internal-sub-only-nl

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      What Jerick McKinnon’s Super Bowl Can Teach Us about Economics

      by

      From an economic perspective, the most interesting play of Super Bowl LVII was near the end of the game, when the Kansas City Chiefs running back Jerick McKinnon sprinted toward the end zone but slid to a stop inches short of scoring a touchdown, like Moses not entering the Promised Land or me rejecting a slice of chocolate cake.If you watch the replay, you can see Philadelphia Eagles cornerback James Bradberry IV chasing McKinnon but … not very hard, like a dad playing touch football with a 6-year-old. Instead of trying to shove McKinnon out of bounds, Bradberry has his arms by his sides.What makes this economically interesting is that it’s an example of incentive incompatibility, a problem that crops up in many other realms. The Chiefs wanted to run down the clock to keep the Eagles offense off the field as long as possible. The Eagles wanted the Chiefs to score quickly so they could get the ball back, score a touchdown of their own and send the game into overtime. So the ordinary incentives of the offense and defense were reversed. It became a pantomime. Imagine if you had to watch a whole game like that. The fans would be streaming out of the stadium.Incompatibility of incentives is usually caused by a flaw in the rules of the contest, whether it be an election or a bankruptcy proceeding. It’s not always easy to fix the rules to prevent strategic behavior. That Super Bowl play is a good example. What rule change could have induced the Chiefs and Eagles to try their hardest on the play? I can’t think of one.Sports are designed to be zero-sum games, in which one side’s gain is another’s loss. For example, you don’t see boxers trying to work out a win-win agreement before the opening bell. Yet there are many times in sports when the rules inadvertently make it possible for competitors to win by losing or tying. In some leagues, unsuccessful teams have an incentive to lose because the teams with the worst records get first picks in the next player draft. (Although that ignoble strategy doesn’t always work.)British soccer fans are still arguing over a 1977 match between Bristol City and Coventry City in which the two sides found out during the second half that a mutual rival, Sunderland, had lost its match, which meant they could both avoid being relegated to a lower division if they remained tied. What had been a hard-fought match became a silly passing drill. Incentives for such strategic play are surprisingly common in European playoffs, according to several recent papers. A 2022 article in The European Journal of Operational Research showed that the design of the European qualifying rounds for the 2022 FIFA World Cup made the playoffs vulnerable to “tanking” — deliberately losing — by teams in certain circumstances. The paper proposed a way to minimize the risk.This wouldn’t matter much if it were confined to sports. But what about elections? Last year, Democrats helped some far-right candidates in Republican primary contests, betting correctly that more extreme candidates would lose in the general elections. They’re doing the same thing now for a State Senate seat in Wisconsin, The Times reported Tuesday. To me, the Democrats’ gambit seems both unsporting and dangerous. A study of German elections in 2012 found that almost a third of voters abandoned their preferred candidate if that person was not in serious contention.There are voting systems that minimize strategic voting, giving people an incentive to vote for the candidate they really want. But the economist Kenneth Arrow proved in his impossibility theorem that when there are more than two choices, there is no procedure that consistently orders collective preferences and satisfies reasonable assumptions about people’s autonomy and preferences.I’ll close with an example straight from economics: auctions. In an auction in which bids ascend and everyone sees them, it’s possible to lose by winning and win by losing. As the bidding rises and other people drop out, you may start to wonder if they know more than you do about the value of what’s up for auction. If you win an item, maybe it’s because you overpaid — making you a loser. Realizing that risk, some people will drop out early, so the thing being sold might actually go for less than it’s worth, to someone who doesn’t value it as highly as others. A good solution is a second-price, sealed-bid auction. You bid what you think the thing is truly worth, but if you win, you pay only the second-highest bid. Because there’s less risk of winner’s curse, the object will tend to go to the person who values it the most, usually for close to the amount that person values it at.Elsewhere: Why Rising Rates Hurt Tech StocksThe big tech companies don’t do a lot of borrowing, by and large, but rising interest rates are crushing their stock prices nevertheless. That’s because tech stocks’ prices are pumped up by expectations that profits will grow for years to come. They usually pay only small dividends, if any. When interest rates were low, investors were willing to pay a lot for that distant payoff. But when rates rise, Treasury bonds and other safe, long-term, interest-bearing investments start to look like a more attractive alternative.Quote of the Day“The Nazi agitator whom, many years ago, I heard proclaim to a wildly cheering peasants’ meeting: ‘We don’t want lower bread prices, we don’t want higher bread prices, we don’t want unchanged bread prices — we want National-Socialist bread prices,’ came nearer explaining fascism than anybody I have heard since.”— Peter Drucker, “The End of Economic Man: The Origins of Totalitarianism” (1939)Have feedback? Send a note to coy-newsletter@nytimes.com. More

    • 100 Shares109 Views

      in Elections

      We’re Not Being Cruel, President Biden. Just Careful.

