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10 Sep, 6 tweets, 3 min read
It's a good week for excerpts from interesting new books. First, Bruno Macaes' History Has Begun -- which is, among other things, a more optimistic (sort of) take on the themes of my own Decadent Society:
nymag.com/intelligencer/…
Then my friend Alan Jacobs' Breaking Bread With the Dead, which you could read as an attempt to rebuild the case for the humanities from the ground up:
theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
I also enjoyed Alex Ross's essay on Wagner in Hollywood, which is taken from his new Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music:
newyorker.com/magazine/2020/…
And in lieu of an excerpt you can watch me discussing Michael Sander's The Tyranny of Merit with the author here:
And here's @mattyglesias in conversation with @tylercowen about his new book Five -- sorry, One Billion Americans:
medium.com/conversations-…
To end w/a pious observation: Trump-era bestseller lists are dominated by "exposes" that tell us the same things, and (esp. under pandemic conditions) better books can't get oxygen. So if you enjoy an excerpt or interview, buy the book! Pledge drive operators are standing by.

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More from @DouthatNYT

Ross Douthat Profile picture
10 Sep
One more thread on the proper baseline for thinking about the US death toll, because I hadn't seen this from @germanrlopez when I wrote yesterday's thread.
vox.com/future-perfect…
Lopez argues that my case for regional rather than global baselines was flawed because I didn't discuss Canada. Fair! But then he just discards the idea of a regional baseline and opts for a general developed-country baseline instead.
But as I argued in the column, regional differences just look much, much more important than country-by-country comparisons. For instance, here's the US compared to a very-heterogenous group of Pacific countries:
Read 13 tweets
Ross Douthat Profile picture
9 Sep
Let's do a thread on my Sunday column, which provoked some understandably strong reactions:
nytimes.com/2020/09/05/opi…
Some of those reactions were misreadings, so it's worth emphasizing:
I think Trump's handling of Covid has been bad.
I think it has undoubtedly cost some number of American lives.
I think it's possible that it will look worse in hindsight than it does in a snapshot right now.
On our podcast recently I debated @herandrews and @ToryAnarchist, who both leaned toward an act-of-God reading of the pandemic in which Trump's actions are essentially marginal to the result. That's not my view.
nytimes.com/2020/08/06/opi…
Read 18 tweets
Ross Douthat Profile picture
17 Jul
Everyone's linking to this, and rightly; fascinating and thoughtful even where I think he's wrong:
nymag.com/intelligencer/…
One small thought: The fact that it's secular or de-churched young black voters who are more likely to trend GOP should be a depressing and even damning data point for white conservative Christians.
A reader asked me to enumerate some disagreements with Shor. Easier than the column-writing I'm supposed to be doing so here are a few:
Read 9 tweets
Ross Douthat Profile picture
10 Jul
This seems not-exactly-right in an important way. In most ways the 1990s were, judged by polling and behavior, more socially conservative than the '70s and '80s.
Taibbi is right that the Boomers overthrew an age of greater of prudery, but the excesses of the Hefner-Polanski era produced a mild conservative backlash, an era interlude of bourgeois liberalism that tried to strike a balance between the '50s and the '70s.
Think Tipper Gore vs. record labels, "Dan Quayle Was Right," the @sullydish conservative case for same-sex marriage, plus dropping divorce and teen birth rates - they all emerged out of this matrix.
Read 6 tweets
Ross Douthat Profile picture
9 Jul
A brief thought about The Letter and political alignments, occasioned by Tyler Cowen's comment here:
marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolu…
I would say the de facto message of the signatory list is more along the lines of, "this is a battle within liberal institutions, and we represent an alliance of liberals and left-wingers against the emergent orthodoxy." With conservatives therefore less excluded than irrelevant.
Tactically this makes a certain amount of sense: Conservatives (at least those of us to the right of the letter's rightmost signatories) really are somewhat epiphenomenal to current battles over the direction of academia or media or pop-culture discourse ...
Read 11 tweets
Ross Douthat Profile picture
6 Jul
A couple of thoughts on this @OsitaNwanevu essay, mostly in the interest of clarifying the debate:
newrepublic.com/article/158346…
Start with this section, which defends those institutions that appear to be narrowing their range of permissible debate against charges of "illiberalism":
I think the assumption made by Chait, Sullivan, and other ppl the essay criticizes *is* precisely that a healthy liberal culture depends not just on formal 1st Amendment guarantees, but also on having important cultural institutions committed to liberal values.
Read 15 tweets

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