The Realignment: Happy Birthday Marshall, Kevin Roose on Automation, and Michael Brendan Dougherty on the Future of Populism
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Today’s Marshall’s birthday, so as a present from all of you, he’d really appreciate it if you forgive how sparse this email is.
Welcome Back to the Realignment
This week we aired two episodes: Kevin Roose, a technology columnist for The New York Times and host of “Rabbit Hote,” a podcast on the ways the internet influences beliefs and behavior, and Michael Brendan Dougherty, a senior writer at National Review and visiting fellow at The American Enterprise Institute.
Episode 107: Michael Brendan Dougherty: Populism’s Just Getting Started
You can purchase Michael’s book, My Father Left Me Ireland: An American Son’s Search for Home, at our Bookshop storefront below.
Episode 106: Kevin Roose: Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation
You can purchase Kevin’s new book, Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation, at our Bookshop storefront below.
The Realignment’s Bookshop.org Storefront
As a reminder, we’ve created a Realignment podcast affiliate shop for guest books at bookshop.org. The shop features our guests’ books, including books from Michael Lind, Scott Galloway, Reeves Wiedeman, Ross Douthat, Matt Stoller, and Lisa Napoli.
We’ve built out three Bookshop lists:
1) Our list of the best books we read in 2020
2) All of the books we’ve read so far in 2021
3) Books written by Realignment podcast guests
If you purchase a book using our link, we get a 10% commission, a local bookseller gets supported, and you get an awesome book! Watch this space for new uploads and future lists by topic.
Let us know what you think about this, or any other week’s episodes. Please share The Realignment with anyone who’d enjoy the podcast.
Great podcasts as always. Hope you're doing well and reading more fiction. Ender's Game and Three Body problem are great, but I find after enough biographies of presidents and books with flashy titles exposing the state of technology, all non fiction books start to blend and lose their uniqueness. Fiction is great to divide those up and actually put the joy back into reading (non fiction books are great, but nothing beats a good page turner).
Anyways: Some guests on the pod propose a solution to money in politics and the dominance of special interests is to put more money and politics and forward the right special interests. The solution to bad regulation of tech is more tech donation (looking at you David Sacks). These very smart and otherwise insightful people have blindspots when it comes to their self interests. Do you think more donation can ever get us out of special interest problems?
Kevin Roose podcast was very interesting and a wide variety of topics covered.
I wanted to point out I don't think his analysis of young Christians and "evangelicals" is entirely accurate. I think there is a strong contingent that is trying to be more balanced and in the realignment where they don't support either extreme of "MAGA" or woke.
Also, organizations like https://www.andcampaign.org/ are giving a more nuanced view of politics and forms of policy for urban Christians.
One of their catchphrases being "too progressive for conservatives, too conservative for progressives."
Cheers,