"What the Constitution Means to Me" by Heidi Schreck (2017)

The play occupies an amorphous middle ground between a serious discussion of the merits and the demerits of the Constitution, and... a polemic? political activism? entertainment? art? It is hard to classify. As written, the play is not persuasive enough as a serious discussion and is not engaging enough as a work of art. The play is too literal, too topical (e.g., in its celebration of victimhood), which are understandable obstacles that arise on the path to timelessness should the playwright happen to come from a time and a place.

As John Updike mused in an interview, "Perhaps I have written fiction because everything unambiguously expressed seems somehow crass to me."

"Nuclear War" by Annie Jocobsen (2024)

The novel explores one branch in a tree of possibilities that spans various nuclear war scenarios. The novel has no central protagonist. Indeed, billions will die in the end (the examined branch is pessimal); it would be immoral to encourage special attachment to just one among many. The good news is that all is over and done in under an hour. Except perhaps for the old New Zealanders and the new ones, the arrivals on the nuclear submarines. These people would get to watch the show for a little longer, until the mass extinction does them all in, too.

The novel's style is the kind of vernacular that ChatGPT would happily disgorge if directed towards the romans de gare aisle at a local airport.

"On Democracy" by E. B White (2019)

White might as well have written all these essays in the last four years. Had he done so, the contemporary discourse would have much benefited from his calm, dignified, aristocratic tone. The clarity of vision is not hard to attain if one is prepared to step away from the mob and reflect a little. Voices unadulterated by political activism existed and were heard in the past, exist and are heard today, and will in all likelihood persist far into the future.

"And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle" by Jon Meacham (2022)

The book’s moral is that it pays to have principles, even in politics. One may lose a score of elections because of principles, but in the end, should one ever be elected, it will be thanks to them principles. And if one is never elected, then at least one can console oneself with the thought that at least one has been true to one’s principles. Staying loyal to principles is the winning strategy—as long as one does not mind a chance of being slightly killed because of them.

Oddly, the book’s author constantly hedges, as if scared of being accused of complicity in Lincoln’s lack of clairvoyance or of being held accountable for Lincoln’s refusal to pander to the sensibilities of modern book-reading audiences.

Meacham purveys facts. He does not bring debates about ideas to life. In his narrative, ideas are dogmas. Some dogmas win, some lose. Thanks to Lincoln’s dogmatism, the deserving dogma has won.

"Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success" by Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan (2022)

The book first fleshes out a handful of immigration myths that some people purportedly hold only to debunk them by appealing to the authors' and their colleagues' academic research. One myth is that immigrants today are slow to assimilate. Another myth is that immigrants impoverish the communities that they join. The book's ambition is to engage with the political debates of the day; those interested in science, can read the papers. This ambition comes at the price of necessarily dating the book.

The book could have been shorter. It prides itself on not needing to rely on anecdotes in order to uncover general tendencies, and yet indulges in anecdotes galore. The book sets out not to weigh in on policy matters, and yet does not miss the opportunity to nudge the reader to accept open borders. At the same time, the book's provocative policy proposals also make the book memorable, raise bigger questions beyond the book's scope, and set the book apart from the presumably dry academic prose on which it is based.

Drácula

(26 October 2024, Un Teatro)

Power is not freedom. Power is the ability to affect change. The powerful unfree do not get to choose whether to affect change and, if so, which change to affect. One is powerful but unfree if one's passions or convictions leave one no choice but to act.

"Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways" in America by David Hackett Fischer (1989)

There is much to be admired about each of the four tribes that migrated to America. There is much to be admired about their mutual suspicion and incomprehension. There is much to be admired about their offspring's ability to eventually agree on building a new country together. A substantial degree of conflict is certainly a feature, not a bug, of American politics. 

“One is occasionally tempted to abandon the role of the historian and to frame what social scientists call a theory,” remarks David Hackett Fischer. And yet he does not succumb to this temptation. As a result, there is nothing to disagree with in the book. A fact is a fact.

