Happy May Day, Friends!

Last year I set an ambitious goal to recap the history of May Day in a newsletter -- covering not just the Haymarket Affair but also a prelude and extended coda. It ended up taking months more than I expected (and being much more content than I expected), but maybe for this 140th anniversary of the original May Day March you might enjoy scrolling through some of the pictures.1

This year, in hopes of publishing on time, I’m focusing on just three words!

But first: some brief context!

Some Words Before The Words

I’ve been thinking about May Day ever since writing last year’s piece. Even if I myself could stop, the world seems intent on constantly reminding me of its existence. Through sheer happenstance, two hotels I stayed at in the past year were immediately adjacent to references to May Day.

In Xi’an, I was staying at a central-ish Novotel2 near one of the old drum towers3, and it turns out that across the street is a “May First Hotel”. In Mexico City, a hotel I picked mainly for its proximity to a laundromat4 turned out to be right off of a “May First Avenue”. Two of my favorite cities5 on different sides of the planet seemed to be calling out to me: “your 22,713-word essay on May Day wasn’t enough, you need to write more!” And so here I am.

So I’m going to focus on three particular words to make three points.

1. The Haymarket Martyrs Were, In Some Regards, “Capitalists”

2. Many Could Benefit from the Haymarket Sense of “Happiness”

3. The Upside of a More Milquetoast “Anarchism”

And I’m going to limit myself to 500 words per point.6 The most important lesson that dead men teach us is that time is precious.

Fieldenian Capitalism

As mentioned last year, my favorite artifact in the Haymarket Affair Digital Collection (or “the HADC”) is the articles of formation “The Anarchist Publishing Association”. Essentially, the defendants established a company to take ownership of their case-related intellectual property -- the speeches given at the Haymarket and those given in their defense trial. They each got ten “capital shares” in the established corporation.7 Does it get more capitalist than this? What do we make of this? Did they… sell out?

I obviously don’t think so, but there is nuance here that shallower discourse can miss. The Haymarket Eight were critics of a system where power and private ownership went unchecked. But that isn’t the same as opposing the core principles of personal ownership and voluntary association. Effectively, in founding their media startup, they found a way to operate both within their ethical principles as well as within their broader sociopolitical context.

So, what is a “capitalist”?

Even Fielden, the most moderate of the eight, only ironically refers to himself as a capitalist in his autobiography, so I don’t want to suggest they embraced this label. The term “capitalism” is used differently by different actors; this IMF explainer focuses on the general unregulated ownership and control of private property, whereas Wikipedia focuses on “private ownership of the means of production and its use for the purpose of obtaining profit”.8 Words can mean whatever we want, of course, but I think it’s helpful when definitions conflict to look to etymology for guidance. “Capital” is derived through French from the Latin “caput”, meaning “head”; this referred initially to the heads of livestock, an early form of capital that was owned and exchanged. Fielden’s status as an owner-operator of a teamster9 business, including his own fleet of horses, indeed makes him a capitalist in this originalist sense!

Why does this matter?

A couple reasons. First, as someone who tries to think coalitionally, I like that the concept of “Fieldenian capitalism” gives even those skeptical of unchecked power a way to participate in constructive politics rather than purely oppositional politics. Second, it grants permission to participate in a problematic system in a deliberate and ethical way. This gives some protection against the draw of nihilistic doomerism; the point is not to get too wound up in procedural details, but to use what we have to drive toward a better and happier world.

Speaking of happiness…

Fischerian Happiness

The four men condemned to death at the Cook County Courthouse gallows each had the opportunity to share some final remarks. August Spies opens with his most quotable: “The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are throttling today”.10 Albert Parsons closes out the four with “Let the voice of the people be heard” and a continued attempt to speak right up until the trap door dropped the men to hang. Of the set, though, it’s the earnest optimism of Fischer’s closing statement that most haunts me. After echoing Engel’s “Hurrah for Anarchy!”11 he adds “This is the happiest moment of my life”. The system has failed him and now he’s been sentenced to death for committing no crime. And he’s… happy about it?

So, what is “happiness”?

In my work with a couple different wellbeing research nonprofits, this is a question I think about a great deal. Academics tend to try to measure this in three different ways:

• affect measures (asking about frequency of positive and negative emotions)

• life evaluation (asking about perceived sense of quality of life), and

• eudaimonic factors (asking about structural characteristics that support human flourishing).

Where does Fischerian happiness fit in this? In general, he’s in the “eudaimonic” camp with a high focus on purpose. To simplify a bit: Fischer was a Marxist; Marx was a Hegelian; Hegel was a Lutheran12; Luther was a Christian13; and Christ was, in many ways, a Daoist14. We see these ideologies as incompatible, but what’s incompatible are the power structures that have built themselves around the ideas. What connects them is a shared view that the arrow of time is benevolent, revealing to us an eschatological utopia -- if we can only find a way to be in harmony with it.15

Fischer’s sense of happiness, then, resonates with global long-standing wellbeing traditions and academic measures, even as it also contrasts with some of our intuitions about what will bring us happiness.

Why does this matter?

We live in an uncommonly unhappy time. And Fischer’s comrades in the modern left seem to be particularly absorbed in doomerism and bad vibes. It seems plausible to me that our definition of happiness is part of what is driving this funk.

Fischerian happiness contrasts with how we’re told to think about happiness in most consumer advertising. We’re taught that the next new thing will fill our hearts, letting us escape lack and emptiness through action and acquisition. Certainly there is some happiness to be had in these pursuits, but it alone is not a complete strategy. Instead, we can find a different sort of satisfaction when we embrace the path ahead of us, no matter how bleak. It’s a sort of sublime peace where we stop fighting and let ourselves be caught up in the flow of the world.

Which isn’t to say that fighting is never necessary; our energy just can be more strategically focused. Our third word speaks to this more directly.

Parsonsian Anarchism

Because the scholarship on the Haymarket Affair tends to draw the relatively radical, Parsons can get a lot of flak as one of the most moderate members. With a personal ideological journey that spanned from Confederate to Radical Republican to Socialist to Anarchist, it’s perhaps unsurprising that his policy ideas and framings are peculiar.

The jury turned against Parsons based on articles he published in The Alarm in his “anarchist” period, but these were not articles he himself authored.16 The Alarm frequently published submissions that could occasionally be quite inflammatory; the “anarchist” ideas directly attributable to him are often surprisingly tame.

So, what is “anarchism”?

Here’s how Parsons describes his turn toward anarchism in his autobiography:

“In 1879 I withdrew from all active participation in the political labor party, having become convinced that the number of hours per day that the wage-workers were compelled to work, together with the low wages they received, amounted to their practical disenfranchisement. [...] I turned my activities mainly toward an effort to reduce the hours of labor to at least a normal working day so that the wage-workers might hereby secure more leisure from mere drudge work, and obtain better pay to minister to their higher aspirations. [...] Several Trade Unions united in sending me throughout the different states to lay the 8-hour question before the labor organizations of the country.”

To view a narrow policy like “reducing work hours” as an anarchist concept feels intuitively wrong to me. Anarchism is about playing loud music and graffiti-ing A’s in circles and the total abolition of the state; it’s so much more hardcore than just the 40-hour workweek, right?

What Parsons is doing here is combining a radical vision with an incremental, coalitional policy proposal. A fundamental reordering of the American political system would be a tough sell to many, but “more time off” has better public support and tilts the world toward the future he believes is possible.

To me, “Parsonsian anarchism” is about identifying the obstacles to human freedom in the world and thoughtfully designing popular and incremental political programs to remove those obstacles.

Why does this matter?

A lot of political activism today can skip the “hard part” of developing a popular incremental political program17, as if modern conveniences have made us as impatient with “the arc of progress” as we are with shipping. The Parsons approach focuses on immediate achievable objectives while maintaining long-term alignment with more dramatic goals.

This manner of thinking generalizes to other political projects as well. For me, I try to apply this approach in a globalist-populist context by designing new systems to help people better intuit the distribution of the global population -- whether with yìgions or dayborhoods. By confronting the obstacle of media distortion and providing alternatives, I can perhaps drive toward longer-term transnational neighborliness.

If you participate in a march today, you are continuing in this Parsonsian tradition. (Alongside his wife Lucy Gonzalez Parsons and his two children, Albert Parsons led the first May Day parade in Chicago on May 1st, 1886.) And so you may find it fruitful to reflect on his motivating question: What obstacles can be removed that are preventing the political engagement and independent flourishing of our neighbors and community members?

May Day Lessons to Live By

These three concepts fit in harmony with each other -- with Fieldenian Capitalism giving guidance for our own personal development, Parsonsian Anarchism guiding us for how we can improve society and Fischerian Happiness giving us a way to relate to the broader cosmos.

I think the three ideas can be summed up maybe something like this:

• Sustain Yourself by Engaging in Voluntary Association

• Embrace the Full Journey of Your Life Inclusive of Hardship

• Think Radically but Act Incrementally and Coalitionally

I hope you’ll agree with me that this episode of history should not be relegated to just socialists and communists, who adopt it and adapt it to serve their own narratives. Indeed, even the Haymarket Eight themselves spanned diverse political ideologies. It should be no surprise, then, that their lessons can guide most anyone to lead a life that balances sustainability, service and meaning.

Happy 140 years since the inaugural May Day March! Here’s to many more.

(PS. If you liked this article but wish it was, like, ten times longer: you should check out my May Day reflection from last year!)

As a traveling sort, I’m often asked how many countries I’ve been to. This is perhaps the most conventional way that travelers keep score1, but I don’t keep track of it.

I’m particular about how I craft metrics. Developing custom metrics was my specialty, working as a digital media researcher before stable, trusted measurement frameworks had become available. Measurement requires effort, and so thoughtfully selecting your metric ensures the time you spend to track it will be well-spent. And any good design process starts first with understanding the core problem we are trying to address.

For us, that means asking: Why do we travel? It’s not just for the fancy meals and the breathtaking views and to signal our socioeconomic status in dating app photos, right? Wherever we are, our locale has its own food and sights and ‘grammable glamoury.2 We don’t need to travel for those things. Plus, travel is annoying! It’s annoying to not know where we’ll find our breakfast. It’s annoying to file the paperwork to renew our passport. It’s annoying to sometimes forget our phone charger, and now our phone is dead and we can’t look up if 10,000 units of the local currency is a fair price or not. We endure this for some purpose. What is that purpose? And how might we measure that purpose?

I’d be curious to hear your answers, but as I’ve already written this essay some time prior to you reading it, it feels sensible that I go first. Personally, I try to understand what percentage of the contemporary human experience I have witnessed. My core travel goal is to optimize my odds of having literal common ground with the random folks whose life paths cross mine -- ideally, when they tell me where they are from, I can share with them how I’ve visited some landmark somewhere that is of some meaning to them. Travel gives me touchstones upon which I can build constructive working relationships.

In addition to this, though, travel is also an opportunity to see the world as it is, not merely as it is imperfectly represented. Three of my favorite quotes all play with the same principle: “the map is not the territory”, “all models are wrong; some models are useful”, “do not mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself”. And in this case, the map/model/finger in need of qualification is the notion of “the country”.

A Country Is Not A Country Is Not A Country

The nation-state is a relatively young framework, first incubated as a Westphalian religious war compromise in the 17th century, and then later strengthened in the 19th century when Napoleonic disruption of the Holy Roman Empire strengthened more provincial politickers. As a tool for reorganizing France’s major geopolitical rival, this system was effective for some time. Whether the nation-state serves humanistic aims is a matter of debate3. But as a framework to think about the varying peoples of the world, it’s deeply skewed.4

I spoke about “the screen door problem” earlier this year: the risk that an imprecise view of the world can cause us real harm. Our map of the world, unchecked by alternative models, can be a core distortion that poses such a risk. There are certainly some cases where understanding the political composition of the planet is occasionally useful, but it should not be our only way of envisioning the people of our planet. When we think of the world in countries, we prioritize politics over people. And we are inherently downweighting massive segments of the global population.

Here are three aspects to consider:

• Population: Countries vary wildly in population. The most populous country, India, has 2.9 million times5 as many people as the smallest, Vatican City. Half the world lives in just seven countries; the other half lives in ~180 countries. If you’re traveling to understand the people(s) of the world, countries aren’t the right framework.

• Sovereignty: While some countries make all their meaningful policies at the national level, this is quite rare. Most delegate some authority either upward to supranational bodies (the EU, Mercosur, ASEAN and ECOWAS) or downward to provinces, states or municipalities in a kind of federalist system. As for those nations that intend to govern their subregions uniformly, they often lack the state capacity to create this kind of uniform experience. Thus, even if you seek to see the world to understand its political variety, a purely country-based strategy still leaves you lacking.

• Legitimacy: Different countries have wildly varying origin stories. Some fought wars of independence, others split amicably, and still others were formed by external elites. Some are homogeneous ethnostates, whereas others are more complex liberal coalitions. Many of the largest people groups have states with seats in the UN, but many communities lack direct representation. When we see the world as a collection of countries instead of a collection of people, we lose these distinctions.

When we see the world as “parliaments and flags” instead of “dwellings and faces”, we are seeing a sort of funhouse misrepresentation of the planet. A warped sense of the world interferes with our basic ability to understand reality. Merely understanding reality without noble vision and purpose can make for bleak politics, but a confused worldview makes even the pure-of-heart dangerous.

The solution I’ve formed to this is one I’ve discussed before: “yìgions”6. Each region has 100 million people -- or “yì” (亿) in Mandarin Chinese.

I think this framework is helpful as you explore the world in any capacity -- not just with travel, which is not always an available option, but also as you use media to interact with the world’s peoples. With this sort of self-run “Media Input Diversity Audit”, I try to evaluate if my experiences are truly cultivating a robust and complex worldview or if I’m just “drinking backwash”.

As I mention in most articles, the concept of “Middling Content” is intended to reference that successful media is inherently social -- that is, it mediates a relationship between people. I highly recommend experiencing the world without such intermediation when possible, but pragmatically we must rely on the media tools available to us. I try to use my own travel as a way to establish a ground truth against which I can evaluate the various media platforms available, and I can share this with my friends and family here.

And because I use dashboards religiously, I have a few key ways I measure my progress on this goal.

Four Ways to See The World

I’ve been continuing to work on the “Holistic Accounting” platform I shared last year7, and in particular I’ve added tracking of various personal metrics cut by these isopopulous “yìgions”. (These constructs provide no relevant support to the tax-filing process8, so I have again filed for an extension.)

Though I hope to broaden the capabilities with time, here are four ways that I evaluate my personal journey to try to experience the breadth of the world’s population. (I am still using the 2022 yìgion breakouts, but I’ll have an updated 82-yìgion map later this year.)

Victory by Travel

The most straightforward way to track my experience of the world is just by looking at which yìgions I’ve personally visited. And indeed, I’ve visited a good handful of them! There are a few ways I can measure this with my personal data:

• I’ve been journaling daily since the beginning of 2020, and in the automated processing of the location I note at the top of many journal entries, I can see that I’ve journaled in 42 yìgions. I know this is missing a few, though, as I’m still working out some kinks in the automated geotagging component of my journaling system. So instead I’m turning to records I’ve had since 2012!

• I was able to pull the metadata from every photo I’ve taken on my iPhone since 2012, and that gives a higher count of 59 yìgions. But some of these are photos I took through airplane windows of yìgions I haven’t truly visited, such as Iran, Central Africa and West and East Bangladesh9. So I’d guess I’m somewhere in the neighborhood of 50.

Regardless of how I measure it, though, I’m over halfway! Generally it’s probably best practice to have visited more than one city/province/country in a yìgion to speak to its diversity, but alas “easy mode” will grant me victory with a single short visit.

All this said, there are factors outside my control that may prevent me from visiting every yìgion, and the world is seeming less open each passing year. Thankfully there are win conditions that I have more agency over.

Victory by Reading

I make an effort to read news from a globally dispersed cross-section of globally oriented publications, but I’m not currently tracking that. What I do track is my (modest) audiobook consumption.

Since I started tracking my books in 2020, I’ve read books by authors from 15 yìgions and books that cover 3410 yìgions. (I mostly read broad non-fiction/history11, so these areas are occasionally covered in a book but aren’t necessarily the focus.)

Lots to improve on in this methodology.

• I currently just pull this from a Google Sheet where I take notes on the books I read, but maybe I should integrate this into Goodreads or something.

• How can I validate the authenticity of a representation of a place in a work? How is fiction different from non-fiction in providing grounding of a place? What settings am I reading about from endogenous vs exogenous sources?

• Since I read history, how should I think about the balance of time periods in cultivating a clearer view of the world? Is it more important to read about the current region to say I’m truly “seeing” each of these distinct geosegments?

Books are wonderful because we can find interesting works about pretty much all regions of the world with relative ease. There have been millennia to compose them, and some of the best of them are quite old. Movies, with their mere century-and-a-bit of history, are tougher to source. Still, they are a delight and less of a commitment, which is why I’m considerably closer to this next win condition.

Victory by Filmgoing

Not every yìgion has its own movie industry -- but actors and directors tend to come from all over, and movies are a great way to encounter narratives of different parts of the world.

I’ve seen films set in 60 yìgions and from creative teams with representation in 72 yìgions. And, though it is perhaps less relevant, I’ve watched movies in 22 different yìgions.12

A film is the product of so many minds in collaboration, often from various backgrounds, so it’s hard to assess when a film is truly “of” a particular place. I’m running a global survey asking people about the movies they feel represent their communities, and I hope to report that out sometime soon.

I should probably expand this to include short-form video in some capacity, as some regions have more accessible short-form content than feature-length films. And further, the smaller creative team involved in many short-form videos means it is easier to get media that is wholly produced by the talent of a specific locale. Ultimately, it’s easier to craft a population-weighted cross-section of the world with short-form video.13

If I only have a couple minutes to explore a place through a media artifact, though, I far prefer listening to its people’s pop music.

Victory by Audio

As discussed before, I like to use music as a means of connecting with people across cultures. And just like anyone who listened to my 2022 UN Playlist14, I’ve connected with all 80 yìgions through music.

Even having “won” this particular goal, though, this framework still helps me find gaps to fill!

For example, I’ve listened to 20X more minutes of music from South Nigeria than North Nigeria. I also have general weakness in my listening in Central Africa as well as several yìgions in India and China. And there’s also taking this to the next level: each yìgion has roughly 10 “crormunities”15 inside it, so a higher-resolution playlist-picture is possible.

I will still take a moment to feel proud here, though. I had been developing this framework for years and first released this system on November 15th, 2022, the UN’s “Day of 8 Billion” when the global population was estimated to have crossed 8 billion people. ChatGPT would be publicly released as a “research preview” just two weeks later on November 30th. And while it could have made this kind of research so much easier, I’m kind of glad I got to do it the long and slow way.

A Unified Worldview Scorecard

While the granularity of four scores can be useful, it’s ultimately easier to put them into a single measure to evaluate incrementally. Just as an LLM-driven chatbot is the product of the content used to train it, we are the product of the experiences we feed into our eyes and ears. Understand your viewing of the world, and you’ll understand your worldview.

Though the length of time16 I’ve been tracking each of these measures varies, I can compile these data sources and plot my progress to bask in the marvel of line-go-up. This helps me assess my performance both annually and cumulatively.

I see this “score-keeping” exercise as mostly something for personal growth -- a competition with oneself. While I’m unsure I’ll be able to personally travel to all the yìgions, I do set the goal of achieving the three media-based win conditions.

But since managing so many win conditions is a lot to think about for so many yìgions, I instead frame my goal as follows:

• I seek to visit all the yìgions I am able to visit, hoping to experience a place “unmediated”17.

• For the places I can’t visit, I seek to connect with a narrative work (book/movie) about the place from a resident.

• For the places where I cannot access a narrative work, I seek to connect with an aesthetic work (music/art).

I see these as three incremental levels of “depth of experience”, where direct “unmediated” experience is deepest and aesthetic is lightest. (Ideally all three can be achieved, and I think experiencing them in order allows each step to enrich that which follows.)

At present, I’m at least at the “aesthetic” stage for all 80 currently defined yìgions.

I should be able to connect to 100% of the world’s yìgions at the narrative level in the next year or so, and then I can further aim to pass through a few adjacent yìgions each year. I’m hopeful that the travel climate will improve, but even if it doesn’t I will explore new ways of connecting to other parts of the world with less intermediation.

…Why Make Things So Complicated?

I’m not directly asked this often, but my sense is this is how most people respond to my creation of these frameworks. And further, I understand why people ask. This is all quite complicated. (I always think I can write one of these articles in a few hours and they usually end up taking weeks.) Many find their epistemic grounding is stable enough without a supplemental geographic model; a new geographic framework like this seems like a lot of squeeze for no juice.

First, it is my goal to make all of this less complicated -- though knowing 80 (or 82) yìgions is already relatively less complicated than knowing 195 countries. (Not to mention that the four-quad framework I discussed last year and the broader “7 Billionishes” framework both are simpler as well.) Second, I truly do think the nation-based framework is insufficient to understand the world and that this poses risks to those who live in it (i.e., us). And third, I think that valuing humans as humans means thinking about humanity in more human-derived terms.

But maybe part of what makes people inquisitive is a desire to understand if I’m bank-shotting toward some particular political objective. Maps are deeply political of course, and anyone reading this without a personal relationship with me is right to be skeptical; it is healthy media literacy practice to inquire about motivations and incentives.18 So I’m going to blurb a little about why this matters to me.

The idea of a better media has been central in my professional life. I worked as a media researcher for a decade, helping new media companies demonstrate the power of their platforms. At the time there was skepticism from advertisers about the new-fangled world of digital advertising, but now these companies -- Meta, Google, Twitter/X -- are the foundation of the American economy. My first jobs were also all in the media space more directly: music teacher, 35mm film projectionist, live sound technician, radio DJ and more. I want media to flourish in a human-aligned way. (The “alignment problem” is not a new one in the media space.) In my journal, I start each day asking myself how I intend to help improve the media19. This is, to be unseemly earnest, the vocation I’ve been working toward for decades of my life.

Even before my career, though, global media was central in my upbringing. I grew up all over the place, which I gloss over as “a series of foreign islands”, spending much of my time in international communities that provided me with physical spaces where I could interact across lines-of-difference with meaningful common ground. Schools and malls are media instruments too, and I was grateful that those of my adolescence provided such cosmopolitan grounding.

And yet it’s deeper than just my own upbringing. It is found in my ancestral people groups too20. In one line, it’s found in the voyageurs canadiens who traversed the St Lawrence and Mississippi water systems, connecting the Algonquian-language-family-speaking peoples in systems of trade, with some even fighting/dying to defend them. In another, I see it in the Ukrainian/Ruthenian subsistence farmers escaping an unraveling empire of the Old World to cultivate the Manitoban prairies of the New World. My own parents’ continuation of this journeyman spirit is what gave me my own transnational upbringing.

So I will continue in the mission and am hopeful that I can share frameworks that make the wide range of global media less intimidating and more parseable. It is not clear to me whether I will find a financially sustainable way to do this kind of research21, but it is my intention to at least provide some tooling that will help others on their journey to see the world as it truly exists -- as ~8.2 billion people and not ~195 countries.

Happy April!

First off, if you’re only reading this interested in the title story1 of the newsletter, you may want to just search for “Taylor Swift” in this newsletter and jump forward to that section. It’s a big chunk of this month’s newsletter and is robustly footnoted2 to argue that there’s insufficient evidence to prove that Ms. Swift is responsible for the documented fatalities. This newsletter is primarily designed to help everyday folks use media more mindfully, though, and to that purpose it will cover a range of academic paper summaries that you are of course welcome to skim.

Any readers upset about misdirection are encouraged to post on social media about how mad you are, linking this post so others can be mad with you. (A sense of shared social presence through media can be a driver of wellbeing, as researchers in Shandong, Shanghai and Iowa City demonstrated in papers #1 and #6 covered in this newsletter below.) If that’s not enough, consider becoming a paid subscriber to send me premium hatemail3, though even unpaid subscribers get these “healthy media research summaries” each month for free!

Subscribe now

For everyone else, some newsletter logistics: a core goal of mine this year is to try to build a community around researchers of media and wellbeing, which means I’ve created a new section just for these literature reviews under the label of “The Good, The Bad and the Monthly” -- so if you’re not particularly interested in this as a topic, you can unselect this section in your settings and you’ll still get general posts from me.

But let’s dig into some recent45 papers! I’m going to start by walking through some methodology6 of how the papers are selected, sharing some high-level observations about “wellbeing and media” as a general topic of research.

Some readers may feel like they need explicit permission to choose-your-own-adventure, so…

Paper Overview

As discussed last month, the process I’m using here has stages -- first identifying papers that match the boolean query “media OR wellbeing”, then filtering for the highest semantic score matches, removing papers without abstracts and completing a three-part agentic review. There were 3,896 papers identified this February and, of those, 155 qualified for analysis -- selected as examining the impact of media (as an independent variable) on wellbeing (as a dependent variable).

Of these 155 qualifiers, 65 observed positive effects of some kind and 89 observed negative effects. (One paper, a lit review in the American Journal of Education and Technology, found that social media “is neither uniformly harmful nor beneficial”.)

Part of what I like about this approach of keeping up on papers is that the authors cover a wider range geographically than I would come across in a more organic method.

Just scanning the map, a few curiosities pop out to me.

• Within the US, it does seem like the liberal northeast is more likely to publish about harms of media whereas the interior of the country seems to publish about its benefits.

• Europe also seems more likely to publish on this topic, with Western Europe’s research generally more critical of media’s effects than Eastern Europe’s.

• Indonesia publishes so much about this topic -- both in total output and on a per capita basis. (Three papers in today’s digest come from Indonesia.) Indonesia does not overindex on wellbeing papers in other categories I monitor, so this trend is notable, and I hope to investigate it further.

• There are considerably fewer publications from Africa and South America than we would expect given their population size.

This general trend of media-critical papers coming out of the US and Europe aligns somewhat with responses from a question I ask in the Mic Check Media Daily Global Omnibus7. Here we find that residents of Europe and the USA are among the regions where residents are most likely to believe that their media habits hurt their wellbeing.

Topic-wise, “social media” remains a frequent focus for these studies -- over half of the studies identified make it their target, 80 of the 155 identified papers. Of those 80, nearly four in five (77.5%) identify negative effects, ranging from FoMO, burnout, reduced physical activity, addiction, problematic use, reduced self-esteem and more. On the positive side, some studies found social media encouraging help-seeking, improving mood, increasing interest, increasing informedness and reducing stigmas.

I’m working on some new ways to visualize the social media results in particular, and to make it easier to understand the specific operationalizations examined, but for now you can note how social media dominates the “large affected population size” of my platform/effect chart.

Enough about methodology -- let’s dig into some of my favorite papers from the month!

What’s Good and Bad in Media Research: February 2026

Rather than having separate “good” and “bad” sections as I did last month, I’m experimenting with a back-and-forth flow -- hopefully this doesn’t leave readers with such a depressing vibe by ending with a parade of horribles. We’ll both start and end on positives!

Good: Podcasts!

In a survey of young adults, Shandong University’s Weiwei Li found that not only is listening to podcasts correlated with higher wellbeing, but that the mechanism at play is that podcasts create a greater sense of social presence and social support. I know podcasts help my wellbeing personally, and I think I can see Li’s model at work in my own listening habits -- connecting me with fellow listeners as well as generally keeping me company.

The paper is peppered with open-ended responses trumpeting appreciation for podcasts and the communities they create. Though the specific programs they mention are different from those we have in the US, I think the same principles likely apply here!

Full paper: “Podcast Listening, Perceived Social Presence, Perceived Social Support, and Subjective Well-Being Among Chinese Young Adults: Sequential Explanatory Mixed Methods Study”8

Bad: ChatGPT!

Researcher Arwa H. Arab, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, found that more time using ChatGPT was predictive of depression in a regression analysis of survey data from 200 students at King Abdulaziz University. Interestingly, though, a question about “comfort discussing mental health with ChatGPT” predicted lower levels of depression and lower levels of anxiety, suggesting a range of possible relationships between AI and wellbeing -- potentially driven by different user characteristics or usage patterns.9

Full paper: “Between coping resource and risk factor: ChatGPT and social media use in relation to anxiety, depression, and somatization”

Good: Mental Health Media Guidelines

The World Health Organization released specific media guidelines in 2023 to prevent deaths potentially attributable to media coverage. A team of researchers across the US, Canada and Australia reviewed 15 studies across 11 countries that examined the impact of similar media guideline efforts, finding that these government-led initiatives significantly increased compliance with best practices.

While the study didn’t demonstrate that these guidelines save lives, the authors suggest this is because only 3 studies in their meta-analysis included death rates. Their literature review, though, is persuasive in referencing other papers that have demonstrated the impact of media coverage on death rates. As such, I’m personally inclined to believe in their broader wellbeing impact.

Full paper: “Impact of Media Guidelines on Sxxxide-Related Reporting Quality and Sxxxides.”10

Bad: The Netflix Film “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World”!

In Surabaya, Nancy Anggita and Ade Kusuma conducted a set of interviews to find that the Indonesian rom-com The Most Beautiful Girl in the World can reinforce beauty standards for viewers.

Specifically, they conducted long-form, open-ended interviews with media professionals and analyzed them with a framework called Stuart-Hall Reception Theory (SHRT). This approach classifies “readings” of a film as either dominant, negotiated or oppositional, based on whether what is understood from a film is aligned with the intended/mainstream message.11 They found that nearly all interviewees (4 out of 5) accepted or partially accepted the beauty myth ideology the researchers identified in the film (“dominant” and “negotiated” reading positions), with only one interviewee taking a critical view (or “oppositional” reading position).

I probably would have preferred a larger sample size with a more structured survey instrument, because I have many more questions. What film characteristics are most conducive to oppositional readings? And what viewer characteristics drive dominant, negotiated and oppositional readings? Ultimately, though, I enjoyed seeing a theoretical tool applied in an empirical setting, and I’ll make sure to not watch The Most Beautiful Girl in the World!12

Full paper: “Penerimaan Pekerja Media terhadap Mitos Kecantikan pada Film The Most Beautiful Girl in the World di Netflix”13

Good: “Deinfluencers”!

A study by Florida Gulf Coast University researchers Gina A. Tran, Youngok Sunny Song and Khaled Aboulnasr explores a subset of anti-consumption content creators (whom they call “deinfluencers”) that are effective in shaping anti-consumption attitudes within their audiences.14 (Or that’s what the abstract says; the results and discussion are paywalled!15)

I wanted to point this paper out anyway because I’ve worked on many, many ad effectiveness studies as a market researcher, and this might be the first “reverse ad effectiveness study” I’ve seen, and if the conclusions truly are supported by their data and methodology, it shows the design of our media system can shape our values and beliefs about consumption.

Full paper [paywall]: “Power to the deinfluencers: how parasocial relationships drive anti-consumption among young consumers”

Bad: Smartphones!

For those searching for it: “Taylor Swift”!

A Harvard Medical School paper making the rounds is media catnip because it could implicate Taylor Swift in the deaths of 500+16 people over the past decade. More generally, though, it found that the release of major, highly publicized albums on streaming services is correlated with an increase in traffic fatalities. The findings suggest that using smartphones to play music while driving is a serious public health concern worthy of deeper consideration. There’s honestly a lot that is interesting in this paper, so I’m going to spend a bit more time with it.

The methodology focuses on the “Top 10 Most Streamed Albums in a Single Day from 2017 through 2022”, which in addition to the 3 Taylor Swift albums includes 2.5 Drake albums as well as albums from Bad Bunny, Kendrick Lamar17, Harry Styles and Kanye West. This quasi-experimental design is very cool, but there are a couple of reasons why I think we can’t attribute traffic fatalities to any particular artist. And in describing these reasons, it is my hope to deliver on the promise of my clickbait headline and exonerate these artists from all suspicion.18

“I Look in[to] People’s Windows[’ Effects on P-Values]”

(Or: “[Publication Incentive Impact on Academic] Paper [Postu]Rings”)19

The crown jewel statistic of the paper is a p-value of 0.01 when comparing album release days to non-album release days, suggesting that it is extremely unlikely this effect is due to chance. But I’m going to cast some doubt on this statistic by examining three window choices.

First, there’s the choice of the 21-day comparison window. This selection is explained as providing “the same weekday one week before and after the release as well as the weekends immediately before and after”, but a 15-day window (±1 week) seems to be the most obvious choice containing both proximate weekends and both proximate weekdays.20 A natural second choice to strengthen the sample size would be a robust 29-day window -- including two full weeks before and after. The 21-day window (±10 days) feels somewhat arbitrary. The elegance of Figure 2A, which shows the fatality statistics for each day in the focus window, is driven in part by the fact that the “norm” is set to 10 days prior to release. If you also include non-centered comparison window possibilities like “past week”, “past two weeks”, “past three weeks” or even “past four weeks”, you can easily arrive at 6 alternate comparison windows that could seem more intuitive than ±10 days.

Second, there’s the choice of the treatment window -- that is, that only the date of release would be considered “elevated” in terms of risk. Their own Figure 1 clearly shows elevated levels of listening for on the second day (the first full day of album availability), and slightly elevated streaming rates through the first week. The release day is probably the most obvious choice here, but there are a couple of justifiable approaches one could take.

Third, there’s the choice of study window. The study focuses on data between 2017 and 2022, and the reasoning for this window is not clarified. As someone who is writing about February papers in April, I understand that there are limits for our ability to incorporate the most recent information into analyses, but the 2023 FARS data has been available for about a year so I’m naturally curious whether they tried to include it. (The study window starting in 2017 is, as far as I can tell, because that’s how far back this dataset from Spotify goes.) Further, there is a choice about how to apply this study window -- taking the top ten albums across the entire window rather than the top 20 or the top 25. Another approach could be selecting the top albums from each year, as Spotify adoption drove increases in usage over this period. Thus, their top ten skews toward later years, with half of them from the latest (2022) and none21 from the earliest (2017). Of the three window choices, this seems the most defensible, but the optionality here is still important to note.

Taken together, these three choices around these three windows create important context for viewing the 0.01 p-value. In a single prespecified analysis, a p-value of 0.01 would be unlikely to arise by chance. But acknowledging 7 possible comparison windows, 3 possible treatment windows and 2 possible study windows means we should be less surprised if one of the 4222 combinations of these windows might have such a low p-value.

To be clear, there’s no definitive proof that these researchers tried other window combinations in their research process, but some level of data exploration like this is normal in the research process. When it is done excessively, it is called “p-hacking”, and its widespread practice in published research is a driver of “the replication crisis” -- that the findings of many papers do not seem to hold up to scrutiny. The findings would be more convincing if other windows were demonstrated to be consistent.

Here at Middling Content, we often reflect on how media platforms can distort truth to serve platform incentives. This is not just a feature of the latest social media platforms; it has also long been a challenge in published research. I don’t blame academics, who face intense pressure in seeking rare paid positions and grant opportunities. And I don’t blame individuals who are drawn to morbidly certain conclusions in papers like this one. This is our nature. When we drive past an accident, we slow our vehicle to inspect the wreckage. We are inherently dark creatures who want to contemplate the death count of “All Too Well (10 Minute Version)”.23

“[More Album] Hits [May Have] Different [Fatality Rates]”

(Or: “I Know [Other] Places [That Suggest All Artists Aren’t to Blame]”)24

Of course, it’s possible that the analysis replicates across various windowing choices or with new data in the future. Even in that case, though, I think these findings do not condemn any particular artist.

To explain why, it’s helpful to ask “what is really being measured here”. On the podcast The Argument25 released last Thursday, Matt Yglesias made a good point that this is likely a substitution effect. I’ll go further: in theory, an album that is all bangers end-to-end26 would not require people futzing with their phones. When a new album is released, though, people don’t have set playlists and have to actively curate; it’s perhaps this higher likelihood of track-skipping that creates the observed effect.

Track-skipping27 would be an interesting explanatory mechanism because this presumably varies considerably across albums and artists. I expect that these top ten albums have varied levels of skipping, and that means it’s possible that some artists on this list are less responsible for the observed increase in fatalities. There’s variation here. Some albums (and thus some artists) are conceivably innocent.

My suggestion for a follow-up study28: do new albums with more skipped tracks2930 cause more deaths? Has single-driven culture not just meant the death of the album as an artform31 but also the death of ~50 people per tentpole album release? The music industry should take note: “filler tracks are killer tracks”.32

“You’re On Your [Phone], Kid”

(Or: “I Wish You Would [Not Use Smartphones While Driving]”)

(Or: “Getaway [From Your Phone While In The] Car”)

Rather than seeing this study as a critique of uneven albums, though, the intended (normie) reading of the paper would be that smartphones are seriously dangerous for drivers.33 The days when our favorite artists release albums are days when we are more likely to switch from our usual driving routine -- a long-form podcast, a playlist or a radio station -- to instead explore something new that will require more intervention, but we certainly choose to skip tracks on other days as well. No matter what you’re listening to, take seriously the risks of even minor and brief smartphone use. Letting that subpar song play out until the end might just save your life.

(You can share this newsletter with a Swiftie to trick them into reading a public service announcement about smartphones and driving! And if you are a Swiftie and had this forwarded to you: someone cares about you and wants you to be safe!)

Full paper: “Smartphones, Online Music Streaming, and Traffic Fatalities”34

Good: Television Public Health Campaigns!

Researchers Musa Mathias and Gana Hope conducted a survey in central Nigeria’s Nasarawa State, finding that public health television campaigns were effective at sharing information with citizens in a broadly trustworthy manner.

My favorite stat was that 95.7% of those surveyed considered the info from the campaign to be “authentic”, with only 2.3% disagreeing with that statement. Though I can’t know for sure, I do wonder if the trustworthiness of TV campaigns in other parts of the world has eroded? That stat sounds so high to me. Further, I’d be interested in how wide the gap is between the trustworthiness of television and of other media.35 As television becomes less central in our media landscape, public health communicators may lose a valuable, relatively high-trust platform.

Full paper: “Attitude and Perception of Nasarawa State Residents towards COVID-19 Television Awareness Campaign”

Bad: Bullet Screen Comments!

If you’ve ever watched content on Bilibili.com36 or similar platforms, you’re probably familiar with “danmaku” or “bullet screen comments”, text written by other viewers that flies across the screen during your viewing. Mingyue Zhang, Lei He and Haipeng (Allan) Chen found that excessive use of these “bullet screen comments” can reduce enjoyment of videos. A moderate quantity, though, could enhance experience quality and increase the “likes” of a video -- a classic “middle path” to wellbeing that we like to see here at Middling Content.37

As for the sweet spot at which this feature tips from useful to annoying, I was not able to view this paper in full, so I’m going off of the abstract here as well. So use sparingly and with caution!

Full paper [paywall]: “Socially engaged or informationally overwhelmed? Effect of bullet-screen comment quantity on video-liking”

Good: “Film Therapy”!

Back to Indonesia, where an empirical evaluation of “film therapy”38 found it increased pro-social behavior in students. A team of researchers at Bandung’s39 Universitas Nasional Pasim (Balqis Arwa Aziizah, Muhammad Fikri Izzuddin, Raden Aurora Sativa Hawa Gantara and Sri Mulyeni) found in a pre/post survey that the short-film Indifferent40 increased self-reported empathy on a battery of five-point Likert scales.

(While the English-language abstract claims they didn’t find significance, Table 5 clearly shows “signifikansi” of 0.003 -- making this the first abstract I’ve ever seen that undersells the research it summarizes, truly worthy of some kind of award!)

Full paper: “Efektivitas Terapi Film dalam Meningkatkan Empati”

Bad: AI-Generated Visual Content!

A team of researchers at Christ University in Bangalore conducted a literature review of studies, finding that AI-generated visual content reduced self-esteem with pronounced negative effects for young people, the economically disadvantaged and women. Other negative effects they found in recent studies observed that AI images can distort identity, promote social comparison, and promote dependency on AI visuals for psychological validation.

Much of the current academic perspective is depressing in this way, but there were a few positive relationships noted.41 To me, the most interesting of which were a couple papers from 2024 and 2025 that discuss the potential for AI-generated visuals in therapeutic contexts.

The balance of papers they draw on gives a range of perspectives. To some degree, I’m not so sure we can draw as much from papers evaluating generative AI visual content from as far back as 2023, as this technology changes so rapidly. And yet, with many papers from the past year, I appreciate this overview!

Full paper: “A Systematic Review on the Psychological Implications of AI-Generated Visual Content for Users’ Self-Esteem and Self-Perception”

…and Good?: AI-Generated Visual Content!

