Insomnia & Justice

Featured Articles

What an Insomniac Knows

The New Yorker • 20 Jan 2025 • ~4650 words • Archive Link

What’s really going on when you can’t power down?

The odyssey that the insomniac undergoes every night, passing from bedroom to living room and back again, is, in a curious way, a parody of sleep, as Walker depicts it, with a conscious architecture of its own. Not being able to sleep and being awake are two distinct settings. Insomniacs seldom just get up, work for an hour, enjoy the silence of the house. This implies a state of serenity that’s exactly what we don’t have; if we could be that calm, we’d be asleep. No, we are inclined to seek out sleep in the same oscillating stages that sleep itself presents, even if that means walking fretfully, or listening to podcasts on early Christian history, or watching late-night television, searching out things that will be sufficiently distracting to keep us from dwelling on the fact that we are not sleeping without being so agitating as to keep us up even more.

As a detective, he helped put Robert Roberson on death row. As a minister, he says he got it all wrong.

Houston Chronicle • 17 Jan 2025 • ~5450 words

Sarah Smith writes about the story of Brian Wharton, a former detective who helped convict Robert Roberson, a man now on death row. Now a minister, Wharton grapples with the weight of his past decisions as he confronts the shortcomings of the justice system.

He has come to believe this about justice: Justice is an ideal, not the collection of regulations that add up to the Texas Penal Code. Justice, like God, is something to be pursued. In a world sculpted by humans, justice that should flow like a river instead balks at dams and battles narrow banks and evaporates in the heat until it’s slowed to a trickle that can’t sustain its momentum through the mud.

Recommended Articles

Who Are the Real Vampires in ‘Nosferatu’?

Current Affairs • 18 Jan 2025 • ~3600 words

Robert Eggers’ vampire film would be easy to interpret as a right-wing, anti-immigrant manifesto. But dig a little deeper, and you realize that the rich are the real bloodsuckers.

Nosferatu has more to teach us about economic class and the monstrous effects of capitalism than it does race or immigration. It’s critical to remember that, although Orlok is an immigrant, he’s not a poor immigrant like the ones Donald Trump or Elon Musk demonize today. Instead, like Trump and Musk themselves, he’s a tremendously rich man. He owns a castle, buys another sprawling mansion from Thomas Hutter’s real estate firm, and pays in gold.

Are we a racist society? The majority of us say no – but science begs to differ

The Guardian • 18 Jan 2025 • ~3300 words

Although greater awareness of prejudice would suggest we are less bigoted than ever, empirical evidence indicates not.

… what the continuing debate around racism ignores is that we have had a scientific consensus about it for a long time: there are decades worth of clear, factual, rigorous, quantitative scientific research out there that reveals empirical truths about racism: from its effects on friendships, relationships, healthcare and the criminal justice system to the financial cost of selling items online while Black.

The Westminster whistleblower: how my friend Sergei tried to expose the Kremlin plot against Britain

The Guardian • 17 Jan 2025 • ~3800 words

Russian-born UK citizen and Tory party activist Sergei Cristo fought to make MI5 sit up and take notice of the Russian political interference operation now threatening democracy in Britain – and around the world.

The committee had finally published the Russia report, two years in the making, into Kremlin interference in UK politics. And at the press conference to launch it, the committee’s MPs couldn’t contain their anger. “The report reveals that no one in government knew if Russia interfered in or sought to influence the referendum because they did not want to know,” one said. “The outrage isn’t if there is interference,” said another. “The outrage is [that] no one wanted to know if there was interference.”

The populist phantom

Inside Story • 17 Jan 2025 • ~5750 words

Larry M. Bartels challenges the widely held belief that a populist wave is sweeping across democracies, arguing instead that the apparent rise of populism is often more about elite politics than genuine public sentiment.

… for all the alarm that populism has generated, its nature and political significance are widely misunderstood. The metaphor of a “populist wave” reflects this error. It exaggerates the electoral success of populism around the world, which has been rather more modest than it sometimes appears. It also exaggerates the coherence of populism as a political tendency, overlooking the extent to which ostensibly populist entrepreneurs in different times and places have appealed to distinct grievances. Even more important, the metaphor overstates the implications of populist parties’ electoral successes for policymaking and for democratic stability.

Collections: On the Gracchi, Part I: Tiberius Gracchus

A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry • 17 Jan 2025 • ~7600 words

Bret Devereaux writes about the history of Gracchus, focusing on Tiberius in this first part.

Tiberius Gracchus had, of course, just demonstrated how powerful a tribune could be who was willing to use those powers to the fullest and then by declaring his intention to run for a second consecutive term, his intent to potentially never give up this power. And there were ten spots for the tribune: the chances of denying a figure as popular as Tiberius Gracchus – with a built in mass of new clients who are honor-bound to support him – were basically non-existent. Having breached the no-consecutive-office-holding norm once, there was no reason he couldn’t keep running and keep winning.

What if the Attention Crisis Is All a Distraction?

The New Yorker • 20 Jan 2025 • ~4000 words • Archive Link

From the pianoforte to the smartphone, each wave of tech has sparked fears of brain rot. But the problem isn’t our ability to focus—it’s what we’re focussing on.

Hayes distinguishes between voluntary and compelled attention. Some things we focus on by choice; others, because of our psychological hardwiring, we find hard to ignore. Digital tools let online platforms harness the latter, addressing our involuntary impulses rather than our higher-order desires. The algorithms deliver what we want but not, as the late philosopher Harry Frankfurt put it, “what we want to want.”

Driving the Tōkaidō

Craig Mod • 19 Jan 2025 • ~2850 words

Craig Mod writes about his experience of driving the historic Tōkaidō, a journey he contrasts with his previous walks along the route.

The car also erased much of the “psychic pain” of walking the boring parts of the road. A car hypnotizes and lulls. Your eyes glaze as you pass the pachinko parlors or industrial hinterlands. Your attention snaps back into focus when you get to a merciful patch of matsu-namiki pines, when you find yourself driving down a well-preserved section like in Seki-juku or Tsuchiyama. And in this way — unlike with walking — the road in totality doesn’t feel so terrible, the terrible bits erased as quickly as you see them.

Eric Carmen Was a Power-Pop Legend. Then He Vanished

Rolling Stone • 19 Jan 2025 • ~8100 words

In the final years of his life, the musical genius behind songs like “Go All the Way” and “All by Myself” was estranged from much of his family — and went down a rabbit hole of far-right conspiracies.

The complex portrait that emerged varies wildly, depending on who’s doing the telling. His bandmates and friends who stayed with him to the end describe Carmen as a kind and generous suburban dad, happily retired, madly in love with Amy, and shattered by the loss of his relationship with his kids. His brother, children, and ex-wife, Susan, describe a bitter, paranoid conspiracy theorist haunted by the past, lost in the face of shifting musical tastes, hopelessly addicted to alcohol, and manipulated by Amy to turn on his family.