Hello again!
Covid finally hit our household. I always suspected that I’d catch it from L who’d brought it home from work. I was half-right — she did bring it home, but she picked it up at pilates. We’re both really cautious, and pilates was really our only weak link in both our activities.
L couldn’t go to pilates during all the Melbourne lockdowns, which had flow-on effects for how her body functioned. Asking her to avoid pilates forever to hopefully avoid a covid infection would result in chronic health issues that would affect her quality of life. Life now feels you have to do a detailed risk assessment of every choice you make, and I think this is why people are so fatigued and pretending that the pandemic is over.
Anyway, here we go!
“It is now time to conclude that the “scare people into making a big push” strategy that climate activists and leftists have been using over the last few years has decisively, utterly failed. People ought to be scared. They ought to support a big push. But this is simply a thing that is not going to happen in the time frame we need it to happen.
Degrowth, anticapitalism, and doomerism are not a single unified package — many climate activists subscribe to only one or two of the trio of bad ideas. And some climate activists don’t subscribe to any of the three. But enough subscribe to at least one of the three that together, this trio of ideas has heavily compromised the effectiveness of activism in generating the degree of popular urgency required for bold policy change.So what can we do? Give up and sit around all day feeling a gnawing certainty in the pits of our stomachs that the planet is as good as cooked and there’s no reason to go on? You can go ahead and do that if you want, but I’ll pass, thanks. A new approach is needed. And fortunately, we have a new approach ready at hand.”
Noah Smith — “How we will fight climate change”
“Remote work has its challenges and downsides, absolutely, but I am sick of hearing people suggest that human contact is this magical, transformative panacea in the workplace. Human connections are not made simply by being in the same physical space as someone else, nor are they guaranteed because you happen to get paid by the same company. Mentorship and training are not things that happen passively; they are actions to be done deliberately, thoughtfully, and consistently, with the intention of fostering and retaining talent.”
“I love Melbourne. I don’t love everything about it. To be serious, this is a punitive city. It demands order, and panics when it loses control. That came into sharp focus during lockdown, too – singling out vulnerable groups, fining the people who could least afford it, then feeling sad when there were no drivers available to deliver our favourite curry. Melbourne can be, as many control freaks are, quick to blame and pass the buck. It could benefit from seeing a good therapist, if one were available. Melbourne has the same spirit as someone who always uses a bookmark, who calls eating biscuits ‘being a bit naughty’, and who sets five alarms to wake up in time for yoga… This city is adorably up itself.”
Anna Spargo-Ryan — “Melbourne is Australia’s most livable city and I finally understand why”
“The Australian dream of home ownership wasn't a natural phenomenon. It was created deliberately in the post-World War II era, with large-scale state support and major supply-side programs.And as historians remind us, Australian governments also promoted home ownership during the Cold War as a way to keep communism at bay. Citizens committed to mortgages tend not to be revolutionaries," ran one wartime advertisement.”
— Australian governments have spent $20b on assistance for first home buyers, but who has really benefited?
1600 people get together to sing a joyful rendition of Running Up That Hill, much to the delight of Kate Bush herself.
More
Everything in this edition of the Dense Discovery newsletter is gold
The James Webb telescope pics are amazing and so is this alt text describing the image
I enjoyed this essay about being in the midst of an open marriage, particularly the fact that it didn’t have a nice neat ending
I hate the title of this article with all my soul, but it’s a good explainer of the impact of the past decade of cheap money.
Good tweets
Listening
My July playlist
The Red Hot Chili Peppers were the first band I ever got obsessed with. I finally gave their new album a proper go after seeing this performance on Kimmel — I can’t believe 3/4 of them are in their 60s and still go this hard, particularly Chad Smith on drums. Skip to the outro to see what I mean.
I’ve been listening to Cassyette compulsively. Her music is very 00s revival (her guitarist looks like he’s cosplaying as System Of A Down’s Daron Malakian) but extremely catchy.
Speaking of 90s/00s revival, Hatchie’s Giving The World Away is my favorite release of 2022.
Watching
P-Valley (on Stan) is hands-down my favourite show on TV at the moment. It’s a drama (with plenty of comedic moments) centred around a strip club in a fictional town in Mississippi. The majority of the characters are African-American and it’s written and directed by women. There’s drama, s*x, comedy and pathos, and it’s beautifully shot and choreographed. Season 1 was a highlight of my lockdown viewing. Season 2 has a bigger budget and is set in 2020 — which means the pandemic, the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests are major plot points. Every episode gives me the same feeling as having finished a really good book.
Five years of my own personal Dry July
Sometimes I’ve been able to recognise the big moments in my life as they happen. The winter of 2017 wasn’t one of those times.
Three things happened, in this order:
I slipped over in the carpark at work and broke my ankle
I travelled overseas for the first time
I had a huge and undignified night on cheap prosecco and decided I needed to quit drinking for good.
I think I always knew that drinking alcohol wasn’t good for me, but I ignored my own intuition. I wanted to be fun! I wanted to stop being anxious! I wanted a break! I’d tried to quit drinking on and off all through my twenties, but I’d eventually get stressed, sad or anxious and pick it back up again.
Breaking my ankle meant I had nothing else to do but lie on my sharehouse couch and evaluate my life for a month. The Seattle trip changed me, and the prosecco disaster made me realise that I was getting too old to be drinking cut-price wine in Footscray squats with pretentious wankers.
With change comes loss. I gave up being part of Melbourne’s music scene because I couldn’t handle the late nights, the drunks or being paid in free booze. Casual dating was a nightmare. I became a pariah at my Wine Mum workplace. I’m now incapable of being awake past 10pm. Five years on, I firmly believe that those losses are worth everything else I’ve gained.
It’s amazing to see just how quickly the sentiment around alcohol has shifted in Australia. When I first quit drinking, my only options at bars and restaurants were soda water, actual water or soft drink. Heaps Normal only launched in 2020, but now it’s a staple in nearly every pub I go to, and most restaurants have nice mocktails. If you’ve ever thought about quitting drinking, cut down to once a week and see how you feel. Quitting drinking transformed my life, and it might transform yours.