Too recent for the above literature review, though, was a new study about AI-generated visual content from a trio of researchers at Universitas Pendidikan Ganesha in Northern Bali. I Gusti Ayu Agung Mascintya, Putu Aditya Antara and Rendy Setyowahyud found that the AI video creation tool Powtoon could be used to localize children’s educational content, which improved student mental health.

It’s an interesting notion when much of the conversation about AI video is negative, but there are a couple missing pieces of the analysis before drawing conclusions: (1) I’d like to see measures for both educational outcomes and mental health outcomes, and (2) the study could benefit from a comparison group of traditional (non-localized and non-AI) content. The upside of representational impact may indeed outweigh the downside of the “slop” factor -- but without a comparison it’s hard to say!42 That said: still an interesting angle on the potential benefits of AI-generated visual content!

Full paper: “Pengembangan Video Pembelajaran Digital dengan Menggunakan Powtoon Berbasis Kebudayaan Bali dalam Menstimulasi Kesehatan Mental Anak”43

Tune In Next Month

I added a few new visuals and statistics versus last month, but there’s still lots to improve.

My focus for the next couple months will be on the following.

• Taxonomy Improvements: Some papers cover multiple applications, so it’d be better to treat app-specific studies as both about the particular app and about broader categories. The study about smartphones and traffic fatalities, for example, should count not just as about smartphones but also about Spotify and streaming audio.

• Broadening Scope: My automated paper identification process misses some papers that are a good fit for this, so I’m looking to improve coverage with more deliberate testing against known examples.

• Social Media: It has been huge in the news lately and dominates research about media and wellbeing, but I haven’t really touched it because there’s so much to dig into. I’m hoping to have a “special edition” on social media in the near future.

• Shorter: This newsletter needs to be so much shorter. For me. For you. Next time will be shorter. It will help with timeliness.

Lastly, special thanks to my former research advisor who sent me a paywalled paper I couldn’t access last month! I will try to find some kind of institutional affiliation to access more of these papers in the future; in the meantime, I’ll continue to do my best with just abstracts!

And if you ever want to nominate a specific paper for me to cover, you can send me a direct message and I’ll try to include it in its respective month!

See you later this April when I’ll dig deeper into the findings of March!44

And if you are a researcher in media and wellbeing, or interested in using media more mindfully, please subscribe to The Good, The Bad and The Monthly and send me nominations for future papers!

Subscribe now

I’ve counted at least 4,774 papers about how the media impacts wellbeing last year. How many did you read? How many did you hear about secondhand?1

It’s hard to keep track of all the research that gets published, and I myself haven’t followed as closely as I’d like to. I’ve written about how media incentives aren’t always aligned with the interests of audiences, and science journalism is one of the clearest examples of this.

This challenge is downstream of three other challenges:

• Reading Papers Is Time-Consuming

• Assessing Papers Requires Expertise

• There Are Lots and Lots of Papers

Last year, I created a system to track papers published related to my particular focus on media and wellbeing, and I’m hoping to utilize this to help non-specialists (with still some level of quantitative background) follow what’s going on in the research literature. And by covering both media harm risks and healthy media opportunities, my goal is to avoid the clickbait doomscroll aesthetic of other newsletters.

Since my personal new-year-to-new-birthday interregnum has elapsed, I’m going to apply some of my own reflections to make Middling Content better. This will be a monthly newsletter that tries to help you understand what might be good and what might be bad in the world of media.

A few values are going to guide this project:

• Focus: I think the newsletter last year had become a bit sprawling, and I’d like to have a core that helps me build toward a specific objective. I may still have a long-form post every once-in-a-while, but this monthly structure will give a more stable architecture.

• Community: Whereas the newsletter was mostly pushing my own ideas and reflections in 2025, I also would like to help connect scholars studying this space with each other.

• Usefulness: While maintaining more of a reflective travelogue has been fun, it’s more obvious how a digest like this can help people make everyday choices about how to interact with various media tools -- and even to design their own media tools as AI empowers more direct management of our media and information pipelines.

And thus I’m introducing “The Good, The Bad and The Monthly”: a breakdown of recent academic articles on media and wellbeing that attempts to distill all these insights into something actionable. I hope to keep this running through the year at least, and if people find it useful or interesting I can continue it further beyond that.

Some extra on methodology since this is the first post, but feel free to skip ahead to “What’s Good”, where I talk about findings that affirm media doing good in the world. (Or just skip ahead to the “Media Impact on Wellbeing…” biplot if you’d like!)

How to Boil the Ocean

There’s a lot of sloppy thinking on what media is good and bad. It’s fun to be sloppy sometimes, but it’s important to occasionally be non-sloppy too.23 (Often, even.) So I’ve created a four-stage pipeline that I’m using to process papers on media and wellbeing: find, filter, finesse & assess.

Here’s what that can look like.

1. Find. Each week I query Semantic Scholar identifying papers that relate to both “media” and “wellbeing”.

2. Filter. Calculating semantic distance toward both “media” and “wellbeing” as topics within the papers. (See my essay on “Law & Quoter” for an explanation of semantic distance as a concept, particularly the section on Wordspace.) Top 200 papers with abstracts progress to the next round.

3. Finesse. First, a chat completion review to confirm that both “wellbeing” and “media” are explored in the publication, and at least one of the two is central to its research question and conclusions. Then, a second chat completion review to confirm that the paper specifically looks at media impacting wellbeing.

4. Assess. A LLM-supported style transfer into structured data, identifying if and how each article observes a specific media type’s impact on wellbeing. Impacts are further quantified in a synthetic maxdiff exercise to estimate relative valence of impacts.

Ultimately, the exercise produces a dataset of media types and their evaluated impact on wellbeing.

From here, I can pick a few particular papers to highlight.

Let’s take a stab at this to show what that could look like!

What’s Good?

Researchers Jan Boehmer and Kyriaki Kaplanidou calculated that the TV program Welcome to Wrexham increased employment, per capita GDP and mental health within the city of Wrexham, Wales. (Full paper: Did Deadpool Save a City? The Social and Economic Impact of “Welcome to Wrexham”.)

An experimental study conducted by researchers at Lafayette College and the Economic and Social Research Foundation in Tanzania found listening to 90-second radio dramas nearly doubled willingness to report intimate partner violence. (Full paper: The effect of radio dramas on willingness to report intimate partner violence.)

Researchers at the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences in Nanjing University found that playing video games with nature settings increased the likelihood of donations to environmental causes and support for pro-environmental policy. (Full paper: Techno-Biophilia Design in Video Games and Its Positive Social Outcomes.)

Researchers Fiona Chalk and Chillonda Agyeman found that music can reduce reliance on medication for dementia patients. (Full paper: The role of music in supporting people with dementia in acute hospitals.)

Interviews conducted by Ikechukwu Williams Eke and Abiodun Salawu found that BBC News Igbo increased prestige and pride associated with the language of Igbo in Nigeria. (Full paper: Impact of digital media on language revitalization: the case of BBC News Igbo.)

Cici Situmorang, Lia Amalia Ramadhani, Iqna Nur Fadilah and Raffa Fahdiaz Romadhon at Institut Prima Bangsa attributed increased learning motivation and decreased anxiety in educational environments to the Sabrina Carpenter “Nobody’s Son” music video.4 (Full paper: “Meningkatkan penguasaan kosakata Bahasa Inggris melalui video lagu Nobody’s son”)

Food vlogging content was found to increase “cultural curiosity” and visiting intention by researchers Md. Salamun Rashidin, Babak Taheri, Giacomo Del Chiappa and Sara Javed. (Full paper: From cultural curiosity to culinary sustainability: how social food reels foster food culture preservation.)

What’s Bad?

On the other hand, researchers at University of Pennsylvania and University of Delaware found that viewers were more likely to eat a cookie instead of an apple after watching food vlogging content that includes sponsorships. (Full paper: Your media diet is impacting your actual diet: The effects of influencer “What I Eat in a Day” YouTube videos on influencer perceptions and nutrition behaviors.)

A literature review from Ibrahim Taylan Dortyol, Merve Nalbant, and Asli Guven at Akdeniz University explored all the various ways that selfies impact body image. It’s paywalled but I’ll go halfsies with anyone interested. (Full paper: Selfie Behaviours and Body Image Concerns: A Systematic Literature Review and Future Research Directions.)

Xiaofan Yue and Xin Cui at Huangshan University found that “emotion enhancement motives” toward binge-watching makes addiction more likely. (Full paper: Binge-watching addiction as an emotion regulation way of coping loneliness.)

Researchers at Ramathibodi Hospital, Siriraj Hospital and the Institute of Child and Adolescent Mental Health in Bangkok, Thailand found that watching short-form videos about parenting was correlated with lower scores on evaluations of parenting knowledge -- whereas reading online materials was correlated with higher scores.5 (Full paper: The Association Between Media Use for Parenting Information (MUPI) and Parenting Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices Among Parents of Children Aged 6-19 Years.)

Kristine Schönhals, Christopher Lalk and Silja Vocks at Osnabrück University found that “fitspo” and “thinspo” content -- content that glamorizes fit or thin body types -- decreased happiness and body appreciation while increasing body dissatisfaction. (Full paper: Fitspiration, Thinspiration, Body Positivity, and Body Neutrality Contents on Image-Based Social Media: Associations With Body Image, Mood, Self-Esteem, and Disordered Eating Behavior in Women With and Without Self-Reported Eating Disorders-An Ecological Momentary Assessment Study.)

Researchers at Universitas Tarumanagara surveyed Gen Z LinkedIn users and found that more focus on maintaining their digital identity was correlated with more feelings of “social comparison”, which can be correlated with anxiety or insecurity. (Full paper: MODERASI KEBIJAKSANAAN DALAM HUBUNGAN IDENTITAS DIGITAL DAN PERBANDINGAN SOSIAL PADA GENERASI Z PENGGUNA LINKEDIN.)

Researcher Dhelittya Finaliyani Putri and the Islamic Communication and Broadcasting Department examines Italian brainrot and speculates on how it may impair concentration of students.6 (Full paper: “Fenomena Anomali Konten Digital dan Dampaknya terhadap Anak-anak”.)

And of course there were 124 papers on the impact of social media -- the majority of them finding negative effects and correlations, with 34 seeing positive effects and 89 seeing negative effects.

I need a dedicated methodology just to think about the social media research, to be honest. I don’t really have that yet. I’m working on it.

What’s Next?

This is a first pass, and since I have this constructed as a data pipeline it’ll be easier to build on this in future months.

I think there are three main areas I can continue to improve.

• Timeliness. It’s March and I’m writing about January! It does take a little time for academic articles to be uploaded to source databases, so I’m okay with leaving a little time between “end-of-month” and the next post, but I’m hoping to be closer to “a week or two after the month ends” for my publication cadence.

• Density. I think I’m losing too much value in the distillation process, and I would like to increase coverage of agentic-filtering and have a better measure of “methodology quality” -- differentiating pure experiments from natural experiments from correlational analysis, weighing concerns about external or internal validity, contemplating sample sizes.

• Accessibility. I’ve been told that some of you find it easier to listen to a podcast than to read a newsletter, and so I’m trying to figure out if I can use a different format. I also am trying to incorporate more visuals and scorecards.

As always, I’m open to your thoughts on how a breakdown of a month’s worth of research can be valuable to you; if you like or dislike a certain approach, please let me know!

Thanks for following this journey as always!

Stay attuned!

Harry

Despite being my 37th birthday overall, today was my first ever summer birthday1. Such is a perk of the Southern Hemisphere, where I’m continuing to prepare for a conference presentation in Buenos Aires. My presentation will be about more humanistic ways to sample the world’s population in surveys based on geography, but today’s newsletter focuses less on spatial segmentation and more on temporality!

Specifically, I’m going to try to make a case for thinking of birthdays more collectively, imagining how a simple connection like a shared birthday can stitch together a global community. Because it’s not just my birthday today. Many have this day as their birthday. And as my birthday gift to others celebrating their 37th year, I’d like to increase the sense of connection between all of us in our cohort.

What Is “Birthday Nationalism”?

In general, we think of birthdays as our uniquely special day, and it’s rare to know people with our exact date of birth. Not just “the same birthday”, which is more common, but the full year-month-day combo. I personally only know of one person! Often we think of our birthday as something that is particularly ours; we don’t want to share it. But in a world where we all are feeling increasingly alienated from each other, the birthday could be a tool of shared identity -- one that cuts across and interweaves with other traditional identity constituencies.

We feel close to people who were born in and grew up in the same places that we did. But this “closeness” is in some sense a misconception.

Due to a mix of Earth’s axial rotation, its orbit of the sun and the sun’s spiraling around our galaxy, very few of us are actually born near each other in an absolute sense. For example, someone born 24 hours after me in the exact same city as me would have actually been born ~20 million miles2 away cosmically; they’d be much closer if they were born at the same time as me on the other side of the planet -- Perth, Australia is roughly 11,400 miles from where I was born in Florida, as far away a city as you can find on Earth, but it’s over 1,000x closer.3 With cosmic distance, where you are born is mere noise; it’s all about when you were born.

It’s for this reason that I believe we should feel more of a kinship with those who share a particular date of birth. Though you’ll never return to that part of space Earth occupied when you were born, that space still exists and ties together those born then.

I call the region of space where a day’s worth of the human population was born a “Dayborhood”. In this sense, we are all diaspora populations far from home. And so “Birthday Nationalism” imagines a sort of community created by the shared spatial origin, and extends the same logic of association and community that we’re familiar with in geographic “nations”.4

As for my birthday, I like to imagine this cross-section as the Republic of February Twenty-Seventh Nineteen Eighty-Nine (RoFTSNEN5).

I don’t think I currently have any subscribers from this particular corner of the cosmos, but I’m hopeful that walking through an exercise imagining this community as cohesive and cooperative is instructive or at least interesting. And you don’t need to have my particular birthday to help make my birthday wish come true.

A Birthday Wish

As you know, on our birthdays we are supposed to make wishes, and so I have a wish. And I’m not allowed to share what it is, for such are the rules with birthday wishes, but without sharing the desired outcome, I can still provide guidance on how you can help actualize this wish.

If you know anyone who was born on February 27th, 1989, please share this newsletter with them!6 You can send them something like this: “Some weird guy on the internet is trying to connect all of the people born on February 27th, 1989 and I thought you might want to know. Here’s the link: substack.middlingcontent.net/p/the-state-of-the-dayborhood.” It would be much appreciated!7

This next section is primarily for anyone who happens to share my particular date-of-birth. Other people can read it too though if they want; hopefully it demonstrates how this kind of community-building exercise can be at least amusing.

“My Fellow RoFTSNENians…”

If my wish has come true, hopefully this message has found its way to at least a few others born on February 27th, 1989.

In full, we are a diverse sample of the planet’s people. At earliest, some of us could have been born at midnight in Kiribati (+14 UTC), and others could have been born just before midnight on Baker Island (-12 UTC). That just-short-of-50-hour8 range covers a good length of Earth’s cosmic arc through space -- over 40 million miles! (Or 65 million km, which I guess is what most of you prefer?)

I say this to recognize we cover much ground among us, even within our distinct subset of outer space where we all breathed our first breath. And we also cover much ground in the work we do! From Wikipedia, I’ve learned a good amount about us as a constituency! We seem to be prolific specifically in athletics, music and the visual arts.

Achievements in Athletics

Athlete seems to be by far the most common profession among the Wikipedia-documented of us! Mostly retired, which I suppose makes sense for us all turning 37 today, but still I want to call out some past successes -- if only I was following everyone here a decade ago, I would have witnessed some pretty impressive wins!

• As a community, we have a full set of Olympic medals! Stephen Kiprotich of Uganda won the gold medal for the Marathon at the London Olympics; Varlam Liparteliani won the silver in Judo at the Rio Olympics; and Koo Ja-cheol of South Korea won an Olympic bronze in 2012 (and also captained his National Team at the 2014 FIFA World Cup).

• Kento Miyahara won his 7th Triple Crown Heavyweight Championship in September of last year, and defended it as recently as this past Monday in Tokyo.

• Also in Tokyo this year, Richard Ringer of Germany finished 13th in the Marathon at the 2025 World Athletics Championships that took place there in September.

• Muhammad Inam is a two-time Commonwealth Games wrestling champion who is now secretary of the Pakistan Wrestling Federation.

• Takahiko Kozuka is a Japanese figure skater! Nina Haver-Løseth is a Norwegian alpine ski racer! Anna Vozakova is a Russian beach volleyball player!

• Carter Jones is an American road-racing cyclist! David Fletcher is a British mountain biker! Donato De Ieso is an Italian cyclist!

• Anna Punko is a Russian handball player! Henrique Teixeira is a Brazilian handball player! Alen Ovčina is a Bosnian handball player! Petit Minkoumba is a Cameroonian weightlifter! Emil Stær is a Danish sprint canoeist!

• Aurélie Groizeleau was on the French National Rugby Team, then became a referee in 2021. (Her Wikipedia says she “breeds 7,000 pairs of pigeons at her parents’ house” -- that’s 14,000 pigeons!)

• There are lots of footballers! Vitalij Lux is a footballer! David Button is a footballer! Facundo Moreira is a footballer! Amir Abu Nil is a footballer! Carolyne Anyango is a footballer! Ivan Matošević is a footballer! Lloyd Rigby is a footballer! Charles Johnson and James Shaw are football players, which is what footballers are called in American football! This isn’t even all the footballers9; there are some birthday discrepancies that are causing me to omit some names. There are so many footballers!

Making Much Music

There are also quite a few of us in music! I’ve enjoyed listening to songs from us while writing this email, and I wanted to share some highlights from this past year in particular! We’re quite creatively productive as a community!

• Hurricane Chris, who you probably remember as the singer of the 2007 #7 Billboard crunk hit “A Bay Bay”, released a new album last year, Hurricane Season 2.5!

• Shota Shimizu released a new album last summer (Pulsatilla Cernua) and released the tour album for that record today -- on our collective 37th birthdays! (We did not directly collaborate on this, but I’m delighted by the happenstance!)

• Peruvian singer Leslie Shaw released a deluxe version of her 2024 record Hay Niveles just last October!

• Sam Sweeney is on tour and is playing in London in April for any FoFTSNENians in the area. (He has a song on the soundtrack of About Time10, which I specifically remember enjoying when I saw the movie in theatres; I didn’t even realize we were birthday-brethren at the time!)

• Esther Huang is in the film 功夫 -- it just came out over the Chinese New Year holiday but I haven’t seen it yet! (She was a member of the Taiwanese girl group Hey Girl!)

• Eurovision competitor Jessika Muscat, who competed in 2018 with the submission “Who We Are”, released a new song “Empire” in June of last year!

• American Idol Season 10 competitor Stefano Langone released two new singles this past year, the more-listened-to of which is “Celebration”!

• While I couldn’t find anything recent from him, Kristof Hering finished in sixth place in the ninth season of Deutschland sucht den Superstar in 2012! He’s still singing somewhere I expect?

Visual Arts Victories

And if you’re looking for something to watch, you’ll be happy to hear that our Dayborhood is also active in visual arts! Here’s a sampling!

• Matt Lapinskas, best known for his role of Anthony Moon in the BBC sitcom EastEnders, was in the film Dream Hacker that came out in June!

• Mike Castle voiced a character in the short film MRI (or, Michael Returns Indefinitely) released last October, and he has a songwriting credit on “I Hated Love Songs” on a Dan Mangan album released last May!

• Arabelle Raphael11 won an award for “Favorite Inked Model” in May from an online platform that I won’t name because its adult nature may trigger spam filters, but you’ve probably heard of it. It’s in her Wikipedia bio!

• Cam Kirk is an American photographer known for his work with top hip hop artists -- and he has a Substack, where he posts weekly with a consistency I aspire to one day achieve!

• And there are folks who I couldn’t find recent projects for: Brittany Ashton Holmes was in The Little Rascals, and Dayane Mello is a model and television personality in Brazil!

This was merely a small sample of our successes! It feels like a long version of that verse in “Piano Man”, except instead of everyone’s life being depressing, everyone is absolutely killing it!12

All in all, I found 97 of FoFTSNENians in Wikidata13 with Wikipedia pages about us; I focused on just folks with Wikipedia pages in 3 or more languages, so I’m sure I missed a lot. The point of this exercise is to be aware that we’re a pretty cool group of people!

Broad Community Trends

It’s been fun to dig into individual stories, but I’m also interested in general trends among us as a population. This is a bit trickier to explore. Estimating how many of us there are around would have probably been too complex a task the last time we all had our birthday. But since we live in an ephemeral era of subsidized computation, I figured why not use it to try to get some insights to try to size up our “Dayborhood” in the world.

I used the same prompt to create deep research14 reports from Gemini, Claude15, DeepSeek16, Mistral, Grok17 and ChatGPT. I’ve linked to each report so you can review them yourself; there’s lots of information about actuarial estimates! Most important to me, though, was trying to get a sense for our current population size.

That puts our current community size at around the size of cities in the US like Irvine, CA or Newark, NJ or Cincinnati, OH. In Europe, cities of this size are Mannheim, DE or Bari, IT or Espoo, FI. In Asia, where most of our Dayborhood population would reside, comparable cities could be Dianjiang, Chongqing in China or Junagadh, Gujarat18 in India; cities in Asia tend to be so large that a city of this size probably wouldn’t be on your radar unless you live near it.

Put another way, assuming equal distribution of FoFTSNENians across cities -- an assumption that is almost certainly wrong but maybe close-ish -- for every 100,000 people in your city there would be 3.9 “daybors”. Jakarta metro area, recently declared the world’s largest city with 42 million people, would have 164 birthday-sharers. NYC’s 8.5 million would have ~332. The 500th largest city in size, Gorakhpur with roughly 1 million people, would have 39. So there is overlap in spatial and temporal proximities.

Still, there are many more questions I’d be interested in here:

• What’s the population distribution of RoFTSNEN? What is our most populous city?

• How are we doing on other key life goals? How are we doing in general?

• Are Dayborhoods a truly random slice of the global population? What makes RoFTSNEN distinct?19

Perhaps future updates can dig into these questions. For now, I hope you appreciate this small brief update as my own birthday gift to you, fellow birthday-haver.

Please notify me if I’ve somehow missed that somebody else in our birthday-having community is already sending a newsletter like this, as I’m not looking to step on any toes. Truly, I don’t know of any other birthday community having a newsletter of this sort? But that can’t be the case, as creating a newsletter like this seems like such an obvious administrative act to take, right?

And so, even though there is much more to report on all the amazing work we’re all doing, I will wrap up for the night. There’s still a little time left in “Greater February 27th” -- the latter time zones still have daylight even! It has been and continues to be a delight to share this day with you all.

Yours in Birthday,

Harry Brisson

Miami Hospital, 4:25pm, February 27th, 1989

PS. Oh yeah, and Happy Birthday!20

I travel a lot for someone who doesn’t quite like traveling.

Truly, I’m much more a homebody who just so happens to not have a home.

I grew up mostly on a series of international islands, trying a few US cities post-college before landing in LA. I mostly kept put between the ages of 23 and 30, traveling a couple weeks a year for work. When I turned 30 in 2019, I realized LA would never feel like home, so I packed up all my stuff into a storage container and set out to broaden my sense of the world.

Since I found travel exhausting, I realized it would be easier to establish a permanent travel routine. I would use Newtonian principles in my favor -- the same inertia that was keeping me at rest could be keeping me in motion.

Six years into this journey, I’ve now been in motion for roughly as long as I was at rest. And traveling is tiring me out. So I’d like to stop.

But it’s not so simple.

I had specific goals when I started traveling. I wanted to understand the human experience in our time. And I wanted to have a more realistic mental model of the world. I’m not eat-pray-loving; I’m cultivating a better sense of species-being. And it just turns out cultivating a sense of species-being is exhausting.

Last week, I wrote about the joys of dashboards in general. This week, I’ll walk through the specifics of how I’m mapping my personal dashboard to my specific goals for the year. And again, this will break down into three parts.

1. The Big Problem of the World’s Bigness

2. Three Models For Tighter-Knit Humanity

3. A Dashboard That Might Help Get There

Feel free to just scroll to the dashboard screenshots at the end if that’s what interests you.

For everyone else: let’s start with the problem.

The Screen Door Problem

Over a billion birds die annually from flying into windows. As animals, we’re quite good at using our senses to detect risks and respond to them. We’re also good at knowing when we lack information; a bird wouldn’t fly full-speed in the pitch-black, for example. It would show more caution. But specifically when it believes one thing about its surroundings (it’s clear ahead) and the truth differs (there’s a window), the result is tragedy.

I mentioned in last week’s essay the idea of “The Screen Door Problem”, which is the risk one takes when they maintain a mental model out of alignment with the world. People don’t fly into windows, so it’s much more visceral and available to imagine a screen door. You or someone you know has likely not realized a screen door is closed and walked into it. It hurts. It’s no fun.

This is the problem I am trying to solve -- for myself and for people more generally. We cannot directly perceive the-world-at-large. I’ve tried. People say the world is small, but it’s not. To think it is small is to show one isn’t thinking at a human scale -- they are thinking of markets or nations or some other framework. And these frameworks are misleading. And when you take the largest capital city on each continent as a sample size, your worldview will be warped. This is how you can walk into screen doors.

We rely on media platforms to fill our gaps. They are our window to the world. But these windows have funhouse physics.

Many publications choose to just focus exclusively on local affairs. And this is good! Alone, it won’t ground your humanism in a global perspective, but placing more focus on your neighbors and community is sensible. Local media operations are important -- they are often under threat, so I’d highly recommend supporting one if you have the resources for it.1 (Not all local news brands do their own independent investigative reporting, though; some simply distribute national/global content. Try to find the former if you can!)

Others focus on that nebulous frame between the local and the global: national news.

Let’s do a quick analysis of what’s in the major papers today.

The “front page” of The USA Today website has 12 national stories and 2 stories I would classify as generic. I will never hate on a story telling people how to observe the Snow Moon, but it feels like a stretch to call it global. (It peaks at 5:09pm Eastern Time tomorrow, in case you were curious.) The other generic story feels roughly as broad as moon coverage: an article about young people’s interest in sex2. For stories that are non-geographic in nature, I’ve classified them as “not applicable”.

Meanwhile, the New York Times front page gives the choice between a US Edition and an International Edition. The US Edition today has 8 US stories, one with a picture and one with a video; it also has 3 generic stories -- about back pain, cozy dinners and making friends. International readers don’t need to learn how to make friends, it seems, but they do get a single international story and no sacrifice of US stories; there are still 8, plus 4 links to coverage of US Immigration excluded from the domestic edition.

It’s fair that at this particular moment, most international readers of American papers are reading them to monitor the collapse of democracy, and I expect a broader study wouldn’t be quite so US-centered. Further, the generic front page is not how people discover stories; they are being directed from social media or search engines, or subscribers are logged in and receiving curated recommendations.

The Wall Street Journal is only marginally better. Of the big three American papers, it’s the only one with two -- count ‘em! -- international pieces above the fold on their website. They are opinion pieces rather than news, so I’ll leave it to your pre-existing biases to decide whether NYT’s hard news piece about Russia is more substantive than WSJ’s two op-eds about Ukraine and Hong Kong. The point is that “the world” that major US publications show us features surprisingly little of, well, “the world”.

People obviously draw information from different sources. But to extrapolate off of today’s websites:

• The US occupies 82% of a WSJ front-page-reader’s mental world map.

• The US occupies 88% of a NYT International Edition front-page-reader’s mental world map.

• The US occupies 100%3 of a USA Today front-page-reader’s mental world map.

There are better English-language publications, thankfully.4 Let’s pick a smaller example that I think actually makes a strong effort to be global, as -- though certainly an improvement -- they still fall short from cultivating a representative humanist perspective.

I’ve been subscribing to Semafor’s “Flagship” newsletter since it started in 2022. And though I will critique it, and I don’t read every edition, I do check in with it and want to give credit where (some) credit is due.

Let’s look at the front page first.

Only two US stories! With five international stories! (And two that are somewhat hybrid.) It invites Americans like me to contemplate that perhaps we are not most of the global population! Radical.

They are doing this in part by recommending content that they themselves didn’t author, but I think that is still wonderful -- so much of a brand is its curation power, not simply its creative capacity. Yes, 100% of the photos are driving attention to US stories; but with a tagline like “intelligence for the new world economy”, you know they expect that their audience can read. And look at all those clocks showing time in different places! Plus they plug Fela Kuti, who I had discussed in my inaugural 2026 newsletter “The Great Calendar Heist”.

The mental world map of the Semafor front-page-reader will be much less distorted than other American publications: only 29% of their location-specific front-page headlines are in the US.

This is getting warmer and closer to the truth, and they often perform even better within their newsletter.

Their weekday morning newsletter is named “Flagship” -- with “flag” both referencing their “semafor” brand and also as a signifier of international scope. As a map-lover, I love that they situate each story within space at the top of the newsletter. It also makes it much easier to geographically analyze their coverage; they clearly are doing so themselves!

Let’s look at the past week of “Flagship” map summaries.

Of the 100 stories they featured in their newsletter during this week, 36 seem to be tagged as within the US -- but I think if anything they’re too generous in identifying stories as US-centric. For example, their January 30th headline “Apple’s Record iPhone Sales” is pinned to Silicon Valley reflecting the headquarters of the business, but those sales took place around the world (with particularly strong growth in China). After accounting for a few of these generic headlines, my math has them closer to 25 US-centered stories. Some days give as few as 10% of their headlines to truly US-centered stories.

Is this the clear-eyed worldview I’ve been looking for?

To answer that, I’d need to know some population statistics. What percentage of the world’s people are in the US? You probably know the global population and the US population, and you can do the division, but before you even do that -- do you have an intuitive sense of the US share of the world’s humans?

Hopefully you have a guess in mind. Or enough of a feeling that when you see a number you’ll be able to sense if it’s higher or lower than your expectation.

Ready? Here’s the number: the US contains ~4% of the world’s population.

Even the praiseworthy internationally ambitious scope of Semafor is over-representing the US by a factor of over 6X by my geographic assessment and 9X by theirs. A truly population-weighted newsletter would have a single US story in fewer than half of their ten newsletters they send in a week.

But nitpicking at Semafor is unfair; they are making a real effort to widen their aperture. Mainstream news outlets like The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and USA Today overrepresent the US on their front page by ~2050%, ~2200% and ~2500%.

And so this leaves us with our challenge:

• Lacking a true and grounded sense of the world is dangerous.

• The tools available to develop that sense of the world largely mislead us.

• Building that broad grounded sense of the world directly is unsustainable.

So what are our options?

How can we follow the broader human story of our time? What’s a globalist to do?

Fortunately, global humanism has a deep historical well that can guide us.

Globalism Is Old

Something I’ve enjoyed about the past two Januaries I’ve spent in Mexico City is the extra couple weeks of holiday decor. Many in Mexico, like in other countries of the Iberosphere, celebrate “Día de Reyes” -- or Epiphany as it is sometimes known in English.

I tend to study the Catholic Church primarily as a media company, maintaining and expanding its story universe. (I try to do so in a way respectful to my ancestors to whom it was sacred, as well as to the many who have been harmed by the institution and its affiliates.) The organization, in its desire to spread, would result in absorbing and incorporating local stories and heroes into their lore. This was often done with creation of new saints and saints’ days, and the tradition can be seen to continue today with the 2025 canonization of Carlo Acutis, deemed to be the patron saint of the Internet. This is a sort of aspirational globalism, and I think there’s perhaps something in here I can learn.

The Three Kings Day traditions similarly evolved over time, though in a seemingly less centralized fashion. There are records from the 700s discussing how the kings represented the three Mediterranean continents: Europe, Asia and Africa. Early depictions of the kings would often reflect the locality of the depiction; only in the second millennium, though, did art have the kings’ appearances reflect their distinct cultural heritages. It may be the earliest example of “diverse recasting”.56

I expect these celebrations were supported in Spain and other monarchies because it provides a framework to legitimize the role of kings within the otherwise radically liberal doctrines of Christianity. And the enhanced racial pluralism of the story was certainly resonant in the explicitly abolitionist Catholicism of Bartolomé de las Casas and his peers in the 16th century -- still centuries before the same movements would pick up steam in the northern Anglo-American colonies.

We can look to other models for global inclusiveness as well.

While visiting China last year, I came across the phrase 人类命运共同体 (“community of common destiny”) several times. The quote is initially from Hu Jintao, who served as Premier before Xi Jinping; Xi Jinping has carried the term forward, though, invoking the ties across nations and communities that bind us all together. We share the earth and therefore are partners in facing the future.

This Chinese notion of common destiny is grounded both in deep historical traditions, going back nearly three millennia to the 易經 (“I Ching” or “Book of Changes”), which was used to predict the rise of their Western Zhou dynasty. The idea was to build a framework to render the randomness of the universe intelligible, using a mixture of casting yarrow stalks and reading the stars. Two major Chinese schools of thought grow out of this idea that we can find our path within an ordered universe: Daoism focuses on the natural order, while Confucianism focuses on the social order.

Today, these ideas are still recognizable within the contemporary ideology of “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics”. In 2020 I watched 领风者 (“The Leader”), a 7-episode donghua7 about the life and contributions of Karl Marx. The material was very new to me at the time, which gave it a dry educational feel. Still, it captures that Hegelian sense of historical inevitability, which is honestly present in most hero narratives. (The theme song samples “L’Internationale”, an expression of transnational human solidarity that serves as a counterpoint to the globalism of market capitalism.)

I came across a third distinct tradition around human connectedness traveling in India. A key part of Indian humanism emphasizes the connection of individuals with their meatstuff through mind-body connection -- in meditation, in yoga, in various oil-based therapies. This physical groundedness shares a bit with how the naturalism of the Daoist frame, but whereas Daoism focuses outward, these South Asian traditions focus inward. (Though both ultimately drive toward a dissolution of the inner/outer distinction entirely.)

But much seemed very distinct to me about how the subcontinent orients itself around pluralism. The easiest reference point for me here is what is sometimes called the “head bobble”. Whereas the West uses a vertical nod for “yes” and a horizontal shake of “no”, Indian head gestures operate somewhere between. The “head bobble” or “head wobble” can be used to say “yes”, “maybe” and even “no”.8

The Hindi word associated with the bobble is “अच्छा” (“āchā”). The term is often translated as “good” or “fine”, but etymologists postulate it is derived from the Sanskrit word “अच्छाय” (“acchāyá”) meaning “without a shadow” -- unshaded being brightly light, or evident/visible. The bobble can then be read as simply a motion that affirms a message is understood. It’s a sort of Vedic “roger that”.

This same nonbinary denotation exists somewhat in the word “okay”, which as an abbreviation for “all correct” both signifies adequacy (in signifying correct) but also lacking (in that it relies on improper spelling)9. It is both right and wrong at the same time. The draw of this irony is part of what makes the word one of the most common to spread outside English.

I personally call the head bobble “the quantum nod”: it conveys a superposition of “yes” and “no” in one discrete gesture.

What do we learn from this? How can we emulate these broad yet distinct traditions of connectedness?

I do think culture and media are critical to an effective globalist-humanist foundation. While we tend to think of media innovations as new apps or devices, there is just as much innovation in these examples: a holiday celebration, a practical theory of natural physics and an expression of body language. Whether it’s from the deliberate diversity of Día de Reyes, the shared journey of Daoist cosmology, or the pluralistic ambivalence of the quantum nod, these frameworks enable peaceful cooperation in groups of over a billion people.

And yet, to believe media can unite people is actually a bit of a “hot take”. The general consensus is that it tears people apart. Most of us can witness how media platforms are clearly polarizing the world now just through using the platforms, but this is nothing new. The printing press is seen as a major driver of the Thirty Years’ War, for example, in which pamphlet-driven religious fervor whipped the Germanic Holy Roman Empire into killing 40% of themselves.

It does not seem inevitable to me, though, that the media must be so destructive. It is somewhat of a paradox -- that in order to connect people, media must be between people, thus separating them. Even the mere creation of language creates an abstract layer that distances us from a simpler mirror-neuron empathy. The trick is to get media to support unmediated interactions, rather than having media replace it10. Humanist media brings people together; anti-humanist media drives people further apart.

Ultimately, the goal is to foster the humanistic spirit. Good media creates a foundation for discourse.

I’m not going to create a new holiday, cosmology or head motion, but I can help provide some light scaffolding to our existing media decision space. This is the project I’ve been engaged in since releasing my first post: The World Is Not Small. It provided a list of 80 tracks representing 80 groups of 100 million people on the planet the day the population hit 8 billion.

While I think improving the world’s relationship with media is a critical challenge of our era, that’s out of scope for this year. What I can do, though, is work on improving my own media mindfulness. And the goal is to make purposeful11 media consumption easy and natural.

To do this, I am creating a dashboard.

A Dashboard To Guide Me

Having covered the sublime joy of dashboard meditation last week, I’m going to focus on the practical elements of how I’m mapping my goal of pushing myself toward a more humanistic media-consuming experience.

This will be a personal dashboard designed primarily to help me stay on track, so I won’t necessarily share every view here, but I will share some key data updates throughout the year. If I committed to sharing everything constantly, it would tempt me to posture rather than merely measure. While conspicuous consumption can be a positive motivator, I think an intrinsically motivated framework will be more durable.12 The goal is for the dashboard to be, in itself, useful.

There’s a criticism of modern politics becoming too centered on a “liberalism of manners”, more about learning the right words to say than about actually making substantive improvements to people’s lives. This critique resonates with me, and yet, as a media researcher, I do believe messages and images are powerful. Again, this is about The Screen Door Problem; everyone is better off when their sense of the world stably maps to reality.

There are many factors that drive one’s capacity to be mindful about their media diet, just as there are with one’s eating diet. I am trying to use my relative flexibility to focus my media environment to find easier ways to consume more whole-grain truth and less empty calories. I am almost certainly not measuring the right stuff yet. The purpose of this is to learn, and it is certainly not to create new rules and shame people. Hopefully that comes across clearly!

The dashboard I’ve designed focuses on three key categories: service, sustainability and systems.

• Service: What value am I delivering to the world? What value is realistic for a given day?

• Sustainability: What risks exist threatening my service capacity? What changes do I need to make?

• Systems: How are my habits supporting or detracting from my global-humanistic mission?

I focused almost exclusively on developing professional skills and saving money from 2013-2020, and I focused nearly exclusively on media processes from 2020-2025. I’m hoping my dashboard design helps me balance these various objectives and ultimately act more directly in ways that help improve lives.

Service

Service will be more central to me in 2026. It is here that I hope to find my primary line-goes-up metric -- my “Global Ontological Digest” as discussed last week. I want to shift away from esoteric systems-tweaking and toward using these ideas to help the willing broaden their perspectives. I also want to share systems I’ve built for myself with others.

To express this, I’m really focusing on word count and making small incremental improvements each day. I think I should be able to write a post a week, especially as I try to integrate my other work into this newsletter. All my work connects to media and wellbeing, so it will hopefully be relevant to subscribers. Achieving my writing goals will mean withdrawing from much other socializing, so hopefully receiving the occasional graphs and reflections is a worthy substitute!

Viewing my word count timeline is quite nice. I am working on adding more tracking of the influence of media frameworks I am introducing, and I’ll consider that a major component of my service as well. I will also start making some of the tools that I use available to others, and tracking their usage and usefulness will be the primary way I assess my own personal success.

Stay tuned on that piece!

Sustainability

Sustainability is really more about keeping alert for “red flags”, so I think a tracker view works well here.

I track a mix of habits to confirm sustainability, and I expect I’ll grow these and even become more strict with time.

The major groupings here are around psychological, biological and financial risks. Am I maintaining an emotionally healthy working relationship with myself? Am I introducing unnecessary health risks in my eating and sleeping? Am I operating at a budget that reflects my economic condition?

Though I know pursuing immortality is currently trendy, I see permanent sustainability as fundamentally impossible and undesirable. But on the ephemeral-sustainable spectrum, I’m hoping to moderate my position.

Systems

I generally think I’ve had the habit of over-investing in my systems, but this is also central to the work I’m trying to do.

It is here where I put my own media habits under the microscope, and try to understand how I’ve been performing so far and where my major gaps are. I’ve started by mapping the subjects and origins of books, films and musicians within my diet.

The largest weakness across all three formats is on the African continent, so this is a place I’ll need to pay more attention to this year. This will take some deliberateness, but I’ll also try to tweak the design of my life to make this more natural.

