4.8 In Air Mail, Yves Klein realizing an “Anthropometry” painting in his studio, 1960.
4.8 Damon Linker in the Times: “There are things the Biden campaign could do to help the president better connect with voters. First, he should stop being so upbeat — about the economy in particular — and making the election entirely about the singular awfulness of his opponent. While the latter sounds evasive, the former makes the president seem hopelessly out of touch and risks antagonizing people who aren’t in the mood for a chipper message. Biden should instead try to meet Americans where they are. He should admit Washington has gotten a lot of things wrong over the past two decades and sound unhappy about and humbled by it. He could make the argument that all governments make mistakes because they are run by fallible human beings — but also point out that elected representatives in a democracy should be upfront about error and resolve to learn from mistakes so that they avoid them in the future. Just acknowledging how much in America is broken could generate a lot of good will from otherwise skeptical and dismissive voters. Even better would be an effort to develop a reform agenda: Mr. Biden could declare it’s long past time for America to put its house in order, to begin cleaning up the messes of the past two decades, to face our problems and return to our own best national self. He might even think of adapting and repurposing for the center-left a few lines from Ronald Reagan’s first Inaugural Address: “It’s not my intention to do away with government. It is rather to make it work — work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back. Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it.” In concrete terms, this means pledging to reform existing institutions and programs, not promising to build new ones on top of the ambitious legislation and substantial spending Congress passed during Mr. Biden’s first two years in office. It means, instead, a commitment to pause and begin assessing what government has been doing at all levels, under both Republican and Democratic leadership, over the past two decades.
4.8 Walk Like An Eclipsian.
4.7 Rutger Bregman, Dutch philosopher: “[Imagining utopia] isn’t an attempt to predict the future. It’s an attempt to unlock the future. To fling open the windows of our minds.”
4.6 Marjorie Taylor Greene: “God is sending America strong signs to tell us to repent. Earthquakes and eclipses and many more things to come. I pray that our country listens.”
4.3 Rep. Michael McCaul, quoted in Puck: “I think Russian propaganda has made its way into the United States, unfortunately, and it’s infected a good chunk of my party’s base.” Later, he told Jake Tapper “We see directly coming from Russia attempts to mask communications that are anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages, some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor.”
4.1 Rebecca Lobo on ESPN: “Good luck finding something to do in Albany.”
4.1 Tom Nichols in The Atlantic: “On Sunday morning, for example, Kristen Welker of Meet the Press noted that Trump had “stepped up his attacks on the judge and his family in the New York hush money case” and is “falsely calling the criminal proceedings ‘election interference.’” Her verdict: “It is yet another reminder that we are covering this election against the backdrop of a deeply divided nation.” Well, sure, that’s one way to put it. More accurately, however, we might say that a mostly coherent and decent nation is under electoral assault from a violent seditionist minority that has captured one of our two national parties, and its leader encourages and condones threats against officials at every level across the country, including threats of violence against the sitting president of the United States. Every ardent Trump supporter should be asked when enough’s enough. And every elected Republican, including the sad lot now abasing themselves for a spot on Trump’s ticket or in his possible Cabinet, should be asked when they will risk their careers for the sake of the country, if not their souls. We have reached an important moment—one of many over the past years, if we are to be honest. After all we have learned and seen, and all of the questions we might ask of Trump supporters, perhaps only one simple and direct question truly matters now: Is this who you are?
4.1 Christine Emba in The Atlantic: “For a long time, I felt there was something wrong with an individual amassing so much money, but I couldn’t properly articulate why,” writes the Dutch philosopher Ingrid Robeyns. “After a decade of analyzing and debating extreme wealth, I became convinced that we must create a world in which no one is super-rich—that there must be a cap on the amount of wealth any one person can have. I call this limitarianism.” In her book of the same name, Robeyns fleshes out the case for such a cap while upending common conceptions of agency, ownership, and what a fortune really signifies. Extreme wealth keeps the poor poor, she argues, and expands inequality. The super-rich undermine democracy through their outsize political influence and wreck the climate with their luxurious lifestyles. Some of their money is acquired through questionable means—from exploitative business practices, or dodging taxes, or outright theft. Robeyns argues that no one deserves such excess, that people would be better off morally and psychologically without it, and that there are better uses for society’s spillover abundance—ending poverty, say, or improving infrastructure. Even well-intentioned philanthropy doesn’t make up for these downsides: It’s no stand-in for a well-functioning, well-funded government—the sort that the wealthy often undermine in the course of making their fortune. And it’s that government and its citizens on which any fortune depends. “Take any multimillionaire or billionaire, and put them on a desert island,” Robeyns writes. “They still have all the same talents and personal traits as before. How rich could they become? Not very rich, obviously.”
4.1 Arthur Miller, in October 1949 response to a letter to a college student named Barbara Beattie who was asking about Death of a Salesman: “I see man’s happiness frustrated until the time arrives when he is judged, given social honor and respect, not by what he has accumulated but by what he has given to his society. This ideal is posited not for itself, but because I know that the frustration of the creative act is the cause of our hatred for each other, and hatred is the cause of our fears. We reward our dealers, our accumulators, our speculators; we penalize with anonymity and low pay our teachers, our scientists, our workers who make and do and build and create. And so the urge that is in all of us to give and to make is turned in upon itself, and we accept the upside-down idea that to take and to accumulate is the great good. And whether we succeed in that or not, we are sooner or later left with the awareness of our emptiness, our inner poverty, and our isolation from mankind. When a man reaches that knowledge and has the sensitivity to feel the loss of his true self deeply, he is a tragic figure; but not unless he tries to find himself despite the world can he raise up in us the actual feeling that something fine and great and precious has been discovered too late. The history of man is his blundering attempt to form a society in which it pays to be good.”