Worthy Reads: Old Biz
Worthy Reads for January 2024
Been a while since the last Worthy Reads, so I think it’s time to blow this thing.
You know the drill, but, De Civ has a lot of new readers recently, so let’s get everybody into step together: welcome to Worthy Reads, where I share some articles and other links I think are worth your time. It’s always one of our most popular features, and one of the only paywalled ones: everyone gets the first half of Worthy Reads, but only paying subscribers get the second half. Retweets are not endorsements.
Okay 3-2-1 let’s jam.
“One weird trick to read a %&$#ing book,” by Luke T. Harrington:
My guess is that we’ve all encountered this phenomenon, the professional-class type who is convinced reading is Good For You, but also convinced that he or she Just Can’t Find Time To Read. And my inner cynic says that this is often more about status, more about wanting to be perceived as The Sort Of Person Who Reads than about actually wanting to read, but I’m writing this article for the people who mean this sincerely—the people who really wish they could read more.
I read this in an airport bathroom in April and it has stuck with me ever since, so I guess it’s a pretty good blog post?
I already used some of Luke’s tricks (the stack-o’-books), I started doing some because of this post (the to-read list), and there are some I won’t do (sixteen-week limit, ha, I’m entering Year Five of having War and Peace on the stack and I’m nearly finished!).
I’m not impressive. Tallying things up, I seem to have read in the vicinity of a dozen books in 2023, and a few of them were books I read to my children. (How I ended up reading Michael D. O’Brien’s Eclipse of the Sun to my nine-year-old is a funny story and I’m still bewildered about it.1) OTOH, when I finally finish War and Peace, I am counting it as ten books.
I do think that reading is essential, especially reading fiction. It seems to me that fiction today is starting to slide down a long downward slope. The world increasingly can’t understand fiction’s value, since you can get more utility from non-fiction and more pleasure from pornography. It can’t understand what fiction is for, since the loss of free will leaves us with little more than the Trauma Plot. But we need stories, more than we need utility or pleasure. Even with today’s terrific fictional TV shows, movies, and video games, books remain singularly good at delivering intense, deep-fried fiction. (Besides, let’s be honest: most of your fiction-reading time isn’t getting sucked up by The Wire; it’s getting sucked up by TikTok.) The problem is, it’s not enough to know that you should read more books; as Mr. Harrington observes, you really have to want it, too.
“What Court (if any) Decided Ex Parte Merryman?” by Seth Barrett Tillman:
So, which was it? Was Ex parte Merryman a decision of:
(a) the Supreme Court of the United States;
(b) the United States Circuit Court for the District of Maryland;
(c) the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit;
(d) the United States District Court for the District of Maryland; or,
(e) the Supreme Court of Maryland?
Of course, the correct answer is: (f) none of the above.
I came across this fun, breezy paper while working through (some of) Tillman’s other material for the Trump Disqualification articles. I won’t spoil his answer, but there’s several reasons I enjoyed the paper:
First, Ex Parte Merryman is a pretty important case, historically speaking! In 1861, after President Lincoln exercised the Suspension Clause to suspend habeas corpus in Maryland, the military arrested one John Merryman, who was leading a treasonous attempt to destroy Maryland railroad bridges and telegraph lines vital to the Union war effort. The Union military arrested Merryman and held him without trial. (That’s what it means to suspend habeas corpus.) In Ex parte Merryman, Chief Justice Roger Taney (the infamous author of Dred Scott) ruled that the suspension of habeas corpus was unconstitutional, therefore null. The Merryman court therefore issued a direct order to the military ordering that Merryman be delivered promptly to Taney’s courtroom for regular legal processing.
President Lincoln directly countermanded Taney’s order, one of the few cases in history where the American executive branch openly defied the judicial branch. To many people (e.g. Ron Paul2), this case is the proof of Lincoln’s lawlessness and tyranny. To others (e.g. Michael Stokes Paulsen), it is proof of Lincoln’s devout dedication to the Constitution, especially his nuanced understanding of how the Founders balanced the different branches against each other. Weird procedural trivia like “who actually decided the case?” can have a pretty big impact on how we end up understanding Lincoln and the legality of the Civil War!3
Second, weird procedural trivia like this is right up my alleyway. It makes me chuckle to spend a whole academic paper answering what ought to be a very simple question, for the same reason I thought the I-494 Bridge Article was hilarious. Plus, the road to trivia is a surprisingly educational one. The past is a very different place! They use many of the same words and forms, but sometimes with subtle differences in meaning. I love the moment when one of those differences clicks and, suddenly, I understand something I previously only thought I understood.
