A Collection of Links
I would like to share some resources that helped keep me from over-worrying and staying grounded, especially in the last few months. Each of these either helped reaffirm my positive opinion of humanity, helped me understand systemic racism in America, helped me understand history better (and how racism has shaped us), or helped me understand how our political system *works*. I really think all of these are key to helping rebuild our government into something that works for everyone.
I expect I’ll be writing more about each of these and how they interrelate over the coming months.
Heather Cox Richardson’s writing is clear and her daily summaries help cut through the noise:
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/
I enjoyed them so much I read one of her books, ‘How the South Won the Civil War’ … this one is a HARD read but it is eye-opening:
https://beta.thestorygraph.com/books/f70b22ec-4576-4ee9-9879-b87d0583658c
The book ‘How to be an Antiracist’ by Ibram X. Kendi is the kind of read that helped a white guy like me start to understand racism in America. In short, we’re ALL racist. That’s OK, it just means we ALL have work to do to be better. (And the book is full of things to do to move from being unconsciously racist to consciously antiracist):
https://beta.thestorygraph.com/books/16036e3d-d8aa-4d5d-8720-9df505d2efdb
Ezra Klein’s podcast ‘The Ezra Klein Show’ and ‘The Weeds’ help me learn about the mechanics of politics:
https://www.vox.com/ezra-klein-show-podcast
https://www.vox.com/the-weeds
The book ‘Humankind: A Hopeful History’ by Rutger Bregman is the lynchpin — most Humans are mostly good, but we can be directed to do horrible things by people in authority:
https://beta.thestorygraph.com/books/cf3d8dfc-1f77-4aca-8ccd-e3cce45f8cf0
I’m going to take a time-out to repeat this one because it is so important:
Most humans are mostly good. Please don’t forget that.
The book ‘Factfulness’ by Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Ronnlund, and Hans Rosling uses data from the world to show that even though things are bad they are improving. For example, the number of people living in abject poverty is under 10% now. It used to be over 50%. OBVIOUSLY we have a very long way to go, but if we don’t give ourselves credit for how far we have come it is easy to despair. (Sort of like an election we just finished …)
https://beta.thestorygraph.com/books/8b50f984-bd10-4cff-afc6-49b562952cac
So most humans are mostly good and they’re improving the world bit by bit.
The podcast Pitchfork Economics is a REALLY good and approachable podcast on economics and why trickle-down economics (and economics-101 generally) is either now proven wrong, oversimplified, or a flat out lie. They mostly cover economics in the US starting from the Reagan era, but once you have read Heather Cox Richardson’s book you can see that the EXACT same thinking took over the US before as well.
https://pitchforkeconomics.com/episodes/
