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Tatler Asia
09-06-2025
- Politics
- Tatler Asia
Your next read: 8 provocative books curated by Natalie Portman
'Autocracy, Inc.' by Anne Applebaum Above 'Autocracy, Inc.' by Anne Applebaum uncovers how authoritarian leaders share propaganda techniques to maintain power. (Photo: Doubleday) Pulitzer Prize-winner Anne Applebaum delivers a chilling exposé that reframes our understanding of modern dictatorship. Rather than viewing autocratic regimes as isolated entities, this meticulously researched work reveals a sophisticated global network of collaboration. Applebaum's investigation uncovers how authoritarian leaders share strategies, resources and propaganda techniques to maintain power against democratic nations. For readers comfortable with traditional geopolitical narratives, this book presents a disturbing alternative reality where dictatorships operate as a unified, calculated force—a revelation that demands urgent attention and action. 'Saving Time' by Jenny Odell Above 'Saving Time' by Jenny Odell dismantles our fundamental assumptions about productivity and progress. (Photo: Random House Trade Paperbacks) Portman describes her pick as 'an exploration of how we can revise our relationship with time to inspire hope and action'. This radical critique by Jenny Odell dismantles our most fundamental assumptions about productivity and progress. Building on her acclaimed book How to Do Nothing , this work challenges the very foundation of our clock-driven society, arguing that our temporal structures serve profit rather than human flourishing. Odell draws from pre-industrial cultures, ecological rhythms and geological timescales to propose revolutionary alternatives to capitalist time consciousness. This isn't merely lifestyle advice—it's a comprehensive reimagining of how we might structure existence itself, demanding readers question everything they've been taught about efficiency and value. Now read: 7 inspiring wellness books for a grounded, mindful life 'The Safekeep' by Yael Van Der Wouden Above 'The Safekeep' by Yael Van Der Wouden explores the unreliable nature of memory. (Photo: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster) Van Der Wouden's stunning debut operates as both psychological thriller and historical reckoning. Set in post-war Netherlands, this tense narrative explores the unreliable nature of memory and the buried traumas that shape entire communities. Through the unsettling relationship between Isabel and Eva, the novel forces readers to confront how personal and collective histories can be manipulated, hidden or conveniently forgotten. This isn't comfortable historical fiction—it's a probing examination of how we construct truth from fragments of experience, challenging readers to question their relationship with inherited narratives. 'Saving Five' by Amanda Nguyen Above 'Saving Five' by Amanda Nguyen is an unflinching account of fighting to pass the Survivors' Bill of Rights Act. (Photo: AUWA) Portman thanks author Amanda Nguyen 'for sharing your truth, your light and for writing your story'. Nguyen's memoir transcends typical survivor narratives to become a blueprint for systemic change. Her unflinching account of fighting to pass the Sexual Assault Survivors' Bill of Rights Act exposes the failures within America's justice system whilst demonstrating the power of individual activism. Uniquely weaving her personal trauma with imagined conversations with her younger selves, Nguyen creates a work that's simultaneously intimate and politically urgent. This book challenges readers to move beyond sympathy toward action, questioning their role in perpetuating or dismantling unjust systems. 'The English Understand Wool' by Helen DeWitt Above 'The English Understand Wool' by Helen DeWitt asks whether cultural preferences reflect learned class signalling. (Photo: New Directions) DeWitt's deceptively sharp novella dismantles our assumptions about cultural sophistication and good taste. Through the story of a young woman raised with impossibly high aesthetic standards, this work exposes how markers of refinement often function as instruments of social control. The protagonist's confrontation with New York's cultural sharks becomes a broader examination of authenticity versus performance in contemporary society. The author challenges readers to question whether their cultural preferences reflect genuine appreciation or learned class signalling, making this brief work surprisingly unsettling in its implications. Natalie Portman sums up the novella best: 'darkly funny but honest look at the exploitation of trauma within publishing'. 'The Coin' by Yasmin Zaher Above 'The Coin' by Yasmin Zaher presents a protagonist whose moral complexity defies easy categorisation. (Photo: Catapult) Zaher's bold debut refuses to provide a comfortable immigrant narrative. Following a young Palestinian woman navigating New York's cultural and economic landscapes, this novel presents a protagonist whose moral complexity defies easy categorisation. Through her eccentric teaching methods and involvement in luxury goods schemes, the narrator challenges conventional expectations about assimilation and ambition. Zaher forces readers to sit with discomfort, presenting a character who embodies contradictions rather than resolution. Portman lauds the author's writing, especially 'about the tension between the body and mind.' 