This week I’m sharing a sobering but life-affirming message that I got this week from New Orleans.
(Over the years, I’ve learned more from this City than from any other in America, so I’m always on the look-out for another one of its smoke signals.)
For as long as I’ve visited New Orleans, it’s been contestng with its water-borne environment and, even harder, with its efforts at continuous renewal. You hear it in the music, taste it in the food, see it in its melting pot of faces. Honesty. Bravery. Resilience. I’d also call it Love.
It’s similar with a beloved, century-old house like mine. Like a massive clock with a thousand parts, there is always something to strengthen or abandon or repair to hold the mess-of-it-all together. But your love for your home enables the next thing that needs doing.
It also reminds me of the drudgery and joy of having a a body that keeps getting older, along with a wonderful dog who’s aging alongside. Someday neither of us will be here, although our timer bells are probably set differenly. We get through our drudgery and find our joys in no small measure from the urgency of those clocks and the love we find in spite of their wind-downs.
That’s true of relationships too, particularly the most difficult ones. You always keep a door open for repair and strengthening (even when you’re apart) so there’s love stored up for spending again before the time you have together runs out.
Finally, I’m thinking about the relationships that we have with our democratic ways of life, which we also say we love but whose survival we take for granted and rarely consider honestly. These too are complex, fragile, interconnected systems, always breaking down a little (yesterday) or a lot (today). Still, it’s through glimpsing these experiments in collective governance with practical, caring eyes that we can recognize their terrible fragility and mobilize our efforts to maintain, repair and evolve them before the inevitable comes.
This week, the message from New Orleans is about clear-eyed love for a place that’s slowly but truly dying, and the daily living such a realization requires.
t’s been said that the perspective Nathaniel Rich brings to his essays and books gestures towards a new kind of ecological writing—and I think his readers are right about that.
Different from most of the writing about the climate crisis, Rich’s words hits you in the face with the reality that (as he writes in “Second Nature”): “no rock, leaf, or cubic foot of air on Earth has escaped humanity’s clumsy signature. The natural world [as we’ve known it] is gone.”
Rich begins his rallying cries with the recognition that we’ve already changed the Earth in such fundamental ways that we can never return it to its prior state, however heroic our efforts or romantic our intentions. But that doesn’t mean that love is abandoned. Instead, it’s the same kind of love that we bring to our own lives, when we truly face the reality of our own deaths every day.
Most of us don’t say, “it’s useless to truly live because death will just take it from us.” Instead, we choose to live in spite of (and in some ways) because of the inevitability of our ends. Limited time makes each of the moments that we do have more worthy of filling them to the brim.
Rich’s new kind of ecological writing moves from this same acceptance to the quality of our actions in the meantime. It’s a more sober but less disappointing future because we’re clear-eyed about it from the start.
Instead of wanting to return to a world that we’ve lost forever, it pointedly asks us: “What world do we want in its place?”
Groceries will never again be as cheap as they were before the pandemic. Our politics will never heal itself because our politicians will rarely be better than we are. The world order that we imagined we had 30 years ago is dying because we failed (as a human race) to maintain “this clock with its thousand parts” in the ways that we might have, Yet in these many “deaths”—and in the one that’s on-going in New Orleans—we have the building blocks for life in the meantime, where we refuse to cower in the face of these inevitabilities.
(It’s why I named my post today “A Place That Looks Death in the Face, and Keeps Living.” In all likelihood, it’s the same title that Rich gave his essay when he first submitted it for publication. It’s the title the Times editors used in the print edition of their paper and the title they should have kept when they shared it with me, but I’m happy to give it another run.)
Rich begins his essay by noting that nowhere is safe from climate change but that New Orleans is “atop the list of unsafe places,” giving it a point-of-view that distinguishes it from almost everywhere else.
I’ve never met a New Orleanian who feels safe from climate change. Living here, rather, engenders hurricane expertise — and hurricane fatalism. You become your own disaster planner, insurance adjuster, land surveyor and roofer. You know how many feet your neighborhood is above or below sea level, which storm drain on the block must be cleared by hand before the rain starts, which door sill needs to be bolstered with a rolled-up towel and where water is most likely to pool, with what appalling consequences.
The National Hurricane Center advises those in the path of a storm to have an evacuation plan. Most New Orleanians I know have three plans: one if the storm lands to the east, one if to the west and a third if the evacuation lasts longer than a week. We don’t wait for a tropical storm to form. We track every depression and cyclone advisory with grim scrutiny. There are storm shutters on every window, a hammer in the attic, candles and matches and gallons of bottled water in the pantry. Local news organizations track how many of the city’s drainage pumps, steam and combustion turbine generators and frequency changers are operational at any given time. We are as prepared as anyone can be with the certain knowledge that one day a storm will come for which no preparations will be sufficient.
Imagine you’re living with a sword like that over your head when you turn on the weather forecast everyday. Well, the length of that imaginative leap may reveal the cloudiness of (and romanticism behind) your future vision about the State of Nature.
I would have thought Rich was exaggerating, but I was visiting New Orleans in 2016 when a storm was approaching, and the weather guy or gal was actually talking about the repairs that had or hadn’t been made to certain key storm drains in recent months–like everyone would know exactly what they were talking about and where these drains are located.