      by

      Messages don’t come any more mixed.An overwhelming majority of Democrats and independents who lean Democratic believe that President Biden has done a good job — 81 and 78 percent, respectively, according to a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll. They can see what an increasingly ungovernable country we’ve become, how much he has accomplished despite that, how admirably he has kept his cool (for the most part) and how well he has honored his overarching promise: to put the puerile and corrosive drama of the Trump administration behind us. For Donald Trump, we needed noise-canceling headphones. For Biden, hearing aids.The silence is golden.Regardless, 58 percent of those same Democrats and independents said that they want a Democratic presidential candidate other than Biden in 2024. They seem to like him. They’re apparently grateful for him. Yet they’re ready to kick him to the curb.It doesn’t add up. And the person to whom the arithmetic must feel strangest — and coldest — is Biden.During his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, he strongly signaled that he’ll seek re-election. So that settles that? I don’t think so, not when you factor in the metabolism of politics today, the predictable unpredictability of the world, and his age, 80, which comes with the increased possibility of deteriorating health and sudden illness.The worries about his ability to endure the rigors of a presidential campaign and come out a winner aren’t going away. Nor will the calls for him to wise up, stand down and let a younger, fresher, more dynamic Democrat claim the center of the stage.My Times colleague Michelle Goldberg issued such a plea in a column on Monday. I second it. I agree with her analysis, including her assessment of a Democratic bench deeper and more interesting than the party’s perpetually self-doubting downers realize. I wrote about that bench last November — and I didn’t even include Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland or Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, promising leaders for whom 2024 is just a bit too soon.But I nonetheless want to pause and fully acknowledge what an extraordinary and difficult thing Michelle, I and others are asking Biden to do.It took him, well, forever to reach the top. That’s perhaps the most compelling part of his political story — his patience, his perseverance, his resilience. And now that he finally stands at the summit, we’re telling him not to get too comfy or savor the view for too long?In saving us from a second term of Trump, Biden quite likely saved us from ruin. And so … we’re done with him?That’s beyond cold. It’s close to cruel.On Tuesday night, as he delivered his State of the Union speech, he mustered more energy than he was thought to possess, projected as much confidence as he ever has and radiated a good humor that’s at odds with the heavy burden of the presidency. It was the kind of performance that, in some ways, should quiet people’s doubts. But it won’t.I know because my doubts aren’t quieted. I registered his endearing brio as he made his remarks, but I also registered his stumbles, the moments when he seemed to lose his way. He has had many of them over recent years. There are surely many, many more to come.And while it’s impossible to say what or how much they mean, it’s equally impossible to deny that they could mean something; that a presidential campaign is a physically and psychologically grueling odyssey for anyone, let alone for someone who’s 80; and that any unsteadiness Biden exhibits is a window of opportunity for a Republican challenger. That’s a big, legitimate concern.Campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, Biden told us to choose him over the other contenders because the stakes of depriving Trump a second term were incalculable and he was the safest bet against Trump. He carried the least risk.Well, the stakes in 2024 aren’t much different, whether or not Trump secures his party’s nomination, because whichever Republican emerges victorious from the Republican primaries will have been touched and corrupted by Trump’s election denialism, his attacks on democratic institutions, his zest for provocation, his resentments, his divisiveness.So, Democrats once again need to tread a cautious path. That caution explains the paradox of the poll I previously mentioned, and that caution is Biden’s lesson and legacy — which is how he should look at it. Democratic voters aren’t faithless or fickle. They’re fearful, just as he told them to be.In other words, they’ve been listening to what he’s been saying since Trump came along. That’s a compliment to him. It’s a tribute. May he bask in it.For the Love of SentencesBig SurIan C. Bates for The New York TimesWe usually end with The Times but let’s start there this week, especially given Victoria Kim’s gorgeous description of living (and driving) on the jagged slopes of Big Sur: “He listened for trickling water, for tumbling rocks big and small, for errant rumbles — signs that the earth was once again about to mock the hubris of those who once saw fit to carve a road into the Santa Lucia Mountains where they plunge directly into the ocean.” (Thanks to Clive Mostyn, of Parksville, British Columbia, for nominating this.)Also in The Times, Susan Dominus went to the doctor: “The meeting was only my second with this gynecologist, a woman who struck me as chic, professional and in a bit of a hurry, which was to be expected, as she is part of a large health care group — the kind that makes you think you’d rather die from whatever’s ailing you than try to navigate its phone tree one more time.” (Daphne Chellos, Boulder, Colo., and Liz Regula, Hackensack, N.J., among others)Nicholas Kristof questioned various words on linguistic scolds’ no-fly list: “As for my friends who are homeless, what they yearn for isn’t to be called houseless; they want housing.” (John Jacoby, Cambridge, Mass.)Michelle Cottle previewed the State of the Union address: “One question that always carries with it a frisson of unease during big presidential addresses: On a scale of 1 to Lauren Boebert, how disrespectfully will members of the opposing party behave?” (Elaine Walter, Syracuse, N.Y.)Adam Liptak reacted to the supposed condescension that Ted Cruz, who went to Princeton, expressed toward graduates of what he deemed “minor Ivies” like Brown and the University of Pennsylvania: “That may strike you as slicing the baloney of elitism awfully thin.” (Henry Von Kohorn, Princeton, N.J.)And Clay Risen paid tribute to the iconic status of Peeps, the marshmallow Easter confections: “It’s the sort of pop-culture celebrity to make a Mounds bar jealous.” (Andrew Wolff, Brooklyn, N.Y.)The Economist examined a winter pastime: “In ancient Israel, somebody walking across a body of water constituted a miracle. In Minnesota, it just means that it is ice fishing season.” (Rich Scissors, Sarasota, Fla., and Bill Smith, Toronto)In USA Today, Rex Huppke marveled at Biden’s interactions with booing Republicans on Tuesday night: “I’ve never seen anything like it in a State of the Union speech — they ran at him like a pack of lemmings and, with a wink and a grin, he politely directed them to the cliff.” (Rudy Brynolfson, Minneapolis, and Millie Baumbusch, Atlanta, among others)In The San Francisco Chronicle, Soleil Ho traced the trajectory of restaurant meals from early 2020 on: “Dining out became pretty janky; and then, after Covid restrictions were pulled back, it took on a refreshed and uncanny grandiosity, like the guttural, ecstatic scream you might unleash after a week of silence.” (David Zielonka, San Francisco)And in The Atlantic, Sophie Gilbert described the onetime ubiquity of an American sex symbol with the first name Pamela: “In the ’90s, Anderson was one of the most famous women in the world, the highest-paid actress on the most-watched television show (that would be ‘Baywatch’), her scarlet swimsuit and box-blond curls covering more bedroom walls than Sherwin Williams.” (Peggy Crowe, Asheville, N.C.)To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.What I’m Reading, Writing and SayingAustin, Texas, residents cool off at a spillway near Barton Springs.Matthew Busch for The New York TimesAlthough I’ve never actually lived in Austin, Texas, I’ve easily spent, in aggregate, a year’s worth of time there, from 1999 to the present. For a while I was a regular at the Austin City Limits Music Festival every fall. I watched the city grow and grow, and up until at least 2010 and maybe even 2015, I disagreed somewhat with locals’ complaints about that: Austin was still amply funky, but with a newly cosmopolitan shimmer that flattered it. Now? Austin is in a whole new, tall, traffic-snarled and unaffordable league — and its measure is taken perfectly and fascinatingly by Lawrence Wright in this excellent article in The New Yorker.Sarah Huckabee Sanders was inaugurated as the governor of Arkansas on Jan. 10 and had never held elected office before. So Republicans’ selection of her to give the party’s official response to President Biden’s State of the Union address on Tuesday says a great deal about their confidence in her, their hopes for her and their belief that she personifies the Republican Party today. I reflected on all of this in an essay about her rise that The Times published on Tuesday.The paperback of my most recent book, “The Beauty of Dusk,” was released on Tuesday. The book’s website has additional information about it. So does this review in The Times that was published last February, right before the hardcover came out. I recorded the audio version in a studio in Chapel Hill, N.C., not far from my home, and that had special meaning for me, given the nature of my story and how many books I now “read” with my ears.On a Personal (By Which I Mean Regan) NoteFrank BruniThere’s an amplitude of joy and magnitude of relief that tip into mania, and that’s Regan’s state when I return from a work trip of several days, as I did last weekend, to retrieve her from the “lodge” for dogs where I sometimes board her.She hurls herself against me, bounces off and then runs madly in circles while making these ear-shredding sounds that aren’t exactly barks and not quite yelps but definitely the result of bottled-up emotion exploding. I imagine that she’s regaling me with a litany of the ways in which she has been deprived, admonishing me for my betrayal and outlining my penance, starting with a trip to the nearby Starbucks for a “pup cup” of whipped cream.But what really gets me — the reason I’m sharing this, its relevance beyond us dog lovers — is her behavior minutes later, when we arrive home and she jumps from the car. She zooms to the center of the front yard, finds the best vantage point and does a visual sweep of the cul-de-sac, as if to make sure that nothing has changed. Then she zips into the house and does a similar inspection, room by room.Her water and food bowls, in a corner of the kitchen: check.Her main bed, just beside the hearth in the living room: check.Her other bed, in a spare room upstairs: check.My bed, on which she jumps whenever she pleases: check.Her inventory is methodical, and when it’s finished, the sense of comfort, security and contentment that settles over her and emanates from her is palpable. If it had a voice and a script, they would be Judy Garland’s in “The Wizard of Oz.” There’s no place like home.She can’t know, as I do, how lucky we are to have this one. But she can savor it nonetheless, and it’s clear to me that she’s doing precisely that when, depleted by the days of uncertainty and disorientation, she collapses on one of those beds and falls into an unfathomably deep sleep.I look at her and see more than a still mound of silky fur. I see the meaning and the gift, in a world that often separates us without warning from the people and places we love, of a refuge where everything is as you left it. Where your defenses can come down. And where you can find peace enough to dream. More

