact with outside influence. Intellectual autarky can lead to esoteric, solipsistic, inbred research, turn scholarship into scholastics, and incentivize scholars to willfully ignore internal contradictions, wastefulness, and failures.

But enough about string theory. At the heart of this frustration with the current state of the academy is an admittedly-idealized nostalgia for the grand discoveries of the Scientific Age, from the Copernican revolution to the splitting of the atom, from falling bodies to black holes. Squinting back at the history of science gives the impression of human innovation leaping forward and at terrifying pace, coming ever closer to the ultimate conquest of nature. The heroes of this history were polymaths with titles like “natural philosopher” and “logician.” Optics and logical symbology (mathematical formalism) riveted Newton as much as the movement of celestial bodies. Erwin Schrödinger immersed himself in molecular biology when not busy formalizing his wave function and revolutionizing quantum mechanics. Renaissance giants delivered humanity from darkness, taught us how to land on the moon, read prehistory in subatomic particles, and created synthetic life. Judged against this, the past 50 years, during which our fields of study have grown more isolated and professionalized, have achieved little more than a readjustment of screen size (hyperbolically speaking). Maybe tearing down the artificial barriers between disciplines will rejuvenate our sciences at last.

Maybe! Not for me to guess whether Krakauer’s reimagining of research is indeed the cure to stagnation — or whether our sciences really are stagnating (maybe it’s true that the great revolutions are behind us and whatever’s left to be discovered will happen within the ever-narrowing tunnel of specialized knowledge?). Is the complexity we need really horizontal rather than vertical? For my two schmekles, having more research centers like Sante Fe is at least a worthy challenge to the status quo of graduate-schools-to-peer-review-journals-back-to-graduate-schools hell loop.

But what it makes me think about is the very question of expertise. It’s a paradox we keep running into on Uncertain Things (arguably the germ that inspired us to launch the blog): the expert class has failed us…so let’s talk to experts to explain how bad things really are.

There’s ample cause for disillusionment with experts. For me: multiple encounters with frauds and mediocrities in my own fields (journalism, history…) supercharged by the shambolic misconduct of central, authoritative, gatekept institutions in recent years. Listing examples is a waste of your time if you’re a regular listener (and if you’re not, then what are you doing reading this?). But as I find myself often lamenting, our despair is not with the notion of rarified expertise itself, but with its corruption. Jacques Barzun, the author of the life-changing From Dawn to Decadence, defines corruption as a stage of advanced decadence in which an institution begins to operate in direct opposition to its purpose. Journalism outlets calling for the suppression of information and the abolition of objectivity, for example. Research universities suffocating research. Civil rights groups gutting due process.

But what causes such corruption? In some cases it really is the lack of cross-pollination. What starts as a process of specialization can result in intellectual insulation. Many an Uncertain Things guest has pointed to lack of viewpoint diversity in our elite institutions as the catalyst of their decay, usually referring to the overrepresentation of progressive thinking. But lack of attention to other fields also has this effect. (Listen to our conversation with Vishaan Chikrabarti to hear why national politicians need to embrace some urbanist thinking, why urbanist community organizers need to think more like economists, and why New York needs much fewer Chase banks.)

But the opposite can also corrupt. Too little focus, too wide a worldview and knowledge, hobbyism, hunches, and vibes all blur together. If anything, that’s the version I’m more familiar with. Journalism is the refuge of the dilettante, after all (pleased to meet you!). Remember how in 2020 our colleagues in the media transformed within days from epidemiologists, to scholars of police violence and racial justice, to constitutional law experts. Life is too interesting for specialization! The result isn’t just shallowness, but also the resurgence of grand narratives. Jumping from one topic to the next can overwhelm the mind… but what if they were to be all understood not as distinct phenomena (in possibly distinct magesteria!), but as manifestations of a monocausal explanation? Systemic racism? Late stage capitalism? The decadence of the liberal world? Have your pick — the important thing is that you’ve taken the rich textures of complex subjects and e pluribus unum-ed them into a flat unified theory of nothing.

So did I go through all this just to acknowledge the triviality that we need both hedgehogs and foxes? Looks like it. Is this a cop out? Hell, yeah. At times I morph into a gooey sapiophile as scientists initiate me into their hermetic research, be it in neurobiology, astrophysics, or evolutionary psychology (and absolutely nothing is hotter than someone showing me just how little I know about my own fields!). Other times the cynicism of our knowledge institutions can make me lose my faith in the very possibility of expertise. I regret to say this fitful answer is the best I’ve got. But, hey, this is Uncertain Things, the point of which has always been to work out, or at least confront, our holes of ambivalence. And this — the paradox of experts — might be the hole of holes for me. But one thing I can say with certainty: if somehow you do come out of this newsletter with even the slightest ray of newly-gained clarity, blame it on Vanessa’s expert edits.

Things Worth Your Time ⏰

🕷️ Into the Spiderverse did not dazzle me as it did some. The gorgeous art and consistently satisfying humor didn’t blind me to its gimmickiness and, worse, to the fact that underneath all its gimcrack stylishness, it was, after all, still a superhero movie. I cannot stomach any more superhero movies. Or so I thought. Across the Spiderverse had me rapt for the entirety of its immodest runtime. This time all the seemingly eclectic elements – from its dizzying art to its entrancing music and sound design – were slaves to a bittersweet moment-to-moment storytelling. I can hardly believe I’m writing this, but I might – might! – rewatch it.

🧑‍🎓We (Vanessa intruding in here) really enjoyed this double-length episode of The Unspeakable Podcast with Sarah Hepola. The first half of the conversation is all about Sarah’s experiences teaching a writing class, and interacting up close and personally with the Zoomer generation for the first time. The second half covers the her experience not becoming a mother, when she always thought she would, as well as the changing mores around sex and dating for women in their forties. 

👶If you, like us, are a Millennial-of-a-certain-age thinking about whether or not to procreate, you may find that this episode of the Embodied podcast has some helpful tactics for baby-making decision-making. 

What We’re Working On ⏭

Coming up next: we’re rejoined by audience-favorite Peter Turchin to continue where we left off in our discussion of Western civilization’s imminent collapse. We will also try to answer a deep query which some of you may have quietly pondered: is Turchin more a Hari Seldon or a Leto II, God Emperor of Dune? 

One Last Certain Thing…

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If you’re new to us (and a good number of you are! hi!), here’s the drill… Every other week, instead of an episode, Adaam and I take turns writing this here newsletter. We reflect on the last episode, muse on something or other that’s been rattling uncertainly in our minds, and tease the next episode that will grace your feeds. 

In my last newsletter, I talked about the ways I’ve learned (and society has encouraged me) to divorce my body from my mind, which can prevent me from truly knowing myself. In this one, in the wake of our conversation with William Deresiewicz (one of my favorites yet), I’d like to explore a prerequisite condition for knowing: Solitude. 

The End of Solitude

Reading Bill’s works in preparation for our interview was a joy in and of itself — he’s a prolific writer who’s covered a true range of diverse, very uncertain-things-y topics, including the shamfoolery of higher education (at the top of the absurd pyramid undoubtedly lies journalism school), the degradation of art in the internet age, the undervaluation of the humanities, and the disappearance of solitude. 

In the title essay of his book, The End of Solitude, Bill describes our current world as one where humans have been hijacked by technology. Yes, it’s “taking away our privacy and our concentration,” he writes, but more worryingly it’s “taking away our ability to be by ourselves.” Although we gain by being constantly connected to others, we lose one of our most necessary conditions for a strong intellectual (and dare I say moral) life: solitude. 

It’s important here to briefly belabor the somewhat obvious point: solitude is not loneliness. If we’re to believe the many op-eds and studies and indices we read in the media, as well as the anecdotal evidence around us, we’re in the midst of a loneliness epidemic (see: our conversation with David French and our event with Niall Ferguson). Just as the technology of television produced the phenomenon of boredom, writes Bill, the creation of the internet is a “powerful machine for the production of loneliness.” 

He goes on: “Loneliness is not the absence of company; it is grief about that absence.” We have all experienced being achingly lonely in the presence of people — physical or virtual — because there’s no sense of true connection. That company is in name, not spirit. The result, loneliness.

Solitude ≠ Scrolling

Solitude, in contrast, suggests a level of comfort in the company of your own thoughts. It is a kind of aloneness to be sought out and relished. In his essay, Bill points out that the Romantics were huge fans of this kind of solitude, which they saw in “dialectical relationship with friendship.” They were yin and yang, mutually making the experience of each a little sweeter. Today, worries Bill, we’re losing both: true solitude and true friendship. 

In my own experience, I’ve been fortunate enough to cultivate enough good friendships that, for me at least, one half of this warning doesn’t ring true. This was a conscious decision on my part: after extricating myself from a long-term, toxic romance in my 20s (where external relationships were deemed suspect), I chose to never de-prioritize friendships again. Indeed, this commitment to friendship is one of the reasons Adaam and I don’t just make this podcast together, but we have also lived together for coming on nine years. So (at least in this pre-baby stage of my life) for true friendship, I don’t lack. 

But solitude, I do. I set aside time for work, for friends and family, for music. When I have any downtime, I fill the void with podcasts, scrolling, television. All things accessible with the mere swipe of a finger. Solitude, on the other hand, takes effort. Because I (again, have prioritized friendship and thus) live with friends, attaining solitude means actively getting out of the house and walking to a park or cafe or taking a bike ride. It’s just enough friction that I almost always opt for the empty aloneness of scrolling instead. So much so that the other day I literally had to write these words to myself in my diary.

SOLITUDE IS NOT SCROLLING. IF YOU CHOOSE TO BE ALONE, CHOOSE TO BE WITH YOURSELF.

I’m still working on it.

Ode to the Voice Memo

I was listening to a so-so episode of the Ezra Klein Show the other day, when Ezra said something that piqued my interest. He was getting nostalgic about the time he had an injury that made it difficult for him to text. Out of necessity, he began sending voice memos to his friends. He was surprised to find that he loved the form of communication. This is what it must have felt like sending and receiving letters in the olden days, says Ezra, with I imagine mist in his eyes. 

