Malcolm Gladwell’s ideas, rural America’s fortunes, restarting Three Mile Island
Wrapping up the week for September 29, 2024
Happy Sunday!
First of all, hot off the presses in The New York Times Book Review is Anand’s take on Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, which he describes as a brand extension of his old book. Check that out here.
Closer to home, this week’s essays and interviews in The Ink look at how we tackle the threats of the present and future while those of the past remain with us. We’ve talked about the lasting impact of the murder of Emmett Till, the way the looming problems of climate change and artificial intelligence are forcing a reassessment of our uncomfortable relationship with nuclear power, and how a new generation of small-town activists are fighting for small-d democracy — and pointing the way towards how to repair the decades of neglect that damaged the Democratic Party’s relationship with rural America.
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In his new book The Barn, author Wright Thompson reexamines the murder of Emmett Till in order to tell a new history of the United States.
[T]his one of the most covered murders in American history. And yet, every time anybody dives into it, there's a whole bunch of new stuff. By the way, the next person who does this will find stuff I didn't find. There's been so much erasure that people are going to be uncovering this forever. The Secretary of the Interior came down here for a tour and was told propaganda and lies by white supremacists that are now being repeated as history. We're not nearly done telling this story. And it's just because we're still fighting these forces of erasure.
In the second season of his podcast, “To See Each Other,” activist George Goehl investigates how a nursing home sale sparked a small-town democratic uprising — and how rural America can demand better politics.
And so I would say what’s going on with this issue kind of gives you a look at what democracy getting stripped away at the local level looks like. We talk about it so much at the national level because of the specter of a second Trump administration. But what's been amazing to me is we've had losses in some of these fights.
And in one fight, we lost a vote. We went back to the church afterward. All these older folks, it's super late at night, and you would have thought they would have been dejected. But actually, they're like, "No, okay. What's the next step on this? Where's the next place that we can get some leverage and fight?"
How dealing with today’s existential threats — A.I. and climate change — has forced a reckoning with the apocalyptic threats of yesteryear.
[I]n every generation, there is an alleged threat to the survival of all humankind. Some persist, and some fade into the past. And in the story on Three Mile Island, three of them crash into each other: the anxiety over today’s greatest existential threat, climate change, is compelling a relaxation of anxiety about a once-dreaded existential threat in nuclear power, but the purpose of this revival is to facilitate A.I., which could well be the next apocalypse we all fear.
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