Minutes of a Monday #7
Brain Food > When politics works
“Scholars who study how to defeat rising authoritarianism agree that such cross-party cooperation is vital. And we have an illustration of just how that has worked here before. In the 1864 U.S. elections, in the midst of the Civil War, Republican Abraham Lincoln and party leaders knew that Lincoln could not win re-election without support from Democrats, who would never vote for a Republican after spending a decade attacking them on grounds of racism.
So Lincoln rebranded his coalition the “National Union Party” and crossed his fingers that it would work to attract moderate Democrats, a hope encouraged when the extremist Democrats split into angry factions at their own convention. Still, by summer, no one knew if the coalition would hold or not, and Lincoln himself thought he would lose unless something major happened on the battlefields. It did: Atlanta fell on September 2. And in November, Lincoln won the election at the head of the National Union Party.
The next year, Congress ended the policy that had thrown the country into war in the first place, passing the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished enslavement except as punishment for crime, and sending it off to the states for ratification.”
Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American
Soul Food
“If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking.”
Leslie Lamport
Rare Air
"One lesson I’ve learned is that if the job I do were easy, I wouldn’t derive so much satisfaction from it. The thrill of winning is in direct proportion to the effort I put in before. I also know, from long experience, that if you make an effort in training when you don’t especially feel like making it, the payoff is that you will win games when you are not feeling your best. That is how you win championships, that is what separates the great player from the merely good player. The difference lies in how well you’ve prepared."
Rafa Nadal on why hard is good (from his autobiography Rafa: My Story)
Appendix
“Here’s a scatter chart of the top 50 grossing films from 2019 with budget on the y-axis and worldwide box office returns on the x-axis. There’s a slight linear correlation between budget and returns, but more importantly, none of these films cost less than $20m, and the average film cost $129m to make.
This dynamic isn’t unique to film. In many forms of content, we see that the most successful organizations also tend to spend the most in absolute terms. The New York Times pays journalists to travel all over the world and gather evidence that may or may not yield an important story. TikTok stars rent mansions and invest heavily in makeup, wardrobe, personal trainers, and chefs. Newsletter writers who spend all their time researching and writing tend to outcompete those who only spend a couple hours a week. Low-budget winners like Joe Rogan and Blumhouse are the exception, not the rule.”
Nathan Baschez on Why Content is King
LOL
I think this is the best 70 second intro I’ve seen for a while.
AOB
Have a great week - Niall