Decoding the Midterms
This week: A Midterm Scorecard with David Bromwich, Jill Lepore, Briahna Gray, David Bosworth, and Mark Blyth. Listen today at 2pm or anytime on our website.
We’re still digging through Tuesday’s election results; it was a mixed bag, somewhere between a thumping and a shellacking, but with some good news sprinkled in with the disappointments. Democrats are closing in on 40 new House seats, more than any election since Watergate, says the New York Times. And there’s loads of women moving to Washington and some progressives we can’t wait to watch in action.
For our show this week we consulted the OS braintrust—starting with historian Jill Lepore and legendary close-reader David Bromwich. Anthropologist David Bosworth gave us a literary-psychoanalytical angle; Briahna Gray from The Intercept weighed in on the new progressives, and Mark Blyth held forth in the pub out of earshot of the pundits and conventional thinkers.
David Bromwich called for a return to the language of morality in our politics, and Briahna reminded us that progressive politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez already employ it, appealing to our universal (and aisle-crossing) respect for at least the idea of human dignity for all. Jill Lepore, likewise, told us to check out Martin Luther King’s 1967 Christmas Sermon for a reminder of what a politics with moral clarity looks like:
Our Favorite Takes
The New York Times put together some graphics on the exit polls. The data, they claim, shows that “middle income voters returned to the Democratic Party.”
Jedediah Purdy wrote about the Democrats and barriers to voting. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor demanded a radical political agenda. Neal Meyer characterized Tuesday as a “blue trickle.” Liza Featherstone knocked on doors in Brooklyn. Briahna Gray reported from AOC’s victory party.
Corey Robin’s Facebook post spelled out several crucial points:
This Just in
Local author Ryan Walsh helped us with one of our favorite shows all year. Ryan discovered that Van Morrison wrote his epic album Astral Weeks while he was living on Green Street in Cambridge in 1968, and the centerpiece of his story was finding a recording of a performance at the Catacombs, a jazz club in the basement of a building on Boylston Street in Boston. A 22-year-old Morrison debuted some of the “Astral Weeks” songs that night, joined onstage by Tom Kielbania, a student at Berklee College of Music, on upright bass, and John Payne, a Harvard dropout, on flute. We thought the only copy of the reel-to-reel recording was in the hands of the elusive J. Geils Band singer Peter Wolf, who had recorded it, but no one, including Kielbania and Payne, had ever heard it. Ryan did hear it, but he’s not saying how.
This week, unexpectedly, the legendary “Catacombs Tapes” became available for download via the UK iTunes store. There’s nothing but radio silence from Van himself, of course, but Ryan offered a theory on twitter:
See the rest of the thread here. For now in order to hear it, you need someone from the UK to buy it for you.
That’s all for this week, folks. Like, subscribe, download, and tweet at us.
❤ The OS team
