Good morning, Quartz readers!
This week in Washington, an excerpt from a new book on the Trump White House landed like a bombshell. The details were salacious, confirming the worst suspicions of his detractors: Trump is incurious, intellectually lazy, and a bully. He uses people to further his own ends and then discards them. He demands loyalty and fealty, but offers none in return. He wants his advisors to be deferential sycophants, but then he belittles them for their weakness and lack of backbone. He respects the generals he’s hired, but is oblivious to their lack of respect for him. His cabinet and staff think he’s an idiot, but most are too power-hungry to walk away, or think they’re protecting the country by protecting the president from himself.
So taken was the internet by the gossip in Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury that a parodic excerpt describing a “Gorilla Channel” set up by White House staff to occupy the TV-addicted Trump was treated with total credulity. (It was a fake. There is no Gorilla Channel in the White House. That we know of.)
But are we really learning anything about this man that we didn’t already know? This behavior was on display at rallies, debates, and interviews, during the campaign, and for decades before it. In spite of Trump’s very Trumpiness, enough Americans pulled the lever to deliver him to the Oval Office.
What the book does suggest is exactly what world leaders fear: There is no good way to engage with Trump. His own advisors can barely restrain him from starting a nuclear war, and foreign powers are at a loss for how to handle him. As Quartz’s Heather Timmons explained: “Consultants and overseas officials trying to ferry foreign leaders around Washington have found themselves flummoxed by the disarray and blindsided when agreements they make with, say, the State Department, are overturned by a Trump tweet.”
“A house divided itself cannot stand,” said Abraham Lincoln, a few years before before going to war to stop the American experiment from tearing itself apart. Today one wonders how long a White House divided can presume to lead the world. The US elected an ill-equipped man after a campaign of fear and cynicism, a man now increasingly cut off from reality and the powers of his office, thanks to a staff that is still trying to convince the public a madman is not in charge. Where, we are all wondering, will this path lead?—Paul Smalera
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The capitalist experiment that keeps Appalachia poor, sick, and stuck on coal. Ask most Americans what they know about coal, and they’ll tell you the industry is dying. But as Gwynn Guilford explains, the industry hasn’t been thriving in central Appalachia for a very long time. Instead, government subsidies have kept coal companies on a kind of artificial life support, passing the costs on to the public—at the expense of their health, environment, economy, and human potential.
Millennials are more perfectionist than Gen Xers, because capitalism. Perhaps you’ve noticed that newer college grads at your office are hyper-focused on accomplishment and are highly self-critical, more than you were at the same age. As Lila MacLellan reports, that would fit the trend: a new study of personality test scores since the late 1980s—and representing college students in the UK, US, and Canada—suggests perfectionism is more prevalent in every new generation. A cultural shift toward neoliberal economics in all three countries can explain the phenomenon, the study’s authors suggest. And Instagram hasn’t helped.
One website is more trustworthy than the rest when it comes to diet tips. Searching for diet advice on Instagram has become the nutritional equivalent of self-diagnosing your medical ailments through Google. So if you want to lose weight this year, swing to the other end of the internet’s rabbit hole: Reddit. There is not a community more skeptical and scrupulous, so you can be assured that you’re cutting the fat. Digital nutrition researcher Tim Squirrell spent the past two and half years analyzing Reddit’s paleo community and has worked out the best ways to work out.
Employees are scary. Being a manager inevitably entails uncomfortable discussions at work, yet an astounding number of managers say that the hardest thing about talking to their employees is talking to them at all. Nearly 70% of US managers are uncomfortable with it, Corinne Purtill reports for Quartz At Work. Their fear of miscommunication could be partly responsible for the virtually identical proportion of US workers who say they’re not engaged at their jobs.
Improve your media diet in 2018. These days, there are so many great podcasts that even dedicated narrative-audiophiles were likely to overlook one or two (or 10) excellent shows. Quartz’s 2017 Casties offer a wide-ranging selection of some of the most creative, forward-thinking, and essential podcasts of the last 12 months. And if you prefer to try it before you buy it, we’ve also handed out awards to the year’s best single episodes across a dozen categories.
Five things elsewhere that made us smarter
What does a trillion dollars in infrastructure spending look like? Photographer Davide Monteleone’s recent portfolio in the New Yorker on China’s Belt and Road Initiative, an infrastructure plan to connect China to Central Asia, Africa and Europe, begins to scratch the surface of this colossal undertaking. Along the way he explores the landscapes and people who will be affected by these investments for decades to come.
2017 was a weird one for a lot of reasons. Chief among those, though, was the realization that a lot of the online platforms we spend our lives on aren’t harmless or even neutral—but often rather quite destructive to democracy and other social norms. Kaitlyn Tiffany’s piece in The Verge serves as a great reflection on how the last year changed our relationship to the internet and whether or not, as she puts it, it is now “useful to debate whether the internet itself is ‘the internet’ or simply the world.”
Who needs sleep? It consumes a hefty fraction of our lives and influences our health, mood, and productivity. But why, exactly, do humans have to sleep? For the Atlantic, Veronique Greenwood visits a lab in Japan to meet the researchers unlocking the many ineffable mysteries of the sleeping brain.
How sausage flavors the German language. Tubed meats certainly are not the wurst thing to base a bunch of German idioms, metaphors, aphorisms, and sayings around. For the BBC, Giulia Pines smokes out how it is that the pork-based meat product came to define a language, culture, and country.
A tale of two garbage collectors. In the city of New York, household waste is efficiently collected by well-paid, unionized, and safe city workers. Commercial waste, however, is removed by a handful of private carting companies using dangerous trucks who run their employees ragged, often causing traffic accidents and fatalities—among their own workers and pedestrians—in the process. For ProPublica, Kiera Feldman tells the tale of parallel waste streams running through the Big Apple, and how privatized trash haulers—workers and owners alike—exist on a razor’s edge of profit, safety, and trash.
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