I’ll be taking the next couple of weeks off to celebrate the Christmas holidays. These Water Dippers should resume in January.
“High Priest of the Dark Enlightenment.” Antón Barba-Kay articulates the appeal of Curtis Yarvin and diagnoses the very-online irony that marks his rhetoric: “One of Yarvin’s more widely quoted aphorisms is that ‘Cthulhu may swim slowly. But he only swims left.’ The image, borrowed from H.P. Lovecraft’s supernatural horror fiction, is one in which a deeply buried, tentacled monster of mandarin opinion only ever trends toward further progressivism. Yet this reference rests on a careless, if telling, misapplication of the image. In Lovecraft’s work, Cthulhu in fact stands for the chthonic and terrifying irrationality that permanently defies human beings’ enlightened attempts to master and order the world. So that, while Cthulhu serves as an avatar for Lovecraft’s reactionary politics itself, it has become its very opposite in Yarvin’s use. More fitting still: In Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu, this awful monster is only ever directly visible to us as a small and cheap-looking bas-relief, a knockoff ‘superficial imposture.’ Such is Yarvin’s writing and such are the avatars of our cultural revolution in their ironic recalcitrance to sense: shadows standing for an urgent darkness, the very power of which consists in the fact that it will not be otherwise confronted.” (Recommended by Adam Smith.)
“Wonder Confronts Certainty, Then and Now.” Gary Saul Morson draws on Russian experience to consider how we might pursue truth well: “All Dostoevsky’s great novels examine package thinking, which he referred to as ‘wearing a uniform’ or as professing ‘ready-made’ opinions. There are always package liberals or radicals in Dostoevsky’s novels, and usually some characters who plead for individual, authentic thinking.” (Recommended by Jon Schaff.)
“A Reluctant Plumber’s Epiphany.” Heath Hardesty recounts a transformative moment on a dull, boring day: “I had zero desire to take up the blue-collared mantle of the family business. Nowhere in my dreams of any desired future were these scenes of turning wrenches or salvaging scrap. Yet here I am, broken pipes in hand and a creeping legion of discontent in my contracted heart. I never set out to work as a service plumber. But now I am spending my days in the dark spaces of homes across town, taking up company with the broken things.”
“Should Everyone Write?” Peter Biles acknowledges that everyone may not need to write, but everyone does need to practice the work of attention: “Writing helps you attend more deeply to the world outside your own head, so yes, everyone would do well to make a habit of putting words on a page from time to time. Ultimately, though, we would all do well to practice honing our skills of attention in whatever method possible, especially in society where the tech giants are fighting for our attentional currency every moment of our lives. Simply looking around is a good place to start. Noticing. Seeing.”
“Man over Machine: Why AI Firms Are Hiring Writers.” Maya Sulkin tries to make sense of the current—and temporary?—reality where tech companies seem to value human writers more than human coders: “It’s ironic. The very companies trying to get us to use AI for everything from fixing our cars to diagnosing an ailment don’t trust their own technology to do what large language models are supposed to have figured out: writing. It turns out that AI-generated writing is cheap.”
“Turn Toward Each Other and Away from the Screen.” Carrie McKean wraps up a thoughtful series of essays on educational technology: “I’ve spent nearly a decade dealing with school tech as a mother and half a decade considering it on the national scale as a journalist. If those years have taught me anything, it’s that we need to slow down. We implemented tech-forward education with little thought for the consequences, dreaming about what could be possible instead of carefully discerning what would be wise. Now we solve each tech problem with a new tech solution, layering program on program and screen on screen and disregarding how poorly many of these solutions play out in real life, at real schools, for real children.”
“An Amish Paradox, by Charles E. Hurst and David L. McConnell.” Jane Psmith distills a taxonomy of Amish communities and draws out some lessons for how the non-Amish might approach building communities with shared technological practices: “I originally picked it up because I was interested in the ways our technological choices shape who we are and how we live, and I thought the Amish might be a good case study of how to pick and choose among them (or even opt out of some things entirely). As I read, though, I had the sinking realization that it doesn’t work that way. . . . The real issue isn’t what you choose to do, it’s why you choose to do it.”
“Pepsi Worked to Keep Prices Higher at Retailers to Protect Walmart, FTC Found.” Sarah Nassauer reports on recently unveiled documents in a dismissed lawsuit that give a glimpse into how large corporations like Pepsi and Walmart work together to crowd out smaller stores: “The allegations shed light on the common industry practice of large consumer goods and food companies carefully managing their business with their largest retail customers because of the volume in sales at stake. Critics say the practice can force consumers to pay higher prices depending on where they shop and give large retailers unfair pricing power.”
“The Lost Generation.” Jacob Savage’s essay paints a bleak picture of a generational cohort who found the doors of many office rooms closed to them. The statistics he compiles are quite stunning: “The doors seemed to close everywhere and all at once. In 2011, the year I moved to Los Angeles, white men were 48 percent of lower-level TV writers; by 2024, they accounted for just 11.9 percent. The Atlantic’s editorial staff went from 53 percent male and 89 percent white in 2013 to 36 percent male and 66 percent white in 2024. White men fell from 39 percent of tenure-track positions in the humanities at Harvard in 2014 to 18 percent in 2023. In retrospect, 2014 was the hinge, the year DEI became institutionalized across American life.” (Recommended by Adam Smith.)
“The Real Christopher Lasch.” Paul Baumann pushes back against some conservative appreciators who distort Lasch’s body of thought: “Brooks’s agenda for turning back the Trump onslaught and reviving American democracy lacks Lasch’s realism about the necessity of limits and his skepticism about technological progress. “Historical tides shift when there is a shift in values,” Brooks writes. “A group of thinkers conceives a new social vision, and eventually, a social and political movement coalesces around it.” Lasch, by contrast, thought that you needed to change the way you live if you were to think differently about what is economically and politically possible.” (Recommended by Gillis Harp.)
