Christopher Wink

Meritocracy should be dismantled

Unsympathetic as they may seem to many, elite workers are stuck in a rotten cycle.

They’ve gotten their status by obsessing over rarified education and lifelong work obsession. They then work to ensure their kids get the same or better advantage, ensuring the system continues.

If a century ago, we saw the end of an aristocratic elite that earned income idly through generational wealth and factories they rarely entered, then today the meritocratic elite earn income working 100 hours a week as a corporate executive, attorney, banker or perhaps true technology leader. There was a time when we thought we solved this: In the 1950s and 1960s, well-intentioned reformers at Ivy League schools introduced a wave of merit-based admissions, which temporarily balanced the scales. But then rich families began to adapt to the rules and now they dominate them.

Rich kids are still more likely to get to elite schools, and then win in elite careers — but they bludgeon themselves with work in a way that their great grandparents wouldn’t have.

This worsens the fate of middle class, who have no chance of breaking into elite educations that are further owned by the rich — not now by hereditary handoffs but by buying elite education — and ensures generational poverty stays so. The elite get the same outcome but at a far higher cost.

That’s the thrust of Yale Law legal scholar Daniel Markovits’s fall 2019 “The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite,” which I just read. Vox review from back then here.

No doubt his timing was tricky. As his book was published the covid-19 pandemic began to swell. It’s taken me this long to come back to the book, though it’s on one of my favorite topics. He wrote in his acknowledgements the book came from years of work, and in the book he says the final push came from this May 2015 commencement address he gave.

He’s a dazzling writer, with some wonderful turns of phrase, but he needs only half of them. I found myself marveling over a pretty sentence, only to notice that he was essentially reasserting the same point he had just made. Nonetheless, I enjoyed the myriad ways he introduced and reintroduced his concepts.

Below I share my own notes from the book for future reference.

Rye whiskey is much harder to make than bourbon

Rye requires more precise temperature control than corn or barley when being passed through a still to produce a spirit to age into a well-liked whiskey.

Cook corn and barley a bit too hot, and there’s more room for error. Do the same with rye, and you end with a burnt mess.

I wrote about this for Men’s Journal here.

“It’s pretty well known that rye can be tricky to work with,” said Herman Mihalich, the chemical engineer turned founder of Dad’s Hat Rye, “and that ranges from small guys to even bigger guys.”

I got this story idea in my head back in March 2024 when I visited my friend’s small micro-distillery (pictured above), and he shared that without more precise temperature control tools he found rye more difficult than bourbon.

Examples of journalism strategy outside news organizations

Journalism is a strategy, not an industry. More verb than noun.

I’ve written for years now about what I called “Journalism Thinking,” and so I cxontinue to collect examples of what I consider acts of journalism produced outside of news organizations. Consider this a place for me to gather these examples for future use.

My Resolutions for 2025

This will be the last year of my 30s.

Might as well send this decade of my life out with a flourish. One way I do that is with my annual resolutions, setting goals and a direction for where I want to get.

Below, I share them for my own reference.

My 2024 in review

I closed last year having felt that I set a new normal I hoped to continue in 2024. I was right.

I traveled a bit more, spoke a bit more, wrote a bit more, all while feeling more comfortable as a parent and a bit more certain where my company had to go. Plenty of vulnerabilities remain but I feel more comfortable in my life post-pandemic and post-kid. I am blessed, if challenged.

Below I share the highlights.

America: A Farewell Tour

In 2018, progressives had an especially dim view of the American project.

The Trump administration — from the “Muslim travel ban” to unfunded tax cuts to the more general corrosion of norms — was considered a destructive symptom of “the toxic brew of American exceptionalism.” The remarkable “special century” of American-led peace, growth and economic prosperity had ended. A subtler decline was made public.

Or as prolific writer and critic Matt Taibbi famously put it back then: “Trump found the flaw in the American Death Star. It doesn’t know how to turn the cameras off, even when it’s filming its own demise.”

