Dispatches from a post-election classroom
✌️ Hallo
Issue #205: a letter from prison + an email from Taylor Swift’s dad
Lest you’ve had enough post-election analysis, I just want to share a single story that felt new to me: Ian Williams’ “Notes from a classroom.” Williams is a graduate instructor at UNC Chapel Hill. He’s currently teaching a “cultural studies” class, the perfect crucible for a conversation about what happened last Tuesday.
Most of his students voted for Harris. Two voted for Trump. Williams doesn’t share much about the demographics of these students, but they’re undergrads. When asked who voted on the economy, almost all of them raised their hands. Policy researcher Brett Heinz agrees that this election was the inflation election. The price of eggs alone doubled in 2022. An MIT study earlier this year found that Biden’s $1,400 stimulus checks were probably responsible, at least partially.
But the most fascinating parts of Williams’ conversation with his students are cultural, not political (though the boundary between those two concepts is blurry). Nobody under ~30 trusts legacy media, but we knew that. More specifically, they’re suspicious of text but they love podcasts. Text seems overly edited and manipulated. Audio feels more authentic, more dynamic. Also: None of Williams’ students cared at all about Harris’ celebrity endorsements. One Harris voter said “she knew that Swift and Beyonce weren’t for her, they were for Harris.” The endorsements felt elitist and box-check-y. They were also just a little… boring? Maybe “the politics of celebrity” are over, Williams writes. None of his students are impressed by big names anymore. What they’re drawn to most is honesty, passion, and perceived authenticity.
What I’m reading
- Taylor Lorenz on why there’s no democratic equivalent to Rogan: “The closest thing to a ‘progressive Joe Rogan’ in mainstream liberal media is probably the podcast Pod Save America. But the podcasters on that show operate with a clear allegiance to the Democratic Party establishment. They don’t speak to the youth or the disaffected masses who are fed up with the entire system.” Who will be the next Chapo Trap House? (User Mag)
- Palantir, which builds AI tools for governments, has quickly grown into one of the top 10 most valuable AI companies by market cap. One writer who worked there before it IPO-d remembers a culture of highly dedicated weirdos who read books on theatrical improv to get good at their jobs. (Nabeel Qureshi)
- The quiet art of living well: pay attention to how your mind wanders. (Bill Wear)
- Taylor Swift’s dad’s emails: “I need to vent. Have actually entered this into Ripley’s longest email contest.” (Jane Song)
A sentence I highlighted recently
“True intimacy, more than sex, is what you’ll miss — Yes, I do miss sex, but in the grand scheme of things, what I really miss is intimacy.”
— Damian Delune, The Top 15 Things I’ve Learned After Three Years in Prison
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