To investigate how the global aperture of my music listening has evolved, I downloaded my Spotify data and used a mix of Perplexity and OpenAI to collect and validate information about the countries of origin for music I listen to13. And indeed, I can see that decisions I made in 2019-2020 to listen more globally did result in a more diverse geographical taste profile.

This chart is a little tricky to read, but the bars stack various countries by hour of listening; the most listened to countries are dark red and the least listened to are later in the classic ROYGBIV spectrum. The more rainbow you see, the more diverse my listening. The four lines correspond to the percentage of my listening from my top country, top five countries, top ten countries and top fifty countries. 2024 had the lowest percentage of listening to my most listened-to country, corresponding to a sort of personal “peak woke” for me.

My music spread was thrown off a little last year, with my most-listened-to country breaking over 20% and my top-five most-listened-to countries tipping over 50%. I think this is in part because I listened to more songs recommended from friends this year, which tipped me a little outside my globalized focus. Music is an important tool to connect with neighbors and one’s local community, so this is permissible. This year, though, maybe I can find ways to both embrace global creative works while also being engaged with communities of meaning to me.

An Era of Unprecedented Media Agency

As we enter into this era of vibe-coding, your decisions about media won’t just be what platform or channel to use. You can already, in a brief amount of time, design your own agent-driven newsroom.

I am hopeful that these less human-intensive media pipelines can still be humanistic in intent. And in fact, they can perhaps even be more humanistic than options available pre-AI. You can create a media that better balances the concerns of people globally -- one that is better insulated against the various anti-humanistic forces that infiltrate our information pipelines.

Maybe you’re skeptical that taking this kind of control is worthwhile. Indeed, creating this system wasn’t as point-and-click as recent viral Claude Code projects seem to have been. It’s taken much of my time and focus, not to mention about half the credits provided with my Cursor Ultra subscription.

A question I return to often is: if my media sources weren’t representing the world accurately, how would I know? When would a blind spot become obvious to me? How can I try to detect such a blind spot before it poses a risk to me? It seems like there are enough fundamental misalignments in my media environment that building this audit framework was worthwhile, and this framework will be easy to repeat and update on a quarterly basis.

This dashboard will be the center of my media usage in 2026, and with a few charts and graphs keeping me honest, I’m confident I can work toward a more humanistic information-gathering experience — even if only within my own media diet.

In an ideal world, this newsletter helps people answer one simple question: “What should I put in front of my face?”

And the main way I’m answering this question for myself this year is: “Dashboards”.

In case that’s not intuitive, I’ve broken down my reasoning into ~25001 words. The case for a dashboard-centric media diet has three sub-arguments.

1. A great deal of unhappiness in high-income countries derives from a lack of meaning.

2. Much media erodes our sense of meaning through misalignment, inaccuracy, and incomprehensibility.

3. Building your media diet around a well-designed dashboard will invigorate your sense of purpose and wellbeing.

I’ve been spending my January developing just such a dashboard that I can quickly use to orient myself each day, and I think others could also benefit from a similar approach.

Let’s dig into the argument.

The Insufficiency of Wealth Alone

Claim: Happiness requires purpose, and purpose requires accommodation.

The draw of Americans on both the left and the right to more centralized leadership styles seems to surprise and upset a lot of people, but it’s not particularly surprising to me.

As someone who runs a daily global wellbeing survey, I’m maybe less surprised than most.

Academics are divided on the best way to evaluate wellbeing, but one popular framework is “eudaimonic wellbeing” which focuses less on emotional state and more on essential qualities of one’s life. It draws on Nicomachean Ethics, where Aristotle posits that what makes a thing “good” is how well it serves its function. (A good chair, for example, supports weight and can be sat in at great lengths; a good blog post is one that is comprehensible and shares useful insight.) A good life, then, is one that helps you realize your human potential -- what he calls “eudaimonia” and is often translated as “human flourishing”.

Psychologist Carol Ryff distilled this concept into a six-factor model of psychological wellbeing, and my daily survey asks people around the world to evaluate themselves on each aspect: Autonomy, Mastery, Growth, Relationships, Purpose and Self-Acceptance2. And when it comes to Purpose, the US is currently dead last3.

Meaninglessness is a serious problem. You don’t want to feel meaningless. You don’t want your neighbors to feel meaningless. You don’t want leaders chosen by people who feel meaningless.

The increasingly pro-authoritarian politics of our era are sometimes called “post-liberalism” -- a reference to how these attitudes are a response to perceived failures of conventional “liberal”4 politics. Some see liberalism as having centralized power in the hands of an elite few, failing to distribute and check power as it had promised. Others, though, have found that when people are given the freedom to choose their own sense of meaning, they are not always effective in locating it within their lives.

This post-liberal attitude is not exclusive to the left or right. Two quotes that articulate this perspective from both sides come to mind. They both have drawn criticism in the past year.

On the left, Zohran Mamdani critiqued the liberal order as dispassionate when he spoke of “the warmth of collectivism”. This was not a call to celebrate command economies and the camaraderie of breadlines. Rather, it voices a hope for a spirit of shared meaning and belonging, a sense of meaning that can be lost even in the most theoretically efficient of market machinery.

On the right, Donald Trump attacked the same market efficiency when he suggested that children have “two dolls instead of thirty dolls”. It’s harder for me to clarify the positive alternative here -- different people have different interpretations -- but my most generous read would be an endorsement of more local supply chains, which are less alienating for workers than the large globalist economic system we have today.

Since I myself am a globalist with liberal sympathies, I don’t totally align with these perspectives. Yet, I feel the tug of post-liberalism, and I too want to take seriously the problems of loneliness, alienation and meaninglessness.

I can at least agree that the path to shared meaning is not through more dolls.

It’s through dashboards. (Obviously.)

And to move further toward that case, we should first establish a rubric to evaluate current media on.

Three Ways the Media Makes You Sick

Claim: Healthy media is aligned, accurate and simple.

The “media”, from the Latin for “middle”, helps you center yourself in the cosmos. In an older time, “the media” was the view out your window and conversations with your neighbors. Later, you might leaf through a delivered newspaper. Later still, some would tune into a morning news broadcast with a focus on traffic and weather. Now when we wake up, we have seemingly limitless options. All designed just for us, intelligently serving us content!

Yet it’s not necessarily the good news that it seems. Last year around this time, I published a newsletter that was very focused around how you should be careful about letting the media shape too much of your values and goals, where I talk about this at greater length.

You want to know what to do, and a well-designed media will quickly provide what you need. An ideal media product serves as a Guiding Ontological5 Digest. Or to abbreviate it blasphemously: a GOD.

Let’s break down the three components.

• Guiding. Your media should guide you. Which means it knows where you want to go, and is designed to get you there. You need confidence that it is aligned with your interests, not pushing its own agenda.

• Ontological. Your media should also ground you. It should be real. It should be honest. It should make you aware of the world as it is, and help you avoid “The Screen Door Problem”: running into obstacles that you don’t see.

• Digest. Your media should distill its subject matter, taking only as long as is necessary. It is comprehensible and brief. Murder is wrong in large part because it deprives a person of their time. Good media avoids such murder. It respects the sanctity of life.

How do our existing media options fare on these three dimensions?

Guidance: Does This Media Take Me Where I Want To Go?

Our media is increasingly trying to sell us things. It used to be that media would sell us things dispassionately, allowing space and time to be carved out of programming. With referral codes and digital ad tracking, publishers are increasingly invested in the effectiveness of their advertising.

As time goes on, the entire experience will become more and more oriented around getting you to part with your hard-earned cash. Their success is your maintaining employment and delivering your paychecks to their advertisers, a perpetual near-impoverishment.

Ultimately, it’s very rare to find media products produced by others that are aligned with your interests. And even when you find such a media product, its interests tend to drift against you in the long run.

Ontology: Does This Media Help Me Connect With Reality?

The view presented of the world in the media is inherently distorted6. Over 8 billion people live twenty-four hours each day, and there’s no way to cut that down without drawing blood. The trick is to find a distillation that captures the broad essence of the nuanced and complex story.

Narrative journalism centers anecdotes and asks you to generalize; it is very easy to warp a worldview with this strategy, selecting a convenient subject for your story. (Perhaps this is why the CIA was so committed to nurturing it.) Though many claim the classical Aristotelian narrative approach is universal7, it is indeed not the only approach. The dramaturg Bertolt Brecht sought deliberately to design his plays to distance the viewer so they could see the whole scope of the system at work, not merely a seductive story. I feel like Bertolt Brecht would have liked dashboards.

The notion of media bubbles and bias is certainly not novel for me to point out. I am emphatically adding, though, that this is a distinct challenge from merely misaligned interests. The media industry, if anything, attracts a disproportionate number of caring and empathetic souls. There are deep wells of good intention. The challenge is that understanding a big complex world is difficult, and while fact-checking a politician’s quote is straightforward, fact-checking a broader model of the world is more complex8.

Digestibility: Does This Media Respect My Time?

Digestibility is perhaps the worst of all. Our media platforms seek more and more time from us; our time is their lifeblood, and they need more and more each passing year to support growth. Great stories often center unresolvable ironies, as perfect resolution allows us to move on.

Even when brevity exists, it’s fleeting. In 2009, I subscribed to a newsletter called The Slatest because my two college best friends both recommended it; it was thoughtfully designed to give you the top 10 stories of the day without requiring you to click out into their ad-laden site. I would read it and quickly feel my news appetite satiated in about ten minutes. It was a great product but a terrible business model. A couple years later, the newsletter was repurposed from news aggregator to “a news companion”; instead of summarizing the news, it would direct you to more news. (And more ads.) Alas, good media is often bad business.

Thus, we have a media environment that is ungrounded, misguided and endlessly complex.

But what the market will not provide, we can learn to provide ourselves.

And joyously, dashboards can be as simple to create as they are to view.

Happiness is a Line-Going-Up

Claim: A self-designed dashboard will serve you better than generic media.

Back when I would interview for jobs, my work with dashboards was one of the first things I would talk about. I deeply enjoy all aspects of them -- decisions around what to place where, how to operationalize complex ideas succinctly, how to create a stable data pipeline that speedily provides needed insight, all of it. I’ve created them to help a wide range of folks: Hollywood studio execs, a multi-billionaire philanthropist and my dad. I suspect the most impactful dashboard I ever made was a bar graph generator used by TV networks selecting shows that would be watched by millions of people9, which was in my early twenties. (Personally I preferred the biplot generator, but after a decade of biplot-boosting, I’ve come to understand that most people just don’t feel the way I do about them.)

What I had never really done, though, was make a dashboard for myself.

I make decisions too. Sure, they are much lower stakes than “what TV series should be blasted out globally” or “what world-problem-solving startup should receive investment”. I control neither a giant media conglomerate’s programming department nor immense tech boom wealth. My main resource is my time and attention. They too are precious. And further, they are under threat.

In the mid-2010s, when I would lay my fingers at the keyboard in a web browser, I’d find my fingers moving on their own. I didn’t realize it at first. My left pointer would gently and independently tap the “f” key, which was enough for my browser to auto-complete “facebook.com” and draw me into the original endless feed.

I almost can’t believe I would struggle so much with Facebook, as someone who now just logs into it once a year when responding to birthday messages. To discover this pattern, I conducted my own self-ethnography, tracking my minute-by-minute time-use for roughly a year. All I knew at the time is that I was seriously struggling with productivity. The day would fly by, and I wouldn’t have a good sense for where the hours went. It didn’t make sense to me.

I didn’t have a dashboard for this data, and indeed I recorded this information by hand in Moleskine notebooks. To find my lost time, I simply would reread the events of the day. It was enough to help me realize I needed to break off of Facebook and approach media more skeptically in general, but there are easier ways in our great golden age of LLM-assisted rapid software development.

In working on a dashboard truly for myself, I understand why others have enjoyed them. The clarity they provide in a world so muddled with ambiguity. The personalized specificity of purpose. The gentle directive, stable and nourishing, with supporting data points where necessary. Some metrics that respond directly to my moment-to-moment activity, showing me I have agency in this world. Other metrics are unpredictable, reminding me that there remain mysteries unsolved that I must continue to pursue in noble faith.

This too is a kind of “post-liberalism”, I think. A decision to create my own straightforward purpose, and march forward in consistent rhythm. It is a kind of “post-liberalism” that doesn’t require structural changes, only the decision to make plans and follow through on them.

I’m confident that centering a dashboard will make me productive in a world that seems hungry for good work. It will also make me connect with constructive energy in a world that seems deeply lost and miserable. But a dashboard alone won’t ensure my productivity and energy are directed toward good. How do I do that? How might you also do that?

Here, it matters what you measure. Though any line-going-up can feel sacred, not every line-going-up truly is.

What do I want to measure? What do I want to achieve? These questions are critical in maintaining alignment, groundedness and simplicity, and I’m set to finish January with a working proof of concept that will guide me through the year.

Join next week when I’ll share how I’m using these concepts to ground my life in meaning -- no post-liberal authoritarian drift required!

When walking last year near New York City’s Times Square1, typically a great joy of mine, I saw an ad that made me upset.

Obviously any reminder of ill-will toward a country I’m in is a bad vibe, but that wasn’t what upset me most. It was probably third on my list of concerns.

Primarily, I was upset because the ad was distorting a classic Maya Angelou aphorism. The quote is “when someone shows you who they are, believe them”2. While I never met Angelou, she seemed like the kind of person who would have considered “tells” as an alternative to “shows” when crafting an iconic line like that. The point of using “shows” is that you shouldn’t pay so much attention to what people say as what they do. People don’t know themselves well and are prone to lying; it’s their actions that give you insight into another person’s true identity. Altering the quote in this way3 completely confuses its meaning.

But then there was the thing I was upset about second-most: the use of quotation marks around words that I’m quite confident were not spoken. What was instead used was the Farsi phrase “Marg bar Âmrikâ” (مرگ بر آمریکا), which official Iranian sources tend to themselves translate as “down with America”. While Wiktionary lists “death” as the primary definition for the “marg” and “to” as the primary definition for “bar”, it also lists “down with” as a translation for “marg bar” earlier than “death to”.

Indeed, the same week of the Tehran University Conference they quote, CNN covered the Ayatollah’s qualification the meaning of the phrase: “it goes without saying that the slogan does not mean death to the American nation; this slogan means death to the U.S.’s policies, death to arrogance.”4 And even here, this is CNN’s translation5 introducing the literality of “death” into a more abstract and nuanced phrase. If a narrowly inflammatory translation is “death to America”, a more generous paraphrase could be “stop hurting us, America”.

This post isn’t going to discuss that particular quote in additional depth6, but it has a robust Wikipedia page with references you can read if you want to. As a non-Farsi speaker outside of Iran7, I can’t adjudicate what the word and phrase “really” means to those using it in Iran. I’m more concerned about how freely the media throws quotation marks around translated remarks.

The AP Style Guide asks that “Quotes from one language to another must be translated faithfully. If appropriate, we should note the language spoken.” The use of “faithfully” here fascinates me; if we must bring faith into this, I’d prefer “must be translated in good faith”, though that would be impossible to audit. Equally fascinating is the qualifier “if appropriate” before “we should note the language spoken”, which leaves much to discretion. The display ad that upset me appears to comply with the AP Style Guide, a noble achievement for an unmarked van.

There is a clear tension here between journalistic accuracy and audience comprehensibility. Quoting the actual words spoken would preserve nuance, but it would make the quote inscrutable to readers. How do we enable truthfulness in global media in a world where 82%8 of people don’t speak English?

In a recent encounter with dubious “quotations”, I experimented with new tech in an attempt to become a more sophisticated media consumer. For others who partake in media covering foreign-language-speaking speakers, this approach can be similarly useful.

¿Cómo se dice “run”?

The writer Gustav Flaubert is said to have written, “A good prose sentence should be like a good line of poetry—unchangeable… just as rhythmic, just as sonorous.” But he didn’t. (Technically.) What he did write was: “Une bonne phrase de prose doit être comme un bon vers, inchangeable, aussi rythmée, aussi sonore.” They mean largely the same thing, of course, but to change the words of a writer who insists his words are “inchangeable” seems almost mean-spirited.

This is not to criticize this translation, though. My French is somewhere between my Farsi (nonexistent) and my Spanish (bad), but I can still grasp much of the original, and the translation seems pretty solid. It’s clear that the English rendition took effort to preserve both the sound and sense as best as possible. And yet… we can observe compromises resulting from unresolvable tradeoffs in the act of translation.

Let’s note a few of them.

• While “bon vers”9 has two syllables, there are six syllables of “good line of poetry”; the tightness of the phrase in French lets Flaubert accelerate up to the ellipsis, a build of excitement and then space that is to my ear more musical and exciting. Preserving clarity here means sacrificing the “Flaubertian rythmée” of the line.

• To maintain the sort-of octuple-quaver feel of “aussi rythmée, aussi sonore”, the translator uses “just as rhythmic, just as sonorous”. But “just as” is enclosed in consonants, and it doesn’t sing free like “aussi” does. It’s supposed to be musical! To substitute “also” is better from a pure-sound perspective, but fails to focus the meaning. Again: a trade-off!

• Translating “sonore” to “sonorous” seems as rote as one can get. Yet the English word “sonorous” is just so much less sonorous10 than the French “sonore”? It sounds too much like the negatively connoted “onerous”11 perhaps? The translator has chosen the seemingly obvious equivalent and yet fails to capture the essential aesthetic.

It is for this reason that I skipped reading some of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary in 12th-grade English12. Flaubert tormented over a precise and particular articulation of his concepts -- only for me to read completely different words? Absurd.

I get the sense that Donald Trump does not suffer so long to find a precise Flaubertian “rythmée” in his phrasing, but it’s a quote of his that has brought me back into translation turmoil. I’m spending January in Mexico City, and to prepare for a presentation I’ll be giving in Spanish in March, I’ve been reading headlines in national papers. And I was intrigued by the varied translations provided of a quote Trump gave in his press conference on the American intervention in Venezuela: “We are going to run the country.”

To give some credit, there is some strategic ambiguity in the monosyllabic, quasi-colloquial “run”. In English, this could cover a wide range of scenarios, broadened further by Trump’s particularly loose use of language. And the breadth of the term makes interesting work for translators -- does one try to find a similarly broad term? or does one read into the broader context to infer specificity?

Ultimately, different papers put different words in the same mouth.

While my Spanish is B1-level13 at best, these are all at least partial cognates14: “dirigir” for “to direct”, “gobernar” for “to govern”, “tomar control” for “to take control” and “hacerse cargo” for “to take charge”. They are all also seemingly more specific than “run”; although “correr” is used in some Spanish-speaking contexts to mean running a computer program, it is not idiomatic Spanish to use it for running an organization or a country.

There is also inconsistency in deciding between Spanish’s two distinct future tenses: near future and simple future. This distinction does not exist in English, but it has some implications as to the certainty and timeframe for future action. To use the near future (“futuro próximo”) tense suggests a resolved decidedness and short-term action, whereas the simple future (“futuro simple”) suggests a more general prediction or anticipation.

With the variance in possibilities in choices, I was curious if there was some way to evaluate the quality of each choice. Since we’re in a golden age of linguistic computational capabilities, I wrote a short script to assess “semantic similarity” between each translation and the original quote.

Adventures in Wordspace

The term “translation” is not just used with words, but also with geometry. To translate a shape, you just move it consistently in a single direction. And in the world of “Large Language Models”, geometrical and linguistic translations are broadly similar15 operations. Many who use ChatGPT16 may be less familiar with some of the underlying technologies, underneath the chatbot is an “embeddings” model like OpenAI’s text-embedding-3-large that can place any word or sentence within a 3072-dimensional space17. Many of the major AI providers make these embeddings models available to developers.

I’ve used these models in the past for activities like sentiment analysis or topic clustering, because similar words will be closer to each other. Positively associated words have a sort of hyper-geometrical neighborhood, as do words in certain categories: adjectives, words in Laotian, technocratic jargon, spooky noises, etc. I think of LLMs as a sort of “hyper-dictionary”, where instead of just providing a set of words that are “equivalent”, you can identify the proximity of every word to every other word.

With this theory guiding me, I used six different models to evaluate the “proximity” of our source content. I started by selecting the three that I hear the most about people in professional conversation: OpenAI, Gemini and Claude. From there, I added three that I thought might represent “outside voices” in my sampling mix: Mistral (for a French model), Ali Baba’s Qwen (for a Chinese model) and xAI (for a MAGA Republican model). Alas, since Claude and xAI do not make their embedding models public18 at the time of this analysis, I substituted in the embedding models they refer to in their developer documentation: Voyage and Cohere respectively.

Using this mix of embedding models, I can evaluate and compare how “close” in “semantic space” the terms are to the original quote: “We are going to run the country”. (I list caveats for this at the end of the analysis; there certainly are a few.) Ultimately, we find that though the models provide different scores, they tend to agree on translation preference.

From left to right, we see that Mistral and Gemini are more likely to find all the quotes as similar, with Cohere and OpenAI seeing them as less similar. And from top to bottom, we see that the “closest semantic match” in terms of average cosine similarity is “Vamos a gobernar el país”, which indeed was the most common translation I came across. This seems to agree with the decision of many publications to choose that wording within their translation. (Three of the eight I came across that used quotation marks.)

It is notable, though, that there’s some disagreement between models. The overall second-place choice “dirigir” is the top choice of OpenAI and Claude’s recommended Voyage, and both Gemini and xAI’s recommended Cohere had the lowest overall performer “tomar el control” as their second-choices.

But these four verbs are just a small subset of the possible translations a headline-writer could use. We want to know how these compare to the broader range of possibilities. I generated a set of 20 different verbs, and for each I created a quote in both “futuro próximo” (near future) tense and “futuro simple” (simple future) tense, resulting in 40 different quotes to evaluate.

As an additional dimension, I used gpt-4.1-mini to classify19 each statement from between -1 and 1, with -1 coded as “malevolente / coercitiva / dominadora / amenazante” (malevolent / coercive / dominating / threatening) and 1 coded as “benevolente / orientada al servicio / inclusiva / cariñosa” (benevolent / service-oriented / inclusive / caring). This gives a sense for which translations may be more politically loaded than others.

We find that the four verbs used in headlines occupy somewhat distinct areas on the map of wordspace we’ve generated.

• The verb “gobernar” was not just the best fit of the actively used examples but the best fit overall, particularly when expressed in near-future tense. It was also deemed largely neutral in tone.

• The verb “dirigir” was also a top verb among the full range of options, though “conducir” and “administrar” performed better than it. I only found an example of it being used in near-future tense, but interestingly it was considered malevolent in simple future tense.

• The phrase “hacerse cargo de” was the most positively associated term of all that we tested in both tenses.

• In contrast, the phrase “tomar el control de” was deemed among the most malevolent potential translations. Among the highly negative translations (such as “mandar”20, “dominar” and “controlar”), it was among the top for semantic closeness.

In general, we also found that the near-future tense tended to be deemed semantically closer in meaning than the simple future tense, and the use of simple future often increases the degree of valence -- that is, negative verbs become more negative and positive verbs become more positive.

There could be some utility in approaches like this when evaluating media bias in translations, with value for consumers reading the news or for public figures who are covered in the news. There are a few limitations important to consider.

• It’s not public what the content was used to train these LLMs. The headlines I was looking at were primarily Mexican headlines, but there are regional variations in the language, and it’s unclear how much of an LLM’s source material is from Mexico vs Spain vs Argentina vs elsewhere.

• This is a translation process that is naive of any meaningful context of the quote. It does not know that the quote is being said by Donald Trump, and lacks insight into his particular style of using words. It does not know that the countries involved are the US and Venezuela, and the history of relations between said countries. It does not know the tone of voice in which the quote is stated. Professional human translators are likely incorporating these factors when translating, and I expect it is these factors that result in different publications making different choices.

• There are different approaches to semantic distance and “cosine similarity” is just one of them. I’m not 100% confident that this is the best way to examine gradient-synonymousness in this way. If there’s interest in this topic I could explore this further.

• I’m reminded of that e. e. cummings poem that basically says not to try to analytically approach humanistic subjects in this kind of computational way. I think of that poem a lot because I tend to approach these subjects in this way a lot. So maybe this isn’t a useful direction to take things at all.

With limitations acknowledged, you are welcome to play around with this approach21. I do generally prefer to analyze these sorts of questions with embedding models because you can plug in the same inputs and receive a more consistent22 output -- rather than the randomization or personalization found in the web applications. Transparency23!

And speaking of transparency, I have a few recommendations based on this brief exploration.

Distrust in Translation

The point of all this is to say that translations involve judgment, and you may or may not agree with the judgments translators make. But while I’m calling attention to this issue, I don’t want this to drive people away from consuming shared media. Quite the opposite! The Middling Content mission is to support the development of “middling content” -- that is, content that mediates the human experience, forming common experiences that enable connections across lines of difference. So in an attempt at being constructive, here are some recommendations.

For Writers:

If the Associated Press wanted to improve their trustworthiness, I’d recommend a revision to their style guide that requires some manner of notating when a quote is translated. Ideally, not only the source of the quote is named but also the translator, since all translations inherently have bias. A translation is just an inter-linguistic synonym for a foreign-language quote, and one would never put a synonym within an English-language quote without notating or explaining.

Even though I trust expert translators, most other expert judgments (research papers, presentations, statistical estimates) transparently name the experts involved so one can investigate their affiliations and credentials.

For Readers:

My guidance here is just to always be particularly careful with how translation is presented to you. If a non-English speaker is being quoted in English saying something that influences your opinions on key political questions, it’s likely worth investigating the source material. As the US seems to be engaging militarily outside the Anglosphere, this will be increasingly important to avoid manipulation.

There don’t seem to be rules when quoting a translation -- different publications can reach different decisions, and ultimately they are all stretching the truth since words and phrases are essentially never truly equivalent.

Sometimes you’ll find that the quote reflects the original statement, but sometimes a quote is just a “quote”.

And for those who observe the new year starting January 1st1, Happy Belated New Year!

Of course, as widespread as the calendar is globally, many choose another day to celebrate. My previous holiday analysis found that New Year’s Day was the second most common holiday globally, with ~77% of the population residing in parts of the world that have a public holiday on January 1st. And most in the largest country that observes the holiday, China, save their biggest new year celebration energy for the Lunar New Year a few weeks down the line. This is all to remind you that you have some freedom in choosing when to mark the start of your own personal new year.

I may have gone too far in closing out my New Year’s Eve email with the claim that January doesn’t exist; the month seemed compelled to aggressively assert itself. On the second of January, I woke up to a shaking room and earthquake alarms in my Mexico City Airbnb. And then on the third, I woke up as we all did to the news that the US had seemingly invaded Venezuela. But while I acknowledge time always moves forward, I still will make a case for treating this month as a part of an inter-year period. (With the awareness that sadly there is no forcefield protecting this or any month from historic or terrible events.)

A third (less jarring) surprise for me was that Substack’s official newsletter was promoting an article that gave a rundown of the surprisingly recent (to me at least) adoption of January 1st as New Year’s Day -- which I had teased in my December newsletter as the topic I wanted to explore.

Romanticon

Happy New Year?

The wheel of the year is the rise and fall of a human life. The year is born on the vernal equinox as the first flowers bloom and the birds return. It grows and copulates and dances through the spring, celebrates its bounteous zenith at the summer solstice, becomes masterful and wise in autumn, then turns inward i…

Read more

4 months ago · 1765 likes · 203 comments · Romanticon and Samara

It gives an amusing but clear summary, and I recommend it in full, but I’m going to specifically focus on the Julian calendar, which the featured article introduced aptly:

The lunar calendar of Numa Pompilius with its scanty 355 days fell out of sync with our actual 365-day solar year, resulting in all sorts of agricultural complications. Planting usually occurred around the vernal equinox, but the calendar had drifted away until the equinox fell in mid-May, which now had no relevance to the agricultural year. The calendar was an unreliable mess.

Julius Caesar decided to fix this. He invited the Alexandrian astronomer Sosigenes to put the calendar in a more sensible order. Sosigenes advised dropping the lunar system altogether and, for the first time ever, basing the year solely on the sun. This idea was met with howls from the Roman priests, who depended upon the lunar calendar for their rites.

But Caesar said it was to be so, so it was so. However, the calendar was at this point utterly out of rhythm with the solstices and equinoxes and in order for Sosigenes’ calendar to re-sync with the agricultural year, a hard reset was needed. The Long Year (or ‘The Year of Confusion’ as it became known), 46 BCE, lasted 455 days. The next year, 45 BCE started on 1 January.

“Happy New Year?”, Romanticon

While Substack is becoming more of a “social media” style website, I generally approach my writing in a very independent manner. That said, a benefit of writing within a broader community is I can defer on some topics and go deeper on ones more central to me. Such is the case with that Romanticon piece. And I’ll let it serve as an amusing review of the broader historical record, saving me the details -- which is great, because it means my new year’s post won’t end up getting sent 143 days2 after the holiday. (I’m just 12 days behind the holiday I’m reflecting on this time! Thank you, Romanticon!)

With the basic contours of the history established, there are a couple areas I want to focus our attention on to build a foundation that will support my advice on handling January and winter more generally: (1) that the revival of the 17th century practice of dual-dating as a healthy year-to-year transition and (2) that Julius Caesar is perhaps not who we should credit for the so-called Julian Calendar. And then I’ll apply these winter ideas to media practices and close with a seasonal song recommendation.

Let’s take these points chronologically by taking a closer look at Caesar and the origins of our modern calendar system.

How Julian Is The Julian Calendar?

The calendar history article makes Caesar out to be more of a technocratic statesman. And while I hate to speak ill of the stabbed-to-death, I’m personally not so sure. There is no direct record of Sosigenes and Caesar meeting, only a reference from Pliny the Elder a century later; while I’m confident Egyptian astronomy is involved, I’m skeptical of the particular dynamics. Maybe it’s better to present the elements of the case and have you reach your own conclusions.

First, let’s recap what we know about the early Roman calendar:

• Rome’s earliest calendar is credited to the legendary 8th-century king Romulus; it had 304 days.

• Romulus’s successor Pompilius would add winter months to create a 355-day calendar.

To the southeast through the Mediterranean, though, we find another calendar:

• Egypt, in contrast, had been using a 365-day calendar from at least 2510 BC.

• In 238 BC, Ptolemy III reforms the calendar, adding a leap year; his reform is ignored.3

• Ptolemy III would have a great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter4 named Cleopatra VII.

Cleopatra is a historical figure of much renown, known for wisdom and speaking perhaps as many as nine languages. And since she is the descendant of the man who proposed the first 365-and-¼-day calendar, the development of the Julian Calendar is particularly interesting through her eyes.

Let’s cover the timeline quickly.

• 48 BC: Cleopatra (age 21) meets Julius Caesar (age 52) when he visits Alexandria.

• 47 BC: Caesar returns to his wife in Rome, and Cleopatra gives birth to Caesar’s son.

• 46 BC: Cleopatra moves into Caesar’s villa in Rome, and Caesar proposes the new calendar.

• 45 BC: The new calendar is adopted.

• 44 BC: Caesar is killed.

So we are to believe that the Romans, who were fine with wrong for 700 years, just decided to make somehow it’s the same year that the emperor’s Egyptian mistress lives with him -- who just happens to be a direct descendent of an adopter the world’s first 365-and-¼-day calendar -- that Rome adopts a 365-and-¼-day calendar.

I mean, which do you think makes more sense? Naming the calendar for the middleman adulter-tyrant who was killed by his own people? Or naming it for a representative of the culture that collected nearly two millennia of astronomical observations that made the calendar possible?5

The naming choice here made me think of one of my favorite listens last year, a new audio biography of Nigerian Afrobeat innovator and activist Fela Kuti titled Fela Kuti: Fear No Man6. Specifically, I’m reminded of the episode “Teacher Don’t Teach Me Nonsense” which explored Kuti’s activism promoting decolonized education. One of the hypotheses discussed: the works of Aristotle are actually works of various ancient Egyptian philosophers, merely disguised as Greek.

While it’s still a far-fetched theory to me, seeing how the Romans so willingly branded Ptolemy III’s calendar with Caesar’s name, the idea seems less preposterous.

This can be a bit depressing, reading how the powerful get to stamp their name on the achievements of others, but I also think there’s some positive to be gained from the history. For example, those with 2026 relationship goals can use this story as a helpful reminder that dating isn’t just about finding a long-term partner; it’s also about learning new calendars to bring back to your empire and name after yourself.7

More seriously, though, I am awed as a researcher by how the so-called “Julian Calendar” has roots within continuous data collection efforts across millennia. Egyptian astronomers nearly two millennia before Caesar and Cleopatra would squint toward the sunrise to see if a rare star called Sirius was visible, documenting (even if unknowingly) the earth’s rotation around the sun. These records were how astronomers contemporaneous to Caesar could estimate the length of a year with accuracy. So when you count down to celebrate the new year, you are using a technology with development stretching back over 4000 years.

Sure, the Egyptian laborers who built the pyramids created a physical structure that still draws crowds today, but the Egyptian star-tracking data entry professionals worked on a project that actively provides utility to nearly everyone on the planet. Their calendar is no less a wonder of the world.

As for how this calendar factors into Caesar’s killing, that murder mystery has not been resolved.8 That research will have to wait. Because just as there’s a lesson to be drawn from the 45 BC adoption of the Julian-ish calendar, I also think there’s a lesson in the 1582 Gregorian reform and the centuries it took to take hold.

Unlucky Stars and Birthday Transfiguration

This was in part because Pope Gregory XIII was really into the works of another Egyptian Ptolemy: Claudius Ptolemy9. Specifically, Pope Gregory didn’t like how the calendar was shifting, because it made it difficult to do astrology.10 This was the same time period of history where we get the word “influenza”, literally Italian for “influenced” because the flu was thought to be “influenced” by the stars. Influenza could then, and still can now, kill you. If you believed the stars were killing people en masse, you’d want to track their positions effectively too.

Pope Gregory was more effective than Ptolemy III at getting people to listen to his calendar reform. Lots of people, actually. Maybe they were worried about the killer stars, or maybe they were just excited to be a part of time-keeping history. But not everyone complied. Some were followers of critic Martin Luther, who didn’t believe in this whole “stars business” because it wasn’t mentioned in his magic book11. And so for centuries, Western Europe would operate distinct calendars.

This created a sort of split in time’s fabric. If you visit the grave of popular musical subject Alexander Hamilton, you may notice that there is a clear lack of any visible tear in time’s fabric. But if you visit the grave of Thomas Jefferson (from Act II) you’ll see it plain and clear -- a mark from how the King12 changed his birthday on him!

The abbreviation “O.S.” after his noted birthday (April 2nd, 1743) stands for “old style”. This means the date uses the “Julian” calendar rather than the Gregorian adjustment. Indeed, many of the characters of Hamilton had their birthdays changed by the King in this manner! One of the signers of the Declaration of Independence named Carter Braxton13 not only had his birthday changed, but had his 18th birthday skipped altogether since it was in the “time jump” in 1752 between September 2nd and September 14th.

But the Calendar Act of 1750 didn’t just change the birthdays of characters in Hamilton, it also changed when the British celebrated New Year’s Day. The British Empire had treated March 25th (“Lady Day”) as the start of the new year, which would cause confusion when interacting with the rest of the world. This is a completely independent inconsistency from the one caused by the Gregorian Calendar.

To attempt to resolve confusion, dates in January, February and much of March would feature both the prior and upcoming years. This practice was called “double-dating” or “dual-dating”, and it can be observed in documents in Britain and its many colonies.

With the passage of the Calendar Act of 1750, January dates from 1752 onward could be unambiguously expressed without doubling up on years. Indicating only one year was now sufficient.

But at what cost?

A Month for Middling

January was named after the god Janus, who had more faces than most other gods: two. In high school, I had friends that worked at a coffee shop14 called Janus that featured the front-and-back-facing god’s likeness in its logo. I think this gives me authority to speak on behalf of Janus and say that he likes how dual-dating honors his dual-faced nature. He thinks it’s kind of sad they got rid of it, and he thinks you should maybe give it a try.

I’ve been journaling daily since the start of 2020, and I organize my entries into monthly documents. Because I set goals aligned with the seasons using the solstices and equinoxes as milestones, it’s easier to align the monthly documents to begin/end with the shift in the classical astrological month rather than the modern calendar month. I like in particular how it gave me around a week of preparation for the coming month change. Sort of like the “setting your clocks early to make sure I show up on time” scenario, but on the scale of several days.

This means that my current entries are indeed for “Winter 1 2025/2026”, and they have been since the Winter Solstice. I won’t double-year-date all the way to March 25th, but a month of it could really help with the year-to-year whiplash.

If you’re a bit stubborn like me and resist rapid transitions, maybe keeping this tradition alive may help you too.

So far I’ve shared lessons on (1) expressing gratitude for a calendar built on millennia of astrology research and (2) considering dual-year-dating journal articles to ease transition between years. These have drawn more on the specific history of calendar consolidation, which I enjoy because it creates a globally comparable perspective on time through which different cultures can understand our shared histories. This is what Middling Content is all about.

But there’s one more general lesson before I get into specific media guidance, and it doesn’t rely on historical particulars. It more just asks you to listen to nature around and to listen to your human body.

How To Not Suffocate

I personally hate letting go of things. I hate goodbyes and I hate death and I hate breakups and I hate getting out of the shower and I hate taking down Christmas decorations. I tell myself I watch movie credits out of respect for filmmakers, but I mostly just don’t want to leave the theater yet. Endings are miserable. Beginnings are where the fun is.

So when January comes around, I, like many people, want to focus on adding new stuff to my life. I’m compelled to jump to the next beginning. New habits, new experiences, new wisdom -- why not begin them all? Let’s start on the right foot. Let’s think positive. Right?

If you’re north enough, you can probably see outside that nature is teaching a different lesson. It’s not necessarily intuitive to grasp, though. Yes, we see that flowers die in the fall and new flowers bloom in the spring -- but can’t we have new flowers without losing the old flowers? Why can’t we just pursue a floral “abundance agenda”?

Breathing, in contrast, is deeply intuitive to all living things. And winter is a good time to remind yourself: you cannot inhale unless you exhale.

Inhalation Requires Exhalation

Here’s an experiment that you can try at home. For around 20 seconds, try to inhale without exhaling. You can a little, probably. And then a little more. But then you’re mostly stuck. Maybe there’s a little involuntary exhalation that you replace with more inhalation. But that’s not enough to nourish you. If you’re more ambitious than I am, maybe you’ll pass out and your body will force you to exhale. (Don’t be that ambitious. That’s not the point of the exercise. It is the exact opposite of the point of the exercise.)

Now spend 20 seconds breathing normally. You’ll find you take several good nourishing breaths in 20 seconds when you allow your body to function as it has since you were born.

If you only focus on inhaling, you actually can’t inhale that much. It is the act of exhaling that allows you and prepares you to inhale. And on top of optimizing the volume of air you inhale, exhaling also has the added benefit of sustaining your life. It is through clearing the field that we grow new crops. It is through giving that we are able to receive.

This lesson of balance is central in the religious foundations of nearly everybody on the planet, whether they are orthodox practitioners or follow secular philosophical offshoots. I wrote about notions of balance within Daoist-Secular, Hindu-Buddhist, Christian and Islamic traditions last year in my post “A Pocket Canon to Shrink the World”, if this kind of pan-religious grounding is useful. Middling Content focuses on mediating the collective human experience, so I try to be mindful of broad traditions when extrapolating about “the human condition”.

To add to your life without creating space is like exhaling without inhaling. This is what adding new year’s resolution habits and practices is like without taking time to clear out the old ones. In the world where we select-all and click-and-drag to digital trashcans, deletion is expected to be instantaneous and easy. But if you’ve ever packed up an entire apartment, you know that clearing things out takes time. That time needs to come from somewhere. Winter is that time!

Winter is nature exhaling. And it’s a good signal that we can do the same, letting go of the things that no longer serve us.

My mantra for last winter was “nest, rest, self-invest”, and I think I will pick that up again. All of these can be interpreted in a “winter” sense: nesting as decluttering home space, resting as creating more space in the day, and self-investment as focusing talents and energy by unloading the peripheral.

Since unmet expectations are a potential driver of January 1st’s calendar-leading deathcount15, I think saving the resolutions for a warmer season can make for a more thoughtful and pleasant transition into the new year.

If you align your new goals and new starts with springtime, then winter is a time to reflect and make room. And since I focus on the “middling technologies” of media in this newsletter, I have some suggestions on how to clear up some room through mindful reductions in media usage.

