Soft in the Center

It's hard to write from the squishy middle

I’ve mostly been using this space to write about current events and politics and academia, because I’ve sort of established a habit of putting science content on Forbes or in books and other pieces explicitly aimed at the pop-science market. That’s been relatively easy because I’ve had a lot of irons in those fires for the last year or so, but I don’t really have another outlet for stuff about politics and pop culture (aside from ranting to Kate, who is too good to me).

It does run into a bit of a snag, though, when the politics-and-pop-culture discourse gets dominated by stuff where I don’t have a very clear Take, and we’ve been in that kind of moment for a little while now. That is, a lot of the topics that have been sucking up all the oxygen are things where my opinions aren’t very well-formed or strongly held, and fall somewhere between deeply dug-in extremes. It’s a situation where it doesn’t feel wise to write anything at all, because anything I could write would stand a chance of really pissing off someone with a much more strongly-held opinion than mine, and I just don’t need that in my life.

So, for example, on the completely trivial end, there’s the Will Smith/ Chris Rock dust-up, which is totally not worth the energy people have expended on it. Rock’s original joke was tacky, but hardly the most degrading thing that’s ever been said. Smith was right to be annoyed, but disrupting the show over it was excessive. That said, the actual slap was hardly the most outrageously offensive display of violence that will forever scar the psyches of weird children who were watching the Oscars for some reason. It’s all very silly and pointless

Honestly, the actual principals in the whole thing have acquitted themselves better than most of the commentariat— they’ve issued publicist-approved statements, and otherwise kept their heads down. Hopefully some reality star or pro athlete will do or say something asinine this weekend that all the pundits can twist around like a balloon animal and hold up as evidence that they were Totally Right about whatever pet issue they’ve been banging on tediously about for years.

On the vastly more consequential end, I have nothing useful to offer on the war in Ukraine. Like a lot of other people, I’ve been impressed with the resilience of the Zelenskiy government and the rest of the Ukrainian people, and I’m very much rooting for them. (It should be noted that around 1914 my paternal great-grandparents made the extremely wise decision to leave a part of Poland that was then in the Russian empire, so I have a bit of an ancestral “Fuck the Russians, anyway” tendency.) At the same time, I’m pretty much on board with the “Let’s not start WWIII, mmm’kay?” side of things. By all means, let’s sanction Putin and his hangers-on, and sell or give Zelenskiy as many Javelins and Stingers as he wants, but NATO taking a direct hand is a step too far. It absolutely sucks to watch the Russians shell cities and target civilians, but expanding the conflict would be so much worse that it just can’t be justified at this stage.

And in between those poles of (in)significance, there’s a giant bog of free-floating culture war topics— “free speech”/ “cancel culture” and its discontents, anti- “CRT” measures, transgender athletes, etc.— that take turns dominating the conversation in ways that I find both baffling and dispiriting. Everybody involved seems to be either vastly overstating the importance of relatively trivial issues, making wildly implausible claims about the nobility of their own intentions and the perfidy of their opponents, and deploying an array of arguments that come off as either laughably ineffective or absurdly disingenuous. Sometimes both at once.

In almost all of these, there’s one side I agree with more than the other, but never to the point of the maximalist position that dominates the conversation. And in most of these, the argument has polarized to a degree where anything short of complete agreement is perceived as complete disagreement. So, while I’m sometimes tempted to do the thing where I try to clarify my feelings by writing something out, most of the time I end up deciding it’s just not worth the risk. But that, of course, has the downside of leaving me feeling cut off from interesting conversations that might in principle be happening, but mostly aren’t. Particularly given that I have this blog-like thing that needs somewhat regular updating… On the bright side, though, I powered through a new novel in a day and a half, so that’s something.

Anyway, that’s a vague grumble, and a bit of an excuse for not having more to say. Here’s the song I lifted the title from because it came up on shuffle play while I was thinking about what to write today:

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