    • 88 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      Is Trump Way Up or Way Down?

      by

      The polls are surprisingly divided, but higher-quality surveys point to an answer.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and President Trump in July 2020, when they were working together. Al Drago for The New York TimesIs Donald J. Trump the clear favorite and front-runner to win the Republican nomination? Or is he badly weakened and even an underdog against Ron DeSantis?At the onset of the Republican campaign, the polls are exceptionally divided on Mr. Trump’s support among Republican primary voters.In national surveys since last November’s midterm election, different pollsters have shown him with anywhere between 25 percent and 55 percent of the vote in a multicandidate field.That’s right: a mere 30-point gap.Huge Variance in Support for TrumpIn national surveys since November, different pollsters have shown Mr. Trump with anywhere between 25 percent and 55 percent of the vote in a multicandidate field. More

    • 163 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      To Understand Why Republicans Are Divided on the Debt Ceiling, Consider Dr. Seuss

      by

      The Tea Party is over. Cultural issues seem to animate G.O.P. voters.“On Beyond Zebra!” is among the Dr. Seuss books that will no longer be published, a fact many Republicans are aware of. Scott Olson/Getty ImagesTo Understand Why Republicans Are Divided on the Debt Ceiling, Consider Dr. SeussOne of my favorite polling nuggets from the first two years of Joe Biden’s presidency wasn’t about Afghanistan or inflation or classified documents.It was about Dr. Seuss.In early March 2021, a Morning Consult/Politico poll found that more Republicans said they had heard “a lot” about the news that the Seuss estate had decided to stop selling six books it deemed had offensive imagery than about the $1.9 trillion dollar stimulus package enacted into the law that very week.The result was a vivid marker of how much the Republican Party had changed over the Trump era. Just a dozen years earlier, a much smaller stimulus package sparked the Tea Party movement that helped propel Republicans to a landslide victory in the 2010 midterm election. But in 2021 the right was so consumed by the purported cancellation of Dr. Seuss that it could barely muster any outrage about big government spending.Whether issues like “On Beyond Zebra!” still arouse Republicans more than the national debt takes on renewed importance this year, as Washington seems to be hurtling toward another debt ceiling crisis. The answer will shape whether Republicans can unify around a debt ceiling fight, as they did a decade ago, or whether a fractious party will struggle to play a convincing game of chicken — with uncertain consequences.Unfortunately, our trusty Seuss-o-meter for gauging Republican interest in fiscal policy isn’t readily available today. But heading into the year, there were very few signs that the debt had reclaimed its Obama-era position at the top of the list of conservative policy priorities.Understand the U.S. Debt CeilingCard 1 of 5What is the debt ceiling? More

