Jay Hoffmann

And we did a lot of work — Stacey Abrams, Latosha Brown, so many activists across the country in Arizona, Georgia, who built infrastructure — to convince people that they should give us one more shot to trust that the government will step in and do something that matters. We’ve got to deliver.

As I keep attempting to unravel the events of last week again and again, I find myself coming to it from so many different angles. Congresswoman Jayapal lends a brand new voice in a moving and stark interview with Rebecca Traister at The Cut.

She highlights some details I hadn’t previously known. They seemed to be aware of the threat, the representatives were given strict instructions and told to bring overnight bags. And there does appear to have been intentional oversights by law enforcement, the question is simply at what level and at what part of the system.

But even more so, Jayapal is rallying for hope. Not the hope of the Obama era, the boundless optimism of an egalatarian neoliberal future. Jayapal’s hope is with the people she represents. She believes that the voting public has put their faith in the government this one last time. And they better damn well do something with that chance.

The knowledge sector’s insistence that productivity is a personal issue seems to have created a so-called “tragedy of the commons” scenario, in which individuals making reasonable decisions for themselves insure a negative group outcome. An office worker’s life is dramatically easier, in the moment, if she can send messages that demand immediate responses from her colleagues, or disseminate requests and tasks to others in an ad-hoc manner

I find myself returning to this question a lot: can the United States ever escape its individualism? Should it? Most recently this came to mind in a small way, when I was reading over Cal Newport’s “Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done.” The article is interesting for a number of reasons — as a history of Merlin Mann, 43 Folders and Gettings Things Done, and a critique of mechanisms of modern industrial “knowledge work” — but it illuminates this point rather well. Through our individualism, we have cultivated a workplace environment that incentivizes autonomy and personal efficency. A greater collectivism at work, thinking of others first, may lead to a less stressful, more productive workplace for everyone. But it is not something I think we can every truly do.

Part of what’s made Covid dangerous is that we got so good at preventing pandemics in the last century that few people before January assumed an infectious disease would ever impact their lives. It was hard to even comprehend. The irony of good times is that they breed complacency and skepticism of warnings.

Morgan Housel extracts lessons from the present moment by thinking like a historian rather than an analyst. For everyday people, there is a lot to learn from what we are currently going through. But it’s not how to manage a pandemic, it’s how society reacts to shared trauma.

I recently had a chance to go back and read Jane Mayer’s incredible profile on David Addigton, Cheney’s right-hand man during the Bush years. She outlines the power-play that Cheney and Addington engaged in, pulling from a Reagan era playbook to expand the powers of the Presidency to extralegal judicial rulings and commissions, and even to spying on U.S. citizens. An incredible read.

There’s a lot I like about Anna Wiener’s look at Moxie Marlinspike and Signal, and she frames it in a modern context couched in the beliefs of Marlinspike, who has done some great things. There’s a lot of strong assertions about privacy which are needed. But I was struck by this passage, which is kind of mentioned in passing:

What we didn’t necessarily anticipate, when everyone was so optimistic, was how little it would change things. The dream was always that, if someone in the suburbs of St. Louis got killed by a cop, immediately everyone would know about it. At the time, it was a sort of foregone conclusion that that would be enough.” “Enough for what?” I asked. “To prevent that from happening,” he replied, flatly.