Friday Miscellaneous

Friday's Child Has Had A Busy Week

I’m just going to tick off some points here rather than put out a fully composed essay.

• I keep thinking about the present state of “leisure” as a concept against its history. Like a number of other “big arc” cultural history classes I teach, my course on the history of leisure and play has hit a point of perplexity in that I’m no longer teaching the historical development of something that is present but dehistoricized in the lives of my students, I’m teaching something that may simply be past. I feel that in the weeks that I experience as “busy” because they are never busy with one major urgent task but many small ones that bleed into all the time I have. But I also feel it when I look at the Epstein files. The men and women in the files are the people who in their professional environments have schedules so ostensibly jam-packed that they would never have time for routine meetings or to talk with the “ordinary people” of their workplaces. They would appear to be working all the time and I’m quite certain that many of them are the sort of person who demanded punishing schedules out of anyone they could control and demanded the imposition of more punishing schedules on the people they disdained. Early 21st Century professional workplaces are full of this kind of “I am busier than you, hence I work harder, hence I am more valuable, hence I have the right to go on LinkedIn and talk about my expectations that people should work 15-hour days without overtime pay to prove their value” thinking. Yet here all these people are in the Epstein files, going to islands and dinners and ranches and lunch-time meetings, coming to and from international meetings. And I am 100% certain that all of them had these trips, this leisure, coded as work on their schedules. It is, after all, the defense that many of them are trying to offer even now: that to work at getting money and keeping influence, one must suffer through dinners with celebrities at Le Cirque, private island vacations, and massages at a New Mexico ranch.

• Speaking of the Epstein files, it really is extraordinary to see the parade of mostly-men and a few women acknowledging that despite their previous claims of having met Epstein only once and having nothing but a formal conversation about a limited transaction, they met him often and were engaged in friendly banter with him, but also that they had no idea that he was trafficking women, either minors or adults. In the other three million files that aren’t in the archive, I feel confident that there will at least be a few of these see-no-evils who will, if unredacted, be found to be making more overt wink-wink nudge-nudge appreciations of the extensiveness of Epstein’s sexual world. But even if one were to extend a very much unwarranted trust that what they say is true, that they had no idea, then they should really have to confess that they are comprehensively frauds in every aspect of their professional lives and completely unworthy of the leadership roles or academic preeminence they have claimed for themselves. A lawyer who was the head counsel of Obama’s White House and then at Goldman Sachs who is saying that she had no idea that Epstein was continuously involved in illegal activities? That’s a confession that you should never have had those jobs in the first place. A former president of Harvard and prominent public intellectual who admits (grudgingly) that perhaps being chums with a convicted sex offender and discussing pressuring a female academic to have an extramarital affair that by golly, he should have known better? That completely affirms what most of us have long thought, that he should never ever have served in any of the roles that he has in his professional life. Psychologists who are painting themselves as so extraordinarily dim about interpersonal relations and sexual violence that they negate any claim of basic competence in their own discipline? But this is apology culture in 21st Century America: the lawyers and the reputation managers get paid to thread the needle so you say just enough to have been incompetent in only one highly constrained fashion and yet also so you are neither liable nor criminal in any actionable way.

• As many commentators have noted, we are not on the cusp of a constitutional crisis in the United States, we are in an extended vigil for our critically ill Constitution. The coming week might be the point where Trumpism takes the patient off life support and shoots it in the head, however. It will all come down to whether Trump outright tells the Supreme Court that he can do as he pleases regardless of any ruling or whether he sends his hatchet men out to announce a new phony legal pretext that allows Trump to do as he pleases on tariffs, hence restarting the litigation clock. And that will put it back in the court of the hapless John Roberts, who is certainly an accessory to the murder of the Constitution, where he will have to decide whether to go along with the clock restart and wait another year to say once again, “No, that’s illegal” or whether he will issue a general stay on all tariff setting by Trump until the US Congress fulfills its Constitutionally proper role. My money would be on Roberts being a coward in the next round. I also suspect that Trump will first announce he is taking an alternative legal route to doing what he wants and then announce that he will do what he wants regardless. That’s what social media does for Trump: it lets him be Schrodinger’s President, doing all the illegal and authoritarian things all at once until the box is opened and we find out which he actually did.

• I am so utterly weary of the nuclear-winter level lying happening inside the political landscape of the United States, spurred entirely by the Trump Administration, its GOP allies, and its most devoted supporters. The latest example—though by the time I hit “post” on this, there will be another, I’m sure—is Trump’s triumphant declaration that American air strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities last June had been wholly successful. Either that’s true, at which point there’s plenty of time for both bilateral and multilateral negotiations to prevent a revival of Iran’s nuclear weapons research, or it was a lie, hence the current military build-up. The goal of all of this action—from a man and an administration that has repeatedly disavowed heedless and needless intervention—is first a distraction from domestic politics and second to gratify the President’s love of killing and destroying with no longer-term purpose or goal. Except for one goal, and that’s to ensure that no future American government, however it comes into power, will be able to return to a cooperative relationship to most of the rest of the world. There’s the isolationism that involves distance from the affairs of the wider world, and there’s the isolationism that involves the rest of the world distancing itself from you. Trumpism plainly favors the latter, and reckons—perhaps accurately—that it cannot be repaired.

• In a conversation yesterday about generative AI, I was struck suddenly by a thought that maybe is banal, or that many people already have had, but it’s the peculiarity of seeing so many large corporations as well as non-profit workplaces suddenly saying openly that writing and reading have been central to their production of value and fulfillment of mission while nearly simultaneously devaluing all that work by eagerly hoping that generative AI will do it for them. In that simultaneous move, much of what constitutes the economy, and the people in charge of it, are forgiven having to say what it is that writing and reading was doing that made it central all those years, and what might be at stake if it turns out generative AI can’t do it. Much as they can’t really say what other generation of value it is that they are plausibly freeing workers to do on their behalf. It is perhaps something like “the supply chain”, an infrastructure that makes everything possible but is only possible to discuss clearly if and when it is broken.

• I was also struck in another conversation that a lot of architects and designers are still trying to make structures that invite people to linger, that people want to spend time in, but that there is nobody in charge of design processes asking “how do we make it possible for people to linger?” I’ve spent thirty years saying that “liberal education” requires facilitating non-instrumental conversations between students, between faculty, between faculty and staff, between faculty and students, where there’s no immediate goal to the conversation, where there’s no product that needs urgent completion, where time is not being violently liberated from the clutches of relentless productivity. And despite spaces being built and funds being allocated that seem to align with that point, it feels vastly more remote than when I started saying it, to the point of being inadmissible in most of the contexts that I might try to articulate it. To say that education might be about truth, about beauty, about curiosity and imagination, about discovery and exploration, and not about filling a non-existing skills gap in a political economy that is built to hurt people and destroy futures, and that for it to be all of that it would have to leave space and time to linger and develop into something unpredicted and unanticipated at the moment of lingering? To say that doesn’t so much advance the cause of lingering as it does intensify a feeling of longing that can never be fulfilled. Which perhaps closes the circle with where I started. Not only has leisure been taken from us, but the people who have the time to linger and satisfy the curiosities have violently squandered what they have stolen on the accumulation of influence and the violation of victims.