On this score, I agree with Ezra wholeheartedly. Of course, it goes without saying that there’s a special circle of hell for the person who sends a 4-minute voice memo to relay factual information — or worse an urgent query — that really truly should have been a short text. But, when the point is to share how life is going, or mull over a knotty problem, or reflect on a piece of art you’ve recently experienced, there’s no better form than the long-winded, stream-of-consciousness voice memo. (Shout out to our friend Misha, who is a master of the medium.)

For the receiver, a voice memo lets you momentarily immerse yourself in the sender’s psyche. If I haven’t connected with a friend in a long time, a good voice memo makes me feel like no time or space is between us at all — they’re chatting intimately, right beside me. Plus, you get to hear your interlocutor’s voice. I’m biased, obviously, but I love voices. The unique markers in tone, accent, turn of phrase. You’re getting their humanity, the stuff that gets utterly stripped via text. 

Indeed, it’s ironic that the word “memo,” as Wikipedia tells me, comes from the Latin “(that) which is to be remembered." For the voice memo is ephemeral. It enters your ear and almost immediately goes into the ether. If you wish to go back to it, to remember that which is to be remembered, you’ll have to either skip through awkwardly or begin the experience anew. There is no easy skimming or extracting. It’s the kind of frustrating friction we need more of these days. 

This is a medium tailor made for messy connection, for companionship of spirit, for true friendship. 

Now just imagine if we went back to writing letters.

Things Worth Your Time ⏰

🖋️ This is an oldie but a goodie I just discovered, thanks to Bill Deresiewicz: Michael Lewis’ hilarious takedown of Columbia Journalism School. (More on our thoughts on J-School here.) 

🦉I’ve never heard a longform interview with Isabel Allende before, and I walked away from this one (hosted by Julia Louis Dreyfus) confirmed in my suspicion that she’s a badass woman with much wisdom to share. 

🥸 Who is the real Elizabeth Holmes? The NYT attempts to be complicated to middling success. It’s still a fun read though. 

🕵️ This episode of Switched on Pop is an admittedly cheesy, endearing romp through the recent history of the key change — and why it has “disappeared” from the pop charts.

What We’re Working On ⏭

Adaam’s hard at work editing our episode with the very impressive David Krakauer — an evolutionary biologist and the President of the uniquely inter-disciplinary Santa Fe Institute. For a good introduction to David, check out his appearance on Sam Harris’ Making Sense podcast.

One Last Certain Thing…

Snug always wins. 

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Hello! We’re gonna talk about babies in a moment, but first... I want to thank our awesome subscribers for engaging with our last two episodes. An extra thank you goes to our paid members. To show our gratitude for your support we’ll be clipping pieces of all our upcoming interviews and sharing them exclusively with you. For starters, you can listen to Nellie Bowles talk a little about her work-kid-life balance running a business with her wife, Bari Weiss.

Speaking of work-life-kid-life balance...

Nellie Bowles was our second guest to extol the virtues of procreation. Last year it was Jacob Siegel who insisted that the right time to become a parent is usually now: there’s no such thing as being ready. I disagreed. I expect a parent to think long and hard on whether they should make the jump, and whether they can afford to — emotionally as well as financially. This decision to me seems daunting. It should be daunting, at least enough to force the would-be childmaker to gut check their motivations and expectations.

Jacob interpreted my reticence as anti-natalism-lite, and he indeed excoriated me for it in a fantastic little blurb on his newsletter, “The Scroll” for Tablet. But my position was never anti-natalist. Though adorned with many koans and syllogisms, anti-natalism, at its core, posits that forcing another into existence is a moral atrocity on the part of the parent, because of the inevitable pain that comes with existing. Though there are certainly pleasures to experience, the argument goes, they are outweighed (or mooted out) by the hardships. But to truly believe this equation requires an assumption that existence itself is at best neutral, which I just can’t follow. Call me a gushing transcendentalist, but I’m firmly on team consciousness and awe over team void.

My concern is less existential than all that. What I care about is responsibility. Bringing a human into the world isn’t an act of cosmic cruelty, as per anti-natalism, but it is a profound pledge to protect the child from spiritual and material want.1 It means love. It means time. It means money. That this pledge is probably broken more often than kept, doesn’t negate it: in fact, that’s my point.

Without accidentally wading into the pro-life/pro-choice debate2, I don’t think it’s controversial to say that pregnancy is best instigated voluntarily. My two cents are that maybe the decision process should raise a touch more friction than it does in the way we sometimes present it. Did you really crunch the numbers? Are you certain you have the means to support another living creature? Are you sure you can be there day after long day after longer day? How much would you be ready to sacrifice for your kid? Your career ambitions? Your romantic life? Your small freedoms?

And you will need to make sacrifices. Which brings me to another thing we talked about with Nellie...

Tradeoffs

The idea of having to make any kind of sacrifice in life is anathema to modern living. Aren’t we suppose to have it all? What are all these apps for otherwise?

With Nellie, this came up in the context of cities: we want cheap cities that have lots of development for housing and business, but also retain the uniqueness we care about; that are dynamic and growing, but also unchanged where it counts.3 But what if we can’t have it all? What if sometimes contradictions, while intellectually delicious, really can’t be reconciled?

With cities as with politics as with child rearing, a devotional attachment to “We Can Have It All” gets in the way of realistic solutions. Why compromise if Heaven is just a few community engagement meetings away? With parenting, what troubles me is a touch of self delusion about how radically things will (or at least, should) change. 

That said, maybe my delay tactics are part of the same problem I’m ranting about. “Many of us drifted into our thirties feeling like we had all the time in the world to make such decisions,” Jacob wrote in his response. Indeed, the “all the time in the world” problem is a corollary of the “we can have it all” cult.

More importantly, Jacob and Nellie agree that when it comes to happiness and babies, my calculus is off. As Jacob put it in his newsletter:

We had accepted the superstitious individualism that promised an infinite number of paths to fulfillment depending on how we chose to arrange the puzzle pieces of our own lives. It’s terrifyingly easy to realize too late how false that is—not because no one can be happy without having kids but because on a planet of billions of people, they are still vanishingly few in number and tend to go in with their eyes open about the choices they are making. For most of us, there are not an infinite number of paths to fulfillment, and the odds are overwhelming that you are not one of the exceptions. It’s not as bad as it sounds. Like my rabbi says, “Everyone eats fish on Shabbat, but we all prepare it differently.” The art of living is in how you make the fish.

There’s an evolutionary appeal to this view of happiness. If we could always have approached procreation with the caviling, overthinking, and paralyzing timidity we can now, we’d long have gone extinct. As a friend once told me, God’s a genius for making sex so fun (or, as Nellie joked, contraceptives have gotten too good!). Fair enough. 

Moreover, Jacob described my position as “imagining that there is a meritocratic admissions test for parenting, instead of seeing it as one of the essential stages of being a person," which he concluded as a form of humanist vanity. Probably true. 

But the flip side is the complacency of taking “the stages of being a person” without honest reflection. The reality of parents abandoning their children, or pouring on them their mediocre frustrations, or just going through their entire parenthood in imperturbable misery, shows that fulfillment is an inconstant bitch.4 

But this is not an argument I hope to win. I want the Jacobs and Nellies of the world to be the voices of parenting. All I ask is to rankle would-be fathers and mothers a little to make sure they’re really, really up for it.5

Things Worth Your Time ⏰

This week I traveled to D.C. from New York to produce an important shoot. It’s been a while since my last big production, so I was a little nervous. Luckily, I didn’t forget anything important in my anxious rush to catch the train in time (I caught the bastard at quite literally the very last minute). What I did forget, in my scramble, were my headphones. So on my ride to and from our nation’s capital, and in all my peregrination to and for throughout the day, I had nothing to listen to. No podcast, no music, no nothing. Except, that is, for the world around me. I gotta say, spending hours without other people’s voices speaking in my head (in the non-schizo way) was shockingly refreshing. Liberating. Highly recommended. Really worth your time.

What We’re Working On ⏭

Coming up is our exciting, multifarious, and, yes, quite long interview with the brilliant essayist William Deresiewicz. We covered so much ground. All the ground. Culture wars, creativity, the corruption of the art world, and more, and more, and more... It was one of those hardcore Uncertain Things-y talks. Get ready. We also have some evolutionary biology in the queue, followed, appropriately, by some tech talk. Busy editing days ahead.

One Last Certain Thing…

The inevitable reaction whenever one watches Daniel Roy’s handiwork…

…which you can also take as my recommendation for today, in case you think my “no headphones” musings were but a gimmick that cheated you of precious, precious content.

Also, also, listen to his interview on Uncertain Things, if you haven’t already, you heathens.

Hello dear follower of Uncertainty! 

In my last newsletter, I bemoaned the depressive unending gray of winter. I write this newsletter on the heels of a warm, sunny day in New York City. Although I did not technically touch grass (sorry Martin), I did smell the daffodils. 

If you’re new to us, and this is your first newsletter, allow me to explain: Every other week, instead of an episode, Adaam and I take turns musing in written form. We share some reflections on the last episode (sometimes delving into the ideas themselves, sometimes doing some follow-up reporting, always trying to grapple more meaningfully with the conversations we’ve had), explore whatever is tickling our fancy, and tease what’s coming next. Which means that this week, I get the distinct pleasure of reflecting on our first ever live event, sharing the thoughts provoked by a book I’m reading and re-reading, and teasing a very fun interview on tech, media, and parenthood. 

An Eventful Episode

Last week, we published the recording of our first ever live event: a virtual conversation between economic historian and erstwhile CIA analyst Martin Gurri about the many ways our world could fall apart. 

Niall and Martin were exceptional — and made the job easy for us. It was interesting to hear their differing shades of pessimism: on China, Niall was darker; on tech-driven social division, Martin was more dour. Both appealed to literature (Martin: poetry; Niall: prose) as an antidote to our decadent condition (more on this topic coming soon in an episode with William Deresiewcz). Interestingly — as one audience member pointed out in the Q&A — neither Adaam nor I pressed them on climate change, arguably the doomiest1 topic of them all (and a blindspot I was glad to have pointed out). 

Speaking of audience members, I have to admit that, for me, the most exciting result of our little experiment was getting to know / hear more from you, dear listeners. 

First of all, getting to hear your voices on the Zoom call itself was a dream. You all exist! You really do! And you came from all over the world! While the vast majority of RSVPs came from the U.S., we had a healthy representation of folks from the UK and the EU, as well as a smattering from Canada, Australia, Turkey, and Ukraine. You also spanned the gamut in terms of age, ranging from 25 to 85. 