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      Anti-Gay? Anti-Science? Antisemitic? Run for Governor of North Carolina!

      by

      The 2024 governor’s race in North Carolina just got underway. You care.Not because this state is the nation’s ninth most populous, though that’s reason enough. But because what happens here is a referendum on how low Republicans will sink and how far they can nonetheless get.Attorney General Josh Stein of North Carolina announced his candidacy last week. At present he’s the likeliest Democratic nominee. He’s a mostly conventional choice, with a long résumé of public service and unremarkable politics. I say “mostly” because he’s in one way a trailblazer. He’d be the state’s first Jewish governor.The likeliest Republican nominee, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, is also a trailblazer. He’d be the state’s first Black governor. But that’s the beginning, middle and end of anything forward-looking and progress-minded about him, and he’s extremism incarnate: gun-loving, gay-hating and primed for conspiracy theories, with a garnish of antisemitism to round out the plate.Robinson hasn’t formally declared a bid, and he could face and be foiled by a primary challenge from a less provocative rival. But as Tim Funk noted in an article in The Assembly about Robinson’s flamboyantly combative speeches during Sunday worship services across the state, he was recently introduced in Charlotte as “the next governor of North Carolina.”Heaven forbid. His election would almost certainly retard the state’s economic dynamism by repelling the sorts of companies and educated young workers attracted to it during the six years that Gov. Roy Cooper, a moderate Democrat who cannot run for another term, has been in office.And if 2024 smiles on Republicans, Robinson could indeed emerge victorious. Both of the state’s senators are Republicans; the newer one, Ted Budd, beat his Democratic opponent, Cheri Beasley, by more than three percentage points in November. In two other statewide elections that month, for seats on the North Carolina Supreme Court, Republicans also prevailed. And Stein’s re-election as attorney general in 2020 was a squeaker. He won by just two-tenths of 1 percent.He came out of the gate last week focusing as much on the brief against Robinson as on the case for himself, making clear that a Stein vs. Robinson race would in large measure hinge on the question of how much bigotry and divisiveness Republican and independent voters in North Carolina are willing to endorse, indulge or be persuaded to overlook. Given what a national mirror this state is, the answer will have relevance and resonance far beyond it.We’re approaching a crossroads in North Carolina, my home for the past 18 months, and I can already feel the anxiety rising, including my own.Funk captured Robinson well in that Assembly article: “In the Gospel According to Mark Robinson, the United States is a Christian nation, guns are part of God’s plan, abortion is murder, climate change is ‘Godless … junk science,’ and the righteous, especially men, should follow the example of the Jesus who cleansed the temple armed with a whip, and told his disciples to make sure they packed a sword.”Robinson’s religion is indeed the whipping, slashing kind. It mingles cruelty and snark. When Paul Pelosi was assaulted in his home by a hammer-wielding intruder, Robinson didn’t offer prayers for his recovery. He expressed doubt that Pelosi was an innocent victim — and mocked him.He has referred to homosexuality as “filth” and to the transgender rights movement as “demonic.” He’s preoccupied with the devil, whose hand he saw in the movie “Black Panther,” which was “created by an agnostic Jew and put to film by satanic marxist,” he railed in a Facebook post that could have used some copy-editing.His whole persona could use some copy-editing. It’s all exclamation points.But that’s his power, too. “Mark Robinson is extremely popular with the Republican base and the Republican rank and file,” Chris Cooper, a political science professor at Western Carolina University, told me. (He has no relation to Roy.) “The reality is that he’s a compelling speaker. And just as many Republicans thought that Donald Trump went too far but at the same time were happy he gave the finger to ‘the establishment,’ Mark Robinson has many of the same advantages.”Another factor that could work perversely in his favor: He wasn’t in politics before his current stint as lieutenant governor, a position that doesn’t require him to take votes or issue vetoes or anything like that. “So his profile is self-created,” Cooper said. He can tweak his stances or outright change his script without any actual record, at least beyond his many wild statements, to contradict him.But Mac McCorkle, a longtime Democratic strategist who is now a professor at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy (where I also teach), said that while North Carolinians have elected their share of firebrands like Robinson to Congress, they have made different choices for the very different job of governor, who guides the day-to-day functioning of the state.“Do people want somebody prosecuting the culture wars when there’s a hurricane?” McCorkle asked. He’s inclined to think not. “We haven’t had a shouter as governor, well, ever.”But then we hadn’t had a spectacle like the far-right rebellion against the ascent of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in at least a century and a half. We hadn’t had a House speaker coddle the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene until Marjorie Taylor Greene. The Republican Party has gone off the rails but keeps hurtling forward, damage be damned. We’d be foolish in North Carolina to trust that we won’t be part of the wreckage.For the Love of SentencesAndy MurrayAsanka Brendon Ratnayake/Associated PressRepresentative Bill Foster, an Illinois Democrat, reacted on Twitter to one of the assignments given to a new House Republican from New York: “I’m thrilled to be joined on the Science Committee by my Republican colleague Dr. George Santos, winner of not only the Nobel Prize, but also the Fields Medal — the top prize in Mathematics — for his groundbreaking work with imaginary numbers.” (Thanks to Caryl Baron of Manhattan and Norma Johnson of Northampton, Mass., among others, for nominating this.)In an obituary for David Crosby in The Los Angeles Times, Steve Chawkins wrote that many of Crosby’s finest songs from the 1960s and 1970s were, half a century later, still “stirring the hearts of fans who had long since traded their mescaline for Medicare.” (John Russial, Eugene, Ore., and Lee Margulies, Ventura, Calif.)In The New Yorker, Peter C. Baker revisited the classic children’s book “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day,” by Judith Viorst: “‘I went to sleep with gum in my mouth,’ the book begins, and that would be a good opening sentence on its own — Kafka with a splash of David Sedaris — but from there it careens forward, one clause tripping into the next, undisciplined by anything so polite as a comma.” (Liz Lesnick, Manhattan)In The Washington City Paper, Noah Gittell noted that “The Son,” which is the writer and director Florian