'Consider Yourself Kissed' by Jessica Stanley Above 'Consider Yourself Kissed' by Jessica Stanley examine love's survival against unglamorous reality. (Photo: Riverhead Books) Stanley's novel transcends typical romance to examine love's survival against unglamorous reality. Set against a decade marked by Brexit and Covid, this work asks challenging questions about commitment in an era of constant disruption. Rather than offering fairy-tale conclusions, Stanley presents the complicated negotiations required for long-term partnership, acknowledging both love's resilience and its frequent failures. For readers accustomed to romantic fantasy, this book provides a more truthful—if sometimes uncomfortable—exploration of what sustaining love actually requires in our fractured contemporary world. For Natalie Portman, the book is 'a look at how relationships shift over time as Coralie navigates motherhood, love and her own desires'. NOW READ Female action heroes: 8 women who redefined courage long before 'Ballerina' pirouetted in From screen to your stove: 6 star-studded celebrity cookbooks worth trying 'Mission: Impossible': 7 stunts that redefined high-stakes action cinema Credits This article was created with the assistance of AI tools
Yahoo
08-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Abundance Makes the Case for 'Supply-Side Progressivism'
Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster, 304 pages, $30 At the turn of the 20th century, labor leader Samuel Gompers had many specific demands, including job security and an eight-hour day. But his list of "what labor wants" added up to a single overarching—and open-ended—desire. "We want more," Gompers said in an 1890 speech. "We do want more. You will find that a man generally wants more." More was once the essence of progressive politics in America: more pay for factory workers; more roads, schools, parks, dams, and scientific research; more houses and education for returning G.I.s; more financial security for the elderly, poor, and disabled. Left-wing intellectuals might bemoan consumerism and folk singers deride "little boxes made of ticky-tacky," but Democratic politicians promised tangible goods. The New Deal and the Great Society were about more. In the early 1970s, however, progressives started abandoning the quest for plenty. They sought instead to regulate away injustice, pollution, and risk. The expansiveness of President Lyndon Johnson and California Gov. Pat Brown became the austerity of President Jimmy Carter and California Gov. Jerry Brown. Activists unleashed lawsuits to block public and private construction. Government spending began to skew away from public goods like parks and roads and toward income transfers and public employee compensation. Outside the digital world of bits, regulation made achieving more increasingly difficult if not downright impossible. With the presidencies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the politics of more came to mean giving people money or loan guarantees to buy things: houses, college degrees, child care, health insurance. But regulation grew along with the subsidies, and the supply of these goods didn't expand to meet demand. The subsidies just pushed up prices. Instead of delivering bounty, government programs fed shortages, and shortages fed anger and resentment. "Giving people a subsidy for a good whose supply is choked is like building a ladder to try to reach an elevator that is racing ever upward," write Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in Abundance. Klein and Thompson believe in supply-side progressivism, a term Klein coined in 2021. Abundance is their manifesto on behalf of "a liberalism that builds." The authors want an activist government to emphasize creation rather than restriction, generating abundance rather than stoking resentment. Although concerned about climate change, they have no sympathy with the degrowthers who invoke it to argue for shutting down industry and imposing stasis. Making people worse off, they believe, is not a progressive cause. Klein and Thompson take on the "lawn-sign liberalism," endemic in California, where signs declaring that "Black Lives Matter, Kindness Is Everything, and No Human Being Is Illegal…sit in yards zoned for single families, in communities that organize against efforts to add the new homes that would bring those values closer to reality." *** Although Abundance doesn't question the many environmental laws passed in the early 1970s, it does challenge the expansive interpretations that let activists block projects ranging from new apartments to wind farms. Klein and Thompson explain how a single court decision turned the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) into a procedural barrier against new construction. Signed by Gov. Ronald Reagan in 1970, CEQA required substantial government projects to file environmental impact reports before proceeding. Neither the governor nor the legislature saw it as a sweeping measure. In 1972, however, the state Supreme Court ruled that a private developer's plans to build condominiums and shops fell under