Leaning into the Silence

Sometimes I catch my students having a conversation that’s so on-point I have to stop and reflect with them on their collective progress. It only happens a few times a year, but when it happens it feels dope. “Y’all remember when you couldn’t figure out [now elementary concept that previously confounded them]? Now listen to us talk about [a far more advanced concept, that I learned about in college]. That’s wild!” Usually, they’ll chuckle and someone will quip something along the lines of “yeah bro, we sound smart now.” Then I groan, loudly. High schoolers are dorks like that, they love to ruin a moment.

I had one of those moments this week. Here in Abu Dhabi, I teach a Comparative Politics class. In the course, we talk about the political institutions and societal trends in six comparative states: the UK, Mexico, Nigeria, Iran, Russia, and China. This unit on political culture, we're looking at civil society organizations and how they strengthen democracies. Because I'm extra, I rotate in additional states each unit. So we’re also examining Indonesia and the Philippines and tracing their trajectories, along the path of democratization, from former colonies → authoritarian states → emerging democracies (or whatever you consider them now). 

We Want a Revolution! No, Not Like That! This week students were assigned excerpts from Stephen Kinzer’s All the Shah’s Men. It’s a book about the twentieth century history of Iran and revolutionaries that toppled the Shah’s monarchical regime, only to find themselves under theocratic rule. I joked at one point that this is the downside of revolutions–you can topple the government in place but the faction that’s most organized is best prepared to dictate the terms of the aftermath. In the case of Iran, it was the Mullahs and Ayatollah Khomeni. 

My opening question for discussion was “What do you think about the particular story being told by the Kinzer (the author) and what he chooses to include/exclude?” This is actually a fine question once their brains are warmed up but it was my opener and the silence afterwards was notable. But I leaned into it. Pedagogy nerds call it wait time. We sat there for nearly a minute before a student chimed in to reflect on the prevalence of male voices in the text. Then one by one the gears started grinding. Another talked about how the Mullahs were referred to several times but never really quoted in the text; they were seen but heard. Another student chimed in about the in-fighting between various reformist factions creating a power vacuum that allowed religious hardliners to take power, because they had a pre-established hierarchy. Someone joked about how the Shah's wives turned on him. Another explained that the tighter the Shah squeezed the weaker his coalition became. Others mentioned that whatever side was backed by the west was well-funded but lacked legitimacy in the eyes of the public. We went on for like twenty minutes on that question. 

None of that wonderful conversation would have happened earlier in my career.  One of the hardest parts of teaching (and life) is knowing when to shut up. Often our instinct is to fill the silence, when the silence is actually students processing. Earlier in my career, I would've tried to reword the question, gone on to the next one, or (God forbid) started answering it myself. I’m a deeply impatient person but I am more patient in the classroom than I am in my own life.  It took me years to appreciate the power of contemplative silence in my classroom. But I get it now and I lean into it. I've been thinking more and more about the idea of silence lately. My new goal is to continue my reset from years of being hyper-online and lean more into the silence in my own life.

When Censorship Backfires and the Toll of Opiates

I have reflected here and elsewhere about my recent-ish turn away from social media. I didn’t like the way it was warping my brain; I didn’t like how much time I spent on it; I didn’t like how often it made me angry about the state of the world. Algorithmic social media feeds are designed to keep you (doom-)scrolling. At some point I had enough: first of FB, then of Insta, and most recently of Twitter. If you care to hear more, I talked about this with Alyson Klein in a recent pair of pieces from Education Week, here and here.

Instead, I have subscribed to a handful of blogs by writers I trust. In some ways, I have gone back in time and am now experiencing the internet 2013 style, largely via RSS feeds on Feedly (RIP Google reader). I feel more in control of what I'm consuming and less like I'm being manipulated algorithmically.

Today, I wanted to share a few things that I think are worth reading. I may do this on a regular basis, I may not. One thing I like about this period of my life is that I am genuinely doing what I want and creating new habits and patterns. It’s like a good midlife crisis. Instead of buying a dumb sportscar or motorcycle, I am changing my information and news consumption habits.

Clive Thompson on how a Chinese streamer was censored for showing a cupcake that looked kinda like a tank. I’ve always been fascinated by how much Americans are obsessed with China’s censorship of discussions of the Tiananmen Square protests (and state suppression that followed). What China did was clearly terrible. It’s also morally indistinguishable from the National Guard’s murder of students at Kent State or the assault on Black Wall Street in Tulsa. Notably, the discussion of these and other incidents of state violence (like the Wilmington Coup) are often suppressed or unwelcome in US schools. It’s obviously not the same level of censorship as China but the intention of the regime in both cases is the same. The Tiananmen Square massacre is just out of living memory for Chinese millennials but the state’s dramatic efforts to suppress knowledge of the events has led to people accidentally discovering the protests, the so-called Streisand Effect. I hope that recent teacher censorship laws passed in many US states will backfire in the same way. 

The scope of the opiate crisis is insane and it has killed an unfathomable amount of people over my adult lifetime. I am in the final pages of Beth Macy’s Dopesick. It is a Michael Lewis-esque work of narrative nonfiction about the US opiate crisis and the extent to which it was foreseeable, preventable, and driven by corporate greed. The data Macy brings to the table is staggering: 

• Over 100,000 people per year overdose in the US; that’s over 2,700 people (or a 9/11 every day);

• We are less than 5% of the global population and consume over 30% of the world’s opioids; 

• In 2010, enough opioids were prescribed in the US to medicate every man, woman, and child in America—24 hours a day—for a month;

• As early as the year 2000, pharmaceutical companies were spending $4,000,000,000 on direct marketing to doctors to induce the doctors to write more prescriptions for drugs, in particular opioids.

