• The concept of “thingeries”—public libraries for borrowing objects, not books (via Alan Jacobs’s newsletter).
  • New Zealand becoming “the first western country to design its entire budget around wellbeing priorities and instruct its ministries to design policies to improve wellbeing” (via The Guardian).
  • Simon Jenkins’s Guardian op-ed about crowds and Venezuela’s confusing, disintegrating revolution: “The greatest of historical fallacies is to confuse crowds with power. Venezuela has disappeared from the headlines, because its headlines were about crowds, not about the realities of power. The trouble with crowds is that, sooner or later, they go home.”
    • “I believe that where the crowd can be most effective is when deployed tactically against a specific, winnable goal. In the climate change argument, local crowds in the north of England have all but stopped fracking. Anti-GM food campaigners won their war in Europe. Demonstrators against the Sackler family in New York are wrecking its reputation and cutting arts funding. Where power is shamed by publicity, it can concede ground without too much inconvenience.”
    • I still think, maybe naively, that the ultimate power in a state lies with the people (or with “crowds”) and that even the specter of the crowd’s power sometimes, partly helps to keep our government in line.