NickS writes: It is remarkable how much this conversation (podcast with full transcript) resembles the discussion on unfogged. It's framed as a look back at a Dan Savage piece from 2004 about embracing urbanism. Most of it will be familiar, but it's an entertaining conversation (also occasionally smug, but part of the pleasure is them not shying away from saying, "we do think this is a better way to live").

And for people who live in cities to embrace being an urbanist or an urban person as a political identity, as a unifying political identity. Because when you think of why Republicans were campaigning against, attacking, and vilifying cities for decades and decades and decades, well, that's where most of the people of color are. That's where most of the poor are, and that's where most of the queers are. And people who aren't poor or queer or black or Hispanic and live in cities tend to be the kinds of white people who are cool with racial diversity and religious diversity and diverse sexual orientations and gender expression, and were kind of suspect by association or by their, you know, being fine with this kind of diversity.

And there was just this sense that there was this identity that transcended so much that we were told, you know, siloed us. If we could just name it, recognize that it was staring us in the face, embrace it, and then demand the Democratic Party recognize who and what and where its base was located, and stopped failing to defend cities and urbanism in national contests with people who would condemn "San Francisco values" before they got out of bed in the morning. And then play to the cities in the same way that Republicans play to and serve and deliver for rural America. Although you could argue that you look at red states where the Republicans control the trifecta and the legislature, and those places tend to be where the dying towns, the dying counties are and a lot of misery is.

Heebie's take: Here's the original 2004 piece, written in the aftermath of anger of Bush's re-election. Parts are fun to read:

To red-state voters, to the rural voters, residents of small, dying towns, and soulless sprawling exburbs, we say this: Fuck off. Your issues are no longer our issues. We're going to battle our bleeding-heart instincts and ignore pangs of misplaced empathy.

but boy howdy did we not manage to ignore pangs of misplaced empathy. It's also depressing because he talks about choice, and the environment, and guns, and well, dang. (Although I think health care is still in a better place than 2004.)

The 2024 conversation veers more towards criticizing cities for failing to implement blue ideals - namely by being captured by NIMBYs and abandoning housing and transit. I enjoyed it, although I imagine there's some good points to argue about.

Lurid Keyaki writes: In the Atlantic:

The author gets a few shots in:

That field was not tucked away in some sleepy corner of academia, but was instead a highly influential one devoted to the science of success. Perhaps you've heard that procrastination makes you more creative, or that you're better off having fewer choices, or that you can buy happiness by giving things away. All of that is research done by Schroeder's peers--­business-school professors who apply the methods of behavioral research to such subjects as marketing, management, and decision making. In viral TED Talks and airport best sellers, on morning shows and late-night television, these business-school psychologists hold tremendous sway. They also have a presence in this magazine and many others: Nearly every business academic who is named in this story has been either quoted or cited by The Atlantic on multiple occasions. A few, including Gino, have written articles for The Atlantic themselves.

Business-school psychologists are scholars, but they aren't shooting for a Nobel Prize. Their research doesn't typically aim to solve a social problem; it won't be curing anyone's disease. It doesn't even seem to have much influence on business practices, and it certainly hasn't shaped the nation's commerce. Still, its flashy findings come with clear rewards: consulting gigs and speakers' fees, not to mention lavish academic incomes. Starting salaries at business schools can be $240,000 a year--double what they are at campus psychology departments, academics told me.

It's easy to imagine how cheating might lead to more cheating. If business-school psychology is beset with suspect research, then the bar for getting published in its flagship journals ratchets up: A study must be even flashier than all the other flashy findings if its authors want to stand out. Such incentives move in only one direction: Eventu­ally, the standard tools for torturing your data will no longer be enough. Now you have to go a little further; now you have to cut your data up, and carve them into sham results. Having one or two prolific frauds around would push the bar for publishing still higher, inviting yet more corruption. (And because the work is not exactly brain surgery, no one dies as a result.) In this way, a single discipline might come to look like Major League Baseball did 20 years ago: defined by juiced-up stats.

Heebie's take: First, link up there is not paywalled.

Second, it feels a lot like the replicability crisis in the social sciences. The article makes this explicit:

In response to the replication crisis, campus psychology departments have lately taken up a raft of methodological reforms. Statistically suspect practices that were de rigueur a dozen years ago are now uncommon; sample sizes have gotten bigger; a study's planned analyses are now commonly written down before the work is carried out. But this great awakening has been slower to develop in business-school psychology, several academics told me. "No one wants to kill the golden goose," one early-career researcher in business academia said. If management and marketing professors embraced all of psychology's reforms, he said, then many of their most memorable, most TED Talk-able findings would go away. "To use marketing lingo, we'd lose our unique value proposition."

Mm-hmm.

Mossy Character writes: I am no doubt the first to observe that Play It All Night Long says all that needs to be said about red America. Elaborations, sophistications, and preferred performances left as an exercise for the reader.

Heebie's take: Lyrics here.

I don't think I like this song at all. In fact, it's pretty terrible!

I don't feel like connecting with red America at all at the moment, but if I were going to, I'd say that Robert Earl Keen's Merry Christmas from the Family achieves this challenge in a much more charming way. Lyrics here.

However, maybe the assignment is to find bile, and not a modicum of charm.

I haven't seen articles written yet that are drawing grounded conclusions from the full statistics of the election. The only things I'm seeing are the things Stormcrow says, and little things like this:

(similar to what JPS said yesterday)

or this:

which does hurt a little bit.

Anyway, it's gotta be getting close to deep-dive time, right?

Who runs for the Republicans in 2028?

1) Trump, of course
2) JD
3) A currently-known nutcase
4) A yet-to-be-known nutcase
5) A sensible moderate to put the pieces back together
6) Someone else

I'm a bit freaked out by what may be put in place on day 1. What are your best guesses as to how it plays out?

In terms of resistance:

1. it feels like protests and marches have become entirely ignorable. Do they still mean anything in terms of rallying energy or spreading awareness? I don't personally enjoy them at all, but would show up if it actually helps anything.

2. Lawsuits, obviously. I assume the only thing here is to donate money, unless you have some specific expertise.

3. I have an untethered fear that we'll be back in Nazi Germany, hiding people in our houses again. The logistics of that make me feel faint. The house is so cluttered already.

4. There's gotta be something else besides things that feel useless, or overwhelming, or just money. I would hope?

I had a dream last night where I distributed a briefcase of money to some immigrants and was hailed as a hero, and demurely explained that it was the least I could do. So at least my superego thinks that all my angst is just a ploy to look good on the progressive highways and byways of central Texas, or something.