The News
Big game, small world
Is globalization intensifying, or ebbing? Neither? Both? The political scientist Daniel Drezner spotlights two recent pieces in the Financial Times and Vox that appear to argue opposite cases but which, Drezner argues, cohere around the notion that the global economy has somehow overcome a seemingly unending series of geopolitical shocks — for now. “Great power governments and violent non-state actors have done their darnedest to push the world towards economic segmentation, and it just ain’t happening,” Drezner writes.
“In many ways the current period might resemble the global political economy of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century,” he continues. “Even as countries were raising tariffs, improvements in technology and infrastructure swamped those effects, causing globalization to continue to grow.” Drezner acknowledges one possible cloud on the horizon, however: “Of course, that era ended with the First World War.”
Joke’s on you
When a graphic artist in 1987 depicted Augusto Pinochet as Louis XIV on the cover of a magazine, the Chilean dictator responded by confiscating every copy of the publication, and jailing the magazine’s editors for extremism: Such is the power humor can have over dictators, “Authoritarians succeed when their extremism and exceptionalism… is normalized,” the scholar of fascism Ruth Ben-Ghiat wrote in her newsletter, Lucid. “Humor that calls this out can be deeply validating.”
Autocrats and their opponents all use humor — in differing ways, and to differing ends. The former seek to humiliate critics and allies alike, in an effort to showcase their strength. The latter group try to use jokes and satire to undermine the seemingly all-powerful dictator. One trend she notes: “As strongmen consolidate their power, they become more insecure and thus less tolerant of criticism, even if that criticism is made in jest.”
A friend in deed
Technology and the internet are changing society in ways we are only beginning to grasp. Take, for example, friendship. Pre-internet, people were largely limited to maintaining friendships in their immediate geography, and a relative lack of mobility meant those connections were fairly stable. Those factors are gradually eroding, and the impacts are not being felt equally: Those with higher levels of education are more likely to report having close friends than those with less education.
That doesn’t, however, mean that friendship is in inexorable decline. “The new social landscape requires a more purposeful and attentive approach to developing and sustaining social relationships,” Kelsey Eyre Hammond writes in American Storylines, reviewing a new book about the changing nature of friendship. One conclusion: “If [friendships] seem more difficult to manage and maintain it’s because they are.”