Joker: Folie à Deux

In this instalment, the system takes revenge on freedom. 

Freedom is the plurality of stories: the human stories that run in parallel in society, the stories that one man is capable of living concurrently, and the stories that are capable of coexisting in one man's head. Identity is the inability to be free.

Am I Racist? (2024)

The theatrical release and the smashing commercial success (by documentary standards) of this motion picture are testaments to the fact that the fabric of American society is more intricate, and the society itself is more harmonious, than legacy media and common news aggregators would make one believe from a distance.

"Benjamin Franklin: An American Life" by Walter Isaacson (2004)

Many ways in which Benjamin Franklin is claimed to have set the tone for America is a reflection of the fact that America was already America and preset when Franlkin was coming of age. America was also setting the tone for him, a curious young man growing up in a society that was open to being free.

Franklin and his peers were the counterparts of today's tech entrepreneurs. Instead of shaping designing apps and ecosystems, Franklin's peers were designing societies and the Republic.

Isaacson observes that, among other things, Franklin was the father of this American trait that is self-deprecating humour. It is hard to tell what the counterfactual would have been. The bar seems low; Americans are not particularly known for self deprecation even post-Franklin. Franklin's far greater contribution to the American character is best captured by Edmund Burke's adage “Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together.” 

It may be hard to re-assess the wisdom of the forefathers, for their wisdom has been stress-tested in the environment that is quite different from ours. The fact that the environment was different from ours does not mean it can never come to pass again. So, we should not discard the institutions of the ancients on a whim.

He Soñado Hormigas Negras

(23 August 2024, Un Teatro)

Words are actions. Movements are actions. In this production, both are directed inwards, towards the character, and outwards, towards the public. Neither is refined through characters' collisions with one another. Collisions must occur elsewhere, in the audience's mind. The concluding dance is a tribute to the timelessness and the universality of the struggle one elects for oneself.

World Press Photo 2024

(Museo Franz Mayer, 10 August 2024)

A good photographer seeks beauty. A war photographer is no exception. That is why many a war photographer (e.g., the Turnley twins) has settled in Paris to photograph beautiful people and things (see also Greg Williams).

The war photographs at the World Press Photo exhibition are ugly and staged. When everyone has a camera and an X account, most photojournalists are redundant. They are rarely in the right place at the right time. The smartphone-brandishing crowd always is. Or that is the impression the exhibition conveys.

To make a living, a photojournalist must differentiate his product from that of the crowd and must search for a paying audience beyond X. Exhibition juries are one such audience, hungry for photographs that would indulge their political agenda du jour. The same goes for journalism. It is harder to make a living as a competent reporter than a partisan columnist. Or that is the impression the press conveys.

Damien Hirst Vivir Para Siempre Por Un Momento

(Museo Jumex, 18 August 2024)

Damien Hirst's is a study of beauty. Beauty is that which facilitates survival. Is a medicine cabinet beautiful because it helps one survive? Is a shark ugly because it is a threat to life? What if it is sliced into two parts? Is beauty skin-deep? Is tobacco ugly because it kills? Do butterflies remain beautiful once dead?

Hirst's work is appreciated. People come see it. They find it beautiful. Beauty must be deeper than skin-deep.

The Blacklist (2013–2023)

James Spade and the show's writers have created a character that has outgrown the show and, ultimately, has outgrown the show's finale. The writers have ceded control.

Reddington is loyal to the people who are loyal to him. Loyalty is the bedrock of cooperation, which is the bedrock of civilisation. Even though, to a large extent, markets have replaced long-term relationships that used to demand loyalty, loyalty---albeit in a different guise---is still called upon. Equally important as loyalty to people is loyalty to principles: the principles that make markets functional by protecting basic freedoms and enforcing contracts. What Reddington had perfected was loyalty to people and loyalty to a constitution---the Constitution, perhaps, if constitution has the uniqueness property. The show does not say whether it does.

