The Monday Mix (02/08/2021)
Hey friends,
Another Monday means another email. I sent out one of my recent essays yesterday, I hope you had a read through and enjoyed it. The essay touches on an important topic, one that’s going to be of more importance as the year goes on.
The plan is to write one or two of these types of essays a week and share one every Sunday going forward. I feel this offers something different for you to read rather than this email every week.
Plus, it lets you know what I’m working on too. As I shared that post yesterday, here’s an older piece I wrote on Medium last year. It deals with ten truths of life and how they can improve your life.
10 Truths That Will Improve Your Life
Man v Food
A fascinating piece that looks at the rise of artificial meat and whether it will usurp normal meat in the coming years. Agriculture and meat production are big contributors to climate change and if we’re to tackle the climate crisis, we’re going to have to reduce the amount we eat or improve agricultural practices. Artificial meat offers a solution, but is it a viable one? At the moment no, but it could be in the not too distant future.
The MyPillow Guy Really Could Destroy Democracy
Anne Applebaum is one of the best political writers out there and this is another fantastic piece on a figure not everyone is familiar with. But Mike Lindell, the CEO of My Pillow and ardent Trump supporter, is adamant his man will be returning to the White House a lot sooner than 2024. It’s easy to laugh at this guy and think he’s a crackpot, but throughout this piece, it becomes clear he really does believe what he says. That’s dangerous for democracy. The recognition of the truth is fundamental for democracy to function properly. Once this goes out of the window, the very foundations of democracy itself are undermined.
Climate change is a global threat demanding national solutions
Climate change is the biggest challenge we face in the coming decades. If you want an indication of that you only have to turn to the news the past few months to see why. Wildfires in America and Turkey, heatwaves across America and Canada and the flooding which ravaged Germany. We need to act soon, or these events will become normal instead of extraordinary. But, that action needs to be fair and have consent from voters. It’s one thing for rich folk to swap gas-guzzling SUVs for electric models, but that’s not so easy for those who aren’t as well off. An effective strategy would reconcile these two points and ensure the race to decarbonise doesn’t come to be seen as another elitist project rather than an essential goal to ensure the planet is habitable for us and future generations.
Book I’m Reading - A Brief History of Time: I’ve always been fascinated with physics and the workings of the universe and it’s a pleasure reading this book by the late Stephen Hawking. It’s a skill to take such complicated matters and make them accessible to the layperson. A skill Hawking pulled off to perception in this book.
Quote I’m Pondering - “Humans cannot live without illusions. For the men and women of today, an irrational faith in progress may be the only antidote to nihilism. Without the hope that the future will be better than the past, they could not go on.” - John Gray
That’s all for this week.
Until next time,
Tom