The third reason I liked this paper is that it boasts a footnote-to-text ratio higher than anything I’ve ever seen! The entire article is not more than 5 pages of actual body text, but it’s 23 pages thanks to footnotes. Page 6 is literally all footnote. That is, in itself, pretty entertaining.
“The New Light is Bad,” by Tom Scocca:
I started to confide in people that I was seeing things, that the light was wrong, and usually they knew exactly what I was talking about. Over lunch, a friend unspooled an epic account of his quest for dimmable bulbs that would actually dim. A stranger in a shared taxi forwarded me a blog post he’d written about his conviction that the color of objects lit by LEDs was washed out and about his incredulity at how fast they failed.
A technology that was once the epitome of simplicity (“How many people does it take to change a lightbulb?”) has become an ever-branching set of complications. Where before I would pick up a pack of 60-watt soft-white incandescents at the hardware store, I now search the internet for the highest-rated equivalent LEDs, then systematically cross-check those equivalences point by point. Everything you used to know about indoor illumination is outmoded. For 60 watts’ worth of incandescent light, you’re looking for about 800 lumens of LED output. To make that light come out the approximate color that the old bulb generated, you need to check the listed bulb temperature and make sure it’s 2,700 degrees Kelvin.
I treasure this article. I want to print it out, warm it up in the microwave, and snuggle it at night. I want to dip it in horsey sauce and eat it like an Arby’s curly fry. I didn’t even realize until much later that the author was specifically Tom Scocca, which makes this so much more delicious/infuriating.
“The New Light is Bad” is a genuinely interesting article that’s well worth reading on its own terms. Written a few months before the federal ban came into force, it’s hard not to notice the things it describes today, a few months after the federal ban came into force. But it’s the subtext that takes this article from interesting so sublime.
Mr. Scocca systematically recites every single problem conservatives warned about back in the late 2000s, when the Bush and Obama Administrations first began the process of banning traditional light bulbs. Scocca then adds several more problems that conservatives back then either did not care about, did not imagine, or which we—in our naivete—actually believed would be solved by the time the ban came into force. (NARRATOR: The problems were not solved by the time the ban came into force.4)
Of course, conservatives were roundly mocked for saying all these things at the time. PolitiFact, faithful handmaiden to the regime, routinely rated conservatives “false” or even “pants-on-fire” for accurately stating what was going to happen. CBS presented the whole thing in the classic “conservatives pounce” frame. The Colbert Reporrrr did its usual mockery while letting his guest lie her face off about what was going to happen to the incandescents. The Hill sought comment from the only two sides it really knows how to see: progressives and neoliberals. If you said, during the 2012 election season, that Obama wanted to take away your light bulbs, people would roll their eyes at you, privately. They’d almost reach out and pet you for being such a charming specimen of fever-swamp conspiracy conservatism. (I remember!)
And now Tom Scocca comes along and realizes…
…well, he certainly didn’t realize that conservatives had a point all along. He instead treats the incipient ban as some kind of impersonal force of nature, an inevitability set to help the environment while harming the poor that, alas, nothing could possibly prevent (even though Pres. Trump spent years preventing it).
This is, of course, what it is to be a conservative in America. First they ignore you, then they mock you, then they announce “the science is settled,” then it happens just as you said it would and they suffer sudden amnesia about the previous three steps. There will never be accountability, because there never is.5
But light bulbs! I didn’t expect Tom Scocca, of all people, to hand me a just-so story about light bulbs!
To be clear, I’m in the upper-middle class by wealth and I’m bougie by social class, so naturally I’ve bought CFLs and LEDs since almost the moment they became available. (It turns out I’ve never once disposed of them properly, something I learned while reading up just now, but oh well! I still like saving money on electricity!) I’ve occasionally gone back to incandescents temporarily for one reason or another (usually color, or impatience with how quickly the expensive bulbs fail in the real world), but I don’t hate the bulbs. I hate that the bougie upper-middle class regime decided to impose our preference—which works very nicely for us—on everybody else, too. I just keep thinking of how bad light is already becoming another burden (and marker) of poverty.