Zeller’s follow-up to his 2020 movie “The Father,” “is not the sequel its title implies, nor is it the second film in a trilogy that concludes with ‘The Holy Ghost.’” (Randolph Richardson, Southbury, Conn.)In The Wall Street Journal, Jason Gay marveled at the stamina of the Scottish tennis player Andy Murray, whose spirited play in a recent match seemed to surprise his younger opponent: “Murray looked like he was running around a cottage, trying to close the windows amid a thunderstorm.” (Steve Garvey, Monroe Township, N.J.)In The Atlantic, Derek Thompson described the importance of a journalist’s inquisitiveness: “Explaining complex ideas in simple terms requires pulling myself out of a pit of ignorance using the rope of other people’s expertise.” (Bernie Cosell, Pearisburg, Va. )In The Times, Pete Wells noted that a plate of fried fish at the restaurant Masalawala & Sons “comes with a small dish of kasundi, a condiment that starts with freshly ground mustard. American yellow mustard has the same relationship to kasundi that a butter knife has to a chain saw.” (Karlis Streips, Riga, Latvia)Also in The Times, Tressie McMillan Cottom reflected on reactions to a TikTok stitch of hers: “I knew a lot of the anger had to do with my critics being Extremely Online, a condition where social media compels us to read thinly, strip out all context and get to the part where we can be insulted as efficiently as possible.” (Bronwyn Alfred, Worcester, Mass., and Paul Spitz, Cincinnati)And Maureen Dowd sat down with Nancy Pelosi, who is no longer the speaker of the House: “I was expecting King Lear, howling at the storm, but I found Gene Kelly, singing in the rain.” (Gloriana Roig, Manhattan, and Faith Delaney, Emerald Isle, N.C., among many others)To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here, put “Sentences” in the subject line and include your name and place of residence.What I’m Reading, Watching and DoingThandiwe Newton in “God’s Country”IFC FilmsI learned a new word the other day. More than a word, really. A role. A job. “Spokescandy.” That’s, um, a candy that speaks for its whole class of candies. The way a press aide speaks for a politician, only fattening. And if you’re scratching your head, well, get ready to scratch harder when you read this very amusing and very depressing article by Daniel Victor on M&M’s, footwear, Tucker Carlson and Maya Rudolph. It falls squarely into the robust category of contemporary American life as a satire of itself.In this charming take on the queues of New York in The Times, Dodai Stewart noted that the city that never sleeps “often stops in its tracks.”It’s never a mistake to follow the Washington Post critic Robin Givhan to the intersection of politics and fashion, and she spends some time there in this glance at the crew necks of George Santos.After Academy Award nominations were announced on Tuesday, Oscar analysts noted that the best actress field omitted two Black women who were thought to be in contention: Danielle Deadwyler, who starred in “Till,” and Viola Davis (“The Woman King”). I want to mention a third Black woman who never even generated significant award-season buzz, but should have: Thandiwe Newton. Her performance in “God’s Country” as a college professor at violent odds with two white hunters who trespass on her land is heartbreaking, even if the movie itself goes curiously slack for stretches when it should be gathering in intensity. It’s streaming on Prime Video and Apple TV.In advance of the Tuesday, Feb. 7, release of the paperback edition of my most recent book, “The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found,” I did an interview with Preet Bharara for his excellent podcast, “Stay Tuned With Preet.” You can listen here. Our discussion ranged far and wide, taking in politics, restaurants and more. On Saturday, Feb. 11, I’ll be at McIntyre’s Books in Fearrington Village, near my Chapel Hill, N.C., home, for a discussion centered on the book. Here are the event details.On a Personal Note (Odd Neighborhood Names)Rattanachai Mok-Ngam/EyeEm, via Getty ImagesWow. In my item last week about the absurd appellation of my North Carolina neighborhood (the Highlands), I invited you to send me any oddly named enclaves and streets around you. And more than 550 of you did. Thank you!It’s going to take me a while to read through all of those emails, so what follows is the fruit of just a smattering of them. But as I work through as many of the rest as possible, I’ll occasionally write and publish brief addenda to this dispatch.Before today’s amusing collection, a serious thought, or rather question, that several of you, including Karen Akerhielm of Greenville, S.C., raised. “Why do so many towns in the South have neighborhoods that still contain the word ‘plantation’?” she asked, noting that in Greenville, “there is Kilgore Plantation (a very upscale residential neighborhood) as well as Plantations at Haywood and Stoneledge Plantation (both apartment complexes). I’m sure they’re trying to evoke the idea of Southern mansions and warm hospitality, but how can you use the word plantation without making people think about slavery?”I don’t think you can. Renaming is in order. And it’s occurring, as this 2020 article in The Washington Post and this NPR report from the same year explain. It can’t happen fast enough.And there are many, many other names available. Your emails made that charmingly clear.Karen Baierl of South Bend, Ind., remembered that her parents once resided in a suburban Milwaukee subdivision called Parc du Chateau. “They lived on La Fontaine Court and some of the other streets in the subdivision are Marseille Drive, Colline Vue Boulevard, La Rochelle Court, and Le Chateau Drive. This is a subdivision in the middle of the Midwest, truly one of the least French spots in the country.”Beth Gianturco of Williamsville, N.Y., marveled at how seriously a neighborhood in the Buffalo suburbs near her takes the first two syllables of its name. Royalwoods comprises Viscount Drive, Dauphin Drive, Infanta Drive, Contessa Court, Rana Court, Pasha Court and Pharaohs Court.Brian Hood of Seattle wrote: “I was once a construction worker and helped build a housing development with the name Boulevard Lane. It struck me as so absurd at the time and still does. ‘Wide Grand Street Narrow Alley’?”To continue this oxymoronic streak, Steven Cobb of Salisbury, N.C., noted that a street near his former home in Louisville, Ky., was called Wooded Meadow Way. “To my thinking, it’s either woods or a meadow — it can’t be both.” On a visit to Melbourne, Fla., he spotted the Turtle Run neighborhood. “Because it’s near the ocean, ‘turtle’ is appropriate,” he wrote. “But I never saw one do more than crawl, even to get across the busy road in front of the subdivision.”And for a segue in the spirit of the tortoise and the hare, Edward Jeremy Hutton of Harpers Ferry, W.Va., remarked on the bunny love of the Briar Run development in nearby Ranson, W.Va., with streets named Peter Rabbit Drive, Cotton Tail Drive, Cottontail Court, Fuzzy Trail Drive, Whiskers Way, Thumper Drive, Jack Rabbit Lane, Bugs Court, Velveteen Court, Trix Court, Flopsy Court and Mopsy Court. Hippety, hoppety, someone got carried away. More

