Gestern war Orga- und Schreibtischtag. Meine Ablage ist wieder auf dem neuesten Stand – ich hatte sie im Zuge der Diss und auch wegen DER GESAMTSITUATION einfach mal ein paar Monate ignoriert, das ging ganz gut. Gestern brauchte ich aber ein bestimmtes Schriftstück, und so lochte und heftete ich, schmiss weg und sortierte.

Abends Augsburg dabei zugeschaut, wie es mal wieder gegen den Angstgegner Leverkusen unterging. In der ersten Liga hat der FCA noch nie gegen Leverkusen gewinnen können, ich weiß gar nicht, warum ich mir diese Spiele anschaue. Im letzten Jahr kam ich sogar zu spät zum eigenen Oktoberfesttisch, weil ich innerlich auf einen Sieg gepolt war und den im Stadion sehen wollte, und dann ging es 0:3 aus. Gestern immerhin nur 1:3. Meh.

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The Erasure of Mesut Özil

Spannendes Stück in der NYT über Özils Stand bei Arsenal – ohne wirklich zu einem Schluss zu kommen, was ich mit am besten fand.

„Everything started with a tweet. Mesut Özil knew the risks, in December last year, when he decided to offer a startling, public denunciation both of China’s treatment of the Uighurs, a largely Muslim minority in the region of Xinjiang, and the complicit silence of the international community.

Friends and advisers had warned Özil, the Arsenal midfielder, that there would be consequences. He would have to write off China as a market. His six million followers on Weibo, the country’s largest social network, would disappear. His fan club there — with as many as 50,000 signed-up members — would go, too. He would never play in China. He might become too toxic even for any club with Chinese owners, or sponsors eager to do business there. […] Yet Özil was adamant. […] And so he pressed send.

How much of what followed can be traced back to that tweet is contested. Özil is convinced that is the moment everything changed. Arsenal is just as adamant that it is not. There is no easy, neat way of bridging the divide between those perspectives. Perhaps both are true. Perhaps neither is.“

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The Lessons of Reading Every Book About Trump

Schön geschriebene Rezension über alles, was über Trump geschrieben wurde. Kann man sich das Lesen also endlich sparen, denn das Fazit hat mich – leider – überzeugt: „Both framings — Trump as exception, Trump as steroidal avatar of the country that formed him — have always been true. The difference is that, in 2020, they are equally banal. Watching Lozada press his lively intelligence into what feels, in places, like a critique of itself is its own education in saturation, and in the incentives of a culture that is designed to keep talking long after there’s anything left to say.“

„Which brings me to Carlos Lozada’s new book, “What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era.” Lozada, the nonfiction book critic at the Washington Post, revisits all the books on Donald Trump that he’s read since 2015: about a hundred and fifty titles, each purporting to illuminate the man and his times. (Immediately, the reader is primed for the sequel: “What Was I Thinking.”) One of the book’s standout preoccupations is whether Trump is an asteroid or a fungus. In other words, was the President’s victory a freak event, a chunk of debris that crashed into the country and transformed it forever? Or had Trumpism long been waiting in the soil, its destiny intertwined with ours? As Lozada shows, some Trump books exclaim over the norms that this Administration has broken; others take a longer view, considering the White House’s channelling of dark American traditions. Lozada finds the second approach more useful (the revolution will, and should, be contextualized) but leaves room for the fact that Trump has degraded us, and that some of the rot can be scraped off.

The book’s most original idea is its structure: a taxonomy that presents ten types of Trump book, including the White House “chaos chronicles” (“an endless encore of officials expressing concern”), “heartlandia” (lyrical portraits of Trump voters in flyover country), “Russian lit” (a genre which both looks at Trump’s personal ties to Russia and unpacks his Soviet-style tactics), and activism manuals for the resistance. Each chapter offers an essay made up of loosely connected mini-reviews; because there’s a lot of stylish recapping, the appeal of Lozada’s study can depend on the material being discussed. A chapter on the erosion of truth contains a fascinating précis of “A Lot of People Are Saying,” Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum’s tract about “the new conspiracism,” which proceeds via “innuendo and repetition” and “substitutes social validation for scientific validation.” (With Trump, Lozada writes, “there is conspiracy, but no theory.”)“