For the European project to survive another 60 years, the key is flexibility, in both directions. Just as Britain is leaving the EU, another country might one day leave the euro. Any such step will be hard to manage. But if the union cannot embrace differentiation, it faces the risk of disintegration instead.
The Economist (March 25 – 31, 2017)
Much has been written since about the shockingly irresponsible behavior of both David Cameron and Boris Johnson, but I don’t think I would have been so entirely focused upon Boris and Dave if I had woken up in my own bed, in London. No, then my first thoughts would have been essentially hermeneutic. What does this vote mean? What was it really about? Immigration? Inequality? Historic xenophobia? Sovereignty? EU bureaucracy? Anti-neoliberal revolution? Class war?
But in Northern Ireland it was clear that one thing it certainly wasn’t about, not even slightly, was Northern Ireland, and this focused the mind on what an extraordinary act of solipsism has allowed this long-brutalized little country to become the collateral damage of an internal rift within the Conservative Party. And Scotland! It’s hard to credit. That two supposedly well-educated men, who have presumably read their British history, could with such utter recklessness throw into hazard a hard-won union of three hundred years’ standing—in order to satisfy their own professional ambitions—appeared that morning a larger crime, to me, than the severing of the decades-long European pact that actually prompted it all.
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A few days after the vote I came to France, to teach my NYU students in their Paris summer program, something that I suppose will not be so easy to do very soon. Straight off the train, I headed to dinner and sat down in a restaurant opposite one of my colleagues, the Bosnian-born writer Aleksandar Hemon, ordered a drink, and pronounced Brexit, melodramatically, “a total disaster.” Novelists are prone to melodrama. Hemon sighed, smiled sadly, and said: “No: just ‘a disaster.’ War is the total disaster.” Living through Yugoslavia’s bloody sovereignty implosion gives a man a sense of proportion. A European war on that scale is something Britain has avoided intimately experiencing for more than half a century now, and in defense against which the EU was in part formed. Whether we go any further down the road marked “disaster” is up to us.
-Zadie Smith ‘Fences: A Brexit Diary‘ The New York Review of Books
Americans need to wake up from their cozy assumption that the apparatus of a supranational state is the only way to ensure a peaceful and cooperative European partner. Across Europe the younger generation wants to go beyond the nation-state to break down barriers and find new ways to resolve problems that extend beyond national boundaries. They will find ways to do this that do not require the outdated trappings of a supranational entity with its own anthem, flag, parliament, and now even steps toward an army.
-Mervyn King ‘Which Europe Now?‘ The New York Review of Books
Other prominent ‘Leave’ campaigners were also rewarded. One, David Davis, took the key role of Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union.
-Kylie MacLellan and William James ‘New PM May gives Johnson big job, says needs time before Brexit talks‘ Reuters
Voter turnout increases as people age and settle into families and jobs, but it also depends on enthusiasm for candidates and feelings about the direction of the country. Millennials may not feel excited about Clinton, but if they would rue the day President Trump got elected, they need to show up and vote.
-Indira Lakshmanan ‘Millennials, Brexit is your wakeup call‘ The Boston Globe
(Emmanuel) Macron proposed a solution that sounded revelatory in the context of the myopia of the political class: a conversation. “That’s what politics is,” he said. Le Pen understands this very well—she has been defter than her opponents at making her ideas heard. It’s unlikely that she will actually be able to win a majority of votes and carry out a referendum, but those who disagree with her will have to make their case just as loudly.
-Elisabeth Zerofsky ‘Marine Le Pen prepares for a ‘Frexit’‘ The New Yorker
Yet in an age when technology is integrating us more tightly together and delivering tremendous flows of innovation, knowledge, connectivity and commerce, the future belongs to those who build webs not walls, who can integrate not separate, to get the most out of these flows.
-Thomas L. Friedman ‘You Break It, You Own It‘ The New York Times
In an industry in which it is sometimes hard to tell what is truth and what is a paid promotion, Cunningham was obsessive in his philosophy of refusal. For decades he worked independently and only grudgingly joined the Times staff — mostly for the health insurance. At a time when fashion influencers regularly receive free airfare, free clothes, free hotels, Cunningham was a journalistic ascetic. He valued his freedom more than anything else.
-Robin Givhan ‘What Bill Cunningham taught us about ethical journalism‘ The Washington Post
But I am all for change. A static world is not a good world. And, as I said, with change comes opportunity.
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But more than that, going into a foxhole right now seems like the wrong idea. Some of the best companies have been created in times of great economic turmoil. And, because of that, some of the best venture capital investments have been made in times when everyone was risk averse. I am not for getting too excited when times are good and I am not for getting too conservative when times feel bad. I am all for looking for opportunity at every turn.
-Fred Wilson ‘Some Thoughts On Brexit‘ AVC
There are some cultural milestones that you don’t even know exist until you trip over them: the moment, for instance, when an “active shooter” becomes the kind of thing a furniture manufacturer might factor into its product design in the same way it considers ergonomics or biodegradability. The migration of the term “active shooter” from law-enforcement training manuals into the world of cable-news chyrons, Twitter rumors and uploaded cellphone videos is itself an indicator of how a once-anomalous tragedy has become just another event to prepare for, like the Fourth of July or a tornado.
-Charles Homans ‘The ‘Active Shooter’ Is Never Far Away‘ The New York Times
The political center has lost its power to persuade and its essential means of connection to the people it seeks to represent. Instead, we are seeing a convergence of the far left and far right. The right attacks immigrants while the left rails at bankers, but the spirit of insurgency, the venting of anger at those in power and the addiction to simple, demagogic answers to complex problems are the same for both extremes. Underlying it all is a shared hostility to globalization.
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If the people — usually a repository of common sense and practicality — do something that appears neither sensible nor practical, then it forces a period of long and hard reflection. My own politics is waking to this new political landscape. The same dangerous impulses are visible, too, in American politics, but the challenges of globalization cannot be met by isolationism or shutting borders.
The center must regain its political traction, rediscover its capacity to analyze the problems we all face and find solutions that rise above the populist anger. If we do not succeed in beating back the far left and far right before they take the nations of Europe on this reckless experiment, it will end the way such rash action always does in history: at best, in disillusion; at worst, in rancorous division. The center must hold.
-Tony Blair ‘Brexit’s stunning coup‘ The New York Times
I once felt all that kind of anger, which a man ought to feel, against the mean principles that are held by the Tories: a noted one, who kept a tavern at Amboy, was standing at his door, with as pretty a child in his hand, about eight or nine years old, as I ever saw, and after speaking his mind as freely as he thought was prudent, finished with this unfatherly expression, “Well! give me peace in my day.”
Not a man lives on the continent but fully believes that a separation must some time or other finally take place, and a generous parent should have said, “If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace;” and this single reflection, well applied, is sufficient to awaken every man to duty.
-Thomas Paine ‘The Crisis‘
Indeed, Brexit also carries serious implications for how copyright is protected and enforced throughout Europe. At present, the European Commission is reviewing copyright legislation, including safe harbor provisions, as part of its Digital Single Market strategy. The U.K. stood to benefit from those regulations and, just as importantly, have a voice in how they are devised. That’s no longer the case, although the country’s newfound independence does raise the possibility of the British government formulating its own copyright regulations, free from Brussels’ restrictions.
-Richard Smirke ‘What Brexit Means For The U.K. Music Business‘ Billboard
When Michael Gove said, ‘The British people are sick of experts,’ he was right. But can anybody tell me the last time a prevailing culture of anti-intellectualism has led to anything other than bigotry?”
— Nicholas on FT.com
The Metal Detector 