I don’t normally like to post big chunks of other people’s text without some commentary, but I really don’t know what to add to this. Sometimes, serendipity means that we come across exactly the right paragraph at exactly the moment we need to read it.

Reflecting on the outcome of the US Presidential Election, Oliver Burkeman wrote in his email newsletter:

You really, really, really don’t know when a given event is, or isn’t, for the best. You can’t know what effect present-day events will have in the long run, and it’s to ignore your status as a limited human being to imagine you ever could. As the old Taoist story has it: “We’ll see.” Remember, it’s one of the normal responses to a diagnosis of critical illness—not the only one, but a commonplace one—to conclude that in the end, it was a wonderful gift, thanks to how it led to a focus on what truly mattered. Seismic political defeats can stoke the fires of renewal or transformation, while victories can breed complacency, leading to worse catastrophe. Of course, the point isn’t that good things always emerge from seemingly bad things—you can’t be sure of that, either! It’s that this radical uncertainty is where you’ve always lived, whether you realized it or not, and the only place from which you’ve ever accomplished anything. You don’t need hope. You can move forward in the dark. You just need to do “with conviction the next and most necessary thing” – which is all you’ve ever been able to do anyway. And there’s room for enjoyment in the middle of it all, too. I come back to John Tarrant’s observation that the average medieval person lived with no understanding of when the next plague, famine or war might come along to utterly upend their lives. If they’d waited until the future looked dependably bright before gathering for festivals, or creating art, or strolling under the stars with friends, they’d have been waiting forever. So they didn’t wait. You don’t need to wait, either.

About a month ago, Charlie Warzel wrote in The Atlantic:

I’m running out of ways to explain how bad this is. The truth is, it’s getting hard to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality.

It’s a sentiment that reads differently after the outcome of Tuesday’s election—and yet, at the same time, that result makes it a much more pressing issue. Warzel uses Hurricane Milton to frame his argument, pointing out that people chose to lie in ways that put people in harm’s way, and led to the government officials who were trying to help being harrassed and attacked.

Misinformation is not a new problem, and it’s not exclusive to the USA. We all know people who credulously believe ever local bullshit rumour posted on Facebook, in the same way that we all know people who believe ever bit of tittle tattle they overhear. We also all know people who peddle that stuff, even if they probably don’t believe it themselves. The rumour mill spins quickly.

We’ve always told people not to believe this stuff. We tell our children to look for reliable sources—what are officials saying? What are journalists saying?

And yet, Warzel observes that television news was peddling lies, and the people who yesterday became the US President- and Vice President-elect also spread falsehoods. The sources we are supposed to be able to trust have proven their unreliability time and again. This is also not a US-only problem: it has been proven that being sacked for lying is no barrier to becoming Prime Minister, and broadcasting lies that put people at risk of death is not a definitive barrier to retaining a UK broadcast licence.

Here in the UK, the Conservatives have just elected a leader who says that she wants to reduce carbon emissions ‘but not in a way that would damage the economy’—as though she believes that an economy can function without a habitable planet for it to sit on.

It feels increasingly like the world is losing its shared sense of reality.

The world feels dark; for many people, it’s tempting to meet that with a retreat into the delusion that they’ve got everything figured out, that the powers that be have conspired against them directly.

I don’t know how democracy can function in this context—and I don’t know how I’d begin to fix it.

On this morning of all mornings, it feels like I should write something about the elections in the USA. As you might have gathered, though, I write most of these posts in advance, and so have no idea how the vote has shaken out. Depending on how tight the vote turned out to be, perhaps you have no idea what the result is yet either!

But one thing can be said with certainty: whoever takes the oath of office on 20 January, the threat to American democracy will not be resolved.

There’s a tendency in politics for narrow escapes to breed complacency.

The ‘no’ vote in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum begat a Tory complacency about referendums which led to a populace voting for Brexit against the Prime Minister’s explicit recommendation.

The resignation of Boris Johnson begat a ‘thank god that’s over’ reaction which did nothing to fix the constitutional problems his period in office exposed. It meant that when his successor was fined for breaking the law in office, eyebrows were barely raised: the standards we expect had been eroded that far, and no attempt was made to repair them.

The electoral defeat of Donald Trump by Joe Biden begat a complacency about candidate selection. There was much hand-wringing, but no practical action to re-energise either the Republican or Democratic races to truly find the best and the brightest. Lest we forget that the output of the Democratic process was a candidate who failed even to complete the campaign, let alone a term in office.

The resignation of Liz Truss begat a complacency about leader selection in the Conservative Party. This led to the same selection process being repeated this year, resulting in an equally absurd selection of leader. The lesson wasn’t learned.