Most of you found us via Twitter. Huh. As much as we rag on the platform as a dumpster fire responsible for most of our society’s degradation and division, I guess it still has its uses. It brought you all out of the dumpster fire and into our little fold.  I guess that means I’ll have to go back to tweeting. Sigh. 

We also asked our event attendees what podcasts you listen to. Interestingly, the top 3 are all interview podcasts that I’ve never listened to myself:

• #3 - EconTalk with Russ Roberts  

• #2 - Lex Fridman

• #1 - The Joe Rogan Experience 

In sum, it was great to get to know you all a little better, and to feel like Adaam and I aren’t speaking into an empty void, but into real ears connected to sharp intellects and questioning spirits. 

Ok, ok, I’ve flattered you enough. Now to a subject I’m far less comfortable gushing about. The following is less a critical reading of the book I’ve been perusing, and more a critical reading of…me. 

On Not Knowing

My parents were both born into strict Catholic households that demanded unquestioning faith. They both independently came to the same conclusion: Fuck that. And so I was born without religion.  I was given no set of laws to follow. When it comes to what is right and wrong, what is moral or amoral, I must set my own path. 

If I think back to our very first interview, our conversation with Tomer Persico, I was dancing around one question: how do I live a moral life? No. More pointedly: how can I distinguish what is or isn’t moral for me? How can I, amidst all the uncertainty, the exasperating gray, find the “right,” moral way for me? 

It’s exhausting, this moral ambiguity. I get why gurus have such appeal. 

But, lately, I’ve come to a conclusion: it’s not hard for me because of the uncertainty itself, it’s hard because I’ve been taught, conditioned, to divorce my mind from my body, and my head from my heart. And despite the wisdom of many philosophers and rationalist thinkers I’ve read, I’m leaning toward the belief that my moral compass lives somewhere buried within my physical, emotional self. 

Selah

I have been reading Untamed, Glennon Doyle’s memoir relaying the latest chapter in her life, in which she divorced her husband and entered into a relationship with a woman who set her soul on fire. I say “have been reading” because, although I sped through the book greedily on my first pass, I’ve been re-reading, picking up stones I had put into my pocket, and am now turning them over and over again in my hands. 

One such stone? Selah2. Glennon writes about halfway through the book that it’s one of her favorite words. It appears in the Hebrew Bible as a kind of embodied ellipsis. The word invites the reader to stop. Be Still. To breathe in the words the author has delivered to you and consider them deeply. 

And so, on this second read, I’ve accepted the invitation. 

This is not easy for me. 

As I noted in my previous newsletter, slow is not in my nature. I am almost always quickly doing something, getting somewhere, talking with someone — fast. Last time, I noted the collusion between speed and forgetting. Today, I want to contemplate a more sinister coupling: speed and not knowing — or the way speed impedes us from living a truer, more moral life. 

Brain in a Jar

I divorced my brain from my body as a means of self-preservation. 

As a nerdy, chubby pubescent girl afraid of growing up, and even more afraid of the rejection of my peers, I decided I did not want the world to see my body at all. I wanted the world to only see my intellect. I wrapped my curves and rolls under enormous sweaters and unflattering jeans. My body was merely a conveyor system for my brain, I decided. A brain not in a body, but a jar. 

In this way, I taught my brain that my body was irrelevant, and I severed the connection that allowed me to listen to myself.  

Rejecting my body for my brain served me well. I got good grades. I earned prizes and the praise of my teachers. I avoided dances — and the opposite sex — like the plague. I pushed down my feelings when they arose. I was innocent, a good girl. 

But I was not me. Just a simulacrum of me. 

Glennon calls this version of herself — the version before she got “free” — a “ghost.”  When she was younger, she thought she was broken, bad, wrong; she strived to live up to an ideal that was always just out of reach. Then she realized that the world was demanding her negation. If she had kept chasing, she would have ceased to exist.   

How to Know

Glennon writes that she had to cultivate a practice of knowing. She would hide in her closet when her kids went to school and practice “sinking” into herself.  She came up with a formula:

• Moment of uncertainty arises.

• Breathe, turn inward, sink.

• Feel around for the Knowing.

• Do the next thing it nudges you toward. 

• Let it stand. (Don’t explain)

• Repeat forever. 

I can’t explain how hard this list looks to me. I get stuck at step two: turn inward. Carving out the space and time for this — in a frantic, fast-paced life — feels impossible, but also so vital. It’s a way of repairing the severing, of re-claiming the body and its role as a locus of morality. “If I am willing to sit in the stillness with myself,” Glennon says, “I always know what to do.” 

When we were younger — before the world taught us how to behave and what roles to inhabit and to pack those layers of “shoulds” between us and our knowing — this process was innate, immediate. Like Lyra reading her alethiometer, we all knew how to divine our own inner truth.

But as an adult, I need this knowing more than ever, because I need to know how to act. To know when to speak up for myself (“Brave means, in every uncertain moment, turning inward, feeling for the Knowing, and speaking it out loud”). To make moral decisions. To steer the course of my life toward something that feels right and good to me, toward the kind of world I’d like to see. 

Without the knowing, I’m at once paralyzed and in perpetual motion — speedily, unthinkingly going through the routines and errands of daily life, skimming on the surface without acknowledging or valuing or heeding the depths.  I believe my body can tell me what is my “right” — if I can only learn to trust it. And breathe. And listen. 

Things Worth Your Time ⏰

🎧 Women at Work & The Episode That Wasn’t with Sarah Spain (We Can Do Hard Things) — This conversation got me thinking a lot about the ways we enforce gender roles and endorse bad behavior, all in the name of diffusing awkwardness. There can be so much power in the simple act of refusing to laugh, to play along, to excuse. 

🎧 The Art of Noticing — And Appreciating — Our Dizzying World (The Ezra Klein Show) — I hadn’t heard of the poet Jane Hirshfield before, but I will certainly look up her work now that I’ve been introduced to her wonderful, wise way of seeing the world. 

☁️ I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud (William Wordsworth) — ’tis the season.

What We’re Working On ⏭

There are lots of great episodes in our back catalog, but we’re pretty pumped to finally share our conversation with the charismatic, open, parenting-happy Nellie Bowles next. If you haven’t read it already, her piece on San Francisco’s failings is a must-read — and helpful context for our conversation.   

One Last Certain Thing…

Great NY Noodletown: The only true and certain thing in New York City. 

But through this haze, I wanted to share a few thoughts about our latest episode. But first…A reminder!

Doominaries

As ardent listeners/readers already know, we’re hosting our first ever virtual event on March 7th at 2pm ET. 

We’ve invited Niall Ferguson and former CIA analyst Martin Gurri for a lively, intellectually supercharged conversation about one of our favorite topics: the end of the world. The event will be capped to only 35 people — reserve your spot now.

Reserve Your Spot!

Scam You Very Much 

It’s long been my belief that any interaction in the U.S. is only three steps away from becoming a scam. Peel a few layers off any relationship, even ones you count as deep or intimate, and there’s a good chance you’ll find a desire to sell you something.

It starts with insincerity. You have a conversation with a friend, a colleague, a partner, and something’s out of place. An odd response. An incongruent tone. A hackneyed phrase. A flash of repressed intensity. You realize you’re not really talking to a person, but to a marketing script, a string of bloodless phrases used by many others before to tell similar stories1. The conversation is no longer an end in itself, but a pitch.

A pitch to get you to buy into an idea or a story, buy into a new MLM or into a new crypto token, buy into a political club or a revolutionary diet, into a new product or a promise or a self image. Whatever’s being sold, the goal is to get you to buy.

Since moving to New York I’ve been joking that in modern English, like in ancient Rome, words like “friendship” and “community” actually mean clout. Hanging out really means “networking.” This mercenary lifestyle is so common that I wonder if it’s really the result of personal ambition and the constant search for advantage (whether professional, social, or psychological), or if it’s just mimetic. Americans have been using their inner-mountebank voice for so long, maybe other forms of communication have been forgotten.

In our discussion with David French about America’s loneliness plague, I suggested that this beautiful country lacks friendship infrastructure23, a built environment that invites spontaneous social activity. Instead, the options are private or commercial spaces, where loitering (the stuff of friendships) is discouraged, if not outlawed. Maybe this duality in American architecture also applies to the American mind: one contains a private self and a public salesman.

That this miserable state of affairs isn’t just my imagination is evident in the widespread hunger for authenticity that defined the past decade. I think it’s this hunger that, ironically, draws so many to follow the influencer-gurus.

Like Helen Lewis (whom we interviewed last week), Vanessa and I have been fascinated with this guru renaissance. We all recognize that certain cavities are being filled, but which? Lack of community? Lack of spiritual purpose? Lack of financial security? Lack of order?

After talking with Helen I started thinking that it might also be our inability to connect with people. If I’m right, many people find themselves stuck between empty interactions on social media and increasingly mercantilist communications in the real world. In this lonely stasis, sharpened by the epistemic chaos and financial instability of The Fifth Wave, authenticity merchants offer solutions — for a price.

Unhappy with your life? Feel you can’t trust anyone? Worried about the future? Trust me, I know. I’ve been there, too. Follow me and together we’ll escape the Matrix.

But of course, whether it’s Tai Lopez promising you life-changing knowledge, Logan Paul offering you early access to the hottest new NFT on the blockchain, or Robin DiAngelo guiding you to racial absolution, the red pills they offer are placebos. The doubts and terrors and uncertainties that haunt you today, the voids that gape inside you, will be there tomorrow, too. And if you do wake up feeling a new sort of lightness, it’s probably not any burdens relieved, just your bank account.

Things Worth Your Time ⏰

📖While preparing for our upcoming interview with William Deresiewicz, we had the pleasure of reading two of his excellent books: The End of Solitude and The Death of the Artist. Both were not only exquisitely written, but put forth profound observations about our 21st century world that provoked many a late-night conversation. 

📺Vanessa spent last weekend away and while browsing the television — yes, that old-fashioned chestnut — happened upon Marc Maron’s latest comedy special “From Bleak to Dark.” In it, Maron talks about the sudden passing of his partner in 2020, and how it made him mystical and stuff. It’s touching, funny, and very well done — plus, he makes a pretty compelling case for never having kids. 

😭February. ‘Nuff said.