Rich quotes with favor Saul Bellow’s comment that:“no one made sober decent terms with death,” but goes on to note that cities can and that New Orleans has, before asking:
What does it mean, for a city, to make sober decent terms with death? It means living in reality. It means doing whatever it can to postpone the inevitable. It means settling for the best of bad options. But it does not mean blindly submitting to fate. (italics mine)
Rich references several of New Orlean’s forward-looking plans, but it was his disclosure that one of them (called the Coastal Master Plan) or “Louisiana’s grand unified theory of coastal restoration, land creation and retreat” automaticallly renews, every 5 years, rendering it “a 50 year plan in perpetuity.” Rich says the most impressive part of it “is its honesty. For the authors of the plan freely acknowledge that, even in the best-case scenario, the plan will fail” but that their work will continue until it does.
Yet despite a future where New Orleans will literally be washed out to sea, its inhabitants are buying a “grace period” for themselves, which (through building and restoring marshland, levees and barrier islands) is “the difference between deliberate, gradual retreat over generations and a sudden one marked by chaos and excessive suffering.”
It’s also worth noting that these efforts are being taken despite the fact (as Rich acknowledged in an interview around “Second Nature”) that Louisiana is sinking, losing a football field of land every 100 minutes. He added: “Were this rate of land loss applied to New York, Manhattan would vanish in less than two years.”
Unless you’re reading this from somewhere around St. Charles Avenue, you know that your city or town doesn’t live like this. “But,” says Rich, “one morning , not very long from now, they will.” It may be too many fires instead, too many 100-year storms, or at the other extreme, not enough rain to fill the local reservoirs. “On that morning, everyone will be a New Orleanian.”
Rich agrees with Torbjorn Tornqvist, an ecology professor at Tulane, that the worst for New Orleans is unlikely to happen within our lifetimes, but that neither the timing of his City’s death nor its inevitability will disable its residents. In this regard, he mentions that Tornqvist said something to him about “value” and even “love” that he’ll never forget:
People find it very hard to accept that a city like New Orleans at some point will not exist anymore. But why don’t we think of the life of a city the way that we think about the life of a human being? Just because our lives are finite, doesn’t mean that they’re worthless.
Rich concludes his essay with a call to arms that rises from his illusionless view about our degrading environment. At the same time, what he urges us to do seems applicable to nearly everything else that feels like a lost cause these days.
The knowledge of our own mortality does not condemn us to fatalism or nihilism. It does not mean that we give up on self-improvement, on reversing injustice, on re-examining our history, on celebrating our culture, on behaving with moral purpose, on setting a positive example for our children. If anything, we love best what we most fear losing. We cherish what we have because we know it won’t last forever. It might not even last beyond the next hurricane season. But for now we live.
I took this picture at the end of the St. Charles trolley line, where a massive, tree-topped levy (and commitment to the future) is temporarily holding the mighty Mississippi back from inundating this part of the City.
Those of us who have never lived in New Orleans have (by definition) spent far less time with the certainty that Nature can’t and won’t regenerate itself to the state where we remember it. Yet even when our daily experience of a degraded Nature “calls out to us,” how fervently and foolishly we cling to our hopes that “everything will turn out just fine” in the long run.
Our blindness may be this willful because our own ways of living continue to be at odds with Nature’s mechanisms and rhythms. A century and a half of our extraction (“Drill baby drill”), pollution and waste continues to throw Nature out of balance, disabling it from regaining the old equilibrium that we pine for and slowing down its “life-will-find-a-way” quest for a new one.
Nathaniel Rich reminds us that we need to face the reality of this death in order to do what we need to do in the days before The End finally comes—and that the death of Nature as we know it is not so different from all those other things that we cherish, like our own lives.
Recognizing Nature’s tragic limits liberates us to reappraise, in a radical way, the different kinds of environmental work that are waiting for us to do–work that New Orleans is already doing and living. Because as Einstein famously said in the course of Rich’s interview: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
This post was adapted from my December 8, 2024 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here in lightly edited form. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.
These days, it seems almost fool-hardy to flag another identity-based group—namely American boys & men—that needs our affirmative action.
Initiatives to help other disadvantaged groups are being purged in Washington these days, and if the MAGA Movement has foot soldiers, many are American boys & men who say they admire the same “toughness, strength and financial success” that Donald Trump (and his recent avatar, Elon Musk) represent. No “wokeness” or government handouts for them.
But considering where many of them find themselves today, boys & men also made Trump and Musk their aspirational role-models because of the “toughness, strength and financial success” that have eluded them. In the run up to November’s election, the Republicans recognized these deficits, even played to them—acknowledging a pocket of the electorate that the Democrats ignored because it could never shake the impression that it favored EVERYBODY BUT these boys & men.
It’s a voting block’s grievance that Arlie Hochschild confirmed for me in “Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right” (2016), a book that preoccupied me around the 2020 election. In this social scientist’s attempt to better understand Red State Americans, it became clear in conversation after conversation that most of them resented how muchidentity-group minorities “were enabled by the government” to get in front of them in the long line that ends in the American Dream. After all, they were struggling as hard (if not harder) to realize its promises too. Some felt forgotten, others victimized. Many of those that Hochschild interviewed were boys & men.
