Autumnal contrast
Nature vs Norman Foster.
Quote of the Day
“It is not what we have as children, but what we are deprived of as kids that defines us and our behaviours for rest of our lives.”
- Om Malik
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Ry Cooder | Feelin’ Bad Blues
Music for those trapped in Trump’s America.
Long Read of the Day
Times Past
The historian (and incomparable blogger) Heather Cox Richardson was probably as keen as I was to get away from poring over the entrails of the US election, which may have been why she penned this lovely essay on another pivotal day in American history — the day clocks were reset — to ‘railway time’ — all over the US.
I often say that 1883 is my favorite year in history because of all that happened in that pivotal year, and one of those things is the way modernity swept across the United States of America in a way that was shocking at the time but that is now so much a part of our world we rarely even think of it….
Until November 18, 1883, railroads across the United States operated under 53 different time schedules, differentiated on railroad maps by a complicated system of colors. For travelers, time shifts meant constant confusion and, frequently, missed trains. And then, at noon on Sunday, November 18, 1883, railroads across the North American continent shifted their schedules to conform to a new standard time. Under the new system, North America would have just five time zones…
Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
My commonplace booklet
Four More Years
An engaging blast from Tina Brown.
“Love him or hate him through this rollercoaster campaign, Trump was, as always, endlessly watchable. He owns the new template to captivate an American electorate hopelessly debased by the values of entertainment. Old-school candidates will never win again.”
The wonderful Neil Postman of blessed memory would have understood (and indeed might have predicted) Trump’s victory. Brown’s post sent me scurrying back to Amusing Ourselves to Death.
Postman didn’t live to see the transformation of our media ecosystem wrought by the Internet, but he was amazingly insightful about the cultural impact of its predecessor, broadcast television. This book of his was all about that — and particularly about the way it had transformed American politics into a branch of show business. Indeed in one chapter he wondered if the US had “reached the point where cosmetics has replaced ideology as the field of expertise over which a politician must have competent control”.
The thing that most struck me when watching videos of Trump rallies was that people forget that he owed his rise not to social media (though he did exploit Twitter brilliantly in 2016) but to his mastery of television in the Apprentice years. His rambling, disjointed, disconnected discourses and ravings on the platform led opponents and critics to conclude that must be losing his mind; but his audiences enjoyed it and clearly didn’t see it that way — just as British TV audiences used to enjoy comedian Tommy Cooper’s mimed incompetence.
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