Somehow It Was Even Worse Than We Thought
The true story of the riots at the Capitol represent a new low -- if such a thing is possible
I can’t believe it’s over. I’ve had this day circled on my mental calendar for the past 4+ years and it’s finally here. But more than celebrating, I feel like I can fully exhale for the first time since 2016.
And yet, this shit isn’t going away. One truly remarkable feat of the Trump administration was to constantly and consistently outperform itself. I’d thought if I just assumed the worst, that’s what he and his cronies would be up to. And yet, they were inventive in their shittiness, dreaming up new ways to be terrible at their jobs that no one could have possibly considered. I’ll bet if you rounded up the gloomiest predictions from four years ago you couldn’t have come up with “mishandled a pandemic leading to the deaths of 400,000 Americans.” Sure we all thought he’d get impeached — but not twice! And we knew there was no respect for the Constitution and separation of powers, but did anyone actually guess he’d lead a physical uprising against a co-equal branch of government?
If the attack on the Capitol represents the lowest of the low, well is it even surprising anymore that it was worse than we thought it was? By now, most people have watched the horrifying New Yorker footage from inside the insurrection, but the accompanying article is in some ways even more jarring. The writer Luke Mogelson has met many of these people before — a huge number of whom just happen to be felons — and his profile of who they are and what’s driving them lays bare just how disconnected they are from the society you (presumably) and I inhabit. It’s one thing for these faux patriots to brandish 1776 flags and play dress-up, but when they accost random Black people in the street, there’s no pretending they’re anything but what they are.
Other great stuff I read this weekend:
Issac Chotiner (why is his stuff never in the magazine?) interviews a historian about how the actual lessons from Reconstruction apply to this moment.
The Man Who Turned Credit-Card Points Into an Empire, by Jamie Lauren Keiles. Like a lot of other people in my cohort (mid-thirties, male, Jewish), I’ve got an unhealthy attachment to credit card points. Maximizing the return on money I’m already spending? What’s not to like? And no one does a better job spelling it out than the Points Guy. I realized that my friends and I were all reading the same blog when the time came to split the check and we’d all drop our thick plastic Chase Sapphire Reserve cards on the table — the heft was how you knew the card meant business. I did not know however, that the Points Guy had used cocaine in front of his colleagues on a business trip (aren’t they all business trips for him?). And had also never considered that points are essentially — like everything else — a regressive tax on the poor. Consider:
If you trace the thread back on any one of these businesses, it’s always the same deal: The poor underwrite the fantasies of the middle class, who in turn underwrite the realities of the rich. When credit cards charge high interchange fees, they pass the cost of loyalty programs on to merchants, who in turn pass it back to customers by building the fees into their sticker prices. Those who pay with credit can earn it back in points. Those who pay with debit or cash wind up subsidizing someone else’s free vacation.
CRISPR and the Splice to Survive, Elizabeth Kolbert. I enjoy a good gene editing story, and in this one Kolbert answers the question of, “Should we be playing God with nature?” with a resounding, “We already are.”
What’s Wrong With the Way We Work? by Jill Lepore. If you’ve read a previous #GluckReads, you know how taken I am with Lepore. So when my friend Jeremy told me about an article that contextualizes and considers how we arrived at our current relationship with work, I was fairly certain who had written it.
Did you guys know Elvis was Jewish? I had no idea.
The Internet’s Most Incredible Collection of Food History Has Been Saved, by Dayna Evans
A Brief History of Peanut Butter, Kate Wheeling
Excerpts from the Sex and the City Revival in Which Samantha Is Replaced with Fran Lebowitz, Tom Smyth