    • 63 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      Britain’s Cautionary Tale of Self-Destruction

      by

      In December, as many as 500 patients per week were dying in Britain because of E.R. waits, according to the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, a figure rivaling (and perhaps surpassing) the death toll from Covid-19. On average, English ambulances were taking an hour and a half to respond to stroke and heart-attack calls, compared with a target time of 18 minutes; nationwide, 10 times as many patients spent more than four hours waiting in emergency rooms as did in 2011. The waiting list for scheduled treatments recently passed seven million — more than 10 percent of the country — prompting nurses to strike. The National Health Service has been in crisis for years, but over the holidays, as wait times spiked, the crisis moved to the very center of a narrative of national decline.Post-Covid, the geopolitical order has been thrown into tumult. At the beginning of the pandemic, commentators wondered about the fate of the United States, its indifferent political leadership and its apparently diminished “state capacity.” Lately, they have focused more on the sudden weakness of China: its population in decline, its economy struggling more than it has in decades, its “zero Covid” reversal a sign of both political weakness and political overreach, depending on whom you ask.But the descent of Britain is in many ways more dramatic. By the end of next year, the average British family will be less well off than the average Slovenian one, according to a recent analysis by John Burn-Murdoch at The Financial Times; by the end of this decade, the average British family will have a lower standard of living than the average Polish one.On the campaign trail and in office, promising a new prosperity, Boris Johnson used to talk incessantly about “leveling up.” But the last dozen years of uninterrupted Tory rule have produced, in economic terms, something much more like a national flatlining. In a 2020 academic analysis by Nicholas Crafts and Terence C. Mills, recently publicized by the economic historian Adam Tooze, the two economists asked whether the ongoing slowdown in British productivity was unprecedented. Their answer: not quite, but that it was certainly the worst in the last 250 years, since the very beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Which is to say: To find a fitting analogue to the British economic experience of the last decade, you have to reach back to a time before the arrival of any significant growth at all, to a period governed much more by Malthusianism, subsistence-level poverty and a nearly flat economic future. By all accounts, things have gotten worse since their paper was published. According to “Stagnation Nation,” a recent report by a think tank, there are eight million young Brits in the work force today who have not experienced sustained wage growth at all.Over the past several decades, the China boom and then the world’s populist turn have upended one of the basic promises of post-Cold War geopolitics: that free trade would not just bring predictable prosperity but also draw countries into closer political consensus around something like Anglo-American market liberalism. The experience of Britain over the same period suggests another fly in the end-of-history ointment, undermining a separate supposition of that era, which lives on in zombie form in ours: that convergence meant that rich and well-​governed countries would stay that way.For a few weeks last fall, as Liz Truss failed to survive longer as head of government than the shelf life of a head of lettuce, I found myself wondering how a country that had long seen itself — and to some significant degree been seen by the rest of the world — as a very beacon of good governance had become so seemingly ungovernable. It was of course not that long ago that American liberals looked with envy at the British system — admiring the speed of national elections, and the way that new governing coalitions always seemed able to get things done.Post-Brexit, both the outlook for Britain and the quality of its politics look very different, as everyone knows. But focusing on a single “Leave” vote risks confusing that one abrupt outburst of xenophobic populism with what in fact is a long-term story of manufactured decline. As Burn-Murdoch demonstrates in another in his series of data-rich analyses of the British plight, the country’s obvious struggles have a very obvious central cause: austerity. In the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, and in the name of rebalancing budgets, the Tory-led government set about cutting annual public spending, as a proportion of G.D.P., to 39 percent from 46 percent. The cuts were far larger and more consistent than nearly all of Britain’s peer countries managed to enact; spending on new physical and digital health infrastructure, for instance, fell by half over the decade. In the United States, political reversals and partisan hypocrisy put a check on deep austerity; in Britain, the party making the cuts has stayed steadily in power for 12 years.The consequences have been remarkable: a very different Britain from the one that reached the turn of the millennium as Tony Blair’s “Cool Britannia.” Real wages have actually declined, on average, over the last 15 years, making America’s wage stagnation over the same period seem appealing by comparison. As the political economist William Davies has written, the private sector is also behaving shortsightedly, skimping on long-term investments and extracting profits from financial speculation instead: “To put it bluntly, Britain’s capitalist class has effectively given up on the future.” Even the right-wing Daily Telegraph is now lamenting that England is “becoming a poor country.”Of course, trends aside, in absolute terms Britain remains a wealthy place: the sixth-largest economy in the world, though its G.D.P. is now smaller than that of India, its former colony. And while the deluded promises of Brexit boosters obviously haven’t come to pass, neither have the bleakest projections: food shortages, crippling labor crunches or economic chaos.Instead, there has been a slow, sighing decay — one that makes contemporary Britain a revealing case study in the way we talk and think about the fates of nations and the shape of contemporary history. Optimists like to point to global graphs of long-term progress, but if the political experience of the last decade has taught us anything, it is that whether the world as a whole is richer than it was 50 years ago matters much less to the people on it today than who got those gains, and how they compare with expectations. Worldwide child mortality statistics are indeed encouraging, as are measures of global poverty. But it’s cold comfort to point out to an American despairing over Covid-era life expectancy declines that, in fact, a child born today can still expect to live longer than one born in 1995, for instance, or to tell a Brit worrying over his or her economic prospects that added prosperity is likely to come eventually — at the same level enjoyed by economies in the former Eastern Bloc.Can Britain even stomach such a comparison? The wealthy West has long regarded development as a race that has already and definitively been won, with suspense remaining primarily about how quickly and how fully the rest of the world might catch up. Rich countries could stumble, the triumphalist narrative went, but even the worst-case scenarios would look something like Japan — a rich country that stalled out and stubbornly stopped growing. But Japan is an economic utopia compared with Argentina, among the richest countries of the world a century ago, or Italy, which has tripped its way into instability over the last few decades. Britain has long since formally relinquished its dreams of world domination, but the implied bargain of imperial retreat was something like a tenured chair at the table of global elders. As it turns out, things can fall apart in the metropole too. Over two centuries, a tiny island nation made itself an empire and a capitalist fable, essentially inventing economic growth and then, powered by it, swallowing half the world. Over just two decades now, it has remade itself as a cautionary tale.David Wallace-Wells (@dwallacewells), a writer for Opinion and a columnist for The New York Times Magazine, is the author of “The Uninhabitable Earth.” More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Answering Reader Questions on a Covid Effect, Gerrymandering and More

