We need to get back to reading and critical thinking

2024 feels different from 2016.

Good morning.

Rather than land in your inbox the morning after the election, I’m glad I took a pause. An outcome this consequential requires time and deserves better than an impulsive reaction filled with platitudes and grievances. You may have already hit your limit on opinion pieces on how we got it wrong, but I promise you this won’t be that—not directly, anyway. This, rather, is about the need to return to the basics: reading, constructive discourse, and critical thinking.

I have many thoughts on how we ended up here once again, but I leave that for real-life conversations because there is so much noise out there. Just, so much of it. Perhaps some of the online discourse we’re having should be held offline and not on social media where much of it can be misinterpreted. I acknowledge that most of us are just trying to find solidarity and community in a time of dissonance and shock, and online communities are accessible and immediate for most. It’s valid. Even so, there’s a lot of rage posting and performative (non)action.

Eight years later, as we find ourselves back in the unthinkable, things feel different despite the stunning similarities from the blindsided outcome of 2016. This time, it hurts because it hangs like shame. We knew what we were in for and that still didn’t stop us from voting him back in. Even in a solidly blue city like New York, nearly every neighborhood shifted red.

The marches and protests back in 2017 (and I did a lot of marching) feels off and self-serving in 2024. Maybe it’s too soon to make that call and maybe this reads as dangerously cynical, but this is just my gut speaking. For what it’s worth, I posed the question on social media and I wasn’t alone in thinking that I was going to sit this one out this time around.

The solidarity that was felt among women in 2016 feels fractured in 2024 now that we have some stats on which groups voted for who. Perhaps the splinter was there all along and I was too blind to see it from my own rage and bubble (and again, as an Asian American, I don’t know where I fit into this conversation because we’re often not included in the conversation). Blue bracelets, shaving your head, and co-opting South Korea’s 4B Movement, perhaps with little regard for how the cultural context of Korea’s own feminist movement began in 2018, don’t feel like the right acts of resistance for something that we could have—but did not—stop from happening.

These were my election day stress drawings. Super quick ink sketches made while watching the returns. There were a lot of really bad ones, but if you know my history with artmaking, it was also freeing to make ugly art.

Nature quietly mends

What I’ve concluded for myself after a week of reading, walking in the woods, and consuming way too much media, is that we need to stop talking over each other and start learning how to listen—and I include myself in that “we.” Enough finger pointing and blaming Gen X, Gen Z, Latinos, the Harris campaign, etc. etc. because aside from Black Americans, and Black women specifically who overwhelmingly voted for Kamala, all groups shoulder the blame. It won’t change anything now, but I’m realizing more and more that the way we communicate online has seeped into the way we communicate in general, and that is a clarifying thought that has me spinning.

What crystallized for me this week is how far away from reading and critical thinking we’ve come. We need to get back to reading books, literature, and poetry in order to exercise our critical analysis skills. We don’t spend enough time in imagined worlds anymore like we used to when books sparked our imaginations and transported us to far away places. We need to double down and teach our children how to think critically, especially since the Department of Education is at risk of being dismantled and curriculums face being under control at the federal level (also, restitution for “victims” of DEI programs, what?).

I keep wondering why parenting feels so much more involved when our generation ran amok with less supervision. It could be because we shoulder much of the responsibility of being the guardrails for our children as media consumption changes the way we consume and influences the way we think. I don’t know if we can reverse the damage and trying to minimize social media from our children’s lives is a losing battle, but I’d like to believe that we can try to counter it. Too many of us are scrolling and not reading beyond the sensationalized headlines from mainstream media that are employing clickbaity fodder. We’ve put too much trust in what the algorithms serve us.

The thing is, social media is the news now, but it’s rife with bias, misinformation, and disinformation. You and I know it, but many people don’t, and children may not know this at all. And now, the tech oligarchs controlling these platforms have strategically steered us into an era of politics that we’ve never seen before. The rest of the billionaires are already falling in line.

I didn’t intend for this newsletter to be gloomy. There was much deleting of entire paragraphs over the course of many days, but I will leave you with this glimmer of positivity:

After cocooning inside the first two days after the election, I finally left the apartment to see if the city was as somber and silent as New Yorkers reported and how I remembered it to be in 2016. I rode the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan, ran some errands, and met a friend for tea.

The train ride back home, filled with high school students and commuters, felt subdued but not oppressively so. A musician, stationed by the subway door, plugged his guitar into a small amp. I internally groaned. Not this, not now. But then he began to sing. I wasn’t familiar with the song, maybe it was his own. He had a beautiful voice. Commuters on the subway car started nodding their heads to the music. People listened. Others smiled. I got off the subway two stops later, undeniably lighter.

Real life conversations and interactions matter, now more than ever.
Art matters.
Your voice matters.
Finding joy is resistance too and vital as a means to store up your reserves to be the resistance.
And I’m so very grateful that this newsletter was allowed to land in your inbox this morning.
We will get through this, but take the time to feel everything you need to feel.

-JP

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What I’ve been reading this week

• Can Reading Make You Happier? (The New Yorker)

  “Bibliotherapy is a very broad term for the ancient practice of encouraging reading for therapeutic effect.”
  I’m here for this. An older essay from 2015, but very apt today.

• The elite college students who can’t read books (The Atlantic - possible paywall)
  University professors’ observations on college students who arrive to school not having been required to read entire books—essays, excerpts, and articles, yes, but not books. I can absolutely understand how this is happening. The pandemic, a time in which both my kids were in high school, was detrimental to learning in ways we’re seeing for years to come. Plus, short-form everything have infiltrated the classroom because we no longer have the attention spans.

• Carl Sagan on the Power of Books and Reading as the Path to Democracy (The Marginalian)

  “Books are key to understanding the world and participating in a democratic society. Tyrants and autocrats have always understood that literacy, learning, books and newspapers are potentially dangerous.”

• 3 brilliant critical thinking tools used by Daniel Dennett (Big Think)

• Who is allowed to practice identity politics? (Don Moynihan)

• Tech billionaires' fashion is "a subtle demonstration of status" (Salon)
  Perhaps fluff, considering we now have a certain tech billionaire leading a newly created Department of Government Efficiency (brb, screaming into the abyss), but an entertaining read nonetheless.

What we’ve been enjoying this week

• Cheesy White Beans and Kale (Cozy, Peach Kitchen)
  We’ve been eating a lot of casseroles this week and this one, which is riff on white beans and kale soup which we love, is my favorite at the moment. While I’m limiting acidic foods right now which includes tomatoes, sadly, this dish hits the right spot of savory for me.

• The Diplomat (Netflix)
  Smart writing, great cast, and suspenseful storylines.

• Walks in nature, here in NY and in Pennsylvania, where the kid texted us on the morning of her 18th birthday, the day after the election, with this message: “I live in a red state now.” Nature never fails to restore sense to the world.