Life working from home continues with the prospect of a tightening lockdown looming. Coronavirus continues to dominate headlines along with the looming American elections. Here are some of the stories and podcasts that have been getting my synapses snapping recently:
I’ve made no secret of my distaste for Donald Trump and sometimes find myself wondering how he manages to garner support given his polarising politics. Anne Helen Peterson gives a thoughtful view on why many people continue to support him, not because they like him but because he is the one that is least likely to upset their precarious middle class existence:
These are the people who get lost when the media focuses on the stereotype of the Fox News-addled backwoods Trump voter. There are so many well to do suburban and small town women — mostly, but certainly not entirely, white — for whom all the ideological stuff, all the character issues, all the racism and white supremacist baiting, all the stuff so many people find morally repugnant, it just doesn’t figure. Part of that is because their class (and, often, race) means that it just doesn’t have to. But part of it has to do with an eagle-eyed focus on their own financial future. Other concerns, no matter how morally pertinent, fall to the side.
Donald Trump’s call for restricting TikTok’s access to the US market has illustrated how America no longer rules the internet like it once did…something that Benedict Evans explores in a recent blog piece:
You can argue about the details of these all day, but it does seem clear that we should just presume a global diffusion of software creation and internet company creation. It doesn’t really matter if Silicon Valley ends up as 25% or 75% of the next 100 important companies – America doesn’t have a monopoly on the agenda any more.
Increasingly accessible international travel (Covid aside) and advances in telecommunications often give the sensation that the world is shrinking. So it’s great to read Sarah Gilman’s account of St Matthew Island which continues to prove resistant to human habitation (and adventure tourism):
It occurs to me that to truly arrive on St. Matthew, you have to lose your bearings enough to feel the line between the two blur. Disoriented, I can sense the landscape as fluid, a shapeshifter as sure as the rootball and whale bones—something that remakes itself from mountains to islands, that scatters and swallows signs left by those who pass across.
Mark O’Connell provides a rather different travelogue with his trip to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, with a rather critical and personal look at disaster tourism:
I wondered whether Igor and Vika held us in contempt, us Western Europeans and Australians and North Americans who had forked over a fee not much lower than Ukraine’s average monthly wage for a two-day tour around this discontinued world, to feel the transgressive thrill of our own daring in coming here. If it were I in their position, I knew that contempt is exactly what I would have felt. The fact was that I didn’t even need to leave my own position in order to hold myself in contempt, or anyone else.
Listening Pleasures
Lockdown life has scuppered many of my original holiday plans. A pleasing substitute has been taking on cycling trips around the UK (Cymru, Wessex and Norfolk). This has given me plenty of time to spend listening to podcasts and these have been more recent discoveries:
Rabbit Hole: Kevin Roose looks at what happens when we spend more of our time online for the New York Times with star turns from Pewdiepie and QAnon.
Wind of Change: Patrick Radden Keefe looks into how music is used as a tool of propaganda and social change and asks whether the German band the Scorpions acted as CIA stooges.
Interdependence – Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst talk about culture and technology with a range of guests. Participants have included Evgeny Morozov, David Turner (Penny Fractions), Kate Crawford (AI Now), Dr Larisa Kingston Mann (DJ Ripley) and Bruce Sterling.
Home Cooking: Cooking show hosted by Samin Nosrat (Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat) and Hrishikesh Hirway (Song Exploder) with a healthy dose of personality.
Imaginary Advice – The Golden House series This is something of an outlier given that pretty much all my podcast listening is factual but it’s definitely managed to get under my skin. File under odd but amusing.
Header image: Mural by Will Vibes at New River Studios in Finsbury Park, London