What We’re Working On ⏭

Apart from preparing for our March 7 event, we’ve been busy interviewing some great writers about technology and its negative impact on our personal and professional lives. Stay tuned! Or tune out? One of those…

One Last Certain Thing…

Beavers Gonna Beaver.

😇 Like Uncertain Things? Share us with your friends — and enemies. 😈

Is it a month too late to be wishing you a happy new year? Yes it is! But it’s barely just the year of the Rabbit…so I give myself a pass. Since I last wrote you, I went from sunny Spain to rainy Ireland and back to a dreary, gray New York City, where the natives endure the inhospitable weather huddled within plastic geodesic domes.  

A hermetic snow globe of my own — in which to hibernate and hide from humanity — truly sounds like the best way to spend January in New York. But, despite the ambient miserableness of home, I must admit it has been fun getting back into the Uncertain Things swing, including writing this newsletter. 

Doom on Zoom 

Before we get into the meat of it, special announcement time. 🚨We’re hosting our first ever virtual event!🚨

In a move surprising no one who’s ever listened to us for more than two seconds, the theme is apocalyptic. In Uncertainty #3: Cancel Vultures (written in the wake of our conversation with the doomsayer himself, Peter Turchin), Adaam cited two folks we’ve interviewed who have similarly mused on the reasons for our society’s (impending? current?) collapse: the historian Niall Ferguson and former CIA analyst Martin Gurri. We sent the newsletter to both of them, and asked: hey, would you two want to talk more about this? To each other? In front of a live audience? 

Reader, they said yes. And so, on March 7th, at 2pm ET, Adaam and I will venture into a Zoom space for a lively, free, virtual conversation on eschatologies, catastrophes, and general doom. We’ll send out more details in the coming week, but in brief: in order to keep the event intimate and interactive, we’re capping the conversation to only 35 people. If you’re a paid subscriber, you’re in luck. From now until February 14, ONLY paid subscribers can sign up for tickets. We will open up tickets to the general public on February 15. So if you haven’t subscribed yet, now is the time to press the red button. 

Subscribe now

So button-y. So clickable. Don’t fight the urge. The UX compels you.  

Slow Town

One of my highlights from last year was getting to interview The New York Times' architecture critic Michael Kimmelman. When I started out in architecture journalism (back in my ArchDaily days), I greatly looked up to Michael — not just for his impeccable writing skills, but for his laser focus on architecture's greater responsibility: making people's lives better.

When I was reading his latest (unsurprisingly, beautifully-written) book — The Intimate City — in preparation for our conversation, I was struck by this quote from Milan Kundera:

“There is a secret bond between slowness and memory" ... just as there is “between speed and forgetting.”

I speed through my daily life, zipping from meeting to text, flitting from phone call to errand. And I forget, so much. Life blurs by. But when I remember to pause — when I go for a walk, when my husband reminds me to relax and enjoy, when I'm truly present with a good friend — I remember. The present becomes punctuated.

Kimmelman wrote The Intimate City in the pandemic, when the world felt both implausibly still and unbearably frenetic. In it, he walks through New York City neighborhoods with different luminaries, taking the time to experience each place's urban life at a pace where it could be truly observed, appreciated, and, indeed, remembered.

When we experience architecture in an instant, we get a snarky hot take, maybe. If we're lucky, a pretty Instagram post of a beautiful building. But when we slow down, listen and observe, we notice, perhaps, how the light delicately shifts across a building's facade, how its materials are in conversation with the neighborhood around it, how the kids from the school next door take advantage of every nook and cranny of the landscaping when the bell chimes. This is the way that Michael thinks about architecture — as part of a greater context and ecosystem. It's also how he thinks about the great issues challenging our cities, and world today, from homelessness to flooding to infrastructure. It's how I strive to think about my work, too.

And now to something completely different!

Part Time

Just as it’s helpful to think of our buildings as part of an ecosystem, so too can we think about our inner world — a series of inter-working parts in service of a more complicated, greater whole.

I recently came across the theory of Internal Family Systems (IFS) while listening to an episode of We Can Do Hard Things (one of the few podcasts in my constant rotation these days). IFS was formed by psychologist Dick Schwartz; in this YouTube video, Schwartz explains how he got his start as a family systems therapist, and realized that the techniques he had developed to navigate family dynamics could help him guide individuals. Every individual, he posits, is made up of many parts — folks who suffer from multiple personality disorder only differ from the rest of us in terms of the severity of the expression of their parts.  

In the video, Schwartz guides listeners through a kind of meditation, inviting them to interrogate a part of themselves they’d like to get to know more. I was listening while cleaning the house, but I dutifully stopped, sat down, broom in hand, to question a part. I chose my disassociative part — the Vanessa who in times of distress vacates the physical realm and goes…elsewhere. In just a few minutes of talking to her (she who floats ethereally along the ceiling, like a young woman in a Chagall painting), I realized, for the first time, that she’s also the Vanessa who is most creative, most magical, most weird…and most banished from my daily life.  

Schwartz believes that traumatic events can freeze parts in time: parts that arose to help us survive the trauma and/or its aftermath don’t know how to adapt or change when the trauma is gone. They keep playing their role. The part that, say, self-cuts to help you escape the trauma of an abusive parent, cannot simply be vanquished by sheer will power or discipline — her role must be understood and respected, first. 

I’ve only scratched the surface of this theory, but I’m intrigued enough to continue reading/watching more. I’m curious how (if at all) it intersects with cognitive dissonance (somewhere, anywhere, Adaam’s ears are burning), and if it could help us all live easier with our inherent contradictions. And I’m dying to bring back our friend, psychologist Misha Thomas — who you may have heard on our episode Blackness and the Other Side of Trauma (one of my favorites) — to get his professional and personal opinion. To be continued…

Things Worth Your Time ⏰

⏲️ While I was uploading some clips from our back catalog onto TikTok, I recently revisited this gem of a moment from our conversation with Adam Neely, in which he explains how his synesthesia manifests — and gets into the many metaphors we employ to talk about music.

🎧 I recently caught a special episode of Switched on Pop (a collab with the Decoder podcast) all about Taylor Swift and the future of the music industry. It’s a fascinating look into the inanities and instabilities inherent to the industry — a topic we’ll be diving into more, soon.

🎵 I don’t know why, but all month I’ve been turning to/yearning for the subdued vocals, cinematic vibes, and intricate, rhythmic piano lines of Richy Mitch and the Coal Miners. I love them as much as I hate them for being so young. Sigh. A good song to start: “Swiss Woods.”

What We’re Working On ⏭

Adaam and I have interviewed some bad-ass ladies back-to-back this month. Tech is in the middle of the Venn diagram of these three conversations — but we also cover the gurus that seduce us, the journalism that disappoints us, and the cities that break our hearts...stay tuned. 

One Last Certain Thing…

Practice Makes Perfect. 

😇 Like Uncertain Things? Share us with your friends — and enemies. 😈

Greetings from Valencia, where the breakfast is good and the weather is better! I (Vanessa) got out of cold New York City for the holidays and am penning this newsletter — the last of 2022 — from a beautiful apartment in an old, affordable neighborhood where fishermen used to live/roam. Today, it’s increasingly the landing spot for unintentionally gentrifying expats with remote jobs and adorable dogs. No point in coming to visit — it will be Williamsburg by the time (or, rather, the moment?) you arrive. 

Sigh. On that note, to the newsletter!

Spin Class 

We recently aired our conversation with economist Robin Hanson on the pod, where we mostly talk about his book The Elephant in the Brain. Hanson and his co-author, Kevin Simler, turned to evolutionary biology to try and explain the motivations that actually drive us (not the nice, fluffy ones we all say that do). 

In our interview, Hanson explained that, evolutionarily, we had to present a good, well-intentioned, norm-abiding face to our group in order to be accepted. Over time, we’ve become adept at deceiving others in the most convincing way possible — by deceiving ourselves, first. Hanson uses the analogy of the “press secretary” to explain how we operate. Here’s a quote from that moment in the conversation (also clipped in audio below): 

“That press secretary doesn't really present a completely realistic, accurate picture. They're trying to spin the positive picture. […]  The idea is that your conscious mind is such a press secretary, that is, you like to think that you are in charge of your mind and that you are deciding what you do, but a different view is that you are the press secretary. Your job is to watch what happens and make up reasons why you did it, but to look good, not to know why, why you're actually doing things.”

Our conscious mind, according to Hanson, is constantly rationalizing our behavior and containing it within a narrative of our own goodness. The concept reminds me a bit of our “default mode network” (DMN) — which I learned about reading Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind — which describes the circuit in the brain responsible for our sense of self (it comes online relatively late in a child’s development). The DMN gives us our “sense of an individual identity,” says Pollan, which is inherently also “a sense of separation from others and nature.” This is exactly what psychedelics dissolve — and why so many people seek them out as a way of “expanding” their consciousness or, put in another way, of accessing their unconscious. 

Back to Hanson, who purports that our unconscious mind is the realm of our basest, most selfish motivations. Society builds/enforces norms in order to curb these desires, so society can function. Then we absorb the norms and deceive ourselves into believing that they were always our motivations in the first place. 

Norm Chore 

But norms don’t just stop us (for the most part) from raping and maiming and killing, they also push us in less than honorable directions. Indeed, our desire to stay in good standing with the people in our groups can lead us astray. For example, Hanson brings up mob mentality, and makes the point that we’re generally far more committed to agreeing with the accuser — and thus preserving our relationship and group identity — than (taking the likely more rational stance of) defending the accused. 

The act of resisting a norm — of purposely ignoring a societal cue — is not an easy thing. Of course, you can think big, and call out the Civil Rights Movement or the Suffragist Movement as times when people conscientiously resisted norms to help create a more just world. But I’m actually more interested in the little resistances of everyday life. 

For example, back in college, I developed a habit that many people (mainly women) do: calling myself fat. Here’s how the script usually went: 

Me: “Ugh, I can’t believe I ate that [INSERT DELICIOUS CALORICALLY HIGH FOOD HERE]. I’m so fat.” 

Friend, with empathy: “You’re not fat! You look great!”

I’d played my part again and again. And then, one day, it shorted. I said my line, and a friend said nothing. The pause was pregnant. The next time? Same thing. It was clearly an intentional move on her part — she was not going to play this game. 

