Hi!

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about polarization and the us-versus-them mindset that started developing during President Obama’s first term and really ran wild under the iPhone and algorithmic social media. It worked out very well for the very rich people who pay to develop those algorithms that we have been forcefully divided along party lines.

That’s not a coincidence, of course. There’s a reason why the algorithms have chosen to divide us by political party when there are millions of other ways to categorize people within a culture.

Specifically, I’ve been thinking about a passage in the Thanksgiving edition of my boss Zach Silk’s newsletter The Pitch about Elon Musk’s decision to slash USAID’s program of international economic assistance.

“The history of civilization is full of stories of the super-rich exploiting the poor, but rarely has economic injustice ever been this literal: The richest man in the world personally ordered the funding cuts that killed more than a half a million of the poorest people in the world,” Zach wrote.

“That’s a new kind of class warfare — one enacted by the super-rich on the have-nots,” he continued. “And in case you’re wondering where you fall on the sides drawn by Musk, keep in mind that your personal wealth is much closer to any one of the poor people who have been helped by USAID’s food programs than it is to Musk’s approximate half-trillion-dollar hoard of wealth.”

That’s a bold statement, but it’s true. Economically speaking, virtually every person alive in America right now has more in common with the poorest people who are starving in poor nations around the world than they do with Elon Musk.

The experiences of Musk and Bezos and all the other centibillionaires are so far removed from our daily life that they’re basically a whole other species. We don’t have the same lives, we don’t have the same goals, and we certainly don’t share the same values. They think of themselves as planet-spanning beings who have tremendous influence over the levers of power (true) and the future of the human race (highly doubtful, in the long run)—basically, they see themselves as gods who are not subject to human laws.

I cannot emphasize enough how detached from the experiences of normal humans these centibillionaires have become. Larry Ellison, one of the richest men in the world, routinely engaged in mock dogfights with his son, David Ellison, over the Pacific in their personal planes. As an adult man, Elon Musk could not figure out how to properly toast Pop Tarts. Jeff Bezos built a sauna shaped like a UFO and he now seems to be addicted to cosmetic surgery.

On the other hand, I think most American families could relate to the needs, fears, and goals of a family struggling to survive in Dhaka or Port-au-Prince. Their day-to-day existence is very different, but those fears of providing for your families and aspiring to a better existence for your children are very similar.

Put another way, the ICE agents who are imprisoning and deporting immigrants have much more in common, economically, with the families they’re tearing apart than they do with the President of the United States—a billionaire who owns at least one golden toilet and who publicly slapped his son for not wearing an expensive suit to a baseball game.

It is in the best interest of the very rich that we don’t see those values that connect us. It’s much better for them if we continue to fight about whatever social media is injecting into our daily feeds, and that we elect people who promise to do battle for our side. Those elected leaders, on both sides of the aisle, have gone on to pass laws and kill regulations that allow the handful of super-rich people to accrue more wealth than anyone has ever possessed in the history of the world.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that we should set aside our values to work together. Nazis, white supremacists, Christian nationalists, and other anti-social agitators should be shunned and shamed and ridiculed and frozen out entirely. Nobody’s freedom or autonomy should be up for debate. But the global population of Nazis is very small. The algorithms just popularize and platform their speech because it attracts attention, and so it feels like there are way more of them than there actually are.

I don’t know how to elevate the similarities that we share. Proximity tends to create empathy. I’m nowhere near the first person to suggest that we have to be better at getting back together again.

But I also know that if we wanted the polarization and hatred to grow, we would continue to do the exact same thing we’ve been doing. So that suggests to me that the best way to change the status quo is to stop giving social media our attention. Once we unhook from the algorithmic drip, maybe the next steps to finding a common ground will be more apparent.

But on an even smaller scale, I think it’s important to exercise those empathy muscles. Lately, when I’m out on a walk or on my commute to the office, I’ve been looking for things I have in common with people. Whether they’re wearing expensive clothes for a job interview or they’re huddled in a blanket from a shelter, I try to notice if they’re tired, if they’re annoyed, if they’re happy or content or optimistic, and I think about times when I felt that too.

History shows that the super-rich don’t tend to do too well when everyone else gets sick of them. This has happened many times before, and it will happen again. It just takes a few seconds of attention on the things that really matter to reorient ourselves and head in the right direction.

I’ve Been Writing

For the Seattle Times, I asked booksellers at four different Seattle-area independent bookstores to list three or four books that they’re recommending to customers as gifts this holiday season. There are some great books in this one that could be just the trick if you’re stumped on a good gift for someone on your list.

And at my day job, Goldy and I podcasted about our favorite economics books of 2025 on the Pitchfork Economics podcast.

I’ve Been Reading

I regret to inform you that Ian McEwan has Still Got It. Or more accurately, after the highs of his early 2000s hot streak and the lows of his 2010s fallow period, McEwan is back on top. His latest novel What We Can Know is an excellent book—a light sci-fi novel set in a future wracked by climate change, and the historian who are obsessed over a potentially world-changing poem that was read once at a dinner party in the early 2000s and then disappeared. The book has all the qualities that I love about McEwan—his wit, the way he suggests lost worlds in an offhand sentence two-thirds down a page—and none of the ponderous or self-important qualities that he developed in the last decade.

Perfection is a buzzy little novel by Vincenzo Latronico and translated from Italian into English by Sophie Hughes that I outright hated in the beginning. The book initially introduces us to its two characters by taking an extensive inventory of all the stuff in their apartment. Okay, consumerism is bad, but David Fincher basically made this point better in ten seconds or so in the opening scenes of Fight Club. But it’s a short book and I’m glad I hung on because it’s less of a novel about two American graphic designer expats living in Berlin and more of an anthropological outlining of a very recent period in American history—that Obama-era period of optimism that immediately curdled into the mess we’re living in now. There’s a clarity to the criticism that makes the critique itself into the narrative, not the actions or emotions of the characters.

In a Little Free Library that I often frequent, I encountered a copy of Sidney Lumet’s book Making Movies. I’ve read lots of books about screenwriting before, and I’ve read plenty of director biographies. But this was an interesting fusion of craft book and memoir. Lumet basically gives away all of his secrets, bluntly explaining choices that he made while directing the lighting, shooting, and editing that shaped classics including The Verdict, Network, and Dog Day Afternoon. It’s such an ego-free and thoughtful explanation of the art of making movies that I felt inspired to go back and revisit some of Lumet’s catalog.

I didn’t really read Schott’s Significa from cover to cover, but I did spend some quality time this month dipping into it. It’s a taxonomy of specialized languages used by different professionals—the terms bartenders use to quietly signal to other bar workers that a patron is cut off, for instance, or the turns of phrase popularized by magazines including Time and The New Yorker. I took this one out from the library, but it might be a book that I’d like to buy for my library one day.

Into the Sun is a lost sci-fi classic about climate change that was written a century ago by Swiss author CF Ramuz. This new translation by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan is fascinating. I don’t know if I can call it a good book, or even a particularly enjoyable book to read, but the way the narration flips back and forth between first and third person feels like a new way to write a novel about a disaster. It’s kind of a painful, stuttering read, but I think a modern novelist might be able to take some ideas from this book and adapt them into narrative styles for the internet age. An interesting read, for sure.

That’s it for this issue! I hope your holidays are happy. I’ll be back on the last day of the year with some of my favorite art of 2025.

Paul