the law merely because the project needed a permit. Regulation, in other words, became an excuse to treat private projects as the equivalent of freeways and dams. In the words of a Sierra Club lobbyist quoted in the book, CEQA had come to cover "anybody engaged commercially in putting two sticks of wood together." The ruling produced an enormous industry of lawyers and consultants while choking off construction. It was a prime example of lawn-sign liberalism: Affluent professionals benefited, while the general public got much less for its tax money and its housing dollar. Within the abundance movement, Klein and Thompson fall into the "eco-modernist" camp, embracing technology and prosperity as solutions to environmental problems. "This book is motivated," they write, "in no small part by our belief that we need to decarbonize the global economy to head off the threat of climate change." They worry that regulation and litigation are blocking green infrastructure. They want to make it easier to build solar arrays, wind farms, and the transmission lines to connect them to a new smart grid. And they support nuclear energy. "By some counts, nuclear power is safer than wind and cleaner than solar," they note. "It is inarguably safer than burning coal and petrol." Klein and Thompson also want political authorities to have more discretion. They recount how Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro used an emergency declaration to speed repairs after a tanker truck exploded and destroyed a bridge on Interstate 95, a crucial artery through the northeast. After he waived the normal procedures for taking bids, drawing up environmental reports, and halting construction at the first sign of rain, rebuilding took 12 days rather than months. "The process Shapiro used would typically be illegal," Klein and Thompson write. "Yet national Democrats and Pennsylvania voters alike loved it. What does that say about the typical process?" Government, they conclude, "needs to justify itself not through the rules it follows but through the outcomes it delivers." That prescription sounds like common sense: Deliver the goods. Give the public what it wants. Make taxpayers feel they're getting their money's worth. But rules matter. A strongman unhampered by picayune restrictions may seem efficient at first, but even a wise and virtuous abundance czar will make serious mistakes when left unchecked by either rules or competition. Such mistakes are why rules accumulate in the first place. *** By their nature, manifestos are not deep. Abundance is more thorough than most, but in rallying progressives to the cause of more it avoids hard questions. More what? Who decides and how? Where does feedback come from? Klein and Thompson isolate much of their abundance agenda from the valuable information conveyed by prices, preferring central direction even to market-based mechanisms like carbon taxes. "The market cannot, on its own, distinguish between the riches that flow from burning coal and the wealth that is created by bettering battery storage. Government can," Klein and Thompson write. "The market will not, on its own, fund the risky technologies whose payoff is social rather than economic. Government must." So the book doesn't make the case that California should have a high-speed rail system, for instance. It simply assumes that high-speed rail would be good and uses California's disastrous project to exemplify the absurdities of procedural progressivism. "In the time California has spent failing to complete its 500-mile high-speed rail system, China has built more than 23,000 miles of high-speed rail," the authors note. But China has also built whole cities that no one wants to live in. It has more steel capacity than it can profitably sell. China has more but not necessarily more of what people want. Who decides and how? Or take the national network of electric vehicle charging stations authorized in the Biden administration's infrastructure bill. Out of the 500,000 stations promised, Klein and Thompson lament, "by March 2024—more than two years after the bill passed—only seven new chargers were up and running." Assuming that electric charging stations are politically popular, they fear the delay will give the Trump administration credit for their construction. They misread public sentiment. At a conference put on last summer by the ecomodernist Breakthrough Institute, Democratic pollster Celinda Lake gave a presentation on climate-related messages that do and do not move voters to support Democrats. The worst message touted the 500,000 charging stations. While most unsuccessful messages had tiny positive effects, this one actually moved people toward Republicans. Women in particular hate electric cars, Lake said, because they're terrified of being stranded. But women love hybrids. In the automotive marketplace, hybrids are a success. Yet the technocratic vision Abundance offers doesn't have a place for them. In 2022, I served on a Breakthrough Institute conference panel moderated by Klein. As we assembled, he made a point of noting how much we disagree, citing my 1998 book The Future and Its Enemies. "I am a technocrat," he said, a term I use in the book to describe people who "promise to manage change, centrally directing 'progress' according to a predictable plan." They aren't the good guys. I argue instead for a more emergent, bottom-up approach, imagining an open-ended future that relies less on direction by smart guys with political authority and more on grassroots experimentation, competition, and criticism. What we share are the convictions that more is better than less and that a good society is not zero-sum. These days those beliefs make us allies. We can fight about the rest later. The post Abundance Makes the Case for 'Supply-Side Progressivism' appeared first on
