Hey friends,
Here’s the first edition of the No Trump Newsletter. Thanks for signing up. I hope you find some interesting stories here to start your week.
Housing in America
We’re kicking things off with a real upbeat report about America’s racist housing structure.
Seriously though, this interview is fantastic. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s perspective is clearly well-researched, and her ability to synthesize big-picture, multi-generational structural problems into digestible paragraphs is fantastic.
Considering ideas like this will help all of us make small, ethical decisions that will hopefully build into a collective better future.
The youths in the office
Young people are going to save the American workplace because we’re committed to the revolutionary idea that we shouldn’t have to feel sad all of the time in order to pay rent.
(This article is part of a series the Times recently published on the workplace. It’s my favorite of the bunch, but the whole project is worth a read.)
Using Instagram in a way that actually helps
Social media is primarily a performative space where we nurse an addiction to technology while giving personal information and ad revenue to billionaires. Nevertheless! There’s a way to use Instagram to make yourself feel better: Scroll through your own photos. (Seriously!)
What happened to Jeremy Renner
Read anything Anne Hellen Petersen ever writes, ever.
(If deep dives into celebrity pysches aren’t your thing, the best introduction to Petersen’s work is her viral piece on millennial burnout that caused hundreds of thousands of 20- and 30-somethings to say, “AMEN!” It’s one of my favorite reads of 2019.)
Money isn’t everything
Wendell Berry has a fantastic essay about an economy of profit vs. an economy of affection. The gist: we can choose to orient our lives around affection — for ourselves, for others, for creation — instead of profit. It has to be a continual, conscious choice, because profit is the starting point of nearly all modern action.
This article puts it another way: Stop monetizing your hobbies.
Issues in the evangelical workplace
If you grew up in evangelical culture (a quick glance at the people who signed up for this email says that about 70% of you did) then you read, and probably tried to write for, Relevant Magazine. (I refuse to adhere to their company style that demands the magazine title be written in all caps. No.)
In the last few weeks, a slew of former staffers have spoken out to expose a toxic leadership culture that has been unchecked for more than a decade. This was spurred on by a brave essay from former managing editor Andre Henry about his experience working for Relevant.
This roundup from Religion News Services explains what has happened, and it also poses an important question for any of us who still claim some form of faith: Why does it seem like faith-based workplaces are prone to this kind of toxicity?
(I have theories, but I’ll leave it as an open question to consider.)
Book recommendation of the week
This feature will appear intermittently in the newsletter based entirely on whether or not I have recently finished a good book. This week, I read Austin Channing Brown’s “I’m Still Here.” It was a three-day read, partly because her writing is concise and partly because I did not want to stop reading.
This book is not for me. This book is for people of color — a clear articulation of black dignity, as the subtitle says, “In a world made for whiteness.” I don’t want to comment on the book, because part of the point is that this work doesn’t need my comment. No white voice needed. Just read it.
That’s it for this week. How’d I do? I’m trying to balance the stories I choose to be a mix of important and entertaining — while making sure it’s all interesting. I’m sure I didn’t strike the balance perfectly on the first go-round, but I promise it will keep getting better. Feedback is always appreciated.
Let me know about great stories I missed. This newsletter is more about interesting thoughts than timeliness, so I have no problem including it later on.
Cheers,
Kyle