My pre-election post a few months ago, “Bro-Magnet Elon Musk is This Election’s October Surprise,”elaborated on the resentments that caused many boys & men to buy Trump’s pitch to them this time around. Many in the cohort already felt that “their masculinity was under siege.” Over the past 30 years, as American manufacturing jobs were gutted in swing states like mine, fewer have gone to college or found sustaining work after high school. Because of dim economic prospects, fewer have married than in the past, and many endure high rates of depression and suicide. (In the meantime, increasing numbers of women entered the workforce, becoming more independent financially.) The Republican Party did a masterful job emphasizing the “hyper-masculine-financially-successful” qualities of their candidate to a voting block that felt vulnerable in each of these ways. By the time the campaign reached October, Musk’s billionaire brand of defiant rebel made him a kind of pied-piper for boys & men who were starting to conclude that their country had turned against them.
Reeves is a scholar at the Brookings Institution who makes recommendations about social policy for a living. He is also the father of three boys, at least one of whom has struggled mightily along the way. It means that in addition to the ambitious new policies that he proposes in “Of Boys and Men,” Reeves’ 20-odd years as a dad also illuminates this excellent book.
Unlike some of the politicians ascendant today, Reeves does not brand the quest for gender equality as either woke or unnecessary. Instead, his appeal addresses the real inequities facing boys & men in addition to those that persist for women & girls. Setting his table early on, he notes:
What is needed is a positive vision of masculinity that is compatible with gender equality. As a conscientious objector in the culture wars, I hope to have provided an assessment of the condition of boys and men that can attract broad support….We must help men adapt to the dramatic changes of recent decades without asking them to stop being men. We need a prosocial masculinity for a postfeminist world. And we need it soon.
Where the grievances and resentments of too many boys & men have root causes, we should address them for the sake of our politics (surely), but also because every American deserves the chance to thrive into adulthood.
Reeves “Of Boys and Men,” identifies three central challenges facing nearly every American boy & man today. As they grow into adulthood, there are developmental differences between boys and girls that have always existed in our classrooms but never been addressed by our education systems. At the same time, the poor job prospects for boys & men and confusion about their roles in society reflect economic changes in America that are so recent we have yet to absorb (let alone address) them. So while boys & men aren’t to blame for the sorry state in which they find themselves, Reeves believes there are effective steps that can and should be taken now to give them the boosts that they need.
1. Proven developmental differences between boys and girls as they grow up argue for ALL boys starting school one year later than girls of the same age so they don’t find themselves behind (and unable to catch up) by the time they reach the crucial high school years.
The science here is not in dispute, and I refer you to his extensive citations for the research behind boys’ developmental differences, their impacts by the time they reach secondary school, and the other findings that support Reeves’ policy recommendations.
The cerebellum in our brains reaches full size by age 11 for girls, but not until 15 for boys, Differences like this in the speed of brain development produce cascading effects over time. It also means that “[t]he gender gap in the development of skills and traits most important for academic success is widest at precisely the time when students need to be worrying about their GPA, getting ready for tests, and staying out of trouble” —in other words, the high school years. Moreover, since reading and verbal skills strongly predict college-going rates, boys as a group are even farther behind the girls in each of these areas by the time they leave high school.
It’s why male students are at higher risk of dropping out of college than any other group(including poor students). At the same time, there’s been too little investment in vocational education as an alternate path to qualify boys for sustaining work.
In light of these shortfalls, Reeves would give boys “the gift of time,” because “treating people the same (ie. equally) is not the same as treating them equitably.” That means giving boys—all boys, as a matter of education policy—an extra year of pre-K before starting them in school.
The main reason for starting boys later is no so that they will be a year older in kindergarten. It is so they will be a year older when they get to middle and high school.
In addition, he advocates for the recruitment of more male teachers to strengthen boys’ engagement in the classroom (“[t]here is solid evidence that male teachers boost academic outcomes for boys, especially in certain subject areas like English”) and to raise expectations (“[f]emale teachers are more likely than male teachers to see boys in their class as disruptive, while male teachers tend to have a more positive view of boys and their capabilities.’) And because boys, on average, tend to benefit from a more “hands-on” or practical approach to learning, Reeves argues for significantly more career and technical education (CTE) opportunities at a time when there has been “a precipitous decline” in those investments given the lingering “bias” in favor of the college-bound and a fear of stigmatizing students who choose the “lesser” vocational track.
2. At the same time that more women are entering the labor market, men have been losing significant ground in it from “the one-two punch” of automation and free trade.
America’s manufacturing heartland (including the swing states of Pennsylvania and Michigan) were gutted in terms of well-paying jobs when they were out-sourced to places with lower labor costs. The manufacturers that remained further reduced employment opportunities by automating. Among other things, fathers who made things in America’s factories were no longer able to pass those jobs down to their sons.
At the same time, “women make up most of the workforce in relatively automation-safe occupations, such as health care, personal services, and education.” Reeves calls these HEAL jobs (for health, education, administration and literacy), and it’s where the American labor market is growing fastest. As a result, he proposes building “a pipeline” for boys in the education system to prepare them for HEAL jobs, provide financial incentives that encourage more men to take them after graduation, and reduce “the social stigma” that men who end up working in these fields often face.
Overall, women now account for 27% of STEM workers, up from 13% in 1980….But the trend has been the other way in terms of male representation in HEAL-jobs. In 2019, 26% were held by men, down from 35% in 1980.
These trends are meaningful because “for every new STEM job created by 2030, there will be more than three new HEAL jobs.” And while HEAL jobs also tend to pay less, they offer higher degrees of job security (“we still need nurses and teachers in a recession”). And as we discovered during the pandemic’s “essential worker” debate, we are slowly coming to pay more for “essential work.”