USA Today
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
In 'The Art of Winning,' Bill Belichick focuses on his true loves: football and coaching
In 'The Art of Winning,' Bill Belichick focuses on his true loves: football and coaching Show Caption Hide Caption Bill Belichick, CBS release statements interview goes viral University of North Carolina football coach Bill Belichick and CBS released statements after clashing during an interview. The subject of Bill Belichick's love life has transcended sports in recent weeks. His first book, however, 'The Art of Winning: Lessons from My Life in Football' (out Tuesday May 6, Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster, $35) refocuses the public on Belichick's first and truest love: coaching football. The 280-ish pages breeze by as a love letter to the sport he holds so dearly and the profession he mastered, in coaching, which also made him extremely rich and influential. Hence the book. Belichick tells dozens of football stories, and his analogies often revolve around what it was like to lead an NFL team for 25 years, as he weaves in and out of the New England Patriots' dynasty. Along the way, he supremely praises people – and there are no surprises here – such as Lawrence Taylor, Tom Brady, Bill Parcells and, of course, his father. The influence of Steve Belichick, an author himself who wrote 'Football Scouting Methods,' on his son cannot be understated and the book makes that clear. 'The Art of Winning' is an ode from Bill to Steve, and a sort of second edition to 'Football Scouting Methods.' Without Steve's time as a scout and coach at Navy, there is no Bill Belichick. That 'The Hoodie' comes across as a drill sergeant at times during the book makes total sense. 'That's summer camp stuff,' he writes during one of his many lessons. The writing style is similar to Belichick's staccato speech pattern. Sentences are normally brief. Most of the substance is instruction. Some of it is rehashing. He'll say it's setting the record straight — sure, but it's also settling the score. After becoming famous for 'do your job,' he wants to tell us how he did the job – it's weird to describe it in the past since, given that he's currently employed as a Division I head coach at a major university. The final words of the epilogue point to that future, with a wink to the past. At times, Belichick can come across like he's binged too many 'Diary of a CEO' podcasts and that he (or the ghostwriter) kept a C-suite thesaurus beside their computer. The advice isn't always original, but the specifics and real-world applications are digestible, even if the mention of performance reviews feels like it's pulled straight from a corporate handbook. The book is not a tell-all but it does provide a peak behind the curtain with which Belichick shrouded the Patriots. There are stories about Adam Vinatieri and Richard Seymour that I was previously unaware of. There is legitimate insight into his coaching process and how he motivated his team. How he taught his team. Not shocking is the adequate and suspected reverence of his favorite football things, such as special teams and weird rules. Some memories display his genius – the ice pick method, for example. Belichick's coaching career apparently ended after the Patriots won their final Super Bowl in February 2019. There's hardly one reference from Brady's final season with the team on. There is no mention of Robert Kraft, or SpyGate, or DeflateGate. Roger Goodell is thanked in the acknowledgements. The Bourbon Street bar Pat O'Brien's is mentioned in a section looking back at his college years at Wesleyan and again during a thought about discipline. Belichick spends an equally inordinate yet appropriate amount of time discussing Brady. Page No. 199 is dedicated to him (there are three other such page dedications in the book, but no more spoilers). There's a cool Brady story from Sept. 25, 2001 that Belichick says has never been public before. If this book was indeed a love letter, the third recipient behind 'football' and 'Steve Belichick' would be 'Tom Brady.' They literally say they bring out the best each in other, Belichick in the book, Brady in his testimonial. That's platonic, intergenerational love. Winning is an obvious theme. 