Nathanael Yellis

In Hidden Valley Road Robert Kolker summarizes one line of thinking about a source of schizophrenia as the inability to tune out very much of the constant stream of incoming stimuli. The theory goes that most of us can usefully ignore a lot of the noise of life—we hear less of the wind to focus on what people are saying or we give more credence to our actual plans than our fantastical daydreams—while some of us are unable to triage amongst these incoming stimuli, giving equal attention to everything and thus losing the thread of what actually matters. I have no idea if this is a good summary of the research or if the research has moved on in the years since, but the concept of subliminal abilities to screen out or focus on some of what we encounter in the world is intriguing. Is our internal filtering trainable? Is it adversely trainable?What could the things we automatically ignore be telling us? How might we adjust what we are able notice?

When Marc Andreessen said that "software is eating the world," we all nodded along. It was (and is!) true that 'businesses are being run on software' and 'delivered as online services.' In the longer view, what software has eaten is less the business or industry and more their information flows. Software is a whole lot better at bytes than atoms. Want proof? Just look at what my almost-self-driving car does on snowy road: its systems shut down because their sensors can no longer identify the lane. (As a highly addicted downhill skier, my minivan is on snowy roads more than you'd advise.) The software is great until there's no data.

Any political coalition has groups that you'd rather not be near. To be a coalition of any significance or real power is to include some divergent opinions. On the left you might see this best when the people who think campus politics (“occupy the library!”) actually matter unite with the indigent poor; when I worked in right wing politics, it was the guy with the knight helmet talking about medieval values or those oddly fixated on immigrants or the gold standard. There were always people that you didn't really want to associate with. Effective coalitional politics takes knowing when to associate or disassociate with those people. Eventually some of the people that you thought were crazy are going to turn out to actually be crazy, but it's hard to say that you knew all along. Especially when, in order to exercise power or build influence, your people engage with those potentially crazy people.

I hadn't looked at work emails all weekend. That fact matters for what happened on Monday morning. It was early Fall in DC. With the windows finally open, I woke up early. After breakfast and coffee, I walked to work through our neighborhood, still feeling a little brisk. Getting to the office building, I was boisterously greeted by the receptionist, buzzed in, and, instead of the elevator, I took the stairs. Quickly up four flights, breathless, I barged into our office. About half the desks were already full. Not surprising, but the few who also worked for my boss greeted me with an odd look. He called me into his office with a question, "did you see my email?" I hadn't, I was sorry, what did I miss? "I told our team to come in early; I don't have time to catch you up; don't let this happen again." Somewhat deflated, I walked over to my desk amidst the smirks from the strivers on our team: not even 9 am and Yellis is already in trouble! I found the email: a classic Sunday evening missive. It was a few vague paragraphs: the organization generally had a lot going on, there were many (unlisted) important things to do, we should all be fighting hard, so can everyone come in early tomorrow?

The boots and skis are all cleaned and in their closet; we packed up the chairlift snacks to avoid feeding summer mice; on Monday night we drove off into the sunset from another excellent ski season. My kids found new challenge and independence on the hill. They made ski friends and, on more than a few Saturdays, we set them loose for the day with a pocket sandwich and a walkie-talkie. We had a few long runs down through the trees and fields out beside the mountain, behind the house; we hiked to the summit when the lifts weren't running, skiing down alone; the older two tried the end-of-season pond skim. I mounted and remounted several sets of bindings on different skis, finally emerging with a lightweight uphill setup for ski touring. There were the usual ups and downs of praying for snow only to see rain and of thinking nothing was coming, only to ski in a snowstorm all day. What a pastime!

It's a week to think about religion. We're about to wrap Passover and are in the middle of the Triduum. Looking at the friends who subscribe to this weekly email, I think some of you are right there in the religious observances and more than a few aren't. That's ok. I'm not here to do too much proselytizing: this year, rather than go to our normal church all week, we're in western Maine at the familial ski house. Our Easter will be a little religious service and a lot of pond skimming and passholder BBQing. You could file this email under "D" for "do as a say, not as I do." But here are a few thoughts on religion nonetheless.

If you're even vaguely into politics, there's a lot to read right now. The sheer volume of political news is tremendous before you even start to read the smart columnists trying to help us make sense of it. While there's reason enough to read journalism and opinion pieces about those on the right currently in power, I think the more interesting stories are about the left. We're in such a seesaw of election cycles that reading about the politicians in their out-of-power wilderness is a preview of the folks who'll be running things in two or four years. (This is probably why the writing about right's internecine years after 2020 was so riveting.) There left has two distinct things going on: abundance and vibes. Both are worth watching and which wins may predict where we're headed.

If you're not listening to Valley Heat, I can't blame you, but you my sympathy. Even if we have the time for a podcast approaching the greatness of art, how can we possibly be expected to find it? The infinite scroll gives us so many off-ramps prior to a piece of truly unique work.

New York Times columnist Ezra Klein has popped up on a bunch of my usual podcasts over the last few weeks, part of his promotion of his new book (with Derek Thompson), Abundance. In his appearance with Tyler Cowen, a question was asked about religion, which, in his answer, Klein described is as a technology for doing something. In context, the use of "technology" made sense: Klein was describing the sociological losses we see with less religion. Put positively, Klein described religion as a technology for directing people's needs for belief, belonging, and service towards their best ends (certainly, politics is a cruder vessel for such desires). But describing our practices of faith as a social technology left a lingering impression that Klein has no idea what religion actually is. Just because its effects appear in society, reducing it to "social technology" is thin. Just because we can talk about it this way, should we?