This is normal

Waiting for the perfect time that never arrives

Welcome to I’m Late To This, a newsletter about things I haven’t stopped thinking about. 

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Last week I had the pleasure of interviewing Michael Lewis. 

And he said something that I genuinely have not stopped thinking about. 

“The Trump phenomenon has slowed me down just a little bit,” Lewis said. 

“Because it seems so important, it's hard to pay sustained attention to other things. And that's been disturbing to me. I'll be happy when it's over so I can go back to thinking like baseball's worth writing about again, because I really wish I had a sports book but it seems irresponsible to write a sports book.”

This comment totally bummed me out — “I’ll be happy when it’s over.” 

It’s a line that jarred me because it assumes one big thing: that “it” is going to end. 

And by “it,” I think Lewis is talking about not only Donald Trump being president — that ends in January 2025 at the latest — but also the whole Trump experience that has made every development in the news, pop culture, sports, business, and so on something that needs to be sorted along some spectrum of political belief. 

And, yes, sure. I think Trump supporters, Trump haters, and the many others who wish politics just wasn’t so all-consuming would like for a lot of “it” to be over. For Michael Lewis, “it” ending means he can return to a time when he’s content writing about baseball again. But that time will never come. “It” is not really the holdup. 

Because there is no perfect moment for anything: to fall in love, to begin a project, to have a child, to lose a loved one. The biggest mistake of our current moment is thinking we’re now only permitted to do certain things, explore certain ideas, take on certain projects, because of the enormity of the president’s presence. 

In the early 00s, when Lewis wrote Moneyball, we were dealing with the fallout of 9/11, the Bush administration was starting to beat the drum for an unjust war that lasted more than a decade, and the markets remained in the throes of the post-tech bubble crash and recession. 

There were plenty of reasons that someone might not have felt permitted to write about sports. But that sports story also told us just as much about where the world was headed than any chronicle of the world as it seemed to be unfolding. 

The story of Billy Beane and the Oakland Athletics is one that shows us how entrenched conventional wisdoms based on vague beliefs about how a game should be played or a business should be run are upended in favor of the data-sponsored hacking of inefficiencies we see everywhere today.

The media we consume, the clothes we buy, the investments we make are now responses to the algorithm, not what an editor, a merchandiser, or an advisor thinks might work. It’s not that Billy Beane started this trend, but his story made vivid for millions of readers how oddball ideas become conventional wisdom and what that looks like to all of us.

Lewis’ book on the financial crisis, The Big Short, is about what at the time seemed to be the winners and heroes of a clear good guys/bad guys narrative about the crisis. The investors chronicled in the book were the righteous men that knew where their peers had erred. And then — because it is an American success story — these noble men did the only thing we can all aspire to in this country: they made a ton of money. 

This week I asked Lewis whether he’s surprised about where Wall Street and the financialized economy is at a decade later. And as so many who covered those events up close often say, yes, he is surprised at how little things have changed. Specifically, Lewis is surprised that the CFPB had such brief turn as an organization with real institutional support in Washington. Protecting consumers, after all, seemed like the most obvious thing that needed doing after the crisis. 

But the story told in The Big Short makes it clear the little guy would never win, no matter what regulatory body was created to respond to that crisis or any other. The winners and the losers were both on Wall Street to begin with. And if there’s a unifying story of the post-crisis moment we still live in, it’s that the only people who even have a chance usually start on third base. 

The election of any president will energize parts of our body politic. The energy — both for and against — unleashed in the wake of Donald Trump’s election has been amplified by the Always Online world we live in and the fine-tuned cable news messaging that floods into our homes. For so many reasons our current political moment is, definitionally, unprecedented. 

But waiting for this moment to pass, for “it” to finally come to an end, is to mistake anomalous events for those that redefine what we thought was and could be true and not. If this moment inspires you to write about baseball or the State Department or climate change or golf course design in the 1990s, then write about it. Tell that story. If Trump’s election energizes you do become an activist, to run for office, to eschew coverage of sports in favor of politics, then do those things. 

Just don’t sit around waiting for things to go back to normal. 

They never were. They never will be. 

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