All posts tagged: ordinary people

When experts fail – The Atlantic

When experts fail – The Atlantic

Published by skeptic

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. In 2017, my Daily colleague Tom Nichols wrote a book titled The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters. Three years later, America underwent a crisis that stress-tested citizens’ and political leaders’ faith in experts—with alarming results. The Atlantic published an excerpt today from the second edition of Tom’s book, which includes a new chapter evaluating the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the relationship between experts and the public. I chatted with Tom recently about American narcissism, the mistakes experts have made during the pandemic, and why listening to expert advice is a responsibility of citizens in a democracy. First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic: Narcissism and Distrust Isabel Fattal: Why did you feel it was important after the COVID-19 crisis to rerelease this book? Tom Nichols: The book is …

Putin’s ‘Rabble of Thin-Necked Henchmen’

Putin’s ‘Rabble of Thin-Necked Henchmen’

Published by skeptic

Not even the most passionate supporters of Vladimir Putin are pretending that the results of this weekend’s election are in doubt: Putin, Russia’s longest-serving leader since Joseph Stalin, is about to embark on his sixth term. And so, with no electoral politics to debate, both pro-Putin and liberal Kremlinologists in the Russian-language mediasphere have been focusing instead on changes at the very top of Russia’s power pyramid: the new elite that is coming to replace the old Putin cronies, the tensions between the men in military uniforms and those in suits, and the perennial question of who will lead the country in the case of Putin’s sudden death. Before the war, perhaps the leading candidate for a successor was Putin’s favorite general and then–deputy head of military intelligence, Aleksey Dyumin, who commanded the Special Operations Forces’ top-secret “little green men” during the annexation of Crimea. But his train has departed, as Russians say: “Dyumin’s name was connected to Wagner, which decreased his chance to become Putin’s successor,” a columnist named Andrey Revnivtsev wrote on Tsargrad, …

Revolutions Take Generations – The Atlantic

Revolutions Take Generations – The Atlantic

Published by skeptic

The Bastille looms large in the revolutionary imagination. When Paris crowds seized the French king’s fortress in July 1789, they unwittingly created a model for every subsequent upheaval. From the Russian Revolution through the “color revolutions” of the early 2000s to today’s calls for an “intifada revolution,” would-be revolutionaries imagine their movements as versions of the one in 1789: brusque, often violent ruptures in a nation’s political life that incise a line of demarcation in time, dividing the old-regime past from a radically new and different future. This vision took shape during the half century from 1775 to 1825, the era of the American, French, Haitian, and Spanish American revolutions. Patriots proudly proclaimed the rights of man while shattering European empires and launching dozens of democratic republics. A central article of faith for these revolutionaries and their heirs was that they were beginning “the world anew,” in the Anglo-American radical Thomas Paine’s memorable phrase. Critics of revolutionary movements are similarly focused on this era. They point to the dark underbelly of the Atlantic revolutions: how …

What Tucker Carlson Saw in Moscow

What Tucker Carlson Saw in Moscow

Published by skeptic

Tucker Carlson went to Moscow last week and had an absolute blast. He rode the subway and marveled at its clean cars, the fancy tilework in Kievskaya Station, and the lack of booze-drenched hobos. He went to a grocery store and was astonished by what ordinary people could apparently buy. He even managed to meet a local history buff and sit down for tea and conversation. Carlson, who had never previously visited Moscow, declared himself “radicalized” against America’s leaders by the experience. He didn’t want to live in Moscow, but he did want to know why we in America have to put up with street crime and crappy food when the supposedly bankrupt Russia provided such a nice life for its people, or at least those people not named Alexei Navalny. My former Atlantic colleague Ralph Waldo Emerson called travel a “fool’s paradise,” but not all forms of foolishness are equal. Many commentators have guffawed at Carlson’s Russophilia and pointed out that Russia’s murder rate is roughly that of the United States, and that its …

The End of the Computer Mouse

The End of the Computer Mouse

Published by skeptic

Once upon a time, long before smartphones or even laptops were ubiquitous, the computer mouse was new, and it was thrilling. The 1984 Macintosh wasn’t the first machine to come with one, but it was the first to popularize the gizmo for ordinary people. Proper use of the mouse was not intuitive. Many people had a hard time moving and clicking at the same time, and “double-clicking” was a skill one had to learn. Still, anyone could put a hand on the thing, move it around on a table, and see the results on-screen: A little cursor moved along with you. “Pointing is a metaphor we all know,” Steve Jobs told Playboy in 1985. The mouse was central to the computer’s populist future, which wasn’t yet assured at the time. But the Mousing Age that followed didn’t last for very long. By the 2010s, the device was clearly in a steep decline. It never went away, of course; the computer-peripherals giant Logitech still nets some $750 million in yearly sales of “pointing devices.” But the …

Why Is the U.S. Is Producing More Oil Than Ever?