To provide more plentiful job opportunities for boys & men, Reeves proposes “at least a $1 billion national investment” in the academic pipeline “for future male HEAL workers” in schools and colleges, for financial support for male students and workers in HEAL jobs, and for “social marketing” to make these kinds of career choices more appealing. For example:
I suggest that among candidates for teaching posts in health and education, a 2:1 preference should be given to male applicants. Before you report me to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, you should know that I didn’t pluck that number out of thin air. It is in fact the same preference that is currently given to female tenure-track professors in STEM fields…. [M]y argument is not that we should be doing less to attract women into STEM; it is that we should be doing as much to encourage men into HEAL. Two thoughts at once.
He also makes a strong case for increasing pay levels “in critical occupations” and for countering stereotypes (like male nurses being effeminate, or simply failed doctors) by more actively portraying these professions as “male appropriate” too. A national investment in better pipelines, higher pay, and reduced stigma needs to do far more of our talking here says Reeves, if we’re to improve the job prospects for boys & men.
3. With more moms in the workforce, more dads have lost their traditional roles as provider. For their well-being and self-esteem, these men need expanded roles within families that provide them with a re-newed sense of purpose in their relationships with their partners and children.
Reeves correctly notes that the mass migration of women into the labor market is a recent phenomenon, so while our society has absorbed these new workers, it has yet to focus adequately on what this new pecking order has meant for men. Or as Reeves observes: “The economic reliance of women on men held women down, but it also propped men up. Now the props have gone, and many men are falling.”
Reeves is more psychologist than economist in presenting today’s views about male identity and what should be done to improve them, arguing that married and marriage-age men today increasingly feel like “ships without sails.” Moreover, the impact on feelings of self-worth are even more profound for men with poor employment prospects in today’s economy.
[T]he very men who are least able to be traditional breadwinners are the most likely to be judged by their breadwinning potential. What this means is that men who fare poorly in the labor market are also likely to suffer in the marriage market, especially in the working class.
Reeves proposes several solutions, but his key proposal is “to establish a new basis for fatherhood, one that embraces the huge progress we have made toward gender equality.” With women bearing more breadwinning responsibilities, men could be undertaking more care-giving responsibilities, giving them a larger stake in the family’s success and the promise of greater satisfaction individually.
From a policy perspective, that means both mandatory and paid 6-month-long parental leave for moms (when the kids are youngest and need them most) and for dads (when the kids are adolescents and would benefit most from learning “life skills” from their fathers). Reeves argues that “[s]ix months of leave is necessary to allow parents to spend meaningful time with their children without losing all connection to the labor market.”
I came away from “Of Boys and Men” thinking that the policies Reeves proposes would go a long way towards calming parents today who are “generally more worried about their sons ‘growing up to be successful adults’ than they are about their daughters.”
Enhancing the self-worth of vulnerable boys & men might also reduce the amount of influence that role-models like Trump and Musk exerted over so many of them in the last election.
Reading Reeves’ book brought me back to his November 11, 2024 interview on Amanpour & Company (linked above) which focused almost entirely on “The Male Vote.”
Adding his voice to the election post-mortem, Reeves wasn’t at all surprised that the boys & men who voted preferred the Republicans. To the extent that the Democrats reached out to them as a voting block at all, it was derivatively.
There was not really an alternative [to the Trump-Musk view of masculinity] put in front of them….In the final stages of the campaign, young men were being urged to vote for the Democrats if they love the women in their lives [which was essentially a pro-Choice argument], and that’s not good enough.
It’s not to say that we don’t care about the other people in our lives, but you are essentially asking men to vote for Democrats because the Democrats stand for women. Well, that’s a flawed political strategy.
This failure surprised Reeves even more because, with Tim Walz on the ticket, the Democrats had the poster boy for some powerful counter-messaging.
In particular [Walz’s] biography. He was the first career public school teacher to run for higher office. Not only that, [he was] a coach. You had his students [football players at the Democratic National Convention] lauding the masculinity he had demonstrated.
If there was any candidate who could have plausibly set out a [more] positive vision for the role of men in society today…it’s hard to think of a better example than Tim Walz. It was easy to imagine him giving powerful speeches, running strong advertising campaigns, directly targeted at young men with an empathetic, respectful policy-based message.
None of that happened.
Reeves doesn’t claim to be giving the Democrats a better chance at a winning formula going forward. In fact, he’s felt the urgent need to come up with solutions that can attract bi-partisan support.
Many boys & men in the past election were swing voters, feeling economic and even deeper levels of anxiety about their futures through no particular fault of their own.
They voted for the only candidate who reached out to them directly, even though much of that outreach played to their insecurities.
But there’s a different way forward for American boys & men than grievance-based appeals. It’s one that acknowledges the most basic problems they face today while proposing a plan to address them.
Our local, state and federal leaders on both sides of the aisle could get behind policies and investments that will improve the lot of boys & men before any more of their opportunities are lost.
They could start with this timely gift from Richard Reeves.
This post was adapted from my February 2, 2025 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.
With the second inauguration of Donald Trump, it feels like we’re approaching the edge of uncertainty again.
Unexpected surprises for friends and foes. Daily dramas that are impossible to ignore. Chaos that frustrates every objective, including worthy ones. In other words, a precipice.
Among other things, it’s caused me to look at “my internal regulating mechanisms” in the hope that I’ll do a better job of “smoothing out” my reactions to the coming ruckus than I did the last time around.
