A year in a week
Time to take a deep breath...
Wow. That was a week. Not in a good way, either.
You know that’s the case when even people who work in news are throwing their hands up and saying, in effect, I can’t keep up with everything that’s happening. If they can’t keep up, then what chance do we?
Listen to me: you can’t. And that’s okay.
I understand why so many of us try to keep up. A lot of us are the people to whom our friends turn when it's time to explain what's happening, so we feel an innate sense of responsibility to Know Things™. On top of that: when so many of our civic institutions are in advanced states of decay and corruption, mostly through intentional neglect, many of us feel the least we can do as engaged citizens is to "follow the news" so we can hold our leaders accountable.
But it's not 1984 anymore. If you wanted to follow the news, you subscribed to the Rocky Mountain News, listened to Morning Edition on NPR, and depending on your preference, at 6:30 sharp you'd watch Dan Rather, Peter Jennings*, or Tom Brokaw to recap the day's events. And when something truly epochal happened, you'd go to CNN.
One of the insidious things about our era of constant connectivity is the way we’re sold (and I mean that deliberately!) the illusion of having near-infinite amounts of information at our fingertips. I don’t just mean Googling things, either: it's the torrent of updates cascading down Twitter, randomly refreshing just when you felt almost caught up, but not quit. It’s our friends and colleagues sharing things on Slack, family members and schoolmates posting old stories on Facebook that only now caught their eyes. It goes on, and on, and on; it never stops. It’s 24-hour news networks breathlessly hyping even the most banal things as BREAKING NEWS!, except instead of one now there's at least four or five, depending on your ideological proclivities, and they don't cover BREAKING NEWS! so much as they feature random political "strategists" you've never heard of arguing over things that only matter in places like The Hill and Axios.
(Except if you're in DC, and then you don't know those folks as strategists as much as you know them as last Wednesday's sublimely mediocre first date, who insisted on explaining the intricacies of various Kurdish political groups to you, despite you having a Ph.D. in Middle East Studies from Tufts and trying to vainly get in a word edge-wise as they confuse the PKK with the PSK and the YPG with the PYD.)
The point is: you wind up feeling something like this:
No wonder we all feel exhausted. Every age has a characteristic sense, a feeling. We borrowed a word from German to capture this sensation: Zeitgist. It means, "the spirit of the age". Increasingly, the spirit of our age is exhaustion; what Anne Helen Petersen calls burnout. She's writing a whole book on it, which tells me this is pervasive.
So here's the thing: it's okay to say no. It's okay to admit that we can't keep up. I don’t, certainly not in real time, and yet: I think I'm well-informed. I get my news from a variety of sources, and - this part is key - I make certain to find things that will challenge my preconceptions.
Standing in the tenth floor of our Brooklyn headquarters two days after Election Day in 2016, exhausted, grieving, consoling fellow HFA staffers - who were in turn consoling me - I decided I was done watching 24-hour news. I knew we had a long fight ahead of us, I needed to save my energy for things that really mattered, and watching MSNBC wasn't one of those things.
But to reiterate: it's okay to switch off. It's okay to step away from the firehose. Take a deep breath. Choose to be more deliberate. You may find that when you're not trying to frantically keep up, you'll get a greater perspective that's more beneficial for you, and the people you care about.
With that in mind, let's kick off The Miscellanies. It's Friday, October 18, and it finally feels like Decorative Gourd Season.
Sportsball time
If you're a sports fan, this is rapidly turning into the best time of year. Baseball is rounding into the World Series, and we're sufficiently far into the college football season that we know which teams are Good and which are Not. You can say the same about The...National...Football...League**, but since NFL teams insist on employing VARSITY BLUES extras like Colt McCoy over Super Bowl quarterback Colin Kaepernick, I don't particularly care about pro football.
If you're a soccer fan, all the European leagues are in full swing, while the MLS playoffs begin tomorrow. We've played a couple of Champions League rounds, and the Copa Libertadores in South America is wrapping up. The NHL season's started, and the NBA season starts Tuesday.
Things, in short, are en fuego. They're especially lit if you're in DC, where the Washington Mystics finally won a WNBA title! Elena Delle Donne helped carry the team to its first-ever championship, and get this: she did it with a herniated disc. For the amount of ink spilled by people of a certain age and gender over Willis Reed's limping journey from the Knicks' locker room over four decades ago, we should fill a library talking about how Delle Donne transcended agony over the course of an entire postseason in order to taste victory.
Oh, by the way: the Washington Nationals (neé Les Expos de Montréal) have finally won not just a division series, but a league championship series, and are World Series bound! It's the first World Series played in DC since 1933, when the Senators (who also went by the Nationals name) played the New York Giants. That's right: it's been 86 years since a Washington team played for a world championship. The last time a Washington team won a World Series was 1924, when they also played the Giants.
One of the wonderful things about baseball, for me, is the sense of history it possesses. Alone among the four major American sports it transcends the centuries; this is the third century in which we've played pro baseball. When Mel Ott squared off against Lefty Stewart in Game One of the 1933 World Series, the NFL was scarcely a professional league, let alone a major one. The NHL was struggling to survive, and the NBA didn't even exist. In that sense, it remains the American pastime. Or as James Earl Jones put it in FIELD OF DREAMS:
The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game; it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and that could be again.
In the next issue, I'll take a look at the last World Series won by Washington, DC: the 1924 World Series. It makes for a hell of a history yarn.
Work to live, live to work
This tweet by Libby Watson really stood out for me:
She's right. I'm not saying this to criticize anyone. As I wrote above, things are set up so that whatever it is that enrages you Monday is forgotten by Tuesday afternoon. That said: I'm extraordinarily lucky to be here. Yes, I'm smart, and hard-working, but the truth is that the causes and things I've worked hard for and on whose behalf I've used my intelligence were mostly made possible because people opened doors for me...and I walked through those doors.
I wouldn't be here if Sarah and Tyler hadn't looked at me as a returning veteran and thought that I had something to contribute; if Tim and Morgan and Mike and Reggie and Megan and, god, so many others hadn't thought of me. I'm so indebted to them - to all of you, really - and the only way I repay that generosity is by being equally generous myself, and opening doors for people for whom they would almost certainly be forever closed.
Here's what I'm going to do. I'll post a few interesting jobs I come across in each newsletter. In addition: if you need help finding a gig, if you want help getting a political job, or if you have related questions, just reply to this newsletter. In return, we'll talk, and if I can, I will help open those doors for you.
We're all part of a beloved community, and this is what people who care for each other do for each other. Without further ado, jobs:
National Media Strategist, RepresentUS (they’re hiring for a ton of gigs, BTW)
OK, I wasn't intending to send out the first issue until next week, but we'll call this a dress rehearsal, I guess? Anyway, I hope y'all have a weird and wonderful weekend, and I'll go home and hang with the armadillos.