Like gun violence, for reasons of general dysfunction, campaign contributions by industry, and regulatory capture, the US is largely alone in struggling with this issue. These are self-inflicted societal wounds. The book is enraging because warnings from clinicians and advocates as early as the 1990s were ignored by regulators and pharmaceutical companies.

Lastly, Melissa Santos on the State Democratic Party Chair bullying State House members for supporting a more experienced and progressive candidate. For my people in Washington, in the aftermath of the recent midterms the tea is coming out about the State Democratic Party Chair, Tina Podlodowski. The short of it is that Podlodowski is deeply pissed that some progressives were supporting non-partisan candidate Julie Anderson for Secretary of State. We discussed this issue on a recent episode of my podcast and Santos covered it in Axios, including screenshots of texts where Podlodowski threatened to cut off house members who didn’t toe the line.  Saying to one, "this is bullshit — apparently the House thinks so little of the Democratic Party … we can spend our resources elsewhere." We all understand the nature of political parties but it’s really dumb to see someone go to the mattresses against fellow progressives, especially in defense of Steve Hobbs, who is less progressive than Anderson and was basically the Joe Manchin of the State Senate.

On a more personal note, we are well over here. This weekend Hope and I are in Al Ain visiting her sister Faith. We stumbled on a local Emirati handicraft festival, had some great Ethiopian and Moroccan food, and I’m looking forward to the opening of the World Cup this weekend. 

See you next week.

Bringing Blogging Back (to the Tune of Bringing Sexy Back)

I was born in the waning days of the Carter Administration. My “micro-generation,”  Late AF Gen-X or Proto-Millennial, was birthed into an analog world and came of age in a digital one. I remember having a gigantic TV with rabbit ear antennas. I remember getting only a few over-the-air channels. I remember getting my first lesson in monopoly pricing as my step-dad fumed about the cost of this new thing called “cable.” I remember getting a Packard-Bell computer with a 386 processor, internal 14.4 kbps modem, and being one of the first kids in my friend group to be “online.” 

My first forays onto the internet–the real internet, not AOL or Prodigy—were on Usenet. For those under thirty-five, Usenet or newsgroups were a decentralized precursor of the current internet. Essentially they were text-based, topic specific, discussion boards where nerds like me in the 90s gathered to discuss topics of interest. Newsgroups covered every subject imaginable and their titles, which fell into eight groups (or hierarchies) were descriptive of their focus: “rec” for recreational topics, “news” for current events discussions, “sci” for science, etc. Fifteen year-old Nate spent an unconscionable amount of time reading and posting on rec.sport.pro-wrestling and rec.sport.basketball. 

The Web as it Was: As the web became more widely available, navigable, and better modems enabled faster data speeds, newsgroups largely withered and the web as we know and use it exploded in popularity. In short order, we entered the era of blogs. Blogs facilitated longer form writing and the expression of nuanced ideas in a way that has fallen out of favor in our 2020s  social media era. Possibly the best online community I was ever a part of was the Horde, the name given to regular commenters on Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Atlantic Magazine blog. It was reading these conversations on Coates' blog, often in response to his frequent “Talk to Me Like I’m Stupid” threads that I learned about CTE, which led to me falling out of love with the NFL. It is also where I learned about the Confederate Lost Cause narrative about the US Civil war and how to pick that argument to pieces: “Oh, the war was really about states’ rights? States' rights to do what?” It was also there that I really started to understand and tackle the brand of homophobia I had acquired from my church and time in the military. 

What made the Horde special was that the forum was moderated with an iron fist. On the blog, if you unfurled an uninformed, nonsense, or reactionary hot take, it was deleted. If you did it twice, you were banned. One of the things that enrages me about our modern moment is that we have allowed a narrow faction of our politics to convince large portions of the populace that “standards,” “rules,” and “conduct expectations” within a given community are tantamount to state censorship. It’s disappointing how many people have fallen for this meme.  

Blogs Made Even Matt Yglesias Tolerable: A strength of blogs, that is shared in some ways by podcasts, is the ability of someone to communicate about a complex issue, to address a topic with depth and nuance, and to address and refute counter-arguments from detractors (and haters).  Blogs felt meritocratic. Writers with quality prose and insights grew their audiences and other writers would cite and link to their pieces. I even found myself reading people I vehemently disagreed with because I admired and appreciated their writing.

But in the mid tens (this is what we're calling the 2010s, yes?) blogs started to lose their audiences. Twitter largely killed them off. As everyone moved to “the Bird,” we all should have seen what was to come. Twitter branded itself as a “microblogging platform.” The micro was telling: fewer words, less civility, less nuance, less meaningful dialogue. We’ve been in this era for over a decade and the results have been disastrous. But it appears that era is sunsetting as a result of self-inflicted billionaire wounds.

I think this is a really long way of saying the following: 

1. I am off Twitter and I am really glad about it; 

2. I plan to write here more and hope you will read it;

3. I hope you’ll join me and write someplace because I’d rather read your thoughts, at length, rather than in 280 character bursts mitigated by a billionaire.