I want to start this week with a comment about the meta-news environment. It’s a point that may not surprise you. But it shapes everything we’re seeing today and does so with an uncanny silence. Quite simply, lots and lots of things are not being reported or said because people are afraid to say them. “Afraid” may be too strong a word in some cases, though the fuzzy, murky spectrum separating “fear” from something more like calculation is a key feature of what is happening. I’m far from the first to note this. But when people do note it it doesn’t get a lot of attention because what’s the empirical basis of noting this? What’s your basis for saying at a society-wide level what people aren’t saying? How do you prove — or, perhaps better to say illustrate — that reality? And yet it is happening and it’s not difficult to see it observationally if you look closely in any one place.
