Hello, and happy Friday! You might have noticed the increased prevalence of multi-colored boxes on your timelines in 2022. When I first spotted them a few weeks ago, I assumed it was some weird form of Twitter Tetris or another internet craze I had little interest in learning about.
But there were only so many unexplained green, yellow, and black squares that my curiosity could take. So one weekend afternoon, in the middle of a coffee break at the National Gallery, my boyfriend and I decided to try our hand at Worlde, the objective of which is to guess the mystery five-letter word in six attempts or less.
Reader, I don’t want to brag (but I will): We cracked it in two.
Thus, a tradition obsession was born. We’ve played Wordle every day since, carving out time each evening to sit down, pen and paper in hand, to solve the day’s puzzle. Like a lot of people on Twitter, Wordle has become a part of my daily routine, squeezed in between journaling, Duolingo lessons, and all the other habits that I’ve resolved to maintain in the year ahead. And unlike the others, Wordle is one I’ll probably keep. I love its origin story and its sense of challenge, which appears to be especially true for non-American English speakers. I also love its scarcity: Unlike most everything else in our online lives that can be binged or doom-scrolled, Worlde can only be enjoyed once a day, for a few minutes, before it’s gone. And then you do it all again tomorrow.
In podcast news: I presented a Bunker Daily episode about Hungary’s upcoming election, featuring Hungarian political expert Péter Krekó and Dávid Dorosz, an MP-candidate and national campaign chairman of the opposition party Dialogue for Hungary. You can tune in via your favorite podcast app (find yours here).
What I’ve written
From President Emmanuel Macron’s pledge to "piss off" the unvaccinated in France to the deportation of Novak Djokovic from Australia, anti-anti-vax politics is on the rise. I wrote about how this political strategy is more shrewd than it seems. By taking a tougher line on the unvaccinated, world leaders are courting an energetic new voter base: the vaccinated, and ever more impatient, majority.
For all of the attention that has been paid to the growing political cleavage between the jabbed and the jabless, getting vaccinated is extremely popular in countries where vaccines are widely available. Countries such as the United Arab Emirates, Spain, and Canada have vaccination rates as high as 94 percent, 81 percent, and 79 percent, respectively, without blanket vaccine mandates. To put this popularity into perspective: More Britons have gotten vaccinated (47 million) than watched the Euro 2020 final between England and Italy (31 million). In the United States, being vaccinated is more common than drinking coffee, owning a television cable box or satellite dish, or even watching the Super Bowl. Keep reading here
What I’ve read
This dispatch from a Trump rally in Arizona, which offers a preview of Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign (The Atlantic)
Trump chose Arizona for this moment for a reason. In this state, the Big Lie thrives. Trump lost Arizona by only 10,000 votes in 2020, giving him and his supporters the space, apparently, to allege that the close outcome was the result of left-wing chicanery, the result of ballot stuffing and interference by Venezuelans, among other false claims. State lawmakers who spent the past year reviewing the ballots ultimately found zero evidence of mischief. But that didn’t matter to Trump’s supporters. GOP politicians across Arizona adopted Trump’s lies anyway. Many of them were guests of honor tonight.
This interesting piece on the political evolution of Tulsi Gabbard (The New Statesman)
While it’s tempting to laugh her off as a fringe figure, Gabbard has a devoted base. Combined with her growing mainstream right-wing legitimacy, that could make her a dark-horse contender for the 2024 GOP nomination — someone who, like Donald Trump, can sell Americans on bogus “anti-establishment” positions on war and civil rights while acting to promote the interests of the far right. As a veteran, former lawmaker, and frequent Fox guest, Gabbard is building a resume for future success, and not in the Democratic Party.
This thoughtful essay on the harsh reality of vaxenfreude, and how it ignores the people left behind (The Financial Times)
The worst harm that antivaxxers do is to their families, whom they expose to daily danger and then sometimes plunge into a grief that cannot speak its name. The harm will reverberate down the generations. How will it shape the millions of bereaved and their relationship to the rest of us?
What I’m thinking about
How TikTok’s beloved trainspotter is now the face of The North Face and Gucci’s latest collaboration. Maybe the internet isn’t such a bad place after all.
Until next time,
Yasmeen