'I've been to the top,' Belichick writes, 'and the top … is very good.' But there's also an emphasis on adaptability, a trademark of every Belichick game plan, and how that skill allowed the Patriots to remain the NFL's most fearsome opponent for nearly 20 years. Belichick is at his best when he's teaching, as he was during his back-and-forths with the media. The history nerd in Belichick shines as an author. The 'Professor Belichick,' class is in session sections are the most enjoyable. Talking about the mundane, or the unexpected, is what gets the juices flowing for 'BB.' The classic bluntness of Belichick never takes a page off. A random 2004 preseason story occupies more space than some of the most famous moments in NFL history, during which Belichick occupied the sidelines. Some of the passages can come across as 'get-off my lawn,' 'old-man-yells-at cloud,' but it's vintage Belichick. He bumps up against technology and social media. It's who he is. And he's probably, at the very worst, mostly right. That can also lend itself to some 'how do you do, fellow kids,' attempts at humor that don't hit. The comedy ranges from dad jokes to witty thoughts to overexertion. The number of parenthetical notes is excessive and eventually becomes distracting. Belichick name checks like no other throughout the book. Every Belichick fave – think Mike Vrabel (the current Patriots head coach), James White, Matthew Slater, Julian Edelman, Rob Gronkowski, Rodney Harrison, Tedy Bruschi – has their origin story told from the coach's point of view. At first, the self-awareness from Belichick is abrupt. But the book spells out how accountability with oneself was integral to the Patriots' success. He addresses fans of the Atlanta Falcons directly, under predictable context. He says, 'I admit at times I have been uncooperative with the media.' He derides the constant media obligations of an NFL head coach and counsels on the advantages of speaking softly. 'But there's another side to strategic communications: knowing when not to speak,' Belichick said. That's timely. Belichick admits to a mistake during the first loss to the New York Giants in the Super Bowl, which spoiled the Patriots' pursuit of a perfect season. Other excerpts and reviews have harped on the 'I (expletive) up,' portion, but the context of that lesson is that it's about making mistakes and being accountable for the team. Another interesting mistake Belichick copped to was fumbling New England's post-Brady succession plan. How does going from Brady to Lamar Jackson, the two-time MVP with the Baltimore Ravens, sound? Belichick said the Patriots didn't want to adapt and passed on Jackson twice in the 2018 first round. He then casually mentioned hoisting a Lombardi Trophy ten months later. A year ago, Belichick had just crushed as a member of 'The Pat McAfee Show' at the 2024 draft in Detroit. He's much better-suited in the television medium compared to the written word, and the three-time Coach of the Year proved that with his 'Manningcast' appearances during the regular season and role on CW's 'Inside the NFL.' But few people can churn out a book in a year based on their life experience and secure a testimonial from one of the following individuals, let alone all of them: Michael Jordan, Nick Saban, Brady, Goodell, Ray Dalio, Admiral William H. McRaven and Suzy Welch. Again, all of this Belichick hoopla over the last month or so is the direct result of this book's publication. He was promoting it on CBS when his romantic and business partner Jordon Hudson chimed in with the interruption heard around the world. The book is dedicated to Belichick's parents, grandparents, godfather and children. But the first acknowledgement is for Belichick's longtime consigliere, Berj Najarian. The second section of thanks went to his literary team. The third? 'Thank you to my idea mill and creative muse,' Belichick wrote. 'Jordon Hudson.'
The Independent
17-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Filmmaker-music journalist Cameron Crowe has a memoir out this fall. It's called ‘The Uncool'
Cameron Crowe was planning to compile some of his old music interviews for a book when he realized he had a more intimate story to tell. Avid Reader Press announced Thursday that the Oscar-winning filmmaker and onetime Rolling Stone journalist will have a memoir out Oct. 28. It's called 'The Uncool.' 'I spent the last decade or so re-interviewing those early subjects like ( David) Bowie and Fleetwood Mac,Joni Mitchell and Led Zeppelin,' Crowe told The Associated Press in a recent email. 'The act of looking back on their younger selves brought out the same in me. The book split into two, the first one being a personal memoir. The second one will come out next year, with a lot of new interview material.' Crowe, 67, is known for such films as 'Jerry Maguire,' 'Singles' and 'Almost Famous,' a fictionalized take on his years in the 1970s as a teen contributor to Rolling Stone that brought him an Academy Award for best original screenplay. Crowe is also the author of 'Conversations with Wilder,' a book of interviews with director Billy Wilder. According to Avid Reader, a Simon & Schuster imprint, Crowe's memoir will offer 'a front-row ticket to the 1970s.' 'He spends his teens dodging bouncers and turning down cocaine from roadies and rock stars,' the publisher's statement reads in part. 'He talks his San Diego City College journalism teacher into giving him class credit for his road trip covering Led Zeppelin's 1975 tour, which lands him — and the band — on the front cover of Rolling Stone. He embeds with publicity-shy David Bowie for eighteen months as the sequestered genius transforms himself: 'Young enough to be honest!' Bowie declares of Crowe.'
