#5SmartReads - November 1, 2022

Hitha on the new world order, buying yourself the f*cking flowers, and the power of naps

November 01, 2022

If you think American politics are chaotic, let me share what’s happening in Brazil.

Luiz Inácio da Silva (better known as Lula) served as Brazil’s president in the early aughts, pledging (and succeeding) to lift millions out of poverty.

Shortly after leaving office, he was found guilty of his involvement in a massive bribery scandal and served nearly two years in prison.

Guess who beat the incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro to become Brazil’s next president? Lula.

Lula is the polar opposite of Bolsonaro in terms of policy - he ran on a platform to raise the minimum wage and to protect the Amazon - but he’s as equally hyperbolic as his predecessor.

"They tried to bury me alive, but I'm here. ... Today, we are saying to the world that Brazil is back."

I’m here for the pendulum swinging away from populism and election denial…but I’m afraid the hyperbolic rhetoric is here to say in Earth’s politics.

I first picked up Tara Schuster’s Buy Yourself The F*cking Lilies during spring break trip, when I was in a state of exhilaration and exhaustion and girding up for another stretch of work travel.

I read the entire book on our flight home - and have never really stopped.

After furiously tapping through the Kindle version, I bought the audiobook to revisit chapters as needed, and I find myself listening to a chapter or two every week since. I have a feeling I’ll be adding her forthcoming book to this ritual (Glow In The F*cking Dark). But if you haven’t picked up the book or know who Tara is, allow me (well, Frances Bridges) to introduce you.

Ballot initiatives and subsidies are some of my favorite policy things. The latter are extremely effective - if also deeply unsexy - in scaling policies we know to work, and the former offer a much better sense of how this country feels about politics than what party they’re registered with or who they vote for.

And Arizona is putting an extremely important issue - medical debt - on the ballot.

The ballot initiative proposes to limit the tactics and measures that creditors can pursue for the payment of outstanding medical costs. The key provision of this ballot measure is capping interest on medical debt to 3% (down from 10%), which 14 other states have already done.

So what’s the argument against it?

"It's marketed as a medical debt initiative but yet impacts all collection remedies across the board," Amber Russo, spokesperson for Protect Our Arizona, which is opposing the Arizona ballot measure, told Politico.

I would respectively argue against this point, as we haven’t seen other collection remedies be affected in the other 14 states that have capped interest and pursued other measures to alleviate the burden of this debt. The data just doesn’t support this claim, and I think it stands to be the basis of stronger federal policy to ease the burden of medical debt (interest reform is something that does carry bipartisan support).

So the unintended category of the “fun” articles today is “books that changed my life”, and I’m not mad about it.

So here’s another book - Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto, which I tore through this weekend in a desperate attempt to dismantle the narrative that I have to say yes to everything and fill my calendar to the brim.

I’ve been a longtime fan of @TheNapMinistry, if only to fantasize about a life framed around rest and recharging instead of going-going-going.

“It’s not normal to be sleep-deprived and exhausted, and to have tiredness as a lifestyle. That’s not why we were born. That’s not why the miracle of birth happened. It’s not what our ancestors would’ve wanted. And so the time has always been right for this message,” she says.

“This culture doesn’t allow us a moment to collectively grieve, to have space, to just be, to have leisure, to really be a human being,” she adds. “So yeah, it’s important that it gets out here.”

There’s so much I have to unlearn when it comes to my relationship with work and rest, and I know that I can’t put it off to “well, one day when things calm down.” My big takeaway in this book is to claim my right to rest and prioritize AND practice it the way I do social media or meditation or the things that fill my day.

Rounding out the ‘what’s going on in the world?’, we have a new prime minister in the United Kingdom (and a new impossible standard set for South Asian children in the diaspora everywhere).

Rishi Sunak is the first person of color (and Hindu & of Indian-origin) to become the head of the government of the UK. He’s also the wealthiest person to become prime minister in recent history, and one who has to clean up the mess that his own policies have made.

While Sunak is making history because of who he is, he also represents the party that championed Brexit, promotes low taxes over adequately funding social programs that Britons are very much used to, and NFTs from the Royal Mint (yes, really).

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