Why Is the U.S. Is Producing More Oil Than Ever?

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If all goes well, 2023 will be remembered as the year the clean-energy revolution took off in America. Hundreds of billions of dollars in climate-related spending flowed into the U.S. economy. Nearly 300 clean-energy projects were announced across the country, and electric-vehicle sales hit a new record. “America is once again leading the world in the fight against climate change,” Joe Biden wrote, not unreasonably, in a presidential proclamation in October. Here’s something else America is leading the world in: oil production. This year, the United States pumped out more oil than any other country in history, producing millions more barrels than Russia or Saudi Arabia ever have and accounting for almost a fifth of the world’s total oil production. And the Biden administration played a part in making it happen. Raising America’s fossil-fuel output was not part of the president’s original plan. In his first week in office, Biden killed the proposed Keystone XL pipeline and placed a moratorium on new leases for oil and gas projects on federal lands (a decision that was …

The Simple, Ancient Idea That Can Replace Concrete Walls

The Simple, Ancient Idea That Can Replace Concrete Walls

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A dry stone wall is a purposeful pile of rocks, held in place by friction and gravity rather than mortar. It’s one of the oldest building methods known to mankind, used over millennia to construct buildings, wind breaks, and dykes, to mark borders and create monuments, and to keep livestock penned in and nuisance animals hemmed out. In rural Japan, where I live, stone retaining walls shape a country that’s 80 percent mountainous into livable and farmable land. To get into town from my home, I walk past century-old stone walls. The rocks are shaded velvety green by moss, and plumes of ferns spring from crevices with starry pink flowers hovering above. These walls carve out spaces for roads and houses, and define irregular terraced rice paddies farther up in the mountains. But closer to town, stone walls give way to walls made of concrete, which has largely replaced stone as the defining material of Japan’s rural infrastructure. Is that because concrete construction is cheaper, stronger, or faster? Not really. Reviving dry stone walling would …

‘The Curse’ Is the Strangest Television Show About Television

‘The Curse’ Is the Strangest Television Show About Television

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Watching something made by Nathan Fielder can be an act of endurance. The creator, host, and star of shows such as Nathan for You and The Rehearsal has cultivated a reputation as a merry prankster and a mastermind of hallucinatory television. On-screen, he tends to be deadpan and awkward, making himself the butt of the joke as regularly as he messes with the ordinary people he meets. When he pushes uncomfortable bits to their extreme, you can feel like your mind is short-circuiting, the deluge of his off-kilter, often meta humor leaving you delighted and disturbed. So the best way to watch Fielder’s work, I’ve long accepted, is to persist until the punch line reveals itself. And yet, I was still caught off guard by The Curse, the new Showtime series Fielder co-created with the filmmaker and actor Benny Safdie (Uncut Gems). I needed breaks between episodes, even pausing in the middle of scenes the deeper I went into the season, fearful of what would happen next. The show is unlike Fielder’s previous output. For …

The Hostages of Kibbutz Nir Oz

The Hostages of Kibbutz Nir Oz

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Earlier this week, while walking through central Jerusalem, I heard a chant in the distance. War has driven away tourists, and in a tourist city without tourists, sounds carry far. The discernible portion of the chant was a single word in Hebrew, akshav—“now.” I followed the sound to Safra Square, where a crowd had gathered, yelling in sorrow and fury, to protest the kidnapping of more than 240 people, most of them Israelis, by Hamas. Survivors from Kibbutz Nir Oz (which lost a quarter of its population in the October 7 pogrom) had taken over Safra Square and installed an exhibit consisting of beds, neatly made, for each of the hostages currently in Gaza. They were arranged in a grid. Some were queen beds. Others were singles. Some had books on nightstands nearby. Several were IKEA cribs, for the dozens of children among the captives. One didn’t need to know even that one word of Hebrew to figure out what the crowd was demanding—the return of the hostages, without delay—and what it was promising: the …

What Israel Can Learn From America’s 9/11 Response

What Israel Can Learn From America’s 9/11 Response

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“I hope Israel looks hard at what the U.S. does when provoked and does better,” one reader argues. Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Stringer / Reuters October 25, 2023, 3:45 PM ET Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here. Last week, as observers characterized the recent attack on Israel as that country’s 9/11, I asked, “What did you learn from the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and America’s responses to them?” Replies have been edited for length and clarity. R. writes: I learned that Al Qaeda was a horrifically evil group in a part of the world where evil is all too common. But I also learned that separating the world into good and evil is not a good way to conduct foreign policy. Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, and our war in Iraq did more harm than good. My advice to Israel is to proceed …