Dance Till We Die, The New Atlantis, Ari Schulman, Summer 2021

I happen to have an essay in The New Atlantis myself, in the fall issue, which just went un-paywalled. Take a look, but I’ll be doing a follow-up post on it here too. But this piece by Schulman is fantastic. It doesn’t fit in the COVID hawk vs. COVID dove, partisan, culture war debate we’ve been having since April 2020. It’s balanced and commonsense, and yet I can’t say I’ve heard anybody else synthesize everything we’ve learned and seen during the pandemic so well. I’m not going to say what’s in the article. I just highly recommend that you read it!

An Archaeological Dig Reignites the Debate Over the Old Testament’s Historical Accuracy, Smithsonian Magazine, Matti Friedman, December 2021

This is a long, nuanced piece of journalism, in which one of the latest archaeological discoveries from a remote part of modern-day Israel seems to modestly support the historicity of the Solomon-era ancient Israelite kingdom. The archaeologist who made the discovery is not himself invested in the historical accuracy of the Old Testament, and was in fact surprised at the radiocarbon dates that came back from some of his findings.

The story behind the carpeting in Metro’s rail cars? It stinks., The Washington Post, Faiz Siddiqui, February 8, 2018

If you’re from or live in the DC area, you’ll know exactly what this story is about. If not, yes: DC’s Metro rail cars are indeed carpeted, or at least they used to be. The newest models have a hard linoleum-type floor, but many of the older cars are still in service, and they’ve still got their carpet. Here’s a really interesting tidbit:

“All of this goes back to a sort of more basic sense that ‘this is not going to be transportation of the last resort, this is going to be transportation that people use,’ ” said Schrag, a George Mason University history professor. “And if you want to get people out of their cars, you’ve got to have air-conditioning, padded seats, tinted windows. . . . It’s part of a larger package of amenities that were designed to meet middle-class expectations — that these are not simple utilitarian devices for people who have no other choice.”

That’s really interesting, and I’ve never heard it before. Read the whole thing.

To Fight Climate Change, Los Angeles Bans Restaurants From Giving Out Unsolicited Ketchup Packets, Reason, Christian Britschgi, November 17, 2021

Beginning this week, a new city law goes into effect forbidding restaurants with 26 or more employees from handing out ketchup and mustard packets without the customer first requesting them. Come April 2022, it will apply to all restaurants.

The intent of the new ordinance—which also restricts the distribution of other single-use items like napkins and utensils—is to prevent waste and combat climate change, according to its authors.

I’m far from a Reason libertarian, but this got my attention. The idea that plastic forks and condiment packets are anything more than a rounding error in climate change or environmental impact seems pretty silly. You can see a parallel here with some of the less effective COVID-era measures: things that we all know don’t do much, but that serve as an easy virtue signal. The cumulative effect of this stuff is to meaningfully chip away at everyday quality of life, without that inconvenience amounting to a sacrifice for the public good, but rather a mere annoyance.

Related Reading:

New and Old #23

New and Old #24

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