DL Open Thread: Sunday, May 18, 2025

A taste of what might have led to Booth’s ‘radicalization’:

But what should have been a charmed life turned dark early: His father had a secret wife and child back in England, a scandal that devastated his American family emotionally and financially when it became public. John, born in 1838, was an adolescent when his father died. He became radicalized as a Confederate sympathizer and then conspirator. His fame gave the 26-year-old actor easy access to Ford’s Theatre and, fatefully, the president’s box.

Those of you who think (and perhaps, hope) that I’m using this as a pretext to bring some Sondheim into the conversation, well, you’re correct:

“The School Of Moral Ambition”? Whaddayathink?

The world is full of highly intelligent, impressively accomplished and status-aware people whose greatest ambitions seem to start and stop with themselves. For Rutger Bregman, those people represent an irresistible opportunity.

Excerpts from the Q and A:

But materialism is real. A desire for status is real. People want to make money. So how do you incentivize someone who might be tempted to go into a line of work that you see as morally vacuous to instead pick a career that is morally ambitious? If people desperately want to work for McKinsey and their main goal in life is to go skiing and have that cottage on the beach, fine. People have the right to be boring. But I think there are quite a few people who work at Goldman Sachs or Boston Consulting Group who are looking for a way out. There’s a period where this happened in the U.S.: the move from the Gilded Age to the Progressive Era. You had figures such as Alva Vanderbilt — a fascinating character who was this very decadent woman, incredibly rich, but later in her life, after she divorced her Vanderbilt husband, became a radical suffragette and one of the main financers of the women’s rights movement. She reminded me of MacKenzie Scott, who divorced Jeff Bezos and now is one of the most morally ambitious philanthropists in the U.S. A decade ago, people like me were told to check our privilege. It’s important to be aware of how privileged you are, but it’s also important to use it.

The dismissal of people’s career choices as “boring” — that tone of light sarcasm or snideness shows up in the book also. Why communicate that way? It works quite well, David.

Does it? Yeah, I agree with you that financial incentives obviously play a big role, but it’s not the only thing. If you go back a couple of decades, students had a very different attitude. There’s this study called the American Freshman Survey, it’s been done since the late 1960s. At that time, when students were asked about their most important life goals, about 80 to 90 percent said that developing a meaningful philosophy of life was most important. Today that’s 50 percent. In the ’60s, 50 percent said making as much money as possible was a really important goal. Today, that’s 80 to 90 percent. The numbers have reversed. For me, that shows that this is not human nature. It is culture. It can change.

A Poem I Liked:

I’m more at home in The Past, want though I may
To live in this lonesome place The Present Moment.

I share a stack of magazines with someone
Who reads the new ones from the top. The bottom,

Salted with gilded ephemera, outspent ads
And failing or faded fads, is just my meat.

Praying that I don’t blind myself to horrors
I study the Times online to behold the face

Of fascism and its disregarding hand.
I keep on thinking about it as I retreat

To scan a home screen of my high school class,
Our posted shades of mortal veils and marrows.

The conversation floats down tunnels of fortune
To the ninth grade, Joe Cittadino expelled

For setting a fire in the Chattle Building attic.
Joe died a while ago, did people know it?

Instead of hiding as always before in silent
Anonymity, I allow myself the homely

Civic pleasure of having something to say,
Posting: Joe told me back then it wasn’t him,

He took the blame to impress a girl, her brother
Was Frankie Quinn who really set the fire.

And thank you, Junior Genovese, for writing:
You are right Robert, it was Frankie Quinn.

Poem By Robert Pinsky

What do you want to talk about?