Happy New Year!

Resuming work this week on 7 Hard Problems. I’m continuing with the partial vomitouts. Maybe even call them “extended outlines”. The point is to get some words on the page, maybe even words that could be used in the final of the chapter. With liberal partial credit.

This week the antinomy is “Local vs. Global”. The Master Anecdote for this chapter is a straightforward one: climate change. And digging into it will get us started with most of the issues of concern for “local vs. global”, including a trend I call “Global Balkanization” which is a reaction to globalization — hardly an unmixed blessing for ordinary people — taking the form of “Balkanization” everywhere. My tribe. My ethnicity. Me.

(I identified this trend maybe 5 years ago, and obviously, sadly, it’s playing out in Trump, in Brexit, in Brazil, in China. I wish it weren’t so.)