Currently reading: Uncommon Unity by RICHARD. LINTS 📚
Currently reading: Generations by Jean M. Twenge 📚
Joseph Lawler, concluding his piece in The New Atlantis on the tradeoffs Austin faces in accommodating growth in the coming years:
Texans plan their daily commutes around what is feasible. And they rent or buy where it makes sense. There are plenty of people who would move further out and brave the traffic on an expanded I-35 if it meant a bigger and nicer house. On the other hand, many of the same people would move into a duplex near downtown and skip out on the commute altogether if that option were available and affordable.
For the most part, though, they will simply do their best given the set of constraints they find imposed on them. Texans, generally speaking, are not invested in the politics of transportation and urban planning.
Maybe they should be. Maybe they should be asked to be. In the coming years, Austin is going to add hundreds of thousands of residents. No one ever voted to have them shunted into exurbs in the Hill Country and proceed to clog up highways, but that is what is set to happen. If the people of Austin instead want them to settle in a pattern that more resembles Venice or even just Seattle, they’ll have to work quickly to reform transportation planning and land use policies to make it feasible. Otherwise, it will be left to TxDOT alone to get them where they’re going.
The Entrance to the Grand Canal, Venice (c. 1730) by Canaletto:
The Stonemason’s Yard (c. 1725) by Canaletto:
Some watercolors from Marie Bracquemond:
Finished reading: Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work by Matthew B. Crawford 📚
An indispensable book from an indispensable thinker. You can detect the major outlines of Crawford’s intellectual project in this book, which are still being worked out today.
Today, in our schools, the manual trades are given little honor. The egalitarian worry that has always attended tracking students into “college prep” and “vocational ed” is overlaid with another: the fear that acquiring a specific skill set means that one’s life is determined. In college, by contrast, many students don’t learn anything of particular application; college is the ticket to an open future. Craftsmanship entails learning to do one thing really well, while the ideal of the new economy is to be able to learn new things, celebrating potential rather than achievement. Somehow, every worker in the cutting-edge workplace is now supposed to act like an “intrapreneur,” that is, to be actively involved in the continuous redefinition of his own job. Shop class presents an image of stasis that runs directly counter to what Sennett identifies as “a key element in the new economy’s idealized self: the capacity to surrender, to give up possession of an established reality.” This stance toward “established reality,” which can only be called psychedelic, is best not indulged around a table saw. It is dissatisfied with what Arendt calls the “reality and reliability” of the world. It is a strange sort of ideal, attractive only to a particular sort of self—insecurity about the basic character of the world is no fun for most people.
As Sennett argues, most people take pride in being good at something specific, which happens through the accumulation of experience. Yet the flitting disposition is pressed upon workers from above by the current generation of management revolutionaries, for whom the ethic of craftsmanship is actually something to be rooted out from the workforce. Craftsmanship means dwelling on a task for a long time and going deeply into it, because you want to get it right. In managementspeak, this is called being “ingrown.” The preferred role model is the management consultant, who swoops in and out and whose very pride lies in his lack of particular expertise. Like the ideal consumer, the management consultant presents an image of soaring freedom, in light of which the manual trades appear cramped and paltry: the plumber with his butt crack, peering under the sink.
