Politics | Recovery | Current Obsessions
Oysters, Andor, and one Maine candidate who thinks winning is less important than building power that lasts.
I wrote one of my favorite pieces ever this week, a profile of the upstart senate candidate Graham Platner.
You could read it for the Andor love. Or for the Star Trek references. Or because John Hodgman makes a cameo. Or just because it allowed me to make this connection:
The oyster is praxis as much as a menu item. From indigenous subsistence to working-class staple, a species decimated by extractive capitalism and the predilections of the elite, brought back to life by a public institution as a sustainable resource. It’s a case study in how labor, science, and regulation can still stitch together a community and economy.
But really, you should read it because it’s about the slow, stubborn work of building a working-class movement. The same patience it takes to grow an oyster.
I have gotten some pushback because, I admit it, he gave me hope and it shows. People wrote to say I got snowed, though I think I’m just being honest about what I saw and thought. The nut of the anger, I think, is that leftists have been burned by would-be proletarian heroes. The most common refrain: “Oh, he’s just another Fetterman, he’ll disappoint us.”
Maybe. But falling for a candidate and then getting your heart broken is part of politics, as it is with everything else. If you live your life too jaded to believe in anyone, you’ll never find much joy. The danger is in elevating a candidate to a hero and thinking that voting for someone is the end of the work. Platner himself minimizes whether he wins; what matters to him is building power that lasts generations.
That feels worth believing in, even if belief stings later.
And speaking of slow, patient work: there’s still room in my fall workshop. Sign-ups have been a little sluggish (writing workshops are apparently a recession indicator), but you still get 10% off with code TSW10, plus scholarships and community pricing. Writing a memoir is the same kind of stubborn, deliberate labor as oyster farming, if a bit dryer.
If you like this piece, please consider subscribing—supporting this newsletter helps me pursue stories that wouldn’t appear anywhere else.