      by

      How much did coronavirus deaths, redistricting and voter suppression matter in the last election?Supporters of a trucking convoy that included vaccine opponents last year in Adelanto, Calif.Meridith Kohut for The New York TimesA lot of mail has piled up since the election, so let’s take a trip to the mailbag while we’re in a relatively quiet period.Covid mortality and votingI’m not sure if I should be surprised by this, but one of the most popular email topics has been a morbid one: the effect of the coronavirus death toll.“Since the 2020 election, Covid has claimed well over half a million lives, predominantly elderly unvaccinated persons. Studies have documented the greater fatality rate in red counties. It appears that more elderly G.O.P. voters have died than their Democratic counterparts. Death certificates don’t include party affiliation, but there appears to have been something of a red wave of G.O.P. morbidity occurring over the last two years.“As pollsters extrapolate from their samples, has the weighting been revised since 2020 to reflect the shift in surviving voters due to Covid fatalities?” — John BaileyJohn, I doubt pollsters are revising their weighting targets to directly account for Covid deaths. And if some went through the motions of doing so, my guess is they found it wasn’t worth the time.I don’t want to appear to minimize the significance of more than half a million deaths since the 2020 election (and more than a million since the start of the pandemic), but the truth is this is not a large enough number to significantly affect the American electorate.Let’s suppose the most extreme case: Imagine that every single post-2020 Covid death was a Trump voter in the last election. How much would the result have changed if they hadn’t voted? Well, President Biden would have won by 4.8 points instead of 4.4 points.A swing of four-tenths of a point isn’t nothing, but polls don’t even report results to the decimal point. If pollsters made this adjustment, most poll results would go unchanged. The likeliest scenario, of course, is a much, much smaller effect.Nonetheless, coronavirus deaths will eventually affect the makeup of the polls, even if pollsters make no effort to account for Covid whatsoever. That’s because most polls are adjusted to match the characteristics of the population, based on data from the Census Bureau or voter registration files. To the extent Covid deaths ultimately change the characteristics of the population or the voter rolls, the targets that pollsters use for weighting will incrementally change as well.The role of gerrymanderingA recurring theme in the inbox was gerrymandering, which I did not mention in any of my post-election analyses:Not a mention of gerrymandering in this piece. A competitive congressional district map in N.Y. was very instrumental in the G.O.P. House victories there whereas a very gerrymandered map in Florida led to Democratic losses there — combined maybe at least half the expected majority the G.O.P. is estimated to end up with in the House when the dust settles. I would love to read your analysis on this issue. — Stan RoeI’m not so sure about that, Stan. As I wrote in the fall, this year’s congressional map was the fairest House map in decades. It gave the Democrats a serious and underrated chance at winning the House. And the final results bear this out: Democrats nearly won the House even though they lost the popular vote by a few percentage points.Going state by state, it’s striking how often the Democrats got their money’s worth. Their riskiest, maximum-effort gerrymanders paid off in Nevada, New Mexico and Illinois, where the party swept the eight competitive districts that they risked in order to maximize their chances at additional seats.Meanwhile, Republicans did so well in the red states that some of their most extreme gerrymanders may not have paid off as much as one might have guessed based on the results of the 2020 presidential election. Believe it or not, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida would have carried more seats on the relatively fair map he vetoed than on the enacted Republican gerrymander.Effects of voter suppressionMany readers asked about another topic I didn’t mention in my post-election analyses: voter suppression.Did voter suppression or even the threat thereof affect Black and Hispanic turnout? Thank you for your interesting newsletters! — Claire HessIt’s worth noting that this is a reply to a newsletter entry from early December, when I noted that Black turnout appeared to drop markedly across the country. Indeed, Black turnout really did seem to decline everywhere, regardless of whether states imposed new voter suppression laws or even expanded voter access.To take the three states where we have the best data — North Carolina, Louisiana and Georgia — Black turnout dropped off the most in North Carolina and Louisiana, where Democratic governors blocked efforts to restrict access. And turnout stayed strongest in Georgia, the epicenter of the fight over voting rights.This pattern doesn’t prove that new voter laws had zero effect in Georgia or elsewhere — and this analysis is separate from the ethics of the intent of the laws — but the broad decline in Black turnout across the country suggests that other factors were mainly responsible. It also implies that the effect of the new laws was small enough that it’s hard to tease out from the other factors that affect turnout from state to state.As I wrote two years ago about the new Georgia law, “In the final account, it will probably be hard to say whether it had any effect on turnout at all.” This is by no means the final account, but that remains my best guess. More