It’s been over ten years, and I still remember this series of interactions. At the time, I was puzzled and felt somewhat rejected. Today, I look back on it with admiration. By resisting the norm — one which encourages us to validate each other by confirming the slimness of our physical appearance — my friend actually got me to see it for what it was. 

I’d like to say I don’t play the game any more — and it’s somewhat true. I don’t start the script as much these days; but I still often play the role of the empathetic friend. And in a world where it’s so easy to go along with the group-think, the mob mentalities, the narratives of our sides, resistance is a skill that I — and all of us — should be cultivating more.  

Feminist Critique

At the very end of our conversation with Eli Lake, he suggested I check out — and give him my thoughts — on the monologue of his episode titled “The Feminist Critique.”  

In the episode, Eli asks: is it true that, as goes abortion, so too goes feminism writ large? In other words, if we lose the battle over abortion rights, will we lose the century-long war for equality? Eli says no: we've made too much progress to go back. We now accept women in all fields of public life — and we Pandoras will not be going back into that particular box.  

But, by and large, liberals believe the answer is yes — and are gearing up to prevent a real-life descent into the Handmaid's Tale. 

(Aside: Having now had multiple conversations with conservatives on Uncertain Things, I’m struck by how much more optimistic they seem compared to liberals. For us, it’s the end of the world, every day. As Christene Rosen put it, we’re addicted to “panic porn.” I’d go further and say, since Trump’s election, we’ve become addicted to “fight narratives.” These narratives have their purpose — they are far more likely to inspire people to action. But when the fight is a marathon and not a sprint — yet you're told again and again to keep fighting on all cylinders — it's all exhausting. Being liberal today comes with a mental burden of feeling constantly targeted and under siege.)

I’m less pessimistic than my liberal compatriots, but more cautious than Eli. I don't believe any status quo is a given (including liberal democracy, as we've discussed ad nauseum on our podcast). It is important to keep vigilant and engaged. But where do we draw the lines? What opens the door for more inequality to come — and must be stopped? And what’s a compromise we should be willing to make? When it comes to abortion, these questions are top of mind for me. 

Abortion and feminism have historically been coupled for obvious reasons: womens’ autonomy or “sovereignty” over their bodies is clearly a feminist issue. However, unlike almost all other issues pertinent to feminism — fair wages, access to birth control, medical support, maternity leave, etc. — abortion directly/intrinsically involves a third party. At some unknowable point in a pregnancy, another person’s life is involved in the equation — which means there is a moment where (albeit, I believe, with some exceptions) abortion is ethically wrong. I find that many liberals, in their quest to stay on-message and on-agenda, deceive themselves on this count. 

If abortion were less central to the feminist agenda (and identity) — if you could be both pro-life and still considered a "good feminist" — I think a few positive things could happen. People of more moderate positions would feel more included in the feminist cause — and feminist ranks could grow. Feminists may begin to devote more attention/resources to other important issues that also impact women — including supporting those working to expand voting rights and reject gerrymandering. These are the folks holding up democracy: a prerequisite for maintaining and safeguarding women's rights.

I'm sure there would be downsides to this approach. But if feminists keep going the way we're going, I ultimately see more division — and we might just create the very dystopian future we thought we were fighting against.   

Things Worth Your Time ⏰

🎵Friend of the pod, Kreesa Lancaster shared this haunting Tunisian tune from E M E L that I’m really digging these days.  

🎧 I never in a million years would have thought I’d be converted to the benefits of equine therapy, but — thanks to this episode of The Unspeakable Podcast, “Do only liberals go to therapy?” — I’m sold. If you’re not already, make sure to subscribe to the podcast, where Meghan interviews (trigger warning for Adaam) “heterodox” folks with, yes, “nuance.” And if you want even more Meghan Daum, check out our interview with her.

🎧 Friend of the pod (and my sister) recommends this two-part Freakonomics series on Adam Smith, which talks about his lesser-known works on the morality of economies and the way “the invisible hand” has been misconstrued on the right.

What We’re Working On ⏭

Adaam and I will be recording an episode looking back on our favorite episodes of the year. Herein lie my predictions for Adaam’s picks: Mark Lilla, Yascha Mounk, and Vishaan Chakrabarti. Will I be right? Will I be wrong? Will we finally create the Noam Chomsky jingle we’ve all been waiting for? Tune in next week to find out :)

One Last Certain Thing…

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas…

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But heck, it’s 2022, and this is clearly the stupidest timeline.

It started, as all intelligible discussions do, with a tweet. Vanessa clipped a brief segment from our latest episode in which Eli brought up the moral question of whether or not we should still support artists who have acted reprehensibly, like Ye, or even committed crimes, like R. Kelly. To briefly butcher the point, while it’s unequivocally clear that society is better off with R. Kelly in jail,1 in Ye’s case Eli called for a little (trigger alert) nuance. He argued that in cancelling a prodigious and indisputably masterful artist like Ye for the offense of bad speech — speech which, Eli and I agreed, was nothing less than rancid, Old World, textbook anti-Semitism2 — we gain a dubious moral victory, while losing an invaluable cultural asset. So who really pays the cost of cancellation, he asked. 

Now, later in our almost 2-hour long conversation, we tunneled further down the rabbit hole of art, morality, and politics as if we were all spry and effervescent turtle-necked college freshmen. We got granular. We got highfalutin. We got (trigger warning #2) nuanced. Eli even used the P word to repudiate my challenges to him as…

*don’t gag!*

… “philosophy.”

But of course, this didn’t make it into the tweet’s 2-minute video, so as far as the world’s concerned, it didn’t exist. So for a few Twitter onlookers, for whom the commitment of listening to an entire discussion is too taxing, the short clip was quite enough to conclude that we were indulging in jolly Jew washing.3 To support Ye’s right to publicly speak his disturbed mind is basically to be right there in the Beer Hall in 1923 with a clear shot of Hitler and do nothing.

Maybe it comes easy to me as a Jew. As I told Eli, giving up on every artist who’s ever professed a taste for some flavor or other of anti-Semitism would leave me quite impoverished, both artistically and intellectually. Detesting Wagner comes easily; I could never get around his interminable pathos. But fuck if I give up on Dostoevsky, Bulgakov, Voltaire, and countless others.

If you’ve never tried it, let me offer you this: it might seem difficult at first, but trust me, it really doesn’t require that much mental overhead to recognize that artists whose work you appreciate are as fallen, rotten, prejudiced, and blind-spotted as the rest of us.

So why does this seem so difficult all of a sudden?

My bet would be that it has something to do with our redoubled infatuation with shallow group identities. 

Maybe it’s the result of having so much of our communication mediated through the social media veil. These platforms provide the illusion of a flat, unified world but really only sharpen our indelible solitude. So we end up clinging to whatever shallow community can give us a sense of deeper association while simultaneously distinguishing us from the faceless masses and their unverified accounts.

Or maybe it’s just  the natural end of Putnam’s warnings about atomization, or the decline of religion, or the changing demographics of the country. Maybe it’s because identity politics is endemic to melting-pot America and simply resurfaces periodically like gonorrhea.

Whatever the explanation, ersatz group identity is the lodestar for most politically active Americans across the board (yes, the right today is just as identitarian as the left; if you doubt it, I suspect you may be stuck in the halcyon days of summer 2015).

Unfortunately, the only way to maintain a sense of belonging to an ersatz identity group is by consistently unearthing sources of offense, something to engender a “we’re all in this together” moment, followed by a hearty, self-righteous mob scene.4

Don’t get me wrong: I’m all about communities. I spent an entire episode talking with David French about how, in my mawkish view, the only real way to ease our political pressure cooker is through meaningful connections, strong communities, and deep friendships. But these are about real encounters between real individuals, rather than vague, if occasionally enticing, abstractions.

Within such real communities, surrounded by real friends, I’d be more than happy to debate whether or not Ye’s anti-Semitism is pernicious, while having Runaway playing in the background.

But the idea that we Jews, qua Jews, should lock virtual hands and spam Ye’s remaining sponsors with clever hashtags until they too ditch him is ridiculous to me. Not because his comments weren’t vile. Not because his mental instability somehow exonerates his bigotry (it only makes everything sadder). And certainly not because I secretly approve of his association with Jew-baiting5 dirtbags like Nick Fuentes.

But because we have better things to do with our time. We have better ways to make the world less bigoted. And because, I’m sorry, Ye’s music is too good to forgo.

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Things Worth Your Time ⏰

🎵 Okorie Johnson really gets it.

🎧 Two worthwhile listens from The Dispatch universe. On Monday, Sarah Isgur and David French got deep and nerdy on a number of legal disputes around free speech. On Tuesday, Jonah Goldberg discussed America’s failure to reinvent its foreign policy with AEI’s Michael Rubin.

What We’re Working On ⏭

Can we do big tech responsibly? Can we stop lying to ourselves about our true motivations? Do banks ruin cities? We’re working on a number of interviews — with a tech ethicist, an evolutionary psychologist, and an architecture critic — which we’re aiming to publish throughout December. If all goes to plan, we might even get to enjoy our holidays.

One Last Certain Thing…

Always dress for the job you want.

Taking some cues from our last guest, I’m pursuing a grab-bag approach: with the midterms now upon us, I confess my history of political malfeasance; in response to Adaam’s last newsletter, I share my pick for the only piece of art that (I think) truly captured 2020; and, because I saw it yesterday, I share my thoughts on Straight Line Crazy, a play where Ralph Fiennes plays the man we urbanists love to hate, the power-broker himself, Robert Moses. Four-ward! 

My Voting Confession 

I consider myself to be a pretty good citizen. I consider the needs of others. I think policy can shape our world for the better. And yet. Very often, I just don’t vote. 

Why? Primarily because I hate doing or saying anything without feeling fully informed (it’s a terribly unAmerican character trait that occasionally keeps me more quiet than I should be in Uncertain Things interviews). 

If I haven’t researched the candidates sufficiently (which, given my busy schedule, often happens) I will do one of three shady things: (1) have my husband, who hopefully has done the research, tell me who to vote for; (2) vote along party lines (Democrat, despite the fact that I would vote for a Republican if the candidate were worthy); or (3 — the most frequent) not vote at all. 

