History – Christopher Wink

Great men are rarely good; good men are rarely great.

This perspective has long influenced my thinking, and it comes to mind again in the context of the longstanding rivalry between the late Apple cofounder Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

I was always uncomfortable with people valorizing Jobs, because the track record seemed clear: he treated people very badly. Meanwhile, Bill Gates has done objective good with his wealth since. And yes, rehabilitating a reputation by investing in meaningful global health projects… that is a good.

But, though we don’t know the final word on the Epstein files, Gates’s relationship there does not look good, especially in light of a noncommittal interview done by his ex-wife Melinda.

A vision for Philadelphia 250 years in the future

I’m deeply proud and honored to have helped develop a vision statement for Philadelphia for the next 250 years. An earlier version was shared last summer here. I shared this new version more widely for one last round of resident feedback in an Inquirer op-ed here.

The statement, a place to give feedback and information on the process can be found at PH.LY.

Below is the vision statement as it stands now.

The Gulf War Did Not Take Place

The Gulf War was a seemingly decisive military action led by the United States against Iraq in 1991.

Over a series of essays, French philosopher Jean Baudrillard argued the war was an expression of his concept of “hyperreality,” in which emerging visual media could be used to create something false that appears even realer than reality itself.

By 1995, he assembled these essays into a final, short book called The Gulf War Did Not Take Place.

The “housing affordability crisis” is really a mobility crisis

What Americans call a “housing affordability crisis” is really a mobility crisis — economic, geographic and social. Housing is where that immobility becomes most visible, and so expensive housing is more a symptom than the disease.

That’s from a new book by historian and Atlantic journalist Yoni Appelbaum called “Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity.“

In healthy economies, including for much of the American golden age, people move to better jobs, cheaper places, growing regions. In the US today, people are increasingly trapped in place. When people can’t move, demand piles up in a small number of “winning” metros. Prices explode there, while other places stagnate or hollow out. I’ve written on the topic this year myself here and here.

Appelbaum’s book recounts the long trends that are piling up today. He recounts how American zoning regulations were introduced for race and class control, not for genuine health or safety concern. Early 20th century leaders, including eventual-US President Herbert Hoover, misunderstood crowded tenements and single-family homes as the obstacle and the accelerant, rather than what they really were: the launching pad and the eventual destination for those who made it out.

That history has persisted to today, where regulation and competing priorities strangle what might naturally occur. As famed mid-century urbanist Jane Jacobs said, over-planning a community is “attempting to substitute art for life”

Below I have notes for my future reference from Greenbaum’s detailed book. It’s wonky, and less colorful than I expected, but for anyone invested in the topic, it’s worth it.

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.

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.

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.

The Rise and Decline of Nations

Coalitions strengthen a nation, and then strangle it whole.

Or so it’s been argued. In his influential 1982 political treatise called The Rise and Decline of Nations, political scientist Mancur Olson (1932-1998) builds on his earlier work on collective action to argue that stable societies tend to accumulate powerful special-interest groups over time, which in turn create institutional sclerosis.

These groups—unions, industry associations and other lobbying blocs—develop to protect their members’ economic rents, but their growing influence eventually stifles innovation, efficiency and long-term economic growth. Olson argues that this “accumulation of distributional coalitions” explains why some rich nations stagnate while others surge ahead. Post-war Germany and Japan, having lost these entrenched coalitions due to military defeat, grew rapidly in contrast to countries like the UK or the US, which retained their institutional inertia. I share notes from the book below.

What is Fascism?

In 1946, George Orwell wrote that “the word fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies something not desirable.”

That sense is back, and since the word is used so often again, I wanted to return to a foundation. I didn’t have clear memories from my undergraduate political science reading so I picked up Fascism, an influential, well-regarded, thick, dense, 400+ page collection of writings on the topic published in 1995 and edited by Oxford political theorist Roger Griffin.

It was a slog but a firm foundation, in which the point is argued that the word was almost immediately stretched and packed with various meanings from its modern launch in the 1920s. In the simplest interpretation I can put together, fascism is a political strategy “idealizing abstraction” that uses power to protect a “mythic core” of kinship around a nation from out-groups.

Judging by the 400-page book, and oodles of dissertations and academic writing, that’s of course incomplete. I have more listed below for that matter. But it does arm me with a clearer picture, grounded in academia and without cartoonish exaggeration. Below I have other notes from the book for future reference.

The Message by Ta Nehisi Coates

Every story is imbued with the biographies of those who hear and repeat it. And so each story gets distorted some. We can lose the author’s original intent.

It’s fitting then that I came to assume that Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new collection of essays published in the fall — one year after the Hamas attack on Israel — was exclusively about the Israeli-Palestine conflict. Notably including a CBS Morning interview, what I heard about the book was centered on the conflict.

Instead “The Message” is a curated archive of private reflections and political commentary informed by short trips Coates took to several locations to reflect on race, justice and U.S. foreign policy. Just the final chapter features a few days he spent in Israel and Palestine. The book’s overall message is less about any single conflict and more what he describes as a moral responsibility of the writer to speak plainly in moments of great public consequence.

Below my notes.