As with the manufacturing jobs item yesterday, Trump wants to bring back *coal mining*.
NY Times, Opinion by Thomas L. Friedman, 15 Apr 2025: I Have Never Been More Afraid for My Country’s Future
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I keep thinking: we’re living in history, that is, we’re living in a period of rapid change that historians will record, yet that most people living right now are not noticing. (I think this is the way history has always happened.) Basic institutions are being undermined. The ideals of the American form of government are being undermined. This seems to be an era in which the ideals of American gave way to fascist or tribal thinking. Without most people noticing.
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This has been common knowledge for years, for decades. For many reasons. I’ll resist spelling out my own understanding of this, and let the article speak for itself.
Vox, Dylan Matthews, 16 Apr 2025: Manufacturing jobs are never coming back, subtitled “Putting Americans back to work in factories isn’t just hard. It’s impossible.”
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A long-running theme here, and in American politics, is that conservatives think themselves under-represented in academia. Don’t send your kids to college, the MAGA folks especially say, or they will be become “indoctrinated” [meaning educated] and become lefties. My short explanation of this was at the end of yesterday’s post. Today, Jerry Coyne covers the recent kerfuffle between the Trump Administration and Harvard. The former wants to impose — on a private university — all sorts of ideological guidelines, or else lose government funding for research. This isn’t about the nature of the research, it’s about ideological indoctrination. Harvard must think proper thoughts, and conduct themselves in a way the government approves of, or else. Harvard responded admirably.
Jerry Coyne, 15 Apr 2025: Administration to Harvard: Fix yourself; Harvard to Administration: STFU
Adam Grant is a university psychologist and author of THINK AGAIN (review here). This aligns with those stories about how many who claim to be Christians are now certain about their hostility to empathy.
NY Times, Adam Grant, 13 Apr 2025: America Is Learning the Wrong Lesson From Elon Musk’s Success
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Alternate title: America was supposed to be better than this.
Perhaps, I’m thinking, MAGA is really about making America *simple* again. That’s the conservative project: remove ambiguities, reduce everything to binaries, our side good everyone else bad, and so on. That’s the motive for MAGA and DOGE. The Nichols insight is (as I would put it) that our minds are wired for the danger-fraught ancestral environment, and so we feel ill-at-ease in the relatively safe modern environment. Another piece of evidence: how TV shows (in America at least) are still dominated by crime and calamity. There are far more spectacular violent events on TV shows than happen in real life. Why do people crave watching them? Because for most of us modern life is too safe, and thus boring, and that primitive mindset needs stimulation.
Some of us call out the emperor’s new clothes.
Andrew Sullivan on Substack, yesterday (via Carl Freedman)
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The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum, 10 Apr 2025: This Is Why Dictatorships Fail, subtitled “The authors of the Constitution separated powers for a reason.”
He blinked. But we don’t really know why.
Today’s deep thought: religion isn’t about faith; it’s about conformity.
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This piece is quite a coincidence, aside from it being politically pertinent.
Washington Post, Mark Johnson, 10 Apr 2025: Fearing paper on evolution might get them deported, scientists withdrew it, subtitled “President Donald Trump’s orders haven’t targeted research involving evolution, but the authors’ unease about publishing reflects uncertainty in the science world.”
Two pieces today: about the complexity of the universe, and the current cosmological crisis.
Quanta is one of those magazine/websites that, like Big Think and Nautilus and perhaps Noema and no doubt others, cover general concepts in current science rather than specific science news.
Here’s an essay at Quanta that summarizes a growing understanding, since at least the 1990s, that the universe has become more complex automatically, so to speak. We’ve seen this in books by Carroll and Hidalgo and others; complexity, the growth of ‘information,’ apparently in defiance of the second law of thermodynamics, does not need explaining; it happens through the evolutionary growth of increasingly complex systems (and the entropy borrowed will be paid back eventually). And we’ve seen this in topics of complexity and emergence.
Subtitled “What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things”
(Harper, September 2023, 311pp, including 21pp of acknowledgements, references, and index.)
Here’s the latest book by Dan Ariely, author of one of the earliest books I read about psychological biases and human irrationality, PREDICTABLY IRRATIONAL, published back in 2008 (review here). Since then he’s become a minor celebrity with a TV show, The Irrational, based on his life and that book. (I’ve only seen it a couple times, despite its just finishing its second season; it’s not on at a convenient time.)
So how is this new book different from the older one? Continue reading