Last week, we spoke with comedian and host of the Political Orphanage, Andrew Heaton, in preparation for the midterms. Heaton’s one of those rare independents that will criticize both sides; plus, he’s incredibly informed about our political past and present. I shared my concern with him that voters, with inflation (understandably) top of mind, will vote Republican in the midterms — despite the fact that, in my opinion, neither Republicans nor Democrats will likely make any difference on that score. Yet if abortion rights matter to voters, now is the time to vote Democrats into office. As Heaton explained in an excellent episode of The Political Orphanage on Roe vs. Wade, in the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson, abortion is no longer in the hands of the judicial branch — and both Republicans and Democrats will very likely soon pass abortion-related legislation. Here’s that clip.

Heaton made the excellent point that, even if my premise is true, he doesn’t trust the Democrats to pass meaningful legislation around abortion rights — after all, they had opportunities in the past to do just that and didn’t. He believes they like to keep abortion open as a hot-button issue to drive voters (like me) to the polls.  

This of course brings me to the second reason I (and I’m sure many others don’t vote): the sense of futility. Particularly as a Democrat in a Blue state, there’s not much motivation to get to the polls. Even if my vote did “matter” in my state, would politicians — even the ones who wear my colors — affect the change I’m hoping to see? 

That said, I attempt to ignore this feeling when voting season comes around. I remind myself that it is a privilege to exercise my right to vote. That if everyone gets swept up with this same sense of hopelessness, democracy dies. If everyone, like me, votes their conscience, despite their misgivings, our democracy becomes a truer reflection of its citizens.

And yet. I woke up early this morning with the intention of doing my due diligence and researching the candidates and proposals on my ballot so I wouldn’t have the excuse to not vote. And let me tell you — I barely found any useful information at all. Here I am, a journalist used to digging around the internet, a Democrat skeptical of Democrat talking-points, a person inflexible on certain issues but willing to be convinced on others, and I couldn’t find any local journalism that gave me a good, balanced take on what the heck I should be voting for. This is what happens when national politics (colluding with big media outlets and tech platforms) literally steal the attention and resources away from the local media. Voters like me, who want to do the right thing and choose the right people for the job (no matter their political affiliation), get stymied. Democracy gets stuck. 

The Ending of it All 

In our last newsletter, “Cancel Vultures,” Adaam applied Peter Turchin’s theory of elite overproduction to help explain why cancel culture has become such a thing — it’s a fascinating read and well worth your time. Adaam also briefly mentioned a piece of art that I think deserves further rumination and reflection: Bo Burnham’s “That Funny Feeling.” 

As readers/listeners may know, we started Uncertain Things back in 2020, when everything felt apocalyptic. We invited intellectuals on the show who could help us make sense of the madness — offer clarity on the issues at hand, theories worth contemplating, insight into historical parallels. We wanted to invite artists on, too, but we were struck by how few creatives were meaningfully capturing the uncertainty, discomfort, and doominess of 2020. 

But Bo Burnhams’ INSIDE — a film that “documents” Burnham’s isolation and mental fragility as he creates and performs various musical satires — did. Brilliantly, in my estimation. And the song that has stuck with me most is “That Funny Feeling.” 

Unlike “Welcome to the Internet,” which is very intentionally over-the-top with psychedelic lighting, zany sound effects, and rapid-fire edits, “That Funny Feeling” is quiet and, oddly for Burnham, sincere? Burnham sets up one shot, plays some nature sounds, sings simply with a guitar, and projects trees on the wall, simulating an intimate campfire setting

Lyrically, the song is an impressionistic collage, snapshots of the lunacy, hypocrisy, superficiality, and anxiety of our current moment. Burnham observes people and trends wryly, but doesn’t resolve them. There’s the infiltration of consumerism into our lives and politics (“In honor of the revolution it’s half off at the Gap”); the inanity and division of our discourse (“The backlash to the backlash to the thing that’s just begun / “Easy answers, civil war”); the irony of our using technology like meditation apps and search engines to try and heal ourselves of what technology has wrought. (“Full agoraphobic, losing focus” / “Total disassociation fully out your mind, googling derealization, hating what you find.”)

But more than anything, to me, the song is an ode to that funny feeling of impending doom. Yes, Burnham points to climate change (“The whole world at your fingertips, the ocean at your door”), but the feeling is less about the planet dying than our society imploding. This is the line that gets me, every time: “That unapparent summer air in early fall / The quiet comprehending of the ending of it all.” More than any of the intellectually satisfying conversations we’ve had on Uncertain Things, that line sums up the feeling of 2020. 

Burnham ends the song with dark lyrics sung in a light, poppy refrain — “Hey what can you say, we were overdue, but it will be over soon, just wait, ba da da da ba da da!” — the musical equivalent of a shrug and a smile. If he really were singing at a campfire, this is the moment when everyone would join in and sing along. Whether we’re marching toward apocalypse or a better world, or both, at least we can go together. What else can we do?

Moses the Monster

As our resident urbanist, I felt obligated to drag my husband to see David Hare’s play about Robert Moses, Straight Line Crazy. If you know Robert Moses at all, you likely know him as the planner antagonist to plucky urbanist hero Jane Jacobs, the author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, who helped save Washington Square Park from one of Moses’ many highways. (Check out the clip below — from our interview with Vishaan Chakrabarti — for the Passover version of the story.)

Straight Line Crazy is split into two acts. The first takes place in 1926, when Moses (fresh off of ten impotent years in the civil service) is desperate to go from planning to doing, to build a system of parks and roads — no matter the enemies he makes. This is Moses at the nascence of his power, laying the groundwork for his mind-boggling success. The second act takes place in 1955, when Moses is at the zenith of his power — miles and miles of roads built, dozens of parks established, and nowhere for his reputation to go but down. This act tells the story of his conflict with Jacobs and her compatriots at Washington Square Park, it shows Moses’ legacy catching up with him in unfavorable ways, and his rigid belief in the reason of his plans.

Surprisingly to me, I found the first act the more compelling of the two — for three reasons. First, it gave me insight into an era of Moses’ life I knew less about. This Moses rings of Howard Yoark. He’s a brilliant Yale-educated non-elite who believes in the rightness of his visions — and isn’t afraid of pissing off aristocrats to accomplish them (he cuts down a wealthy family’s trees for one of his highways, even though he could easily have avoided them by shifting the route a matter of yards). For Moses, “consultation” is a dirty word. Because “unreason” is wired into the human brain, people don’t see his plans for their obvious, logical merits; instead, they panic at the sight of what is new. Once the thing is built, however, the people can’t imagine it never having been so. We must, says Moses, “enhance their fortunes without respect for their opinions.” 

Reason number two: Governor Al Smith, brilliantly played by the Shakespearean actor Danny Webb, steals the show with his scenes. Smith was a beloved Democrat, a working class Joe with a filthy mouth who won four gubernatorial elections — despite being Catholic. The push-pull repartee between Smith and Moses is mesmerizing. The way the unlikable Moses pulls the likable Smith into his orbit, over rounds of illicit Bourbon, of course, is masterful. Right before he leaves the stage, Smith gives Moses one last condition for his support: he must build trains to Jones Beach, not just a highway. Moses pretends to kowtow, but, as we all know, ultimately ignores Smith’s prescient order. If he hadn’t, how different might his legacy have been — would we have been more forgiving of the means of Moses’ trespasses, if the ends had been more in line with what we want for our cities today? 

Finally, the second act — where the most dramatic tension, and my own interests, should lie — failed to live up to my expectations. As listeners may know, I have another podcast that explores the urban history of people of color — I’m very familiar with the damage Moses’ highways inflicted on Black communities in New York City and the unfortunate precedent he set for cities across the U.S. In this act, we are introduced to Mariah Heller (played by Alisha Bailey), an idealistic student straight out of school who joins Moses’ office, hoping to change it from within (Heller, who is Black, has family members who were displaced by the Cross Bronx Expressway). She, more than Jacobs, is Moses’ foil. The narrative makes it clear: Mariah is the angel, Moses, the monster. 

Moses wasn’t a warm person; in the play, he himself admits he’d rather be “right and alone than soft and with people.” And when we look at the historical facts, it’s hard to deny that Moses committed monstrosities that destroyed lives, all in the name of progress. However, I can’t help but feel that this play took complicated personalities, and equally complicated questions of policy and democracy, and compressed them to fit into a neater narrative of morality.  

I wish this play had done more to lay bare the complexities and the questions we all must continue to ask ourselves when it comes to making great cities: who benefits — and suffers — from planning and development? How much consultation is enough? When the needs are so urgent (say, for housing) should we bias action over inaction? What sacrifices, if any, are we willing to make? When does safeguarding architecture come at the expense of progress? Can we increase access to nature without sacrificing nature itself? Do democratic methods create the most democratic outcomes? These are all genuine questions with no clear solutions — and I wish the play had dwelled in their crazy complexities, rather than clearly draw straight lines between good and evil. Indeed, that’s exactly what we try to do with Uncertain Things — I leave it to you, dear reader, to decide how well we accomplish that goal. 

Things Worth Your Time ⏰

📺 If you’re looking for the opposite of Robert Moses’ intellectual coldness, may I suggest my new favorite show: Netflix’s Heartstopper. This British teen dramedy follows the crush-prone, awkward, adorable Charlie Spring as he falls in love with the captain of the rugby team and navigates friends and bullies. I binged it all in a weekend.

🎧💲Since we started making Uncertain Things, I’ve become more aware about the intolerance of many of the people on my side to dissenting views. With the return to physical interactions, I’m navigating in-person social dynamics with liberal strangers for the first time. In an episode for our paid subscribers, I rant about a particularly awkward series of interactions, and ask Adaam: is our podcast making things worse?

🎧 In our next episode (see below), we get into Israel’s recent elections. If you, like me, are pretty ignorant to Israel’s current political landscape, I highly recommend Bibi’s Back, Baby — this 34-minute explainer, which Adaam produced for The Dispatch, clearly sets up the context for the red wave (and its charismatic leaders) that recently swept Israeli parliament. 

What We’re Working On ⏭

We recently sat down with journalist and podcaster Eli Lake (who also recently produced an episode on the Israeli elections). While our conversation ranged the gamut, I most enjoyed our discussion on art and artists — and when the sins of the artist should (if ever) impact our enjoyment or support of the art? Not only did we have a great debate, I learned quite a bit about Ye — and why Eli’s opinion of him (that he’s a genius) isn’t changing. 

