Welcome to the third reading list post of 2025! For this month, I’ve got mostly fiction on my list. How does that compare to yours?
Continue reading for some sci-fi, general fiction, and a bit of non-fiction.
Just about everyone who tries to explain Kamala Harris’s loss loves talking about the working class. They point to Harris’s loss of the working-class vote as a starting point. And then they explain the decline of the Democratic Party’s electoral fortunes as a decline in their support among workers in states like Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Of course, they draw very different conclusions from this starting point.
Bernie Sanders, for instance, explained Harris’s loss as a loss of support among black and Latino working-class voters. Others, more friendly to the professional classes, thought Harris alienated working-class voters by running too far to the left on social issues. But they shared a focus on loss of working-class votes in swing states.
At one level, that’s a fair enough starting point. Harris did lose the aforementioned states after Biden won them in 2020.
But the politicians and pundits glide through these debates without justifying how they define the term ‘working class.’ And it’s no mere academic debate.
How you define the word matters. A lot. Competing definitions put entirely different groups of people into the ‘working class.’ They thereby recommend very different strategies and tactics for bringing them back into the fold.
I’ve argued in a few ways that a good Epicurean – and certainly an Epicurean sage – wouldn’t seek public office or a career in politics.
For Epicureans out there, it shouldn’t be hard to tell why. Politics fills our lives with stress and drama. It leads to exactly the kind of anxiety and mental anguish Epicurus advised us to avoid.
But I recently read an interesting set of essays called Epicurus and the Epicurean Tradition. In it, Jeffrey Fish plays devil’s advocate on behalf of Roman Epicurean politicians. To get there, Fish draws a distinction between desiring to participate in politics, on one hand, and reluctantly participating in politics because it’s the best choice, on the other.
In support, he also cites the work of Epicurean philosopher Philodemus. Philodemus’s work shows that Epicureans tolerated a wide range of professions among their practitioners. While the practice of philosophy and life among friends stood out as the Epicurean ideal, we find ourselves in many different life circumstances. Couldn’t even politicians practice Epicurean attention to tranquillity as an ideal?
Fish’s article didn’t exactly dislodge from me the view that the Epicurean shouldn’t seek out public office. But it does serve as an important corrective in some respects.
We shouldn’t be dogmatic in deciding, a priori which professions are OK and which aren’t. It’s entirely possible that a person finds themself in a situation where holding political office is the best way to promote tranquillity, both for themselves and for their friends and community. It’s also possible for even people who work in inadvisable professions to incorporate Epicurean insights into their lives.
On reading Fish’s article, I thought these were fair correctives. The Epicurean sage wouldn’t become a politician, but we can all benefit from incorporating Epicurean insights.
No matter our starting point.
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Here in Iowa City, the votes are in. And just as in last month’s primary, Oliver Weilein won big! He won despite strong efforts to defeat him by housing industry interests and Iowa City moderates. And, to boot, he won despite spending very little money and most Democratic officials endorsing his opponent.
Of course, our city council elections are non-partisan. That helped a great deal on the final point.
I’m very glad Oliver won. He brings a much needed perspective to the council. But I’ve already said some words about all that.
In this post, I’ll sketch out the big picture by drawing a deeper comparison from Oliver’s win to our 2015 city election.
This week’s post is a follow up to last week’s post. We might call it a coda.
I recently read an article on housing and zoning in Current Affairs. It’s called In Sprawl We Trust, and it’s written by the consistently compelling Allison Lirish Dean.
Indeed, about a year ago, I wrote about her take on ‘strong towns.’ There we discovered the limits of the term.
In this article, Dean provides us with a different frame for thinking about debates over zoning. Housing, of course, is one major focal point of those debates. Rather than thinking about the debate as split between a NIMBY and YIMBY side, she frames the debate as one between private capital and people-powered planning.
We can surely see the appeal.
Both NIMBY and YIMBY sides reject popular power. But Dean calls these sides ‘market suburbanists’ and ‘market urbanists.’ This phrasing places the two sides within broader zoning debates. They share a trust in the free market to deliver the goods, differing only in terms of how they want to use market power to protect private interests.
This contextualization helps. Indeed, it takes us all the way back to the idea of tenants unions. After all, what better way to prepare people for democratic decision making?
