A milestone and some memories
Plus: Links and News
When I started this Substack in May of 2020, I was sitting at home in the middle of a global pandemic. School was canceled. Sports were canceled. The only saving grace was that ESPN decided to early release their Michael Jordan documentary, The Last Dance.
Cholla Express was an outlet that allowed me to escape the news. The early issues I wrote were longer, released on the first day of each month, and revolved around Arizona history and non-political stories.
Over time, my Substack moved away from its original concept. I got bored and wanted to write about different things, including politics.
Now, when someone asks me what I write about, I don’t have a good answer. I’ve written about politics, education, social media, spirituality, mental health, Abraham Lincoln, and the playoff troubles of the Phoenix Suns.
As of this month, I’ve written over 100 posts on Substack.
One of my regrets as an old millennial is that I wasn’t paying attention to the blogosphere when it launched in the early 2000s. From what I understand now, these were the glory days of political writing on the internet. Smart people were arguing thoughtfully online, and social media hadn’t ruined everything yet.
Even though I grew up with a sense of awareness about the political world (many of you have been reading my dad’s political writing for years), I didn’t start following politics until 2015. In the early 2000s, I was paying attention to basketball, and I suppose these were the glory days of basketball, before analytics warped the aesthetics of the game.
Two things happened in 2015 that caused me to start following politics. First, I started teaching American history and government. The content area forced me to study the political process. Second, a celebrity game show host rode a golden escalator down to a microphone to announce a run for president. When the fire-breathing candidate succeeded in November of 2016, it felt like a civic duty to try to understand what was happening.
My first job out of college was teaching psychology and coaching basketball. The year was 2009. Laptops were first being introduced to the classroom. Everyone had a cellphone, but smartphones were just starting to become normal.
I started a WordPress blog in 2011. My first post was titled, “The Watson Problem.” Watson was the name of the IBM computer that played “Jeopardy!” and defeated human champion Ken Jennings. In my blog post, I wrote about the seemingly inevitable technological takeover of everything. I pondered what it meant for human minds.
My conclusion was that it is a good thing human minds are not entirely machine-like. We are slow on the input, and that’s ok. We forget things, and that’s ok because we can daydream and have insights:
What happens in the human brain, although mechanical if analyzed piecemeal, transcends the mechanics of its functioning to produce mind, and in a deeper sense to produce soul. Our biological functions allow us to not simply exchange information with each other but to connect and understand each other. Ultimately, they allow us to love each other.
I posited that, if a threshold exists past which further technological advancements hinder our capacity for self-actualization, we were already there.
In 2024, we seem to be recognizing that we are beyond a threshold. Schools are getting serious about keeping students off smartphones during the day. Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, is facing a number of lawsuits. Instagram recently introduced a semi-serious set of restrictions on the accounts of young people.
In terms of political discourse, things are still ugly on social media. After a two week break from Twitter last month, I reactivated my account. My algorithmic feed has somehow gotten more repulsive than it was before.
The good news is that the blogosphere is making a comeback. It’s happening on Substack, and this time I am paying attention.
Some of you have been following Cholla Express from its initial attempt at holding a focused structure. The vast majority of you started reading later, after it turned into a “blog by a guy who lives in Phoenix.”
I am grateful to have everyone here. I am especially grateful for the feedback I have received, both critical and positive, from those who have interacted with my writings.
Looking forward, I hope to write a bit more frequently. I don’t have any specific goals, but I would like to grow to the point where I can publish a section for reader reactions and questions.
We’ll see what happens.
Links and News
Which party is the YIMBY party? The other day in Arizona, Republican lawmaker Warren Peterson and former Republican gubernatorial candidate Karrin Taylor Robson held a press conference talking about free markets and housing. But at the Democratic Convention last month, Barack Obama let loose a call to “build more units and clear away some of the outdated laws and regulations that made it harder to build homes for working people in this country.” Matt Yglesias wrote about the promise and perils of Obama’s YIMBY turn. In the piece, Yglesias compares Republicans and Democrats on the issue of housing.
Could teachers be making $100,000 per year in Arizona? School choice researcher Matt Ladner wrote a blog post analyzing the (lack of) growth of teacher salaries over time after adjusting for inflation. He finds that, because the number of non-teaching jobs in district schools has grown, the money that could have gone to teacher salaries has been dispersed.
GPA and its discontents: Freddie deBoer thinks GPA is a less valid measure of academic performance than standardized testing because tutoring enhances GPA more than it does test scores. Yascha Mounk thinks we should abolish grades altogether, at least at the college level.
In Congressional District 8 in the West Valley, the Democratic candidate is talking about “means testing” as a reform for social security, reports Laura Gersony via AZCentral. Meanwhile, the Republican candidate doesn’t want to touch entitlements. Another example, perhaps, of the political realignment happening in Arizona.
Arizona Debates: Prop. 314 Immigration Enforcement Referendum
How will you save small midwestern towns without mass immigration?
Phoenix Suns organization, fans, hosts react to Al McCoy’s passing
No. I’m not always available. “Don’t apologize for disconnecting,” writes Freya India in an essay for Jonathan Haidt’s After Babel Substack, which is dedicated to research and advocacy for a healthier relationship between humans and digital technology.
Five things, Billy. 1. You care. 2. You observe 3. You question. 4. You ponder. 5. You share.
Pretty good combination, I'd say.