Oh, the Places You’ll Glow!

(The Second City, 27 July 2024)

The cast are at their best when they interact with the audience. The rest of the time, they are philosophers' philosophers, at best. Their sketches are about the unseen process, not the product. The product, too rough and too puerile to delight, shows how far one can get by simply trying and playing along, the lack of acting skills and talent notwithstanding.

The generous interpretation of the Second City is that, just like democracy itself, it is mediocre but robust. One could remove or replace any cast member, and the sequence of tolerable sketches would still keep coming. This democratic arrangement can be appropriate in families, organisations, and firms. The arrangement will not deliver beautiful art, though, except by the accident of nature selected through vigorous and brutal competition, which Chicagoland appears to be incapable of furnishing.

"Reagan: An American Journey" by Bob Spitz (2018)

While those who are good at something are usually good at most things, a person who is capable of rising to the top in one field need not be capable of rising to the top in all fields. The search for one's calling may take one on a path not lined with triumphs. That's OK. Indeed, such a path may be the best preparation for success in the field of one's calling. For Ronald Reagan, this field of calling was presidency.

Reagan's style as president was consistent with his convictions. He believed that the Constitution described the rules of the political game as it ought to be, and the market economy described the rules of the economic game as it ought to be. As a result, his job was not to redesign, to reengineer, or to regulate: neither the liberal democracy prescribed by the Constitution nor the free market beg to be micromanaged 

Reagan's job was to inspire fellow Americans to coordinate on the good equilibrium of the game that was the American project he wholeheartedly endorsed. His experience in Hollywood had equipped him well to inspire. The comfort that he habitually found in being good gave him the confidence in the existence of an equilibrium that was good, too.

"Tyranny of the Minority" (2023) by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt

The book complains that minority candidates win office thanks to the minority-bias in the electoral system. What the book fails to acknowledge is that candidates' campaign strategies respond to the electoral system. If one changes the game, players change their play. If a president who has won electoral college but has lost the popular vote had to win the popular vote instead, he would have likely changed his strategy and would have won the election anyway. As a result, the book's counterfactuals are unpersuasive.

The book acknowledges that liberal democracies combine two ingredients: the liberal one (which protects minorities) and the democratic one (which protects majorities). This is an easy (but valuable) observation to make (over and over again). What is hard is to determine the optimal proportion in which the two ingredients ought to be mixed. The book makes little progress on that front and instead argues for the majoritarian extreme.

By examining a series of case studies, the book argues that the current balance between liberalism and democracy must be wrong simply because the policies that the book's authors favour end up being blocked by minorities. This is not a principled argument.

The book argues that the rules of the game must change, but it fails to persuade why doing so would make any difference. Games with different rules can lead to the same outcomes. Games with "nicer-looking" rules can lead to "worse" outcomes once one takes into account how players adapt their play to the rules. Amending the Constitution to suit the political sentiment of the moment in a small town in Massachusetts could erode the legitimacy of the Constitution while delivering precious little in benefits from purportedly superior outcomes.

The electoral system in the U.S. is biased in favour of representing places and away from representing people. (The bias towards places has also been noted by urban economist Ed Glaeser, who bemoaned the fact that urban policies are often designed to revitalise places where no one lives instead of focusing on helping people move wherever they might flourish.) There ought to be a normative argument for over-representing empty spaces, but it is nowhere to be found in the book. Perhaps, by over-representing a place, one somehow takes into account the welfare of the future generations who will inhabit this place.

The book claims, without proof, that proportional representation is the only true form of democracy. This idea is controversial. (The Supreme Court rejected it in its deliberations on gerrymandering.) The idea requires a justification that would go beyond "Europeans do it."

The book claims it ought to be easy to vote, but, once again, does not argue the case. Do not barriers help to ensure that only those who care deeply enough about the outcome bother to vote and are heard?