One of my bugbears in healthcare is that ‘near misses’ are rarely taken as seriously as incidents in which harm occurred. We often miss the opportunity to fix systems before disasters strike. There’s an aphorism among some that ‘a Datix is never investigated like a death is’ (Datix is the error-reporting system in the NHS).

It feels to me like the response of our elected representatives is often based on that same principle. Every time we flirt with constitutional disaster, in the UK or the USA, the response seems to be to shrug and observe that it all worked out in the end.

But unless the underlying problems are fixed, unless the unflashy, unpopular hard miles of constitutional reform are put in, then one day, it won’t all work out in the end. Perhaps that day is today.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

Did Joe Biden say:

The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s – his – his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.

Or did Joe Biden say:

The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters – his – his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.

There is an obvious third option:

The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters’ – his – his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.

Is the ‘garbage’ the demonisation of Latinos by his support act; his supporters as a group; or the demonisation of Latinos by his supporters as a group?

The context may be offensive and absurd, but there’s something comfortingly twee, normal, and reassuring about a dispute over an apostrophe amid an election of extreme rhetoric.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

According to BBC News:

A Scottish island community is divided over a supermarket’s plans to open on a Sunday.

The Tesco branch on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides has started holding consultations with staff and residents about opening seven days a week.

The island, which has a population of about 20,000, has a long tradition of observing the Sabbath day, meaning that some shops – including both supermarkets – currently keep their doors closed on a Sunday.

There are many good reasons for Tesco to be closed on a Sunday, but I wanted to rant about the claim that ‘a tradition of observing the Sabbath day’ is one of them.

In Christianity, the Sabbath day is the seventh day of the week—Saturday. Observers are supposed to follow God’s example in Genesis and rest on the Sabbath day.

Christians then devote the first day of the week—Sunday—to worship. This is distinct from the Jewish tradition of resting and worshipping on the Sabbath; Christians worship on the first day rather than the Sabbath as a commemoration of Christ’s resurrection on a Sunday.

This was drummed into me endlessly in GCSE Religious Studies, and I’ve never forgotten it. No wonder I won the Religion Cup several years running.

Except… the Isle of Lewis is Presbyterian, and the Free Presbyterian Synod has declared Sunday to be the Sabbath for Presbyterians. God may have rested on the seventh day, but Presbyterians don’t. They even have a strict rule against using the internet on Sundays, to the extent that their website closes each Sunday.

So, I was wrong, and I’ve learned something new about the world.

As an aside: you might imagine that ‘Saturday’ is derived from ‘Sabbath day’, but it’s actually from the Roman god Saturn—wrong religion, and all that. The same does not hold true in Catholic countries: sábado (Spanish and Portuguese), sabato (Italian) and sobota (Polish) all come directly from ‘Sabbath’. Life must get confusing for Presbyterians in those countries!

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

In the final seconds of BBC One’s Weekend News bulletin yesterday, Reeta Chakrabarti squeezed in an extra story in just 25 words:

Just before we go, President Biden has just tweeted that he intends to address the nation later this week, saying that it has been a great privilege to serve. We’ll bring you more at ten.

We know now, of course, that in the judgement of mere seconds, the team had perhaps overlooked the more significant message of Biden’s message: his decision to withdraw from his re-election campaign.

It’s not hard to see why: Biden’s statement refers only to standing down, without complete clarity on what from. It’s a letter that’s hard to parse on a scan-read, with the eyes of a nation watching.

Wendy and I switched over to the news channels, and after minutes of slightly desperate filling, the airwaves were thick with discussion of the political consequences of the decision, with hot takes and commentary on who might replace him and what it may mean for an election that’s still months away.

Nobody seemed keen to take a step back. It’s not hard to imagine the sense of profound grief Biden must feel at this moment. This is surely a moment that marks a painful shift in the way Biden sees himself: judged irreversibly incapable by dint of age of doing something he’s done before.

As Peter Wehner wrote in The Atlantic last night:

Coming to terms with mortality is never easy. We rage against the dying of the light. Many elderly people face the painful moment of letting go, of losing independence and human agency, when they are told by family they have to give up the keys to the car; Biden was told by his party to give up the keys to the presidency.

It must cut deep; I hope he’s okay.

It’s funny, really, how little attention the news pays to the universal aspects of stories like this. How the immediate reaction focuses on predicting what might happen next, rather than on sitting with what’s just happened. How it refuses to dwell on the humanity, those moments of insufficiency most of us have faced and will continue to face in life.

The news runs away from the lessons of others’ experience, the things we might take and apply in our own lives. And that seems like a shame.

When The Times started publishing its ‘compact’ edition in 2003, initially alongside the broadsheet format, there was a lot of debate about the potential impact on its journalism. One concern its journalists wrote about publicly was that in a compact size, it becomes more tempting to ‘hang’ stories around photographs, which can pervert the way that stories are covered.

