This post is not paywalled, but I have a lot of content that is, including two ongoing series: “How to Not Suck at Math,” and another of creative writing. If you’d like a paid subscription but cannot afford one, email hollymathnerd at gmail dot com for a free year.
One of the most important life skills is to know what you don’t know.
Watching President Biden’s press conference on Thursday night, all I knew for sure was that my memories from high school—of a grandmother suffering from dementia who reacted badly to having her daily routine interrupted—were flooding into my mind.
Intuitively, it seemed like an astonishingly stupid and dangerous thing for Biden to do. That thought (“How in the hell are they letting him do this, and do it live?”) no sooner appeared in my conscious mind than he started talking about Mexico being on the border with Gaza. But I know that I don’t know nearly enough—not about political science, political game theory, historical context, or really anything beyond what happens in the world outside my small New England village—to trust my intuition on such a thing.
But even if my intuition were, in this case, totally correct—what does any of it mean? I knew the significance was beyond what I could grasp with my current base of knowledge and life experience. Things are so bizarre now that it’s February 9 and the final candidates aren’t—it seems to me—decided with any certainty yet. Between Trump’s legal jeopardy and Biden’s age and health, who knows? The persistence of question marks about these things is one of the many aspects of 2024 I find perplexing and stressful.
Thus, I am absolutely delighted to share with you that one of my favorite writers released an analysis of Biden’s press conference that I found immensely helpful and clarifying. He took a lot of the noise in the culture around me that I could “hear” but not understand, and identified the sources and significances. I highly recommend it.
Three Pieces of News
One: I’ve removed the paywall (permanently) and opened comments to everyone (at least for now, ha ha) on a recent essay about “anti-racism.” It’s a deep dive on what I learned from studying a major “anti-racist” newsletter archives and my attempt to boil that worldview down to its five major tenets. If “anti-racism” is popping up in your life (or in your kids’ schools) you may find it helpful.
Two: I’m enjoying a new Substack, The Fiction Dealer, that posts daily prompts for very short fiction—50 or 100 words. I’ve started participating via Substack Notes, to good responses, and may start gathering some of those for inclusion in my creative writing series.
Three: Finally—my recent book reviews have been popular enough that I’m getting a ton of requests from writers to review their books. You are welcome to send me your book to review. My guidelines for authors who want me to review their books are here.
Have a wonderful weekend!
About My Substack: I’m a data scientist who would rather be a math teacher but, being unwilling to brainwash kids into Woke nonsense, am presently unqualified to teach in the US. So I bring my “math is fun and anyone can learn it” approach to mathematics here to Substack in my series, “How to Not Suck at Math,” (first five entries not paywalled, links at the top of part 5, here). Paid subscribers also have access to a creative writing series in which I post a variety of things, including fiction, poetry, descriptions, and other “writing experiments,” along with personal stories that don’t relate to Larger Points I Want To Make About The World.
My other posts are mostly cultural takes from a broadly anti-Woke perspective—yes, I’m one of those annoying classical liberals who would’ve been considered on the left until ten seconds ago. Lately I’ve regained a childhood love of reading and started publishing book reviews, including of the Wokest novel I’ve ever read and a memoir by Rob Henderson. My most widely useful essay may be this one, about how to resist the demon of self-termination.
Jesus Christ. "A Simple Moment of Weakness" (https://jdanielsawyer.substack.com/p/a-simple-moment-of-weakness) is truly frightening. I knew all of that before... but to see it organized before me was anxiety-inducing. Our situation reminds me of the 'three-body problem' in physics. Apparently it's functionally difficult/impossible to model the movement of 3 gravitationally-linked bodies. Tiny changes from one can lead to increasingly wide divergences. Idk.. I'm not a physicist but we are at the mercy of so many dark and accelerating trends right now. Who knows how they will influence each other... and us?
Just a reminder that every person's acts and words matter. Be just, be kind, be honest. You never know who it might redeem, and it couldn't hurt.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/
I just subscribed to your recommendation. I needed that. It's so difficult to be in the place we are in right now. I can feel the shifts in my gut, but I can not pinpoint them. I am not crazy. This is really what is happening. I don't know why that makes me feel a little better, but it does.