Wintering Your Media to Free Your Mind

One way to think about a “Media Winter” is to ask yourself “What would Dry January look like for my media habits?” Different people will answer this differently, because different people have different challenges with their media. Some people maybe need to cut back, and others could use it more proactively to reach their goals.

As a general approach, though, I think the conceptual arc of winter would have us scale back and spend less of our time mediated. For some this would mean spending more time with the people around them, and for others this would mean spending more time with themselves. From a single day-long media fast, you’ll get two waves of insights: first, when you experience the novelty of the break; and then second, when you reintroduce media with the context your break provides.

Identify Your Media Habits & Opportunities

This is not setting resolutions! Winter isn’t for adding new things!

This is for reflecting on your values and examining how they intersect with your current media habits.

You can think of this as a series of three questions:

1. What are your pre-existing goals? What do you need or want more of in your life? What do you need or want less of? The answers to these questions will be essential context when evaluating your media habits. Media is seldom good or bad in itself, so having some sense of your independent objectives will help.

2. What media do you interact with within a given day? Maybe it’s apps, email, websites, streaming video, TV, etc. These are the places where you can look to make adjustments or changes.

3. Ask yourself, “If I want to (see my friends / get a raise / exercise more / talk less loud in public places), what media might be hurting that?” And specifically for the winter, we’ll be attentive to what is counter to our goals. Your inputs determine your output, and the media you consume are the inputs into your mind! Be mindful of them!

A piece I wrote last year investigated how advertisers and TV studios think about “good media”. I guarantee there are marketing professionals at this very moment planning what they want you to read, watch and/or listen to this January. Don’t let them do all the planning!

When you have a sense of your goals and habits, you’re in a better position to tidy up your key media portals: your phone, your inbox and your feeds.

Purge Your Smartphone Notifications

I’ve spoken more about Janus and January, but February was the other half of the unnamed pre-Pompilian winter months duo. Its name was derived from Februatus, an Ancient Roman festival that promoted washing and purification rituals. Wikipedia suggests speculation that Februatus is also connected to Febris, the goddess of fever, as Romans saw fevers as the body purifying itself of illness.16

While this isn’t a February newsletter, it’s not clear if the Februatus took place in what we now consider January or February17. (Such is a challenge with having an un-month-ed winter.) That means January is as good a time to cosplay The Purge with your media portals. And a good place to start with this is with that ever-by-your-side pocket computer: your smartphone.

I personally don’t let anything make my phone buzz. I wouldn’t let another human rattle me out of nowhere, and I generally try to be more lenient with humans than with technology. But I do allow notifications to show up in the “notifications view”, and they do draw my attention from time to time.

In my heightened awareness so far this month, I’ve purged notifications from apps of a few different types:

• notifications for apps no longer relevant to me (eg., Baidu Maps from my China trip last year)

• notifications for apps that I don’t want reminders to use more (eg., social media)

• notifications for useful apps that are just too pushy (eg., Duolingo RIP)

You can also use your phone purification time to delete apps, cancel app subscriptions and more. I personally find the notifications to be the most important since they really guide so much of my phone screentime.

But save some purging energy, because we’ve got two more portals to purge!

Tend To Your Email Garden

Extraneous emails tend to take less attention than a mobile notification, particularly if you’re automating classification of emails in Gmail or the like, but enough extraneous emails add up. So a helpful Media Februatus ritual is to review your inbox and decide where you might want to cut loose and focus your inbox.

The most obvious candidates to unsubscribe to are the emails that you don’t read. But the real time savings comes from deciding that maybe some of the news alerts you do read aren’t serving you. Then you save time not just in saving the time deleting/archiving/scrolling-past the email; you’re also saving time by not engaging with content that didn’t serve you. Do you see a link that after clicking felt like clickbait? That might be a good cue to part ways. Is a social media site you’re trying to use less emailing you about all the fun people are having on their site with you? Also a good sign to unsubscribe.

I occasionally do a “news fast”18 and find that after a few days of feeling anxious and disconnected, I hear about all the most important stories through conversations even if I don’t directly engage, and my reading-viewing-listening time is much more intentional and satisfying.

Not this email though. This email is definitely aligned with whatever your goals are. Look how much we talk about your goals! We’ve said it so many times already! Goals, goals, goals.19

Likely the media portals you’re most concerned about, though, are your feeds: Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook and more all using some of the most sophisticated computer science in history to try to increase your time spent with their platforms.

Feed Your Feeds Better Feed-Feed

I don’t want to lie to you: you are limited in how you control these feeds.

There are ways you can improve the feed through giving intentional feedback and manipulating the data the feed’s algorithm accesses, but if you really want to protect yourself you should think through a couple other possibilities first.

Hardcore Mode: Get rid of the application. Block the website. Cancel the subscription.

The most effective way to protect yourself from a feed is to abstain from using it altogether. This probably won’t be your solution for every feed-based media service you use, but it might for some of them. If you are pulling media from over three or four applications, you can probably afford to consolidate to fewer. Of your list: Which pull you away from your core goals? Which most aggressively deny you agency and control your experience? Which are superfluous but still draw your attention? These are candidates for the most extreme Media Februatus actions.

• Deleting Your Account. You can delete your account, though this always feels extreme for me. If I do delete an account, I’ll download my data with a GDPR request first to feel less separation anxiety. Deleting your account will prevent you from logging in anywhere, but not all media services require an account so this may not work depending on the service in question.

• Blocking the Site. I often find it enough to just delete the application and block the website with a web blocker. Some web blockers require you input a password or complete a puzzle to evade them, encouraging even greater mindfulness. Ultimately, though, if you know how to enable an extension, you know how to disable one, so these blockers require your cooperation to be effective.

• Redirecting the Site. Rather than just blocking sites, I personally prefer redirecting trouble-sites to sites that are productive and aligned. Maybe you redirect to a trade publication20 focused on a growth area for you. Maybe it’s a text of meaning on Wikisource that helps center you. There are many web extensions that do this, and you can find guidance elsewhere based on your browser-of-choice.

• Cancel the Subscription. In some cases, breaking up with a media platform is as simple as cancelling21 a paid subscription. That adds extra friction that will help keep you away from it, so they’re easier to stay off after you quit. At the same time, they do require you to have the inner strength to make it through whatever highly-tested messaging they push on you. They’ll make desperate deals with you. They’ll show you the picture of a creative person that is depending on your subscription revenue for healthcare. You must be strong. Whatever they are promising you, remind yourself that the world will be better when you own your attention and own your time. You’re doing the right thing.

Unfortunately, many media platforms have become deeply embedded in our social or professional22 lives. There will likely be some you can’t break free of for these reasons. Fortunately, there are other options.

Very Hard Mode: Get rid of the application. Allow the website (with protection).

Any media service would rather you use its app than use its website. Its app is its home field, and as a part of its “home field advantage” it can manipulate a great deal of the environment to entrance you into longer viewing sessions. (It often has greater capabilities to collect data on you in an app environment, allowing it to more sophisticatedly attempt to shape your behaviors.) Getting rid of a media service’s official app allows you to move your interactions to a web browser, which is a more neutral space. In a web browser, extensions23 can protect you from some of the more notorious “dark patterns”24 that media services use even in their websites.

There are definitely difficulties with mobile web experiences, but the friction is the point. When someone shares a link from TikTok or Instagram with me, I am constantly frustrated by the ingenious ways these services make the mobile web experiences miserable. Ultimately, I’d rather be frustrated and free. I don’t want to develop habits with these platforms; I just want to watch the unhinged content my friends have discovered for me.

For desktop experiences, there are many extensions that can help you. While you can certainly identify helpful tools on your own, here are a few examples I’ve found helpful, grouped by mindfulness principle.

Remove Manipulative Design Features

If you want to be able to check your messages on social media sites without the risk of being drawn into “the Feed”, I’ve been using News Feed Eradicator for a couple years and it does more-or-less exactly what it says. It hides the “feed” aspects of sites like Instagram, LinkedIn, Reddit, Facebook and YouTube. Without the feed, you can still access functions like messaging, so if you are socially or professionally obligated to use any of these platforms an extension can help.

There are also more platform-specific extensions that give you more granular control over particular sites. For YouTube, I use an extension called Unhook to hide the feed and the home page, forcing me to deliberately choose the topics or channels I want to investigate. I’ve used Control Panel for Twitter and Antigram to modify X/Twitter and Instagram respectively, and I’ll talk about them a bit more in later categories.

If you’re trying to make a popular site’s layout more aligned with your intentions, there’s probably an extension that can help you out.25

Revive Chronological Default Sequencing

The social media of yore functioned more like a public information utility than a media busines26s, giving you a simple rundown of what was happening now or near-now in the discourse. People complained for a week or so when the system changed, but ultimately accepted the new normal. While there have been years of broad and persistent criticism of AI replacing creatives like writers, photographers, videographers and musicians, the concerns around AI replacing editorial staff of the pre-feed era seemed more industry-specific. Personally, I continue to be more concerned about opaque editor-bots directing the attention of billions of people than I am about generative AI tools.27

To have more control over my own Twitter/X feed, I use Control Panel for Twitter. In the options menu, I can select the “Following” timeline to show tweets in chronological order, which gives me the same feeling of checking “what’s going on in the world” without having to worry about whether my interests are aligned with the AI of Twitter/X/Grok. (At the very least, they generally want me to spend more time on the site than I would like to; in the worst case scenario, they may have an interest in distorting my understanding of the world.)

What if it isn’t the chronological feed you miss but the way social media used to be more, well, social? The “Following” feed solves that too, but there are also other tools for other sites to address this challenge as well.

Maintain Intentional Community Focus

If you want to focus on your friends and your friends alone, that too can be managed with extensions.

On Instagram, I use the extension Antigram to default to a feed of exclusively those I follow. Admittedly, I do follow more than just friends, but I try to stick to just friends or small businesses as much as I can.

There are still some potential challenges here to prepare for. For example, the news accounts you follow will post much more frequently than your friends do, so if you really want to be community-focused, you’ll want to be particularly judicious with who you follow. You can always maintain multiple accounts for different follow lists to have a more news-oriented feed and a more social feed. (Or, like me, you might want to have a feed with accounts in a particular language optimized for language-learning.)

Ultimately, though, you can create a more local or otherwise-intentional feed to avoid being delivered more sensational algorithm-optimized content. It just may take a mix of extension setup and follow-list curation28. You have all winter though!

Set Time Limits

Another obvious way to use extensions is just to have them break you away from a distracting site after you’ve been on it for a certain amount of time.

I tend to redirect rather than set time-limits, but at early stages in using extensions to promote media mindfulness I made heavier use of the extensions StayFocusd and BlockSite. There are lots of extensions for this particular use case, so there’s a good chance the best one out there for you isn’t one I’ve used. The extension Limit looks pretty slick?

As a default approach, though, I’d encourage you to be strategic and defang a media service of its addictive mechanisms; it’s not always practically possible to directly manage the amount of time you spend on site. These services are good at capturing your attention, and your “five minute” time limit will come in the middle of you reading or watching something, and suddenly you’re circumventing the extension and trying to find the same content to finish, which will only take more time.

With web browser modifications, you can implement time limits, community focus, recency prioritization and dark pattern avoidance to keep your media services aligned with your interests. If you have to continue using a distracting media service, this is the best way to maintain control of the experience.

But what if you need to keep the app on your phone? There is one more line of defense to consider, though it is imperfect.

Hard Mode: Allow the application and website. Attempt to tame the algorithm.

It is important to remember, when trying to guide the algorithm, that it does not work for you. Its objective is to serve those who pay for its servers, and it does that by keeping you scrolling and seeing ads as long as possible. The algorithm doesn’t particularly care about your interests, so your ability to shape it is limited.

That said, there are two ways in many apps to attempt this feat, and the second is ultimately more effective than the first.

But let’s start with the first anyway.

Give Your Algo Feedback

This is the front-door to algorithm customer service. Most services provide some button to let the algorithm know you’re displeased with its selection. Usually, it’s easy to just scroll by, but Media Winter can be a good season to be a bit more proactively engaged. You can participate more actively in curation, investing in eventual higher quality recommendations.

When I see something that seems slop-adjacent or sensationalistic, I’ll not only flag that particular post/video, but I’ll spend five minutes just scrolling through as many recommendations as I can and block/unfollow accounts to better direct future recommendations. And depending on your goals, you can even “dislike” high-quality, interesting, informative content that simply doesn’t align with what you’re looking for from the app at this moment.

This can look different in different applications. You can go into the options on a recommended Instagram post and select “Not Interested”. Spotify has an option called “exclude from your taste profile” that you can select on songs and playlists, potentially helpful for those sharing accounts with children. I’m sure any app you’re trying to increase your agency within has a similar feature, and you just might need to fish around for it a little. And proactivity here can shape your recommendations.

Mostly.

Recall that the algorithm doesn’t work for you. While these systems aren’t transparent, I expect they do incorporate this feedback in some fashion, and they will in particular respect a direct block of a particular content source or creator. At the end of the day, the algorithm is trying to keep you on the app, and so it may still find ways to provide content similar to what it provided earlier if it believes that will keep you on the app.

If the algorithm anticipates you will watch a video, this tends to outweigh feedback you’ve provided.

Sometimes you have to help the recommendation system forget.

Lobotomize Your Algo

Many services will allow you to adjust your history, and this will be more effective at influencing your recommendations.

The main algorithm I do this with is YouTube29. YouTube lets you remove items from your history and comment on the algorithm. You’ll notice that it considers anything you even let autoplay without audio in your “history”, so even passive viewing behavior can influence your recommendations.

This may not be possible on every media platform you use, but when you can directly manipulate the context your algorithm is working with, it gives you more control over the recommendation experience.

Remember: The more mindfully you feed your feed, the more aligned your feed will be in feeding you.

Bonus Homework: Revisit Your Wrapped(s)

All the purging and purification can be a lot, so it can be good to offset that energy with something a bit more warm and fuzzy. Extending the “inter-year” transition doesn’t just give you more time for resolution-making, it also gives you more time for the end-of-year reflections that can feel rushed after the various holiday celebrations with family and friends. And one of my favorite ways to reflect is by digging into the “best of” lists: for movies, music, writing and more.

Further, I think observing “Old January” gives us all another month or so to put together our own “best of” lists. I will be using this extra time to do just that, and I’d encourage you to do the same. If you feel like you missed your chance to give your takes, consider this an extension.30

And while you reflect and select your favorite parts of the “old year”, you might find it useful to spend time with the various Wrapped-esque year-in-review reports you received. While these activity summaries seemed particularly overdone this year31, I think there is real value and meaning that can be drawn from them -- particularly when you’re able to space them out over the broader winter rather than cramming it all into a single-week nostalgia binge. And with the more relaxed timeline, you could even create your own year-in-review reports if you’re extra ambitious.

Extra and ambitious both describe me, so I’ll be using my January and February to practice some “Old Winter Revanchism” and share some analyses of my 2025 data to plan out my 2026. I’m hoping this will include some travel analysis, some updates on the survey system I ran all last year, and a cross-platform media self-audit. This last item will include (finally) completing the final newsletter in my Wrapped analysis trilogy that I started last year.

And on the topic of music, I have a track that I like to use to help remind myself to slow things down in January. It’s unfortunately been removed from Spotify, Apple Music and most dedicated music streaming services. It’s available though, to those willing to take the moment to be intentional and seek it out.

An Anthem for “Old January”

The evolution of January from deliberately passive to aggressively success-oriented is mirrored by the evolution of a pop-rap single that swept the radio waves in 2004. I associate the song with Star World Asia, a TV channel in Singapore that made heavy use of the song in promos when I lived there, which is a testament to the global resonance. But the song is a bit of a paradox.

The song I’m referring to is “Let’s Get It Started” by The Black Eyed Peas.

While “Let’s Get It Started” promotes the ambition, initiative and proactivity we associate with Contemporary January Culture, this was not the original message. Indeed, much like how Old January has roots in a season of rest and recuperation, the original lyrics preached the exact opposite message; that is, the song suggested, to paraphrase slightly, “Let’s [Slow Things Down]”.

There’s even evidence that the “Let’s [Slow Things Down]”/”Let’s Get It Started” song-cycle deliberately explores how developing the new requires an abandonment of the old. In the music video for “Let’s Get It Started”, the first half features the destruction of various objects, having them fall from great heights onto a street. Then, the second half plays the still-life snuff-films in reverse, letting the audience witness how the destruction enables creation. This is clearly a metaphor for the cycle of death and rebirth. This is the transition from old to new year. The front-facing face and back-facing face of the great Janus himself.

Though it’s hard to find this original version online32, I think January is a good month to revisit this lost track. It reflects an older view. I’m glad we have both versions of the song. A world with only “Let’s [Slow Things Down]” or only “Let’s Get It Started” would be a poorer world. We need both, a yin and yang that keep our lives in healthy balance. A song with a winter and summer version, a sort of modern superdistillation of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons”.

Could un-cancelling “Let’s [Slow Things Down]” help reduce the toxic growth-oriented pressure that makes January 1st such a deadly day for suicides? Mass culture elevates and celebrates intellectual achievement constantly; by “purifying” the media of slowness-glorification, we create a high-pressure culture that drives us all toward anxiety and depression. We must maintain balance. And as far as songs that encourage relaxing one’s mental faculties, the track has the self-awareness to open with the line: “in this context, there’s no disrespect”. This is from the same album as “Where’s The Love”. Is this not a sort of inclusion?

Alas, you nor I can control the licensing and distribution strategies of a multi-platinum alt-hiphop collective. You can only control your own approach to January.

So I compel you: Don’t “get it started”. Not yet. Slow things down.

Let yourself breathe all the way out. Make lungspace for a nourishing inhalation to come.

There’s a new year ready for you33, whenever you’re ready for it.

Since starting this tradition at the end of 2016, this is my tenth “end of year wrap-up”. It’s been four years since I made the pivot to sharing outside of my immediate professional community, blasting friends and family with an email in 2022 and 2023. And only in 2024 did I move this exercise completely onto Substack, which makes this my second Substack annual wrap-up.

Doing this on Substack means there are a couple of you who I don’t personally know, but hopefully you still find this connected to the Middling Content mission to support pro-human global media systems. And for those of you that are indeed friends and family members, know that I have greatly appreciated you keeping me in your reading list! I enjoy the texts you send my way, whether they are responding to an idea I’ve shared or asking when the next article will drop.

This year had more posts from me than ever before -- 13 total, averaging over one per month! And though I did not complete my “booksquare”, the number of words I published was over 66,000, which could be a short nonfiction book if my writing was more cohesive. I have thoughts on how I can better focus my writing in the new year, and hopefully that will create more interesting and useful content for readers like you. Expect a deeper debrief on this in January, but feel free to reach out to me if you have specific thoughts on how you think this newsletter could be more useful to you as you look to improve how media serves you and your goals.

For today’s reflection, I will do a bit of meta-reflecting. I’m big on traditions like this “end of year” newsletter, and I think it’s worthwhile to investigate how traditions can help or hamper our journeys to be our best selves.

Habit expert and guy-I-went-to-college-with James Clear defines a habit as “the small decisions you make and actions you perform every day”.1 Traditions tend to be more spread out and mindful, in part due to how they tend to be more temporally spaced out. Clear teaches how stacking and context can be used to make habits easier; with annual traditions, our lives change so much .

This raises the next question: With life so short, what if anything is worth repeating?

Here I think to the old Emerson line in Self-Reliance, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” I don’t think this end-of-year email is foolish, as it fits in what I see as the spirit of “Old Year’s Day”, the last day in a given year. But how can we articulate this spirit of the holiday? And why honor the changing of a timekeeper’s detail like the year at all?

Indeed, a good “Old Year’s Day” tradition serves a deeply noble human goal: protecting human life.

Surviving the Summit of Mount SAD

Between flu season, scarce daylight, intense gatherings and cultural pressure, many folks struggle this time of year. New Year’s Day serves as the peak of this difficult season, and indeed an analysis of over 57 million death certificates found that it is the peak of biological disorders overall. Sociologists Phillips, Barker and Brewer found that between 1979 and 2004, more death certificates were dated January 1st than any other calendar date.

Knowing this, it’s important to ask: How can traditions help people evade the most common traps of this deadliest day of the year?

I like to picture the average dotted-line as where the snow starts on the mountain.

The researchers found a variety of causes and explanations, though they focused more on the spike in deaths on Christmas that is observed in emergency rooms. The authors connect this with staffing issues, people postponing treatments to be home for the holidays, drugs and alcohol usage and also travel-related deaths.

But the New Year’s Day story is a bit different. Digging deeper into this requires another paper and a trigger warning, because a major driver of death on New Year’s Day is as tragic as it is often preventable: suicide. A group of researchers with Multi-City Multi-Country (MCC) Collaborative Research Network published an analysis in 2024 that found rates of death due to suicide could double on New Year’s Day in some regions, making this likely a large contributor to the 2010 death certificate analysis.

The researchers specifically cite a few possible explanations:

• the “economic activity cycle”, with victims struggling to readjust to work after vacation

• “broken-promise effect theory”, driven by clash in new year expectations and reality

• alcohol use that is particularly heavy on New Year’s Eve

• the shift from a high socialization season to a relatively isolated season

Based on this, a healthy and safe New Year’s Eve & New Year’s Day is nourishing, balanced, dry and connected. And if you want to incorporate the broader health risks into the season, it doesn’t hurt to keep close to your regular sleep schedule. (I’m going to bed right after sending this, personally.)

A supportive tradition that is nourishing, balanced, dry and connected helps curb the risks associated with the holiday while also hopefully providing you additional benefits. This newsletter hits all four notes for me: (1) it nourishes me by aligning with my passions for reflection and analysis, (2) it is balanced in realistically assessing the past year, good and bad without setting unachievable expectations, (3) it is alcohol-free and (4) it helps me feel connected with people who matter to me -- you all!

Slightly rephrased to map to an acronym: a good tradition is Realistic, Interconnected, Sober and Enjoyable. My newsletter tradition helps me RISE to meet the new year, even in tough times. (And tough times are the times when I need it most.)

If you are trying to survive the summit of Mount SAD this year, you might also benefit from traditions that target the exhaustion, disappointment, intoxication and loneliness that can make New Year’s Day so hard. With some slight rearrangement of these nouns, you can remember the acronym IDLE: you don’t want to be IDLE on this holiday unless you absolutely have to be. This could mean creating new traditions that keep you nourished/balanced/dry/connected. And if you have traditions, as I do, you may benefit from reflecting on how well they suit the shape of the holiday.

So to demonstrate this, I’m using my Old Year’s Day newsletter to investigate 3 of my consistencies! I think two consistencies prove themselves to be healthy life-affirming traditions. But in one case, my investigation did turn up a hobgoblin.

And at precisely midnight tonight, that hobgoblin will be eliminated.

Consistency #1: 19 Haircuts

My oldest tradition is “New Year, New Haircut”, which turned 19 this year. This means I’ve honored “New Year, New Haircut” for over half of the years in my life. It is time-honored -- but that doesn’t mean it isn’t still secretly a hobgoblin!

Let’s work through the RISE / IDLE2 framework.

Realistic / Disappointing:

This is perhaps a point of danger. We have grand expectations from our haircuts, but they are notorious for throwing curveballs. The newer and more ambitious the haircut, the higher. Assessment: Some Risk of Disappointment.

Interconnected / Lonely:

Not in itself a social experience, though having a fresh haircut can motivate socializing. The pseudo-social conversation with the barber can certainly go poorly, and the wrong questions about the holidays or life can get your mind focused on unhelpful thoughts. This requires modification. Assessment: Some Risk of Loneliness.

Sober / Intoxicated:

I’ve never had a “NYNH” under the influence, and a drunk haircut sounds honestly nightmarish. Assessment: Sobriety Assured.

Enjoyable / Exhausting:

For cities that I knew well or cities abroad, I could usually find a place that is open. In Katy, TX -- long our family headquarters in my college and early career years -- I would get my hair cut for $3 (plus a generous New Year’s tip) at a nearby Vietnamese barber, and in NYC there would be barbers open in Chinatown. In many cities, though, finding a haircut place that is open on New Year’s Day is very exhausting, so this too pushes toward modification. Assessment: Some Risk of Exhaustion.

Because this tradition has been around for me for two decades, I’ve made adjustments to make it more manageable. Specifically, I allow myself to get my “New Year, New Haircut” haircuts on the Solstice instead of New Year’s Day proper. This both reduces the exhausting logistical requirements and makes it easier to find a barber I feel more confident in, plus even if things go a bit sideways I am not forced to confront a bad haircut on an already emotionally strained New Year’s Day.

Verdict: Some of these haircuts were foolish, but the post-modification tradition itself succeeds at creating a sense of hope and possibility for the year ahead. It will not face execution this year. After thorough Emersonian investigation, it is deemed: “not a hobgoblin”.3

Consistency #2: 15 Whenvelopes

This newsletter is actually just one piece of correspondence that I have in my Old Year’s Day tradition. I also write my “future self” a letter each Old Year’s Day (AKA Dec 31st) and then on New Year’s Day I will read my letter from a-year-and-a-day prior. I place the letters in a “Whenvelope”4 and I only allow myself to open the Whenvelope on January 1st.

Again, we can work through the RISE / IDLE framework.

Realistic / Disappointing:

My personal reflection, even more than what I share in my newsletter, is deeply realistic. I cover both highlights and challenges of my past year, but I also don’t over-sell my future self on what the new year might bring. After all, I don’t have any idea what the circumstances of my future self will be; they could be great, but they also could be pretty terrible. So much can happen in a year. Perhaps due to my disposition, I’ve never had a challenge keeping my letter grounded. Assessment: Highly Realistic.

Interconnected / Lonely:

This is a solitary activity for me, and it’s one that on rare occasions has pulled me away from real human-to-human interaction, but overall I’ve found receiving a letter from my past self on New Year’s Day to feel genuinely pleasant. I think as a young person I had a pretty bad relationship with myself, and even today I can have unhelpful self-talk. But these Whenvelope letters are special to me, and I’m always deliberate to write in such a way that makes my future self feel loved. I don’t think anyone should be their own only friend, but being a good friend to yourself is important, and it’s most important on a New Year’s Day in a tough season. With the Whenvelope, I know I’ll never spend a New Year’s Day alone. Assessment: Combats Loneliness.

Sober / Intoxicated:

I have probably had a drink before writing my letter to myself, but never in excess. Because I take the exercise seriously, it gives me a reason to keep myself lucid and effective. It’s more likely to reduce my drinking than increase it. Assessment: Not Inherently Intoxicating.

Enjoyable / Exhausting:

I have found that balancing both my newsletter and my Whenvelope is sometimes too much of a burden for a single day, which is why I sent my end-of-year email out on the Winter Solstice the last two years. I was running behind this year, and that created a little undue pressure. But it’s manageable, and I’ll try to better separate these next year. Assessment: Some Risk of Exhaustion.

I will note also, though, there is additional upside with the Whenvelope exercise in that it provides me with my own brief summary of what I’m working through each year. I can see that the past 15 years break into roughly three chunks: (1) figuring out how to contribute to the world with research from 2011 to 2015, (2) being drawn to research with greater social impact from 2016 to 2020 and (3) experimenting with a more independent work arrangement from 2021 through now. And looking at the overall range of letters, I can see I’ve had many tough years: specifically in 2011, 2013, 2014, 2020, 2022 and 2023. This also helps me see, though, that through focus and effort, I’ve been able to find my way to success.

Verdict: The name “whenvelope” is a bit foolish, but the tradition is purposeful and healthy. It will survive into the new year. After thorough Emersonian investigation, it is deemed: “not a hobgoblin”.

Consistency #3: 2117 Days of Duolingo

My streak with Duolingo is shorter than the other traditions I’ve mentioned, mapping to roughly 5.8 years, but this is still a long time.

It’s longer than I’ve lived in any particular dwelling (five-and-a-half non-consecutive years in an East Hollywood apartment) and nearly as long as I’ve lived in my longest-lived-in city (Los Angeles for six-and-a-half years). It’s also longer than any romantic relationship I’ve had. (Considerably so.) So it’s with a heavy heart that I consider: do I need to break up with Duolingo? That is: is Duolingo a hobgoblin?

Duolingo as an app changed a lot over the past six years that I used it. I started using it when I started “decentralizing” my life in 2019. Many of these changes were good: new reading exercises, interactive games, more lifelike voices, the vocab card-matching. Some of them, though, seemed close to what designers call “dark patterns”, with gambling-machine style engagement mechanisms. While I still admire a lot of Duolingo’s mission when it comes to providing low-cost language credentials for non-native English speakers, as an app user who has also dabbled in creating his own language-learning applications, I don’t feel it’s the right way for me to be spending my time anymore.

I don’t feel the need to break out by the RISE / IDLE framework. Let’s jump to the verdict.

Verdict: Duolingo has stopped being enjoyable and instead has become exhausting. Rather than making me feel meaningfully interconnected to friends, it exploits my relationships with them, holding them hostage and demanding my increased usage. Vibrations and sounds and in-game currency make it less sobering and more a cheap hack of my dopamine systems. After thorough Emersonian investigation, it is deemed: “a hobgoblin”! OoooooOOOOooooo!

Sentencing: I last completed a lesson on Monday, and I used up a “streak freeze” yesterday. And so the good people of Times Square will be counting down to the moment my streak will elapse and be no more. Add it to the January 1st heap of casualties. Hobgoblin handled.

I do want to add that this is all actually quite difficult to contemplate. Having a 2k+ streak has been a source of pride for me, but that pride is the exact kind of foolishness that hobgoblin-hunting is designed to reveal and address. I left two jobs this year, and even though I know those were both the right decisions, parting ways was still tremendously difficult. I also wrote about leaving the Intuit ecosystem earlier this year, and though I was flippant about the departure that too was a little frightening.

There is more to note in this exercise, though, so I will add another assessment: this time evaluating the overall act of “hobgoblin-hunting”. Might this be a worthwhile way to spend the early days of the new year?

It seems to me such a tradition (1) is grounded in realism, (2) has potential upside for interconnectedness if hunted hobgoblins were interfering with human relationships, (3) does not require drugs or alcohol and (4) can be energy-conserving in the long run. Maybe it’s less a “New Year’s Day” tradition than it could be a broader “early-in-the-year” tradition.

Bonus Meta-Verdict: After a tough year, it can be a good practice to allow yourself to break with old inertias. So a tradition of parting ways with software that increasingly deviates from your own interests is life-affirming. Hobgoblin-hunting in itself is a healthy Old Year’s Day tradition, and thus deemed: “not a hobgoblin”. (Though it’s also “not a consistency” either yet, so perhaps I’ll revisit this next year; I’m sure there will be new applications and brands trying to pull the rug from under me, and I must maintain my vigilance.)

Where To Next

You may find it useful to conduct a similar analysis of your traditions, but I’ll leave that to you depending on if you feel in need of making this season more bearable. Perhaps you are harboring hobgoblins? Now you can assess your individual traditions or habits to see if they help you RISE to meet the new year (by being Realistic, Interconnecting, Sober and Enjoyable) or if they are keeping you IDLE and unhappy (weighed down with Intoxication, Disappointment, Loneliness and Exhaustion).

As for me, I’m not done with my post-2025 reflecting. The time-scale with which we shift from the holiday season to “the new year” is brutally fast in the US, and it’s actually unusual that we structure it this way. Lunar New Year celebrations, honored in the vast Sinosphere, provide a 15-day festival that is less jarring. Even in the West, much of Christendom continues festivities into the new year rather than just dumping people in the future with nothing to look forward to until… Presidents’ Day? MLK Day?

Further, January first has only served as New Year’s Day in the Anglosphere for fewer than 300 years. Even January itself is only about 2700 years old. The Romans traditionally considered winter a monthless period, and the new year wouldn’t start until March when the Roman Consul would begin session.

So if you find yourself struggling, just say to yourself: “There’s no such thing as January. It was invented around 713 BC and it can’t hurt me unless I let it.” More on that in the coming weeks. For now, I’m just sending love as we all do our best to survive the deadliest day of the year. (And getting some rest to prepare for the year ahead.)

You’ll hear from me again in the post-December pre-March un-monthed winter! I’ll share more about the shift to the modern abrupt switch from a more graceful inter-annual cross-fade. The old more humanistic calendar is still there for us, and embracing it might even save lives.

Until Then,

With Much Love,

Thanks for Reading,

Harry

As someone who grew up in the wind, New York City remains a social locus for me. Though no individual city contains more than maybe 10% of my friends, more of them live in NYC than in any other city. I lived in Manhattan and Brooklyn in 2022 and 2011, and back when Airbnb was widely available in the city, I made an effort to spend a week or so in a couple dozen neighborhoods across all five boroughs. It’s close to my heart even though I can tell it’s not my home.

In sampling out around a hundred global cities trying to decide where to live, I developed a framework for the kind of place I want to live, which I call “a good city & a good place”. A “good place” is mostly about kind people, strong neighborhoods and green/blue spaces; it’s often not as immediately responsive to mayoral policy.1 But a “good city” very much is within governmental control, and I have some thoughts and hopes for the future of the city.

Mostly though this is just a chance to share some pictures of me on buses.

Let’s get into it!

Getting There, Staying There, Getting Around

a framework for assessing urban functionality

As a globalist vagrant, my priority in evaluating any city is how inclusive and open a city is to the people of the world. From one angle, New York City is one of the most diverse cities on the planet with nationalities and linguistic diversity galore. But from another angle, it’s made one of the most profoundly exclusive cities by its high cost of living. So how can we understand inclusiveness/exclusiveness in a city context?

I group three questions under the umbrella of “urban functionality”:

• Can you get there?

• Can you stay there?

• Can you get around?

“Getting There” is a mix of geography, immigration restrictions and state capacity. “Staying There” is driven by cost of living, and the cost of housing in particular. And “Getting Around” is all about cost and quality of transportation.

Though Middling Content is mostly about understanding how media creates this space for people to interact, functioning global cities are a critical piece of this as well. And thus, I’m deeply interested in how NYC and other large cities can really flourish and create a space for the world’s people to interact.

I think this framework is actually front-loaded in difficulty, so let’s start at the end with “getting around” and work our way backwards.

Getting Around

While I love all transit, I really have come around on buses. I’ve had a long affection for them, since taking one to prom my senior year in high school2. And the fact that Zohran Mamdani has been able to take an often ignored topic like buses into national conversation is my favorite part of his campaign. I’ve evolved through all major transit life stages, starting as a “bike lane advocate”, becoming a “train snob”, but I’m convinced “bus stan” is where I’ll stay.

If you don’t like buses, you probably just haven’t found the right bus yet. And that’s okay, because I’m going to talk about some of my favorite buses and maybe one of those buses can show you the magic of buses too.

Houston:

People don’t think of Houston as a strong urban transit city, and in most senses it isn’t. But from a cost perspective, I brag to people about the Houston METRO Bus system because it is the cheapest per-minute public transit system I have taken in the US. For $1.25, you have free transfers for up to three hours. That is less than a penny per minute! I once took a bus to the movie theater, watched M. Knight Shyamalan’s Old, and then returned home on the same fare. Does your bus system let you do that?

Jakarta:

The first BRT system I ever took was the Transjakarta and it blew my mind. BRT is “Bus Rapid Transit”, and Jakarta has the largest in the world. It is at the same time just a bus but designed to operate so much more effectively; a mix of small rider experience improvements like a dedicated lane, off-board fare collection and platform-level boarding make for a much better experience, and many of these BRT lines have buses running every minute or faster at peak times.

Mexico City:

I rode the Metrobús BRT system in CDMX and it was the main reason I was rooting for Claudia Sheinbaum to be elected president of Mexico. (As Mexico City’s Secretary of Environment from 2000 to 2006, she oversaw its development and its first line launched in 2005.) I ended up seeing Sheinbaum’s acceptance speech in the Zócalo and I was thinking about the BRT the whole time.

Luxembourg:

This past July, I was lucky to ride my first free bus in Luxembourg; an alternative to collecting bus fare prior to boarding, as is done in the BRT model, is to just not collect fare at all. The route is faster and people get where they’re going sooner. Luxembourg’s GDP per capita as reported by the UN is around $128k, the second richest country by this measure. The state of New York reports a GDP per capita of $117k, so it’s not preposterous or unprecedented to have a system operate in this way. I personally found the buses in Luxembourg pleasant!

Pittsburgh:

Pittsburgh has a great BRT line, and it’s the only one I’ve taken in the US. I don’t have a picture of it though.

If you have never taken a BRT, I highly recommend it. I will write more about BRTs in the future.

The idea that NYC could become a sort of bus capital of America is very exciting, but it’s also true that NYC is easily already the best city in the country for “getting around”. When it comes to being an affordable place to stay, though, it’s at the other end of the list.

Staying There

A city can only be as inclusive as its cost-of-living is low.

The Mamdani platform here is a bit quirkier and less how a neoliberal-sympathetic wonk like myself would approach it, but I think he has identified the right goals. I’ll talk through these quickly, but I’m hopeful he can knock out a couple of these.

Grocery Stores:

I’m currently in Bengaluru, and one of my favorite aspects is that I can go to a grocery store and buy a small candy bar. I have a sweet tooth, and it’s nice to be able to satisfy it without having to buy a “mega share-pack” of sweets, which I will probably compulsively eat in one sitting. It is not an act of compassion that grocery stores here offer smaller candy bars; it is because purchasing power levels here make it advantageous to sell a low-volume low-cost option. In the US, everyone can afford the bigger option so giving the customer an option that results in less spending. A privately run store needs to profit-optimize, which pressures it to overserve customers; it would be appealing to be able to get my food from a place that isn’t just trying to shake me down for as much money as it can.

At the same time, I get how some people are triggered by the suggestion of a government-run grocery store since centrally planned food systems have killed millions of people. A few new stores in NYC will not destabilize the food system, and even if these stores are popular, we seem far from any risk of a collapse in resilience within food supply logistics.

I am excited to see how this experiment plays out, and its low cost should make it an easy win!

Rent Freeze:

While this won’t work as a long-term solution, I think it can provide some instant relief for specific communities. And in trying to drive cooperation across constituencies to create more units and decrease costs, using all available tools is appropriate.

Real estate developers will be most willing to go along with the mayor’s plan if the mayor has an alternative plan that excludes them entirely. If they think they have leverage, they hold out and try to extract as much as they can from the city. The goal should be to replace the old machine that has taken on decades of bloatware with a nimbler efficient people’s machine.

Free Childcare:

This is a wonderful idea, and the main challenge will be funding it. I often hear that the mayor can’t raise taxes, but that’s only partially true; the mayor can’t raise the tax rate, but he can impact the amount of taxable income within the city, and more income in the population means more revenue for the city.

The wealthy are the wealthy often in part because they love money, but it’s seldom the only thing they love. Wealthy people give money to all sorts of things without a financial return. I’m hopeful there’s a path to funding this project, whether it’s through working with Governor Hochul or creating a vision of NYC that is attractive to the right kind of high-income professional to live in a high-functioning city.

Getting There

A good city is a city you can get to. Some of this is geographical, but beyond the considerable cost issues preventing people from being able to visit NYC from all over the world, there is also the fact that many people who want to visit NYC can’t get the needed approval from the federal government to do so. And even with approval, there is currently an elevated threat of soldiers kidnapping visitors at gunpoint and taking them to detention centers.

The relevant Mamdani pledge on his platform website is “Trump-Proofing NYC”, which is an important part of keeping the city functioning and accessible. That said, the nature of the American political system could make this a real challenge. Any time I think about strategy for handling the Federal Government, I always think back to Trump’s “you don’t have the cards” quote in his Oval Office meeting with Zelensky. In this case, what are the game conditions and who has what cards? I think NYC has real cards to play here, more than most cities, but an honest assessment of the situational dynamics will help drive the desired outcome.

In the hopes that maybe I can help communities navigate these current bleak circumstances, I will focus next on sharing some polling work I’ve been conducting about American perceptions of immigration. Ultimately, if Mamdani is able to create an accessible and functioning city, he can make NYC not just a great place but also a great city.

The book will be a manual to help people make the most of their media experiences in a media environment that is growing increasingly hostile to healthy human functioning. In it, I’m consolidating my experience doing research with major advertising platforms like Google and Facebook, analysis for major creative studios like Disney and Sony, and my personal exploration of global media traditions in a half-dozen trips around the world. I hope it’ll be useful to others, but at the very least I am confident it will be helpful to me as I map out my 2026.

I am using the above 5x5 matrix to track the components; I’ll share more about this matrix in an upcoming post.

