23 and You
A conversation at the start of the Democratic primary marathon, with Reed Hundt, Matt Stoller, Senator Mike Gravel, and Randall Kennedy. Listen today at 2pm on WBUR or anytime on our website.
23 presidential candidates is a lot, but there’s more going on here than just too much. We’re listening to the 2020 Democratic candidates and hearing a range of ideas, different tones (from optimism to dismay), and a multitude of stories. For all their similarities, these candidates are not all saying the same thing.
Often they aren’t even saying the same things as President Obama. Something has shifted. Reed Hundt’s new book, A Crisis Wasted: Barack Obama’s Defining Decisions, gave us a point for jumping into this topic. It tells the story of troubled efforts influenced by neoliberal policies during the Obama presidency, and the results that are with us to this day.
We talked to Reed Hundt about the 2020 Democrats, and how they represent departures from past Democratic approaches. Next Matt Stoller and Randall Kennedy discussed—and debated—the nature of the Obama presidency and its legacy. Then, with Senator Mike Gravel (also a 2020 presidential primary candidate, and one whose campaign has a real connection to podcasting) we talked foreign policy, and considered the enduring grip of the military-industrial complex.
This gave us a lot to think about, and a lot to look forward to reading. Later this year, Simon and Schuster will publish Matt Stoller’s Goliath, a consideration of monopoly power in U.S. politics.
Compare: 2020's Coverage with 1960's
We’re not only looking forward to more reading; we’re looking back, too—for precedents, or for people trying to find their way through a mystery different from but related to our own. We’ve lately been reading “Superman Comes to the Supermarket.” It’s an early example of Norman Mailer’s political journalism, and there, writing about JFK and the 1960 presidential election, he’d already refined a booming journalistic voice that he applied to, for instance, the sort of character that elections can manifest:
One would have an inkling at last if the desire of America was for drama or stability, for adventure or monotony. And this, this appeal to the psychic direction America would now choose for itself was the element most promising about this election, for it gave the possibility that the country might be able finally to rise above the deadening verbiage of its issues, its politics, its jargon, and live again by an image of itself.
Listen: A Mitsuko Uchida Masterclass
If you’re seeking more of the sonic intensity that you’ll hear if you read the above excerpt out loud—an intensity that also drives toward adventure and mystery—there’s always Beethoven. And if you’re curious about how that intensity works, it’s worth listening to someone who knows Beethoven well.
Over on Youtube, you can watch one of the great pianists perform excerpts from Mozart and Beethoven; she also explains what she finds in their piano concerti, in this video of a masterclass by Mitsuko Uchida at Oxford.
Read: The Organs of Sense
Adam Ehrlich Sachs has written a mind-expanding and elegant short novel about the nature of knowledge and perception. The Organs of Sense follows the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s encounter with an astronomer who has no eyes.
Leibniz is the notoriously optimistic philosopher who called our actual world “the best of all possible worlds,” and this novel is, correspondingly, philosophically ambitious. It’s especially thoughtful about the absurdity that challenges optimistic efforts to know or grasp that actual world:
Notice how in the history books you never come across a man or indeed a woman who climbs up a pillar for no reason, and never comes down. Where is the history of this pointless pillar person? Whose bones are picked clean by the birds? Where is the historian who will write the history of this person who climbs up a pillar for no reason, reports nothing from God, and is ultimately devoured by birds?
The usual texts have left something out; or, just in general, something always seems left out. This novel advances ceaselessly toward that mystery, the mystery into which Mailer’s (or our) America might yet plunge, into which a performance by Mitsuko Uchida might lead us. Optimistically, maybe. In spite of everything.
This Week’s Ephemeral Library:
Review the 2020 Democratic candidates, and hear them out on topics from climate change to sleep habits. Reflect on the current conversation about reparations. Ponder the nostalgia surrounding Beto O’Rourke’s indie rock videos. Read Jia Tolentino on the poet and novelist Ocean Vuong.
Onward!
-The OS Team