More distance and dispassion. Resisting the next shock’s claim on my attention.
Between the election and today, that’s meant considering the moment that we’re in and how it feels to be thrown off the axis of what’s “reasonably foreseeable” once again (my post: “An Unnatural Calm Between One Storm and Another”). It’s meant reaffirming basic principles, like the responsibilities that are born of our interconnections (“An Ethic of Reciprocity”) and daily work that builds our resilience when we take one practical step after another (“A Place That Looks Death in the Face, and Keeps Living”). I’ve begun to write an upcoming post that considers the crisis facing Boys and Men in America and what we can do about it: a kind of book-end to my look last October at a key voting block that helped determine this election in swing states like mine. In other words, I was also thinking about problems I might help to solve.
I’ve also spent two of my post-election posts considering the edges of the precipice that we’re on (our seeming to get stupider individually and weakeras a country), when not avoiding its proximity altogether (by surveying year-end favorite songs, music videos andtelevision).
I suppose I’ve been making a kind of pre-emptive strike against the confusion and alarm to come.
Today I wanted to confront Trump’s “attention grabbing” itself, to challenge his claims on my time and ability to throw me off balance.
For me, that involves admitting that we’re not all wired the same, and that some of us need to be more proactive “to keep our triggers in check.” It’s why I quoted historian and culture critic Robert D. Kaplan last week, on the relatively few Americans who pay enough attention to the daily news to get roiled by it, and how far greater numbers pay it little mind, beyond expecting “the government to keep them safe and hunt down and kill anyone who threatens their safety…Inside these extremes, don’t bother them with details.”
On the other hand, those like me–who are unsettled by events like nominating unqualified people to run our defense and intelligence establishments–need to have reliable ways to step back from the next and the next and the next controversy.
As I was reminded in an op-ed this week, the unsettling relationship between “my need to know what’s going on” and “keeping up with the news cycle” overwhelms my attention and becomes even more exhausting with a “disrupter in chief” as president. But the op-ed’s author, a host on a cable news network, argues that it’s not just Trump or even the sad state of our politics that’s to blame. It’s the undigestible assault “of all the other bad news too” that we need to step back from if the susceptible among us want to maintain a sense of balance (in the present) and agency (for the future).
In other words, it’s about more than surviving Trump 2.0.
I don’t get my news from the cable networks, so I’ve neither watched nor followed Chris Hayes, who helms a show on MSNBC. But with more than a little interest, I read his recent op-ed in the Times called: “I Want Your Attention. I Need Your Attention. This is How I Mastered My Own.” [The link is pay-wall free.]
Hayes has recently written a book about our attention dilemma, so he seemed to have done his homework when it comes to summarizing “how we feel” when our attention is manipulated and overloaded in an unending cycle of manipulation and overload. This is how he describes “the attention capitalism we are enmeshed in” today, including “the news”:
Our attention is a wildly valuable resource, and some of the world’s most powerful corporations extract it at scale in increasingly sophisticated ways, leaving us feeling like bystanders to our minds. You might say we’ve built a machine for producing boredom and then entertainment to fill it in an endlessly accelerating and desperate cycle.
Hayes seems exactly right when he describes how we feel when we’re caught up in this boredom-to-entertainment cycle: “like bystanders to our minds.” That’s me when news purveyors drown me in whatever I’m likely to keep watching or reading about out of fear or dread. I’ve become a bystander in the show that somebody else has colonized in my mind!
Hayes has a dozen ways of describing how we are continuously “occupied” like this, a whole lexicon for how we’re made to feel bored so somebody who stands to profit can provide momentary relief from that boredom, which (of course) is when the cycle starts all over again. Indeed, given the consistently outrageous “content” that Trump reliably provides, Hayes wonders: “Did Americans elect him again because they were just kind of bored with the status quo,” and can count on him to relieve it over and over again?
Perhaps because Hayes studied philosophy in college, he finds an even deeper dilemma in our compulsively cycling between boredom, entertainment and back again. He calls it “the unsettled self.”
The restlessness and unease of our times aren’t simply, in my experience, the vertigo of distraction and distractibility. No, that experience is itself a symptom caused by some deeper part of the unsettled self. The endless diversion offered to us in every instant we are within reach of our phones means we never have to do the difficult work of figuring out how to live with our own minds.
As Hayes reminds us, it’s Pascal’s description of an existentially uncomfortable man sitting in a room with only himself as company—“the unoccupied mind” as a “feral beast” that needs to be fed and seems to want to consume him because he’s not enough on his own.
It’s at this point that he mentions the cure for this universal human discomfort: not seeking more and more distraction, but instead, learning how to calm “our itchy minds.” Hayes cites Jenny O’Dell’s book “How to Do Nothing” for “a plan of action” that includes a “lateral movement outward to things and people that are around us” and a “movement downward into place.” He also mentions times when he was younger that he achieved this heathier mental state, talking about his “daydreaming, reverie, mind wandering, [and being] lost in thought,” as well as how he’s more recently:
developed a set of routines, habits and hobbies that can provide the framework for a form of modified idleness, just enough to focus on to keep myself rooted and present while allowing my mind to wander. Chopping wood, making handmade pasta, going to the dog park with my canine-obsessed 6-year-old — these are all in the happy but endangered category of things to do that are neither work nor looking at my phone.
They allow him to reclaim at least some of the space in his mind for his own purposes.
