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Everyone's talking about abundance. Our 3.23 roundup.

A roundup of this week’s news with our thoughts, comments, and recommended reading. franknews is committed to bringing quality information to the public — and remaining independent, ad-free, and accessible to everyone. To support us, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Why is everyone talking about abundance: Ezra Klein, a New York Times columnist and the co-founder of Vox, published a book, Abundance, claiming to be the Democrat’s panacea. The argument he lays out is essentially that Democrats have stilted progress and growth because of their penchant for process. Houses don’t get built because of their support for zoning restrictions. The green energy transition is stifled by environmental laws. A cross-country rail hasn’t been built because of costly conditions to public infrastructure spending. Look, they say, to California and New York population growth rates versus Florida or Texas. So Klein and his co-author Derek Thompson have sketched out an “abundance agenda” seeks to remedy this. The critiques are plenty. From Matt Stoller: “Finally we get the Abundance position on corporate power, which is that it’s not important. This whole thing is just a rebrand of 1980s style supply side politics.” From Noah Smith (taken from his very compelling review of the book): “In order to make the abundance agenda the new “political order” of America, its proponents are going to have to make a forceful ideological argument for why enriching the average American is Job #1, rather than one job among many.” From Samuel Moyn: “Even at the height of American optimism in the 1950s, historians and policymakers knew that the people of plenty had to keep inequality and immobility from bringing the experiment crashing down.”

Before we were even tracking any of this, we were going to recommend Abundance Mindset, an article in the Baffler that essentially profiled what an “abundance” candidate might look like. They write, “It’s a revealing response. The ‘abundance agenda’; a Koch-funded initiative to roll back regulation in the energy and housing sectors, has found in Polis its ideal Democratic messenger. The same network of interests that engineered the free-market revolution of the 1970s now sees in the Colorado governor their best chance at reversing the Democratic Party’s skepticism of neoliberal orthodoxy. If capital’s latest attempt to push the party further to the right succeeds, it may very well wear Polis’s face.” This could probably make for a fun debate.

Some stats for the week: CNN reported that, “The Democratic Party’s favorability rating stands at just 29% – a record low in CNN’s polling dating back to 1992 and a drop of 20 points since January 2021.” For reference, 79% of Republicans and Republican leaners currently take a positive view of the GOP. And Remember Gavin Newsom’s new podcast? It was clearly him dipping a toe into the presidential race and trying to frame himself as a “practical” Democrat. This week, there was new data on its impact. Favorability for Newsom amongst Liberals has declined from 46% to 30%. While some Republicans agreed with his stances, they overwhelmingly viewed him as insincere, calling him “fake” and “pandering.” His net favorability dropped from +4 to -6, a 10-point swing in the wrong direction. Only 1 in 5 said the podcast made them want to tune in for more. More proof points that Democrats don’t win when they try to be more Republican. On another note, Harper Magazine’s March index had a not fun fun stat: “Percentage of events at nightclubs in New York City that went past 3 am in 2014: 70. That do so today: 53.”

The death of the party: On that front, the Washington Post reported that, “In nightlife hot spots like New York and London, clubs are shutting down. Champagne sales are tanking, according to CNN (and those threatened 200 percent tariffs probably won’t make things better). In a rather on-the-nose development, Party City, once the go-to spot for party-phernalia like themed hats, paper napkins, goody bag stuffers and shimmery banners, is going out of business.” Emily Sundberg’s post on Monday blamed it on too much wellness and 8am workout classes — probably not wrong. This made us want to re-read our old interview with Rachel Connolly (her Substack is

Who knows?

) — we covered fun, communication, dating, and death how the internet shapes it all.

Reading Recs —

A letter from Mahmoud Khalil: “Who has the right to have rights? It is certainly not the humans crowded into the cells here. It isn’t the Senegalese man I met who has been deprived of his liberty for a year, his legal situation in limbo and his family an ocean away. It isn’t the 21-year-old detainee I met, who stepped foot in this country at age nine, only to be deported without so much as a hearing. Justice escapes the contours of this nation’s immigration facilities.”

“Going Soft”, an essay in Harper’s Magazine: “Everyone should be reskilling and upskilling all the time, whether they are doing daylong etiquette courses, microlearning, or nanolearning (“short bursts of instruction to help people make progress in small bites,” as LinkedIn puts it). Employees should be like the ship of Theseus, comprised of endlessly interchangeable components. But even as soft skills claim to be a solution to automation, they also help you automate yourself, reducing human interaction to an arsenal of techniques programmed into the mind.”

An interview with Sally Rooney about her new essay in the New York Book Review (we are sorely lacking a subscription over here or else we would probably be recommending the essay as well): “So it’s probably not surprising that so far I have mostly worked in the realm of fiction. I am quite attached to my own sanity, such as it is, and I feel I have to approach the essay form with caution. In fact, I wonder if nonfiction somehow taps into my (otherwise largely suppressed) competitive instincts. I never feel competitive when I’m writing fiction, obviously—I don’t see how fiction even could engage that feeling. But I do seem to feel a little inkling of that instinct when I write nonfiction. It’s something I can’t quite explain.” We did spend a long time watching snooker Youtube compilations after this..

Free Will, Inside and Out, an essay in Pioneer Works: “For me, the appeal of compatibilism is that it grapples with the central dilemma of free will. Despite knowing intellectually that all our decisions can be traced back to preceding causes, we feel free. Samuel Johnson summed it up in 1778: ‘All theory is against the freedom of the will; all experience for it.’” This essay is a rebuttal to Robert Sapolsky, a neuroscientist who has become the leading thinker of free-will denial. Vox had a good interview with him a few years back.

A photo essay in Harpers — A heated history of public lands: