David Payne Candy Cane Christmas Train - Monday Morning Memo

Alert rabbit-holer Bryan Kennedy sent us this link to an amazing story-cartoon.
It’s worth the 3-minutes. Trust me. – Indy

If you want to prepare yourself for this little story cartoon, read this quote I snagged from the wizard’s random quotes database. He always goes to it on day one of the Magical Worlds workshop:

“Our perception does not identify the outside world as it really is, but the way that we are allowed to recognize it, as a consequence of transformations performed by our senses. We experience electromagnetic waves, not as waves, but as images and colors. We experience vibrating objects, not as vibrations, but as sounds. We experience chemical compounds dissolved in air or water, not as chemicals, but as specific smells and tastes. Colors, sounds, smells and tastes are products of our minds, built from sensory experiences. They do not exist, as such, outside our brain. Actually, the universe is colorless, odorless, insipid and silent. Although you and I share the same biological architecture and function, perhaps what I perceive as a distinct color and smell is not exactly equal to the color and smell you perceive. We may give the same name to similar perceptions, but we cannot know how they relate to the reality of the outside world. Perhaps we never will.”

– Dr. Jorge Martins de Oliveira

“‘Highly educated, curious, ironic, wittily countercultural, X people tend to underdress for social occasions,’ Fussell wrote. ‘They know the best wine stores and delis. They have risen above the muck of mainstream culture to a higher, hipper sensibility.’ The chapter about X people was insufferably self-regarding, but Fussell was onto something.

Every once in a while, in times of transformation, a revolutionary class comes along and disrupts old structures, introduces new values, opens up economic and cultural chasms. In the 19th century, it was the bourgeoisie, the capitalist merchant class. In the latter part of the 20th century, as the information economy revved up and the industrial middle class hollowed out, it was X people.

Seventeen years later, I wrote a book about that same class, Bobos in Paradise. The bobos didn’t necessarily come from money, and they were proud of that; they’d secured their places in selective universities and in the job market through drive and intelligence exhibited from an early age, they believed. X types deemed themselves as rebels against the staid elite. They were—as the classic Apple commercial had it—“the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers.” But by 2000, the information economy and the tech boom were showering the highly educated with cash. They had to find ways of spending their gobs of money while showing they didn’t care for material things. So they developed an elaborate code of financial correctness to display their superior sensibility. Spending lots of money on any room formerly used by the servants was socially defensible: A $7,000 crystal chandelier in the living room was vulgar, but a $10,000, 59-inch AGA stove in the kitchen was acceptable, a sign of your foodie expertise. When it came to aesthetics, smoothness was artificial, but texture was authentic. The new elite distressed their furniture, used refurbished factory floorboards in their great rooms, and wore nubby sweaters made by formerly oppressed peoples from Peru.

The bobos have coalesced into an insular, intermarrying brahmin elite that dominates culture, media, education, and tech.”

- David Brooks, How the Bobos Broke America, The Atlantic, Sept 2021