The “Middling Content” of Middling Content

Just as Frankenstein isn’t the monster and Jaws isn’t the shark, the content I write in Middling Content isn’t itself “middling content”. True “middling content” spans large audiences and provides a common reference point through which human beings can connect with each other. The 80-song playlist was a helpful exercise for me, but it takes a few hours to listen to completely1. What if you want to middle in a more short-form and convenient way? What could be a tool to facilitate this, almost like the Babel Fish in The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, but for narratives instead of languages?

In trying to facilitate communication and understanding in broad global contexts, I’ve assembled what I consider my “pocket canon”: a short list of passages that I personally have found meaningful from distinct yet populous traditions of thought. I have specifically tried to identify passages that complement each other and my own passions, so that I can continue to deepen my understanding of them without straying too far outside my normal life and goals.

In today’s newsletter, I’m going to talk through a few key points:

• an overview of modern western history

• my four passages that represent over 7 billion people globally

• how I knit those four passages together

• how you might create your own “pocket canon”

But first: a quick disclaimer.

A Quick Disclaimer!

I’m going to talk about texts that are literally sacred to people.

In all of world culture and human history, religion is one of the most beautiful, spiritually deep and intellectually enriching aspects of our species. And yet, it also incites terrible and horrific violence. People have been killed for liking sacred texts, killed for disliking sacred texts and killed for minor deviations in interpreting sacred texts.

I don’t want that. I want the opposite of that. I think a lot of human conflict boils down to misunderstandings and semantics. I am approaching from a place of genuine adoration and curiosity.

As a part of trying to be respectful to the texts I’m discussing, here are four disclosures that hopefully communicate my entering this conversation in good faith.

My Knowledge Is Limited. While I’ve been working through these texts for years (and in some cases decades), I am not trying to crowd out other deeper expertise and experience. Indeed, I’m trying to do the opposite and I hope that with more conversations my thinking will continue to evolve. My goal is to provide a broad-based yet simple textual foundation for a global society, and I believe being open about this process will allow me to improve and document what I learn so others can benefit.

Intentions Matter. If you want to use a structure like this to spark conversation, it does require some level of tact. My success in using this “pocket world canon” to enter into conversations with people around the world has been because I balance genuine adoration and curiosity. And I think both elements are needed together. If you are just passionate about the text but inflexible in your interpretation, you can find yourself starting a fight. If you are inquisitive but haven’t spent any time or work investigating independently, your inquiry can be burdensome. But in balance, appreciation and curiosity can allow you to use these passages to build common ground and grow relationships across lines of difference.

Text Inclusivity Is Essential. I’ve deliberately selected texts that resonate on a purely humanist level for those who don’t identify with any religious tradition. I also think they can reflect on each other in case you identify exclusively with one of these traditions. I know many people have had negative experiences with religion, and that will certainly make it harder to see anything positive in a religious text.2 I still hope that by selecting texts that are meaningful to billions of people, that there might be an opportunity for creating connection and value. But it’s okay to skip parts that aren’t for you at this moment.

Exclusion Doesn’t Signify Dismissal. I do not consider my “pocket canon” the optimal “pocket canon” for everyone. I expect it may even evolve for me as I continue to read and learn. I understand that it overlooks many important narratives and people groups globally, and that is not to be taken as diminishment of those narratives and people groups. Indeed, having a “pocket canon” hopefully facilitates branching out into these traditions as well. Having a core foundation helps integrate and retain new information.

If you see anything in here that doesn’t look or seem right to you, please reach out and let me know as I can continue to revise this! Though I’m keenly aware of the maxim “all models are wrong, some models are useful”, I do still aspire to

With that out of the way: let’s talk about knitting!

Generations Simplified: Knittings & Splittings

Before the word “millennial” was co-opted by the marketing industry, it was coined as a part of a generational theory created by playwright William Strauss & policy consultant Neil Howe. Their deeply detailed “Strauss-Howe Generational Theory” has four types of generations and four corresponding cycles that combine into what they call a “turning”. Essentially, a “turning” is a roughly 100-year process through which a stable society collapses and rebuilds in its own ashes; there are four cycles between the American Revolution and the Civil War, and another four cycles between the Civil War and World War II.

Rather than getting lost in the weeds of learning all of this, I like to simplify it into an alternating pattern between “knitting” and “splitting” that is less caught up with birth year, which seems to be useful mainly in applying generational segments in marketing contexts. History tends to have two kinds of critical figures: “knitters” who unite disparate peoples into a greater whole and “splitters” who disturb an unjust consensus. Usually the knitters whose coalitions persist will be viewed favorably by historians like Alexander the Great, Sukarno and Yu the Engineer; figures whose coalitions don’t last, like Genghis Khan and Napoleon Bonaparte, have a more mixed consensus. Similarly, the splitters whose divisions are permanent, like George Washington and Simón Bolivar, are viewed more favorably than those who fail to make a lasting impact on the map.

Because Middling Content is a humanist project, we tend to be more interested in the “knittings”; specifically, we are interested in the “knitters” who use media and culture to unite rather than divide through fear or violence, and we are interested in ways to knit the knittings together to an even broader human consensus.

The Strauss & Howe Generational framework is specifically a framework for thinking about “The West” in particular. You already have some intuition of their system if you’ve used the phrase “Generation Z”. Strauss & Howe start their generational framework with the “Arthurian Generation”, which includes the explorers that brought Europe into contact with the New World. Because “Z” is the 26th letter, “Gen Z” is the 26th generational season3. But of course, over three-quarters of the world’s population exists outside this framework.4

The goal here is to find four texts that each cover roughly a quarter of the world’s population. And to do this, we’ll begin our history not around the sixteenth century’s age of protestant reformation, but instead to an earlier reformation a couple short millennia earlier.

I.) Reformation & Self-Help in ~544 BC

When trying to create a “pocket canon” to fit the thinking of the world’s people, an easy way to start is to look at a list of the most populous countries, and at the top of that list is the country where our first text is sourced.

The largest country in the world as of April 2023, India is home to over a billion practitioners of Hinduism (or, to some, “Sanātana Dharma”), with another 200 million abroad. And the traditions within the practice are expansive enough that they substantially overlap with other major practices -- and finding a text that is both in conversation with Hinduism but also groups in the 400 million followers of Buddhism in countries like China (244M), Thailand (64M), Japan (46M) and Myanmar (38M) will give a key to conversation with over 1.6 billion humans.5

Though many Buddhists will practice and study Buddhism separate from the other traditions that influenced it, the Buddha draws from Vedic concepts in core Hindu texts like the Upanishads. And even though he deviated from some core Hindu ideas, much of his thinking was later incorporated into broader Indian culture; Ashoka, a ruler of the Maurya Empire that spanned the Indian Subcontinent, was a major patron of Buddhism, and as a consequence, many practitioners of Hinduism today still consider this text significant. (Some of this may even not be religiously motivated but simply a fact that any primary source from Buddha is at the very least relevant as a piece of India’s intellectual history and development.)

My personal favorite text that knits together the large and disparate Hindu and Buddhist communities is one I spoke about last week in my October tax reflection: the Dhammacakkapavattana. It’s the first sermon given by Siddhartha Gautama after his enlightenment, and is associated with Sarnath, just north of the holy city of Varanasi6. I actually have visited where this speech allegedly took place!

I prefer to refer to it by its Pali pronunciation7, because that was the language the Buddha used to deliver it -- and also because it avoids the dreaded “r” sound that outs foreign language speakers in basically every region of the planet. But the Sanskrit name will have more familiarity to yoga practitioners and/or viewers of the LOST television series: the Dharma Chakra Pavartana. The use of concepts like “dharma” and “chakra” are just another way that the text fits not just within the Buddhist canon but also in the broader South Asian philosophical history.

This ~800-word text has Buddha’s greatest hits like “the middle way” and “the four noble truths”, but personally I ground my thinking with the 54 words near the end where he outlines his befamed “eight-fold path”.

What is that middle way of practice?

It is simply this noble eightfold path, that is:

right view, right thought,

right speech, right action, right livelihood,

right effort, right mindfulness, and right immersion.

This is that middle way of practice, which gives vision and knowledge,

and leads to peace, direct knowledge, awakening, and extinguishment.

The translation above is from Sutta Central, which I’ve enjoyed using for my study of Buddhist texts because they will provide the Pali transliterations; because this was an aural tradition before it was a written tradition, I enjoy hearing the rhythm of the words and consonants.

Eight steps are manageable on their own, but every consultant knows a process should have three steps; and indeed, the Buddhists are good consultants -- centering the problem (suffering/pain) and providing a three-step framework to abstract over the more granular/technical resolution. I found it helpful to use a common distillation of the eight steps into three categories8: panna (wisdom), sila (virtue) and samadhi9 (immersion). This breakdown also becomes more relevant as I talk about synthesizing these passages later on.

II.) The Wind & the Water

Again, to find a large intellectual movement, it can help to find a large nation-state; the other 1.4 billion-person population powerhouse China also has deep roots for its intellectual history. The three major philosophies in Ancient China all relate to orienting the self within a broader system: Confucianism focuses the social order, Legalism focuses on the political order and Daoism focuses on the natural order.

Of these three, Confucianism is probably most discussed both in and outside of China, but I think despite Wikipedia’s estimate of a population of only 12 to 173 million Daoists that it is a school of thinking with broad applicability and relevance. Just as Buddhism was grounded in a validatable study of the psychological/psychic world within us, Daoism was grounded in a study of the physical world around us. To study “the Dao” is to study the way the world operates and develop life practices within that. In this way, one can see it as similar to the study of physics or “design thinking”.

For example: consider the Daoist practice of “fengshui”. To those who don’t speak Chinese, the name can sound exotic and perhaps mystical, but the truth is much more practical and empirical. Translating to “wind and water”, it explores a kind of broad fluid dynamics within nature. It is a study of flows. One can see gravity and electromagnetism within a Daoist concept of the universe. Mainland China’s CCP could be seen as believing in a historical “dao” or path, an innate Marxian entropy to the universe that eats away at wealth inequality and elevates the working class. There are crackpot Daoists just as there are crackpot scientists and crackpot economists, but the goal is to identify the hidden springs that move the world. If you include naturalistic atheists and scientists/engineers into a sort of Greater Daoism, this group likely draws on at least 2 billion of the world’s population.

By using a Daoist text to reflect this perspective, I do not mean to suggest China is the only region of the world analyzing the flows and tendencies of the universe. There are many others, and I don’t mean to claim Daoism is the first of these practices either. What Daoist texts do, though, is connect you with over 1.4 billion residents of Greater China. And it is a school of thinking that came into the world with some truly beautiful poetry.

The Dao de Jing is the first and core text of Daoism; written by the father of Daoism Lao Zi, its brevity makes it an easy access point to the way of thinking. When I was in my mid-twenties, I would ask my Alexa10 to read it to me when I wanted to fall asleep. Essentially 81 short poems, it can be read in its entirety in under an hour. But its sparse and metaphorical style means translations run the gamut, and the reading and re-reading of passages can be a deeply satisfying process.11

The passage I use in my “Pocket Canon” from the Dao De Jing is Chapter 28.

Know strength, yet remain yielding;

Through this flow, excellence is unending and rejuvenating

Know truth, yet remain open-minded;

Through this system, excellence is unfailing and expanding.

Know right, yet remain humble;

Through this path, excellence is sufficient and sustainable.

The wise govern with simple splits;

The best rules never divide.

This above translation is my own, influenced by the Chinese Text Project, which has a variety of key Daoist and Confucian texts; in particular, I like how they have implemented tooltips for fast character-by-character translations, which allows for a more direct reading of the original text. (The translated lines they provide for the Dao de Jing in particular force a rhyme scheme that distorts the meaning and makes the passage too verbose, in my opinion. But it can still be interesting as an alternative! And I love rhymes!)

Though this passage does not explicitly mention the famous yinyang (literally: dark-light), we see how Daoism both elevates and rejects binaries.12 The xióng/cí binary (strength/yielding) reflects on gender and power; the truth/ignorance binary reflects on knowledge; and the righteous/humility binary reflects on virtue.

And even as we move west and into the new millennium, we still find a continuation of this struggle for balance.

III.) SparkNotes from a Street Magician

The latter two texts in my “Pocket Canon” hit the two billion mark pretty easily, though it’s still useful to break down. Wikipedia suggests that the world has 2.3 billion Christians, for whom their sacred text would be the Bible. This large number does somewhat mask variance in a couple ways: (1) there are various denominations within the ~1.3 billion Catholics, ~700 million Protestants and ~300 million Eastern Orthodox and (2) of all the texts discussed so far, the Bible is consumed almost exclusively in local languages through translations that can vary considerably.

I was raised Catholic, which means the Bible is the text I’ve spent the most time thinking about; it also means I was not raised with the text in the same way as friends of mine raised Protestant. I do still tend toward the Catholic belief that meaning resides not within text itself but within communities. While I don’t currently attend Mass, I received my first communion, was confirmed, and even considered becoming a priest. Part of what sparked my prioritizing writing my thoughts out was a conversation about Catholicism with my grandfather in June 2019 where he said I ought to write this stuff.13 This exercise requires me to be a bit more textually-centered, though, so it’s still a bit outside my primary context.

While we don’t know much about the childhood of Jesus Christ14, the Gospel documents that he moved at least twice -- from Bethlehem to Egypt and then later to Nazareth. Using the historical context of his time, though, we can make a few educated speculations.

A Few Educated Speculations

• Since the city with the largest Jewish expat community at the time would have been Alexandria, there’s a good chance that’s the unspecified Egyptian city where the Holy Family relocated post-Bethlehem and where young Jesus grew up.

• Since Alexandria was famous for having the largest library in the world, it would have been a likely place where knowledge from the rest of the world would be stored.

• Since Alexander the Great made it as far as the Nanda Empire15 in 323 BC, some knowledge of Buddhism is likely to have made it back into his empire by the times of Jesus centuries later.

• Since the Silk Road that connected Chinese and Roman empires started in 30 BCE when Rome conquered Egypt, it also seems reasonable to expect core Chinese literature and ideas would be represented in a knowledge center like Alexandria.

Putting these together, it feels highly feasible and even likely that Jesus had exposure during his childhood to ideas from the traditions we’ve already discussed. Turn-of-the-Millennium Alexandria would have been an extraordinarily diverse place, drawing on a variety of traditions from Africa, Europe and Asia.

Some go further and theorize about a Beatles-esque “Jesus in India” period, which would of course provide him even more exposure to broader thought, but to me that starts taking unfalsifiable leaps of faith. Even just using consensus text, I think we can infer that young Jesus was a “third culture kid” who had exposure to a wider range of ideas than his peers by the time he returns to Jerusalem. And this insight helps us make meaning of our next text.

The Bible focuses on Christ’s life between the ages of 29 and 33. As an adult back in Jerusalem, Jesus was a part of a broader movement within the Roman empire of itinerant preachers who would create spectacles to draw attention to their message. And my go-to passage is Christ’s own simplified expression of his religious perspective when asked.

Three of the four Gospels share the interaction. Let’s cover it in Matthew 22:35-40, because I like the phrasing there the most.

One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question:

“Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

Jesus replied:

“‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’

This is the first and greatest commandment.

And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’

All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

I’m using the NIV Translation above through Bible Gateway, which provides word-for-word translations in Greek or Hebrew for New and Old Testaments respectively. This “godly love” and “neighborly love” binary is reminiscent of the binaries found in Dao De Jing 28, though the layers of translation and interpretation can make it tricky to interpret. The “neighborly love” directive comes across as intuitive to most people, but the “godly love” directive has more theological weight to it.

In particular, the word “God” can trip some folks up; it is genuinely a bit odd that English speakers use the word “God” when the word doesn’t appear in any of the four languages Jesus is believed to have spoken. As we discussed earlier, Buddhist texts don’t translate key terms like “dharma” or “chakra”; Daoist texts retain key terms like “fengshui” or “wuwei”. But in the spread of Christianity, those speaking Greek and Latin would use the terms “Theos” and “Deus”, which share etymology with words for “day” since the sun was a critical deity. (And these terms carry into other Romance languages with the Spanish “Dios” or the French “Dieu”.) Slavic language speakers pray to “Bóg”, the name of the pagan deity at the center of their pantheon. In Indonesia, the Christian deity is called “Allah” because Islam spread to the island nation before Christianity did.

The word “God” is perhaps the weirdest of the bunch, though, because it’s the central deity for the Gothic peoples who were responsible for the sack of Rome in 410. So to pray to “God” is in a way to pray to Christianity’s greatest enemy. Due to the lack of written material, it’s hard to know what the Gothic peoples named themselves after, but one theory is that the term evolved from the name of the river where they originated (also the namesake of the city of Gothenburg). The idea of God-as-stream feels very Daoist and also consistent with the Greco-Roman God-as-sun etymology; these are etymologies that fit the Judeo-Christian model of thinkers like Newton and Spinoza who considered God deeply intertwined within nature itself.

Read this way, the primary directive is to love “the forces of the world”, to love nature and to love life itself. It’s to love “the flow” or to love “beingness”. It’s to love that the world exists.16 It’s a more internal project that contrasts with the external project of neighborly love.

This internal/external divide has parallels with the texts we’ve already discussed: Buddhism’s external virtue (sīla) and internal meditation (samadhi) or Daoism’s external strength (xióng) and internal yielding (cí). And similar to how these other texts created a portable framework that individuals can apply, this gloss functions as a sort of secret decoder ring through which all prior moral instruction can be read. In programming, we call this “refactoring”; this new framework takes a large codebase and expresses it more succinctly and elegantly. While it’s considered more “miraculous” that he conjured merely two fish into hundreds to serve his followers a feast, it was by reducing hundreds of commandments down to merely two that he most served his followers.

And there’s more active/passive duality expressed again in our final text.

IV.) Meditation on a Sunset

Our final major text draws on two billion readers to bring our canon’s coverage of the human population around 7.4 billion people (89%, solid B+ work). I’m not sure a text has changed the face of the earth as rapidly as the Quran. Completed in 632, the book’s followers would take less than a century to cross the northern coast of Africa and into Europe to become a tri-continental Umayyad Caliphate by 711.

The linguistic context in which the Quran is read is unique in that its sacred language is among the most spoken in the world. It is rare for readers of Dhammacakkapavattana to be able to speak Pali, and though it’s most common to read the Dao de Jing in Traditional Chinese characters with Mandarin pronunciation, it was originally in an old, now-unused version of spoken Chinese that is uncreatively called “Old Chinese”. There is a minority of Christians who speak Modern Greek, but this is not mutually intelligible with the Koine Greek of the New Testament; and, as touched on earlier, Christ’s quotations written in Greek were likely spoken in Aramaic or Hebrew, and the specific phrasings/diction is lost-to-time and -in-translation. MSA or Modern Standard Arabic was deliberately constructed to retain classical elements of Quranic Arabic to maintain comprehensibility against forces of linguistic entropy.

And on the topic of entropy, it is maybe fitting that the final of the four texts in my “Pocket Canon” is in some sense about the decline of the afternoon sun in the sky. And who doesn’t love a sunset?

Surah 103 is one of the shortest in the Quran, and I find it an accessible point to start thinking about the Quran because it’s light on abstract cosmology and metaphysics. The cosmology/metaphysics is really limited to the Sun, which is a pretty universal and accessible point of human experience. The “Asr” is the name of the third prayer time, which generally is considered to start when the sun is halfway between noon and setting. (So it’s about the buildup to sunset rather than the setting itself.) The surah opens with this “Al-Asr”, and its opening line also serves as its title, like an Emily Dickinson poem.

At the end of the day, everyone is lost,

except those who see clearly and do good

and those who help others see clearly and be patient

This is my own translation, which I created with the assistance of Quran.com which provides word-by-word translation. While I’ve shouted specific sites for each text, I’ve found that the Quran has dozens of high-quality websites and applications, perhaps because it is a more standard practice in Quranic study to try to capture original intent and meaning of specific terms. These sites are some of the best user experiences I’ve ever had reading a text in another language; providing word-level translations, line-level translations, pronunciation audio and even the correct singing of each word. While I don’t pick favorite texts within the “pocket canon”, because I see the texts within conversation with each other, I also must acknowledge superior website design when I see it.

There are echoes of our other texts here.

• Similar to the Buddha’s Dhammacakkapavattana, we see that Muhammad opens this Surah by framing the problem: “lostness”, which is a kind of disconnectedness, alienation, depression, suffering. And Muhammad, like Buddha, prescribes a path as well, though this one only has four steps. And it too begins with view and ends with supporting a sort of meditation/mediation.

• As we found with the Dao De Jing, we see binaries in this four-step path. We have a division between the self (1 & 2) and the community (3 & 4), and there’s also a division between internal truth-seeking (1 & 3) and external action (2 & 4). The internal/external binary most closely maps to the binaries we explored in Chapter 28.

• It’s unsurprising that we would find overlap with Christian doctrine since Jesus (“Isa ibn Maryam”) is in the Quran, but the parallels are worth noting. As we found with Christ’s distilled commandments, there is a godliness and neighborliness element. What I’ve translated here as “see clearly” is more often translated as “believe”; the word in Arabic is “aminu”, which Catholics will recognize as a close cousin of our common refrain “amen”.17

Lastly, I’ll just add that there’s also a sort of force of history I read into this text. I mentioned already the speed of Islam’s spread in the 7th Century, with the westward expansion serving as a kind of original manifest destiny; Northeastern Africa in Arabic is referred to as the Maghreb -- literally “sunset”. (Reflecting this concept back, Westerners will refer to parts of the Middle East as the “Levant”, which refers to the sunrise.) And I think the sun-chasing idea is powerful in “the West” at large. After the Umayyad Caliphate chases the sunset all the way to Spain, they occupy18 the territory for nearly 800 years; then in 1492, the same year the Muslim rule ended in Spain, the Spanish then carry the torch in the sunset-chasing conquest relay further West still into the New World.

As we follow the sun around the world a couple hundred thousand times, we find ourselves back in the present.

And so how in this moment might you make a framework like this? And how will this framework inform future writing here?

Assembling & Activating a Pocket Canon

As mentioned earlier, I don’t think everyone needs the same shortlist of cultural shortcuts to create common ground with the world’s population. If you’re trying to create your own “pocket canon”, LLMs have put us in a golden age of text-analysis tools that make it easier than ever to find parts of a text that could be meaningful to you. If you use a chatbot often, you could even just deliver a prompt: “based on what you know about me, what passage or quote from [text/tradition] do you think would resonate with me?”19 This allows you to make most of your reading grounded in primary sources with real human authors, but you’re just using the LLM to help find a suitable place to begin.

I think of this task as similar to peeling an orange in a single rind20. Before you start to peel, you want to examine the orange and find the right place to start, because this makes all the difference. If a passage doesn’t resonate with you at all from the get-go, it’s probably not the passage for you!

For me, it’s probably no coincidence that these texts all are applicable to media theory, the subject of this newsletter. The acts of producing and consuming media match these binaries: media production aligns with the action of Daoism’s xióng, Buddhism’s sīla, Christianity’s ahavta-rea & Islam’s amilu; meanwhile, media consumption aligns with the acceptance of Daoism’s cí, Buddhism’s samadhi, Christianity’s ahavta-Elohim & Islam’s aminu. Most academic media research21 I’ve read seems to center on pragmatic questions around messaging (either in the context of state propaganda and private marketing), but since my focus is wellbeing and the good life, religious texts and doctrine provide a more humanistic foundation.

For those still resistant to the use of religious frameworks in this way, it may be of some comfort that I also draw on the psychological frameworks of Freud, who considered all religion a “universal compulsive neurosis”. I find a lot of value in the writing of his school of thought on Lebenstrieb and Todestrieb -- the life drive that pushes us to act and the death drive that pulls us into submission. These too map to the creator/consumer tension modern media users must navigate.

The long-term goal is to develop a media practice that balances the wisdom of these four texts within themselves and between each other. It’s a humanistic knitting project that spans the species, and I think it’ll hopefully make me less frustrated with my own media experiences. Is such a Sudoku puzzle possible? I’m not sure yet, but if you follow along, you’ll know around the same time that I do.

Next I will move away from broad theory and textual basis and toward applying the “middling content” approach to navigating a particular political challenge: urban accessibility and immigration.

The book will be a manual to help people make the most of their media experiences in a media environment that is growing increasingly hostile to healthy human functioning. In it, I’m consolidating my experience doing research with major advertising platforms like Google and Facebook, analysis for major creative studios like Disney and Sony, and my personal exploration of global media traditions in a half-dozen trips around the world. I hope it’ll be useful to others, but at the very least I am confident it will be helpful to me as I map out my 2026.

I am using the below 5x5 matrix to track the components; I’ll share more about this matrix in an upcoming post.

Misalignment & The End of the World

If your “feeds” look anything like mine, you’ve been reading and hearing a lot from Eliezer Yudkowsky and his new book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All. The core assumption is that any time a lesser intelligence engages with a higher intelligence, the lesser intelligence loses. Our current geological age is considered by some geologists to be “the anthropocene” or “human era”, as humans have used their intellectual advantages to shape the world to suit their own needs and flourishing -- though often in short-sighted ways. If artificial intelligence gets smarter than us, our flourishing depends on how well we are aligned with it. To AI researchers, this is called “the alignment problem”.

But alignment problems are broader than just AI, and misalignment elsewhere can be catastrophic. I studied economics in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and a major explanation for that systemic collapse was misalignment between investment banks and investors. Bankers make more money in bonuses when your investments grow, but when your investments shrink they aren’t penalized -- this means taking risks has upside but no downside, encouraging riskier behavior.

I talked a bit about this in “Don’t Let Billboards Ghostwrite Your Mantras”: the institutions that provide you with information all have independent agendas. They are also much better resourced than you are, leading to a tamer version of this “superintelligence” trap. These institutions and applications can still be useful to you, of course, but you need to understand their agendas to craft a media diet that serves your own objectives.

And more important than understanding their agendas is setting your own: what is the role you want “content” to play in your life? And from there, how can you decide what content to include in your media diet?

Let’s look at the definitions of “good content” I came across most when I spent a decade working within media research. When the client was a studio or network, they wanted to know how likely the content was to capture engagement. When the client was an advertiser, they wanted to know how effective the content was to persuade audiences. Then I’ll give you a measure of “good content” that I use and is the namesake of this newsletter.

Engagement: Have You Time for a Spiral?

If you find yourself in a cartoon world, it is generally best practice to trust a man directing you to gaze at his giant spinning spiral. Used by James Braid, a pioneer of early therapeutic hypnotism, the spinning spiral’s design facilitates prolonged visual fixation. The optical illusion draws the eye by presenting motion that seemingly approaches resolution but never does.

The spiral illusion got perhaps its first commercial application when it was used to generate foot traffic in early 20th Century barbershops. Today, its illusory unendingness is continued in spirit with the “endless scroll” of social media apps. Where the television of my youth used to center more on standalone stories (“monsters of the week”), series today are much more likely to end episodes on cliffhangers that compel us to stream another episode, even though it’s late and we should probably get some rest. Even season finales don’t provide us the finality.

Duolingo uses an audio version of the spiral called the “Shepard Tone” to create endless continuity within its matching game. I constantly see language learning app ads criticizing Duolingo’s low effectiveness as an instructional tool, but joke’s on them because I don’t use Duolingo to learn languages; it’s just a daily 5-minute treat of pure gamified validation.

To call a work of art “captivating” is to pay it a compliment. We enjoy occasionally being captivated by works of genius. To “captivate” is “to hold captive” or “to imprison”, and though it’s insightful for liberally minded people to be reminded that agency and freedom are not our only human drives, I expect it’s also true that no human wants to live in permanent captivity. With artificially-intelligent content-generation, this risk of “perfectly captivating content” does indeed become more real.

This idea of a Faustian counterintuitiveness to measuring the quality of content by its retention rate is itself explored in media. The pilot episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus features a sketch about the world’s funniest joke, where those exposed laugh themselves to death. In David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, “The Entertainment” refers to a film so gripping it too is weaponized. It’s probably intentionally poetic that a book that deals with the dangers of media that cannot be put down is in an inaccessible tome that must be one of the least-completed novels in the history of consumer fiction.1

The concern about “entertaining ourselves to death” has some scientific basis as well. In experimental settings, mice given the ability to directly stimulate the reward centers of their brain will prefer this to food and water. A 48-year-old woman provided this capability in the 80s developed a “chronic ulceration” on her fingertip from manipulating the dial so frequently2. The paper on her case study describes: “At times, she implored her family to limit her access to the stimulator, each time demanding its return after a short hiatus.” This kind of study of direct mechanical stimulation is now considered immoral in academic departments, but billions of studies like this happen every day -- every time you spend a few moments attending to a video before swiping onward, your decision to watch or not watch guides a system trained on the attention patterns of mobile-phone users globally. It’s smarter every day.

Algorithmic curation in apps like TikTok and Instagram already compel our attention to the degree where we utilize time tracking tools to limit their use, like Odysseus tied to the mast to resist the Sirens’ song. When AI is also able to directly create the content experience itself, who is to say it won’t discover methods of such debilitating stimulation?

Fortunately, there’s not much of a sustainable business model in exclusively transforming an audience into braindead zombies. For that kind of long-term strategic thinking, we need to look to advertisers, and ask: Is “good content” simply “persuasive content”?

Ad Effectiveness: 100% Not Brainwashing

A great deal of content is created with the goal to convince you to spend. If a business can spend X dollars to create Y dollars, it will fund the initiative when Y is greater than X. Businesses call this “ROI”, or a “return on investment”. Few industries provide such clean math of how to turn money into more money, and so its unsurprising that advertising is big business. Less than a century has passed since the boom of the Mad Men era, but the supporting technology has improved dramatically.

A controversial University of Zurich study deployed a swarm of bots into Reddit’s r/ChangeMyMind subreddit, and it found that they could be nearly 7X3 as effective at persuasion when compared to average baseline Redditors. Put another way, the bot was more effective at changing minds and opinions than 99.4% of humans.

This research was considered so controversial that the resulting paper was not even published. And yet, the process of analyzing human behavior and then providing tailor-made staged creative to influence opinion and behavior is the foundation of the advertising industry.

Indeed, I am not sure hiding the data is helpful here. I think there are many follow-up questions that could be better understood by accessing the data. Were the bots more or less effective when the original posts aligned with consensus viewpoints? Were the bots more or less convincing when the viewpoints were humanistic in values? I’m less concerned about bots that affirm a humanistic consensus than about those that seed chaos and division. I guarantee this research is continuing, but now it’s continuing outside the open forum of academia.

Banning the publication of this one paper does not protect to internet users against AI-crafted targeted persuasion attempts. If you aren’t already being extra cautious about claims you find on the internet, perhaps this gives you impetus to do so.

Whether a system that perfectly can implant opinions in people is better or worse than one that permanently subdues them feels unanswerable to me. But I do think we need other ways to measure how “good” content is if we want to be critical consumers of information. Metrics can keep us honest, rather than pursuing a broad sense of media literacy which can be warped and faulty.

A “Third Way” for Good Content?

I don’t believe a single metric can capture the goodness of content; much like with food, it’s about creating harmony and balance within a broader diet. But as a researcher, I do still rely on metrics to assess and improve my own media behaviors. My focus in my media diet, though, is crafting a mix that allows me to engage productively with the broadest group of people4; using this logic, the golden metric for me is how many people my media diet allows me to engage meaningfully through shared narratives.

Humans think in stories, which is why our earliest models of understanding the world used anthropomorphized deities to communicate causal principles. Our stories help us understand the world itself, but they also help us understand our cohabitants on the planet. A world where we only sing the same songs is dull, but a world where there’s no overlap risks unnecessary division and conflict.

If this sounds familiar, it may be because I spoke about this some when introducing the new “Middling Content” newsletter title, and this was also the underpinning behind the “Around the World in 80 Plays” Spotify playlist. And as the technology industry continues to develop algorithms striving for “the perfect content”, it behooves us to have a rubric more aligned with our humanistic objectives.

In my next post, I’ll outline a five-minute global canon of texts that I use as my foundation in connecting with a majority of my 8 billion neighbors.

Stay tuned!5

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I’m up in the mountains of Tamil Nadu completing the third leg of my Train Trip Triangle of India. In 2022, I rode the train (mostly) from Chandigarh to Chennai; in 2023, I rode the train from Delhi to Kolkata; and this year, I am riding the train (mostly) from Kochi to Darjeeling. I’m fond of the weather here in this historic “hill station”, temperate during the day and even chilly at night, and the mountain environment has been conducive to the reflection I tend to do this time of year.

The firework crackbangery, intermittently spaced through the night, marks the celebration of Diwali here, but my mind has been focused on the spookiest of American holidays: the extended US Federal Tax Deadline1. I’ve had to postpone a retreat exploring yoga and ayurveda instead tending to my annual government-mandated “spreadsheet meditation”.

Though my likening tax prep to meditation is partly ironic, I do think there’s something to the notion. I recall, for example, how my otherwise unreligious father would spend most sabbath mornings at his home computer, silently reviewing his personal economics in Quicken. The way we earn our living is critical in Buddha’s Eightfold Path, which features the fifth step of “Sammā Ajīva” or “Right Livelihood”2; indeed, it is the ultimate stage in the trio of steps that mark a life of “Sīla”, often translated as “Virtue”. And so meditating on your money’s comings and goings is more than just complying with IRS requirements, it’s also aligning yourself with the famous Pali Prince’s view of the noble and good life.

While reviewing the past year’s expenses and income is always a moment to reflect, though, this year had an additional complication: my accounting-software-of-choice, Mint, was shut down at the end of 2023. This meant the taxes due last week required a new approach to calculating and compiling aggregate financial statistics. And since this is the age of the Vibe-Coder, perhaps I could craft a quick tool that helps me satisfy legal paperwork obligations while also enhancing the process’s meditative qualities.

A DIY Framework for Holistic Accounting

Having built a couple dozen data apps in the pre-gen-AI days working in a corporate product incubator, volunteering in hackathons and nurturing passion projects, I had a good sense for what I wanted to build, and it didn’t take more than a few hours to have a system that integrated my various accounts and estimated vendors and tax categories. You can even do a lot of automated classification in Google Sheets, though throttling makes this a bit inconvenient for now. I made classification corrections around 10%-20% of the time, which for a personal project was more time-efficient than taking the time to identify air-tight prompting approaches.

Where things got fun, though, was trying to take the next step and see if I could get advice on my spending from a broader wellbeing perspective. While I’m not a tax expert, I have more expertise in this second broader domain, serving on a couple nonprofit boards that support wellbeing measurement and wellbeing research. For each transaction category, I assessed the transaction on a variety of key measures known to drive wellbeing, compiling them in a Eudaimonic Index and a Maslow Index.

Let’s see a biplot!3

The Eudaimonic Index combines two key factors from Ryff’s Scales of Psychological Wellbeing: Autonomy & Purpose. The full six measures are included in the global wellbeing survey I conduct each month, but I had these two in mind because they were central in a recent interview between Derek Thompson and The Art of Spending Money author Morgan Housel. Summing up his perspective, Housel shares “if there’s one formula in there, it’s a simple formula for a pretty nice life: independence plus purpose”. So I was curious how effectively I was “buying happiness” through this frame.

The Maslow Index scores each item on the five categories in Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs, assigning a number from 0 to 10. Out of a theoretical 50 points, most categories score somewhere between 25 and 40. I created this because I felt these would be easier for an LLM to map to concrete functional categories, but I’ll need to tune this approach further to improve usefulness.

A few observations:

• The top scoring category across both the Eudaimonic Index and Maslow Index was the category containing small monthly contributions to Khan Academy, which I do think contributes to both my wellbeing and to societal wellbeing at-large.

• For 2024, the lowest scoring item on freedom was last year’s payments to the IRS. Very “No Kings” inflected.

• I am morally wounded by the AI categorizing Uniqlo as a women’s clothing store. What is Sam Altman feeding this thing.

As for how my overall spending breaks down in the Maslowian hierarchy, the portions roughly align with their orientation within the pyramid, though my spending on “esteem” should maybe increase4. Caveats on everything here -- I didn’t proof this analysis as thoroughly as other areas since errors here wouldn’t land me in jail, but I intend to tidy this up a bit before the next tax season rolls around.

The analysis isn’t perfect, but the exercise of reviewing and adjusting these classifications initiates a deeper investigation of how I’m spending money. And I think a simple addition of a feature to let me journal on each expenditure would foster even deeper mindfulness while also providing better context for the LLM estimates.

Call to [Direct] Action

In the wake of the largest protest so far this millennium, protest is on everyone’s mind as a tool of social change; while protest is certainly an important part of the toolkit5, my instincts tend to lead me toward direct action. And of all the kinds of action, the simplest action is often non-action -- that is, to quit supporting organizations that don’t reflect your values. It sounds easy, but it can be quite hard. I’ve spent the past decade trying to quit one of very few organizations in this world that I actively hate: Intuit.

I mentioned earlier that Mint had been shut down sparking this whole project. I didn’t mention that that decision was made by their parent company Intuit, who had acquired Mint in 2009. I have had a long-standing antipathy toward Intuit, their exploitative dark patterns and their regulatory capture of the e-filing process6. I would even tell them as much7 in the feedback surveys after filing my taxes with them. Mint was the only bright spot they had; I’d been a user of Mint since 2011, and it had become a central part of my budgeting process, so when they shut it down, I knew I had to finally draw the line and quit.

I am sure I’m not the only person who feels trapped supporting a software company in opposition to their interests. I would like to see LLMs spark a thousand bespoke personal finance solutions tailored to unique needs at affordable costs. AI can enable non-violent adventurism and entrepreneurship -- so-called “creative destruction” that improves consumer outcomes. We’ve existed inside the mono-web so long, we don’t even think about how weird it is that we share personal financial information with a giant corporation that consistently acts against our interests.

We can live in a world where the people building our software are community members working on projects for people they interact with face-to-face, more like an electrician or barber. These contexts are less alienating for software engineers to work within, and I think they’ll result in products better targeted to diverse users and use cases.

And when we do choose to use a large software platform, we will know we have available alternatives quickly and easily available to us. I still did choose to use a broader digital platform to submit my return; the personal finance app I vibe-coded only focused on calculating the numbers I needed, but I was able to use Cash App Taxes to do the rest. They didn’t charge me at all, and it seems like just a play to increase awareness and usage of Cash App. I’ll stay vigilant as their business model evolves, but at least in this year of 2025, they enabled a smooth and pleasant conclusion for my tax meditation.

I know not every corporate demon can be vanquished like this, and I do try to check my techno-optimism, but since this was a personal success story for me, I wanted to share in case others could take similar action in their lives and finances.

So as a general conclusion, when you hate a company doing evil things, you don’t have to resort to propaganda-of-the-deed to make change. Support a non-violent overthrow in your own budget by building an alternative solution and cutting out the offending organization. It’s never been easier to do so.

And more specifically: don’t use TurboTax. Switch to an alternative like Cash App Taxes. And if/when Cash App Taxes begins its own evil empire phase8, support another consumer coup.

While nothing is certain about the future of AI, I’m hoping that LLM-assisted development allows for more local and neighborly ecosystems of software. But if AI does destroy the world, it does comfort me that either way it will take down Intuit.

I know you just got a long email from me, but I’ve had September 22nd marked on my calendar for quite a while to make the case for a new holiday. (We’re going through a bit of a holiday phase here it seems!)

In my work with a couple wellbeing nonprofits, there’s lots of activity around the International Day of Happiness -- a holiday the UN declared in 2012 that is observed on March 20th. You are probably thinking: “March 20th! Why, that’s often the Equinox!” And yes, though your time zone may cause it to be occasionally on the 19th or 21st, you are generally correct!

Middling Content loves the equinox, because it is the day when everyone gets the same length of day. It is a shared experience in a world that does not have many shared experiences. And if the Spring Equinox is the International Day of Happiness, then it must follow that the Autumnal Equinox is its emo cousin. For starting about 10 hours ago, roughly 81% of the world transitioned the half the year where nights are longer than days.

Though there has not been a UN resolution to declare it, I like to think of today as “The International Day of Despair”. “Blue Year’s Day”, “Dearth Day”, “Cryday”, “Blahlloween”. You get it. We have so many days to be happy together, but no days to be sad together. And so we often end up being sad alone, which is such a drag.

This is not, to be clear, a new idea. Around the northern hemisphere, the autumn has holidays that have us reflect on our night times. In China, the Hungry Ghost Festival was a couple weeks ago -- it marks the last full moon of the summer, a harbinger of long nights. The “Ghost Month” spans from the new moon before and after the festival, so it just wrapped up on Saturday. Though the concept of the “hungry ghost” is originally Buddhist, the Daoist adaptation of it sees “hungry ghosts” as created from unhappy deaths. So it is, in a sense, a holiday honoring bad vibes.

