This is a regular feature where I provide weekly recommendations to subscribers.
Links
Liam Dillon and Janaki Chadha on Zohran Mamdani and Nithya Raman’s DSA-YIMBY fusion politics:
The biggest cleavage between YIMBYs and DSA members emerges over the profit motive in the housing market. YIMBYs argue letting developers make money means they’ll build more homes to bring down costs for everyone. (Many YIMBYs believe subsidies would still be required to house lower-income residents.) DSA groups contend applying an investor’s logic to the basic need for shelter is inherently exploitative. True affordability, they argue, comes only with public or community-led development.
This fundamental dispute has sparked years of scorched-earth debates between the groups, through rival memes from their terminally online members and in-person protests and counterprotests.
Yet Mamdani and Raman contend the divide isn’t as unbridgeable as it might seem. Their attempted union pairs stronger tenant protections with the removal of regulatory obstacles to all kinds of housing, both public and private.
Rogé Karma for The Atlantic on why California’s pro-housing bills haven’t led to a building boom:
Each of these requirements might sound reasonable on its face. Who’s against high wages and cheap apartments? But when taken together, and combined with California’s already high construction costs, they meant that A.B. 2011 projects would never be financially viable. “It’s already hard enough to make a project pencil out in California,” Bruce Fairty, the chief development officer at Cypress Equity Investments, a national housing developer, told me. “These extra requirements make it basically impossible.”
The New York Times columnist Ezra Klein has coined the term everything-bagel liberalism to describe Democrats’ tendency to layer bills with so many well-intentioned requirements that they become unworkable. The scholars Christopher Elmendorf and Clayton Nall argue in a 2024 paper that nearly all of the housing bills passed in California over the past decade have been positively covered with what they call “bagel toppings,” including labor and affordability standards. “It’s the same story over and over again,” Elmendorf told me. “A housing bill passes with this fantastic-sounding headline policy. But then you read the fine print and there are so many costly requirements that the actual policy itself is basically guaranteed to fail.”
This raises a question: Why would legislators keep making the same mistake? When it comes to prevailing wages, the answer is interest-group politics.
Christian Glässel and Adam Scharpf for Can We Still Govern? on how to build a secret police force:
Most people assume that repressive organizations are filled with true believers — ideological extremists who genuinely want to harm others, or at minimum sadists and sociopaths for whom the work is personally gratifying. The logic of this view is that the way to build a secret police force is to find the worst people and give them badges.
Our research tells a different story.
When we combed through the personnel archives of Argentina’s Intelligence Battalion 601 — the secret police unit that orchestrated the disappearance, torture, and killing of thousands during the country’s so-called Dirty War — we were not looking for monsters. We were looking for patterns. And the pattern we found was strikingly mundane: the officers who joined Battalion 601 had, in the main, performed worse than their peers at the military academy. They had graduated toward the bottom of their cohorts. They had stalled in the lower and middle ranks. They were men whose regular career paths had quietly closed.
These were not the most extreme officers in Argentina’s army. They were the most stuck.
And herein lies the key insight. The Argentine army maintained a rigorous, century-old meritocratic promotion system — Prussian in design, consistent across political regimes, based on performance at each career stage. This system did exactly what meritocratic systems are supposed to do: it identified and advanced the most capable officers. But it did something else too, something less discussed. It reliably produced a large pool of men who did not make the cut — men who underperformed early, fell behind their cohorts, and faced the prospect of forced early retirement under the army’s unforgiving up-or-out rule.
Elias Isquith for The New Fictions on a fire-and-brimstone song from the frontman of Geese:
Two lines are especially noteworthy here: “You’re gonna appear before a stranger” and “Some are not dragged down Fifth Avenue by the hairs in their ears.”
Initially, Winter’s reference to “a stranger” sounds like he’s talking about God — a suspicion confirmed later in the song when he refers to “a tall far-off thing with eyes / Whose existence I cannot prove or disprove / Looking at everybody all the time.”
But that phrase, “a stranger,” has special meaning and resonance within Judaism.
Exodus 22:21 says: “You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”
And in Leviticus 19:34, we’re told: “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”
What Winter is suggesting, I believe, is that if God is real — “Whose existence I cannot prove or disprove” — then God is “a stranger.” In this respect, he’s echoing what Jesus says in Matthew 25:35-40 (emphasis mine):
And lastly, Isaac Butler for Slate on what makes Jessie Buckley such an incredible actor:
The secret to Buckley’s performances is a feral quality that seems to come from some other dimension. In Hamnet, Buckley first appears asleep in the roots of a gigantic tree like a lost dryad. She is a creature of nature, in tune with the forest and its spirits, the opposite of her husband, Will Shakespeare, a creature of mind and word. Even as they are married, and have children, and lose one of them to the plague and then each other to grief, there is a part of Buckley’s Agnes that seems to be always dwelling in the forest, away from civilization. She cannot be tamed; she can only contain herself for a while if she chooses to.
In The Lost Daughter, for which she earned her first Oscar nomination, for Best Supporting Actress, she brings a similar sense of barely restrained unruliness to the role of Leda, a woman about to blow up her life and marriage because she has fallen in love with an older academic. While playing Leda, Buckley seems to be rafting down the river of the character rather than guiding where the currents take her. In the four years since The Lost Daughter’s release, we’ve had any number of films about mothers and wives transgressing, or turning monstrous. But for all the pyrotechnics of Poor Things or Die My Love or Nightbitch or If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, few scenes feel as truly daring, hypnotic, and troubling as the sequence in The Lost Daughter when Buckley languidly masturbates while her children call to her from the next room. There’s no judgment in her performance, just a simple, primal portrayal of a woman slamming up against the walls of the domestic life she thought she wanted, and yearning to break through them.
(Confession: I found The Lost Daughter so harrowing that I had to abandon it after the first half. That was partly due to my own anxieties about my then-impending fatherhood and partly due to the disconcertingly raw performances from Olivia Colman and Buckley.)
A Book Recommendation
I’ve been listening to the audiobook version of Waging a Good War, a history of the Civil Rights movement written by Thomas Ricks, a military historian. It might seem strange and even a little perverse to write a military history about a nonviolent protest movement, but Ricks’s approach yields a lot of powerful—and useful—insights into the strategy and tactics of the SCLC, SNCC, CORE, and other major players of the period. More than a few of the movement’s major leaders understood their work in warlike terms, and this approached how they thought about strategy, tactics, logistics, recruitment, and the other elements of a complex, long-term operation.
There are a lot of lessons in Waging a Good War for people thinking about how to effectively resist the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant terror campaign. These include: the importance of careful planning, training, and logistical support for what might seem from the outside like spontaneous actions; the hard-nosed strategic logic of nonviolence; how to maintain cohesion in the face of incredible hardship; and how to best probe the weaknesses of what might seem like a near-invulnerable enemy. I would not be surprised to learn that some of the organizers behind the Minneapolis resistance had studied this book.
Sounds
Here’s the Cameron Winter song that Elias mentions in the above post: