Alienation, autonomy, and ideology
As 2025 draws to a close, I feel like I’ve hit a nice medium (pun intended) in my two writing platforms – this blog, plus my Medium page. I’ll say a bit in this post about the blogging half.
Perhaps I’ll mirror it in a Medium article.
Read on for some thoughts on the blogging world today. And, as always, I hope you enjoy reading. Send along your comments and suggestions for what to cover next!
Due to problems with a distributor, my local library took awhile to get Kamala Harris’s 107 Days. With that resolved and book finally in hand, I sat down this month to read it.
Harris wrote the book, in theory, as a journal of her brief 2024 campaign. And she captures the feeling of a whirlwind race to the presidency. But along the way, Harris also does the work of a traditional political autobiography. She just introduces herself more briefly and compactly than usual.
In a way, I found this refreshing. I read a lot of political autobiography. Much of it ends up as fluff. Harris comes off as more honest than most politicos. Yes, in part 107 Days makes her case for running again in 2028. That’s clear enough. But that case is short(er than usual) on cliches. And I think she stays upfront about her decisions and motives.
But the book irked me in many ways. What, then, is its problem?
Harris centers the book on an argument: if she had had more time to make her case, she would’ve won. But this is transparently a bad argument. To cite one obvious problem, Harris’s standing didn’t improve as the campaign wore on. If anything, her numbers regressed after a brief honeymoon phase in the first month or so.
But let’s take a closer look at 107 Days and see for ourselves.
And so, we’ve hit the end of the year. This is our final reading list for 2025!
Read on to see what I’ve been reading at the end of 2025. And, as always, let me know what you think and what you’re reading as we wrap up the year and head into 2026.
A local guy named Mason (note: not his real name) goes to lots of local events – political events, activist meetings, festivals, and so on. He’s somewhat older, friendly but rather awkward, and overall a good natured person.
He also still wears a mask in 2025.
Sort of.
To put it more accurately, sometimes he wears a mask and other times he doesn’t. And there’s little discernible pattern to it. Whether or not he wears a mask doesn’t seem to follow any risk assessment related to Covid-19. It’s not just that he’s not at elevated risk – though he almost certainly isn’t – but at times I even see him wearing a mask while he’s outdoors and not in a crowd and then taking the mask off or wearing it on his chin when he joins an indoor meeting.
I’m not trying to pick on Mason here. He’s a good guy. My point is that his behavior tracks a lot of what I see. I’ve seen a few dozen or so local characters who fit a similar profile during the pandemic. Most of them gradually reduced or cut out their mask usage by last year.
A few remain holdouts.
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