And of course as pop-up costume aisles are foreshadowing, America is entering its “spooky season”, which is connected with a variety of autumnal traditions in Europe and the Western Hemisphere. When visiting Budapest in 2019 during All Saints Day, the midpoint of autumn, a new acquaintance shared with me how she was heading to her home village to visit her deceased relatives in the cemetery. In Mexico, this same day hosts festivals for El Dia de los Muertes. In what I think is quite thoughtful holiday design, there are separate celebrations for those who have recently lost children and those who have lost other relatives, creating a shared space for sharing sorrows. Meanwhile, the US celebrates the mid-autumnal festival with candy distribution, gruesome displays and looping “The Monster Mash”.

Having shared days of mourning to deal with difficult feelings helps to normalize them and provide support, and they help struggling people find each other. I don’t know if Autumnal Equinox is quite the right fit, but I’ll try to make an effort to use this writing project on this day to focus on topics of struggle.

Though we don’t have a shared day like this, I suppose I just want to remind everyone that tough times are a shared part of the human experience. And I do think that pain that teaches us empathy while also encouraging us to spend some time in our hearts, reflecting and growing.

The assignment I’ve given myself today was to critique that old saw, “Facts Don’t Care About Your Feelings”. It has been done in a few places, but I have some of my own thoughts.

I will make the following three points:

• The Implicit Understanding of Facts is Flawed

• Everyone Cares About Feelings

• Thousands of Feelings Facts Exist

These points together will, I hope, make the case that the phrase should be retired.

The Implicit Understanding of Facts is Flawed

To some degree, I suppose some would say that “facts don’t care about feelings” in that facts don’t care about anything. And there is some truth in this. Facts don’t feel; people feel.

But I think this misunderstands facts in two ways: (1) it treats estimates as facts and (2) it incorrectly anthropomorphizes them.

Most “Facts” Are Estimates

I used to work at a large TV Ratings company that spent lots of money creating and operating a system to measure media viewership. The statistics are very valuable to companies who buy or sell advertising, and so it’s important that the statistics are only available to those who financially support the measurement ecosystem.

A possible concern about a business like this would be that intellectual property law doesn’t permit copyright protections for facts; “facts” are public domain, encouraged to be spread to support education and future research. And so how can such a business make money? The business was able to operate sustainably for decades because it differentiated between “estimates” and “facts”. And most of what we think of as facts are actually “estimates”.

In his article “Three Theories of Copyright in Ratings”, law school professor James Grimmelmann breaks down the difference between ratings as “facts”, “opinions” and “self-fulfilling prophesies”. Courts have found ratings to be protectable “opinions” if they are labor-intensive, expertise-driven or creatively-designed.1

When people speak about their sense of the Truth, these feelings are often drawing upon estimates -- like TV ratings, coroner’s reports -- that rely on particular methods from a particular perspective. It’s often complicated that most purveyors of “estimates” try to position them as “facts”, as facts are higher-status and more monetizable. But alas, it’s just marketing.

Opinions have lots of feelings, of course. The facts themselves wouldn’t adjudicate these sorts of matters.

Facts Won’t Tell You What To Value

The semantic construction of the phrase “facts don’t care about feelings” is also inherently misleading.

By specifically calling out “feelings”, we are being asked to anthropomorphize facts -- poetically imagining them as caring about some things and not about others. (The addition of “about feelings” would be superfluous otherwise.) And this idea seems misconstrued. Facts are neutral arbiters, but they require people to make judgements.

A Fact, if it were a human, would be the sort of human that cared only about Truth in itself.

I think in some regards, I feel a sort of kinship with this Fact-as-Person. In part because, as a professional researcher, it is my vocation and calling to seek Truth, a pursuit I’ve engaged in for over a decade now. But also because, when I was 25, I was diagnosed with OCD.

OCD is very publicly misunderstood. Many folks are familiar with the excessive handwashing that can cause a person to scrub their hands so hard they break skin. I’ve never been an obsessive handwasher.2 I think of my experience with “OCD” as an experience with “pathological skepticism”. Or put otherwise: I had a deep hunger for certainty that was fundamentally unresolvable.

Understanding OCD has been helpful in me thinking differently about how Facts and Truth operate in our lives, so I’ll give a quick overview.

A Brief Overview of OCD

The handwasher persona can be a helpful illustrative guide to how OCD functions. Someone can see a person handwashing obsessively, and they imagine it as a deep drive toward cleanliness; as I understand it, a person with OCD is more driven away from disease and infection. “But aren’t all people driven away from disease and infection?” Indeed, but some people don’t think about it; some people just have a phobia that leads them to avoid hospitals or countries on the CDC advisory; those with OCD are not capable of feeling “certain” that they’ve removed the germs from their bodies, and thus will do harm to themselves in seeking that certainty. Where many would get a feeling of “cleanliness” or “sufficiency” from washing to their 20-second song of choice, someone with OCD is denied that sense or feeling. While OCD is seen as moving toward something, it is felt as being starved for a kind of epistemological clarity.

This “certainty-seeking” behavior is what differentiates having OCD from just being someone who likes things organized. My obsessions were of the “pure-O” type, which meant that I would be drawn into self-reinforcing thought loops, mostly of the “existential” subtype. What that meant is I would become gripped by mundane philosophical questions, like “what if this is all a dream”, and I would desperately think as hard as I possibly could, trying to think myself out of distress while ironically escalating it substantially.

I’m generally not always a fan of classifying unique modes of thought into pathological categories, but I did find that “CBT” and exposure therapy were helpful. I had to learn to not feed this hunger for certainty; that hunger only deepens once you let it chase shadows through the labyrinth of your mind. We have agency! And we can learn to say no!

Part of what helped me was learning that Descartes’, in the life he led leading up to his “cogito ergo sum” revelation, had a series of nightmares one night in 1619 when he was a mercenary in the Thirty Years War. I even went to a series of lectures on the anniversary of these nightmares -- which I think of as the panic attack that launched Modern Philosophy.

When I first read Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy in college, I honestly found it deeply unsatisfying. I still sought Truth as my primary goal, and his reliance on faith at the end felt like a cop-out. I don’t agree with his entire process and with the particulars of his solution, but ultimately I do agree that we must choose to ignore certain deep philosophical questions in order to operate as “healthy” adults.

It still seems counterintuitive to me that “healthy” psyches can ignore such blatant risks and concerns. People with “healthy” psyches do indeed occasionally miss germs when washing their hands, and sometimes those germs take root and kill them. People with “healthy” psyches occasionally leave the stove on to burn down their apartment killing innocent people. People with “healthy” psyches are wholly unconcerned with whether or not they are living an inconsequential life in a meaningless dream. This is because what is “healthy” is not the relentless pursuit of certainty. Life is so rich with mysteries, and so we must pick and choose which to chase to advance our broader human dreams.

It is typical for many people that go through a therapeutic intervention that reshapes their cognition, and then to see their pathology everywhere in the world. This is often unhelpful. But in this case, I do think the analogy is useful. Seeking Truth as an end to itself leads to unbalanced and unhealthy psychology.

If a Fact were a person with feelings, it would be overly obsessed with minutia and incapable of functioning in a healthy way. It would be no guide to anyone. A Fact serves its function within the broader context of human judgment.

As humans, we have a responsibility to see the broader context of things. We set the plan and use facts to navigate to our goal. And that requires us to see certainty as not just a logical abstract state, but as a feeling that occasionally is denied to us through unpleasant neurochemistry.3

Truthiness as a Nicomachean Virtue

I, like many college students of the late 00s, found the Colbert Report brilliant and delightful. One of the most famous coinages from the program was the concept of “truthiness”, which would describe the “feeling” of truth that may not even be true. It was the focus of his segment “The Wørd” in the program’s pilot episode in 2005, when it was increasingly clear to Americans that the intelligence that led to the 2003 Invasion of Iraq was misleading. In that context, “truthiness” was obviously a troubling and dangerous idea.

I do think, though, that seeing “truthiness” as always bad can be troubling as well. As I’ve gone through life deciding exactly how much time and energy to spend on truth-seeking versus other pursuits, I think there is a less explored antonym of “truthiness” -- perhaps called “truthinesslessness”.

Aristotle famously saw the good life as one of balance. Too much courage and we are brash; too little and we are cowardly. Similarly, I think too little “truthiness” can disconnect us from our humanity. When we see college campuses as spaces to throw our facts in the ring and see them fight each other like Pokemon, we miss how they are also spaces where people learn to connect with each other as a community. Our Facts don’t have to be weapons; they can be tools to build our shared environments.

You can’t survive on Facts alone; you have to care about other things.

Fortunately, pretty much everyone cares about other things.

Everyone Cares About Feelings

Feelings are a huge part of how people experience the world, to the degree where it’s almost tautological.

We like to feel good. We don’t like to feel bad.

And it’s something observed across geographies, across politics and across interests.

Americans Are Particular Feelings-Oriented

For those in America, it’s within our founding sense of human liberty. The right to pursue the feeling of happiness closes out the first sentence of the second paragraph of the US Declaration of Independence. Other countries have adopted happiness as an objective too, most notably the Government of Bhutan with its Gross National Happiness concept.

When we meet each other, we check in on each other’s wellbeing. In Singapore, where I spent most of my teenage years, the local greeting was more practical, asking “Have you had your lunch?” This was an anglicization of the Chinese greeting “你吃饭了吗?”, which I have always assumed gained deep meaning to generations that survived periods of brutal starvation during the Great Leap Forward famine. When visiting Croatia, I remember learning that a common greeting is “Jesi živ(a)?” or “Are you alive?” Here too, one can speculate that tragically harsh historical conditions shape pleasantries.

People who visit the Anglosphere from other countries are surprised at how feeling-oriented the culture is. Rather than asking about wellbeing from a purely material sense like the Chinese or Croatians, we allow the interrogated to interpret the greeting “how are you?”. Visitors will sometimes misunderstand the question to be a deeper probing of sentiments, but practice is more to signal interest in the feelings of others before moving into other topics of conversation. And if you’re in the Beverly Hills of 90s film Clueless, teenagers have the emotional sophistication to respond to petty annoyances by asking “what’s your trauma?”

There is a sense within the United States it is only the Left that concerns itself with feelings, but that seems to me to be not true.

Conservatives Care About Feelings Too

The person I most associate with the phrase “Facts Don’t Care About Your Feelings” would attend high school in Southern California a couple years after Clueless came out. I wonder if Ben Shapiro saw it in theaters?4 His 2019 book, Facts Don’t Care About Your Feelings, was named after the phrase that he helped make popular. It was such a success that in 2020 he released a sequel Facts (Still) Don’t Care About Your Feelings. I’ve not read these books, but I have listened to a few episodes of his podcasts in perhaps 2021, mainly as part of a project trying to understand how right-wing media criticism is different from left-wing media criticism.

Most of the news it felt like his program was covering at the time was in fact talking about the media environment, which was something that I think was also increasingly common on the left. Everybody was operating with a “clip show” style that I think was first made famous by The Daily Show. The format is highly replicable, and in some ways social media feeds that use shares/replies/stitches are just algorithmically curated clip shows.

Regardless, it’d been a few years since I’d last heard him, as I had felt that a few episodes was enough for me to understand his format and take, which I took to largely align with what academics call “elite capture”. It’s in broad strokes the same theory that motivates the Fighting Oligarchy Tour; the examples that the populist right selects to make the point are just more centered around cultural issues rather than class issues.

Talking About Feelings Without Talking About Feelings

That said, I do think hearing him speak on The Ezra Klein Show5 about his new book Lions and Scavengers gave me new insight on his politics. Lots of seemingly prolific program hosts rely on a format, and the clip show format is commonplace largely because it lends itself to factory-style production that isn’t too taxing on hosts; a couple interns can find a bunch of clips online, and a producer can boil down the list to a few pieces that the host can respond to more-or-less in real time.

The new book fits his typical anti-feelings framing with a taxonomy of “Lions” and “Scavengers”; “Lions” bravely defend noble ideals of a healthy and good society and “Scavengers” are false prophets who exploit ego, resentment and hedonism to gain power. Unsurprisingly, the Scavengers play to feelings whereas the Lions somehow transcend that style of politics.

To his credit, Shapiro does acknowledge that many of Trump’s policies align him with Scavengers, though he suggests that politicians can scavenge a bit without going full-Scavenger. It’s unclear to me how much of this is his genuine take versus hedging to avoid retribution from the current administration; he also could be just savvily positioning his ideology in a way that will sell more books to Ezra Klein Show listeners.

The part that interested me, though, was a part that, to me, gave me a better sense of how “feelings” fit within the Shapiroean vision of Lion-led society. Klein observes that the Lions are positioned as defenders of “Western Civilization”, and so he asks him to define Western Civilization.

The definition he provides is narrow yet pluralistic:

The way that I describe it in this book, and I give a sort of more fulsome definition in an earlier book that I did called “The Right Side of History,” is the tension between Jerusalem and Athens. Not my original construct. That’s a division that goes back to Tertullian.

The idea of a biblical heritage combined with Greek reason and the tension between them. They don’t easily fit together. And so what you see over the course of Western history is this tension. Sometimes it moves in the direction of biblical theocracy, which you can see in European history. Sometimes it moves more in the direction of reason.

But if either comes on more than the other, you end up with a pretty bad thing. If you end up with, like, a full biblical theocracy? Bad. If you end up with a fully amoral, rationality-based system? Also bad. Which is the history of the mid-19th to mid-20th century.

And so the history of Western civilization is the symbiosis between those two factors. But the basic principles of Western civilization that I think are the most important, at the very least that I discussed in the book, are things like equal rights before the law, private property, freedom of mind, freedom of thought, freedom of religion.

The balanced tension between reason and religion on one level avoids reference feelings explicitly, and yet both reason and religion are blissful pursuits. In a Freudian sense, reason plays to Lebenstrieb (“life drive”) and religion plays to Todestrieb (“death drive”); one provides the delight of agency and the other the delight of submission. Shapiro overstates the unique Western heritage; before the times of Socrates, the Dao De Jing Chapter 28’s endorsed of balancing the agentic 雄 (“xióng”) and yielding 雌 (“cí”).6

There are certainly politicians that scavenge on feelings on both sides of the aisle. An appeal to the ego of his “Barbarian” archetype will resonate with White Savior types on the Right and with Social Justice Warriors on the Left. An appeal to the resentment of his “Looter” archetype can exploit class regardless of party, with the Left dividing on income brackets and the Right dividing on educational attainment. An appeal to the hedonism of the “Lecher” archetype will resonate with the wealth-obsessed on the Right or with the sex-obsessed on the Left. But both parties also have many people who delight in thoughtful action and community participation, even as I’m sure opinions will vary on the validity of egoism, resentment and hedonism as pleasures to pursue.

So to me, the main face of the contemporary “Feeling-Nonaligned Movement” has a place for feeling within his ideology, though he does not name feelings directly. And I think his frustration with the Left is more driven by a lack of shared narrative through which to communicate. And because he’s drawn a semantics-grounded boundary, it’s hard for others to break through.

An Alt-Right Appeal for Feelings Conscientiousness

I’ve said it many times in this newsletter, but my goal is to help people create a media diet that “middles”. I specifically try to engineer for myself a globally oriented content diet that spans the political spectrum. With podcasts, that usually looks like Blowback on the populist left, Pod Save the World on the institutional left, The Intelligence (from The Economist) on the institutional right, and History 102 on the populist right.7 I round that out with reading a few of my favorite publications: The South China Morning Post, The Hindu and Al Jazeera.

I share that because it just so happened that the Rudyard Lynch, who co-hosts History 102 and runs the Whatifalthist YouTube channel, is not someone I’d listen to if I were only seeking out content that affirms my current worldview. There is a great deal that disagree on, and he does occasionally get facts wrong without issuing corrections, meaning anything I hear from him has to be independently verified. He does connect me with new historical examples and also synthesizes and critiques narratives in a way I find strengthens my own thinking. To me, listening to people discuss history is similar to how I think about listening to jazz, and I’m curious to hear people riffing on a shared collection of stories and ideas. Also, Lynch is a 23-year-old and the only person a decade younger than me that is in my information diet, which I think is important in a world where young men’s worldviews diverge meaningfully from my own.

Obviously people listen to arguments in different ways, and while I think consuming a broad range of ideas has benefits, I respect that most people lead busy full lives that don’t give them the energy and patience for this kind of thing. Citations are never endorsements unless explicitly stated. My goal is to design an information diet that reflects the world, not to curate one that reflects my own tastes and values exclusively.

This is all preamble to share that Whatifalthist posted a video titled “why empathy is the meaning of life” yesterday, which within his own definition of terms, defends empathy as a value and offers his perspective as an anthropologist. I will warn that I think most people I am friends with will dislike almost all of the video, as it uses phrases like “woke tyranny” unironically, presumes his listeners share his specific conservative gender ideology, and makes claims like “it’s obvious the Left is totally incorrect and mentally ill”. Again, he’s 23. He’s willing to read extensively, break with orthodoxy and construct his own theories, and I’m interested to see how his thought continues to develop. And he’s an advocate for EMDR as a PTSD treatment, which I think is a nice thing for his young adult male audience to hear. (Honestly the part that triggered me most was when he was praising Bismarck, who I had framed as a major enemy in my recent Haymarket Affair article.)

So if a self-proclaimed “constitutional conservative” like Ben Shapiro cares about feelings, and a more MAGA-flavored Gen Z conservative like Rudyard Lynch cares about feelings, it’s clear feelings can be central to the American Right. But to make one more point, I think it’s important to draw in the central figure of the contemporary right.

Ave Maria and Permission to Feel

It feels deeply intuitive to me that the figurehead of the populist right right now, Donald Trump, is the most id-driven vibes-based politician who has led the country in my lifetime. (In order: Trump, Clinton, W., Biden, Obama, H.W.) His ability to feed on the energy of crowds is quite unique, navigating their feelings while also delighting in the process.

For me, the quintessential Trump feeling video is the roughly 3½-minute segment of him vibing to “Ave Maria” in the middle of a rally. For those who intensely need to win and dominate in every interaction, the arts can provide an outlet to the part of our soul that yearns to yield.

So it seems obvious that feelings are central to the right as well as the left; they just conceptualize them differently. I think Shapiro’s feelings palette with three corrupt drives (ego, resentment and hedonism) and noble drives (reason and community) can show how good and bad feelings are central to both political projects.

Still, a major challenge is perhaps convincing conservatives why they should care about other people’s feelings, and I think the Tertullian Athens-Jerusalem axis can potentially be of use here too.

Feelings are in Everyone’s Interest

Even if one isn’t concerned about feelings in themselves, one is certainly concerned with factors downstream of feelings.

If all you care about is captured within the Tertullian framework, as noted Feelings-Disregarder Ben Shapiro puts forward, then it should be enough to get you to care about feelings if positive feelings support a society’s treatment of reason and of religion. So let’s handle each of those in turn.

Feelings Support Society’s Capacity for Reason

Education is one of the nine domains in the Bhutanese framework for Gross National Happiness, and many people associate their wellbeing with the freedom to pursue independent intellectual pursuits -- free through, free speech, free assembly, etc. But what about the reverse? Does increasing the wellbeing of a society make it more friendly to reasonable living?

I’m a member of an organization called ISQOLS (any politics expressed here are my own), which is a consortium of researchers that investigate questions of wellbeing. There’s intense debate about how to best measure these concepts, but a common measure is called “Subjective Wellbeing”, or “the degree to which an individual judges the overall quality of his/her own life-as-a-whole favorably”. Some colleagues of mine recently published an article comparing self-reported life evaluations to Total Factor Productivity, a common measure of economic output.

To some degree, we can see creative and productive activity as a reason-oriented activity. It emphasizes agency, Lebenstrieb and xióng, acting on the world to create a desired future.

While that study does time-order variables to assess some level of causality, it’s not experimentally evaluating this effect -- but that’s just a paper from my own personal network!

Looking more specifically for direct impact on reasoning, we can find a 2001 literature review that finds studies where positive affect increases cognitive flexibility, creativity and efficiency.

All this while stress, on the other hand, has been shown to be detrimental to the pre-frontal cortex. This is observed in experimental settings where participants are randomly assigned a stress-inducing task like public speaking, and then their working memory and cognitive flexibility are testing -- and both show degraded performance.

So if you care about maintaining an Athenian society of reasoning, you also implicitly care about feelings! A society that feels bad will reason poorly!

Feelings Can Support Society’s Capacity for Religion

This is admittedly a bit more mixed as an effect. People can seek religion in trying times, which is actually a useful counter-cyclical response since religious participation tends to increase wellbeing.

But there are some documented cognitive effects of note, particularly on how wellbeing can in some cases increase open-mindedness and therefore religious tolerance. This was noted in a study with physicians where they

And one study found a particular kind of wellbeing, the loving-kindness sort, to reduce biases on implicit attitudinal testing.

This means that those who value religion might prefer to live in a society that is feeling-forward.

Literally So Many Facts About Feelings Exist

The clearest case for facts being at least occasionally concerned with feelings is the wide range of statistics about feelings that are easily available to anyone online today.

To say there are no facts that care about feelings is demonstrably false. Let’s walk through a few different examples.

The World Happiness Report (link)

This annual study, run by Gallup in partnership with a wide range of nonprofits, provides happiness measures for 140 countries. Finland has been the happiest country since 2018. (Honestly, I’m skeptical.)

CDC Mental Health Household Pulse (link)

The US government reports on levels of depression and anxiety on the CDC website; this data comes from the National Center for Health Statistics and breaks out by state and other key demographics.

OECD’s “How’s Life?” Report (link)

An investigation of what factors drive wellbeing in the 40 member countries in the OECD. It specifically calls out that people are struggling with financial wellbeing in particular, driven largely by increasing costs of housing.

GSS Data Explorer (link)

The General Social Survey, running out the University of Chicago, has been asking a happiness question to Americans every other year since 1970. Happiness levels show a slow three-decade decline, with a sharp decline in 2020 that has not yet recovered.

WHO Global Health Observatory Dashboard (link)

An interactive map of depression prevalence around the world, plus the Global Health Observatory has an API with a wider range of metrics to access and analyze related to mental health.

And this is just broad public datasets. Lots of smaller-scale independent research takes place as well in academic institutions. I track publications of studies that investigate the connection between media and wellbeing, and my tracker tells me that in the past week there were 480 papers on that topic. (And that’s down from 673 the week before!)

The previous administration’s Surgeon General released a 2023 report declaring a “Loneliness Epidemic”. And the current US Secretary of Health and Human Services explicitly called out making government data on depression more visible to policymakers in the White House.

The current Health Secretary’s operating model of wellbeing-creation may focus more on food dye than mine, but ultimately he’s decided to elevate facts that care about feelings. Putting aside other policies, this is constructive.

I even have collect my own facts about feelings. I personally have collected 25,000 interviews about feelings in a survey platform I built a few years back, and then I use LLMs to break them out into word embeddings, which break each feeling fact into 3072 components, so that’s like 76 million feeling facts. I’m on the board of an organization that stewards video interviews with people all over the country, talking about what matters to them in life and why. I analyze my journal entries to evaluate drivers of my mood, and I know others who use apps to track their moods over time.

There truly are a mind-melting quantity of facts that concern themselves with feelings.

Fighting Despair Together

I am continuing to build out my survey platform Mic Check Media, and if you have any interest in supporting that work, you are able to sign up at www.miccheck.media. I will give 10% of my profits to a blend of ISQOLS, GNHUSA, Samaritans and NAMI; these are all wellbeing organizations I’ve interacted with at some point and can vouch for, but the politics in this post is merely my own.

If folks want to help but don’t want to subscribe to Mic Check, I am happy to provide another option. I don’t want to force people into the subscription-industrial complex. If you just want to support directly you can Venmo me at @Eric-Brisson. As a disclosure, Mic Check is not a non-profit, but the 10% of your donation that goes to nonprofits will be tax-deductable.

Above is a biplot I created in Mic Check. If I’m reading this biplot right, then income (proxied by per capita GDP) is negatively associated with happiness, so maybe that means you will be happier the more of your income you give to Mic Check? That is not a guarantee. Could be worth a try through?

No matter what you decide, I’m wishing all an emotionally rich and thoroughly cathartic International Day of Despair.

Your Brother in the Struggle,

We’re Never Alone,

Harry

I originally intended to write a short reflection this past May Day, and most of you received an earlier draft that was rescinded because immediately after I sent it I could tell it was incomplete. This draft is not perfect either, but I do think it at least better contextualizes its central question as compassionately grounded and better answers it.

Since the prior release, these are the main adjustments I made:

• I read a broader range of primary and secondary sources that I link at the end of this email, correcting my own sense of the history and, in at least a couple cases, correcting Wikipedia’s as well.

• I designed, deployed and analyzed my own global survey of thousands of respondents about May Day associated policies, much of which is referenced only briefly.

• I traveled to a few key cities relevant to the Haymarket Affair’s origins, trying to understand the narrative at a human scale.

• I added more info on historical context, included more background on the key characters, deepened the existing timeline, added narrative analysis and conclusions, and all-in-all over quintupled the length of the essay.

I know this is mainly a space where I share intermittent updates with friends and family, so please feel free to just skim headers and/or pictures. You can think of this as an optional draft that I’m sharing with you, and I will likely revise this to share on future May Day(s), so I am open to hearing likes/dislikes.

You may have feedback like “don’t use the word anagnorisis so much” or “stop spreading disinformation about the Chicago flag”. The only feedback I won’t incorporate is criticism of the historical present tense. Spellcheck really hates it. And clicking “ignore” when it gets triggered is a small way I assert my humanity and fight the rapid technological erosion of the storied craft of storytelling.

…And do you know who else was futilely resisting rapid technological dehumanization of their labor? (That’s as good a segue as we’re going to get, I think.) Skim away and you will find out, dear reader!

Have a happy May Day, no matter what month you find yourself in.

In Your Inbox,

Harry

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Happy Waning Day(s) of Summer!1

While most of my readers are friends and family in the US and Canada who wrapped up their Labor Day Weekends this month, I’m currently in Istanbul where they observed a completely different holiday that same weekend. Turkey instead celebrated Victory Day, which commemorates their victory at the Battle of Dumlupınar in 1922 which set the stage for the end of the 623-year-old Ottoman Empire. There’s something kind of cool about a country celebrating the end of their own empire.2

Turkey celebrates Labor Day too, of course, but they did it back on May 1st. Indeed, in most of the world's countries, Labor Day is celebrated on May 1st. And that’s not a plurality or driven by many small countries; May 1st is Labor Day for a full-on majority of people on the planet. Over two-thirds of the world’s population live in a country that celebrates Labor Day on May 1st. The explainer map on Wikipedia is so steeped in deep socialist red for May-celebrants, it has the aesthetic of a Reagan-era war game rapidly approaching checkmate.

This map in some ways overrepresents American counterprogramming to May Day:

• The UK is engoldened to remind us that even though its “Early May Bank Holiday” overlaps with May Day septennually, it does NOT identify as May Day.

• Australia’s green coloring is somewhat misleading, as their provinces independently choose when to celebrate labor day, with Queensland and the Northern Territory in the same; the Northern Territory’s holiday is explicitly called May Day.

• Though Denmark and Greenland are gray on this map, the Scandinavian nation and its territory tend to follow the rest of the EU and give workers at least a halfday.

• This map is from 2020, when Afghanistan was still US-occupied and there was no celebration of May Day; after American withdrawal from the conflict, Afghanistan seems to celebrate May Day again.

But putting aside the scheduling disagreement for a moment, it’s remarkable to note the widespreadness of Labor Day celebrations as a whole. Truly global holidays like this are actually somewhat of a rarity. If we gave out awards for holidays here at Middling Content, a “Middley” for Most Shared Holiday, how close would Labor Day be to earning that prize?

Middling Content Holiday Rankings

As I wrote about on the Vernal Equinox of 2024, the purpose of this Middling Content project is to reflect on the media's function as a grand societal centerpiece that provides a platform for discourse. A healthy media environment serves the public by providing a common “middle”, connecting people across lines of difference through shared touchstones. Individuals can know they’re consuming a healthy media diet when they have something to talk about in the elevator -- astrological phenomena, local sports and the weather. Such was easier in the days of a small handful of TV and radio stations; when the media fails to provide a common “middle”, people are more isolated and strangers feel further away.

And so when I think about how to rank the holidays, I’m influenced by the question “If not the people then who?”, a 1966 speech given by a man who built and shaped the organization where I learned the trade of media market research. In it, Art Nielsen Jr defends TV ratings with a take reminiscent of Churchill’s “Democracy is the worst form of government… except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time”. He invites us to consider alternative approaches to evaluating media, and arrives at the conclusion that indeed a people-centered approach is the optimal method to select programming available to the country.

So what holidays win in a raw count of government-directed observation? I collected data on each country and aggregated it to create the following ranker:

It’s perhaps a surprise that the most common holiday, with over 4 in 5 people on the planet in a municipality that honors it, is Labor Day AKA May Day AKA International Workers’ Day. It is bigger than Christmas by over a billion people. And it even ekes out New Year’s Day, that old holiday that gives us an annual opportunity to think about the Roman Empire that established it. Over four times as many people live in a region that recognizes May Day / Worker’s Day than speak the most-spoken language English (~6.8B vs ~1.5B).

Experiences that unite more than half the planet are phenomenally rare, so May Day is really something to marvel at. And indeed I have been marveling at it -- all summer long, from Labour Day (Intl) through Labor Day (US). And I suppose it all started when I decided to make my way into the American Interior and settle myself down in Wyoming.

Some Stats on States & Stadia

About a year ago, when I started centering my life in Wyoming to strongarm myself into getting more serious about writing and entrepreneurship, I was seeking out analogies to comprehend the state’s population. On one end, there are countries with roughly its population, such as Bhutan -- another mountainous landlocked polity that I visited last year. On the other, fewer people live in Wyoming than saw the Eras tour in London. (100k fewer! It’s not even close!)

A series of stadium events would be a great way to meet all the citizens of Wyoming. A dozen meetings with a dozen people each day, you could meet everyone in about 11 years assuming no days off. Too long! While Wyoming’s largest venue, War Memorial Stadium, is only a third the size of London’s Wembley stadium (30k vs 90k), you could introduce yourself to all ~587k Wyomingans in 20 gatherings. Maybe a matinee and a couple evening shows back-to-back?

This is all theoretical, of course. I have a strict “no friends in Wyoming” policy that I’ve been abiding by. I’m confident friends here would disrupt what I see as my life’s “mid-meal sorbet course”. For this sensory deprivation chamber to provide its productivity gains, I must be disciplined. But in theory: if I did want to say hello to everyone in Wyoming in a series of stadium events, and I were not restricting myself to only locally available mass assembly infrastructure, where would be the best place to hold it?

According to Wikipedia, the largest stadium in the world is Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad, Gujarat as of 2020, a year when it would find itself underutilized; with a capacity of 132,000 one could feasibly handle the population of Wyoming in four events. Wikipedia excludes stadia that no longer host athletics, so Prague’s “velký strahovský stadion” is ruled out (capacity 250k), even though this massive space famous for gymnastics could hold Wyoming in merely three gatherings. They also don’t consider motor sports athletics, disqualifying racing circuits like the Indianapolis Motor Speedway (capacity 400k) which could easily handle it in two.

But the reason this exercise has stayed on my mind the past year is not because of the largest raceway nor the current largest stadium nor even the all-time largest stadium. But what sparks today’s newsletter in the twilight minutes of technically-May-somewhere is over a year of reflecting on the name of what was for over 30 years the largest stadium in the world: May 1st Stadium.

It resonated with me because the namesake of May 1st Stadium is the “eight-hour workday” march down that kicked off “the Haymarket affair”, a slice of American history that I’ve always found personally fascinating. I also found it amusing that this established a roughly ten-year period where Chicago both held the tallest building in the world (the Sears Tower) and was a namesake-of-sorts for the largest stadium in the world.

But this stadium named for Chicago’s labor movement is not in Chicago. It’s not even in the US. May 1st Stadium is actually known as 릉라도 5월1일 경기장. It’s on the Korean Peninsula, and not the part that allows Americans 30-day visa-free visitation.

More directly: the May 1st Stadium is in Pyongyang, North Korea.

From a May 1st Parade to a May 1st Stadium

There are really two parts to this journey: first there is the story of what’s called the “Haymarket Affair” which takes place between May 1st 1886 through November 11th 1887 -- a series of events resulting in the state-sanctioned murder of four men in a judicial process the government itself declared as corrupt and misled less than 6 years later.

Then there is “the story of the story”, which carries this tale from Chicago to Paris to Russia to China to Pyongyang, while also seeding the debate for the forty-hour workweek.

I break this out into the following sections:

• Preamble: 15 Years Earlier

• Part I: The Story of the Affair (May 1st, 1886 through November 11th, 1887)

• Part II: The Spread of the Story (November 11th, 1887 through May 1st, 1989)

Representing the story of the Haymarket Affair is challenging because there is not one definitive telling of the story. There are thousands of pages of court documents available from the trial. There are books that have done additional research, recounting the events and hypothesizing about details. And then there’s somewhat of a mythical oral tradition distinct from everything recorded.

I do my best to capture a common version of the story and give context where aspects are disputed, occasionally in footnotes. I know many folks are already familiar with these events and their context, so you are welcome to skip to my conclusions and analyses. But if it’s been a while since you brushed up on the contours of this event, I’ll revisit the key dates connecting what some in the US still see as the most lethal anti-police act of violence of the 1800s to over 6.5 billion vacation days globally.

1871: The Historical Maylieu

a Confederation Consolidates, a Commune Collapses, a Cow Kicks a Candle3

The 1880s, when the key events of this story take place, lacks a sense of specificity which can make the events hard to comprehend. For example, you could even be a history podcast so passionate about the Haymarket Affair that you make it the pilot episode of your series and still accidentally write that it took place in the 1860s.4

My point being: the 1880s are just a non-distinct old-timey time, and so giving some background will help process the story if it’s new to you.

Further, nearly all the secondary sources I consumed were told from a very American perspective, focusing on the more domestic mysteries of “who threw the bomb?” or “how did this impact the American labor movement?” But because the mystery I’m most interested in is the mystery of how this became such a global phenomenon, I think it’s helpful to view the story globally and begin, as most of the Haymarket defendants did, outside the country.

And if we’re going to allow ourselves some context for how the world saw the US in the 1880s, my advice would be to look to the year 1871. It’s a year that sets into motion both the forces that push our protagonists away from Europe and toward the United States. And the motivations it establishes help us see the entire arc of the narrative as an immigrant story.

So after the clock strikes midnight and “all acquaintance [of 1870] be forgot”, the world wakes to tidings of a pivotal year: European political upheaval and an American city’s global plea for support.

January 1st, 1871: The Empire/Reich’s Back

Having published and distributed a constitution on New Year’s Eve, the Northern German Confederation becomes a new German Confederation overnight -- expanding Prussian King Wilhelm’s militarist-authoritarian coalition further south and absorbing new states. This concludes a decades-long campaign of consolidation, earning elite support by crushing democratic uprisings in 1848 and expelling Austrian pluralists in the Austro-Prussian War. Wilhelm’s modern industrial state can at last reconstitute itself as the Second Empire or “Reich”, a nostalgic classification calling back to the 1007-year-lasting Holy Roman Empire.

The Prussians’ ability to operate a highly centralized system while savvily cloaking themselves in pseudo-democratic norms would bias those departing Germany against even seemingly well-meaning governance. This is part of what makes trust-building a challenge in the New World. For an example of this, you can look at their three-class franchise which is basically “what if the US Electoral College existed, but representing wealth instead of people”.

Most of the May Day Martyrs grew up in areas under increasing Prussian dominance and its accompanying rapid industrialization and rising authoritarianism. This political and cultural transformation not only drove them out of Germany but shaped their politics in the New World.

March 18th, 1871: The Communards Take Martyr Mountain

Meanwhile, in the Parisian working-class neighborhood of Montmartre, the civilian militia resists an attempt by the federal government to appropriate their cannons. Because the Prussian military had marched into Paris and forced the French military to disarm, the civilian militia alone is managing city security and is brimming with new recruits from artisan and manual labor classes. This gives them a numbers advantage that allows them to drive the military out of the city, putting Paris and its two million residents under complete local control.

For two months, the people of the Paris Commune experiment with self-governance. They held elections for a Commune Council with roughly half of all eligible voters participating. They created nine functional commissions to keep municipal services like railways and telegraph/mail delivery operational. They toppled the big statue of Napoleon as it was "a monument of barbarism". They decreed to bring back the old revolutionary calendar and its 10-day weeks.

After the military has time to regroup in Versailles, they return to take the city. It takes a week of violence, but the experiment is brought to an end and remains only an anecdote to be discussed and debated among historians.

I stayed in Montmartre last October and hope to write about it in greater depth at some point. But for now there are really two important factors to draw from this:

• In crushing the commune, France proves not-so-friendly to the cafe radicalism that some may have otherwise associated with it. Leaders were demonstrating further that they were willing to use state violence just as they had in the suppression of the Revolutions of 1848. This makes a transatlantic journey seem more compelling to those seeking a life outside of government oppression.

• The other is that all other cities globally would be on higher alert, with the Paris Commune’s bloody conclusion elevating the term “communist” as a political epithet. It raised awareness of these radical political ideas outside of esoteric theoretical circles.

Oh if only some major city would just burn itself to the ground, creating a blank canvas for these European radical refugees and their utopian schemes…

October 8th, 1871: A Great American Fire

It is global news when a three-day fire burns through the city of Chicago, destroying over 17,000 buildings and leaving over a quarter of the city homeless. The city’s critical location between the largest estuary in the world and the largest river system in North America made it a natural logistics hub to take goods further west, so it would take the opportunity to rebuild and modernize to serve a growing country. The city would nearly double in population in the decade following the fire, and it is in this rapidly developing Chicago where the May Day mythology takes shape.

Of the Haymarket Eight, only one was in Chicago by 1871 and even he had just been there a couple years. Most were not even in the United States yet. They would eventually all become involved in the same broad movement, loosely aligning with International Working People’s Association and its anarchist Pittsburgh Manifesto with a few sharing office space for their publications, but their closest association as a large group would be as co-defendants in their 1886 conspiracy trial.

I’ve summarized what I took from their autobiographies and layered in some independent research of time and place, giving them each epithets because eight is a lot of names to keep straight. It’s worth noting that I’m not in a position to verify their claims, but there are two points to be forewarned as likely spurious.

• First, my source for Louis Lingg’s childhood home address is an unsourced claim on German Wikipedia that I have not been able to verify elsewhere, though I provide some reasoning on its inclusion in footnotes.

• And second, despite it being directly and plainly stated in his autobiography, I’m skeptical that August Spies was born in a castle.

With that, let’s start with August Spies.

1871: Before They Were Martyrs

The 🏰 “Castleborn” August Spies 🏰 [rhymes with “keys”] turns 17 in 1871 in Kassel, Germany, having grown. I put “castleborn” in quotes because though he claims to be born in the ruins of an old mountain-castle, I’m honestly skeptical of this. I walked up the mountain this castle is on, and the idea that his deeply pregnant mother made this hike in labor seems doubtful? Was she hiking to induce labor? In December? Adding to the suspicion is that the castle in question is cited on German Wikipedia as being built in the totally-not-made-up-on-the-spot year of 1234.

By the time he’s writing his autobiography, he seems very aware of how he’s fitting into history, so it seems fitting he’s crafting himself a hagiography. The story of the mountain castle allows him to pivot adeptly and elegantly into his pitch for socialism -- a pitch that winds through the curves of history. The rise and fall of serf lords, of religious systems, of empires give him faith a future despite the bleakness of his own end.

But childhood for the “Castleborn” Spies was largely positive. Having been educated by private tutors, he attends a prestigious Polytechnikum in Kassel that educated five early 19th century scientists notable enough to have Wikipedia pages and plans to be a government forester like his father. Unfortunately, after his father passes away he and his family are driven to make the move to America in 1872, and he eventually settles in Chicago where he is reported in 1880 in the US Census as an upholsterer. That same year he joins the staff of a workers newspaper, the Arbeiter-Zeitung, and he’ll be promoted to editor in 1884 which is the position he’ll hold during the Haymarket Affair.

