A round-up of news, trends, and thoughts that we think were noteworthy this week. Lots of political news this time…
The Election Part 1: Early this week, the Supreme Court released a decision ruling that Colorado did not have the authority to remove Trump from the ballot. The argument was that Trump should be disqualified from running for office under a constitutional provision that prohibits insurrectionists from holding office. The decision was unanimous, the Court did not touch on the question of whether Trump is an insurrectionist, but agreed this was not a decision that individual states can make. The three liberal justices did, however, write a separate opinion, saying that while they agreed with the result they would have issued a narrower ruling. On Truth Social, Trump called it, “BIG WIN FOR AMERICA!!!.” Whenever the Supreme Court enters the news, we like to revisit one of our favorite interviews, a conversation with Eric Segall, professor, author, and Supreme Court critic. It’s a few years old now, but then again, the Supreme Court doesn’t change very quickly.
The Election Part 2: Super Tuesday happened: Haley bowed out, the protest vote against Biden grew, 65% of registered voters said the country is on the ‘wrong track', and the stage is now set for the country’s first presidential rematch in nearly 70 years. We now have eight more months of two deeply unpopular candidates telling us how much things suck, basically. Both are running quite negative campaigns — Trump’s victory speech on Tuesday can be summed up with this line: 'Frankly, our country is dying.'
The Election Part 3: With the 2024 match-up set, Biden walked into his final State of the Union Address as a first-term president, pretty explicitly campaigning for a second term. He touched on immigration (he capitulated to GOP talking points), Trump (he and his campaign are convinced the country has “Trump amnesia”, so he tried to remind people of how he’s really, really bad), Roe (he promised to enshrine it into law if “Americans send him Congress that supports it”) and the economy (among other things, he proposed a new tax credit that would provide $10,000 to first-time home buyers).
A New Internet Derangement Syndrome: In non-election news, everyone on the internet seems to be in a psychosis about the passage of time. This tweet went viral:
In response to that, @TJBreen tweeted: “The reason that 1976 seems much more distant from 1993 than 2007 does from 2024 is that the internet has trapped us in a cultural forever-present, unable to move into the future because the things of the past never fade from sight. We inhabit a static, stuck, ersatz culture.”
Meanwhile on TikTok you’re met with face after face asking viewers to guess how old they look. In the comments people frantically speculate, compare, and tell each other to wear more sunscreen. Vox wrote about this phenomenon stating that “social media’s encouragement of appearance and “self-focused attention,” as well as American culture’s dismissal of older people, particularly women, as possible causes for Gen Z’s aging panic. There’s also the fact that young people today are delaying adult tasks, such as getting their driver’s license or going on dates, and “there may be a natural tension or confusion when social or cultural markers of adulthood are delayed, but the body keeps aging on a relatively consistent timescale.” That all makes sense, but here’s another take to read this week on aging:
Thinking about the internet more broadly, we really enjoyed this piece in Dirt on "internet criticism” and often reread a really great conversation we had a few months back with Rachel Connolly, one of our favorite writers.