One Last Certain Thing…

There’s no greater betrayal than mango. 

😇 Like Uncertain Things? Share us with your friends — and enemies. 😈

Hello,

This newsletter thing still feels new for me and in need of some explanation.  So if you’re also new to Uncertainty, a quick primer: for our Uncertain Things podcast,  Vanessa and I strive to get guests we find fascinating — and be as ready as we can to push the conversation forward (preparing, researching, conducting, and then editing after). Given the annoying dearth of hours in a week, we long ago decided to publish our episodes biweekly. But, given that our episodes tend to be of, um, considerable length, we thought it might be smart to use the time between episodes to sit down and work through our post-interview ruminations. And here we are. We started this newsletter to offer you, our dear subscribers, another take on a familiar theme, sharing where our minds are and what we’re currently working on, plus a few recommendations for other reads and listens we think are worth your time.

Ok, expositing over.

Though before we get into cancel culture, the looming civil war, and all that good stuff, allow me a detour about drunken college students. As you may or may not know from personal experience, drinking copiously is a time-honored tradition of young college students. What better way to celebrate one’s youth than singe the liver with booze and then embarrass one’s self in public? But sozzled asininity also has a way of turning violent. Sometimes ridiculously violent. At the Swindlestock Tavern on Feb. 10, 1335 a bunch of Oxford students, supposedly displeased with the quality of the wine in which they were marinated, picked a fight with the barkeepers. The arrogance of the scholars struck a chord with the local townsfolk, whose resentment quickly turned into something deadlier. What started as a brawl grew into a two-day riot. A mob of thousands fell on the university, dozens were killed and several were scalped. The affair is usually recalled as a grim but droll historical oddity. A bar crawl gone wrong. But there’s something more to it. Listeners may have noticed that I used the incident as the cover art for our latest interview with Peter Turchin. If the connection still isn’t clear, I promise I’ll get to it shortly. But first, let’s talk about the End of the World.

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Ode to an Ending World

Eschatology is front and center for Uncertain Things. The pod, which we started at the apocalyptic Annus Domini 2020, was a way for us to have conversations at a slower pace and think through — or you might say, cope with — what seemed like a general collapse of institutions which we'd taken for granted, from our political order to our information sources to the ineffable cultural suppositions that we once thought glued us together.

That so many parts of our society seem to be unraveling makes it impossible to unite around a single explanation or tell a single story about what’s going on. Whatever is happening is shaking us on a deep and foundational level, and our vocabularies are just not up to the task. I suspect that’s part of the reason our public discourse is stuck repeating the same clichés that feel more detached than ever from the shattered reality that we experience. The best we can do is shiver uncomfortably whenever that funny feeling hits.

So What’s Really Going On?

Well, that’s what we’re trying to figure out.

When we spoke with historian Niall Ferguson, he invoked Francis Fukuyama’s idea of the end of The End of History. Fukuyama’s work often gets mischaracterized by people as overly naive and patently debunked.1 But read Fukuyama’s own words from 1992 (which Vanessa texted to me in the summer of 2020 as we were deciding to start the pod) and tell me if he sounds off the mark:

Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.

So is that it? Classical liberalism and democracy are in regression because the people got bored with it? We just got tired of winning?

In our interview, Ferguson mentioned another contributing factor: pointless complexity. Liberal democracies in general and the United States in particular have grown so unwieldy, so technocratic, and so legalistic that individuals can no longer engage in a meaningful way with the state, whose activities seem increasingly untethered to the needs of the public. In fact, there’s a whole class of mediators (or, depending on your perspective, rent seekers) who thrive on this systemic bloat: lawyers, consultancy firms, lobbyists are all vocations whose prosperity depends on key parts of our system remaining largely inaccessible to the public. “Complexity is a subsidy,” as Mary Katherine Ham once summarized a century of economic conservatism in one tweet.

This disconnect between state power and the public breeds feelings of disempowerment and resentment, as observed by author and former CIA analyst Martin Gurri. We spoke with him last year about his prescient masterwork The Revolt of the Public. Public disaffection and (to return to Fukuyama) boredom, Gurri argues, are supercharged by the social media revolution — dubbed by Gurri as “The Fifth Wave.” Angry people plus unrestricted information equals boom. While many commentators in 2012 believed the rise of social media would carry the Western gospel of freedom and democracy to the rest of the world, Gurri, still at the CIA, maintained that it would do the opposite, bringing public unrest, political upheavals, and even social collapse to the West. In 2020, with many on the American right embracing election deniers (who would soon break into the Capitol building waving the flag of their God Emperor  — cc: Peter Meijer), and many on the left making callow excuses for rampant mob violence that claimed the streets of once-great cities (cc: Nancy Rommelmann), Gurri’s grimmer predictions for our social order seemed to be coming true.

The Disempowered Elite

Which brings me to Peter Turchin. In 2010 he was among a number of sociologists and historians asked by Nature magazine to offer their projections for the country a decade hence. Most contributors were quite bullish on America in 2020. Turchin was not. His work on Cliodynamics — a field of prediction-yielding historical analysis which he pioneered — led him to conclude that political instability, social turmoil, and economic crises “all look set to peak in the years around 2020.”

Can’t say we weren’t warned.

If you listened to our talk this week or have read his essays, you know that he made these predictions after observing three disheartening trends in America, the first two of which tie in neatly (if imperfectly) with the works of Gurri and Ferguson. First is what Turchin calls “immiseration.” By this he means the regression in material and psychological wellbeing, from economic insecurity to dipping life expectancy. As Ferguson shows in his book The Great Degeneration, this at least partly stems from the overwrought and sclerotic nature of our current financial and political system (see above). This leads neatly to the second trend: a weakening state due to loss of public trust. Um. Yeah. If you’re a regular listener, I think we can leave it at that.

But the third trend was the one that really stuck with me: elite overproduction.

Put simply, this means that the number of Americans expecting elite status — influence, income, reputation — has grown at an exponentially higher rate than available elite positions.

This is where things start clicking together. Peel off one or two layers from recent examples of social ferment and you'll find at its core a rotten, petty struggle of elites against elites.

After all, who is this “public” who, according to Gurri, so deftly exploits the Fifth Wave of media to stir shit up? Who are the disestablishmentarians who, in Ferguson’s telling, were impelled to war by systemic decay and boredom? These aren’t, generally speaking, working class people. Working class people are usually too busy…working. 

Cancel Vultures

The people who drive our current culture war dumbassery tend to be overeducated, overgroomed, ambitious upstarts who are just oh-so-thirsty.

Think of the pathologies on the left: by now we're all familiar with the story of a moral crusade being rallied by angry activists for the purpose of destroying a fellow academic, journalist, or coworker just because they used “insensitive” language once, or because they expressed a mildly contentious view, or because it's Tuesday. Sure, the activists claim that this is about fairness and reckoning and whatnot. But does anyone really believe that the absurd ostracism of documentarian Meg Smaker or the elbowing out of Alexi McCammond from Teen Vogue or the defenestration of Mike Pesca from Slate or of James Bennet from The New York Times are truly about justice and accountability?

But things make a whole lot more sense2 when you start seeing cancel culture not as a highly charged and deeply ideological moment, but rather as rampant pettiness, repressed envy, and invidious social climbing that got gussied up and rebranded as “doing the work.”

The same is happening on the right, of course. JD Vance and Blake Masters wax populist about America's delusional and corrupt elites. But as graduates of Yale and Stanford Law (respectively), their Men of the People pose isn't looking so sincere. (Yes, yes, I've read Hillbilly Elegy, and actually liked it quite a lot.)

And what about the ideological infighting within the conservative movements? Post-liberal NatCons against Classically Liberal squishes, Sohrab Ahmari versus David French — truly the Burke v. Paine of our lifetime. If you want elucidation, I’d recommend our talks with Mark Lilla and Matt Continetti, but for now suffice it to say that many of the objections raised by the New Right sounds less like “here's an honest vision for a better, happier, more thriving America” than “it’s our turn to be in power.”

And all the while these bored, power hungry parvenues remain obstinately blind to their own elitism. Take the scores of journalists touting Biden's loan forgiveness program as a coup for underprivileged Americans. They will rarely-if-ever acknowledge how heavily they themselves will benefit from this elite-minded subsidy, all while leaving it to tax-paying working class Americans who never completed a 4-year college to foot the bill. (Friend-of-the-pod Batya Ungar-Sargon has been ferocious on this.) Or consider the far right’s political machine that fleeced their poorest supporters for millions in the name of beating the aristocratic left. For both sides, the end justifies, and the end is ultimately nothing more than gaining an advantage in a crowded and increasingly immiserated field.

Let Them Eat Elites

So what, you might ask. Let the elites devour each other.

Here's the thing: my problem isn't that I hate elites. I want to live in a competitive world that produces high quality journalism, and art, and scholarship, and scientific research. I just want better, less petty, and less self-involved elites.

But beyond that, there's a chance that as go the elites so go we all. Remember the Oxford douches on St. Scholastica Day? Their wine snobbery triggered an unbridled bloodlust that got nearly 100 people killed. Now scale that up. Imagine what can happen on a national level when millions of bored and moderately powerful people decide to go to the mat for the power that they believe they're entitled to. And imagine the reaction of the folks who think they aren’t.

Things Worth Your Time ⏰

📚 I just now finished The Name of the Rose a second time. If you haven’t already, read it. If you have, read it again. Some novels are just worth it.

Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them… Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.”

🎧 LA Times journo Arellano Gustavo joined The Fifth Column pod to drop some context on the LA City Council scandal. Was laughing start to finish. Listen asap. (Plus, it ties in surprising ways with our talk with architect Vishaan Chakrabarti about progressive hypocrisy in local politics.)

🎧 The Meg Smaker interview on the Making Sense podcast… oh boy.

What We’re Working On ⏭

We just had an unadulterated pre-midterms punditry sesh with recurring guest Andrew Heaton, the erudite and euphonious host of The Political Orphanage. Patrician diction aside, Andrew possesses a trait quite unique in modern journalism known as “studying up on a subject before talking one’s ass off.” As such he’s the perfect companion to help us figure out exactly what it is we should — and shouldn’t — care about in the coming elections.

One Last Certain Thing…

Vanessa found some magic in our gloomy city today.

