Paying ($) Attention

12 Weekend Reads for January 25-26

Dear Friends,

Last week, friend and fellow Substacker

Alejandro De La Cruz

asked for a photo of where I do my reading:

From 6:30 to 8:30 am, I read through my newsletters¹ and RSS feeds.² My desk looks out across Oaxaca’s Etla Valley to Monte Albán, the Zapotec capital founded 2,500 years ago. It’s a civilizational perspective that helps me step back from the 6-hour news cycle and take the long view.

🎵 Songs I liked this week

Hat tips to Vaz & Iris for reminding me of Bakar and to Yon for the Kid Cudi nostalgia.

What sounds good at the start of 2025? Send me your recs, please.

📚 12 Weekend Reads

1. 🔈 Democrats Are Losing the War for Attention. Badly. — Ezra Klein and Chris Hayes discuss the political economy of attention.³

Attention is now to politics what Democrats think money is to politics.

Does politics now select for a kind of attentional sociopath?

2. How to Survive Being Online — Mike Monteiro nails what it’s like to listen to Trump when you grew up with a narcissistic parent. Plus, Cocteau Twins on KEXP!

The only way to defeat a narcissistic sociopath is to starve them and refuse to be their audience.

3. Left-Wing Cancel Culture Gets Canceled — The WSJ’s weekend essay explores “the censorious methods of progressives” before pointing out that MAGA Republicans are just as guilty: policing discussion about racism, sexuality, and criticism of Israel. “Censorship is ultimately about power, which, like speech codes, is ever-shifting.”

4. The Origins of Wokeness — Quotable throughout:

There's a certain kind of person who's attracted to a shallow, exacting kind of moral purity, and who demonstrates his purity by attacking anyone who breaks the rules. Every society has prigs. The question to ask is why our prigs are priggish about these ideas, at this moment.

5. Two of the World’s Leading Thinkers on How the Left Went Astray — A French economist and American political philosopher walk into a bar and debate the future of the left. Piketty wants liberals to defend the virtues of egalitarianism and migration. Michael Sandel argues the left needs “an ethic of membership, belonging, community and shared identity.” But they agree that:

Democrats need a broader project of civic renewal. They need to affirm the dignity of work, especially for those without college degrees; rein in the power of Big Tech and give citizens a voice in shaping technologies, so that A.I. enhances work rather than replaces it. Citizens should also have a hand in shaping the transition to a green economy, rather than being forced to accept whatever top-down solutions technocratic elites impose.

6. Facebook Without Fact-Checkers Will Put Truth to the Test — Adam Kucharski, a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, lists the many failures of Facebook’s fact-checkers and describes his experience using X’s Community Notes feature. Ultimately, he’s hopeful crowdsourced moderation will work for Meta for the same reasons it worked for Wikipedia.

7. The Making of Community Notes — Fascinating interview with the product team that built the Twitter’s Community Notes feature starting in 2019. Lots of academic research and user testing informed tough trade-offs (such as whether to require real names). Turns out, according to research, people trust the crowd more than experts.

8. The Business School Scandal That Just Keeps Getting Bigger — Surely we can trust peer-reviewed academic journal entries? If only. The Atlantic profiles business school professor Juliana Schroeder’s unsuccessful efforts to clear her name in a widespread research fraud scandal.

9. Is NYC’s Congestion Pricing Working? Fewer Private Cars Are On the Road (For Now) — Some clever data journalism from Bloomberg showing the effects of New York’s new congestion pricing. More congestion pricing to fund public transit, please.⁴

10. Nearly half of young Americans don't want to own a car — my first time reading about “MaaS,” which apparently stands for Mobility as a Service. I’d prefer mass transit, but I’ll take it.

11. Good news: Wage inequality has declined in two-thirds of countries since 2000, according to a new report from the International Labour Organisation.

12. Bad news from the UK:

Two quotes I liked

“The opposite of doom isn’t hope but curiosity.” ~ Ezra Klein

“At first I was lonely, but then I was
curious.” ~ Ada Limón

True:

Have a lovely weekend with a long view,

David

1. In this order: Semafor, Bloomberg, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Reforma, Animal Político, Le Monde, The Times (of London).

2. I spend most of my RSS time with The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, Financial Times, the New Yorker, and our local paper in Oaxaca, El Imparcial. I also prioritize some old blogger friends and, recently, interior design blogs as we look to buy/design new furniture.

3. Oy vey. I don’t want to watch video clips of the tech moguls in the front row fidgeting with their cell phones. Or hot takes about Melania Trump’s hat. I don’t want to see replays of JD Vance’s grimace when an Episcopal bishop asks for mercy for migrants. I don’t want to see Sam Altman sucking up to Elon Musk on Twitter to achieve his AI dreams. I have two hours each morning, and I’d like to stay clear of the spectacle to focus on insight. But my prehistoric, pathetic lizard brain wants the drama.

4. For a real deep dive on the benefits of congestion pricing, check out

Zvi Mowshowitz

’s “NYC Congestion Pricing: Early Days”