Joan Westenberg

06:41 Thursday, 23 April 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 45.82°F Pressure: 1016hPa Humidity: 91% Wind: 3.29mph
Words: 552

For my money, Joan Westenberg has the best long-form blog on the web today. As I write this, I have not yet paid for a subscription, but the sentence telegraphs that I will.

Today.

Yesterday's post about prediction markets finally pushed me over.

I find myself struggling a bit with long-form content. If a YouTube video is more than 12 minutes, I will probably skip it. Especially the political commentary ones, which used to be entertaining but are now merely repetitive. If it's something that I'm trying to learn about, I'll watch it at a faster playback speed, usually 1.5x, though I've been doing some at 2x.

It's not hopeless though. I'm reading The Third Reich at War by Richard J. Evans on my Kindle. I'm doing most of my reading in the afternoon, when I'm less "productive." (Whatever that means in retirement.) It's a very long book, but readable. (I will say that I find some of the praise incongruent with my experience of reading the book. Ostensibly presented chronological order, Evans bounces back and forth in months and years and locations, such that it's often difficult to keep any kind of structure in my mind. And many of the incidents and events he recounts don't serve as historical structure, so much as a comprehensive account of so many horrible things. To me, it's criminal that in the 21st century every ebook doesn't come with an electronic timeline linked to the index.)

And yesterday I purchased The Sorrow and the Pity, a 1969 documentary by Marcel Ophuls on the Nazi occupation of France. I searched for it and found it on Apple's movie store, whatever that "service" is called now. I guess it's Apple TV, but I don't know. Great branding, right?

But it's a four hour documentary. I watched thirty minutes of it yesterday. It's a bit fatiguing because it's all subtitled and I know a little French, so my brain is jumping back and forth trying to square what I hearing with what I'm reading. But I'm quite confident that I will finish it, certainly by the end of the weekend.

I was tipped to The Sorrow and the Pity by Kottke.

So how to tie all this together so I can wrap this up? Westenberg's view is that prediction markets are a sign that we are a civilization in decline. It's largely a moral question, and we seem to have become, at some level of society, morally unmoored. Not entirely as Minnesota has heroically demonstrated, but certainly among the rich and the powerful, and the thugs who are willing to do their bidding.

To the extent that we are unwilling to wrestle with difficult questions, turning them into wagers instead, is perhaps closely related to our growing inability to sustain focus.

There's probably a long post in here somewhere, but it's probably already been done better by someone else. I find, to some dismay, that this is about as much as I can muster for now. Perhaps when the new house is built, and I have a private space to think and write, I can do better. Right now I'm hearing Mitzi's phone as she's watching a video, and it's distracting.

Anyway, and as always, (American Association for the Appreciation of Alliteration) the beat goes on...

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