That’s from the 2018 book America: A Farewell Tour, written by journalist Chris Hedges. A Pulitzer Prize-winner, Hedges self-identifies as a socialist and has had an outspoken career — leaving the New York Times after his criticism of the Iraq War featured getting booed for a commencement speech. He later contributed to and ran Green Party campaigns.

The book thoughtfully features many in-depth character studies from far-flung corners of American life, from BDSM culture to white supremacy, from sex work to gambling.

“This is the new American capitalism,” he wrote. “It is not about producing products, but escapist fantasies.”

Regardless of whether my politics overlap with his, I respect how Hedges has pursued his sense of truth. He’s at least an independent thinker. This book came in the heat of progressive reaction to the Trump administration. With his second administration starting next month, It felt fitting to return to see how much of Hedges’s 2018 take held up, and what fell flat.

Back then, like as now, he wrote that we were in Gramsci’s interregnum — which the Marxist writer used to describe when an old order has fallen but the new one has not yet come.

“The American empire is coming to an end,” Hedges writes confidently (p. 294). “It will limp along, losing influence and electing diminished leaders. It will lose reserve currency status [Editor’s note: but to whom!?] and falter.” All “within a decade or two”, he writes. This is by no means an optimistic book, and what hope it has is in working people building something better, it is outstripped by Hedge’s antipathy to the established order. I enjoyed the book, and would recommend it to others — I especially appreciated his thoughtful argument against reactionary violence, as a distraction from the work of organizing.

Below find my notes from the book for future reference.

Beat reporters: How to respond to an angry community source

An old editor told me once: always pick up the phone, but never apologize until you mean it.

As a beat reporter, you’re going to get feedback from sources—sometimes praise, often critique. That’s a good thing. Sometimes we’re wrong, and hearing feedback helps us correct the record. Our goal is to get it right. But sometimes, the anger directed at reporters isn’t about errors or issues that require action. It’s about emotions, misunderstandings, or disagreements.

Autocracy Inc.

Naïveté abounded among rich-world leaders in the 1990s.

Free market capitalism and representative democracy seemed ascendant. Free-flowing information online seemed to inspire people to overthrow repressive governments.

In March 2000, then President Bill Clinton famously dismissed a new effort from the Chinese Communist Party to censor the internet: “That’s sort of like trying to nail Jello to the wall.” Likewise, German and other European leaders argued that doing business with Russian and Chinese companies would make them freer. Looking back, this all looks plainly wrong.

That’s a theme from the 2024 book from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Applebaum’s book Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World.

More free-flowing information does not necessarily mean more truth. Technologies have helped democratic movements no more than they’ve helped authoritarian ones, and turns out those Russian oil providers and Chinese electronic vehicle firms were at least in part government actors, so their motivations weren’t only aligned with a Western capitalistic view.

Today, at least half of all humans now live within states considered autocratic. The world has gotten less democratic in recent years, a backward trend that in the early 1990s seemed impossible. Applebaum’s book is a breezy and thoughtful overview of this emerging bloc she calls “Autocracy Inc.

Below I share my notes for future reference.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Initially set in 1992, later editions of the science fiction classic “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” updated the setting to 2021. And so, we have now lived through Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel.

Perhaps best known as inspiring the 1982 Harrison Ford movie Bladerunner, the novel won mixed reviews at launch but has developed a cult following. Dick (1928-1982) is not remembered as a great writer as much as a great thinker (Minority Report and Total Recall also inspired by his stories), and that’s felt truer still after a new wave of artificial intelligence hype.

The title plays off a subplot of the book in which the humans who remain on earth (after nuclear fallout) covet the status symbol of a living animal, as opposed to artificial ones. So, the question is whether androids (the increasingly human-passing machines that the main character is chasing) would dream of electric ones? Its big theme: What defines humanity, especially if machines increasingly recreate many of the skills we identify with? I enjoyed the book, and below share notes for my own future reference.