The Top 5: "abusus non tollit usum"
Plus, rewriting legacies online and voter apathy
Welcome to your weekly edition of the Top 5 articles we’ve read this week. Each week, we read dozens of articles in the hope we find essays and reporting that speaks to big ideas, trends, future looks, and incredible human stories. We hope you enjoy our list, and do always let us know if you have a suggestion or a recommendation! Please also consider becoming a paid subscriber if this is one of those newsletters you open up all the time or look forward to each week.
Before we get to the Top 5, here are some articles regarding the launch of the Center for Christianity and Public Life:
The Top 5 articles for your week:
“Jan 9th & May 24th 2007” (How to Measure Ghosts - Substack)
Because Matt Locke argues, “On Jan 9th 2007, Apple launched the first iPhone, and a few months later, on May 24th, Facebook launched the Facebook Platform, a tool that would let developers embed the Facebook network across the web. These two products - a mobile phone with sensors and cameras that capture a wealth of data about our lives, and a social network that can gather our actions and opinions from across the web - have, over the last 15 years, fundamentally reshaped much of our world in a way that makes those moments feel, more than anything else, like the start of a new century.”
“Who Gets the Last Word on Steve Jobs? He Might.” (NYT)
Because the new archive website dedicated to Steve Jobs, “…has worried historians who fear it may inspire other wealthy and influential figures to curate the historical record about them just as ordinary people curate their lives on Instagram.”
“On the Abuse of Legitimate Terms” (You Are Not Your Own Substack)
Because O. Alan Noble argues, “…there is a corollary to abusus non tollit usum. If we accept that the abuse of a thing does not take away its use, then we have already accepted something that we don’t like to accept in contemporary: people abuse good, true, and proper terms. In fact, social media gives them all kinds of incentives to abuse good, proper terms. Because of the power of the culture war Social Myth, groups don’t like to admit that people—especially those in their group—abuse their terms. Because that is interpreted as a sign of weakness. So instead of acknowledging what we all know to be true (that some people really will abuse a good and proper term or idea), we prefer to silence those stories and shame people who bring them up.”
“On Murders Especially Heinous, Atrocious, or Cruel” (The Atlantic)
Because Liz Bruenig dives into the dilemmas surrounding how we process the prosecution of heinous crimes, “…there is no reason, and no meaning, in wanton destruction. It is exactly what it appears to be. It does not entail a greater theory, purpose, or truth of some kind that we could use to our benefit, for prevention or healing, if only we could discover it. It does not respond to the demands of morality or reason, because a moral, reasonable person would not commit acts of vile degradation against other people. What the most spectacular of killers do directly infringes upon the sphere of meaning by eliminating its more common sources in our lives: relationships, plans for the future, love.”
“Voter apathy is a thing of the past in national elections” (LA Times)
Because while cynicism about our politics is high, participation seems to be growing in national elections. “‘Give people an existential fear,’ and they’ll show up to vote, says Tom Bonier, the head of the Democratic voter targeting firm TargetSmart. Political leaders generally like to project a sunny optimism about the future — think of President Reagan‘s “shining city on a hill,” President Clinton‘s “Man From Hope” or President Obama‘s poster of that same emotion. But political professionals know that fear, anger and hatred provide more powerful motivation. Trump’s political success in 2016 rested on his willingness to openly exploit those negative emotions. So did his 2020 failure.”