Christopher Wink

Pronoun Trouble by John McWhorter

The singular use of “they” is entirely consistent with other linguistic shifts, and even familiar to older periods of English. The term’s partisanship may come more from how quickly and forcefully the change, rather than the change itself.

That’s from linguist John McWhorter’s new book Pronoun Trouble: The Story of Us in Seven Little Words.

I’m a fan, and have read most of his other books. This one is consistent with his growing style: Using credible linguistics research to guide us through today’s language changes. It’s a quick and approachable read, I recommend it.

Below I share my notes for future reference.

The CIA Book Club

In the 1980s, the American government spent billions of dollars on paramilitary campaigns to advance Cold War objectives. They also spent something like $20 million on a series of information campaigns.

Effective as it was, few are interested in celebrating the effectiveness of what more often got laughed about in military circles, including funding secret newspapers and distributing banned literature within the Soviet system, Poland in particular.

This is documented in The CIA Book Club: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War with Forbidden Literature, a book published this summer and written by Charlie English.

The book is not really about the CIA, that’s just a particularly compelling subplot. Rather the bulk of the book is a thorough rehashing the Polish underground resistance and how that intersects and was often funded in part by the CIA. The subterfuge is inspiring in a sense, the power of free information. I enjoyed the book and recommend it to other history fans.

Below find my notes for future reference.

The Big Myth of the “free market”

“Market fundamentalists aren’t wrong about everything.”

Sometimes the right solution is to do nothing until there’s more information. Some markets do resolve themselves. Prohibition was a worse cure than the very real disease of alcohol abuse.

“But competition doesn’t mean we don’t have rules.”

That’s from The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market, a 2023 book from Erik M. Conway and Naomi Oreskes. They’re the journalist-researchers behind the influential 2010 book Merchants of Doubt, which identified the strategy of disinformation used to defend cigarettes and then climate denial.

When they wrote their 2010 book, they assumed those blocking interventions into tobacco addiction and then climate change were motivated by greed. Later, they realized it was because of a true and ideological market fundamentalism. This new book is answering how that pathological fundamentalism came to be.

A binary choice between the market and the state, between unconstrained capitalism and Soviet central planning is a myth, they argue. The “free market” category, and spirit, was a manufactured marketing and propaganda campaign. Instead, a sensible approach balances market and government interventions.

It’s not the problem that corporations don’t do more for society, they write, it’s that they stop governments from doing so. “If efficiency were our only goal, then market fundamentalism might make sense. But efficiency is a tool not an end.”

Below notes for my future reference.

We’re all journalists now: Scott Gantt wrote in 2007

The 20th century “hardened an artificial distinction between professional journalists and everyone else.” The 21st century has crashed that down.

That’s from “We’re all journalists now,” a book written almost 20 years ago in 2007 by lawyer and constitutional law scholar Scott Gantt. As he wrote: “In a sense, we are returning to where we started.”

Gantt’s thin volume is a valuable representation of what was changing then. Below I share notes for future reference.

Careless People: a Facebook whistleblower’s account

Mark Zuckerberg could reign “like the Queen,” writes Sarah Wynn Williams.

She’s the former Facebook exec turned whistleblower who’s new book Careless People details her time working closely with Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and other international staff.

“I’m struck by the impermanence of importance,” she writes. “And yet, Mark could conceivably continue to hold his place cheering world leaders for another 50 years. He’ll see these leaders off in the generations of leaders that follow them.”

Other former staff at Facebook, later renamed Meta, were critical of Wynn Williams’s portrayal. But the book is detailed and riveting. It portrays not evil-doers, but, like the characters in the Fitzgerald novel that originates the book’s title, self-interested and vain people who have more power than they’ve earned.

“A different path was possible,” she writes. “We all would be better off.”

Below I have notes for my future reference.

Free will is an illusion: Sam Harris

Free will, as we commonly understand it, is an illusion.

Chemical reactions and and a complex interplay of far-flung factors shape what options come before us, argued neuroscientist-philosopher Sam Harris in his slim, sharp 2012 book Free Will.

“You can do what you decide to do,” he writes. “But you cannot decide what you will decide to do.”

The practical implications inform how to treat criminality, with a sense of sympathy for the unlucky bastards whose lives lead them to bad deeds. Strategic punishment is still possible, though, he argues: If we could incarcerate hurricanes we would, and we give justice to wild animals without calling it free will.

Below are notes for my future reference.

Abundance

Democrats should be able to campaign by saying ‘vote for us, we’ll govern like California.’ Instead Republicans campaign by saying ‘vote for us, or they’ll govern like California.”

