Just a Few Tabs

It's been a long time since I did a too-many-tabs post. It doesn't mean I don't have too many tabs open (hah!). I just don't have the energy to look through them all and summarize the content for you... sorry!

So instead today I'm going to just post a few fresh ones before they even have a chance to be come tabs.

Oh, and before I start, let me just say: everyone should throw some money to The Atlantic because it seems like half the great articles I end up wanting to read are theirs and they're hiring great writers lately.

The Lesson Americans Never Learn by Annie Lowrey in The Atlantic (see?). "The United States is forcing its citizens to bootstrap their way through a global catastrophe, saddling traumatized families with the burden of public administration and amplifying the country’s inequalities." And: "trying to replace the government with personal initiative requires an impossible amount of energy: raising money for your post-COVID-19 convalescence, working with multiple providers and a Kafkaesque health-payments infrastructure. Setting up a temporary school for your high-needs kid, interviewing teachers and working out payroll on your own. Figuring out how to get an Uber to an infrequent train to an unpredictable bus line to make it to your job. Liaising with dozens of nonprofits to save your restaurant. Searching for a day care, then arranging a nanny-share, then arguing for a reduced-price slot in a nursery school, because the United States has no public child-care and preschool system. It is exhausting." And: "The answer that virtually every other rich country has figured out: The government should act like a government, like its job is to provide these things."

I'm asking my friends on the Left to vote for Joe Biden by tech guy Anil Dash. "I do understand that for many of you, there are principles you feel you cannot compromise. You can never vote for a person who has Biden (or Harris’) view on the issues you care about most. But I want you to have the chance to elect that candidate who will support you on those issues. There’s a very real threat that you won’t have that option if we aren't able to hold things together this year."

Incremental Change Is a Moral Failure: Mere reform won’t fix policing. By Mychal Denzel Smith in The Atlantic (again). "...I hate the police the same as I hate any institution that exists as an obstruction to justice. It’s important here to define justice, as the U.S. legal system has perverted our sense of it. It cannot be punishment or retribution for harm caused. Justice is not revenge. Rather, justice is a proactive commitment to providing each person with the material and social conditions in which they can both survive and thrive as a healthy and self-actualized human being. This is not an easy thing to establish, as it requires all of us to buy into the idea that we must take responsibility for one another. But it is the only form of a just world. The police have never been capable—historically, presently, either in statement of purpose or in action—and, I believe, will never be capable of fostering such conditions." 

Tying in with that, there's How to dismantle white supremacy by Barbara Smith in The Nation. To end systemic racism, the country needs a comprehensive racial justice program even more sweeping than the Marshall Plan. "I would start by calling it the Hamer-Baker Plan. Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker did as much to end white supremacy as any persons who ever lived. It feels appropriate to evoke their legacies in the process of envisioning the completion of that task."

How to avert a post-election nightmare from Vox. A “war game” that tried to simulate the 2020 transition ended in violence. One of its organizers explains how to prevent that. (The answer, in short: Biden has to win in a landslide.)

Oh, heck, here's one more tab that's been sitting open for months (also from The Atlantic) just to round things out. It's by the great science writer Ed Yong (whom I've mentioned before, but not often enough). It was published on MARCH 25, 2020. The title was How the pandemic will end, and the deck was this: The U.S. may end up with the worst COVID-19 outbreak in the industrialized world. This is how it’s going to play out. It's quite something to finally read it now, on August 22, just about five months later, still nowhere near the end of the pandemic.