Wear is the Love, Episode #7This week’s episode was recorded early due to Michael’s travel, and so instead of talking Top 5, we caught up on politics, including the latest scandal for UK PM Boris Johnson and how COVID has changed some conventional political wisdom on scandals. We also chatted about Maryland Governor Larry Hogan’s statements that he might run in 2024, and how leaders can still change the trajectory of party politics, especially for the GOP.Episode notes:Former PM Theresa May’s comments at Parliament (CNN)More on the PM’s scandal (The Independent)Hogan’s appearance on CBS about a potential 2024 presidential runThe Top 5 articles for your week:“The moral calculations of a billionaire” (Washington Post)Because one billionaire looks at where he’s come from, where he is now, and how he struggles with stewarding his fortune.“Is This Still an Emergency?” (The New Atlantis)Because this article on pandemic polarization is a great chaser to last week’s Top 5 and podcast feature on Thomas B. Edsall’s article. M. Anthony Mills observes: “…two years after the pandemic began, quite like two years after 9/11, today we are no longer united around a common purpose but divided. We are divided over the nature of the threat, what it will take to defeat it, and what defeating it even means. We are a long way from the tornado politics that seemed to characterize our pandemic response in the winter of 2020, and we are not likely to go back.”“What College Students Really Think About Cancel Culture” (The Atlantic)Because when we think about polarization, we tend to ask “how will any of us ever get along again?” There are many grassroots and nationally organized civil dialogue groups taking place on college campuses which gives us a bit of hope for the future of social cohesion.“What Was the TED Talk?” (The Drift Magazine)Because “…as Chris Anderson, TED’s longtime curator, puts it, “We live in an era where the best way to make a dent on the world… may be simply to stand up and say something.” And yet, TED’s archive is a graveyard of ideas. It is a seemingly endless index of stories about the future — the future of science, the future of the environment, the future of work, the future of love and sex, the future of what it means to be human — that never materialized. By this measure alone, TED, and its attendant ways of thinking, should have been abandoned.”“If Everything Is ‘Trauma,’ Is Anything?” (NYT)Because I (Melissa) am personally interested and invested in “semantic drift” or how our lexicon changes to fit the moment (the pandemic) and the

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