Episode 9: DCCC polling and "anti-ambition"

Wear is the Love, Episode #9

This week, we chat about the recent polling commissioned by the DCCC and reported by Politico (article here) that shows how Democrats, especially in vulnerable districts, are faring against Republican culture war attacks (spoiler: not well!). After, we discuss the NYT Magazine piece in the first Top 5 on what might be driving “anti-ambition” across American workplaces.

Episode notes:

IFYC report: “Evangelicals and Interfaith Engagement: Assessing Evangelical Resources, Motivations, Hesitancies, Hopes”

IFYC webinar registration, 2/21 at 1pm EST/12pm CT

Ezra Klein interview with David Shor (NYT)

“The Digital Gap Between Rich and Poor Kids Is Not What We Expected” (NYT)

The Top 5 articles for your week:

1. “The Age of Anti-Ambition” (NYT Magazine)

   Because the “Great Resignation” isn’t happening just because of burnout or because some would like a better title or salary. There are multiple factors causing workers to ask “ what is all this striving for?”

2. “A Child’s TikTok Stardom Opens Doors. Then a Gunman Arrives.” (NYT)

   Because children and their parents are being given choices: pursue fame and fortune on social media apps and risk all kinds of negative consequences, or limit the potential for stardom, income and avenues of self-expression that comes with hyper-connectivity and virality. In a world where it seems there are no gatekeepers to attracting the attention of millions, how is one expected to turn down the opportunity to seek their affirmation and be validated by it? Our society has few ready, constructive answers to turn to when answering these kinds of questions.

3. “On Attentional Norms” (Hedgehog Review)

   Because Alan Jacobs looks at the norms we’re creating on Zoom, that is how little time and attention we give to meetings and speakers. “But Zoom, it seems to me, is a medium that offers constant permission to be distracted. And while the norms of any particular moment are in a sense not objectively good or bad, they can be good or bad in relation to certain human purposes. The purposes I have in my classes are not compatible with the attentional norms that we’ve learned to employ in our teleconferencing pandemic.”

4. “COVID and the Brittle West” (The New Atlantis)

   Because we’re at the point in the pandemic — two years in — where we can start asking questions about when the US’s public health policy succeeded in doing its job, and when it failed. And this essay argues that the West’s fixation on data and personal choice caused reactive rather than proactive policy decisions. “Our need to fully justify action by politicians and public officials — a basic requirement of the rule of law — tended to reduce their ability to make decisions in a moment of emergency, when full justification by data, let alone publicly available knowledge, is impossible. Younger democracies such as Taiwan and South Korea did much better, not because of a greater sense of collectivism in these societies, but because their rules and procedures are less fixed, less ossified and could therefore be adapted to new circumstances. It was not Confucianism that saved these Asian countries, but rather a kind of modernity that we have lost in the West.”

5. “The Bad Ideas Our Brains Can’t Shake” (Galaxy Brain - Charlie Warzel)

   Because further to our COVID policy reflections, this essay also explains why doing public health is so hard, and it’s because humans like to take the first pieces of information they hear and base future behaviors off that information, even if it’s been proven ineffective or wrong.