    • 75 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      The Coming Year of Republican Drama

      by

      G.O.P. infighting figures to be the political story line of 2023.A 2015 presidential primary debate included, from left, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. The first Republican primary debate this cycle is expected to be in late spring or summer.Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesThe Coming Year of Republican DramaGood morning, everyone! I’m finally back from a few weeks abroad and excited to get back in the swing of things. I hope you had a great holiday season.The start of an odd-numbered year is always an odd period for political analysts. We’re still litigating what happened in the last election, and yet it’s already time to look ahead to the next campaign. This year, the pivot from one election to the next is going even more slowly than usual.The Republican primary campaign hasn’t really gotten underway. By the end of January in 2019, a half-dozen Democratic candidates had entered the fray. This time, only former President Donald J. Trump has formally announced, and I wouldn’t say he “entered the fray.” There isn’t a fray if you’re alone in the arena.We did at least get a bit of January drama in lieu of a presidential race: the most rounds of voting for House Speaker since before the Civil War.Kevin McCarthy’s slog to the speakership was a fitting enough way to start the year. No, it’s not a half-dozen entrants to a presidential primary. But it’s still Republican infighting — and Republican infighting promises to be the political story line of the year, whether it’s in Washington or on the presidential debate stage (assuming that President Biden seeks the Democratic nomination without a serious contest).It has been a few years since Republicans have held center stage in such drama. The last year might have been 2017, before Mr. Trump established his dominance over the Republican Party and inaugurated an era of relative peace and unity — something like a conservative Pax Romana or Pax Britannica.But Mr. Trump’s dominance appears to be waning, and the fault lines and fissures of a still deeply factionalized Republican Party are being gradually re-exposed.This year, one of our biggest tasks will be to survey the newly revealed Republican landscape. This is not necessarily an easy assignment. In some ways, Republicans are a tougher challenge for political analysts than Democrats, who can usually be analyzed on a simple ideological spectrum or with the readily available demographic traits of members or their supporters, like race and education.The same can’t always be said for Republicans, a majority of whom are white conservatives. I do think educational attainment will be a central dividing line in this year’s Republican primary electorate, but good luck capturing the difference between Mr. McCarthy and the Freedom Caucus leader, Scott Perry — two conservative, California-born white Christians from evangelical denominations, ages 57 and 60 — based on demographics or their positions on the issues. It’s not Joe Biden versus Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, that’s for sure.The old ways of thinking about the Republican Party may not be so useful anymore. In that regard, this month’s fight for House Speaker — which was eerily reminiscent of Obama-era fights between House leadership and the Freedom Caucus — may prove to be somewhat misleading. The pre-Trump Republican Party will not be making a comeback in most other respects. Carthage didn’t make a comeback with the decline of Rome, and Jeb Bush, John Kasich, Paul Ryan, Liz Cheney and a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants won’t be making a comeback in 2023, either.Instead, 2023 offers opportunities for new players — most obviously Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis. And those new players on the national stage will mean a new set of hard-to-predict issues and fault lines. After so many years when Republicans were allied with Mr. Trump or else cowered on the sidelines, it is not at all obvious how Republican Party politics will scramble and realign if and when a vigorous challenge to Mr. Trump emerges.It’s not obvious how a challenge to Mr. Trump will divide the Republican electorate, either. For all we know, Mr. DeSantis might run at Mr. Trump from his right and attack him for bringing Dr. Anthony Fauci into our lives and the vaccine into our bodies. Maybe he’ll blame Mr. Trump’s trillion dollar coronavirus spending packages for bringing about inflation. Exactly how Mr. Trump might go after Mr. DeSantis is a mystery in its own right.It may not all add up to a “new era” of American politics or anything quite so grandiose. Mr. Trump could still win the Republican nomination again. But this year could look pretty different than what we’ve gotten used to over the last half decade. We’ll have our work cut out for us in the new year. More