Yahoo
18-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Lawn-Sign Liberalism vs. Supply-Side Progressivism
Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Avid Reader Press, 297 pages, $30 At the turn of the 20th century, labor leader Samuel Gompers had many specific demands, including job security and an eight-hour day. But his list of "what labor wants" added up to a single overarching—and open-ended—desire. "We want more," Gompers said in an 1890 speech. "We do want more. You will find that a man generally wants more." More was once the essence of progressive politics in America: more pay for factory workers; more roads, schools, parks, dams, and scientific research; more houses and education for returning G.I.s; more financial security for the elderly, poor, and disabled. Left-wing intellectuals might bemoan consumerism and folk singers deride "little boxes made of ticky-tacky," but Democratic politicians promised tangible goods. The New Deal and the Great Society were about more. In the early 1970s, however, progressives started abandoning the quest for plenty. They sought instead to regulate away injustice, pollution, and risk. The expansiveness of President Lyndon Johnson and California Gov. Pat Brown became the austerity of President Jimmy Carter and California Gov. Jerry Brown. Activists unleashed lawsuits to block public and private construction. Government spending began to skew away from public goods like parks and roads and toward income transfers and public employee compensation. Outside the digital world of bits, regulation made achieving more increasingly difficult if not downright impossible—in the public sphere as well as the private. With the presidencies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the politics of more came to mean giving people money or loan guarantees to buy things: houses, college degrees, child care, health insurance. But regulation grew along with the subsidies, and the supply of these goods didn't expand to meet demand. The subsidies just pushed up prices. Instead of delivering bounty, government programs fed shortages, and shortages fed anger and resentment. "Giving people a subsidy for a good whose supply is choked is like building a ladder to try to reach an elevator that is racing ever upward," write Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in Abundance. Klein and Thompson believe in supply-side progressivism, a term Klein coined in a 2021 New York Times column. Abundance is their manifesto on behalf of "a liberalism that builds." The authors want an activist government to emphasize creation rather than restriction, generating abundance rather than stoking resentment. Although concerned about climate change, they have no sympathy with the degrowthers who invoke it to argue for shutting down industry and imposing stasis. Making people worse off, they believe, is not a progressive cause. "We imagine a future not of less but of more," they write. "We do not subscribe to the seductive ideologies of scarcity. We will not get more or better jobs by closing our gates to immigrants. We will not turn back climate change by persuading the world to starve itself of growth. It is not merely that these visions are unrealistic. It is that they are counterproductive. They will not achieve the futures they seek. They will do more harm than good." Klein and Thompson take on the "lawn-sign liberalism," endemic in California, where signs declaring that "Black Lives Matter, Kindness Is Everything, and No Human Being Is Illegal…sit in yards zoned for single families, in communities that organize against efforts to add the new homes that would bring those values closer to reality." Progress, the authors argue, is not about enlarging a familiar pie. "The difference between an economy that grows and an economy that stagnates is change. When you grow an economy, you hasten a future that is different," they write. "The more growth there is, the more radically the future diverges from the past." Abundance is the left-leaning complement to James Pethokoukis's 2023 book The Conservative Futurist. Both books represent a growing intellectual movement to replace the zero-sum politics of pessimism and sclerosis with a hopeful vision of progress and abundance. "The nostalgia that permeates so much of today's right and no small part of today's left is no accident," Klein and Thompson write. "We have lost the faith in the future that once powered our optimism. We fight instead over what we have, or what we had." Although Abundance doesn't question the many environmental laws passed in the early 1970s, it does challenge the expansive interpretations that let activists block projects ranging from new apartments to wind farms. Klein and Thompson explain how a single court decision turned the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) into a procedural barrier against new construction. Signed by Gov. Ronald Reagan in 1970, CEQA required substantial government projects to file environmental impact reports before proceeding. Neither the governor nor the legislature saw it as a sweeping measure. In 1972, however, the state Supreme Court ruled that a private developer's plans to build condominiums and shops fell under the law merely because the project needed a permit. Regulation, in other words, became an excuse to treat private projects as the equivalent of freeways and dams. In the words of a Sierra Club lobbyist quoted in the book, CEQA had come to cover "anybody engaged commercially in putting two sticks of wood together." The ruling produced an enormous industry of lawyers and consultants while choking off construction. It was a prime example of lawn-sign liberalism: Affluent professionals benefited, while the general public got much less for its tax money