TLP Week in Review, 2/11-2/17
Your weekly summary of what we've been up to here at The Liberal Patriot.
What We’re Reading (and Watching and Listening To…)
“Why Americans Suddenly Stopped Hanging Out”: The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson details America’s great hanging-out crisis, noting that from “2003 to 2022, American men reduced their average hours of face-to-face socializing by about 30 percent”—with similar reductions for unmarried Americans (35 percent) and teenagers (45 percent). “Face-to-face rituals and customs are pulling on our time less, and face-to-screen technologies are pulling on our attention more. The inevitable result is a hang-out depression… The sum result of these trends is that we are both pushed and pulled toward a level of aloneness for which we are dysevolved and emotionally unprepared.”
“Geopolitics and the geometry of global trade”: This McKinsey report looks at the ways global trade is reconfiguring amidst increased geopolitical tensions. “Although nearshoring has been a prominent feature of recent debate, the United States is a relative outlier in shifting some of its trade toward geographically closer partners. Moreover, the extent of this shift is less pronounced than the shift toward geopolitically closer partners. The other economies we analyze show no substantial evidence of nearshoring of trade relations; rather, their trade has often been traveling farther on average. It is a similar story for diversification: while the United States has materially shifted to a more diverse set of trade partners, others so far have not
“How to Buy Stuff Like DARPA Does”: At Statecraft, the Substack of the Institute for Progress, Santi Ruiz interviews NASA and DARPA lawyer Rick Dunn who describes how both agencies use “Other Transaction Authority” to circumvent the legal red tape that so often gums up regular government contracting. “The Space Act gives NASA a wide-open authority. It allows NASA to enter into ‘contracts, leases, cooperative agreements, and such other transactions as may be necessary’ under terms that the administrator shall determine. It's just an open-ended authority.”
The Wild Men: The Remarkable Story of Britain's First Labour Government: British writer David Torrance tells the story of Britain’s first Labour government in 1924 via the biographies of its leading lights, ranging from those with deep working-class and trade union roots as well as patricians and aristocrats intellectually attracted to Labour’s version of socialist politics. While Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald’s minority government had some policy successes in its brief nine months it office, it proved that Labour could be trusted with political power.
The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution: As featured in Ruy’s interview with Ezra Klein! Here's what he said about the book:
I’m a bit of an evangelist for this book. It’s called The House Of Government by Yuri Slezkine. And it’s an incredible, brilliant book... The ‘house of government’ was the big house built on the embankment near the Kremlin where all the apparatchiks lived in the ‘30s under Stalin. But what the book does is, it’s this panorama of oral history, of architectural studies, of literary analysis, of memoirs, of incredible stuff just that paints this portrait of how the Soviet Union came into being. Who were these people who made this happen? What did they think? How did it affect the way they did everything, from their views of art and literature to their views of politics to their personal relationships with each other? I just can’t recommend this book highly enough… It’s 1,000 pages, but I consider it one of the most brilliant books I’ve ever read. And I would almost go so far as to say, you can’t really understand the Soviet Union until you’ve read this book.
Strange Disciple: The New York youngsters of Nation of Language famously turned away from guitar rock after hearing the synthesizers on OMD’s “Electricity” and haven’t looked back since. Their latest album is chock full of electronic earworms, tight bass lines, and sharp vocals—1980s nostalgia with originality. Tickets for their show at the 9:30 Club are on sale now!
What We’ve Posted
“The Case for National Developmentalism” by Information Technology and Innovation Foundation president and founder Robert D. Atkinson.
“The Way of the Fetterman” by TLP politics editor Ruy Teixeira.
“All Politics is Media Criticism” by TLP executive editor John Halpin.
“Hubert Humphrey—Now More Than Ever” by TLP senior managing editor Peter Juul.
“Biden's Bully Pulpit Needs a Reboot” by TLP contributor Josh Kraushaar.
Ruy’s Science-Fiction Pulp Cover of the Week
Just one more thing…
Marvel Studios announced the cast for its new MCU version of The Fantastic Four, featuring The Mandalorian’s Pedro Pascal as Reed “Mr. Fantatstic” Richards, Napoleon’s Vanessa Kirby as Sue “Invisible Woman” Storm, Stranger Things’ Joseph Quinn as Johnny “The Human Torch” Storm, and The Bear’s Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Ben Grimm (aka the Thing).
