But what is so seductive about 1997 is that it represents an exceptionally unusual model of modernity in British political life, where the nation’s endemic post-imperial nostalgia could be cast aside as much as that of the welfare state and Labour’s socialist past. Although it is now widely criticized for being excessively “cosmopolitan,” flag-waving was always part of New Labour’s vision—the most famous image of 1997 is of Blair arriving in Downing Street to find an adoring (Party-organized) crowd waving little Union Jacks. This was in the service of a country rebranded. One of Blair’s vacuous but utterly optimistic books is titled New Britain: My Vision for a Young Country. The 2005 manifesto is called Britain Forward Not Back. 1940, 1945, 1974, and 1979 are full of haunting possibilities, roads not taken, memories transformed into monoliths. Yet the same could be said of 1997, when Labour had a gigantic electoral mandate for a transformation of Britain into a more equal, more open, more modern, less cruel country, but decided that the means to achieve all this was to trust in the sensible bankers and reliable outsourcing companies. It’s the resulting failure that has let the ghosts back in, and nobody seems able to exorcise them yet.
When you hear someone say “dark social,” they’re bemoaning the inability to get click reports off of actual conversation. Because when you see someone on the street head-down in their phone and dabbing away at the screen, they’re not cut off from the outside world. They’re talking to people. Fuck your Black Mirror narrative – they’re just more interested in a window to their friends and family than they are in you peering at them in judgement.
Random Idea
A limited run podcast where, each episode, a different writer reads a newly-written, ~5 minute story inspired by a song selected by a curator, followed by said song playing in its entirety. After 5 episodes (and 5 songs), the curator explains why each song was chosen. The season lasts 6 episodes, and then any subsequent season, should there be one, has a different curator.
John Montgomery, a psychologist in New York City and adjunct professor at New York University, said “it’s hard to say definitively without rigorous testing” of Trump’s speaking patterns, “but I think it’s pretty safe to say that Trump has had significant cognitive decline over the years.”
No one observing Trump from afar, though, can tell whether that’s “an indication of dementia, of normal cognitive decline that many people experience as they age, or whether it’s due to other factors” such as stress and emotional upheaval, said Montgomery, who is not a Trump supporter.
Even a Trump supporter saw and heard striking differences between interviews from the 1980s and 1990s and those of 2017, however. “I can see what people are responding to,” said Dr. Robert Pyles, a psychiatrist in suburban Boston. He heard “a difference in tone and pace. … What I did not detect was any gaps in mentation or meaning. I don’t see any clear evidence of neurological or cognitive dysfunction.”
Johnson cautioned that language can deteriorate for other reasons. “His language difficulties could be due to the immense pressure he’s under, or to annoyance that things aren’t going right and that there are all these scandals,” he said. “It could also be due to a neurodegenerative disease or the normal cognitive decline that comes with aging.” Trump will be 71 next month.
Coming back to Tumblr after a few months – even longer since I’ve used it in any appreciable way beyond updating the Wait, What? account – one of the most interesting things is how many accounts I was following that have more or less gone dark. It feels like mainstream culture has moved it to… I have no idea, what is the current social media du jour these days, anyway? It’s interesting; I’m wanting to change the information going into my brain lately, so we’ll see whether Tumblr’s shifting output does that for me, I guess.
For the first time in 17 years, Fox spent an entire week in third place in prime time in the all-important 25-to-54 year-old demographic. The last time Fox found itself in that ditch, Bill Clinton was president of the United States, Gladiator was in theaters, and Jesse Watters was in college.
Strange days, indeed. (From tonight’s CNN Reliable Sources newsletter.)
Somehow I Stayed Thin While The Other Guys Got Fat | The World That’s Coming
Somehow I Stayed Thin While The Other Guys Got Fat | The World That’s Coming
Back from the dead. We’ll see how long I keep this up, considering previous attempts have stumbled and failed.
Somehow I Stayed Thin While The Other Guys Got Fat
And so we return and begin again, again.
Everything collided in the last year or so to keep me from updating this — work and personal stuff, house projects and an obsession with the U.S. election that turned into an obsession with everything that followed, and kind of flattened everything else out. One of the things I’ve been trying to do this year is regain the sense of perspective that just utterly disappeared last year. We’ll see how that goes.
What actually prompted me to return here this time was this article, as pointed out in Warren Ellis’ recent email newsletter, of necessary skills for the “postnormal era” that we’re now living in. It’s a fascinating list, filled with insights like “We can’t be defined just by what we know already, what we have already learned. We need a deep intellectual and emotional resilience if we are to survive in a time of unstable instability. And deep generalists can ferret out the connections that build the complexity into complex systems, and grasp their interplay.”
This speaks to something I’ve been wrestling with for awhile now — a way to escape the internet’s demand for complete and utter surety and confidence in everything. There’s something to be said for being lost, and thinking out loud, and being willing to be wrong in public.
Along those lines, I keep realizing the more I do it, how much I appreciate doing Wait, What? with Jeff — the very nature of it allows us (requires us?) to be wrong and uncertain and explore things in real time, and I think that’s necessary. The conversational — and safe — space inside the show feels more productive and helpful as a result, if that makes sense…? Uncertainty, ambiguity and a freedom to be wrong: I think this is what I’m looking for more of online, I think.
**
Current earworm:
I think I need to explore more of Big Audio Dynamite’s stuff. It feels like a step towards Gorillaz that I hadn’t really considered before. I heard this in a store the other day and thought, “Man, I haven’t heard this in years. It’s awesome!”
(Changing the music I listen to is another thing to do more of this year; I’m not sure obsessively listening to Humanz counts.)
