Things to read and think about

1. Let's start with politics. David Runciman: "It is often said of democratic politics that the question voters ask of any leader is: ‘Do I like this person?’ But it seems more likely that the question at the back of their minds is: ‘Would this person like me?’"  Runciman also tells us this: "All the women in May’s current cabinet, barring the leader of the Lords, Baroness Evans, were helped to enter Parliament by May’s organisation, [Women2Win]." (Runciman's article is a review of a book about Theresa May. Runciman knows David Cameron from school, and makes it somewhat about Cameron too. The contrast is interesting and he writes it very fairly. But I would love to see a similar article written by someone who was at school with May.)

2. For those of you who care about such things, reasons not to worry about all that Brexit stuff that people still keep going on about:

(A) There was no wave of hate accompanying Brexit. You didn't spot it in real life. That's because it didn't happen. In fact "the UK public actually became more positive towards EU immigration between November 2015 and November 2016, the period covering the campaign, vote and supposedly hate-filled aftermath". Note also that "the UK’s positivity towards non-EU immigration is significantly higher than the EU average." People just don't like the EU. If you think that normal British people are unable to distinguish EU citizens from the EU, consider whether you are able to distinguish between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

(B) And there's not going to be a problem with a Brexit deal either. Deals will get done. Maybe this will be one of them.

3. Now let's slow down and chillax more generally.

(A) There are good reasons to slow down. Drugs can make you better at chess and it seem that they do so not (as you would have thought) by speeding you up, but by slowing you down.

(B) Resist the Internet!, says Ross Douthat calmly and sensibly. But he's not alone. You may recall David Gelernter saying it in one of my links not long ago, and here is Scott Adams too: "My observation is that smartphones have made half of all adults mentally ill. I mean that literally, not figuratively. The business model of phones is addiction, not value. And they addict you at the expense of the things humans need in their lives to be happy and healthy."

(C) Are you reading stuff? Stop! "Let’s say you pick up a copy of Jude the Obscure, become obsessed with Victorian fiction and somehow manage to make your way through all 200-odd books generally considered part of that canon. Moretti would say: So what? As many as 60,000 other novels were published in 19th-century England—to mention nothing of other times and places. You might know your George Eliot from your George Meredith, but you won’t have learned anything meaningful about literature, because your sample size is absurdly small. Since no feasible amount of reading can fix that, what’s called for is a change not in scale but in strategy. To understand literature, Moretti argues, we must stop reading books." But you should read that link and perhaps worry a little.

(D) You're not surfing the web or reading, so what should you do? Voltaire had it right: we must cultivate our garden. Perhaps because everything is going to be fine, or perhaps because the (or at least a) world is going to end.