The 💼 Journeyman Michael Schwab 💼 will eventually work with the “Castleborn” Spies as the Assistant Editor for the Arbeiter-Zeitung; he opens his autobiography pining about the Franconian forests which served as common property for him and his community growing up, and I imagine Schwab and Spies connected over their shared appreciation of forests.

In 18715, though, he is a 17-year-old apprenticing as a bookbinder in Würzberg, Germany. Having only recently arrived from his birthplace in Kitzinger, he completes his training and then his work search takes him to Bern, then Zürich, then Meerane, then Cologne, then Vienna, then Plauen. (And I am skipping over shorter stays in summarizing this.) It’s in Plauen working in a blank-book factory in 1879 that he decides to study English and try the United States.

He makes the trip to NYC, when he leaves for Chicago where he continues to study English and works a little in bookbinding. But Chicago doesn’t work out at first, and so he also tries Milwaukee, Kansas City, Denver and Cheyenne before returning to Chicago in late 1881. This time he’s more deeply networked in the social cause and finds work translating the book The Nihilist Princess for the “Castleborn” Spies at the Arbeiter-Zeitung. He is then offered a role as a reporter, and then promoted to Assistant Editor and Business Manager.

The third will-be employee of the AZ is 🍞 Understudy Oscar Neebe 🍞. Oscar Neebe is the only American-born of the German subset of the Haymarket defendants, though his parents' insisted he be educated in Germany, so like the “Castleborn” Spies he was educated in Kassel. By 1871, though, he was 21, living in NYC and manufacturing milk cans. In 1877, he’d return to Chicago, where he had spent some of his later teenage years earlier as a waiter.

In Chicago, he would find work at Adams' Westlake Manufacturing Company before being “discharged because [he] stood up for the right of working men”, after which he could not find other tradeswork, so he became a compressed yeast salesman and then started his own yeast business with his brother and some partners. He was on the publishing coop board that managed the AZ, and in that role he would step in when needed.

The 🤝 Liaison Adolph Fischer 🤝 is a 13-year-old in Bremen in 1871, a “free city” associated with the old league of merchant city-states. The city is perhaps most famous for a Grimm’s Fairytale about a quartet of farm animals that leaves their master to pursue a career as musicians in Bremen, an indicator of the sense of possibility a city like Bremen held at the time. The animals actually never make it to Bremen; instead they trick a group of robbers to give up their house instead. Kind of a “Babe meets Home Alone” vibe.

Liaison Fischer will move to the US in 1873 -- first to Little Rock where he is an apprentice compositor, then to Nashville, then to St. Louis and will make it to Chicago in 1883 with his wife and three children. In Chicago, he’ll serve as a typographer for “Castleborn” Spies’s Arbeiter-Zeitung while also co-editing a more radical publication Der Anarchist.

Liaison Fischer is important in the Haymarket trial because he is connected to both the Arbeiter-Zeitung and to “the North West Side Group” -- both are organizations connected with the anarchist IWPA, but whereas the the Arbeiter-Zeitung was simply a mouthpiece, the North West Side Group was focused on defense and direct-action.

It’s helpful to contextualize all this in the rise of private militancy in post-fire Chicago. Factory owners looking to ensure smooth productivity would hire their own security forces, and without much regulation and with Civil War veterans commonplace, it was pretty easy to find people to point guns at workers to keep them working. In response, laborers founded their own private militias, one of which was the “Lehr und Wehr Verein”. Wikipedia translates the name as the “Education and Defense Society”, but I think that misses the delight of how the name sounds. It says a lot about a militia that they commit to rhyming. “The Reflection & Protection Group”? “Maturity & Security Association”? “Skills & Kills Club”? I like to think they’re the kind of guys who would say “suns out, guns out”, but with actual rifles and muskets. The Lehr und Wehr Verein would be less active by the time of the Haymarket Affair, but the North West Side Group carried forward the principle that to balance power between owners and employees, the workers must be equally armed.

The next two defendants are not involved with journalism at all, but they were alleged to be at a “Monday Night Conspiracy” meeting connected with the North West Side Group of the IWPA.

The 🧸 Old Toymaker Georg Engel 🧸 is the only of the defendants that is already an adult in 1871. This is why I refer to him as old, not that his age is empirically such -- my take is that trees grow old and some maybe some species of sharks, but humans never do. But the Old Toymaker Georg Engel is the eldest of the group by over a decade, and so therefore I call him such.

On April 15th, 1871, the Old Toymaker Georg Engel turns 35 and he has already had a great deal of challenging life experience. Born in Kassel, he spent his earliest years in the same city where Understudy Neebe and “Castleborn” Spies attended private school. His experience there, though, would be much tougher. After losing his father at 18 months old, he would lose his widowed mother when he was 12. With no funds for schooling, he found a shoemaker who would apprentice him if only he had someone to pay for his washing and clothing, but alas had nobody.

He heard of others heading to the US, and realized this was likely his best path too. And so, for over 20 years, he will scrounge up what he can, constantly displaced by wars and economic distress, to make the voyage across the world to a country that will ultimately condemn him. At 14, he walked 100 miles from Kassel to Frankfurt, where after roaming the city starving he was eventually able to find someone to teach him the trade of painting in return for his labor. After training, he applied his skills in Mainz, Cologne and Düsseldorf until he arrived in Bremen in 1863, where he drilled with their militia to respond to a northern invasion from Denmark. (It’s worth noting that Liaison Fischer, from Denmark, would have also been in Bremen at this time, though he would have been just five years old.) He then made it to Leipzig but left to avoid the 1866 Austro-Prussian war. In 1868, he moves to Rehna, is married and starts his own business, but rapid industrialization and the factory system forces him to close down.

It is in 1873 that he finally makes it to the United States with his wife and young children. He spends a year in Philadelphia and though he initially finds some decent paying work at a sugar refinery, he quickly becomes ill and his family is starving. He moves to Chicago in 1874. As his life stabilized, he found more opportunities to read and become politically engaged, first becoming involved with the International Workingmen’s Association until it was disbanded in 1876, then helping to organize the founding of the Socialistic Labor Party of North America which would successfully elect four Chicago alderman, three Illinois House Representatives and one Illinois State Senator. In 1883, he would become an active member of the IWPA and its militarist North West Side Group.

He started his toy store with his wife in 1876 and she continued to run it after he was imprisoned.

At the start of 1871, 💣 Young Bombsmith Louis Lingg 💣 is only seven years old. He lives in the “Mannheimer Quadratestadt”, a unique number-letter planned grid system that as far as I can tell exists only in Mannheim. Instead of a street and a house number, each home would have a square with its North-South position dictated by a letter, its East-West position dictated by number, and then radial positioning by another number. See how easy it is?6 It’s the sort of radical design thinking that befits an engineering city that claims to have birthed the invention of the bicycle, the car and the plane. The Young Lingg would eventually be an engineer as well -- specifically, a bombmaker.

Even within the radically designed SquareCity, the Young Bombsmith grew up on a block with particularly radical history: Quadrat F57. This block housed the print shop that printed the Mannheim Evening Times, a radical democratic newspaper that would publish the Mannheim Petition of February 27th, a call for a bill of rights that spread revolutionary fervor across the country and sparked action across the country. This published call to revolution was the first of a wave of such calls in Germany and resulted in the imprisonment of the newspaper’s editor, Peter Grohe.

The specific rights in this call for a bill of rights were a major influence on both the formation and legislating of the Frankfurt National Assembly, Germany’s first freely elected parliament of all German states that was elected two months later on May 1st. (38 years before our May 1st.) They passed the Basic Rights of the German People reflecting the Mannheim Demands in December, and then the following March passed a German Constitution. When they offered the role of Emperor to the Prussian King, he declined the offer to rule a democracy, saying he “will not pick up a crown from the gutter”; as discussed before, Wilhelm and Bismarck would instead create their own unified Germany with “blood and iron” in 1871.

And so, in 1849, the Prussian state mobilized their military to crush the uprising in Mannheim. The 48ers fought for their democratic constitution while the monarchy forces occupied the city just south of Mannheim. Lingg’s radical F5 block was also home of Maria Theresia Canton, who founded the Concordia Women’s Society, a pro-democratic organization that supported the freedom fighters, and is documented gifting a legion from Poland a flag -- presumably the flag of the Frankfurt National Assembly government, which flew the same German tri-color design still used today. This would be deemed incitement, and after the Prussians crushed the uprising they banned the Concordia organization and denied Canton her pension.

And to speculate broadly: the freedom fighters defending Mannheim were being led by Ludwik Mierosławski, and so it’s at least a possibility that Louis Lingg, who was born “Ludwig Link”, was even named after the man who defended the city. It’s also true, though, that the occupied city south of Mannheim is called Ludwigshafen, named for the anti-revolution King Ludwig I. So, you know, I guess lots of people seem to be called Ludwig8.

Moving forward again to 1871, Young Louis was too young to experience the revolutions before his time, but the influence of this community was likely still felt. And further, many 48ers left Germany after the democracy movement failed and instead moved to the United States to fight for the Union Army, so it is unsurprising that he saw about United States as a place of freedom but I expect he grew up hearing old stories of evil reactionary rulers and the men chasing revolutionary dreams. I don’t see how such an environment wouldn’t cultivate a love of freedom.

If the political history of his neighborhood was not enough, the Young Lingg’s childhood alone will be sufficiently radicalizing. As a thirteen-year-old in fast industrializing Mannheim, Germany, he saw his father incapacitated by a lumber mill accident, made a victim by his own hustle. The accident broke his father’s spirit, which in turn resulted in him losing his job. For the next three years, the Young Lingg would watch his father die slowly. Determined to maintain control of his own life and career, Lingg trained as a carpenter, as a tradesman could have more agency than a day laborer. From ages 18 to 21 he set out into Germany and Switzerland, finding work and joining worker’s organizations. At 21, to avoid mandatory military service and with money secured by his mother from her new husband, he travelled to NYC and then Chicago to build a new life in the new world.

And the final two I group together as “Anglo Allies”. Whereas the IWPA is primarily a German-American association in Chicago, these two are drawn in despite not sharing that ancestry.

Only one of the Haymarket Eight was already in Chicago in 1871, and that man was ⛪ Lay Preacher Samuel Fielden ⛪. He was relatively new there, having left his family home in Lancashire, England only a couple years prior. Then 21-years-old, he headed to New York City where he briefly worked at a Brooklyn hat factory before packing cloth at a textile mill in Providence and working at a farm outside of Cleveland. Once in Chicago, he was a laborer on public projects like the Illinois and Michigan Canal and Douglass Park. The day of the fire, he was working on the drainage of Mud Lake near where today the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal runs north of Midway Airport. After about a decade of working for others in 1880, he used his savings to buy a team of horses and operated his own business hauling stone.

It’s around this time that two paths of his begin to merge. He had been religious in his upbringing, joining the Methodist church at 18, following in the footsteps of his mother who had passed back when he was 10. His involvement grew, and he was even “on trial” to serve as a local preacher but plans were interrupted and he chose to head to America. He continued with preaching while doing farmwork in Ohio, but in Chicago after a late night debate with D. L. Moody (of Moody Bible Institute fame) felt further from the church and instead found a use of his voice in the world of labor agitation.

He was involved with the creation of a Chicago Teamsters Union of which he was elected Vice President, though the union did not end up being effective and disbanded. He joined the Chicago chapter of the National Liberal League which advocated for separating church and state, and as an officer he represented them at a national convention. Most crucially to our purposes, he became a member of the IWPA and was a frequent speaker at their events, which is how he ended up speaking at Haymarket Square on May 4th, 1886 at the moment when the bomb was thrown.

Finally, we have 🇺🇲 American Idealist Albert Parsons 🇺🇲. In 1871 he was working in Austin, TX with the Texas state government, helping fill vacancies created by reconstruction era bans on ex-Confederate officials. In addition to his election as a secretary to the state senate, he also held one of the least anarchist jobs conceivable: an IRS tax collector.

Indeed, Parsons' resume is all over the place. Born 1848 in Montgomery, Alabama, he’d lose his mother at 2 and his father at 5 and be sent to Waco, TX to live with his sister. With a family with centuries of American heritage and several officers who fought in the American Revolution, it perhaps unsurprising that as a 13-year-old he snuck away to join his local military company -- though this being 1861 that meant he was on the side of the Confederates in what he would later call “The Slaveholder’s Rebellion”. After the war, he’d trade a mule for some corn for six months of college that prepared him to launch his own newspaper, the Waco Spectator; in his journalism and later in direct political action, he supported the rights of newly enfranchised Texans.

He would come to Chicago at 26 years old with his wife Lucy Parsons, getting a job as a typesetter for the Chicago Tribune. Investigating the accounts and activities of the Chicago Relief and Aid Society made him sympathetic to the worker’s plight, driving him to ultimately join the Social Labor Party of America and Knights of Labor. As a candidate with the Workingmen’s Party of the United States he would run for alderman three times, county clerk twice and US congress once; the Workingmen’s Party nominated him to be their presidential candidate, but he had to decline as at 31 he was too young to qualify. A speech to tens of thousands of striking workers during the 1877 Great Railroad Strike led to threats on his life, his firing from the Chicago Tribune and a general disillusionment with electoral politics.

In 1883, the American Idealist Albert Parsons will attend the Pittsburgh convention where the International Working People’s Association is founded, and it is in association with this group that he launches his anarchist weekly The Alarm. With this publication as his platform, he advocates for the eight-hour work day within a political frame of anarchism. He publishes from the same building as fellow IWPA publication the Arbeiter-Zeitung at 41 N. Wells St.

Viewed out of sequence, Parsons' politics seem almost chaotic; like a petitioner’s dream passerby, he seemed to join anything. But his arc is clear: a confederate at 13, to a Republican at 18, to a socialist at 26, to an anarchist at 32.

And he will be 37 when he and his family lead that first May Day Parade.

Okay, I think you’re caught up. Let’s dig in.

Part I: The Story of The Affair

May 1st, 1886: The Parade

On May Day, Parsons and his wife and his two young children marched in support of Eight-Hour Workday on a day that had been selected years in advance to enact a general strike.

This is of course the day commemorated as Labor Day in much of the world; its power is less in narrative nuance than in the sheer mass of people participating in a general strike for an eight-hour workday -- as many as half a million Americans by some estimates. Chicago, the center of the movement, sees 30k-40k striking and as many as 80k marching down Michigan Avenue. It’s a strong foundation for the lore that events to come will build upon.

This year, there were marches in Chicago again; to give a sense for relative scale, Block Club Chicago estimated the participant number as “thousands”, so the march of 1886 could easily have been ten times the size.

I spent the day working on an early draft of this blog post instead of attending the march (boo me!9), but I did attend the Haymarket Memorial Plaque Dedication, which occurs every year at the old Haymarket Square site since the current honorary installation was put up in 2004.

This year the plaque was from the Illinois AFL-CIO. Neither the AFL nor the CIO existed on May 1st, 1886, but the AFL would be founded later that year in December. I happened to learn the founding date of the AFL because I stayed in a Holiday Inn in Columbus, OH in June that happened to be on the grounds where the AFL was founded, with a plaque up as to mark the space.

Placing an AFL plaque on the Haymarket Memorial is a particularly interesting choice because it will be an AFL founding officer, Peter J. McGuire, who is credited with being the “father of Labor Day” as a September celebration. They say he proposed the idea in 1882 to the New York Central Labor Union.

The AFL-CIO website also calls McGuire the “founder of May Day”, as while serving as a delegate representing the United Brotherhood of Carpenters, he proposed that the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (a precursor to the AFL) directly enforce the eight-hour workday on May 1st, 1886. It is perhaps one of many examples where the invention is less consequential than the marketing; I’d say that McGuire is perhaps the Zune to Parsons’ iPod. An AFL marker on an IWPA memorial truly does embody solidarity forever.

What catches the world’s attention, though, is where things go from here.

May 3rd, 1886: The Escalation

After their Sunday day of rest, many workers are ready to carry out their general strike.

At the McCormick Reaper Works, strikers led by the “Castleborn” August Spies confront workers and when police become involved guns are fired and two workers10 are killed. Outraged at the killing, strikers use the printing presses of August Spies’s Arbeiter-Zeitung calling for a gathering to protest police violence.

I could not find any buildings from the McCormick Reaper Works still standing, but it was an absolutely massive plant in its time. From what I read, it seemed reminiscent of the massive factories we now associate with Chinese manufacturing. I believe some of it existed on the banks of the river across from the Daley Park Boat launch, which I visited on May 3rd.

It seems a bit unfair to me that this series of events is referred to as “The Haymarket Affair”, when the initiating events take place the day before the Haymarket gathering; by centering the story on the May 4th events instead of the May 3rd shooting, we lose the Monday context for the tension that likely sets Tuesday’s tragedy in motion.

After all, it is at the McCormick Reaper Works, not at Haymarket Square, where the first blood is drawn. And this was a repeat offense, with workers11 killed by McCormick’s private security forces during a strike the prior year, with no consequences faced by the Pinkerton guards responsible. Does it not make sense to instead call this whole episode “The McCormick Affair”? Or does that clash too strongly with McCormick Bridgehouse, McCormick Tribune Plaza and McCormick Place?

I do speculate that the McCormick Reaper Works is honored in historical iconography, regardless of how Americans refer to the series of events in their own history books. What symbol might you select to counter the mechanized farming technology McCormick develops? An old-fashioned reaping device of some sort? Though it’s merely conjecture, the “sickle” in the classic communist “hammer and sickle” could be seen as a historical allusion to the McCormick’s place in sparking a labor revolution.

Regardless, it is in response to this series of worker killings that the motivates the “Monday Night Conspiracy” meeting later this night, with Toymaker Engel and Liaison Fischer allegedly deciding that a designated codeword “ruhe” (German for “quiet”) will be published in the Arbeiter-Zeitung, signalling to the broader labor militia groups that they should take arms -- the revolution is nigh.

May 4th, 1886: The Assembly

Thousands see the flyers printed by the Arbeiter-Zeitung, and as many as 3,000 gather in Haymarket Square to protest the killings. That evening, the “Castleborn” Spies, the Idealist Parsons and the Preacher Fielden deliver speeches to a crowd that the mayor would later testify was peaceful.

Around 10:30pm, police ask the crowd to disperse. The Preacher Fielden is just completing his remarks, and when the police ask the crowd to peaceably disperse, Fielden reinforces their message, saying “but we are peaceable”. Perhaps hearing “peaceable” as a reference to the call-to-revolution codeword “ruhe”, someone launches a homemade bomb into the air, and when it lands near a police officer, Mathias J. Degan, he is killed. The resulting gunfire and chaos lasts a brief five minutes, killing six more policemen and at least four workers. Many more are injured, including Preacher Fielden who is shot in the leg. The crowd quickly scatters to escape the violence.

Over the next few days, the police seek out those they see involved with the conspiracy. August Spies and Samuel Fielden are arrested for their speeches which are seen as riling up the crowd. Albert Parsons is sought out for his speech as well, but he has fled the state. Three employees of August Spies at the Arbeiter-Zeitung are also arrested (Michael Schwab, Oscar Neebe and Adolph Fischer) for their connection to the flyers that drew together the crowd. Louis Lingg is arrested when his landlord reports him for assembling bombs in his apartment. George Engel is arrested for his attendance at a planning meeting for the event.

The detective’s lead suspect to have thrown the bomb is Rudolph Schnaubelt. He is captured by police, interviewed and then let go; after his release, he crosses the border to Canada, then escapes further to England and then to Argentina.

June 20th, 1886: The Homecoming

The police tell Albert Parsons’ wife, Lucy Parsons, that his evading capture in hiding gives credence to the conspiracy case. The four employees of the Arbeiter-Zeitung share an office with his own publication, The Alarm. To show solidarity with the fellow defendants and to demonstrate both his and their innocence, he realizes he must return and stand trial.

On the night of his 38th birthday, Parsons leaves Waukesha, Wisconsin and travels through the night back to Chicago. He reports to a police station and turns himself in. It is the Summer Solstice, and the days get shorter -- for everyone, and especially for Parsons.

June 21st, 1886: The Trial

The trial opens the same day Parsons turns himself in, and jury selection begins.

There are thousands of pages of testimony and evidence online in the Haymarket Affair Digital Collection provided by the Chicago Historical Society. The trial runs roughly seven weeks, from June 21st through August 11th. The jury deliberates for only a few hours. Their verdict, delivered August 19th, is that all eight men are guilty. Seven12 are condemned to death.

On October 1st, the Haymarket defendants’ counsel motions for a retrial, naming 14 justifications and providing new sworn testimony that contradicts existing testimony. The concerns include how the jury was constructed13 with deliberate bias, how the instructions to the jury were inconsistent with the law, how the judge didn’t permit dividing the trial to handle the militant IWPA North West Side Group separate from those merely involved in writing and speaking, and how the “verdict is manifestly illegal, unjust and against the testimony”. On October 7th, though, the motion is overruled.

The executions are planned for December 3rd. Roughly a week before, on Thanksgiving Day, they are granted a “writ of error” from the Illinois Supreme Court -- putting the executions on pause and setting a date for their appeal on March 1st in the new year. Closing arguments are held on March 18th, but the court’s 220-page decision isn’t published until September 14th of that year, when it affirms the original conviction. A new execution date is set for November 11th.

Nov 10th, 1887: The Lineup Changes

An attempt to appeal to the US Supreme Court is unsuccessful, but the Governor of Illinois is conflicted by the case. A “Radical Republican” and former major general in the Union Army, he is no stranger to passionate and violent pursuits of noble ideals. And so, to those who ask for clemency, he will reduce the sentence to “merely” a life of hard labor in prison. Of the seven on death row, two take the deal: Samuel Fielden and Michael Schwab. Less than 24 hours before their scheduled execution, they no longer face the noose.

Five remain on death row, with Louis Lingg the only of them with a clear connection to the violence in that he potentially assembled the bomb. As you recall, at 21 he was sent to the US by his mother to pursue his dream of moving to America. Now 23, Lingg has now spent the majority of his new-world-new-life held captive within the Cook County Courthouse and Jail. He was only in Chicago seven months before his apprehension by police, and he’s been awaiting his fate for over twice that time.

If Louis Lingg were to hang for associations with the bombing, then the county could at least know they were punishing one man with plausible direct connections to the violence. The trials did show bombs allegedly from Lingg’s apartment that were similar to the one used on that prior May 4th. While I’m not certain about his participation, and many claim the innocence of all seven martyrs, having a bombmaker among those persecuted would at least provide better optics to the state in their performed justice.

Alas, the night before executions would be carried out, Louis Lingg places a blasting cap between his lips like a cigar. He then, lighting it, blows up his own face. While he slowly dies over the next six hours, he scrawls “Hoch die Anarchie” (“up with anarchy”) on the jail cell floor in his own blood.

This leaves only four non-violent men scheduled to hang the next day: three journalists and a toymaker.

Nov 11th, 1887: The Martyrdom

Dressed in white robes, the four activists marched to the gallows by the Cook County Courthouse singing the Marseillaise. In the moments before their death, August Spies shared his last words, “There will come a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today”. Adolph Fischer and Georg Engel shout “Hoch die Anarchie”, echoing the Young Lingg’s bloody scrawl.

I have often been dismissive of the term “leftist”, as asking “where would this person sit in the 18th century French parliament” has the same vibe of describing a foreign city’s neighborhoods with NYC boroughs. But something about these martyrs walking to their death singing the “Marseillaise” has me thinking differently about this. Something about the German-born Americans singing a French swan song captures the transatlantic identification with the revolutionary story that grows into the global labor movement.

On the anniversary of the Haymarket Bombing this year, I ate ramen across the street from the former Cook County Courthouse where the Toymaker Engel, the Liaison Fischer, the “Castleborn” Spies and the Idealist Parsons were executed. I was listening to an audiobook (finally getting around to Cobalt Red) but it wasn’t loud enough to drown out being bookended by two Hinge dates who seemed much less interested in the historic hangings that had taken place outside ~138 years ago.

While we do not get May Day off in the US, it’s somewhat ironic that the US does provide a Federal Holiday on November 11th, which is the anniversary of the martyrdom. What we now call Veterans’ Day was once called Armistice Day, honoring the day in 1918 when the people of the world decided to stop killing each other for a while. While many of the fighters were young men who weren’t yet born, anyone over 31 would have been alive when an American and three Germans died side-by-side for a loosely shared idea of freedom. And if you think of Veterans’ Day as a day where we celebrate those who risk their lives to protect their vision of the American Dream, perhaps there is room in your conceptualization to reflect on the May Day Martyrs.

After the four had died, a funeral procession was held where participants wore red ribbons and sang the Marseillaise. The more modern anthem “L’Internationale” was not yet composed, and would not be used ceremonially until the Second Internationale would assemble in 1889.

It would be at this meeting that the global journey of the Haymarket mythology begins.

Part II: The Spread of the Story

The world was watching as the executions provided a definitive conclusion to the Haymarket Affair, but the struggle that the May Day martyrs were fighting for was far from over.

July 14th, 1889: The Holiday

Over three years later, a gathering would take place in Paris on the 100th anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. The goal was to reorganize workers in the continued struggle for workers’ freedoms.

That gathering, “The International Workers’ Congress”14, would result in the formation of the “Second International”. The “First International” was the International Workingmen’s Association15; the “International Working People’s Association” was also called the “Black International” but it does not receive a number, only a color. (We honestly need an equivalent of those monarchy lineage charts but for all these labor organizations.)

Whereas the First International began its collapse when it kicked out the anarchists 8 years into its founding, the Second International was a new start and re-engaged with the anarchists in fellowship until kicking them out again 7 years later. (It’s important to recognize this was an earlier era when the Left struggled to hold together a broad coalition and would constantly become mired in counterproductive infighting.)

The constituency of The International Workers’ Congress was so divided, the people who had gathered for it were literally split into two separate factional meetings: The Marxists meeting at the Hall of Parisian Fantasies (“Salle des Fantaisies-Parisiennes” at 42 Rue Rochechouart) and the Possibilists meeting a 25-minute walk to the southwest at the Union for Trade and Industry (10 Rue de Lancry). It would be in the Hall of Parisian Fantasies and on the final afternoon of the congress where the motion to create a global May Day would be put forward and passed.

The holiday was first simply a decision to demonstrate on the 1890 anniversary of the original Chicago demonstration. The AFL in the US had already set this date, and the Second Internationale was presenting a broad global coalition of support. After initial success, it became recognized as an annual event the following year.

June 26th, 1893: The Pardon

Though 1893 had a particularly noteworthy May Day, with President Grover Cleveland giving his opening address at the World’s Columbian Exposition, the more remarkable date would be a couple months later when Illinois Governor John P. Altgeld would drop a 16,545-word pardon16 for the three imprisoned of the original Haymarket Eight. This was deeply controversial and even earned Altgeld a place in Profiles in Courage (the TV show, not the book).

One note here though: Altgeld calls the circulation of the IWPA-affiliated publications small, which is kind of sad for the state to do as a part of the pardon; he basically calls their life’s work of writing inconsequential? If I am ever murdered by the state for anything I write in this Substack, please don’t posthumously pardon me by saying that nobody even reads my Substack. I am aware that just a few friends of mine read my Substack to humor me, but that just feels unnecessarily hurtful.

Altgeld is remembered by a plaque in his birthtown of Selters that faces a skatepark.

Though Altgeld’s publication of his reasoning is titled “Reasons for Pardoning Fielden, Neebe and Schwab”, it is later republished under broader headers, such as a pamphlet published by Lucy Parsons titled “Gov. John P. Altgeld’s Pardon of the Anarchists and His Masterly Review of the Haymarket Riot”. This later titling encourages a broader reading of the Altgeld pardon. Though he does not explicitly pardon the four men killed in 1887, his reason mostly focuses on discrediting the process as a whole -- including selection of jury, competence of jurors, fittingness of the charge and overall judge bias. This strengthens the martyrdom narrative and builds into the myth.

June 28th, 1894: The Other Holiday

The following year, President Grover Cleveland is back in DC and signs S-730 (“A Bill Making Labor Day A Legal Holiday”) into law.17 The bill had been proposed almost a full year earlier by North Dakota Senator James H. Kyle from the Populist Party, but now the country is deep in a summer-long strike and boycott of the Pullman Company and the government is looking to show solidarity with working people. Many states already recognize the first Monday of September as Labor Day, and this broadens the reach of the holiday.

As mentioned earlier, the September Labor Day was first celebrated in New York City in 1882 -- nearly four years before the May Day March that would escalate and capture the world’s attention. As for who to credit for the 1882 parade, historians dispute between two similarly surnamed strikeleaders, Peter McGuire18 and Matthew Maguire. It’s a topic for another essay.

I didn’t focus on the September Labor Day so much in my research, but I did enjoy how congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh tied the two together in her history explainer that covers the Pullman Strike in greater detail.

October 24th, 1938: The Workday

It’ll be on the other side of World War I before the US passes a broad eight-hour workday in The Fair Labor Standards Act. As one of the key components of New Deal legislation, it is signed into law by FDR on June 25th, 1938 and then takes effect on October 24th, 1938.

The bill is famous for guaranteeing time-and-a-half wages for time worked over forty hours, establishing the norm of a five-day workweek of eight-hour workdays. (The original 1932 draft from Alabama Senator Hugo Black actually set the workweek at 30 hours, which perhaps was merely shrewd negotiation.) In addition to encouraging limits on working hours, the bill also decrees a federal minimum wage and prohibits child labor. Bangers all.

It took over fifty years from the original May Day march, but at last the dream of the eight-hour day has been achieved.

December 21st, 1939: The Flag

And now let’s engage in baseless speculation.

When Chicago’s May Day March movement had finally achieved its mission, restricting work hours and protecting free time and free thinking, there were only three stars on the Chicago Flag.

Initially adopted in 1917, the Chicago flag had featured two stars for events already discussed: the Great Chicago Fire and the World’s Columbian Exposition. Chicago then adds a star to the flag as a promotional stunt19 for the WCE’s sequel in 1933.

And so here we are in 1939. Chicago’s historic and globally renowned labor movement has achieved a critical policy goal that liberates laborers across the country. The march and movement that captured the hearts and minds of people, though never finished, can finally call itself a success. Chicago City Council gathers. They have a new star in mind. Along with the fire that drew support from around the world and two world-famous fairs that drew global crowds, the Chicago Flag will add a star for… Fort Dearborn?20

I’m not going to talk about Fort Dearborn at all. I did read some about it. Someone wanted to name a bridge after Fort Dearborn and then the City Council was like “no let’s add a star to the flag instead”. And so they did.

It does lend itself to a conspiracy theory though: what if the “fort” is actually code for the “fort-y hour workweek”? Hmm? And the radical Chicago City Council of 1939 just knew that celebrating leftwing activism of the late 1800s would be too much for most people to swallow? So they had to do that thing that kids do on TikTok where they use “unalive” instead of “kill” to evade automated content moderation. It is perhaps a little open to interpretation.

I’m generally opposed to government speech regulations, but it does feel like there should be some regulation as to what can represent a star on a flag. When someone dreams of becoming a movie star, they are dreaming of becoming globally recognized -- a star is seen in the sky regardless of your provincial habitation. When Chicago burned down, drew donations from 2521 foreign countries making it a global affair. The World’s Columbian Exposition has at least 3422 countries represented and the followup Century of Progress has at least 1823 countries represented -- not including attendees which would span even wider. The May Day March not only set into motion nationwide policy achievements but it would become a holiday in 180 countries, making it more recognized than Christmas. What has Fort Dearborn done? Does anyone outside of Chicago know about it? I’m skeptical.

Those in Chicago can claim the stars mean whatever they want. Seen from abroad, though, I like to think the stars represent Spies, Fischer, Engel & Parsons. Four men whose origins were outside of Chicago, and whose legacy burns brightest outside the city and country where they made history. One needn’t obsess over the particular minutes of the Chicago City Council. We can disregard “alderial intent” and all that post-modern literary theory stuff.

May 1st, 1955: The Canonization

As May Day ages into its 60s, it starts to get religious.

The Catholic Church, in part attempting to deepen its solidarity with the working Catholics of the Soviet Union, gets in on the May Day hubbub. Pope Pius XII adds a second feast day for St. Joseph, supplementing March 19th. Saints Philip & James, who already have the awkward situation of sharing a Feast Day, must now also oblige as the church asks them to move their feast day a couple days later to May 3rd to accommodate the new holiday.

St. Joseph was a carpenter, just like the Bombsmith Louis Lingg and AFL President Peter McGuire. And so St. Joseph gets a feast day of St. Joseph the Worker on the same day as May Day / International Workers’ Day.24

May 1st, 1958: The Other Other Holiday

As May Day has grown globally, along with the central myth of the Haymarket Eight, the US feels it must counterprogram. The Eisenhower administration creates an American alternative to the seditious socialism of May Day: “Law Day”.

I like to think the parallel six-letter length was to trick communists into revealing themselves in a crossword puzzle clue “holiday that starts the fifth month”. It is evenly weighted in length to remind you that it is just as real a holiday as May Day is even though you maybe never had heard of it until just now.

Eisenhower rang in the first Law Day, reminding us: "In a very real sense, the world no longer has a choice between force and law. If civilization is to survive, it must choose the rule of law."

If the purpose of the day is about rejecting force, then I think the freedoms fought for in the May Day movement are broadly aligned.

May 1st, 1989: The Stadium

It is the year following the 1988 Seoul Olympics, and Pyongyang wants to show it too is a part of the global community. It, like the government in Seoul, celebrates May Day on the first of May. And it, like the Olympics-hosting city of Seoul, can build a big stadium. Bigger even than the stadiums that held Olympic athletes from all around the world! It is at the time the biggest stadium in Asia and would eventually be the biggest stadium in the world after Prague decommissions its giant gymnastic center.

Though they are politically isolated, the hermit kingdom wants the world to know that they are not so different maybe. They celebrate May 1st like just about everyone else. They like to gather around in a circle by the tens of thousands and cheer for/against teams and contenders. And they are around if you’re looking for an enormous sporting hall for a transnational athletic competition of some kind.

How To Go Viral in the Late 1800s

One of my first jobs out of college was working in Hollywood as a data analyst that helped major US broadcast networks like CBS, ABC and FOX decide what TV pilots to put on the air; I designed and developed a dashboard that was used to determine programming that over a hundred million people ended up watching. For better or for worse, it’s probably the most impactful dashboard I’ve ever made.25

Every day while eating my lunch I would listen to longform podcast interviews with writers talking about their processes and frameworks, so I’ve easily listened to over a thousand hours of interviews with TV writers. I hoped that one day maybe I would be more involved in creative details, but my career took off in the direction of researching new ad platforms. (There is always a sense of gravity toward “where the money is”, and there was a lot of money in then-tween-age Silicon Valley social media companies; on top of that, the network creatives generally wanted research folks to stay in their lane.) Still, I layer in these elements and frameworks to hopefully approach Story in a way that is not excessively clinical.

In TV pilot testing, the most important measure for deciding what shows got picked up was self-reported intent to view more episodes. We’d recruit people all over the United States to sit and watch the first episode of a TV show (“the pilot”). When we wanted to break down a pilot that wasn’t working, the diagnostics focused on three measures: characters, concept and execution. Ultimately, I see the May Day Myth as succeeding on all three core elements.

1.) The Characters: 3 Stolen Rules to Engineer Love

In the old days of television, researchers would highlight the importance of characters by emphasizing that by tuning into a program a viewer was inviting the characters into their home. We can think of modern programming whose casting seems to appeal more to our sense of curiosity, but while shock or strangeness can help initially draw attention, the longevity of a story relies on building a story world that people truly want to live in and return to, and to succeed at that we must feel connected to the characters.

The head of the TV pilot testing consultancy I worked at bought one book for nearly everyone who worked there: Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The book identifies a “monomyth” structure that identifies common threads in stories all across cultures, and it has a reputation in part for its influence on George Lucas and Star Wars. Like any “theory of story” that is widely adopted, it can be used in tired ways by unimaginative risk-averse people to create dull art, and people in the creative industry hoping to achieve a kind of raw self-expression can resent it, but it’s a great place to start with Story.

That said, while Joseph Campbell’s anthropological approach is deeply researched and broadly applicable, it can also be unwieldy; I find that the practical wisdom of writers themselves can be useful. To understand Story, I tend to look to people who have been effective at captivating me in stories that also have published thoughtfully on their process. And at the risk of pigeonholing myself as a specific kind of person, the two monomyth-aligned creator-analysts I look to here are TV showrunner Dan Harmon and science fiction author Kurt Vonnegut26. And so when introducing people to Campbell’s “The Hero’s Journey”, I tend to prefer to introduce Dan Harmon’s gloss, “The Story Circle”.

The story wheel is read like a clock, starting with a character (“You”) who has a need (“Need”). The specific insight I like here is that the first job of every story is to get a viewer to identify with the protagonist. As for how writers work this magic, I’ve always liked Kurt Vonnegut’s “eight rules for writing fiction” as a toolkit -- specifically the three rules that are character-focused: #2, #3 and #6. They speak to a character’s success at being relatable, motivated and vulnerable.

By these rules, a creator can achieve “soulbinding”; a good story will get you in the shoes of its protagonist(s) fast, activating your mirror neurons. If you can get the audience to fall in love with your characters, the rest of the story doesn’t even have to be that interesting. We can tolerate a great deal of dullness from those we love.

There is a classic situation writers can complain about, where they get a note from a production executive that asks them to give their main character a dog. In this situation, DO NOT GIVE YOUR CHARACTER A DOG. This is a hack move. Executives are not experts in how to write; they are simply experts in how they feel when they read a story. They are telling you they don’t feel connected to your main character. In business culture, it is generally frowned upon to just say you don’t like or get something, so instead people try to be solution-oriented; this is also a decision insecure people make to avoid flat out saying “they don’t get it”. But many executives are ill-equipped to resolve a problem, bringing characters to life is the explicit domain of the storyteller.

When you read about the May Day Martyrs, you don’t feel like they need a dog to be captivating. The people of the world fell in love with the Haymarket Eight in large part because they presented themselves as remarkably relatable, motivated and vulnerable.

Relatable: “[Someone] To Root For”

Relatability is admittedly a bit of an annoying concept, but the basic idea is that a story should have at least one character that a viewer or reader can connect with.

Vonnegut’s Rule #2

“Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.”

The Haymarket Eight are a diverse mix of characters that allow anyone to step into the story and feel connected.

As labor movement icons, it was probably most important that they cover different ground professionally. The Lay Preacher Fielden worked in textiles; the Bombmaker Lingg was a carpenter; the American Idealist Parsons was a government employee. Indeed, despite their anarchist philosophy, a number of them are actually business owners. Old Toymaker Engel of course owns his toy store; the Understudy Neebe is a shareholder in the collective that publishes The Alarm and The Arbeiter-Zeitung. Lay Preacher Fielden specifically jokes in his autobiography that when he bought his own horses to operate independently as a teamster he “became what Chicago Tribune calls a capitalist”.

Their biographies also are diverse. At the time of the affair, Young Lingg was 21 and Old Engel was 50. Religiously, we also see a mix of perspectives common to Europe at the time. Schwab begins his autobiography talking about his Catholic Bavarian upbringing, whereas Fielden talks about his service in the Methodist church. Their politics are also very broad. Even just from the four hanged men we get three different definitions of socialism and anarchy. It invites a broad coalition to see themselves in the story of their martyrdom.

Motivated: “Every Character Should Want Something”

This is relatively straightforward, and I think it’s clear that the May Day Martyrs were deeply motivated. Those motivations strong enough to be felt shared by their global audience.

Vonnegut’s Rule #3:

“Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.”

They were motivated in different ways, but all wanted to see America live up to a promise of freedom. The Old Toymaker Engel wrote in his autobiography about his conversation with a dissident after arriving in the US: “I sang the praises of this ‘free and glorious’ country. […] I told him America was a free country, anybody could earn good wages if he wanted to, and save money besides.”

This motivation of seeking a better life was widespread and relatable at the time. Europeans in the 1800s were weebs for America as an idea. Seeing the Haymarket Martyrs betrayed by the country they crossed an ocean for pushes a shift from fandom to fear, leaving the international public disillusioned with the state of freedom in the US.

Vulnerable: “Be A Sadist”

When a person watches another person experience some sensory scenario, their brain will create similar patterns as if the event was happening to them; this phenomenon is said to be caused by “mirror neurons”. The more intense the experience, the more intense the connection. This motivates the third of the Vonnegut rules that apply to May Day Martyrs’ story.

Vonnegut’s Rule #6:

“Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.”