Did the poor need that? I don’t think so! Those responsible will tut and sigh and it will never even cross their minds that they’re the cause of it.
“(Several tweets regarding): In-Person Schooling and Youth Suicide: Evidence from School Calendars and Pandemic School Closures,” by Benjamin Hansen, Joseph J. Sabia, and Jessamyn Schaller, via Lyman Stone:6
School makes kids commit suicide. Whenever kids are in school, they commit suicide. When you cancel school (snow days, COVID, summer, holidays), they stop committing so much suicide. School is a suicide-generating institution.
I confess: I did not read the underlying paper. I read the abstract, the introduction, and the conclusion. But the thing that caught my attention was Lyman Stone’s tweet about it, quoted above. “School is a suicide factory” is the particular phrase that has lodged itself in my brain.
I do not homeschool (though I respect the hell out of parents who do). My kids are well-adjusted students at a good parochial school. I think they are learning a lot of important things there, both intellectually and socially. Yet, fairly regularly—especially near the end of summer—I find myself thinking “School is a suicide factory school is a suicide factory”.
Combine that with Scott Alexander’s argument that school is useless (or worse!), and you do find yourself no longer sweating the small stuff… and occasionally writing on a homework assignment, “[daughter’s name] is excused from this assignment. -Mr. Heaney.”
In fact, if I could only figure out how to make my nine-year-old love reading, for pleasure, without anyone telling her she has to read, I might just trade her entire K-8 education for that single precious appetite.
“Are People Who Disagree With Me Just Worthless Idiots?” by Richard M. Doerflinger:
Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the apostolic nuncio to the United States, commented on polarization in the Church and society shortly before receiving his red hat. His interview with Vatican Media was titled “Polarization Arises When We Put Ideas before People.” In it, he writes: “the problem is that instead of considering the reality, we escape from the reality, and we take refuge in ideas, and these ideas, became ideologies.” Pope Francis has similarly cautioned against polarization in the Church, most recently in remarks on the current synod. He said the synod should be “a place where the Holy Spirit will purify the church from gossip, ideologies and polarization.”
But I am not sure a commitment to ideas or “ideologies” as such is at the root of our problem. If anything, public debate today has little patience with ideas, directed instead toward the very motives and character of the people one likes or dislikes. It’s a little known fact that freelance writers mostly do not write the titles of their own articles. When I briefly interned at Aleteia, much of my work involved writing headlines and subheads (and picking the image). I don’t really know why this is the way it’s done. It seems to me that the writers will usually do a better job promoting their own material. But something something SEO, so random interns end up writing your headline instead instead of you. This is true all the way up to the New York Times. My point is, Mr. Doerflinger probably did not write the title of this piece—but I like it!
Doerflinger makes a very good point:7 many, many people say that polarization is rising because many citizens are becoming beholden to rigid ideology, rendering themselves unable to empathize with others. I myself have said this, and I may even have given examples (from both sides of the aisle). Doerflinger argues that this gets it exactly backward: the contempt for opponents doesn’t arise from immersion in ideology. Rather, attachment to ideology arises as an excuse to allow the ideologue to express contempt for his opponents. The contempt comes first, the ideology second, and the shallowness of today’s ideologies helps prove the point.
I have no idea what to do about it. If Doerflinger is right, the root cause of polarization is a spiritual crisis gripping the nation—arguably the entire Western world—and I don’t know how anyone can fix a spiritual crisis.
This is where the paywall hits. Sorry, free subscribers, you are all beautiful people, but De Civitate’s paying subscribers deserve some reward, at least occasionally, and, let’s be honest, I’ve been neglecting them during the Trump Months. If you’d like to sign up to support my work and, incidentally, read the rest of this edition of Worthy Links, you can do so here:
In the remainder of this edition of Worthy Links: lame heresies, AI explained to seminarians, New Star Trek is bad, some of the weirder effects of religious decline and polarization, and of course the Video of the Month. Plus access to the footnotes, including that story about Eclipse of the Sun, which, I assure you, is not worth a $5 one-month subscription.
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