In these regards, Hayes’ debt to O’Dell seemed obvious. I first posted here about her “How to Do Nothing” in 2021, referred to her revelatory proposals again during a rough patch the following year, and explored her thinking at greater length after her most recent book (“Saving Time”) was published in 2023. Here’s some of what I said about her approach to the attention dilemma at the time:
Against the harshness that presses down and calls out for some relief, Odell would recommend letting the mind (and heart) rest in what she calls an ‘almost psychedelic encounter’ with something close at hand but still unfamiliar, because of how far towards recovery reclaiming our attention and re-focusing [on realities that are deeper than our distrations] can take us.
She’s saying: I don’t need to be overwhelmed or pinned down by these rushes of cold reality. I can find refreshment in the simple act of paying attention to something around me that usually escapes it.
On the eve of what will likely be four tumultuous years, it might help to conclude with a couple of additions to Haye’s “plan of action” in light of O’Dell’s much needed insights.
Jenny O’Dell sees herself more as an artist and teacher (her first two jobs) than as an expert about anything. In light of that, instead of prescribing to us in either of her books, she makes “suggestions given what she sees and how she lives…a kind of observational witnessing”—which is my slant on her contributions as a writer.
What O’Dell does to clear and open her mind is to visit “third places” around her home in California, places where she doesn’t have to be productive or to buy anything, where she can simply observe, notice and immerse herself in what’s around her. Anchored in a place that makes no demands, she employs her sensory observations almost like springboards to make “illustrative discursions.” They’re associations that provide sparks or clues about her place in the world and how to enrich it when she eventually gets back to work.
These free associations are akin to the “mind-wanderings” that Hayes says he enables when he’s chopping wood, is making pasta or on those direction-less ambles when he was just starting out in his twenties. As he wrote in his op-ed:
Almost without exception, my best thinking happened on these walks. I would come back to my laptop, sometimes almost racing up the steps to my apartment, to get the thoughts [that had bubbled up when I was out there] down.
(Interestingly, “The Overstory” author Richard Powers makes almost identical observations about the creative aftermaths of his off-line walks in the old growth forests of the Smokies.)
When Issac Newton was hit by the apocryphal apple in the course of “day-dreaming” under that famous tree, he changed his future and ours with the theories that his mind was freed to ponder. Whether for Newton, Hayes or O’Dell, it is the undemanding place or leisure activity that tethers you enough so you can free up space in your mind, escape destructive cycles, and find healthier and more satisfying ways forward. Or as O’Dell notes:
only there can we locate hope and desire—wishes for things to be different, new things to happen, the ability to change.
It can break the cycle of boredom and diversion, giving us the chance to reclaim our attention.
It can scratch the itch of our always restless minds.
It can “save our time” for what truly matters.
It can provide ways to get through the next 4 years with fuller, richer lives.
I just need to keep remembering how easy this can be.
+ + +
The photographs above are care of @robertdawsonaestheticsabotage and @nigelslater.
This post was adapted from my January 19, 2025 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.
Usually I enjoy the marathon of newsletter writing on Saturdays, but not this weekend.
The clues came early. I’d sketched out a topic that seemed suitable to the day and time, but however much it coaxed me on I wasn’t feeling the thrill of the starting line or the promising place where the race might end.
It was like my energy had gone into hiding–and was calling on me to join it.
There could be a dozen reasons, and I might as well begin and end with the environmental ones. Yesterday was another, in a succession of days, that felt askew.
Like the temperatures, either outside or inside. Over the past two weeks, we’ve had days here that hit 79 or 80 degrees, and others teasing 32.
For the first weeks of November, swings like that used to be unheard of and my body’s been struggling to catch up. It’s unsettling to feel in your bones either one step ahead or behind, but never quite landing.
Meanwhile at the U.N. Climate Conference (or COP29), the attendees were being hectored for their inability to move beyond proclamations and towards deliverables. “You’re caught between here and there as a more populist world loses interest. Reclaim the attention out there!”
But pictures (like the one above) were already reminding us that Mother Nature has usually dumped some of her trademark snow on the top of Mt. Fuji by this time of year.
Anyone who’s affected by the weather can see that she’s increasingly out of sorts.
And if I’d been looking for more signs that Nature’s rhythms had grown unnatural, other messengers have been wandering into my side and front yards, carrying their portents.
The side-yard tulip, chestnut and ginkgo trunks, framed by the morning light and beckoning visitors.
A few days ago when I was moving fallen leaves from porch to compost pile, I surprised a young antlered buck who’d been huddling with a doe in the side-yard’s shadows, causing them to leap past me in an explosion of muscle and irritation for what they must have believed was the relative safety of the autobahn out front–another reminder of how cheek by jowl we are between Fairmount Park and the rest of Philadelphia.
After their flash I couldn’t find where they’d gone, but when I was out with Wally the following day we were startled by the same buck, who’d decided to cross in front of the house a few yards from where we were standing. It’s always strange and marvellous how a creature so large can materialize out of nowhere on his cat-like feet.
On reflex, I ordered him to “Go back where it’s safer” before noticing that he’d also lost one of his antlers since we’d met the day before.
A buck’s antlers typically drop in late winter, after their rut, growing back bigger and showy-er in the following year.
That’s when I realized that even his “shedding”—if that’s what it was—wasn’t happening when it was supposed to, and that he too might have lost his bearings and broken off a key part of himself before he’d ever had the chance to joust.