and its housing dollar. Within the abundance movement, Klein and Thompson fall into the "eco-modernist" camp, embracing technology and prosperity as solutions to environmental problems. "This book is motivated," they write, "in no small part by our belief that we need to decarbonize the global economy to head off the threat of climate change." They worry that regulation and litigation are blocking green infrastructure. They want to make it easier to build solar arrays, wind farms, and the transmission lines to connect them to a new smart grid. They deem the war on nuclear power a massive government failure. "By some counts, nuclear power is safer than wind and cleaner than solar," they write. "It is inarguably safer than burning coal and petrol. And yet the US—facing a crisis of global warming—has almost stopped building nuclear power reactors and plants entirely. Between 1973 and 2024, the country started and finished only three new nuclear reactors. And it has shut down more nuclear plants than it's opened in most of our lifetimes. That is not a failure of the private market to responsibly bear risk but of the federal government to properly weigh risk." Klein and Thompson want political authorities to have more discretion. They recount how Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro used an emergency declaration to speed repairs after a tanker truck exploded and destroyed a bridge on Interstate 95, a crucial artery through the northeast. After he waived the normal procedures for taking bids, drawing up environmental reports, and halting construction at the first sign of rain, rebuilding took just 12 days rather than months. "The process Shapiro used would typically be illegal," Klein and Thompson write. "Yet national Democrats and Pennsylvania voters alike loved it. What does that say about the typical process?" Government, they conclude, "needs to justify itself not through the rules it follows but through the outcomes it delivers." That prescription sounds like common sense: Deliver the goods. Give the public what it wants. Make taxpayers feel they're getting their money's worth. But rules matter. A strongman unhampered by picayune restrictions may seem efficient at first, but even a wise and virtuous abundance czar will make serious mistakes when left unchecked by either rules or competition. Such mistakes are why rules accumulate in the first place. By their nature, manifestos are not deep. Abundance is more thorough than most, but in rallying progressives to the cause of more it avoids the hard questions. More what? Who decides and how? Where does feedback come from? Klein and Thompson isolate much of their abundance agenda from the valuable information conveyed by prices, preferring central direction even to market-based mechanisms like carbon taxes. "The market cannot, on its own, distinguish between the riches that flow from burning coal and the wealth that is created by bettering battery storage. Government can," Klein and Thompson write. "The market will not, on its own, fund the risky technologies whose payoff is social rather than economic. Government must." So the book doesn't make the case that California should have a high-speed rail system, for instance. It simply assumes that high-speed rail would be good and uses California's disastrous project to exemplify the absurdities of procedural progressivism. "In the time California has spent failing to complete its 500-mile high-speed rail system, China has built more than 23,000 miles of high-speed rail," the authors note. But China has also built whole cities that no one wants to live in. It has more steel capacity than it can profitably sell. China has more but not necessarily more of what people want. Who decides and how? Or take the national network of electric vehicle charging stations authorized in the Biden administration's infrastructure bill. Out of the 500,000 stations promised, Klein and Thompson lament, "by March 2024—more than two years after the bill passed—only seven new chargers were up and running." Assuming that electric charging stations are politically popular, they fear the delay will give the Trump administration credit for their construction. They misread public sentiment. At a conference put on last summer by the eco-modernist Breakthrough Institute, veteran Democratic pollster Celinda Lake gave a presentation on climate-related messages that do and do not move voters to support Democrats. The absolute worst message touted the 500,000 charging stations. While most unsuccessful messages had tiny positive effects, this one actually moved people toward Republicans. Don't talk about electric cars, Lake warned. Women in particular hate them, Lake said, because they're terrified of being stranded. But women love hybrids. In the automotive marketplace, hybrids are a success. But the technocratic vision Abundance offers doesn't have a place for them. In 2022, I served on a Breakthrough Institute conference panel moderated by Klein. As we assembled, he made a point of noting how much we disagree, citing my 1998 book The Future and Its Enemies. "I am a technocrat," he said, a term I use in the book to describe people who "promise to manage change, centrally directing 'progress' according to a predictable plan." They aren't the good guys. I argue instead for a more emergent, bottom-up approach, imagining an open-ended future that relies less on direction by smart guys with political authority and more on grassroots experimentation, competition, and criticism. What we share are the convictions that more is better than less and that a good society is not zero-sum. These days those beliefs make us allies. We can fight about the rest later. The post Lawn-Sign Liberalism vs. Supply-Side Progressivism appeared first on
