Tag: Comes

In an emergency installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew breaks down what is new and notable in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Friday indictment of 12 Russian intelligence agents. The charges lay out detailed accounts of how investigators believe Russian government agents conspired to hack Democratic campaign infrastructure and attempted to break into state elections systems. The news also comes days before President Trump is scheduled to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin. You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen. The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast publishes Monday evenings, with occasional special episodes throughout the week. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

Image The philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum wants Americans to get in touch with their feelings; not in a fit of self-indulgence but as a righteous act of civic duty. In “The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis,” she writes against a (mostly male) tradition of philosophical and political thinking that minimizes emotions as merely a source of irrationality and embarrassment. With more than two dozen books to her name, Nussbaum has been here before. But the 2016 presidential election made her realize she “hadn’t gone deep enough.” A self-described “liberal social democrat,” she was so shaken by Donald J. Trump’s victory — having been “reasonably confident that appeals to fear and anger would be repudiated” — that she felt an overwhelming sensation of alarm. She believed fear was what had gotten Trump elected, and here she was, so scared that she was momentarily incapable of being “balanced or fair-minded”: “I was part of the problem that I worried about.” An elegant and precise stylist, Nussbaum has always seemed a peculiar spokeswoman for bringing unruly emotions into the fold. She writes about gut feelings like envy and disgust with an air of serene lucidity. She has spent decades parsing the role of negative emotions while resisting their seductive pull. Once she realized she might be able to wring some insight from upheaval, she “went back to sleep with a calming sense of hope.” Since we’re talking about feelings, I’ll confess to experiencing pinpricks of irritation when I came across that self-satisfied line, which appears on the second page of Nussbaum’s preface, before she has even started to make her argument. “On the one hand, I am helpless, and the universe doesn’t care about me,” Nussbaum writes. When the vulnerability of children becomes less a reason for protection than an opportunity to do harm, perhaps some fear really is in order.