Again it seemed: this is not how it’s supposed to be at this time of year.
What’s called “a spike on one side buck,” usually spotted in February or March.
Trying to not be affected by the drumbeat of geo- and national-politics—with so much more of it to come—also leaves one feeling unmoored or drained or hungover after too many slugs. Maybe this is just the dip before one administration really collides with another.
But even from Forced Stop I’m hearing that the American Weather Service has issued a region-wide fire warning because there’s been virtually no rain here since July.
The high atmospheric pressure has literally been sucking what moisture remains on the ground, in my eyes and body, up into the sky. I can’t even hold my water without noticing.
Maybe the message continues when a new Dune saga starts streaming this weekend, those stories about a planet whose inhabitants recycle all of their moisture so it doesn’t get taken down by the desert, leaving only husks.
Maybe it’s natural to be in conservation mode about water and energy and weathering, to marshal resources while you can.
This post was adapted from my November 17, 2024 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here in lightly edited form. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.
In searching for hidden pokets of support that could change a dead-locked election, Trump Republicans are looking to “the bros.”
These are young men (white, black, Latino), who are under 40, ended their schooling in high school, have modest jobs when they’re working, are often un-married, have not been politically active and see themselves as modeling a particular breed of American masculinity.
It’s one that emphasizes toughness, strength and financial success as well as a suspicion (if not hostility) towards “woke” ideologies. Because some were drawn like moths to a flame by the leadership qualities Trump brought to the White House in 2016, his current campaign has targeted the group as a whole with a vengeance, seeing in them a source of new, first-time voters this election year.
When Harris’s early momentum began to flag a few weeks ago, a greatly diminished Trump—tired, looking old, and struggling to complete a thought—found the perfect avatar for “his kind of man” when the richest contrarian in the world took up his mantle and started offering million-dollar prizes on a daily basis to those who’d take the Trump pledge. With many still on the sidelines, the bros were electrified by the appeal, and Elon Musk became this election’s October surprise just as surely as Hillary Clinton’s “missing emails” turned the tide away from her during the very same weeks of 2016.
Just last August, I’d been puzzled at first by the almost-comic prominence of Trump’s appeal to the bros at the Republican National Convention. Instead, I thought he might start looking for new support among the undecideds who clustered around the political center.
He’d also just survived an assassination attempt, and as the convention built up to his accepting-their-nomination speech. I also expected that there might be more “Thank you for saving him Jesus” than World-Wide Wrestling Federation as they brought him onto the stage, but the agenda had clearly been set in stone long before that bullet grazed Trump’s ear.
So the Republican candidate was heralded by a parade of rough-and-tumble, financially successful men in “the fight business,” culminating in the comic challenge of Hulk Hogan ripping off his shirt at the end of his “Make America Great Again” pitch. Just minutes later, I was whipsawed again when Trump came out and started talking in soft tones about how God had spared him for just this apocalyptic moment.
It was such a U-turn that I found myself down-playing the hour of bro-directed messaging that had come before or how much Trump’s 2024 campaign was a direct appeal to them. Now, several weeks later and on the eve of the election, Hulk Hogan’s ham-handed endorsement has been eclipsed by an even more vital and successful cheerleader, woke-poker, and twisted-genius than the man at the top of the Republican ticket: Elon Musk.
The only thing left hanging today is whether this new celebrity billionaire is the catnip that’s needed so the bros will get it up to vote in sufficient numbers to inaugurate a second Trump presidency.
In 2012’s “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010,” political scientist Charles Murray discussed the widening gap that has grown between “the new upper class” and “the new lower class,” largely defined by educational attainment. New lower-class men, in particular, are generally “less industrious, less likely to marry and raise children in a two-parent household, and more politically and socially disengaged.” Their social disengagement, according to Murray, has also involved a flight from traditional religion as a source of personal belief and meaning, so the cohort is amenable to new religion-like commitments. By contrast, a new class of men with higher educations and incomes has tended to resist these outcomes.
Now, a little more than a decade after Murray’s book came out, this divide among American men persists. A few in this new, lower class voted for Trump in 2016, and a few more did so in 2020. The question today is whether laser-like targeting by the Trump campaign and a bro-magnet like Elon Musk can drive a critical enough mass of them to vote and make all the difference in swing-states like mine here in Pennsylvania.
This was Hulk Hogan’s big moment at the RNC in August. For a different modeling of masculinity, here is a link to my post about a music video that plots the transformation of a sullen, island-of-a-man (the terrifically physical British actor Michael Socha) into someone who’s almost akin to a real brother by the time the music ends.
Part of me doesn’t like Elon Musk very much, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t much to admire.
They’re flip-sides of one personality. The same adolescent f*ck the establishment demeanor (see Musk’s daily obsessions on his Twitter/X feed) has also produced a dizzying array of against-all-odds innovations, including building today’s dominant electric car maker in Tesla, as well as SpaceX, the largest satellite launching and internet providing (via Star-Link) company in the world.
Entrepreneurship has made Musk richer than anyone (and a possible role-model to some for that achievement alone) while his “against the world” rebelliousness makes him a natural champion for those who feel like much of the known world has turned against them. Musk’s split screen makes a direct appeal to the undercurrent of rootless men who can easily identify with someone who is (in many ways) even more Trump than Trump. So it’s hardly surprising that the former president’s campaign has welcomed the energy and echo that Musk has brought to it at just the right moment in time.