Two decades on, this feels a bit quaint: large numbers of journalists for most media outlets work in multiple formats, writing stories, taking photographs, and filming videos, for example. But it feels undeniable that this has changed the weight that is given to different aspects of stories.

For example, over the last few days, we’ve been subjected to a huge amount of news coverage about a widespread computer fault. A huge proportion of the coverage—the lede in most cases—has been the impact on air travel. Yet, there is no reasonable interpretation of this story in which air travel is the most significant angle. The effect on GP services, for example, will have affected far more people and almost certainly caused more harm—and the underlying technical issue, and the way it has affected so many system across many countries, is a much more interesting analytical story.

I posit that the reason for the heavy weighting towards air travel is the multimodal way in which journalists now operate. It’s very difficult to create images of the problems with GP systems, and even more so to illustrate IT problems, yet airports provide an immediately available endless supply of emotive imagery of huge queues. That imagery can be easily supported by information on flight cancellations that’s freely available on websites journalists can access from their desks.

The lede becomes what’s easy rather than what’s important. Images become more important than analysis. We’re all less well-informed as a result.

There are more guns than people in the USA. More than 100 US citizens are killed each day by gun violence, mostly poor young black men.

When ’black lives matter’ became a slogan, some complained that ‘all lives matter’. Of course they do, but seeing that as a counterargument to the original statement misunderstands the desperate cri du cœur for the poor young black men who are killed in massively disproportionate numbers.

The repudiation of political violence in the USA over the past 36 hours strikes me as similar. Of course political violence is abhorrent. But where is the force of anger, the outpouring of rage, the flood of statements condemning the gun violence that killed tens of young black men in the last 36 hours? How is it that US society condemns an old white man’s grazed ear with so much more fervour than the deaths of thousands of other citizens every week?

Yesterday, I read Emilio Casalicchio’s excellent Politico article which gave a glimpse into the Conservative’s election campaign. I was struck by the line ‘launching the first attack by shooting yourself in the head doesn’t look so clever’.

But I was even more struck by the notion that the campaign had been led by a headstrong small team, which neither sought nor responded to external feedback. This is redolent of the flaws of Theresa May’s 2017 election campaign.

Perhaps responding well to feedback counterintuitively conflicts with the egotism necessary to seek public office. Perhaps this is only exacerbated for those seeking the top office in an era of ‘strongman leadership’.

It was certainly true that Sunak’s public response to even a hint of public criticism during the campaign was primarily defensive: he did not give the impression of being curious to better understand the alternative viewpoint, let alone to change course in response to it. It’s not like he’s alone; this behaviour is common.

Over the years, I’ve read quite a lot about the skill of constructively receiving feedback. I don’t think it is something that comes naturally to anyone, but it is a skill that’s particularly well-developed among people that I admire. Getting better at it has certainly been useful for me and has helped my professional development.

I recently read one of Arthur C Brooks’s articles in The Atlantic covering this topic, too. I enjoyed his observation that ‘once you depersonalize criticism, you can start to see it for what it is: a rare glimpse into what outsiders think.’

This is both blindingly obvious and yet also often missed: it’s easy to get too caught up in judging the person who wrote the comment or perhaps being defensive. But taking feedback exactly as it is offered—as in, this person thought X—can be radically helpful. One doesn’t need to agree with the other person’s viewpoint, but having knowledge of it can nevertheless be extremely useful.

After reading Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen’s book Thanks for the Feedback a few years ago, I added a link in my work email signature which gives people the opportunity to offer anonymous feedback. This has served me very well, giving me lots of opportunities to reflect and develop my understanding of others’ viewpoints. Philippa Perry’s book also offered some useful insights into contextualising and using feedback in a personal (as opposed to professional) context.

I can’t help but think that the world would be a better place if people were better equipped to receive criticism—politics would certainly be better for it. Failing to make use of feedback feels a bit like ‘shooting yourself in the head.’

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

I wrote the other day about the effect on Britain of the last fourteen years. But politics is personal too.

When David Cameron became the first Conservative Prime Minister of the twenty-first century, Keir Starmer had been Director of Public Prosecutions for less than two years. He surely cannot have imagined that he’d be the next Labour Prime Minister. And yet here we are.

And yet, it must surely feel daunting. The New York Times yesterday talked about him inheriting a ‘legacy of ashes’, while Le Monde talked of ‘creaking public services and a flatlining economy’.

On top of that, he’s got a unsupportive press looking to land every possible blow, and an insurgent Reform party primed to cause as much political instability as they can muster.

It’s a tough old job he’s got on his hands, and I don’t envy him.