It’s a trope to achieve this by just killing a character of meaning and this is often hacky. And it can be problematic how often male protagonists demonstrate their vulnerability by killing a female character. But then Pixar will make the opening of Up where they do just that and people will be like “greatest opening ever”. So it’s hard to say what will or won’t break through.

Some of my favorite examples of this find creative ways to trigger multiple examples at one.

• Walter White caught moonlighting at the carwash and getting made fun of by his students in the pilot of Breaking Bad, showing his vulnerability in a way that also highlights his broadly relatable motivation to earn more money.

• In Train to Busan, we are introduced to protagonist Seok-woo as he gifts a Wii for daughter only to be told he gifted her one last year, showing a moment of weakness and framing his core motivation for the film.

• The Battle at Lake Changjin, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army unit that we follow is early on bombed from above on flat open ground, leaving them defenseless and vulnerable.

• On page two of Stephen King’s writer’s guide On Writing, he tells a childhood story about being wasp-stung and the dropping a cinderblock on his own foot crushing his toes; this is explained makes no sense for a book on writing, except its demonstration of his deeply human fragility deepens the reader’s connection with him as a narrator of his memoir.

• Because I’ve watched Edge of Tomorrow many times (mostly on planes), I’ve seen Major William Cage die horribly perhaps thousands of times, an incomparable display of vulnerability which makes me deeply and tragically soulbound to Tom Cruise.

• The shoeless John McClane of Die Hard is vulnerable and motivated to find shoes.

The May Day Martyrs demonstrate their vulnerability early in their autobiographies listing out their childhood traumas. Fielden loses his mother when he is 10; Spies loses his father when he is 15; Lingg loses his father when he is 16. Schwab and Engel both are orphaned at 12 years old; Parsons is orphaned at just 5 years old. Their struggles to find decent work in a rapidly industrializing world stack atop social disruptions.

Their many trials and tribulations show not just their humanity but their strength to strive amid strife. In hard times, they offered hope that hard work could lead the way to success.

When many movies are star-driven, the writing doesn’t necessarily have to do much “soul-binding”; you’ve already attached yourself to the protagonist by seeing their trials in prior films (even if as other characters). But for stories without stars, the narrative does more work. And since the May Day martyrs were not yet stars before their history unraveled, their emphasis on relatability, motivation and vulnerability was particularly important.

2.) Concept: “It’s The Gospel Meets Serial”

While the characters are critical to retain an audience, the audience first must be drawn into the narrative. Today’s film industry relies heavily on marketing to draw in prospective filmgoers, generally spending as much on selling the movie as they spend on the movie itself; for a story without attached talent, though, it is the concept that draws in viewers.

The go-to book to understand Concept in the early 2010s when I worked with a story consultancy was Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat; looking at the wide range of consulting tools and workshops on their website, I get the sense it is still popular (and consequently rejected by certain artist types). The most succinct expression of the concept is the “logline”, which is a brief pitch intended to spark interest in the full story.

Snyder has four rules for a logline: (1) it must be ironic, (2) it must imply the story in full, (3) it must make an investment case to producers, and (4) it must include the (“killer”) title.

“The Haymarket Affair” is a title that seems deliberately designed to disengage, so there is a clear failure on the fourth criterion. And Snyder’s third criterion is more directed toward screenwriters trying to get their script optioned, so telegraphing factors like potential audience and production budget can be consequential.

The core irony in the May Day Martyrs logline is clear though, and to capture both the irony and the arc of the narrative in a sentence, you could write something like this27:

A group of tradesmen pursue freedom across the ocean to the “Land of the Free”, where their practice of free speech, free association and free assembly result in their arrest, imprisonment and state-sanctioned murder.

This kind of irony is perhaps trite for a modern American audience, and I’m certainly framing things from a particular angle and reducing complexity, but this is what would draw a reader in. Readers would want to understand how and why America, a place famous for choosing freedom over tyranny, would be so hostile to the immigrants who share its dream.

Who Is Heisting Whom

The book Save the Cat also breaks down stories into specific story archetypes; with the Haymarket Affair, we are looking at a “Golden Fleece” -- a reference to the 8th Century BC myth where Jason and his team of Argonauts engaged in a journey to capture this particular amber-hued pelt. The fleece is a proto-macguffin in this three-millennia-old ancestor to the heist film.

The three essential elements Snyder identifies in a “Golden Fleece”28 story are (1) a road, (2) a team and (3) a prize. The road does not have to be the paved sort. In the Haymarket Affair, the literal journey of metaphorical trials is rather the metaphorical journey of a literal trial. The team is evidently the defendants, made a distinctive cohesive unit seemingly only by the trial itself. The prize is the Eight Hour Workday that the May Day demonstrators were marching for. The workers are trying to reclaim a pre-industrial independence of working life that political and technological shifts have taken from them. Its heist movie is a heist of justice and freedom.

It’s not essential, and actually somewhat rare in Hollywood films, that many protagonists will die in an STC “Golden Fleece” story. Nearly all of the Argonauts in the original myth make it to the fleece and back home. But as you already know, the Haymarket protagonists will all pass on years before the Eight Hour Day prize is won.

Ingredients of a Tragedy

Roughly half a millennium after the times of Homer and the age of the Argonauts, Aristotle would also write his own theory of narrative in Poetics -- much older than Save the Cat or Harmon’s Story Circle or Vonnegut’s Eight Rules for Writing but still very useful today.

In particular, he provides a series of elements that contribute to tragic “mythos”, a term generally translated as “plot” but relevantly also a cognate of “myth”. We find many of these within the story Haymarket Affair.

Peripeteia: a reversal of fortune

As already discussed when distilling the Haymarket Affair to a compelling logline, the grand reversal here is seen in the core irony of immigrants coming to the US to find freedom and instead being imprisoned.

The proceedings of a court case create frequent mundane reversals, as motions are introduced pointing toward hope only to be denied pointing again toward damnation. And the broader arc of the case is rife with reversals as well: its petition for retrial that is shut down, its appeal to the state supreme court that succeeds at earning a review but fails to change the fates of the defendants, and lastly its appeal to the federal supreme court that does not succeed.

Governor Oglesby’s commutation is a reversal for Journeyman Schwab and Preacher Fielden who learn they will not hang less than 24 hours before they are scheduled to hang. It’s a reversal again when the next Governor Altgeld pardons Schwab, Fielden and Neebe altogether, condemning the whole process.

Perhaps one of the most emotionally complex reversals is when Louis Lingg takes his death into his own hands, denying the state the possible justice of punishing the possible (if not likely) creator of the offending bomb.

Anagnorisis: a moment of revelation

Much as reversals are commonplace within court proceedings, so are revelations. The judge’s role in a court is simply to provide these revelations, elucidating what is in or out of order. Perhaps deliberately, the design of the court seems drawn heavily upon Aristotle’s Poetics.

And every trial has its highest stakes anagnorisis at its conclusion, when the judge reads the verdict. For the Haymarket Affair defendants, this was when they were sentenced to death.

But I think there is an ultimate anagnorisis after that. On the gallows, when four men are standing and sharing their last remarks, the American Idealist Parsons is the last to speak.

He cries out:

“Let me speak, oh men of America! Will you let me speak, Sheriff Matson! Let the voice of the people be heard! Oh—”

And with that, the trapdoor has swung open, and his voice has been quieted. This is the final revelation in Parsons’ experience of the Haymarket Affair. He hangs with three of his fellow defendants and slowly is strangled to death.

There will be no more twists for him.

His story is over.

Catharsis: an experience of clarification and redemption

The story of the May Day Martyrs can be gut-wrenching in that it provides catharsis to the audience that it denies to the characters -- a sort of dramatic irony created by the “theater of the mind” where history is viewed in the memories of the present.

The imprisoned three at least learn that Governor Altgeld redeems them and discredits the state institution he leads when he pardons them, but the five dead are denied such a catharsis even though his condemnation of the trial is broad, and undermines their judgments.

And further, we learn that the Eight-Hour Day eventually succeeds long after all the martyrs have passed on, valorizing their struggle.

These are critical moments that make the tragedy more resonant, even though these moments only occur outside the scope of the protagonists’ lives.

Hamartia: an inner flaw that renders one’s fate inevitable

For this last point, I expect some may dispute me here; it feels perhaps wrong to frame steadfastness in politics and solidarity as a flaw. I think there are at least a couple possible readings here. And because this is not a dramatization but history-in-itself, it can be harder to see what specific moment might ground a revelation.

We could perhaps see their refusal to disavow their politics in the trial as a flaw, whereas others maybe would be more practical, staying alive for their wives, their children, their friends. I wonder if Albert Parsons could have survived simply by not turning up to court, which he did as an act of solidarity. He had evaded capture and could have remained out of reach; others like Rudolph Schnaubelt (who the court believed had thrown the bomb) did this, and they were able to live out the rest of their lives.

I think the clearer read, though, is to see the tragic flaw as naivete. This is part of why it was resonant for me to visit the places they came from; these were the locations that they made their fatal choice, to pursue an ideal of freedom in America that in fact was not there to be enjoyed.

They were misinformed. They had the wrong address.

These tragic elements are in themselves powerful, but they are made more powerful by the analogies they enable to a central narrative to Europeans in the 19th century.

Cross Examination

Another three centuries after Aristotle, we approach the so-called “common era” and another story that would prove highly influential: that of Jesus of Nazareth, made famous when broadly published and distributed in The Bible.

The May Day Martyrdom can be read explicitly as a Christian allegory. It is, after all, a tale of a political execution. You have the moment where the martyrs can live if only they choose to disavow their Truth, with Governor Oglesby in the role of Pontius Pilate. They can survive if they only submit to local provincial authority, but many would rather die. Just as early Christians fed to lions by Romans would laugh in ecstatic excitement for reunion with their creator while being mauled to death by lions, May Day Martyr Fischer’s last words at the gallows are “This is the happiest day of my life”.

There is the presence of a Biblical frame in the casting of the Martyrs as well. Bible scholars see the Gospel’s authorship as designed to speak to two doctrinal paradoxes: the servant-leader represented by Matthew and Mark (a former Roman tax collector and a former slave) and the divine-incarnate represented by Luke and John (a doctor and fisherman29). The Haymarket Eight reflects the servant-leader paradox in Parsons and Engel (politician and indentured servant), and it reflects the divine-incarnate paradox in Lingg and Fielden (engineer and preacher).

Many of the countries that find the martyrdom meaningful today are heavily Christian, such as Mexico. At the 1939 May Day parade in Mexico City, Oscar Neebe's grandson was told the festivities were "how the world shows respect to your grandfather". Mexican muralist Diego Rivera featured the May Day Martyrs in his NYC mural, commissioned then decommissioned by the Rockefeller family, then moved to Unity House in Forest Park, PA where it would be destroyed in a fire in 1969. (Though admittedly Mexican sympathies for the May Day Martyrs may be driven less by Christian allegorical resonance and more by the fact that the US army’s invasion of Mexico City and the seizing of half their country’s territory was merely 40 years before the Haymarket Affair, easily in living memory. A bit of both, maybe.)

Having a new myth take a form so parallel to an old myth means that new myth can to some degree ride in the older myth’s draft to spread more quickly.

Open World Gaming, Participatory Sensemaking & the Sublime

Even beyond these more classical elements, though, there is an aspect of the Haymarket Affair that satisfies more contemporary theoretical tastes as well.

Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan introduces his concept of hot and cool media in his 1964 work Understanding Media. Famous for his aphorism, “the medium is the message”, he defines “hot media” as “high definition” and optimized for low effort consumption, whereas “cool media” was the opposite. To him, “hot media” includes text, film and photography, whereas “cool media” included comics and TV, which was lower resolution. He attributed “cool media” as a label to the detached cool nature of jazz, but I find it easier to remember it analogizing media to food: “hot media” is cooked and ready to eat, whereas “cool media” requires your active participation and preparation.

Even in the present day, understanding the Haymarket Affair seems to require , it would have been a real time commitment to sift through and compare the various documentations about the events to piece together the narrative, using perhaps newspaper articles and eventually court transcripts and biographies. The transcriptions from court minutes online are low resolution and imperfect. Photography did not really exist much at the time, and so for visuals we rely on . Consuming “the story” of the Haymarket Affair requires an amount of activity that I can think of are reading in a choose-your-own-adventure novel, participating in an escape room or even participating in an open world video game.

In a similar framework, French literary theorist Roland Barthes lays out a somewhat similar but distinct framework in his 1973 book Le Plaisir du Texte. Whereas McLuhan focuses on the fundamental technology through which a message is delivered, Barthes is interested in the sense-making process within the message. He differentiates between “readerly” texts and “writerly” texts. Readerly texts are clear and effectively transmit the intended information to their audience, whereas writerly texts invite the reader to engage in the meaning-creation process.

The question that naturally follows then is: Which is better? As in, which do we enjoy more? Which has more staying power? Which draws us in? A pragmatically functional “readerly” text or an open-ended participatory “writerly” text?

Our instinct might suggest that the “readerly” text outperforms on these measures, as it does its job of passing forward ideas. This theory would anticipate that we like engaging with stories because we like conclusions and the peace that they provide.

But Barthes argues that while utilitarian “readerly” texts can occasionally provide pleasure (plaisir), only “writerly” texts can provide deeper bliss (jouissance). We are drawn to the conflict and enjoy the tension. A resolution will merely leave us bored, upon which we will let go of the text and move on.

Tension and complexity exists in the Haymarket Affair story in multiple ways. On one level, the story is disharmonious because the characters are disharmonious, with the Haymarket Eight not actually representing a cohesive politics or movement. Fischer and Engel and Parsons provide contradictory definitions of socialism in their published autobiographies.

Beyond this though, tension exists in that there is a lot of the story that is fundamentally unknowable. Testimonies from many witnesses contradict each other, and even minor details are not clear. It evokes the sublime “writely” bliss evoked by the enigmatic 2014 podcast Serial, which captivated its audience with its refusal to take a particular side.

Perhaps I haven’t been clear up until now that there is no member of the Haymarket Eight that I am absolutely certain is innocent.

From my readings at this point, it seems true that the Haymarket Eight were not demonstrated to have engaged in conspiracy in a way that would surpass the “reasonable doubt” standard. It seems clear that the trial was constructed to produce an outcome and was a miscarriage of justice. Even Judge Gary, who the Governor Altgeld the Pardoner considered the architect of the entire injustice process, felt that Samuel Fielden should have his sentence commuted.

But that doesn’t mean that I am wholly convinced that the “Monday Night Conspiracy” theory is not accurate. The idea that there was a meeting where Lingg was directed to provide bombs and Engel told Fischer to tell Spies (and fellow Arbeiter-Zeitung teammates Schwab and Neebe) to put a codeword in the paper, and then Parsons would draw a crowd and the police and then Fielden would say the codeword to trigger the bombing is plausible in a very distant sense. Much more likely is that some of these things happened deliberately and others happened accidentally. But specifically what was deliberate and what was accidental? The ambiguities and gaps, along with the disparate source material make this for a uniquely “cold” and “writerly” myth, that also perhaps make it particularly delightful to contemplate.

Ultimately, the rise of modernism in literature after WWI would create more complex works presenting complex concepts in complex fashions, more “writerly” in the Barthesian sense. And the rise of consumer gaming would create media experiences that depended more on user engagement, or “colder” in the McLuhanian sense. But back in 1887, in the wake of the Haymarket Affair, this would have been a distinctly cold and writerly text to engage with.

It’s reminiscent of Dao De Jing’s Chapter 11.30

Thirty spokes are joined in the wheel's hub.

The hole in the middle makes it useful.

Mold clay into a bowl.

The empty space makes it useful.

Cut out doors and windows for the house.

The holes make it useful.

Therefore, the value comes from what is there,

But the use comes from what is not there.

Like the functional emptiness implicit in a bowl or a window, the gaps in the story serve to deepen its experience and meaning. The gaps in the story create space for its audience to participate more deeply in the meaning-making.

This also means that many who read the tale of the Haymarket Affair may not optimally enjoy it. After all, we live in a time where black-and-white thinking permeates our politics, but a story like the Haymarket Affair is most resonant among those who refuse to fit it into a simple model. If you adopt an attitude of “the state is always violent and corrupt”, then that simplifies the story into commonplace dreariness. If you adopt an attitude of “the state must be strong to tend to criminals and miscreants”, that too will lose your attention. It is between these models of thinking that the story opens up.

The timelessness of the story is rooted in how the story is to some degree intrinsically unresolvable. As much as political violence is a part of American history, so is the rejection and opposition to that violence. And as long as they are unresolved in parallel, the story will maintain relevance and attention.

3.) Execution: Court-as-Studio & Product-Martyr Fit

One of the documents I find most interesting in the Haymarket Affair Digital Collection shows that on October 20th, 1886, after the judge denies their motion for a retrial, all eight defendants do something quintessentially American: they co-found a start-up together.

Essentially, they declare shared collective ownership of the intellectual property they had shared over the course of the trial, creating the “Anarchist Publishing Association or Labor Press Association". (Not enough companies have names that are just two completely different names with “or” in the middle.) They were strategic from the start that they would get their message out to the world. And their execution contributed to the spread of their myth.

Meeting the Medium of the Moment

Many of the defendants were journalists who understood how information traveled.31 They understood how to tell a story, but they also understood how to get it out into the world.

We already discussed how court records inherently apply Aristotelian drama principles, but there is another challenge that faces a political minority attempting to make a point: establishing a trustworthy record.

The first video camera would be invented a couple years after the Haymarket Affair in 1888 by French inventor Louis Le Prince, and in that same year Kodak would release its first mass-market still photography camera. Back in 1886, though, you could not capture an event in a way that would inherently demonstrate authenticity. Edison’s phonograph had been recently invented but would not be broadly available until the 1890s, and not yet suitable for a group of guys like the Haymarket Eight to get into podcasting. It was a world without the blockchain. Writers could write or say whatever they want, and so how does a reader know what to believe?

The solution was having the government they opposed provide the very documentation of the government’s own offenses. After all, the government would have every incentive to make their opponents look bad, so if they can be convincing in the harsh light of the Cook County Courthouse, they can establish credibility. The Haymarket Eight were able to use this mundane feature of democratic governance to create an early antecedent to Cops, but viewed through the eyes of citizens rather than those policing them.

Another challenge with using journalism to advance political goals is that people generally don’t seek out journalism with the express purpose of altering their politics. Readers are trying to gather a basic understanding of the world, both to operate successfully within it and to connect with others in their communities. To break through, they had to create a story people would want to share.

Jack Shephard, editorial director at Buzzfeed when they dominated attention in the early social media age 2014, had two main principles to generate content that would be shared: (1) people like to share content that is about themselves, (2) people like to share content that highlights a positive emotional experience like awe-inspiring, emotional, positive or surprising.

As discussed already, the defendants’ mixed backgrounds helped a wide range of people relate to them, but the optimism of their visions despite their bleak circumstances made people want to identify with the message. The ideas they stood for were ones that others felt good standing behind. And that alongside using the tools of the state to verify their critique helped spread the word.

The Social Network of Holiday-Setters

It is important to note the importance that future geopolitical features of the world would play a key role in the global celebration of the May Day Martyrs. This was of course unknowable to the Haymarket Affair defendants at the time.

For marketers trying to induce virality, a strategy called “seeding” will be employed -- deliberately focusing on a small audience of influential voices that will spread the content. In this case, foreign governments of course have interest in spotlighting the failures of the American government to protect their documented freedoms. For much of American history, countries have engaged in zero-sum competition with the US for talent and other resources; it is, after all, governments that set their own holiday calendars.

There is deep irony that many states that honor these martyrs also use state violence against those who speak out against power, but do so without the transparent processes that the Haymarket Eight were able to utilize. So be wary that those who elevate great dead men often do so for exploitative political reasons; one shouldn’t equate the heroes with their ventriloquists.

The processes that have allowed the world to reflect on and learn from the Haymarket Affair should be celebrated, as transparency exists precisely for that purpose. But these processes also need defending, as even American governments can instead choose extrajudicial processes to handle perceived threats

If there must be ugliness and injustice in the system, it is better to have a loud and open ugliness that allows for reflection and improvement. Not every city in the world is so lucky to have the humble civil servants of 1886 Chicago’s deep state.

Five Lessons For Political Storytellers Today

Now with a better understanding of what intrinsic characteristics helped May Day spread around the world, I do think it’s worth sharing a couple thoughts on what we might be able to apply in our own political movements. And when I say “we”, I suppose I refer to anyone who seeks to increase public freedom and wellbeing; I don’t really affiliate strongly with any particular political organization.

I try to ground my takeaways, but I’m always open to revising these thoughts as I continue to reflect on the holiday in future years. These are simply the lessons that hit me now, and I’ll admit that this section is the most likely to be revised with time. But it feels prudent to share a few reflections and applications, so here we go.

[Editor’s note: This section is the most in need of revision! Caution ye who read ahead, sentences are particularly long, winding and disconnected!]

Lesson I.) Violence Alienates Local Support

My interest in this essay has been how May Day became a shared touchstone of the global calendar, because a main goal with Middling Content is understanding how our designed global environment connects people across lines of difference through shared experience. I wanted to understand: “Why do so many countries outside the US recognize this holiday?”

But if we were to ask the reverse question, “why is the US one of very few countries to not recognize May Day as a formal holiday?”, then that answer is very clear: to recognize it risks a tacit endorsement of violence against government employees. Even though the date was selected by someone unaffiliated with the Haymarket Affair and even though the Haymarket Affair took place four days later, the connection is too clear and too strong.

The way that violence had different impacts within the US and abroad is curious though. In some ways, it feels like the global escalation of the holiday depended on the act of violence and the resulting government overreaction. So it’s somewhat ironic that the very factor that made the holiday catch on abroad is what stunted its adoption at home. We don’t get to know what a non-violent path might have looked like.

The violence of the Haymarket Affair didn’t just hurt the possibility of a public May Day holiday; it also doomed the organizations associated with it. The International Working People’s Association (IWPA) that the Haymarket Eight were affiliated with dissolved the same year of the executions. The Knights of Labor’s Chicago chapter that Parsons had co-founded would name themselves the “Albert R. Parsons Assembly”, but the broader organization peaked in 1886 with the May Day march, and post-Haymarket participation declined over the next decade until it eventually dissolved.

It’s worth noting that other American labor organizations were able to survive their associations with acts of violence. In the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, an International Workingmen’s Party of the United States rally led to the raiding and looting of San Francisco’s Chinatown, killing four residents; they would change their name that same year but still exist today as the Socialist Labor Party of America. And in 1917, the AFL-affiliated Central Trades & Labor Union hosted a city hall meeting that similarly boiled over into the East St. Louis Massacre, killing what the local police chief estimated as 100 residents in the black community. While acts of violence like this against minority and immigrant communities were frowned upon, these killings of civilians were not the existential threat of a single anonymous bombthrower directed at the state.

It is worth noting that Parsons himself disavowed this kind of civilian violence in particular. He did not see immigrant labor as “the enemy” in the way that other labor movement leaders did.

"Here is a distinction between socialism and trades unions. The unionist fights the scab. [...] Gentlemen, socialism [does not] do this thing. [Socialists] regard these men as the victims of a false system, and to be pitied. These scabs I might say could be compared to the fleas on the dog. The unionist wants to kill the fleas, but the socialists would kill the dog, and that the dog is the wage system of wage slavery."

-- Testimony of Albert Parsons on August 9th, 1886

Putting aside that analogizing your political project to killing a dog seems to be microtargeting its appeal at Kristi Noem, this analogy is still hard to make sense of -- who or what is “the dog” here? And how do we attack a system?

Fully exploring this would be another essay entirely, so it is maybe enough just for the lesson to be that attacking systems and attacking people are not the same thing. Personal violence is destructive. The anonymous act of personal violence at Haymarket Square contaminated the cause of the IWPA and forced its dissolution. The responding act of personal violence against the May Day Martyrs created a global response of condemnation. But the systemic critiques published by the Haymarket Eight and their Anarchist Publishing Association helped take that condemnation and help it grow into a global community striving for more dignity in work.

Lesson II.) The Higher the Penalty Paid, The Higher the Perceived Honesty

One can imagine somewhere in a smoke-filled room in the late 1880s, a political strategist bemoaning: “We need a Democratic Albert Parsons”.32 But the iconic status Parsons achieves as a May Day Martyr is largely earned by the sacrifices he made -- his politics got him chased out of his home state, fired from his job at the Chicago Times and ultimately imprisoned and killed. The willingness to pursue one’s own truth relentlessly makes one overall less likely to adhere to a particular mass political party, which is why pure partisans will always struggle with credibility.

The term “martyr” is from the Greek word for “witness”, which makes the term a relative of others like the contemporary “woke” (from African-American English) or its rightwing equivalent “red-pilled”33 (from The Matrix). They suggest someone who has ventured out of Plato’s allegorical cave and learned enough for their cave-bound peers to find them annoying.

But the “bad faith” problem is less clear when framed as “wokeness” and better understood in the 1990s framing of “political correctness”. While the term initially was used to reflect political sensitivities -- that is, concerns about uneven distribution of power in society -- it also can be interpreted as prioritizing systems of power over authentic representations of fact. That is, a “politically correct” statement is one that savvily aligns with goals or interests. When so much of our speech is policed, it makes it challenging to know when people are merely performing their stated opinions. The alliance between social liberals and large corporations has created an environment where “leftwing” ideas are keys to senior managerial jobs, and as a result, a lot of this discourse is presumed to be argued in “bad faith”.

It is useful to think about how other institutions that rely on long-term perceptions of “good faith” can defy this skepticism. The Catholic Church has been around roughly two millennia and is thoughtful in having its frontline workers clearly sacrificing for their beliefs -- vowing celibacy and trading away the possibility of families.34 This is somewhat why recent scandals have hurt the church so much in the pluralist world; if priests are not sacrificing for their beliefs but are instead choosing a priestly life because it secretly enables their illicit interests, the whole model can collapse.

The more “woke” becomes a shibboleth for access to corporate-paying jobs, the more people will presume bad faith. As witnessed in SF’s recent “Performative Male Competition”, beliefs that become associated with a mate-signalling strategy will be viewed less credibly. So, ironically, we may not want the truths we hold sacred to become institutionalized and normalized in these ways. Seeing people occasionally punished for a point of view actually helps that point of view gain credence.

And further, as politics turn against “wokeness”, it will create the exact opposite effect. When expressing critical opinions about power systems becomes riskier, it makes those ideas more credible. The more people are punished for defending the values of diversity and inclusion, the more authentic-coded they become.

The May Day Martyrs took their ideology seriously, and they demonstrated that by paying the ultimate price. It is worth considering whether your most important beliefs are ones seen as currying favor with elites. And for anyone seeking credibility, it may simply be a matter of voicing a critique or two of contemporary dogma.

Lesson III.) A Radical Vision Can Be Incrementally Approached

The fact that “anarchism” to Parsons meant “an eight-hour workday” initially felt absolutely absurd to me. I associate anarchism with its much more extreme endpoint and with extreme actions to get there, but Parsons was able to balance a radical vision with an incrementalist policy goal in a way that was constructive.

Here was Parsons’ framing of anarchy, stated in language familiar to many Americans:

“[A]narchy is the social administration of all affairs by the people themselves; that is to say, self-government, individual liberty.” - Autobiography of Albert Parsons

In particular, he was concerned about how industrialization was changing work to make it much more demanding of their time. And so with the long-term goal to provide people absolute freedom from the demands of industrial labor, he focused on the short-term objective of restricting the windows of time where their labor could be demanded, seeing this as a step in a favorable direction. Rolling this up into a pithy popular policy promise like “the eight-hour workday” made organizing much more effective.

The term “radical” is off-putting to most people, but it fundamentally just means “root cause”. (This is why “square root” or “cube root” functions are called “radicals”.) And root cause approaches like the “five whys” toolkit is not just a tool of community activists but also of normcore business consultants. Understanding a problem’s root causes can be coupled with empathetic and coalitional approaches to action to great effect.

To be clear, though, I think this kind of “radical in vision, incremental in tactics” method can be hard in a couple ways.

First, I think our particular generation is unusually inclined to identify with abstract labels. Because so much of the social internet of the past couple decades has relied on sharing content, and because shareable content tends to play to “identity groups”, our generation is much more likely to frame our thinking in terms of the labeled “isms”. But broad ideologies with nebulous labels that are easy for opponents to redefine, derailing a policy discussion into pointless semantic debates.

Second, choosing a single “next step” is hard because any given moment has a wide range of sufferings to acknowledge. And I think our particular current moment feels uniquely deep with suffering. True solidarity feels like it should acknowledge the full slate of challenges, whereas identifying a single focus can feel cruel. A strong democratic movement should be broadly inclusive, but that can’t be an excuse to avoid specificity that enables progress.

Specific policy proposals that are deliberately coalitional can account for both these concerns. The May Day March was eventually effective because it rallied around a narrow goal, avoiding a loose concept like “anarchism” by centering the specific and popular “eight-hour workday”.

Lesson IV.) Broaden the Coalitions by Connecting to Popular Narratives

Another replicable element from the spread of May Day is its ability to draw on existing coalitions. I spoke specifically about both the variety of religious upbringings of the martyrs themselves, and I spoke about the way the Haymarket Affair plays out as a Christian allegory, but I think it’s also insightful to view how Parsons directly embed this coalitional approach in closing his autobiography.

He closes out his autobiography with two quotes deliberately intended to draw in a broad coalition. It’s worth looking at the actual images to see how he actually pastes in clippings of the primary sources a la scrapbook, perhaps even to prove to himself that he is not delusional.

On the 50th page of his 51-page account of his life and journey, he pastes a clipping of the preamble.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they were endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is THE RIGHT OF THE PEOPLE TO ALTER OR ABOLISH IT."

(image on the Haymarket Affair Digital Collection)

And as his final statement, he cites Chapter 5 of the Book of James.

"Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days." - James v.1-3.

(image on Haymarket Affair Digital Collection)

Often our instincts are to critique competing narratives, as we want to agree on every detail, but it is easier for someone to join a movement that doesn’t require them to fundamentally restructure how they think about the world. And even where such fundamental rethinkings are possible, they can be difficult and even traumatic for the person who rethinks their core narratives. In this way, a Parsonsian approach can be both more compassionate and more effective.

I think about this kind of coalition-building a lot these days, as my central objective is helping people identify with the global human story. This is the project of Middling Content -- to identify more ways to help the media serve as humanity’s “middle”, providing common ground so it’s easier to reach across lines of difference.

I grew up mostly on a series of foreign islands, interacting mostly with other expatriate children whose parents were also involved in the liberal globalist project. In the late 90s and early 00s, connecting the world seemed so inevitable, but that goal seems largely abandoned these days. The American right no longer claims to care about spreading American democratic ideals abroad, and the American left no longer claims that foreign factories will bring about world peace. Perhaps the cynics were correct and the right just wanted cheap oil and the left just wanted cheap manufacturing. While I know both these projects have worthy critiques, I do worry about the future of globally minded humanitarianism.

I do think the ideas and projects that grew out of the May Day Movement share this globally minded humanitarianism. And though I know “The Internationale” in concept is aligned with a socialist cause that sees itself as the opponent of the capitalist cause, they really only conflict in their recommendations of approach. Both ideologies promote a eschatological utopian vision, either driven by Hegelian Geist (socialism) or the Invisible Hand (capitalism). The closing line of each chorus, “L’Internationale sera le genre humain” (or “The International(e) will be the human race”) posits a broad inclusive politics; the song contrasts with the organization in that the song strives to not be factional but to support humanism.

And so I thought it would be interesting to evaluate policies mentioned in the lyrics of “L’Internationale”, just to see where the different policies would shake out. I had over one thousand people all over the world provide feedback on policies drawn from the lyrics, and then I matched zipcodes to voting skews to see what policies were more Democrat-aligned versus Republican-aligned.

While it is unsurprisingly true that most policy ideas mentioned in “L’Internationale” tend to skew toward Democrat-skewing districts. Examples include pushing support for workers’ councils (“producteurs, sauvons-nous nous-mêmes”), nationalizing Amtrak (“Les rois de la mine et du rail ont-ils jamais fait autre chose que dévaliser le travail?”), forgiving student debt (“du passé faisons table rase”) and starting a committee to redraft the Constitution (“le monde va changer de base”).

But there are policy ideas that are actually skewed toward Republicans! “L’Internationale” complains about how the wealthy avoid taxation (“l’impôt saigne le malheureux, nul devoir ne s’impose au riche”) and a flat income tax was preferred more in Republican-skewing zipcodes and less in Democrat-skewing zipcodes. Concerns about how the law/state are self-serving could be addressed by simplifying legal codes (“l’etat opprime et la loi triche”). And yet some wonkier regulations that appealed to individual work ethic could be favored in Republican-skewing areas, such as requiring that owners of business must work at least one week in the most commonly held job in their business (“l’oisif ira loger ailleurs”).

And then there were also policies that skewed toward normie swing district spots, such as increasing investment in domestic metalworks (“soufflons nous-mêmes notre forge, battons le fer quand il est chaud”) and easier migration for all working people (“l’Internationale sera le genre humain”). And some policies skewed both toward more extreme districts, like reducing celebrations of violence (“appliquons la grève aux armées”) and general debt forgiveness (“du passé faisons table rase”).

There’s more to analyze here, and I want to do additional research on this before drawing too many conclusions, so perhaps this is a place I can dig into more in future May Days!

Lesson V.) Nostalgia Is Not Just For The Right Wing

We tend to associate the May Day Martyrs more with the Democratic Party for a couple reasons: (1) because their pardoner Altgeld was a Democrat and (2) because after being sent into the wilderness for aligning with the Confederacy, Democrats were forced to reinvent themselves as a labor-oriented party that appealed to Midwestern voters.

But visiting some of their hometowns and imagining their upbringings gave me a more complex view of their politics that in many ways conflicts with how Democratic Party presents itself. Whereas Democrats can promote more of a technocratic solutionism, the Haymarket Eight were largely looking to be left alone to their own industriousness. Faced with a rapidly changing society where technology challenged their sense of meaning and autonomy in their work, they sought a specific kind of life that they had experienced firsthand but then lost.

It’s not completely disconnected, but I think there’s utility in articulating their particular vision of the American Dream.

Techno-Abundance vs Paleo-Abundance

There is something half-connected to the “abundance” framing in vogue in political conversations at the moment. But I think the abundance of contemporary liberalism is more of a futuristic techno-abundance, distinct in how it centers the elite managerial classes as saviors.

I’m not altogether opposed to the techno-abundance message. It sounds nice. But ultimately, it’s a bunch of politicians selling me something. I can believe it because I’ve been friends with people who work in or with Democratic politicians. I know that many are good people who are trying to achieve good in the world. But if I didn’t have that pre-existing trust, I don’t know if I would believe that this world of abundance can exist.

Focusing on the past is more tangible. Conservatism gets a home team advantage. When an idea can be rooted in history, it requires less faith in a particular politician’s vision; it’s easier to believe it can be done because it’s been done before.

One of the books that most deeply changed my life was David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. As an economics major, I’d been taught that money was created to resolve difficulties in exchanging products of different value -- that is, so shepherds wouldn’t have to pay for everything in sheep, which are difficult to make change for. But Graeber’s analysis finds that this was not a problem for pre-money societies who simply would monitor the levels at which members were contributing and hold them accountable. Money was instead developed to enable “taxation”, or paying protection money to a ruling class.

Graeber’s anthropological background makes him persuasive in that he can frame societal designs as established and familiar, rather than experimental and novel. We’re much more comfortable taking a path that is well-trodden.

The Old Anarchist Dream

In his submission to the Haymarket Affair Autobiography Anthology, Journeyman Michael Schwab opens with a reflection on the Franconian forest where he was raised.

“These woods are common property; they are taken care of by the officials called foresters. Every year a certain number of trees and bush are hewn down and sorted into piles, after which the citizens repair to the woods and cast lots for the numbered piles. A certain part is kept back to defray expenses necessary for the cultivation of the forest, taxes, etc. [...] The custom dates from time immemorial. I am at a loss to understand why, for instance, cereals could not be raised in the same way.”

Where much contemporary leftism veers into “luxury space communism”, Schwab’s leftism merely yearns for an idyllic past. In its earliest days, the American colonies would provide space to Europeans who took the time and energy to make the trip. With the Homestead Act of 1862, the US again would simply give land plots to citizens willing to improve them. That whole free land thing was kind of cool, right? These programs were certainly not perfect, but it’s okay to romanticize a part of the past while acknowledging deep imperfections elsewhere.

A “left MAGA” would bring back the public option for accommodations. Rather than seeing our vision of the future as something radically different and new, we can just see it as a revival of Lincoln-era aggressive recruitment through land grants. This kind of framing is helpful whether you’re trying to win a senate supermajority or whether we’re trying to build a broad popular movement to re-liberalize a post-democratic police state.

A lot of great leftist pitches do this already. “Medicare for All” takes a successful policy and expands. I’ve ridden the convenient bus au gratis between LGA and NYC’s 7 train, which helps me see Zohran’s “Free Fast Buses” as possible.35 Radicalism on the right similarly benefits from grounding policy in an idea of the past. MAGA works as a radical message because it brands itself as non-novel with its embedded “again”.

In part because our culture prizes individualism, politicians can want to get in the weeds on some narrow wonky projects. Unique and novel policies can play to our egos, comforting us as immortality projects. But it also overcomplicates things when it is often more crowd-pleasing to channel nostalgia politics and “shut up and play the hits”.

There is a nostalgia politics in the current Democratic party too, as I see it. But its core issue is the preservation of the status quo -- a sort of “protect our endangered political class” strategy that rings as self-serving. This is a kind of conservative too, but it’s looking to conserve a power system rather than conserving cultural norms (social conservatism) or conserving distribution of resources (economic conservatism). I personally do think there are elements of our governance system that should be preserved, but I am not sure this is sufficient as a governing vision. It is also hard to see how non-politicians can participate in the project, which limits its transformative capacity.

The substance of “the abundance agenda” has more potential to connect with a broader and electorally significant audience, so the focus here makes sense to me. But rather than a solely futuristic techno-abundance, I’d encourage folks to also think about a historically grounded paleo-abundance -- the abundance that our ancestors used to have in our native homelands before the rise of oppressive state politics. An American abundance of this sort could revive the dream that four men died for on November 11th, 1887.

All in all, reflecting on the history of the Haymarket Affair and the movement that was involved in it has made me more appreciative of the informal nature in which it is celebrated.

If the US did observe May Day, I’m not sure it would actually absolve anything. We’d likely just accuse them of co-opting the day. There’s a quiet respect in choosing a different day to celebrate. The goal of the Haymarket Eight wasn’t to create a new better world with more holidays; it was to return to a sense of pre-industrial decency in working life that they themselves experienced.

Further, it sets a dangerous precedent if we let governments give themselves days off to celebrate the martyrdoms of the innocent people they kill. They could just keep killing more and more people and take more and more days off. If anything, the government should maybe work a little extra on May 1st. Let them keep their September celebration and the American public can keep May Day as a people’s holiday.

Until Next Inter-Labor-Day Season,

Back To Work,

Harry

PS. I still have many questions on how specifically this story and its holiday spread. So perhaps next May 1st (read: mid-to-late-September) I'll have more thoughts to share. How lucky am I to live in a country with both an official and unofficial Labor Day -- twice the opportunity to reflect!

PPS. If you are in possession of information demonstrating the feasibility of August Spies actually having been born in the ruins of an old castle, contact me at tips@middlingcontent.net.

PPPS. I am clearly not abiding by any remotely regular posting schedule, but I will try to reflect on another holiday at some point, hopefully not so long after it passes next time!

Works Consulted

Primary Sources

The Autobiographies (available on HADC)

The Speeches (available on HADC)

Altgeld’s Pardon (available on HADC)

Illinois Supreme Court Decision

Secondary Sources

Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff Ep 1+2

BBC’s In Our Time, “The Haymarket Affair”

The Dollop “#454 Albert Parsons”

Officer Down Memorial Page for Mathias J. Degan

Guy Aldred’s Red May and the Physiognomy of Social Revolution (excerpts)

James Green’s Death in the Haymarket (excerpts)

(and lots of Wikipedia, but only cited confirmed facts unless noted otherwise)

Artistic Works about The Haymarket Affair

Haymarket: A New Folk Musical

Grillteller Fuer 2’s “Ballad of August Spies”36

Artistic Works for Political Context

Le jeune Karl Marx (2017 film)

领风者 (2016 Animated Series)

Eugène Pottier’s “L’Internationale”

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