Of course, Trump was already trying to “bro whisper” enough young men to support his candidacy according to an op-ed last Monday in the New York Times. Its author, John Della Volpe, nicely supplements Charles Murray’s description of Trump’s (and now Musk’s) most targeted voting block:
Today’s young men are lonelier than ever and have inherited a world rife with skepticism toward the institutions designed to promote and defend American ideals. Men under 30 are nearly twice as likely to be single as women their age; Gen Z men are less likely to enroll in college or the work force than previous generations. They have higher rates of suicide and are less likely than their female peers to receive treatment for mental health maladies. Most young men in my polling say they fear for our country’s future, and nearly half doubt their cohort’s ability to meet our nation’s coming challenges.
(My only quibble is with his limiting the cohort to members of Gen Z. My non-scientific observations together with Murray’s underlying data from a decade ago indicate that many lower-class millennial men should also be included.)
Della Volpe’s op-ed concludes with the observation that Trump and MAGA’s cheerleaders are “systematically exploiting the fears and insecurities of young men, making them feel that their masculinity and future are under siege”—and (even more importantly) will continue to be under siege if they don’t get out and vote for the former president.
It’s an appeal that’s difficult, if not impossible, for the Democrats to counter. For example, what do the bros likely hear when Kamala Harris proclaims that she’s a gun owner, loves Formula One racing and once flipped burgers at McDonalds? Most likely that she’s “full of sh*t” and is pandering to them out of desperation instead of trying to find any real common ground. On the other hand, Musk is literally giving them the equivalent of their daily bread (in the form of $1M checks) and circuses (dispensed in a “come on down” lottery of dreams). Manifesting the almost cosmic discrepancy in the parties’ sales pitches, here’s a short film clip of Musk launching his new contest last weekend.
An article that appeared last Thursday about Musk’s latest gambit noted that it had “the goal of nudging 800,000 ‘low propensity voters’ to go the polls in support of Trump, urging them to vote early and register other voters.” As if being given a shot at a million bucks weren’t enough, Musk pushed them even further, saying “the fate of Western civilization” hangs in the balance in this election, while predicting both runaway crime and waves of illegal immigration if Harris wins. They’re appeals to insecurity, made while waving fistloads of cash in their faces.
Despite rumblings from Pennsylvania’s governor and others about “buying votes,” no challenge to these give-aways will likely make them stop in enough time before Election Day. But Musk’s similarities with Trump have another and possibly darker side according to a deeply-researched front page storyin the Wall Street Journal this past weekend. Just as the bros are drawn to these “strong and rich men,” both Trump and Musk also seem to be in the thrall of foreign autocrats and unconcerned about how their attractions might compromise the loyalties that they owe to their country.
The story is entitled “Elon Musk’s Secret Conversations with Vladimir Putin: Regular Contacts Between World’s Richest Man and America’s Chief Antagonist Raise Concerns.” It notes how the current American government has found it difficult to challenge Musk’s outreach to Moscow “because it is so dependent on the billionaire’s technologies,” particularly those provided to NASA and the Defense Department by SpaceX. Perhaps to make light of the high stakes for someone like him with national security clearances to be speaking on a regular basis with the Russian leader, Musk tried to dispel any suspicions that are being cast in his direction by jokingly challenging Putin “to one-on-one combat” on his Twitter/X platform.
The bros who were paying attention probably admired his attempt at diffusing a sticky situation in such an off-handedly straightforward way–like Trump’s offer to bring peace to Ukraine in a single day when he makes his own (apparently regular) phone call to the Kremlin shortly after the election.
Trump holds on while Musk jumps for joy at a recent Trump rally.
As I was finishing up writing this on Saturday, the New York Times posted a new interview with Pennsylvania’s junior senator, the hoodie-wearing and in many ways bro himself, John Fetterman.
In his travels around the Commonwealth over the past few weeks, Fetterman has gotten increasingly concerned about the level of enthusiasm for Trump that he’s been witnessing across the state: an “astonishing intensity” of support was how he characterized it. Does Trump have “a special connection with the people of Pennsylvania?” he was asked. “One hundred percent,” he answered.
To explain the recent uptick in enthusiasm, Fetterman said that first and foremost, the locals here have become even more galvanized by Elon Musk’s support for the former president than they were already.
I mean, to a lot of people, that’s Tony Stark. That’s the world’s richest guy. And he’s obviously, and undeniably, a brilliant guy, and he’s saying, Hey, that’s my guy for president. That’s going to really matter….
[W]hen they were having an A.I. conference in Washington, [Musk] showed up at my building at [the Capitol], and senators were like, [Fetterman’s voice gets very high at this point, according to the Times] Ooh, ooh. They were like, I got to have two minutes, you know, please. So if senators are all like ooh! ooh! then can you imagine what voters in Scranton or all across Pennsylvania [are like]— You know, in some sense, [Musk’s] a bigger star than Trump. Endorsements, they’re really not meaningful often, but this one is, I think. And that has me concerned.
Then Fetterman was asked: “How will the vote go in Pennsylvania?” and he said: “It’s going to be much, much closer than anyone would want.”
The only question is whether Musk’s much needed vitality, his true genius and even greater wealth convinces enough of the bros to leave their sidelines for long enough to actually vote for Trump.
Many have never voted before and only a few thousand of them could make a difference in battlegrounds like this one.
From where I”m viewing it, Elon Musk is the October surprise in this nail-biter of an election.