The American left lacks a central organizing principle, other than slowing progress with an ever growing checklist of rules: they need an alternative. So argues Abundance, a book by prominent, center-left national journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. As a perfect representation of the divided era, the book’s commercial success and the author’s rising popularity has created a backlash from many progressives. Classic liberal Klein in particular just seems to irk a whole class of leftists.

As the authors write in the book: “One way of understanding the era we are in is as the messy interregnum between political orders.”

Their “abundance agenda” is polarizing in part because their interest is in operating the current system, and many of their would-be-allies turned critics are not. The identifiers of “liberal,” “progressive,” “leftist” and “socialist” are discussed tirelessly among smart people with graduate degrees and little serious focus on governing. Many of them contribute to the dismaying see-sawing of elected Democrats, that have for generation focused on appeasing a diverse coalition.

The left, the authors write, “seeks legitimacy through rule following rather than through the enactment of the public’s will.“ The United States is a big distributed republic, with thousands of layers of government, at town, county and state levels, to experiment and demonstrate an ability to solve problems. Instead, as the authors argue, rather than solving homelessness in some Democratic city, leaders oversee a multi-year research phase to hire a BIPOC-led consulting firm that confers with a full list of constituent groups from identities, environmental and social causes to gather community feedback.

Nothing is solved, everyone complains. Most vote elsewhere next go-round. This has gotten Klein and Thompson lots of glowing praise from centrists, and ferocious pillorying from progressives. One small contribution I kept thinking about while reading the book: Lots of their perspective would play nicely in local political contexts, rather than vicious national conversations.

Meanwhile, public trust continues to decline, and green infrastructure is slowed. Setting aside the Biden administration’s ambitious IRA green energy bill and the Chips and Science Act focused on industrial policy, Democrats long ago gave up “supply side” policies. Their book argues that should change.

Politics today is a fight over what we have, or had — not what we can create.

Below I share my notes for future reference.

How to Stand Up to a Dictator: Maria Ressa

Bullies only respond to strength. Complicity won’t due. When confronting an authoritarian, best to “hold the line.”

That’s from the 2022 book “How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future,” written by Maria Ressa, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning journalist-entrepreneur behind Rappler — a respected, digital-first news site in the Philippines. Ressa was jailed and harrassed for her unwavering coverage of Filipino corruption.

The book is memoir and field guide, with a telling mirror for American audiences: the rise and fall of her enthusiasm for social media, and her battles with elected officials disdainful of free press and democratic norms. She’s charming and energetic. I spoke at a recent journalism funders conference where she was the headliner, and she gushed on-stage, effusing advice and perspective and vision. It’s easy to believe in her, and she tells a story of optimism, provided we work for it.

Of building open discourse-use and democratic values in the Philippines, in 2016, she thought Facebook was the solution; by 2018, she thought of them as indifferent and by 2020, she thought that “Facebook was the bad guy.” For all her reporting and operating a fearless news organization, she was jailed.

Why return to the Philippines to be jailed, even though she has American citizenship and family there? “There is no choice,” she wrote — couldn’t turn on Rappler and her employees and community and it’s where she wants to be. This will remind of Navalny, as she writes: “Over time, you get used to fear”

So, how do you stand up to a dictator: “by embracing values, defined early.. you have to create a team, strengthen your area of influence” — and know your lines and stand firm by them.

Below I have notes for my future reference.

Multi-local news can thrive when it’s about more than just place

(This originally appeared a Linkedin article)

Newspaper veterans keep trying to rebuild newspapers.

The impulse is rarely stated so bluntly. But you hear it in most strategy sessions about “saving local news.” Funding and analysis focus on a town-square-style local news bundle that newspaper veterans are determined to sustain for shared identity.

I actually agree with the civic benefits of a single, professionally-curated website, newsletter and social feed that approximates what’s happening in a place. I benefit from such efforts, even if I don’t share the deep emotional connection that people who loved the best years of local newspapers do.

Yet single-mindedness squeezes out other ideas. This blind spot is illustrated in the way the term “multi-local” is currently being discussed and digested by journalism insiders.

What Baltimore’s “Black Butterfly“ teaches the rest of us

Why does there remain a plethora of social ills the disproportionally affect Black people in America over 150 years after chattel enslavement has ended? “The answer: black communities have been subjected to unrelenting an ongoing historical trauma.“

That’s from The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America by Dr. Lawrence T Brown in 2021. He coined the term “black butterfly” to refer to the patterns of racial segregation in Baltimore, which mirrors patterns in other US cities.

Below I share my notes for future reference.