National interest

I’ve been thinking often of the the season 4 finale, season 5 opening arc of The West Wing. President Bartlett’s attention is split between a national security crisis and the abduction of his daughter. Realizing he’s unable to make decisions in the national interest, he invokes the twenty-fifth amendment to the U.S. Constitution to transfer his powers per the presidential line of succession.

The wrinkle with doing so is that the vice president had recently resigned. The president’s powers, then, skip the office of the vice president, and pass to Speaker of the House of Representatives Walken—a leading figure from the other party, with a very different approach than Bartlett’s.

Walken and Bartlett’s staff quickly clash over these differences, but Walken makes clear what the constitution itself sets out: at that point, Walken is the president, not only for particular issues, but for the full range of matters to which the occupant of that office must attend. Whether or not Bartlett’s staff agree with his actions, whether or not Bartlett himself agrees, Walken has the legal authority to act, making those actions just as legitimate as if Bartlett himself had taken them.

As with many of that show’s portrayals of American politics, there’s a deep reverence for democracy as respect for the rule of law and the role of institutions. While accepting Walken’s authority may be a bitter pill to swallow for the show’s characters, they do it because it’s right—it’s the proper path to take in the circumstances, using the institutional levers available to them. Most importantly, it’s the path that prioritizes the national interest over any of their own.

You might imagine how that’s been on my mind.

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• Of course, it’s hard to separate President Bartlett’s character from the wise, kind, generous character of the actor who played him, Martin Sheen. That conversation with Krista Tippett is one of my favourites—wide ranging, moving, and funny.
• The tech industry continues to foist generative AI upon us. Paul Robert Lloyd wrote a poem on being “Bored of it”, then reflected on reactions to the poem. Jeremy Keith gathered a bunch of links on the impacts of unruly AI scrapers on free sites like Wikipedia—stripmining the open web, with environmental costs both on- and offline. It is all, as Tressie McMillan Cottom puts it, “pretty mid”.
• Allen Sutherland on protecting cultural sovereignty by having publishers and printers based in the country.
• Bill Hunt on being content with smaller economic activities (by “economic” here, I mean its less-laden, original meaning, oikonomia, “management of a household”).
• Ben Werdmuller on the importance of technologists to journalism operations.
• I’ve been doing some statistics at work. When doing so, I often need to refresh myself on certain concepts. Allen Downey’s latest edition of Think Stats has a great explanation for estimation (going from a sample to the population). Using code instead of math to explain stats really resonates for me. (I also like Downey’s explanation for why he publishes his books for free.)
• Newsletter rec #1: Perfect Sentences, by Ingrid Burrington, a weekly collection of miscellany, each introduced by an excerpted sentence or two.
• Newsletter rec #2: The Main Event, by stacy-marie ishmael. I particularly enjoyed the latest issue on honest coverage of troubled economic times.

These are WEIRD TIMES, and it’s easy to feel not great about life. I like Annie Mueller’s rules for “Never trust how you feel about your entire life when…” (e.g., the inspiration for the list, “Never trust how you feel about your life after 9pm.”) Reminds me of, via Austin Kleon, “Deal with problems in daylight.”

All the best for the week ahead. Focus on the daylight!!

Lucas