Here is a possible argument for making it easy to vote: Today, political candidates waste too much time and money trying to turn out voters in ever greater numbers. If voting were easy, then, instead of competing in the zero-sum (negative-sum?) game of turnout, the candidates would compete on policies. Policy competition, presumably, is a positive-sum game.

The book's strength is in putting present-day politics into a historical perspective. But of its conclusions, the book will not persuade anyone who is not already a convert.

"How Democracies Die" (2018) by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt

A good constitution defines a game that is fun for players (politicians) to play and is fun for spectators (voters) to watch. If the game is more fun to play by following the rules than by breaking them---if peer esteem and spectator admiration depend on the rules being followed---then the players will follow the rules.

A good constitution defines a game that is interesting.

Players may be more likely to care about peer esteem if they all come from the same social class, or if they all reject class divisions and derive their shared identity from a collection of common values instead. What kind of play spectators find it fun to watch is likely a moving target. Figuring it out is the art of politics.

What is probably universal is the spectator taste for a show of skill and grit. If a player stands a better chance of signalling his skill by following the rules rather than breaking them, he will follow the rules. If the game rewards grit, and grit is what spectators would like to see, the players will keep playing the game.

A game whose outcome is determined by the player characteristics that are easy to see at the outset is not a fun game to watch. In this sense, hereditary monarchy sans court intrigue is not fun. Similarly, meritocracy when merit (e.g., an advanced degree from a top university) is easy to observe is not fun either.

Some randomness in the outcome of an otherwise meritocratic game may add to the fun by forcing the players to employ skill and grit in order to overcome the handicap imposed by chance. Chance can be replaced by seemingly gratuitously complicated rules, deciphering which would require skill.

If politics is not boring, it stands a chance of being healthy.

Argylle (2024)

 Why?

Whitney Biennial 2024

(Whitney Museum of American Art, 3 May 2024)

This exhibition is the best argument against socialism---or at least the version of socialism in which merit is apportioned by a committee of opportunists rather than by markets.

A generous interpretation of curators' intentions is to engage in small acts of insider trading: pluck an unremarkable artist out of obscurity, buy some of his work, exhibit the rest, and watch the artist's oeuvre appreciate. There is no law against that.

The best thing about the exhibition is the view from a window, any window, especially if not obstructed by "art."

A less generous interpretation of curators' intentions is that, having lost the public, they are scared and groom politicians for attention. Museums are no longer gatekeepers or trend-setters. Museums are largely irrelevant. Art is everywhere. One can go to galleries, one can go online, one can walk the streets, and one can stop by a Tesla showroom. It appears that, in order to spite the social media, which traffics in beauty so well, Whitney has turned to ugliness, which, presumably, sells to politicians, who have been preferring their messaging dark, as of late. Pandering to politicians is a dangerous game in a democracy, where prevailing politics are liable to change. Whitney's confidence in doubling down on the ugly may be a bad omen.

Will the cult of ugliness persist? Ugliness lacks universality. It excludes by design. In a society that is free, it will not survive.

Another ungenerous interpretation of curators' intentions is that they sought their offerings to be "diverse" as in "preserving irrelevant path dependence." By definition, irrelevant past is preserved when skill is lacking. The mathematics of a skilful mathematician does not sport the Southern drawl or clipped vowels. It is just mathematics. To seek out the scars of the past is to reward mediocrity. To sprinkle them with salt and serve them to the know-all elites is cruel to the mediocre.

Civil War (2024)

Civil War is a paean to capitalism, to its resilience in war and its potential to forestall war by directing thrill-seekers towards the quintessentially pro-social activity of amassing wealth.

To most trapped within it, war has no logic. Those who shoot at you are bad. You try not to get shot, you keep doing your job. You live by your instincts.

By not laying out the "logic" of war, the movie succeeds at being immersive. Cinematography is excellent: deliberate, confident, beautiful.

The movie is about a calling. The calling is neither right nor wrong, neither beautiful nor ugly. Being true to one's calling, not squandering it, is all one should be.