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As you may or may not know, my professional background is in urbanism/architecture journalism. So, spoiler alert: nerdy urbanism is ahead ⚠️ (for Culture War content, stay tuned for Uncertainty #3, when Adaam re-takes the lead). 

Last week, we got to speak with Vishaan Chakrabarti, an urbanist I’ve admired for a while — and not just for his architectural work. Most architects speak in a language that’s infuriatingly inscrutable and smoke-up-your-assy. Vishaan, instead, talks like a human. And he works with journalists to create words and images that clearly communicate architecture’s potential to regular people who care about their cities. 

Take Manhattan Without Cars, when Vishaan collaborated with Farhad Manjoo to show what could be possible if we gave the land allocated to vehicles — road bed makes up about a third of New York City’s streets — back to people. Or Penn Station Reborn. Penn Station’s mid-century transformation from transcendent work of architecture to putrid underground labyrinth is one of New York’s most tragic urbanist errors — as NYT architecture critic Michael Kimmelman once eloquently put it: “'One entered the city like a god; one scuttles in now like a rat.”). Vishaan worked with Kimmelman to re-imagine how it could be returned to its former splendor (the proposal ultimately wasn’t taken up but, hey, the new Moynihan Train Hall seems to have taken at least some inspiration from it). 

For Vishaan, his journalistic collaborations are about inspiring people about what’s possible — about injecting optimism and a sense of tangible, everyday joy back into a societal conversation laden with cynicism and abstraction. Rather than get weighed down by the crushing impossibility of stopping climate change, or ending racism, or reforming the corruption of our political systems, consider, instead, how we could shape the world around us, on a very local level, and begin to inject our principles of sustainability, justice, and representation into our daily lives. Imagine: if we all felt inspired and activated to make our corners of the world a bit better, how much more attainable the seemingly impossible would become. (Full disclosure: I love the idea. The execution? I.e. how can I make my corner — and, at scale, world — a better place? No idea.)

Epic Fail 

Vishaan also taught me something I didn’t know before: the original definition of “The American Dream.” I assumed it was a phrase born out of the post-World War II boom, a slogan designed to inspire Americans to strive until they could leave the city and raise a family in a suburban house with a yard and a fence all their own. 

But, in fact, it was coined by historian James Truslow Adams in 1931, in a book he would have called The American Dream — if his publisher hadn’t found the title too glib on the heels of one of the worst decades in American history. In The Epic of America, Adams writes that the American Dream is: “a dream of a social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.” There’s nothing about property, or the accumulation of things, or the grassy lawns of suburbia in that definition at all. Rather, it speaks to an equity of opportunity — no matter where you come from or where you live, here, you can become all that you have the potential to be.  

Adams wasn’t under the rosy impression that Americans had actually achieved said dream, but, he noted, it “has been realized more fully in actual life here than anywhere else, though very imperfectly even among ourselves.” It’s a sentiment that — for me, at least, as a liberal steeped in panic porn and content made for doom-scrolling fodder — is worth remembering.

Lend me some sugar, I am your neighbor!

With the Vishaan interview fresh in my mind, I was biking back home to Queens from a freelancing gig in Brooklyn the other day when I noticed the phrase “Domino Park” plastered along some scaffolding in Williamsburg. I realized this must be the site of the Domino Sugar Refinery, a commercial building which, as Vishaan mentioned in our episode, his firm — Practice of Architecture and Urbanism — has been working on for the past few years. 

I’m a real sucker for post-industrial re-use (give me a smoke stack and a water tower and I’m yours), and I love that Vishaan’s firm is attempting to keep as much of the original 19th century brick structure intact as possible — by essentially building a new, glass building inside the facade. This may sound like an odd solution, but it’s pretty smart — it will create virtually column-free interiors with plenty of light and views and an airtight curtainwall1 for energy-efficiency (part of the strategy to keep the building net-zero). 

Don’t get me wrong — this building is sitting on ground-zero of gentrified New York and will certainly cater to some ultra-rich, yuppy office tenants. But at least its architectural form — and extensive landscaping on a public waterfront — will make it a welcome addition to a city increasingly overwhelmed with banal, basic buildings.

Things Worth Your Time ⏰

🗞Nellie Bowles’ Atlantic article on SF — which we quoted often in our conversation with Vishaan — is a must-read: “How San Francisco Became A Failed City.”

🎧 I had a fascinating follow-up convo with Vishaan for my other podcast Urban Roots, where he and my historic preservationist co-host Deqah bonded over the idea of “community preservation” — an approach to preservation that is less about saving buildings, and more about giving communities what they need to connect to the past and thrive in the future.

🎧Adaam and I previously talked to another urbanist hero of mine, Justin Davidson, about how we memorialize traumatic historical events in public spaces. 

🎧If you, too, are an industrial cities fan, and want to know how cities are attempting to bring industry back in a sustainable, equitable way, check out my City of the Future episode on Next-Gen Manufacturing. (Shout out to Uncertain Things listener Johanna Greenbaum for helping to make that episode possible.)

What We’re Working On ⏭

We recently had a fascinating conversation with the founder of Cliodynamics, Peter Turchin. Turchin’s best known for his 2010 prediction that, by 2020, we’d be experiencing new levels of unrest — and would potentially be en route to civil war. We got a sneak peek of Turchin’s new book for that interview, and listeners, you are going to love it. The conversation also made us imagine a supergroup panel of end times analysts: Peter Turchin, Martin Gurri, and Niall Ferguson in conversation. Should we make it happen? Let us know what you think — send a note/voice memo to theuncertaintimes@gmail.com or @uncertainpod.   

One Last Certain Thing…

New York City squirrels are the best squirrels.

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After much deliberation, Vanessa and I reached the conclusion that we owe you some lagniappe. In the weeks between new episodes we thought it could be an interesting experiment to debrief (briefly — we’ll try), share with you where our minds are at post-interview, and tease what we’re working on and what’s coming down the pike.

Last week we spoke with Walter Russell Mead. The theme was (as admittedly often happens when I talk to people) how things — namely, foreign policy things — get distorted by American perceptions.

Mead makes a very strong case that Israel occupies a bizarre place in the minds of America’s decision makers and public. The causes of distortion are many: anti-Semitism, Orientalism, traces of Calvinistic predestination, America’s special relationship with the Enlightenment and the theology of progress, and, of course, the imminence of the end times.

But I actually want to write about water.

This Argument Holds Water

I'm writing this first dispatch from the Adirondacks. To be surrounded by this opulence, fresh air, and natural beauty is not just humbling, but also possibly the closest I'll ever get to encountering an alien civilization. I can't imagine being regularly confronted by such grandeur, let alone taking it for granted. There's a story about the importance of gratitude (and the complexity of privilege) in there somewhere, but it'll have to wait for another post.

On my first day, after being shown around the camp, I was taken to a lookout to have the surroundings explained to me. The encampment is enclosed between two dazzling lakes. My guide pointed at one of the wild streams that stretched into the horizon and called it “a pond.” This pond was larger than some of the things we call “sea” in Israel. In the Middle East, water is the thing you protect, the object of scarcity, the cause of wars. Here, it’s so abundant it almost stops being impressive.

It's neither good nor bad, but it starkly shows the comprehensibility gap that can form in the minds of people trying to make decisions about other corners of the world. Can someone who thinks water is synonymous with abundance (for whom the danger in water is flood and overflow, rather than shortage) really fathom what it means to launch a nation state in the middle of the desert? I don't want to overstrain this thought experiment, but it's helpful to recognize just how much we — and our intuitions about the world — are shaped by the material and natural landscapes in which we live.

Dune Squirm

All this talk of water and cultural perceptions reminded me of my favorite quote in Dune. To anyone who hasn’t read the book or watched one of the many screen adaptations, Dune tells the story of Paul Atreidis, a trans-galactic immigrant who’s ordered to move into the dry, brutal wasteland of Arrakis from his vernal, paradisiacal home planet, Caladan. In Arrakis, Paul quickly becomes a cult guru of sorts, gaining the trust of the native Fremen, and eventually taking the role of their spiritual leader, if not deity. Paul constantly dreads his own influence over his followers, his ability to inspire blind and fiery loyalty, recognizing in it the potential for both greatness and horror. By the end of the book, Paul’s hold over the minds of the Fremen becomes absolute. He is accepted as the prophesied savior, who the Fremen call the Lisan al-Gaib (“Voice From Another World”). The crucial moment in which this fidelity is locked isn't grandiose, but rather devastatingly subtle. It happens when Paul casually remarks on something that to him seems trivial but to his Fremen companions, having known nothing in their entire lives but drought and desolation, appears mystical. Here Paul is speaking to the Fremen leader Stilgar, who until this moment was his friend and mentor, but is now mesmerized by Paul's messianic implications.

"My mother's sick with longing for a planet she may never see," Paul said. "Where water falls from the sky and plants grow so thickly you cannot walk between them."

"Water from the sky," Stilgar whispered.

In that instant, Paul saw how Stilgar had been transformed from the Fremen naib to a creature of the Lisan al-Gaib, a receptacle for awe and obedience. It was a lessening of the man, and Paul felt the ghost-wind of the jihad in it.

Between the evergreen fields of Caladan and the arid nightmare of Dune there’s another one of those comprehensibility gaps, and in that gap there’s enough space for a new religion, new fanatical prejudices, and even a new holy war.

Things Worth Your Time ⏰

• 📕 Well, obviously you should read Walter Russell Mead’s The Arc of a Covenant from cover to cover. Trust me, if you’re even moderately interested in American foreign policy, it’s worth it.

• 🎧 Speaking of how anti-Semitism (and unexamined philo-Semitism) can rot people’s brains, give a listen to our chat with literary scholar Dara Horn, author of People Love Dead Jews.

• 🗞You might be interested in my piece for Newsweek from last month, unleashing my frustration with the American foreign policy discourse. Somewhere in the previous sentence I should have used scare quotes, just not sure where.

What We’re Working On ⏭

For our next talk, Vanessa is going to take the reins, and I will be shouting comments from the gallery. We’re talking with urbanist Vishaan Chakrabarti about why cities are so expensive and how bad policy has led to culture-war-politics on the local level. An early glimpse into our pre-interview editorial meeting will be available shortly for our beloved paid members! Wanna sign up? We’re not gonna stop you.

One Last Certain Thing…

This is Tootsie. His indelible loveliness has the power to close any comprehensibility gap.

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