The Crowhill Journal

Recently I’ve been possessed with a new story idea. It’s currently at 59 pages, about 29,000 words. (A normal novel is about 75,000 words, for reference.)

It’s not final, but it’s at a good stopping point — in the sense that a good serial TV show might be at the end of an episode.

If you want to read it, contact me and I’ll send it to you. It’s fairly rough, but should be entertaining.

P&C review a Mexican lager, then discuss David Goodhart’s theory about anywheres and somewheres.

The anywheres are educated, footloose, urban and socially liberal. The somewheres are rooted in a specific place or community, are socially conservative and often less educated.

It’s an interesting way of looking at current issues like Brexit, Trumpism and populism generally.

In the U.S., we have our east and west coast elites who view “fly over country” as a basket of deplorables.

How does this fit with the idea of a republic, where the representatives are supposed to bring local values to the nation?

To download the file, right click on this link: Somewheres vs. anywheres

This is pretty cool.

I heard a discussion on the news tonight where a woman was asked for proof that it’s a man’s world.

She said (I’m quoting from memory) “a lot of my male colleagues were promoted ahead of me.”

Why do we put up with this sort of nonsense?

If a cop pulls me over, and I think he was a jerk, I say, “Gee, that cop was a jerk.”

But if a woman gets pulled over by a cop, and she thinks he was a jerk, she says, “that cop was sexist.”

You’ve probably heard that dentists commit suicide at a disproportionately high level. Whether that’s actually true is subject to debate, but for my purposes here it doesn’t matter.

When I was a kid, my sister had this theory (I think it was mostly a joke) about why dentists allegedly commit suicide at a high rate. She said they’re getting in close with people, and when you’re that close to someone you have an urge either to kiss them or to kill them. Suicide is a consequence of that daily tension!

Again, I think she was joking, but there’s an underlying lesson there — i.e., there are situations that mix and confuse our sense of distance with our sense of intimacy.

I thought of that when I heard a comment about the problem with Twitter.

In normal life, you don’t have many conversations with random strangers, and when you do, it’s about the weather, or directions, or something like that. You don’t talk about controversial issues.

On Twitter, you do precisely that. So it could be that part of the problem with Twitter is the disconnect between intimacy and distance.

Consider how easy it is to get angry with other drivers when you feel as if they’ve slighted you, or didn’t follow the rules. You would never get that angry in a crowd of people, and certainly not among people you know. The problem is the sense of anonymity you have when you’re driving. You don’t know them and they don’t know you.

It may be that Twitter is the perfect storm of all these things. You feel anonymous, but too close. You’re talking to strangers about intimate things. When someone is mean, if feels like a friend has betrayed you. It’s a toxic mix that our brains aren’t trained to handle.